by Masuji Ibuse
“A child stands on a stepladder beneath a tree in his mother’s garden; he is an evacuee, home for a day. Pressing his lips to each ripe fruit in turn he whispers, ‘Don’t fall, pomegranate, till I come back again!’ A minute later he is dead, killed by the blast from the new American bomb; it is August 6, 1945….We do not know whether Ibuse imagined this or whether it is true; or rather, we know that it is true in the sense that Ibuse convinces us in every word he writes that this is how it was and this is how people endured it.”
—Observer
“Immensely effective….This is a book which must be read.”
—Books and Bookmen
“One of the finest postwar novels we have seen in this country.”
—Times Literary Supplement
“Warm understanding, a keen sense of humor and a great compassion that lifts the story above the mere documentary level into the realm of true literature.”
—Japan Times
“I would recommend Black Rain to every reader, even the squeamish.”
—Spectator
“Its subtle ironies and noble, unsentimental pity are a reminder of the strengths of Japanese fiction.”
—New Statesman
“Excellent translation of an important novel.”
—Library Journal
THE AUTHOR: Masuji Ibuse was born in Hiroshima in 1898. He majored in French at Waseda University and joined the School of Fine Arts to pursue a serious interest in painting. His first story, “Salamander,” was published in 1923, when Ibuse was still a student, and by the early 1930s his eloquent use of dialect and his unique prose style had established him as one of the leading figures in the Japanese literary world. In the years since 1938 he has been awarded almost every major literary prize in Japan, and on the publication of Black Rain Ibuse was presented with both the Cultural Medal and Japan’s highest literary award, the Noma Prize.
BLACK RAIN
MASUJI IBUSE
Translated by
JOHN BESTER
KODANSHA INTERNATIONAL
Tokyo • New York • London
Black Rain first appeared in installment form in the Japan Quarterly.
Distributed in the United States by Kodansha America, LLC, and in the
United Kingdom and continental Europe by Kodansha Europe Ltd.
Published by Kodansha International Ltd., 17-14 Otowa 1-chome,
Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 112-8652.
Copyright © 1969 by Masuji Ibuse.
All rights reserved.
LCC 69-16372
ISBN 9780870113642
Ebook ISBN 9784770050106
First edition, 1969
First paperback edition, 1979
www.kodansha-intl.com
v4.1
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Contents
Cover
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Translator’s Preface
Chapter 1
August 5
August 6
August 7
August 8
August 9
Chapter 2
August 6. Fair.
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Diet in Wartime Hiroshima
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
August 7. Fine.
August 8. Fine and sweltering.
Chapter 10
August 9.
Chapter 11
August 10. Fine.
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
August 11.
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
August 12. Light clouds in the morning. A spell of pain in my leg. Fine in the afternoon.
Chapter 16
July 25. Thundery rain. Festival of the Tenjin Shrine.
July 26. Fine. A cool breeze.
July 27. Great rain clouds.
July 28. Fine and sunny. A shower around noon, then sunny again.
July 29. Fine.
July 30. Fine.
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
August 13. Fine, slight clouds in the afternoon.
Chapter 20
August 14. Cloudy, later fine.
August 15. Fine.
TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE
When I was first asked to translate Masuji Ibuse’s Kuroi Ame I had considerable doubts. I knew that the work had been acclaimed in Japan, but suspected the critics of prejudice in its favor on account of its subject. Could the author possibly have avoided stridency, sentimentality, melodrama, monotony, and all the other pitfalls? Could such a theme yield, in the widest sense, beauty? Could it, in short, be fashioned into a work of art?
In my ignorance, I underestimated Ibuse. My work has left me with a sense of deep respect for the author, a new understanding of some aspects of the Japanese novel, and fresh insights into a country in which I have lived for fifteen years. However difficult it may have been to render the subtlety of Ibuse’s language into English, I believe that the work itself is important both for Japan and for the world.
The work is woven from many different strands. Given such a theme, a lesser author might—to borrow a metaphor from music—have produced no more than a steady, discordant fortissimo. In Black Rain, we have a subtle polyphony. That is not simply to say that Ibuse weaves together, around a central theme, the stories of several different people. More important, he creates an interplay between varying moods and between his main and secondary themes. It is from this interplay, rather than from the significance of its theme, that the work derives its value as literature.
The basic material, of course, is drawn from actual records and interviews—to the extent that Black Rain might even be called a “documentary novel.” It is interesting to know, for example, that Shigematsu Shizuma and his journal really exist, and that Dr. Iwatake is, indeed, alive and practicing today in Tokyo. The horrors, too, are described as they were, without exaggeration (the author, in fact, has been accused of playing them down; but to set down more than he has here was unnecessary and irrelevant to his purpose).
Against its basic theme, the work creates many contrasts. These serve to give the work variety; they are also, I feel, the essence of its success as art. It is the distillation of these conflicting elements that gives it its depth—its beauty, even. A typical example is the way the author invariably balances the horrors he describes with the wry humor for which he has long been famous. At times, the effect this creates is quite indescribable; indeed, until one has become attuned to the characteristic flavor of the work it is sometimes difficult, almost, to accept the humor as really intended. In the same way Ibuse, with infinite nostalgia, sets against the violent destruction of the city the beauty of the Japanese countryside and the ancient customs of its people. Against the mighty, brutal purposes of state, he lays the small, human preoccupations and foibles. Against the threat of universal destruction, he sets a love for, and sense of wonder at life in all its forms. Significantly, it is often at the points in the narrative where one feels these contrasts most strongly—where humor and horror, gentleness and violence come into sharpest conflict—that there occur those moving human vignettes that linger so strongly in the memory after one has finished reading.
It is a truism that the Japanese are not much given to the explicit statement of personal feelings or to extravagant emotional gestures. Ibuse, one of the most Japanese of authors, is no exception. The scene of Shigematsu’s reunion with his wife after the bombing may seem at first almost brutally casual to the Western reader. Yet to the sensitive Japanese reader, the spare exchange of questions and answers will be immensely movin
g, and the rice-cooking pot and small pan that stand by Shigeko’s side will symbolize a whole world of traditional values and feeling.
Not only is this approach intensely Japanese—and here, probably, artistically necessary—it is also most effective if one considers the work as a protest against the bomb. More than twenty years later, the author has succeeded in ordering the violent emotions that, as he himself has admitted, the subject once aroused in him. On the one hand, he avoids all emotional political considerations, all tendency to blame or to moralize. On the other, he refrains from bludgeoning the senses into apathy with an unvaried repetition of horrors. In a way that no other book has done, Black Rain succeeds in relating the bomb to our own, everyday experience, wherever we may live.
The skill with which the varied elements making up the work are organized becomes more and more apparent as one’s reading progresses. The narrative moves backwards and forwards in time, the moment of the bomb’s dropping, the crucial point around which the whole work revolves, occuring to great effect in many different guises throughout the book. The Imperial broadcast ending the war, mentioned in the very first chapter, is reintroduced in the last chapter in a moving scene that creates the effect of a wheel that has turned full circle. In the same way, themes at first apparently irrelevant—such as the carp-rearing scenes—gradually reveal their symbolic significance for the author as the work progresses. The work is in the tradition of the discursive “I-novel”—a chunk of life is presented for our inspection without overt comment or a very obvious “plot”—but its “discursions” are peculiarly well organized. And the suggestion of life going on after the novel is finished has, in this context, a fresh significance, together with an added poignancy in the awareness that, for the first time, that continuity is actually threatened.
Black Rain is a portrait of a group of human beings; of the death of a great city; of a nation crumbling into defeat. It is a picture of the Japanese mind that tells more than many sociological studies. Yet more than this, it is a statement of a philosophy. Although that philosophy, in its essence, is neither pessimistic nor optimistic, it seems to me to be life-affirming. Dealing with the grimmest of subjects, the work is not, in the end, depressing, for the author is ultimately concerned with life rather than with death, and with an overall beauty that transcends ugliness of detail. In that sense, I would suggest, Black Rain is not a “book about the bomb” at all.
JOHN BESTER
CHAPTER 1
For several years past, Shigematsu Shizuma, of the village of Kobatake, had been aware of his niece Yasuko as a weight on his mind. What was worse, he had a presentiment that the weight was going to remain with him, unspeakably oppressive, for still more years to come. In Yasuko, he seemed to have taken on a double, or even a triple, liability. That no suitable marriage was in sight for her was a circumstance simple enough in itself. The real trouble was the rumor. Towards the end of the war, it ran, Yasuko had been working in the kitchens of the Second Middle School Service Corps in Hiroshima City. Because of that rumor, the villagers of Kobatake, over one hundred miles to the east of Hiroshima, were saying that she was a victim of radiation sickness. Shigematsu and his wife, they claimed, were deliberately covering up the fact. It was this that made her marriage seem so remote. People who came to make inquiries of the neighbors with an eye to a possible match would hear the rumor, would promptly become evasive, and would end up by breaking off the talks altogether.
On that morning—the morning of August 6—the Service Corps of the Second Middle School in Hiroshima had been listening to an exhortatory address on Temma Bridge, or some other bridge in the west of the city, when the atomic bomb fell. In that instant the boys were burned from head to foot, but the teacher in charge had got the whole party to sing, pianissimo, a patriotic song: “Lay Me Beneath the Waves.” When they had finished, he gave the command “Dismiss!” and himself led the way in jumping into the river, which happened to be running high with the tide at the time. The whole party followed suit. Only one pupil had struggled home to tell the tale, and he too, it was said, had died before long.
It seemed likely that this account had come from a member of the Patriotic Service Corps from Kobatake who had got back alive from Hiroshima. Even so, the story that Yasuko had been working in the kitchens of the Service Corps of the Second Middle School in Hiroshima was pure fabrication. Even had she been in the kitchens, it was hardly likely that a girl would have been on the spot when they sang “Lay Me Beneath the Waves.” The truth was that she had been working in the Japan Textile Company works at the town of Furuichi outside Hiroshima, where she served as messenger and receptionist to the manager, Mr. Fujita. Between the Japan Textile Company and the Second Middle School there was no connection whatsoever.
Since starting work at Furuichi, Yasuko had been sharing the Shizumas’ temporary home at 862, 2-chōme, Senda-machi, Hiroshima, and had traveled to and from the factory on the same Kabe-bound train as Shigematsu. There was no connection whatsoever either with the Second Middle School or with the Service Corps. The only link, if any, was that a former pupil of the school—an army man with the forces in northern China—had written Yasuko a rather fulsome letter of thanks for a gift parcel, and had followed it up with five or six poems, all written by himself. Shigematsu still remembered how, when Yasuko had showed them to his wife, Shigeko had blushed inappropriately for someone of her age, and had said, “Yasuko, these must be what they call ‘love poems.’ ”
During the war, of course, “irresponsible rumors” had been forbidden by an army edict controlling freedom of speech, and topics of conversation were regulated by means such as the bulletin boards that were circulated among the inhabitants of each district. Yet once the war was over, rumors and stories of every kind—of holdups, robbery, and gambling, of army stockpiles and men who became rich overnight, of the occupation forces—ran wild, only to be forgotten again, rumors and stories alike, with the passage of time. All would have been well had the rumors about Yasuko likewise passed away once they had had their day. But they refused to do so, and whenever somebody came with inquiries relating to a prospect of marriage, the same well-worn story that she had been in the kitchens of the Hiroshima Second Middle School Service Corps would be served up yet again.
For a while, Shigematsu had entertained an idea of hunting out the arch-villain who had first touched off the irresponsible talk. But apart from Shigematsu and his wife and Yasuko, the only people from Kobatake who had been in Hiroshima when the bomb fell were young men belonging to the Patriotic Volunteer Corps and members of the Service Corps. The Patriotic Volunteer Corps was organized from young men drafted from country districts of the same prefecture to work as laborers on the compulsory dismantling of houses, which was carried out to create fire-breaks in the built-up areas of Hiroshima. The young men from Kobatake were incorporated in a unit known, rather pompously, as the Kōjin Unit, because it drew its members from the two districts of Kōnu and Jinseki. Their job was to pull down people’s houses. They would saw about four-fifths of the way through every pillar of any size in the house, then attach a stout rope to the ridge-pole and tug, twenty or thirty of them, till the house came tumbling down. Single-storied houses were hard work, and came down piecemeal, with much fuss. Two-storied houses were more obliging, and collapsed in one mighty crash, though the cloud of dust they sent up made approach impossible for a good five or six minutes at least.
Unfortunately, the members of the Kōjin Unit and the Service Corps had barely got down to work, having arrived in Hiroshima only the day before, when the bomb fell. Those who were not killed outright were taken, their bodies burned raw all over, to reception centers at Miyoshi, Shōbara, Tōjō, and other places round about Hiroshima. The first party sent from Kobatake to the ruins of Hiroshima consisted of the village firemen, who went there in a charcoal-burning bus. They were followed, early on the morning of the day the war ended, by a party of volunteer workers from the Young Men’s Association, who went to the te
mporary reception centers at Miyoshi, Tōjō, and elsewhere to search for injured from the village.
The members of the Young Men’s Association who were offering their services were given an official send-off by the village headman, in the presence of the acting president of the Association.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “you have our deepest gratitude for giving thus of your services in these busy wartime days. I scarcely need to remind you that the injured whom you will be bringing back with you are blistered with burns over their entire bodies, and to request you, therefore, to take every care not to cause them yet further suffering. It is said that the enemy used what is referred to as a ‘new weapon’ in his attack on Hiroshima, which instantly plunged hundreds of thousands of blameless residents of the city into a hell of unspeakable torments. A member of the Patriotic Service Corps who escaped with his life from Hiroshima has told me that at that moment when the new weapon wiped out the city he heard countless cries for succor—the voice of those hundreds of thousands of souls—seemingly welling up from beneath the earth. Even the Fukuyama district, which he passed through on his way back, was a burnt-out waste; the keep and the Summer Gallery of Fukuyama Castle had been destroyed in the flames. His heart was wrung, he told me, by the realization of the awfulness of war….Be that as it may, however, it is an unquestionable fact that a war is in progress, and you, as members of a voluntary labor unit, are proceeding henceforth to bring home your comrades-in-arms. I must request you above all, therefore, to take care not to drop those symbols of your invincible determination to fight on to the bitter end—your bamboo spears. It is most unfortunate that I should have to see you off in this hole-in-the-corner manner, addressing my parting words to you in the predawn darkness without so much as a light, but in view of the prevailing situation I feel sure that you will understand.”
His speech over, he turned to the eighty-odd people who had come to see the party off. “I hope you will join me,” he declared, raising his arms ready to beat time, “in three rousing cheers to speed the members of the voluntary labor unit on their way!”