by Masuji Ibuse
“Well put, woman! Why, you’re as cut and dried as these tobacco leaves yourself! Aren’t you, now?”
Everything on the second floor of the storehouse, which was dimly lit and smelt of dust, was so dry that it seemed to suck at the very moisture in their bodies. The wood was so wormy that they had to tread lightly to avoid putting a foot through the boards.
Shigematsu unfolded the letter and turned the flashlight on it. It was done by brush in an excellent hand, but the writing had faded to a pathetic light brown color:
Sir:
I am in grateful receipt of the two ounces of kemponashi seeds which I begged of you last year on the occasion of our tour of inspection to your village of Kobatake. They were delivered to me at my home by S. Murata, Esq., one-time magistrate of the village of Kobatake, on his recent arrival in the capital. I shall in due course have them grown to discover whether or not the tree in question would be appropriate for lining the avenues of the capital, and shall duly report on the matter to those in authority. May I mention that this letter, in accordance with my promise to you at the time, is written in the “ink” commonly in use in the West…
The magistrate of Kobatake in the closing days of the feudal era, who after the Restoration had continued to be responsible for keeping the peace in the district until the new district office was established two years later, had finally packed up his bags in 1873 and moved, at least temporarily, to Tokyo. All that now remained on the site of the former magistrate’s office was a tumble-down rear gate, half of the living quarters, and the white, clay-walled storehouse; the primary school now stood on what had once been part of the grounds.
“Mr. Ichiki of Surugadai in Tokyo” was doubtless an Inspector for the new Meiji Government, or a member of such an inspector’s entourage, who had happened to drop in on the magistrate’s office in Kobatake. He must have seen the trees and extracted from Shigematsu’s great-grandfather the promise to which the letter remained as witness. It was said that five great kemponashi trees had stood in the garden before Shigematsu’s house right up to the time of the Sino-Japanese War.
The kemponashi is a noble tree. Five such trees in a row must have given Mr. Ichiki a fancy to seeing them lining the streets of Tokyo. He would have summoned Shigematsu’s great-grandfather to his lodgings, and commanded him to send him two ounces of the seeds in the care of the former magistrate, when the latter should come to Tokyo. And he would graciously have bidden him name his reward for doing so. Why—great-grandfather would have replied—might he dare suggest (such an honor, indeed!) that his worship send him a letter written in this ink of which he had heard so much? How amazed, indeed, great-grandfather must have been at the new-fangled talk of “the avenues of Tokyo” and the like! Small wonder that he had cherished this letter so dearly….
Shigematsu decided to rewrite his “Journal of the Bombing” using a brush and Chinese ink. He would have Shigeko copy out again the part already written with a pen, and would himself go on with the rest on Japanese-style writing paper, using a brush.
He had been so thirsty that day. He would have given anything for a drink of water. He had turned a tap by the roadside, and steaming hot water had come out, too hot to drink directly, too hot to cup in the hands….His head full of such memories, he took up his brush, and set to work.
—
In the grounds of the Yokogawa Shrine, which lay on the east side of the station, nothing remained of the main sanctuary save a number of naked uprights. The worship hall in front of it had vanished, leaving only its clay foundation, a bare and ugly hump.
The people in the street by the shrine grounds were all covered over their heads and shoulders with something resembling dust or ash. There was not one of them who was not bleeding. They bled from the head, from the face, from the hands; those who were naked bled from the chest, from the back, from the thighs, from any place from which it was possible to bleed. One woman, her cheeks so swollen that they drooped on either side in heavy pouches, walked with her arms stretched out before her, hands drooping forlornly, like a ghost. A man without a stitch of clothing on came jogging along the road with his body bent forward and his hands between his legs, for all the world like someone about to enter the communal tub at a public bathhouse. There was a woman in her slip who ran wearily along the road groaning as she went. Another carrying a baby in her arms, crying, “Water! Water!” and constantly wiping at the baby’s eyes between her cries. Its eyes were clogged with some substance like ash. A man shouting at the top of his voice; women and children shrieking as they ran; others crying for relief from their pain….A man plumped down by the side of the road with his arms thrust skywards, waving them frantically. An elderly woman sitting earnestly praying with her eyes closed, her hands pressed together in supplication, beside a pile of tiles that had slid off a roof. A half-naked man who came along at a trot, cannoned into her, and ran on cursing her foully. A man in white trousers who crept along a little at a time on all fours, weeping noisily to himself as he went….
All these I saw in less than two hundred yards as I walked from Yokogawa Station along the highway towards Mitaki Park.
The street was swarming with people, like the rush hour in front of the station, and I simply let myself walk in the same direction as the throng. Suddenly, I heard a shrill voice calling my name amidst the other varied cries about me: “Mr. Shizuma! Mr. Shizuma!”
“Where? Where are you?” I called, and was pushing my way in the direction the voice had come from when someone seized my arm and flung herself on me.
“Oh, Mr. Shizuma! I’m so glad to see you!”
How she had wormed her way through to me, I don’t know. It was the woman who owned the Takahashi spinning-comb works. She put her arms round my waist and her head against my chest, and began to shake all over. I pulled her between two of the collapsed houses by the road, out of the general turmoil.
“Whatever can have happened, Mr. Shizuma? Such a horror!” Her face was ashen, and she continued to shake.
“We’ve been bombed, that’s what.”
“Where do you think it fell?”
“Who can tell? We’ve been bombed, though—that’s certain.”
“Mr. Shizuma—you’ve hurt your face, haven’t you? The skin’s coming off and it’s turned a funny color. It must hurt—it looks as though it would.”
I ran my hands over my face. The left hand came away wet and sticky. I looked, and found the left palm had something bluish-purple like little shreds of damp paper on it. I stroked my cheek again, and again some sticky substance came off on my hand.
It was extremely odd—I had no recollection of hitting my face on anything. It must be ash or dust or something else that rubbed off like tiny rolls of dead skin. I was about to feel it again when Mrs. Takahashi grasped my wrist.
“No you mustn’t rub it! Leave it alone until you can put something on it. If you play with it, the germs will get in from your hand.”
There was no particular pain, yet a mild horror prickled at the nape of my neck. My left cheek felt as though countless small particles were clinging to it. I made the skin move by opening my mouth wide and shutting it, and the impression of something sticking there grew stronger. Mrs. Takahashi would not let my left wrist go, so I furtively ran my right hand over my left cheek. Again the little shreds stuck to my palm. I rubbed them on the palm of my left hand, and it was like the shreds from a rubber eraser, but more slippery to the touch. A chill struck throughout my body. Suddenly, the uproar about me receded into the distance; it was not exactly faintness, but the mental shock of that moment was quite indescribable.
Something recalled to my mind a phrase from a propaganda leaflet that an enemy plane had dropped early the previous month. Words to the effect of: “We’ll be along sometime soon with a little present for the people of Hiroshima.” I didn’t see it myself, but old Tashiro, the chief technician at the Ujina canning works, told me about it. Yasuko said that one of the people at work told her about it too.
“Something terrible’s happened,” I said. “Something terrible, so we must keep calm, Mrs. Takahashi. We must think before, we act. And keep really calm.”
“Whatever can have happened, though—for everything to be like this all at once? Whatever it was—a bomb or whatever—they’ve gone too far. Yes, it’s too much!”
“Say, Mrs. Takahashi,” I said. “Your face and hair are all covered with dust. You look like you’ve got a wig of ashes on.”
At this she finally released my wrist and slapped at her hair with both hands. A fine sprinkling of something like ash or dust fell, onto her face and shoulders, so she turned her head, first left, then right, so that she could blow it off. That got it off better than slapping at it with her hands. Then she bent forward and slapped at it again, shaking her head and blowing furiously at the same time.
I tried tapping at my own hair. Powder flew off it, like the cloud of dust that rises if you spill water from the kettle onto hot charcoal in the brazier.
“I don’t like the look of this,” I said. “Stop that, Mrs. Takahashi, and let’s find some water and wash our hair and faces. We’d better wash them properly.”
She agreed with me, but all the houses about had collapsed, and the fire tanks used to store water for fire-fighting, which had formerly stood under the eaves, were buried under collapsed walls and piles of eave tiles. We went back to the tap from which boiling water had spouted, only to find it left turned on with nothing, either cold water or hot, coming out of it. We realized now that it was the tap to a tank that had been installed at the entrance to a shop. An oil drum had been set in a concrete stand, apparently for use as a makeshift cistern. The shop itself had been blasted out of existence.
The number of people we passed in the street had grown fewer, and the cries of the injured more scattered. Most people seemed to be going in the direction of Mitaki Park or the Sanjō railway bridge, so we walked in the same direction too. Along the railroad tracks there stretched a long train of refugees like a trail of ants, or like the pilgrims—it occurred to me—who were said to have lined the approaches to the shrines of Kumano in olden days. Seen in the distance, the hill in the park was like nothing so much as a great pale bun with ants swarming all over it.
As we were passing by Yokogawa Primary School, we noticed an emergency water tank in a corner of the grounds. Mrs. Takahashi, who saw it first, ran off towards it. I started to run too, but the shaking of my cheek muscles at once made me painfully aware of my left cheek, so I forced myself to keep calm and walk there. As I went to remove my spectacles to wash my face, I found they had gone. My hat, I realized, had gone too.
“I dropped my glasses and my hat!” I said.
Mrs. Takahashi put her hands to her sides and then to her shoulders.
“And I’ve dropped my bag,” she said in a hushed voice. “That bag had more than three thousand yen* in it. My money, and my savings book, and my seal.”
“Then let’s go and look for it. I expect you dropped it at Yokogawa Station when the fireball burst. Three thousand yen—that’s an awful lot of money—!”
Either way, we decided to wash ourselves first, pouring water over each other’s hair with a bucket we found nearby.
“Now you mustn’t rub your face, Mr. Shizuma!”
I scarcely needed to be warned. I washed my face by thrusting it into a bucket of water and shaking it steadily from side to side without using my hands at all. I filled the bucket full, took a deep breath, and plunged my face into the bucket, breathing out little by little as I shook my head; the bubbles caressed my cheek comfortingly.
I had a raging thirst, so I filled the bucket with fresh water and gargled three times, then drank. I don’t think anybody actually taught me to do so, but when I was a child I always made sure to gargle three times before drinking from a well or spring on unfamiliar territory. The other boys said they always gargled three times first. Besides preventing upset stomachs caused by drinking strange water, it was supposed to be a mark of respect for the water god who dwelt in the well or the spring.
The number of passers-by in the street had decreased sharply. We retraced our steps, myself in the lead, and entered what remained of Yokogawa Station as though this was the only thing there could possibly be for us to do. Mrs. Takahashi followed behind me tearfully, quailing at the thought of having lost the bag containing her entire worldly wealth.
“It’s a patent leather bag with a strap,” she said, though she had told me the same thing already. “With gold-colored metal fittings.”
“You’ll have dropped it where you were caught in the crush,” I said, also repeating myself.
There was not a soul inside the station. Around the ticket barrier and along the platform was strewn a miscellany of objects—shoes, wooden clogs, sandals, canvas slippers, parasols, air raid hoods, jackets, baskets, bundles in wrapping cloths, lunch-boxes—something of everything, like the dressing-room during school theatricals on graduation day. The lunch-boxes were particularly numerous, and I was oddly shocked—no wonder, perhaps, when the food shortage made eating loom so large in one’s mind—at the way their contents were all upset. The rice-balls were not good plain rice, but rice mixed with barley, rice mixed with soybeans from which all the oil had already been extracted, rice mixed with vegetables of a kind, rice mixed with the pressed-out leftovers from making bean curd. To go with the rice, pickled giant radish, and nothing else. Everything testified to the mad scramble that had occurred a while ago.
“There it is, my bag! There!”
She jumped down from the platform onto the tracks. It was the place where she and I and the rest had spilled out of the train in that instant when the fireball had flared up in the sky.
“Well then, my spectacles ought to be where I got caught, too.”
I was right. I found them at the foot of the pillar I had been clinging to. Luckily enough, the lenses were unbroken, but the celluloid on the left half of the frame had curled up like a spring, leaving the metal core bare and shiny. I twisted off the celluloid, and found myself with a lop-sided pair of spectacles of which the left half, sidepieces, and lens frame alike, were of metal and the right half of celluloid.
Mrs. Takahashi picked up the bag and checked over the contents, exclaiming “Oh, thank heavens!” as she did so.
As I went to wipe the lenses of my spectacles on the lapel of my open-necked shirt, I found my hand trembling. It trembled so violently that Mrs. Takahashi must have noticed, for she said, “Shall I wipe them for you, Mr. Shizuma?”
“No, I can manage,” I said, wiping the lens with a quivering hand. “I know why my hands are shaking. The enemy’s just throwing his weight about by now. That infernal light, whatever it was, burnt my left cheek. I know, because the left side of my spectacles is burnt too. It’s unimaginably beastly. It’s the act of a vicious bully, if ever there was one.”
“Yes, but there won’t be any more air raids today, surely?”
“I’d like the enemy to take a look at those lunch-boxes lying there. If only they could see those rice-balls, I doubt if they’d bother to come raiding any more. There’s been enough stupid waste like this! Why don’t people realize how we feel?”
“Mr. Shizuma, you mustn’t say such things!”
I put my spectacles on. I caught sight of a service cap trampled in the dust not far away, and picked it up. It was like mine, but not mine. What difference does it make, I thought, and, putting it on, left the station with Mrs. Takahashi.
“Put a bandage round your face,” she said. “It won’t heal over properly if the wind gets at it.”
I got an all-purpose bandage out of the first-aid kit on my shoulder and wrapped it round my head, tying it under my chin. When I put the hat on again it was too small. Stolen clothes ill fit the thief, I thought, and decided to leave it behind rather than try to keep it on. I hung it over the gargoyle-like end tile decorating the ridge of a house that had collapsed: somebody would be certain to find a use for it
.
We walked on, still with no definite goal, in the direction of Mitaki Park. Our encounters with others were far more sporadic now, but the people wending their way in the same direction as ourselves were all much more badly injured. I noticed a woman standing quite still in a disconsolate attitude, with blackish blood spurting through the fingers of her left hand where she clasped her right arm. I turned my head away, unable to look at her, only to see a young boy rush past me shouting “Ichirō! Ichirō!” He was dressed in a short-sleeved shirt, trousers in tatters from the shin down, and canvas shoes.
“It’s me, Kyūichi! It’s me!” He had halted before a young man in a steel helmet who was coming from the opposite direction. The young man stopped too, but said, “Who are you?” and seemed to shrink away slightly. Mrs. Takahashi and I paused to watch.
The boy’s face was swollen up like a football, and was much the same color; his hair and eyebrows had disappeared. He might have been anybody.
“Ichirō, it’s me. Me, your brother!”
He looked up into the young man’s face, but the young man made a wry expression as though unwilling to recognize him.
“Come on, tell me your name, then,” he said roughly. “Tell me the name of your school.”
“Kyūzō Sukune, first grade, second class, Hiroshima Prefectural First Middle School.”
The young man drew back, suddenly on his guard.
“I see, but Kyūzō—yes, Kyūzō’s wearing puttees. And he’s got a shirt made from a cotton kimono, with dark blue spots all over.”
“But the puttees got blown off. And the spots have all gone into holes. It all happened when the bomb flashed. Ichirō, you must know who I am!”
The shirt was indeed covered with holes, but the young man still seemed wary.
“But…yes, of course—I could tell Kyūzō by his belt!”
“You mean this one, Ichirō?”