by Masuji Ibuse
Mr. Nojima stood talking for a while with his father-in-law, then they walked down by the ornamental spring and stood talking a while longer. Finally, Mr. Nojima came over to where we were standing, a resolute expression on his face.
“I’m sure you’re all worried about your families,” he said. “If you like, I can take you to the city now. My wife is worried about the children, and wants to go back to Hiroshima at once.”
I looked at that monstrous cloud and wondered whether I could bring myself to go home beneath its shadow. To do so seemed like inviting disaster. But there was a chorus of “Oh, please,” “Thank heavens!” “We’re in your hands, Mr. Nojima,” with the result that it was decided to set off for home at once. We had already said good-bye to the old lady and gentleman when I suddenly noticed the lid of the tea ceremony kettle, lying where it had rolled down onto the stone below the veranda.
The old lady gave each of us some rice balls wrapped in a piece of bamboo sheath. “I’m afraid it’s only ordinary boiled rice,” she said. “I feel it ought to be millet dumplings, like those that Momotarō took with him when he went to conquer the Island of Devils in the fairy tale.” She had an elderly manservant put three or four dampened straw mats in the back of the truck, for use in case of fire.
We set out about nine. As we came out onto the main road, black clouds gathered in the sky over Hiroshima, and there was a rumble of thunder. Mr. Nojima saw a man on a bicycle pedaling furiously along the road from the opposite direction. He stopped the truck, and he and the man had a whispered conversation. I think he must have been asking about traffic conditions on the main road, but didn’t want to alarm us. At a place where three roads met he turned the truck back in the direction we had come from. When we got to the sea at Miyazu, he hired a black market boat at the house of a fisherman, apparently someone he knew, and left the truck there as a pledge. The boat, which he said was about two-and-a-half tons, was a sailboat only a little larger than a fishing boat, but the fisherman’s sturdy build and the look on his face were somehow reassuring. I felt that Mr. Nojima was a man to depend on too, to be able to produce someone like the fisherman out of a hat.
The married women kept their faces averted from the direction of the city, avoiding looking at Hiroshima as though they had made a pact not to do so. I myself kept my eyes turned towards the islands of Ninoshima and Etajima. Mr. Nojima was holding a hand net, and from time to time would lean out over the gunwale to scoop up refuse from the surface of the water, obviously to see what was being washed along by the sea. “Hey, Tanomura!” he called suddenly to the master of the black market boat. “The tide’s going out by now, isn’t it?”
He was staring at a piece of board he had just netted. It was no more than a fragment of wood, about three inches wide and six inches long, that had been wrenched off somewhere, but his face was grim. I edged along toward him to see what was the matter, then, almost instinctively, I averted my eyes. It was unmistakably recognizable as a piece of floor-board from the corridor of a house. It was scorched black all over except for a design of Mt. Fuji with a sailing boat and pine trees, standing out white in unburned wood on the surface. The floor-boards must have been scorched by the heat when that monstrous ball of fire had flashed high over Hiroshima, leaving only the pattern from the frosted glass standing out on the wood; then the blast had lifted the fragment up and away and deposited it in the river or the sea.
Mr. Nojima flung it back into the sea.
The boat arrived at the foot of Miyuki Bridge, on the right bank of the Kyōbashi River. Above the bridge, the river was shrouded in black smoke. It was impossible to tell what was happening in the direction of the city hall, though there were flames wherever one looked. The air was murky, as though night was already drawing in. Senda-machi still stood undamaged, so we went ashore, only to encounter a barricade of military police who were refusing to let people through. Mrs. Doi thrust her face into that of a policeman. “We live here in Senda-machi,” she said. “We have children at home. Why don’t you let us through? I am going through!”
“This is an emergency barrier,” he said harshly. “When I say get back, you get back!”
Mr. Nojima retreated dejectedly from the barricade. But then, acting as though he were going away, he muttered to us in a low voice: “Follow after me, everybody. We’ll borrow the wisdom—or should I say the cunning?—of the ancients. This is a trick that a famous hero thought up during the Teiyū civil war. Come on, after me!”
He stepped into the passageway of one of those houses that have an unfloored passageway running from front to back. He walked straight through the house, and out at the back. Next, he went in at the rear entrance of a house backing onto the first, walked straight through the passageway, and out into the broad street beyond. All the houses were leaning at an angle, and plaster had fallen away from the walls. They were unoccupied.
“Well I never!” said Mrs. Miyaji.
I admit I was rather startled myself. For all Mr. Nojima’s resourcefulness, what would have happened if there had been somebody in the houses we had passed through? Fortunately, everybody must have fled for fear the flames might spread in this direction. My heart was thumping faster when I came out of the passageway than when I had gone in.
CHAPTER 2
At this point, Shigematsu decided to get his wife Shigeko to help in transcribing the remainder of his niece’s diary. She wrote in a better hand than he, for one thing. Besides, three days previously he and Shōkichi and another man called Asajirō had begun trying to rear carp, and somehow he felt uneasy unless he went to make a quite unnecessary inspection of the pond in which they were keeping the fry. He had been twice the day before yesterday, and three times, braving the rain, yesterday.
At suppertime the previous day, Yasuko had said to him sympathetically, “Going to inspect the ponds is a kind of act of homage for you, isn’t it Uncle? I don’t expect it’s such fun as it looks to the outsider.”
But she was wrong: it was a pleasure that no outsider could possibly know, a pleasure only comparable to that of fishing.
“Shigeko!” he called to his wife as he was going out. “I’m going to ‘pay homage.’ Will you go on copying out this diary for me? But you’d better not write in that calligraphy-teacher hand of yours—do it in ordinary writing as far as possible. Those fancy styles aren’t very practical, you know. The go-between might find it hard to read.”
He went off to visit the pond at Shōkichi’s place beyond the hill, the private nursery in which he, in cooperation with Shōkichi and Asajirō, were to raise the baby carp, feeding them on rice bran and silkworm pupae throughout the summer in order to release them in the lake at Agiyama.
There had been a dozen or more people suffering from radiation sickness in the village, but now only three survived—mild cases, of whom Shigematsu was one. All three had checked the progress of the disease by taking care always to get plenty of food and rest. Where the rest was concerned, however, it was not enough—nor was it tolerable for the patient himself—simply to lie in bed all day. The doctor had suggested doing light jobs about the place, supplemented by “walks.” Unfortunately, it was out of the question for the head of a family, to all appearances in the best of health, to stroll idly through the village. For someone to “go for a walk,” in fact, was quite unheard of. A “walk” was unthinkable in terms of traditional custom, and thus unthinkable in principle.
Why, then, should they not go fishing instead? Both the doctor at the clinic and the heart specialist in Fuchū had said fishing was very beneficial in mild cases of radiation sickness, both psychologically and because it provided an added source of fat in the diet. Fishing from a boat—for sweetfish, for example—was too chilly, but fishing from the embankment of a lake was the ideal way (therapeutically speaking) of killing two birds with one stone. While one was fishing, one’s powers of thought were temporarily paralyzed, so that it had the same effect in resting the cells of the brain as a deep sleep.
; Even so, for someone to go fishing at an age when he should have better things to do was liable to cause bad feeling among others who were busy at work. Shigematsu and Shōkichi had themselves been subjected, to their very faces, to a piece of unpardonable sarcasm on that same score.
It was during the busiest season on the farms, at a time when everybody was hard at work cutting the wheat and planting the ricefields. It was the best time of year for fishing, both in the river and the lakes, and the weather had just cleared up after a spell of rain. Shigematsu and Shōkichi were fishing on the bank of the lake at Agiyama when the woman from Ikemoto’s hailed them:
“Lovely weather we’re having!”
So far, so good; but she halted in her tracks and went on disagreeably:
“Both fishing, eh? Some people are lucky, I must say, seeing how everybody else is so busy.”
She wore a cotton towel over her hair and carried an empty bamboo basket on her back.
“What are you getting at?” said Shōkichi, keeping his eyes on his float in the water. “It’s the woman from Ikemoto’s isn’t it? Just what would you mean by that, woman?”
Instead of getting on as she ought to have done, she deliberately came closer to the foot of the bank.
“Well, what do you mean, some people are ‘lucky’?” went on the normally mild and gentlemanly Shōkichi. “If you mean us, you’re barking up the wrong tree. Quite the wrong tree, I can tell you! Come now, woman, let’s see if you can’t put things more civilly.”
The tip of his fishing rod was quivering with indignation.
“Look here,” he continued. “We’ve got radiation sickness, and we’re fishing for loach at the doctor’s orders….You think we’re ‘lucky’ to be sick, do you? I’d be only too glad to do some work, I can tell you—any amount! But people like us have only to do a bit of hard work and their limbs start to rot on them. This damned disease comes out.”
“Well, fancy that now…! Of course, you wouldn’t be taking advantage of being caught in the raid, would you?”
“That’s enough! Shut your mouth! A joke’s a joke….I suppose you’ve forgotten how you came to see me when I got back from Hiroshima, have you? Or were they crocodile tears? I remember you blubbering and calling me a ‘precious victim’ at the time.”
“Did I now? But that was before the end of the war. Why—everybody said that kind of thing during the war. If you ask me, I think you’re trying to pick a quarrel or something, to start bringing up things like that now.”
Still she refused to get on, a typical widow in her determination not to be got the better of.
“And you’re a fine one aren’t you, Shōkichi—” she went on, “reminding me about going to see you when you were sick. Whose place do you think it is to talk like that? You’d do well not to throw people’s kindnesses in their faces.”
“People’s kindnesses? What do you mean? I suppose you think you own this lake, do you, just because you’re in charge of the lock? You’re wrong there—quite wrong, woman! Anybody on the irrigation committee for this lake can fish here as he pleases. Didn’t you know that?”
“Isn’t that just what I’m saying—that it’s very nice for you? That’s why I said you were lucky—”
“Why, you damned widow bitch!”
He made as if to jump up, but his lame leg thwarted him. His legs were dangling over the inner slope of the embankment, and he could not get up in a hurry. He began easing his buttocks round towards the water so that he would not slip down the embankment, but the woman in the meantime had got down to the path that sloped away from its foot. Not content with that, she had rakishly flung the rope of her empty basket, which had originally been over both shoulders, over one shoulder only, so as to cut a dash with her back view as she went.
“Did you ever hear the like! My God!” stormed Shōkichi, glaring at her retreating form. “It makes my blood boil.” He was so carried away that he was actually stirring the waters of the lake with his rod.
“The people at Ikemoto’s have forgotten that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were atom-bombed. Everybody’s forgotten! Forgotten the hellfires we went through that day—forgotten them and everything else, with their damned anti-bomb rallies. It makes me sick, all the prancing and shouting they do about it.”
“Come, now, Shōkichi—you mustn’t say such things….Why, look—you’ve got a bite! Your float’s bobbing!”
Wondrous to behold, the float of the rod with which he had been stirring the water was being tugged down vigorously below the surface.
Shōkichi raised his rod and drew it to him, revealing a large loach with the hook embedded deep in its throat. Needless to say, this deus ex machina successfully assuaged his wrath, and he fished steadily throughout the rest of the day, catching nearly eight pounds of fish in all. Even so, both he and Shigematsu decided that they would not go to fish in the lake for a while.
The third friend, Asajirō, had been in Hiroshima as a member of the Service Corps when the bomb fell, having himself volunteered for work there. His symptoms were the same. If he pulled a heavy cart or worked in the fields, he got an ominous rash of small pimples among the hair on his scalp, but they dried up if he ate nourishing foods, went fishing, and took other mild exercise. His particular method of taking nourishment did not follow the instructions of the visiting doctor, but was something he had got from a practitioner of moxibustion. He ate three meals a day, invariably including two bowls of bean paste soup with fried bean curd and dried, shredded giant radish, plus a raw egg and, once a day at least, some garlic. Medical treatment for him consisted of a weekly moxibustion session. The lower, unfloored part of his barn was hung with row upon row of giant radishes, both whole and shredded, waiting to be eaten.
Asajirō had been fond of fishing since childhood, and was adept at catching eels using a special contrivance made from a bamboo tube. On the night before the bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima, he had left his lodgings after dark (being a member of a voluntary labor unit, he was free to move about as he pleased) and had gone down to the river from the west end of Sumiyoshi Bridge, where he set his bamboo-tube trap on the river bed. The next morning, his unit had gone to work as usual with the foreman at its head, but, hearing distant explosions, Asajirō and his friend Shōkichi had taken refuge under the bridge, hiding in a covered boat tied up there. It was high tide, and there was six or seven feet of water in the river. The all-clear sounded almost immediately, so Asajirō came out of the boat, hauled up the bamboo trap, and went back under the cover so as to take out the eel without being seen. Shōkichi got in with him.
The cover of the boat, a piece of old sail-cloth covered with patches, was dyed a virulent yellow. The broad flap that hung all round it was similarly dyed yellow. Asajirō’s bamboo trap, which worked on a special principle of his own, was a good six feet long. The tube was wet and slippery, and Shōkichi was wiping and rubbing at it with a cotton towel when there was a flash, bluish-white like a will-o’-the-wisp, and a terrifying roar. The boat spun round on its bow as though on a pivot, and its gunwale crashed against that of the next boat. They threw themselves clumsily into the bottom of the boat and Shōkichi, rolling head over heels, banged his ankle against the gunwale.
They found later that one side of the part of the bamboo tube that had been projecting beyond the gunwale was blackened—scorched by the flash, or by the heat from the explosion. The other side was still the natural color of green bamboo. When they tipped up the tube, a small quantity of lukewarm water ran out into the bottom of the boat. The gunwale, bow, and stern of the boat were all scorched; the hawser, being chain, was spared. The cover of yellow canvas was not scorched: yellow, it seemed, repelled the flash. Thanks to this, they were both spared having their skin charred or blistered, though they could not escape the after-effects of radiation. Shōkichi’s limp was the result of breaking a bone when he banged his ankle against the gunwale.
—
For a while, Shigematsu and the other two gave up any idea of g
oing to the lake to fish, but at Shōkichi’s suggestion they decided to get together to rear carp in the lake. “I’m so eager to give the woman at Ikemoto’s a taste of her own medicine,” Shōkichi said, “that I thought up the idea just to be nasty.” As an idea, there was really nothing out of the ordinary about it. When the rice-planting season came, they were to order carp fry from the hatchery at Tsunekanemaru village. They would feed them throughout the summer in the pond at Shōkichi’s place, then release them in the lake at Agiyama before the typhoon season began. They would club together and have about three thousand fry sent to begin with.
“That will mean we’ve invested capital in it,” he said. “Nobody can call it just amusing ourselves to fish for something we’ve invested good money in. It means we shall be able to fish with a completely easy mind. In fact, it might even be a good thing to spread the story that we’ve bought twenty or twenty-five thousand fry.”
Both Shigematsu and Asajirō approved of Shōkichi’s plan, and Asajirō went to the local office to get permission to release fish in the lake. Permission was given on condition that only those who belonged to the irrigation committee for the lake could fish there. Even so, the main thing was that Shigematsu and his friends should be able to fish there without worrying about what other people thought. As Shōkichi said, so long as one had invested even a little money in the fish one caught, it was not just amusing oneself, but a kind of work, or like running a business. The doctor, of course, had insisted on the importance of regular daily walks, but since it was not possible, unfortunately, to invest in walking, the activity tended to be looked down on as merely frivolous. To stand gossiping by the main road, or to take a nap by the side of a path, was something different; these needed no capital either, but they happened to be customs sanctioned by hundreds—if not thousands—of years of tradition.