by Masuji Ibuse
The Second General Army Headquarters was on the north side of the East Parade Ground. That meant that from the Yokogawa area to here Miyaji had fled along the same route as myself.
We walked from the Clothing Branch Depot toward the Regional Monopoly Office. It was a district of wealthy homes, completely laid waste. Broken telephone wires hung in great fringes and the road was covered all over with tiles, sliding doors, and other debris.
Sometimes the cat was ahead of Miyaji, sometimes behind. Miyaji was in a pitiful state. He seemed on the verge of collapse, and was hardly aware of what he was doing. I felt a desperate urge to make haste. I picked up a piece of bamboo for him to use as a stick, then threw it away again: with the skin off the back of his hands, it would have been unkind. There was nothing to do but pick our way ahead slowly, treading on tiles, pushing doors and screens out of the way, stooping to pass beneath dangling cables.
The tiles crunched under our feet. Our shoes would slip on them, and we would fall forward. We would put our hands out to save ourselves, but to stand up again was a sore effort. Nobody was about but the pair of us, and the cracking of tiles beneath our feet rang unnaturally loud in the silence. I noticed a large chest of drawers lying tumbled on the undulating mounds of tiles. A young woman in nothing but a loincloth sat propped against it, with her legs flung out before her and one of her breasts torn off. She may well have been dead.
The tortoiseshell cat, it occurred to me, was probably taken with the smell of the boots. It continued to shadow Miyaji, and was still with him when we came out on the broad road along which the streetcars went to Ujina.
The streetcars were all stopped. Here, though, the streets took on a completely different appearance. Trucks loaded with the injured passed by unceasingly. There was a car carrying army officers. A hand-drawn cart went by, the injured hauling the injured. The many maimed who went on foot were in much the same condition as the refugees I had seen on the railway embankment and the East Parade Ground, but here many of them were using pieces of wood or bamboo as sticks. Here, there were few calls for help or cries of pain, and almost none of the injured were running. Why run, indeed, when to run was only to hasten to the world of shadows? Among the refugees I saw a cripple in a chair. He pedaled his chair with his hands, zooming past the injured with an almost contemptuous indifference.
Miyaji felt his way with his hands along the wall of the Monopoly Office as though he might collapse at any moment. When the wall gave out on him, he groaned “Water! Water!” and the next moment had staggered out into the road and halted by a stranded streetcar. I felt myself on the verge of fainting, but followed him up to the streetcar and half crawled onto the deck. Miyaji sat on the step. Inside the car, in a corner of a seat, were a charming small boy barely old enough to walk, a girl of seven or eight, and a boy who looked like a primary school pupil and held a ping-pong paddle. I dropped a triangular bandage from my first-aid kit over the raw flesh on Miyaji’s shoulders, and tied the two corners round his throat. It looked like a white shawl.
“Mr. Miyaji, I have some mentholatum at least,” I said. “What shall I do—shall I put some on?”
He shook his head. “But I should like a drink of water,” he said. He pointed at the sky. “Why—look at that fire!”
A tremendous funnel of flame was shooting up into the sky from somewhere around the center of the city. A truly huge column of fire, it sucked together the smoke and flames gushing from different parts of the district, and fashioned them into a single great whirlpool, at the same time spreading out the smoke into a cloudlike shelf above. Around the twisting column of flame that pierced this cloud I could see, scattering and falling, small gobbets of fire and shapes that emitted flames. It dawned on me that they were the pillars and beams and other timbers of houses. They had been drawn up into the whirlwind, and were burning as they fell.
Although the wind did not seem to change direction, the flames from time to time would creep out over the roofs of buildings. At one moment, the fire would stretch out as though a huge rope were being twisted out of the flame, then the next moment it would surge forward in a great wave. With the pointed tongues of its flames, it licked at the windows of the larger Western-style buildings.
“Look—” said Miyaji in a shaking voice, “the tips of the flames are like snakes—they flicker their tongues in at the windows first, then they crawl right inside. Do you see that building that’s just started burning—that’s the Fukuya Department Store isn’t it?”
Every time one of the great waves of fire broke against the Fukuya Department Store, the Chūgoku Power Supply Corporation, the Chūgoku Newspaper Office, the City Hall, or any other large building, its flames would burst out in a southwesterly direction from countless windows at once. One such surge of flame would almost certainly have consumed a dozen or two dozen ordinary wooden houses. Suddenly, though, the wind must have changed, for a part of the fire suddenly bulged out from the center and, first spindle-shaped, then spherical, drifted up into the sky on its own. Then, even as we watched, the center of the sphere on its upward journey split, and gaped wide open.
A remarkable phenomenon. I pressed my hand against my chest. Possibly I was past fear, for my heartbeat was normal. My state of mind was definitely not. I felt, at one and the same time, as though I were being pressed inexorably backward, as though I were being swallowed up into the earth, as though my brain were going numb to all feeling.
Miyaji stood up. “Mr. Shizuma—let’s go home,” he said. Getting off the streetcar, I glanced back inside; the three children had disappeared.
As we reached the front gate of the Monopoly Bureau, the roof of our home came into sight amidst the houses still standing unburned on the other side of the river. The only smoke to be seen was still far in the distance. The house had survived; quite suddenly, all the strength went out of my limbs, and I sank down onto the ground. Miyaji’s house, which was one-storied, was not visible.
“Mr. Shizuma—I’m worried,” Miyaji said. “I think I’ll hurry on. The way that fire’s burning, everything’s certain to go up in flames sooner or later.”
He went off across Miyuki Bridge on unsteady legs, and disappeared from sight. (They say he died the next day.) I had got halfway across the bridge myself before I noticed that there was no parapet left. On the north side, it lay collapsed along the bridge, but on the south it must have been blown into the river. The posts were of granite—a foot square and about four feet high, I should say. They had stood at intervals of some six feet, each capped with a block of stone about twice the area of the post itself. There had been dozens and dozens of these massive posts, and they were all blown down or blown away.
A man lay at the northern end of the bridge. It was not Miyaji. Several more bodies were floating in the water beneath the bridge. I hastened on towards the university sports ground. Our prearranged assembly point was by the side of the swimming pool. It was four or five hundred meters from Miyuki Bridge to the pool, and all the way I felt my chest constricted, almost as though I were approaching some fierce animal that had escaped from its cage. Nor can I believe that it was just because I walked too fast.
The sports ground was a turmoil of refugees. Threading my way through them, I reached the edge of the pool, and there on the other bank, seated on her heels on the ground with a knapsack on her back and a blanket over her knees, I saw my wife. Scooping up water from the pool with my hands, I drank, then made my way around to the other side. I had always instilled into her that she must use a knapsack when taking refuge in a raid, since a suitcase would catch on other people in a crush. And she must go to the side of the pool, I had said, where one could jump in if the fires got too close. She had obeyed my instructions faithfully. Beside her where she sat stood a rice-cooking pot and a small pan.
“You’re not hurt?” I asked.
“No.” Seeing my face, she looked down and said no more.
“What about the house?”
“It tilted, but it’s
still standing.”
“No fire?”
“The top of the pine tree in the garden started to burn, but it was too high to do anything about it.”
“I expect Yasuko’s all right. She’s at Furue, isn’t she?”
“I expect she’s all right.”
“Not hungry?”
“No, I’m not hungry.”
“How about the neighbors?”
“I came here right away, so I didn’t see very much.”
She seemed to be in a rather dazed state, so I decided to make sure by going to look at the house myself. With a strict injunction to her not to leave the spot until I returned, I set off home.
The fire on the pine tree had gone out, but the props of the telephone pole were burning at the base. I extinguished them by beating them with a bamboo broom.
The house was leaning in a south-southeasterly direction at an angle of about fifteen degrees. The sliding screens and outer shutters on the second floor had all been blown out. I stepped up into the drawing room, and found it strewn all over with pieces of glass, and the sliding doors pushed into a slightly rhomboid shape. I went round all the rooms in turn—the big room, the two smaller rooms, and the one smallest room, as well as the two rooms upstairs—and everywhere the sliding doors were lop-sided and stuck fast in their grooves.
I went through the kitchen into the bathroom, and found that the kitchen from the Hayamis’ place, our neighbors at the back, had been blown, wall and all, into our bathroom. The bath-tub was buried in a litter of cups, ladles, chopsticks, gridirons, china bowls, and the like, and the wall of the dressing room was plastered with some blackish food boiled in soy, pickled vegetables, and used tea leaves. There was even a piece of dried cuttlefish lying on the boarded floor, also presumably blown over from the Hayamis. I was tempted to try it, but cuttlefish was such a luxury that I put it in my first-aid pouch instead.
I went back to the smaller room and helped myself to the cold tea in the teapot, drinking from the spout. I rummaged in the medicine chest for something to put on my burned cheek, but there was nothing that could be used as an ointment. The full-length mirror lay broken on the floor. I glanced at the calendar with its message for the day. “Never say die,” it said.
CHAPTER 6
Early the next morning, Shōkichi and Asajirō, dressed as for a journey and carrying Gladstone bags, came to ask Shigematsu whether he would care to join with them in making a pond for hatching carp in. They had already bought fry from the Tokikanemaru hatchery, of course, but this time they wanted to rear much larger numbers of them from the very earliest stage, for release in the large pond at Agiyama.
“As I hear,” said Shōkichi, “they begin spawning on the Eighty-eighth. They start when the water gets a bit warm, and go on into July, or August even, so long as the temperature of the water’s right. We’re going to go to the hatchery at Tokikanemaru to learn how to hatch them.”
“So Shōkichi and me, we’re just off to Tokikanemaru to learn how,” put in Asajirō. “We’re going for a period of study, you might say. Then, when we’ve done our stint, the idea is to make a pond for hatching them in. We two are already set on the idea. So do you agree, or don’t you?”
Shigematsu agreed readily. The “period of study” would probably only last three or four days altogether; he could use the time to get on with the transcription of his journal.
Shōkichi and Asajirō went off without further ado to catch the first bus of the day, taking their heavy-looking Gladstone bags with them. They were so active today that it seemed hardly possible they were victims of atomic disease. Shigematsu decided to follow their example, and to press ahead with the copying of his journal.
—
I went over to the pond by the rockery in the back garden. A parasol and mosquito net were floating on the water. Of late, it had become a kind of ritual after dinner in our family to put a board across one corner of the pond and to stand on it the crockery, the pots, and the other utensils we used every day, so that in the event of an air raid we had only to raise one side of the board with one hand, and the whole lot would disappear under the water. Shigeko must have taken a hint from this and, on the spur of the moment, done the same to the parasol and net.
Taking some bricks from where the wall had collapsed, I loaded them on the mosquito net and parasol to sink them. The net was a valuable piece of property that could be traded for 50 gō of rice, and I weighted it with plenty of bricks to make sure it would not come to the surface. As I was doing so, I spotted, in a corner of the pond beneath an overhanging aloe branch, a carp about a foot long and a loach of about six or seven inches, both floating dead in the water with their bellies all swollen up. I fished them out and threw them away at the foot of the brick wall, in case they decomposed and made the net and other things smell. Both their bellies, I found, were distended quite hard.
Years before, when I had been living in a rented room, an earthquake had brought a bank in the garden crashing down, and several carp in the pond had died. I had dissected one of them, a black carp about a foot long that they gave me, and was surprised to find its air bladder blown up tight, like a balloon. I recalled the incident now. It seems that when fish are subjected to some sudden, sharp shock, it paralyzes the machinery regulating their air bladders and their nervous systems, so that the air bladders fill with a mixture of gases which exerts a sudden pressure on the internal organs and stops the functions of the whole body. I remembered, too, how as a child in the country I had caught fish in a mountain stream by hitting a rock with a large, flat-headed hammer. The method was only possible in the winter, when the flow was small. I would raise the hammer high, and bring it down with all my strength on the side of the rock. There would be a great clang of metal on stone, and a gunpowdery smell, and at the same instant the fish would emerge from under the rock and stop quite still, stupefied, in the water. You could get hold of them and they wouldn’t try to get away; their nerves had stopped functioning for the time being, paralyzed by the shock.
I, though, who had been on the deck of a train in Yokogawa Station, had registered nothing with my senses apart from the ball of light and the blast. That fish should die, great granite posts be blown down, and walls be broken through, yet human beings on the ground come through almost unscathed, was beyond my understanding. Even though I knew that fish had skins more sensitive to sound than human beings, a nameless dread still filled me whenever I wondered what type of bomb the ball of fire had been, or what its scientific effects might be.
I went around the neighbors’ houses, peering about me as I went. I visited each house in turn—the Nozus and the Nakanishis in front of us, the Nittas on the west side, the Miyajis, the Ōkōchis, and the Sugais on the east—but there was no sound from anywhere. Next, I went to the houses on the street at the back. Of the people in our neighborhood association, Nojima, Mrs. Yoshimura, and Mrs. Miyaji had gone to Furue with Yasuko, and should be safe. But here all the houses stood vacant, leaning at an angle of fifteen degrees or more. I called again and again to Miyaji, with whom I had been walking only a while before, but even here there was no reply. The Nakamuras’ house had collapsed. “Mr. Nakamura! Mr. Nakamura!” I called, but there was no reply. “Mr. Nakamura!” I called again. “Master Nakamura! Mrs. Nakamura!” I pricked up my ears for a possible groan, even, but there was no reply of any kind. A silent collapsed house is still more unnerving than a silent empty one.
The members of the neighborhood association must have taken refuge somewhere. The doors and shutters were all left unfastened, with the same complete indifference to the dangers of theft as in the houses I had seen on the way. All those hours of firefighting drill with the members of the association had come to nothing now. Not a single lookout posted, much less anyone to bother about bucket relays, stretchers, or the like….Suddenly, all the things we had done up to now seemed to me so much children’s play, and my own life, too, a toy life.
“All right,” I told myself, “so everythi
ng’s kid’s play. All the more reason, then, to throw yourself into it wholeheartedly. Do you get it, now? No throwing in the sponge!”
I went back to our own house and walked round it to see where the tiles had come off. The roof on the north side had been stripped completely, while the south side had a score or so left. The ridge tiles had all gone, except for one that I had once secured with copper wire when I did some repairs. On top of the collapsed wall by the pond, a piece of timber more than six feet long and four inches square was resting, and three logs about nine feet long were lying on the inside of the wall. Some of the local timber merchant’s wares must have come flying over the Hiroshima University vegetable gardens and landed there, which meant they had been blasted a distance of four or five hundred feet at the very least. I was appalled. With a flash of inspiration, I used the timber and the logs as buttresses to shore up the tilting house. A buttress is designed to afford a constant and powerful check to the impulse of a building to fall down; my own buttresses, I thought, had a plucky air about them.
I was looking out through the wall where it had collapsed, to see if I could find another log somewhere, when I saw a young man sitting on a piece of timber, rewinding his puttees. It was the student from the Hiroshima Industrial College who lodged with the neighbors.
“Hashizume!” I called. “What are you doing there?” He looked round as though startled, and said “Yes.”
“What’s happened to Mrs. Nitta and everyone?” He only stared at me and said “Yes” again.
“Now, son, pull yourself together,” I said, stepping over the collapsed wall and out into the road. “You’ve come back from school haven’t you? What happened to the school? Any damage?”
“The school collapsed,” the boy said in an empty voice. “Most of the others were crushed to death. Some of them were caught underneath but got out injured.”