Mr Two Bomb

by William Coles

  Sumie was actually crying as she stepped off the gangplank, making no attempt to dry her tears. “That poor girl,” she said.

  “Yes.” That was all I thought fit to reply.

  We sat on one of the benches outside the shrine and in time Sumie’s tears dried. With one last decisive sniff, she gave herself a shake and squared her shoulders. “I think I am ready,” she said.

  “Good.”

  If only I had been more attuned to portents and signs, I would then and there have led Sumie back to the ferry. For sometimes I do believe the heavens give us due warning of what is to come. And if ever there had been a warning sign that Miyajima was not for us, that cabin-girl’s accident was it.

  But we stayed, digging ourselves deeper into our hole until we were drenched from top to toe in misfortune. Now that I think of it, even Miyajima’s famous plum tree, planted by the great Saint Kobo Daishi, had been against us. That spring the tree had failed to produce any of its legendary double-petalled red flowers. That alone was a sign of extraordinary ill-omen.

  Sumie followed me into the vermillion shrine, washing her hands and mouth before entering the portal. Myself, although I went through the motions, I have never much been one for religious ritual.

  Like my father before me, my heart had been turned against religion – whether it were Buddhism, Christianity, Mohammedanism, or any faith you can think of. All of them, in their own fanatical ways, are as bad as each other. Why is it that all of the greatest outrages that have been inflicted on this world have always been in the name of ‘religion’? And the Buddhists, with their protestations of peace and goodwill, were no better than anyone else; who was it, after all, who launched the attack on Pearl Harbour? But I had not gone to the shrine for religious purposes. I was there purely as a mark of respect for my father.

  I walked alone down colonnaded corridors that were hung with lanterns. The main shrine was gloomy after the bright sunlight, with that eternal musk of religious devotion. From below, I could hear the water slapping on the stilts, while all around were the muttered chants of the penitents next to me. I knelt and said a prayer of thanks for my father. In every way, he had been a much better man than myself.

  Unlike the rest of the pilgrims, I was not going to waste my time on praying for my own good fortune; if it happened, it happened. I could not conceive how my future could be even remotely altered by a prayer on Miyajima.

  I left after only a few minutes and was thankful to be back in the sunshine and away from that stifling atmosphere of religious zeal. As I had left the shrine, I had taken one of the fortune-telling paper slips, an Omikuji. I had been playing with it in my hand and had scrumpled it up into a little ball before forgetting about it.

  A deer, one of Miyajima’s 600-odd tame deer, came over and nuzzled my hand. Deer, along with the monkeys that infest the island, are said to be messengers of the Gods. The doe thought I had some food and as I opened my fingers I saw the fortune-slip. I flattened out the paper to find out my destiny. But it had nothing at all about my future – and everything about my way of life. ‘Can you be kinder?’

  I remember how aggrieved I felt. Could I be kinder? What did that mean? All of us could, perhaps, be kinder, but we have other things to do: family, lovers, work, commitments, obligations and traditions that must be kept. Did they not know there was a war on?

  I fed the slip of paper to the deer, but still it rankled. Why me? Had I been especially unkind? Was I more unkind than anyone else? Not that I was superstitious, but still it vexed me – and that, of course, was because it had so precisely hit the mark.

  I waited for Sumie and tried to distract myself by reading the Hiroshima paper, the Chugoku Shimbun. You would not believe the drivel they used to serve us. We had been at war for four years, we were being beaten out of sight, and yet still the Chugoku Shimbun and all the other festering newspapers in Japan were claiming that ultimate victory was just around the corner. Well, perhaps it might have been – if it had been us who had spent the last five years developing the atomic bomb. But Japan’s atomic weapons programme was nothing, nothing at all; just a dozen men wandering blind in the very foothills of atomic research. As it was, all we could fall back on were our bamboo spears, our suicide boats and our indomitable pluck.

  But the editors of the Chugoku Shimbun were never in any doubt. Every day, they ran pictures of girls eating bramble shoots, as well as delicious recipes to make the most of the grass and acorns. And always the countless stories about how we were on the very brink of winning the war. What was going on? Did they think we were imbeciles? How could anyone swallow this twaddle, this outrageous claptrap, when we were on the verge of a full-scale Yankee invasion?

  Some people believed it; I suppose they must have, in much the same way that some people believed the Emperor was divine. I remember how, after it was all over, one of the army’s most senior men, a Major General Masakazu Amano, had bleated: “We were absolutely sure of victory. It was the first and the only battle in which the main strength of the air, land and sea forces were to be joined. The geographical advantages of the homeland were to be utilised to the highest degree.”

  But I never bought it. Not for one moment.

  I flicked to another page – more lies. As I simmered with resentment, I didn’t notice the man at my feet. He was a war veteran and had lost both his legs. He sat on a cushioned wooden pallet and used his arms as crutches, pivoting on the knuckles of his gloved hands.

  I lowered my paper and looked at the man. He was in his early-thirties, practically the same age as me. But with a face that was unlined, serene, as if he had found contentment on Miyajima.

  “Yes?” I asked.

  He proffered up a wooden bowl that had been tucked under his shirt. “Alms for a war veteran? Alms for a man who lost his legs fighting for the Emperor?”

  “Perhaps,” I folded up the paper, “If you can tell me one thing.”

  “Yes?” he smiled up at me, his teeth gleaming in the sunlight and his scuffed hands hanging limp by his side.

  “Tell me honestly. Are we going to win the war?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Without question. We will win the war.”

  “And how are we going to do that?”

  “I do not know.”

  I stood up. “Well I know. We are getting a beating. And if we do not surrender soon, your beloved motherland will be nothing but scorched earth –”

  “How?”

  “Have you not heard what happened to Tokyo five months ago? Do you know nothing? Half the capital has been burned to the ground. Every day, hundreds of bombers are pulverizing our cities.”

  “But Hiroshima has not been attacked. Be thankful for that.”

  “I will not be thankful for that! Be damned to you!”

  The beggar shuffled at my feet. He was wearing the most pristine white shirt that hung loose over the stumps of his legs. “Alms for an old soldier?”

  “No.” I tossed that useless copy of the Chugoku Shimbun into his bowl. “You have lost your legs and still you have learned nothing.”

  He raised his hands anyway, as if in prayer, nodding towards me. “May the Goddess protect you.”

  “To hell with you.” I stormed back to the water’s edge, seething with rage at the war and at what the beggar had told me. For I knew that in one respect, at least, he was quite right. And I had long dreaded the consequences.

  Just as he had said, throughout the duration of the war Hiroshima had hardly been hit by a single bomb – and meanwhile every other city in Japan was being pummelled to ruins by the Yankees’ B29 bombers. Some believed that the Yankees had somehow forgotten about us; that our wonderful port city was blessed. Some idiots even thought – and I do not make this up – that President Harry Truman’s mother had been captured by the Japanese and that she was being held prisoner in Hiroshima.

  Truly it was as if we had built our city on the verdant Southfacing slopes of a simmering Vesuvius and were revelling in our great good fortun
e. But just as they say in the West: beware Greeks bearing gifts.

  There were a few cynics like myself, though, who believed there was only one reason why the Yankees were not bombing Hiroshima. And that had nothing to do with some slight cartographical oversight on the part of the American High Command. Rather it was because something special was being prepared just for us.

  If I had had more sense, I would have followed my instincts. I would have left Hiroshima that very afternoon. But, come to think of it, I would only have been returning to my wife and son in Nagasaki, so I was going to be blown up whatever happened. Does it make any difference if you are blown up by two atomic bombs rather than one?

  CHAPTER FOUR

  My wife and child? Yes, among my many defects I also happened to be a faithless swine. But I can assure you that marital infidelity was the very least of my sins.

  I had a wife and child waiting back home for me – in, of course, Nagasaki. The boy, Toshiaki, I loved to distraction; his mother Mako I had loved once, but my love had withered and died and was now nothing but a bare husk, like a shrivelled grape that has been left out on the autumn vine.

  It was not solely because of my loveless marriage that I had taken up with Sumie after my posting to Nagasaki – but it had certainly helped. Alhough even if Mako had been the most affectionate of wives and a houri in the bedroom, I would still have more than likely taken up with all of my lovers. That is just the way of war. If you know that you might be nothing but ashes tomorrow, you are hardly going to be restrained by oldstyle notions of marital fidelity. So if a woman let it be known, by glance or deed, that she was interested then I saw it as a point of principle to take her up on the matter.

  Since I’d married four years earlier, just a month before Pearl Harbour, I’d had seven lovers. Some were nothing more than a back alley tryst, feverishly panting out our lust against the walls before we went our separate ways, and some were full-blown affairs, with a proper beginning, middle and end. Most of my affairs ended cordially enough and, if the opportunity arose, could be rekindled.

  But of all of them, of my wife, my mistresses, and my flings-in-the-night, it was Sumie who was my favourite.

  I had not noticed her as she glided up behind me at the water’s edge. She had been in the shrine for nearly half-anhour, praying for good fortune, health, wealth and happiness, and all the other little boons that we beg of our Gods – as if they cared one jot what we asked for.

  In my total self-absorption, I did not recognise her agitation. She sat at the water’s edge beside me, her feet a few centimetres above the water but not quite touching; just like death, now that I think of it, which also perpetually hovers over our heads.

  She stared again at the fortune-slip in her hand before tucking it back into her pocket. How she twitched, first burying her hands between her entwined legs and then running her fingers through that rich, long mane.

  “What does it say?” I asked.

  “Everything is fine,” she snapped. “Thank you for bringing me here.”

  She looked as if she was about to burst into tears. If there is one thing I cannot handle, it is a woman crying. It turns my heart to flint.

  “Shall we go,” I said, standing up, and the deer followed as we shuffled from the shrine complex and onto the island proper. Perhaps I could have been kinder, just as my own fortune-slip had suggested. But are we all supposed to turn our lives upside down just at the say-so of a scrap of paper? No, of course we do not. If we are going to change our selfish ways and shallow mindset, it is going to require something much, much more substantial than some injunction to kindliness on a random fortune-slip.

  The mountain is said to have seven wonders, including a cherry tree beneath which the ground never dries and a fire which has been burning for over 1,200 years. Not that those weren’t interesting enough, along with the hollow rock that was perpetually replenished with sea-water, but for me it was pleasure enough to walk through the maples with Sumie’s hand in my own.

  The sweat was slick on my face, my shirt sticking to my back before we had even walked halfway up the hill. Sumie had at least stopped crying, but I left her alone with her thoughts. I did not wish to pry and I hoped that in time she would come out of it.

  There was a bench by the path and wordlessly we sat on it. I offered her my water bottle.

  She sipped, rolling the water round her mouth before swallowing. “I wish they would stop the war,” she said.

  “I wish they had never started it.” Through the trees I could just catch a glimmer of the Inland Sea; how tranquil it all seemed.

  “I do not understand why they go on. They talk about victory, but what are we hoping to achieve?”

  “That is Ketsu-Go. We will kill so many of their soldiers that eventually they will realise we cannot be beaten. Ever! And then they will give up and go home.”

  “How many of us are they going to kill?”

  “Does it matter? Does it matter if every man, woman and child is killed in defence of our country? It is an irrelevance. The aim of Ketsu-Go is to administer sucha blood-letting as has never been witnessed before in recorded history. Ketsu-Go will give the Western Imperialists a perfect display of Oriental inscrutability.”

  She laughed and cuffed my leg. “Do you always have to make light of these things?”

  “I would have gone mad if I didn’t.” I laughed and kissed her on the neck. “What else am I supposed to do? There is death all around us, hundreds of thousands of people burned alive in Tokyo. And yet still we are supposed to be cheering this blind charge over the cliff-edge? Laughter, I tell you Sumie. It is the only way.”

  “The only way?” She kissed me full on the lips, her hand slipping beneath my shirt to my waist.

  “As always, you are right,” I said, and dutifully followed her into a cluster of trees about 50 metres from the path. We took off her clothes with practised ease, tossing them onto the ground to make a bed of sorts. How easy it was making love in those days. I hardly remember a pause in the conversation as we began to make love in the matter-of-fact way of new lovers for whom sex is a daily requirement.

  How she wriggled and teased beneath me, smiling up as the dappled shadows flecked across her face. “The war did bring you into my life,” she mused. “Should I be grateful for that?”

  “Perhaps we would have met even if there had not been a war?”

  “But without the war, I probably would not have become your lover.”

  I paused for a moment to kiss her that exquisite mole beside her mouth. I have never so loved an imperfection on a woman’s body as that little mole, its vivid blackness in stunning contrast to her perfect white teeth. “How could you deny your instincts?

  She sighed with contentment, lifting her knees off the ground. “Did you ever joke around with your wife like this?”

  “No. She doesn’t like my jokes. She never has,” I stroked some hair out of Sumie’s face. “What about your husband?”

  “What do you think? He was a soldier. He did what he was ordered – and he was certainly not ordered to think ”

  “Stop,” I whispered. We were being watched. In a bush not fivemetres ahead of us, I could see a pair of unblinking black eyes. For a moment I thought we were being stalked by a child.

  “What is it?” Sumie said, trying to turn her head.

  “One second.” I rolled back onto me knees and picked up a stone, hefting it once before hurling it at the bush. There was a flat wet thud, followed by a shriek of pain. The monkey screamed as it clambered up a tree, a young buck calling out for its mother. It sat on one of the upper branches of a maple, rubbing its chest as it chattered insults down upon my head.

  Sumie, so at ease with her nakedness, her hair a perfect shimmering black waterfall, rolled onto her side and stared at the enraged monkey. “Was that a good idea?”

  “You wanted to put on a sex show for him?”

  “He was just interested, the poor thing.”

  “I will throw anothe
r if he stays there.”

  “You will do no such thing. Come here and make love to me.”

  “Watched by that monkey?”

  “I am sure you have done worse.”

  By now a second monkey, a larger one, had come swooping through the tree-tops in all its long-limbed glory. And there on the high branch the two monkeys sat, squawking to themselves like a pair of hunched crones.

  Despite my lust and despite Sumie’s extraordinary beauty, the moment had gone. The monkeys had killed my ardour and there was nothing that Sumie could do to recover it.

  “I didn’t know you were shy,” she teased me.

  “There is a difference between being shy and wanting to put on a floor show for a troupe of monkeys.”

  “And would you be able to teach them anything?” How gaily she laughed as she put her top on.

  “How about this?”

  I picked up a handful of stones, each about the size of a hen’s egg, and then and there bombarded the monkeys. How they shrieked as the stones whistled round their ears.

  “Stop that,” she said. “You might hurt them.”

  “That’s what I am trying to do.” I must have been mad – standing there naked amid the trees, hurling stones at two monkeys who had unwittingly spoiled my fun.

  “Please stop,” she said. By now she had pulled on her trousers and was slipping on her shoes.

  “And one for luck.” I tossed the stone lightly in my hand, remembering how I had used to scare the crows off my father’s vegetable plot. I hurled it with all my might, as heedless as a schoolboy of the consequences. The stone arcked up through the branches and clouted the smaller monkey full in the face. For a moment, the screeching stopped and then the animal slowly toppled head-first out of the tree. It caromed off two branches before thudding headfirst into the ground just a few metres from where I stood.