Hiroshima

by John Hersey

  FATHER WILHELM KLEINSORGE

  BACK IN THE HOSPITAL in Tokyo for the second time, Father Kleinsorge was suffering from fever, diarrhea, wounds that would not heal, wildly fluctuating blood counts, and utter exhaustion. For the rest of his life, his was to be a classic case history of that vague, borderline form of A-bomb sickness in which a person’s body developed a rich repertory of symptoms, few of which could be positively attributed to radiation, but many of which turned up in hibakusha, in various combinations and degrees, so often as to be blamed by some doctors and almost all patients on the bomb.

  Father Kleinsorge lived this life of misery with the most extraordinarily selfless spirit. After his discharge from the hospital, he returned to the tiny Noborimachi chapel he had helped build, and there he continued his self-abnegating pastoral life.

  In 1948, he was named priest of the much grander Misasa church, in another part of town. There were not yet many tall buildings in the city, and neighbors called the big church the Misasa Palace. A convent of Helpers of Holy Souls was attached to the church, and besides his priestly duties of conducting Mass, hearing confessions, and teaching Bible classes he ran eight-day retreats for novices and Sisters of the convent, during which the women, given Communion and instructed by him from day to day, would maintain silence. He still visited Sasaki-san and other hibakusha who were sick and wounded, and he would even babysit for young mothers. He often went to the sanatorium at Saijyo, an hour by train from the city, to comfort tubercular patients.

  Father Kleinsorge was briefly hospitalized in Tokyo twice more. His German Jesuit colleagues were of the opinion that in all his work he was a little too much concerned for others, and not enough for himself. Beyond his own stubborn sense of mission, he had taken on himself the Japanese spirit of enryo—setting the self apart, putting the wishes of others first. They thought he might literally kill himself with kindness to others; he was too rücksichtsvoll, they said—too regardful. When gifts of delicacies came from relatives in Germany, he gave them all away. When he got penicillin from an Occupation doctor, he gave it to parishioners who were as sick as he. (Among his many other complaints, he had syphilis, which he had apparently caught from transfusions in one of his hospital stays; it was cured eventually.) He gave lessons on the catechism when he had a high fever. After he came back from a long hike of pastoral calls, the Misasa housekeeper would see him collapse on the steps of his rectory, head down—a figure, it seemed, of utter defeat. The next day, he would be out in the streets again.

  Gradually, over years of this unremitting labor, he gathered his modest harvest: some four hundred baptisms, some forty marriages.

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  FATHER KLEINSORGE loved the Japanese and their ways. One of his German colleagues, Father Berzikofer, jokingly said that Father Kleinsorge was married to Japan. Shortly after he moved to the Misasa church, he read that a new law on naturalization had been passed by the Diet, with these requirements: that one live in Japan for at least five years, be over twenty years old and mentally sound, be of good character, be able to support oneself, and be able to accept single nationality. He hastened to submit proofs that he met all these, and after some months of review he was accepted. He registered himself as a Japanese citizen under the name he would henceforth bear: Father Makoto Takakura.

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  FOR a few months in the spring and summer of 1956, his poor health declining still further, Father Takakura filled a temporary vacancy in a small parish in the Noborimachi district. Five years before that, the Reverend Mr. Kiyoshi Tanimoto, whom Father Takakura knew well, had begun giving Bible classes to a group of girls whose faces had been disfigured by keloids. Later, some of them had been taken, as so-called Hiroshima Maidens, to the United States for plastic surgery. One of them, Tomoko Nakabayashi, whom Father Takakura had converted and baptized, died on an operating table at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. Her ashes were carried to her family when the first group of Maidens returned to Hiroshima that summer of 1956, and it fell to Father Takakura to preside at her funeral. During it, he nearly fainted.

  At Noborimachi, he began instructing the female members, a mother and two daughters, of a wealthy and cultured family named Naganishi. Feverish or not, he went to them, always on foot, every evening. Sometimes he would arrive early; he would pace up and down the street outside, then ring the bell at precisely seven o’clock. He would look at himself in a hall mirror, adjust his hair and habit, and enter the living room. He would teach for an hour; then the Naganishis would serve tea and sweets, and he and they would chat until exactly ten. He felt at home in that house. The younger daughter, Hisako, became devoted to him, and when, after eighteen months, his various symptoms grew so bad that he was going to have to be hospitalized she asked him to baptize her, and he did, on the day before he entered the Hiroshima Red Cross Hospital for an entire year’s stay.

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  HIS most disturbing complaint was a weird infection in his fingers, which had become bloated with pus and would not heal. He had fever and flulike symptoms. His white blood count was seriously low, and he had pain in his knees, particularly the left one, and in other joints. His fingers were operated on and slowly healed. He was treated for leukopenia. Before his discharge, an ophthalmologist found that he had the beginnings of an A-bomb cataract.

  He returned to the large Misasa congregation, but it was harder and harder for him to carry the kind of overload he cherished. He developed back pain, which was caused, doctors said, by a kidney stone; he passed it. Dragged down by constant pain and by infections that were abetted by his shortage of white cells, he limped through his days, pushing himself beyond his strength.

  Finally, in 1961, he was mercifully put out to pasture by the diocese, in a tiny church in the country town of Mukaihara—the town where Dr. Sasaki was flourishing in his private clinic.

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  THE compound of the Mukaihara church, at the crest of a steep rise from the town, enclosed a small chapel, with an oaken table for an altar and with space for a flock of about twenty to kneel, Japanese-fashion, on a spread of tatami matting; and, uphill, a cramped parsonage. Father Takakura chose as his bedroom in the parsonage a room no more than six feet square and as bare as a monk’s cell; he ate in another such cell, next to it; and the kitchen and bathroom, beyond, were dark, chilly, sunken rooms, no larger than the others. Across a narrow corridor running the length of the building were an office and a much larger bedroom, which Father Takakura, true to his nature, reserved for guests.

  When he first arrived, he felt enterprising, and, on the principle that souls are best caught while unripe, he had builders add two rooms to the chapel and started in them what he called the St. Mary’s Kindergarten. So began a bleak life for four Catholics: the priest, two Japanese sisters to teach the babies, and a Japanese woman to cook. Few believers came to church. His parish consisted of four previously converted families, about ten worshippers in all. Some Sundays, no one showed up for Mass.

  After its first spurt, Father Takakura’s energy rapidly flagged. Once each week, he took a train to Hiroshima and went to the Red Cross Hospital for a checkup. At Hiroshima station, he picked up what he loved best to read as he travelled—timetables with schedules of trains going all over Honshu Island. The doctors injected steroids in his painful joints and treated him for the chronic flulike symptoms, and once he reported he had found traces of blood in his underwear, which the doctors guessed came from new kidney stones.

  In the village of Mukaihara, he tried to be as inconspicuous—as Japanese—as he could. He sometimes wore Japanese clothes. Not wanting to seem high-living, he never bought meat in the local market, but sometimes he smuggled some out from the city. A Japanese priest who occasionally came to see him, Father Hasegawa, admired his efforts to carry his naturalization through to perfection but found him in many ways unshakab
ly German. He had a tendency when he was rebuffed in an undertaking to stubbornly push all the harder straight for it, whereas a Japanese would more tactfully look for some way around. Father Hasegawa noticed that when Father Takakura was hospitalized, he rigidly respected the hospital’s visiting hours, and if people came, even from far away, to see him, outside proper hours, he refused to receive them. Once, eating with his friend, Father Hasegawa declined his host’s offer of a bowl of rice; he said he was full. But then delicious pickles appeared, which caused a Japanese palate to cry out for rice, and he decided to have a bowl after all. Father Takakura was outraged (i.e., in his guest’s view, German): How could he eat rice plus pickle when he had been too full to eat rice alone?

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  DURING this period, Father Takakura was one of many people whom Dr. Robert J. Lifton interviewed in preparing to write his book Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima. In one conversation the priest hinted that he realized he had achieved a truer identity as a hibakusha than as a Japanese:

  If a person says to me that he is weary [darui], if it is a hibakusha who says it, it gives me a different feeling than if he is an ordinary person. He doesn’t have to explain….He knows all of the uneasiness—all of the temptation to lose spirit and be depressed—and of then starting again to see if he can do his job….If a Japanese hears the words “tenno heika” [His Majesty the Emperor], it is different from a Westerner hearing them—a very different feeling in the foreigner’s heart from what is felt in the Japanese person’s heart. It is a similar question in the case of one who is a victim and one who is not, when they hear about another victim….I met a man one time…[who] said, “I experienced the atomic bomb”—and from then on the conversation changed. We both understood each other’s feelings. Nothing had to be said.

  IN 1966, Father Takakura had to change cooks. A woman named Satsue Yoshiki, who was thirty-five years old, recently cured of tuberculosis, and recently baptized, had been told to report for an interview at the Mukaihara church. Having been given the Japanese name of the priest, she was astonished to be greeted by a big gaijin, a foreigner, dressed in a quilted Japanese gown. His face, which was rounded out and puffy (doubtless from medication), struck her as that of a baby. At once, indeed, there commenced a relationship, soon to blossom into one of complete mutual trust, in which her role seemed to be ambiguous: part daughter, part mother. His growing helplessness kept her in subjugation; she tenderly nursed him. Her cooking was primitive, his temper cranky. He had said he would eat anything, even Japanese noodles, but he was sharp with her about his food, as he had never been with anyone else. Once, he spoke of “strained baked potatoes” his real mother had cooked. She tried to make them. He said, “These are not like my mother’s.” He loved fried prawns and ate them when he went to Hiroshima for checkups. She tried to cook them. He said, “These are burned.” She stood beside him in the tiny eating room, her hands behind her gripping the doorjamb so tightly that in time its paint was all worn away. Yet he praised her, confided in her, joked with her, apologized to her each time he lost his temper. She thought him—under the shortness, which she attributed to pain—gentle, pure, patient, sweet, humorous, and deeply kind.

  Once, on a late-spring day, not long after Yoshiki-san arrived, sparrows alighted in a persimmon tree outside his office window. He clapped his hands to drive them away, and soon there appeared on his palms purple spots of the sort that all hibakusha dreaded. The doctors in Hiroshima shook their heads. Who could say what they were? They seemed to be blood bruises, but his blood tests did not suggest leukemia. He had slight hemorrhages in his urinary tract. “What if I get blood in my brains?” he asked once. His joints still hurt. He developed liver dysfunction, high blood pressure, back pains, chest pains. An electrocardiogram turned up an anomaly. He was put on a drug to ward off a coronary attack, and on an antihypertensive drug. He was given steroids, hormones, an antidiabetic drug. “I don’t take medicines, I eat them,” he said to Yoshiki-san. In 1971, he was hospitalized for an operation to see whether his liver was cancerous; it was not.

  All through this time of decline, a stream of visitors came to see him, thanking him for all he had done for them in the past. Hisako Naganishi, the woman he had baptized the day before his long hospitalization, was especially faithful; she brought him open-faced sandwiches on German rye bread, which he loved, and when Yoshiki-san needed a vacation, she would move in and tend him in her absence. Father Berzikofer would come for a few days at a time, and they would talk and drink a great deal of gin, which Father Takakura had also come to love.

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  ONE winter day at the beginning of 1976, Father Takakura slipped and fell on the steep icy path down to town. The next morning, Yoshiki-san heard him shouting her name. She found him in the bathroom, leaning over the washstand, unable to move. With all the strength of her love, she carried him—he weighed a hundred and seventy-five pounds—to his bed, and laid him down. For a month, he was unable to move. She improvised a bedpan, and cared for him day and night. Finally, she borrowed a wheelchair from the town office and took him to Dr. Sasaki’s clinic. The two men had known each other years before, but now, one living in his monk’s cell and the other in his grand apartment in the four-story clinic, they were light-years apart. Dr. Sasaki took an X-ray, saw nothing, diagnosed neuralgia, and advised massage. Father Takakura could not abide the idea of the usual female massager; a man was hired. During the workout, Father Takakura held Yoshiki-san’s hand, and his face reddened. The pain was unbearable. Yoshiki-san hired a car and drove Father Takakura to the city, to the Red Cross Hospital. An X-ray on a bigger machine showed fractures of the eleventh and twelfth thoracic vertebrae. He was operated on to relieve pressure on the right sciatic nerve, and he was fitted with a corset.

  From then on, he was bedridden. Yoshiki-san fed him, changed diapers that she made for him, and cleaned his body. He read the Bible and timetables—the only two sorts of texts, he told Yoshiki-san, that never told lies. He could tell you what train to take where, the price of food in the dining car, and how to change trains at such-and-such a station to save three hundred yen. One day, he called Yoshiki-san, greatly excited. He had found an error. Only the Bible told the truth!

  His fellow-priests finally persuaded him to go to St. Luke’s Hospital in Kobe. Yoshiki-san visited him, and he drew out from a book a copy of his chart, on which was written “A living corpse.” He said he wanted to go home with her, and she took him. “Because of you, my soul has been able to get through purgatory,” he said to her when he was in his own bed.

  He weakened, and his fellow-priests moved him to a two-room house in a hollow just below their Novitiate, in Nagatsuka. Yoshiki-san told him she wanted to sleep in his room with him. No, he said, his vows would not permit that. She lied, saying that the father superior had ordered it. Greatly relieved, he allowed it. After that, he seldom opened his eyes. She fed him only ice cream. When visitors came, all he could say was “Thank you,” He fell into a coma, and on November 19, 1977, with a doctor, a priest, and Yoshiki-san at his side, this explosion-affected person took a deep breath and died.

  He was buried in a serene pine grove at the top of the hill above the Novitiate.

  FATHER WILHELM M. TAKAKURA, S.J.

  R.I.P.

  The fathers and brothers of the Nagatsuka Novitiate noticed over the years that there were almost always fresh flowers at that grave.

  TOSHIKO SASAKI

  IN AUGUST 1946, Toshiko Sasaki was slowly pulling out of the ordeal of pain and low spirits she had undergone during the year since the bombing. Her younger brother, Yasuo, and sister, Yaeko, had escaped injury on the day of the explosion because they had been in the family home in the suburb of Koi. Now, living with them there, she was just beginning to feel alive again, when a new blow came.

  Three years earlier her parents had entered into marriage negotiations with anoth
er family, and she had met the proposed young man. The couple liked each other and decided to accept the arrangement. They rented a house to live in, but Toshiko’s fiancé was suddenly drafted to China. She had heard he was back, but for a long time he had not come to see her. When he finally showed up, it seemed clear to both parties that the engagement was doomed. Each time the fiancé appeared, young Yasuo, for whom Toshiko felt responsible, would rush angrily out of the house. There were indications that the fiancé’s family had had second thoughts about permitting their son to marry a hibakusha and a cripple. He stopped coming. He wrote letters full of symbolic, abstract images—especially butterflies—evidently trying to express his trembling uncertainty and, probably, guilt.

  The only person who gave Toshiko any real comfort was Father Kleinsorge, who continued calling on her in Koi. He was clearly bent on converting her. The confident logic of his instruction did little to convince her, for she could not accept the idea that a God who had snatched away her parents and put her through such hideous trials was loving and merciful. She was, however, warmed and healed by the priest’s faithfulness to her, for it was obvious that he, too, was weak and in pain, yet he walked great distances to see her.

  Her house stood by a cliff, on which there was a grove of bamboo. One morning, she stepped out of the house, and the sun’s rays glistening on the minnowlike leaves of the bamboo trees took her breath away. She felt an astonishing burst of joy—the first she had experienced in as long as she could remember. She heard herself reciting the Lord’s Prayer.