Black Rain

by Masuji Ibuse

  When they ordered the fry from the hatchery at Tsunekanemaru, the young owner of the hatchery came personally on his motorcycle to inspect the pond at Shōkichi’s. He measured the temperature of the pond, the rate of flow, the depth, the area, and so on; checked to see whether any agricultural chemicals were getting in; and even investigated what kinds of foodstuffs occurred naturally in the pond. Then he wrote out a card with details (including some impressive words in English) of the kinds and quantities of artificial feed needed for three thousand fry.

  “I imagine the temperature in this pond ranges from 59° in midwinter to 75° in midsummer,” he said. “You couldn’t do better for keeping carp fry. Just the right temperature. Ideal conditions, in fact.”

  Having delivered this verdict, he went on to see the lake at Agiyama before going home. A few days later, he came again in a truck bearing a tankful of fry and a cylinder of oxygen. The tanks held tens of thousands of fry, all for release in ponds in the neighborhood. Shōkichi, as he had said all along he would do, brought an abalone shell suspended from a bamboo pole and set it up by the pond—in order, he said, to keep away weasels.

  “Well, well—an abalone shell!” said the young hatchery owner, pausing in his task of scooping out the fry. “Takes you back to the old days, doesn’t it? An abalone shell….I expect they bring back memories for most of the old folk in these parts, don’t they?”

  He had put three thousand fry in the pond, taking care not to waste a single one. This had been three days ago, on a day with a warm, damp, almost stifling wind.

  —

  All seemed to be well at the pond at Shōkichi’s, and no noticeable number of fry had perished. When Shigematsu, having reassured himself on this point, returned home, he found Yasuko rattling a chain in the bathroom chimney to get rid of the soot. Shigeko, who had got the straw mats from the garden in the unfloored downstairs part of the barn, came to the door.

  “Mightn’t it be better to cut out that one place in Yasuko’s diary?” she said. “At the time she wrote it you could still talk to people about the black rain without their getting funny ideas, as nobody knew there was anything poisonous in it. But nowadays everybody knows. If we leave that part in when we send them the copy, mightn’t they get the wrong idea?”

  “How far have you got with the copying?”

  “That’s just it, you see—I wanted to ask you, so I waited. Don’t you realize—it’s down there in writing, about her getting rained on.”

  “Oh yes, the rain….Then, you mean you haven’t copied out a single word?”

  Quite suddenly, the memories of the day the bomb fell swept over him, and he went off into the house, grumbling to himself as he went. Yasuko’s diary and her notebooks were stacked on the table in the box room. Checking the contents, he found that he himself had copied out less than one-fifth of the whole.

  “Bother them and their black rain!” he muttered to himself querulously. “And people getting the wrong idea! And being scared about what people think.” He began to read on in Yasuko’s diary.

  It felt as though night was drawing in, but after I’d been home for a while I realized that it was dark because of the clouds of black smoke filling the sky. My aunt and uncle had just been setting out to look for me. Uncle Shigematsu had been at Yokogawa Station when the bomb fell, and was hurt on his left cheek. The house was leaning at an angle, but Aunt Shigeko was unharmed. I wasn’t aware until Uncle Shigematsu told me that my skin looked as though it had been splashed with mud. My white short-sleeved blouse was soiled in the same way, and the fabric was damaged at the soiled spots. When I looked in the mirror, I found that I was spotted all over with the same color except where I had been covered by my air-raid hood. I was looking at my face in the mirror, when I suddenly remembered a shower of black rain that had fallen after Mr. Nojima had got us in the black market boat. It must have been about 10 a.m. Thundery black clouds had borne down on us from the direction of the city, and the rain from them had fallen in streaks the thickness of a fountain pen. It had stopped almost immediately. It was cold, cold enough to make one shiver although it was midsummer. Obviously I had been in a state of shock. I had had the idea, for one thing, that it had started raining while I was in the truck. Actually, the shower had come and gone in a moment, as if to befuddle my wits. A nasty cheat of a shower!

  I washed my hands at the ornamental spring, but even rubbing at the marks with soap wouldn’t get them off. They were stuck fast on the skin. It was most odd. I showed them to Uncle Shigematsu, who said, “It could be the oil from an oil bomb, after all. I wonder if it was an oil bomb they dropped, then?” Then he looked at my face and said, “Or it might be poison gas—some sort of substance like mud, but more clinging. Perhaps they dropped a poison gas bomb.” He looked again, and said, “Or it may not be poison gas, but something that sprayed out of a Japanese ammunition dump that blew up. Perhaps a spy or someone set fire to an ammunition dump. There may have been an arsenal for storing the army’s secret weapons. I was at Yokogawa Station when it happened, then I walked back along the tracks, but I didn’t see any black rain. I expect you’ve been splashed with oil.”

  If it’s really poison gas, I thought, then this is the end. I felt horrified, and then awfully sad. However many times I went to the ornamental spring to wash myself, the stains from the black rain wouldn’t come off. As a dye, I thought, it would be an unqualified success.

  —

  Yasuko’s diary for August 9 ended here. Ideally, he realized, it would be better to cut out the account of the black rain as his wife had suggested. But what would happen if, when they sent a copy of the diary to the go-between, she asked to see the original? Somehow or other, Shigematsu wanted to put off thinking about that question until another day. And yet, he told himself, at something past eight on August 6, when the bomb fell, Yasuko must have been more than ten kilometers from the center of the blast. He himself had been at Yokogawa, only two kilometers from the center, and his cheek had been burned, but even so he was alive, wasn’t he? He had heard that some people who had been in the same area but had escaped without burns were now leading perfectly normal married lives.

  He began to feel like showing the go-between his own account of the same period, from his own journal, so that they would realize the difference. This time, whatever happened, Yasuko’s proposed marriage must not be allowed to founder. Recently, Yasuko’s appearance had improved beyond recognition. Her eyes had a new, almost unnatural luster, and she seemed terribly young and fresh. He knew that she was devising every possible way to make herself more attractive without seeming to do so, and he felt desperately that he must not disappoint the enthusiasm she so clearly felt for the match this time.

  “Shigeko!” he yelled, his frustration finding an outlet in his voice. “Get out my journal of the bombing, will you? Shigeko! You remember—you put it away in your chest of drawers, didn’t you? I’m going to show it to the go-between, so get it out for me.”

  Shigeko, who was in the next room and could have heard perfectly well without being shouted at, brought the diary at once.

  “I should have had to copy it out decently soon at any rate, if I’m going to present it to the Primary School Library for its reference room. I’ll show it to the go-between before I give it to them.”

  “Surely Yasuko’s diary will be enough for the go-between, won’t it?”

  “Yes, but this will be a kind of appendix to it. Either way, if it’s going to go in the school reference room, it’ll have to be written out properly sometime.”

  “Won’t you just be making yourself more work?”

  “I don’t care. It’s my nature to keep myself occupied. This diary of the bombing is my piece of history, to be preserved in the school library.”

  Shigeko said no more, so with a smug air he went and got out a fresh notebook, then set about rewriting his own account of the bombing.

  —

  Document entitled “A Journal of the Atomic Bombing,” written
by Shigematsu Shizuma in a room of a rented house in the town of Furuichi, in the district of Asa, Hiroshima Prefecture, during the month of September, 1945.

  August 6. Fair.

  Every morning until yesterday the familiar voice on the radio would say “A squadron of eight B-29’s is proceeding northwards over the sea at a point 120 kilometers to the south of the Kii Channel.” This morning, the broadcast said, “One B-29 is proceeding northward,” but we paid little heed since it was the same kind of broadcast as we had been hearing every day, day and night, for so long. We had become so used to air raid warnings that they bothered us little more than the midday siren had done in the old days.

  On my way to work, I entered Yokogawa Station as usual to board the Kabe train. The train was about to leave. There was a station official whose face I knew at the ticket barrier, but the platform was empty of passengers. As I jumped onto the deck, I heard a voice say “Good morning, Mr. Shizuma.” Standing beside me on the deck was the woman who owned the Takahashi spinning-comb works.

  “Mr. Shizuma,” she said, brushing back a wisp of hair with her fingers, “I shouldn’t really ask you in a place like this, but we need your seal on those papers you prepared for us the other day so—”

  At a point three meters to the left of the waiting train, I saw a ball of blindingly intense light, and simultaneously I was plunged into total, unseeing darkness. The next instant, the black veil in which I seemed to be enveloped was pierced by cries and screams of pain, shouts of “Get off!” and “Let me by!”, curses, and other voices in indescribable confusion. The passengers came pouring out of the car. I was squeezed off the deck and flung onto the tracks on the opposite side from the platform, landing on something soft that seemed to be a woman’s body. Another body landed heavily on top of me in turn. More bodies were piled up on either side of me. A cry of pain and rage escaped me, to be echoed in my ear by a similar cry, in a heavy local accent, from a man whose head was jammed against mine. With cries and groans rising all about me, I shook myself free of those lying on me and struggled to my feet. I pushed out with all my strength, thrusting others out of the way, until eventually I found myself being buffeted from behind against something hard. Recognizing it as the edge of the platform, I elbowed people out of the way and clambered up onto it.

  Here, the cries of pain outnumbered those of alarm and anger. My eyes shut, my body wedged in a wave of humanity, I took one, then another step forward and found myself up against something hard again. Realizing that it was a pillar, I clung to it, scarcely aware of what I was doing. I wrapped my arms about it tightly, but still I was torn and buffeted mercilessly. Pushed to the right, thrust back immediately to the left, many times I came close to being torn loose. Each time, my arms were squashed, my body and chin ground against the pillar till it seemed that my shoulders must give way with the pain. I knew I had only to let go and join the wave of humanity, yet every time the wave beat against me I clung desperately to the pillar so as not to be swept away. The first opinion I had formed was that the B-29 had dropped a poison bomb that blinded one’s eyes, and that the train had been the direct target.

  Eventually, quiet descended around me. Slowly and fearfully, I tried opening my eyes. Everything within my field of vision seemed to be obscured with a light brown haze, and a white, chalky powder was falling from the sky. Not a soul was in sight on the platform. Despite the uproar a moment ago, now not even a station official was to be seen in the building. I must have stayed clinging to the pillar with my eyes shut for considerably longer than I had realized.

  Dozens of electric wires were dangling loose about the pillar. It occurred to me that they were awfully dangerous. I picked up one of the pieces of board that were lying about everywhere and brought some of the wires together, but there was no sign of a short circuit. Even so, I avoided the places where wires were crossed, pushing them aside with a piece of board as I climbed over a fence of old railroad ties to get out of the station. I was shocked to find that almost every house adjoining the station had been knocked flat, covering the ground about with an undulating sea of tiles. A few houses away from the station a young woman of marriageable age, the upper half of her body emerging from the rubble, was throwing tiles as rapidly as she could lay hands on them and screaming in a shrill voice. She probably thought she was crying “Help,” but the sound that emerged was no intelligible human speech.

  “Hey, young lady, why don’t you get out of there?” called an old man with features like a Westerner, who was passing by. “Nobody can get near you if you throw things like that.” He made to approach her as he spoke, but the girl began to fling the tiles at him, and he beat a hasty retreat. She must have been pinned down by a beam or something below the waist, yet it was remarkable that she should be stuck so firmly in the tiles and still move the upper part of her body so freely. The tiles were traveling quite far. She was breaking them, to make them smaller for easier throwing….

  CHAPTER 3

  At three o’clock in the afternoon, when Shigematsu went to the kitchen for tea, the spring cicadas were venturing on the year’s first song in the pine grove at the bottom of the hill. Shigeko was preparing a snack.

  “About your journal of the bombing—” she began. “You’re going to present it to the library for posterity, aren’t you? That’s right, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right. The headmaster asked me to. It’s my piece of history.”

  “Then you ought to take more care over it. Why don’t you write it out with writing-brush ink instead of ordinary pen ink? Writing in pen ink gradually fades away with time, doesn’t it?”

  “Don’t be silly. It may fade a little, but not as much as all that.”

  “But I’ve seen a letter written in ink around 1870, and it had turned light brown. A letter grandfather got from someone in Tokyo.”

  “When do you say you saw it?”

  “Actually, it must have been over twenty years ago. The day after I came here as a bride, mother showed it to me upstairs in the storehouse. I came here on July 1 by the old calendar, which means she showed it to me on July 2. I remember the date distinctly.”

  “Then let’s go and find out whether ink really turns light brown. Come on, take me to the storehouse and show me.”

  He brought a flashlight and went with Shigeko into the storehouse, leaving the food uneaten.

  Downstairs, the storehouse was divided in two—a section with a hardened earth floor, and a rice store with a stout door of boards. Before the postwar redistribution of agricultural land, the rice store had always been piled high with bales of rice. In years when tithes from the tenants were particularly large, they had been piled in the unfloored space too. The second floor was boarded with red pine, but badly worm-eaten; there was a set of built-in drawers containing a collection of spurious prints and calligraphy, and below it a number of chests. The chests, which were inscribed with large family crests, were said to have been brought by great-grandmother when she came as a bride. They contained, among other things, a memorandum kept by great-grandfather and various other documents which he had considered worth keeping. In the old days, Shigematsu had left the regular airing of the things in the storehouse entirely to his mother; since she had died, he had left it to Shigeko.

  “It’s in a writing-box in this chest,” said Shigeko. “Great-grandfather must have attached a great deal of importance to that particular letter.”

  She opened the lid of a chest and by the light of the flashlight drew a bundle of papers out of the writing-box. She undid the ribbon and, from amidst letters from the district office and the district officer, a Red Cross membership certificate, and sundry other papers, produced the letter in question. The sender was one Ichiki of Surugadai in Tokyo, and the addressee was Shigematsu’s great-grandfather, in the care of Mr. Sonoda, at Uchisange by Okayama Castle in the province of Bizen. The date was “an auspicious day of the eleventh month in the sixth year of the Meiji era.”

  “According to mother, lette
rs first started coming to the villages in the sixth year of Meiji,” said Shigeko. “They were sent care of somebody in Fukuyama or Okayama, then they were given to somebody to bring from there.”

  Mother would have been right: the sixth year of Meiji, 1873, was the year when the official postal service was first extended to all the nation’s major cities.

  “Great-grandfather must have set a lot of store by this letter,” said Shigematsu. “Look what’s in it.”

  Along with the long, folded sheet of writing paper on which the letter was written, the envelope contained a folded tobacco leaf. By now, of course, it was dark brown and crisp. In 1873, tobacco would not yet have been a government monopoly, and farmers had probably grown it themselves for use as a vermifuge. Another ten or twenty leaves were interspersed among the documents remaining in the box.

  “What a waste!” said Shigematsu. “I wish I’d found them while tobacco was scarce during the war. Why didn’t you tell me about it at the time?”

  “But the nicotine will all have gone out of them, won’t it? Besides, they are tobacco after all, and to cut them up and smoke them would have violated the Monopoly Law.”