Black Rain

by Masuji Ibuse

  Young Hashizume was a relative of the Nittas. He was normally a cheerful, lively youth, but now be seemed almost half-witted. The things he said were rambling and I only half grasped the sense, but I gathered that he had crawled along under desks and chairs, then through the space between ceiling and roof till he found somewhere to get out.

  “When I got home there was nobody there,” he said.

  “Then the thing to do is to look for them before the fires get here,” I said. “I imagine most of the people around here have taken refuge in the university sports ground. My wife’s there, you know. Now, what shall we do, son? Shall we go and have a look?”

  “Yes,” he said, and followed me as I led the way.

  The sports ground was still a confused mass of injured and refugees. We threaded our way through the crowd and reached the poolside, where we found Mrs. Ōkōchi of the neighborhood association sitting by my wife.

  “Why, Mr. Hashizume!” she exclaimed, then seemed to hesitate, at a loss for words. “Oh dear, some people have all the misfortune! It’s really too….Mr. Hashizume—your aunt has gone to the Kyōsai Hospital with your uncle.”

  So it came out. She had seen Mrs. Nitta injured in front of her very eyes. She had stopped in the street to talk with her about seeing off some young men who were going to the front when, all of a sudden, there had been a brilliant flash and a blast, and a tile had come flying through the air and sliced the flesh of Mrs. Nitta’s cheek clean away.

  Mrs. Ōkōchi had been born in Tokyo; she had been through the Great Earthquake there, and though she had only been at primary school at the time, she knew from her experience then what terrible things tiles could do. In a big earthquake, some force would send them skimming through the air like the pieces of cardboard children sometimes play with. Occasionally, they would travel up to 150 or 200 feet. One could imagine, she said, what an impetus the blast from something like that ball of fire would have given a tile.

  As though to prove that he had recovered himself at last, young Hashizume was beginning to weep. “I’ll go to the hospital, then,” he said. “Thank you for your kindness, and look after yourselves.” Reluctantly accepting the five yen that Mrs. Ōkōchi insisted on pressing into his hand to help him on his way, he set off alone along the side of the pool.

  Working through the possibilities together, Shigeko and I decided that the best thing we could do was to go and contact the Japan Transport branch at Ujina. It seemed to us that even if Yasuko started back to Hiroshima from Furue on the truck, the fires rising menacingly in the east and the increasing number of injured they met as they progressed eastward would convince them that it was impossible to get through to Senda-machi. They would assume that Senda-machi was on fire by now. Since the resourceful Nojima was in charge, they would almost certainly reject the overland route in favor of a boat as far as Ujina. Nojima had always said that if Hiroshima was raided he would get away to Ujina by fishing boat. He told me he had contracts with an angler who lived at Ujina and a fisherman in Miyazu so that he could hire a boat at any time. I had been quite overwhelmed at the extent of his forethought.

  “I feel sure Nojima will put ashore at Ujina,” I said. “He’ll never come back by road once he sees those fires. He couldn’t, in fact, even if he wanted to. If they land at Ujina, though, Yasuko’s sure to call in at the Japan Transport branch there. There’s some urgent business I’m supposed to see the Transport people at Ujina about this evening. I’m obliged to go, in fact, and Yasuko knows it, so she’ll show up there for certain.”

  My wife agreed with my estimate of the situation, and we decided to go and wait at the Ujina offices. Even so, it was a gamble, since there was no definite arrangement that Yasuko should call there. Shigeko turned to face the pool and, pressing her palms together before her, prayed silently for the briefest of moments.

  “I only hope your Yasuko really will look in at Ujina,” said Mrs. Ōkōchi. “Myself, I’m beginning to feel rather nervous.” She was supposed to meet up with her husband, who worked at a bank, by the side of this same pool. They had an only son, a university graduate who was in the army, stationed at somewhere called Palembang in Sumatra.

  For want of a better idea, Shigeko put some broken bricks from a wall in the pot and pan and sank them in the pool. I watched them slide effortlessly out of sight beneath the water.

  “I mean to come and get that pot and pan one day,” I said. “I only hope that day really comes.”

  “Oh, so do I!” said Mrs. Ōkōchi. “Well then, take care of yourselves. And remember me to Yasuko.”

  Shigeko and I left the sports ground and made for Miyuki Bridge. The dead body at the northern end of the bridge had flies swarming black at its mouth and nose. There was so much clotted blood about its ears that it was difficult to tell what was ear and what was blood. I was hastening past it when Shigeko said behind me, “Let’s just look in at the house. Yasuko may come back while we’re away, so we’d better put up a note for her.”

  She was right. I was disgusted at my own stupidity in not thinking of it. We went back to the house, and were looking for paper to write the note on when Yasuko suddenly arrived home out of the blue. Shigeko crouched down on the tatami amidst the fragments of broken glass and started to weep. Yasuko, who was still outside, seated herself on the raised floor of the corridor between the room and the garden and, with her rucksack still on her back and her air raid hood over her head, shed great tears of joy.

  “Yasuko, you shouldn’t rub your face,” I warned her. “Look—you’ve got tar or something stuck on your hand. It’s lucky you came back now, though. A little later, and we should have gone to the office at Ujina to look for you.”

  Since Yasuko was in my care—was almost a daughter—it would be inexcusable to my wife’s parents if anything should happen to her. Moreover, I had been responsible for bringing her to Hiroshima in the first place. Young women, from country and town alike, were being conscripted for work in military supply factories, where they were set to work wielding hammers and turning shellcases. So, taking advantage of my position in the works, I had pulled strings in order to get her appointed messenger to the works manager.

  “Oh, uncle!” she exclaimed. “Whatever have you done to your face?”

  “Oh, this?—just a little burn,” I said.

  She told us that Nojima had hired a fishing boat at Miyazu and put them all ashore downstream from Miyuki Bridge, on the right bank of the Kyōbashi River. His wife had wanted to come back with them, but he had left her at her parents’ place at Furue and brought back, besides Yasuko, Mrs. Yoshimura, Mrs. Miyaji, and Mrs. Doi. He had insisted that it was his responsibility to see them to their homes, and had negotiated with the fisherman to provide a boat for them. My prediction made by the pool at the sports ground had, in the event, proved to be approximately half correct.

  The sky was dusky with the smoke from the fires. There was no water in the taps, so I made Yasuko wash her hands at the pool in the garden, but the marks would not come off. She said they were made by the black rain, and they were firmly stuck on the skin. They were not tar, nor black paint, but something of unknown origin.

  Without delay, I went round to the Nojimas, thinking to ask how things were and, incidentally, to thank him for what he had done. I found him hastily preparing to evacuate. He, too, had the marks of the black rain on his hands.

  “Do you think it’s poison gas?” I inquired.

  “No, it’s not poison gas,” he replied, stuffing food and notebooks into a rucksack as he spoke. “They say it’s the black smoke generated by the explosion. It mingled with water vapor in the sky and got carried down in the rain. The black rain fell mostly in the western districts of the city. I met someone from the Health Department of the City Hall just a while ago, and he told me about it. They say it’s not harmful to human beings.”

  If someone from the Health Department had said so, I supposed it was all right.

  As Nojima saw it, the fires would almost certa
inly spread to Senda-machi at any moment now. So after arriving home, he had dashed back to the river below Miyuki Bridge and asked the boatman to wait a while longer so that he could escape to Miyazu by boat. That was why he was so frantically making preparations to get out. If we intended to make our way to Ujina, he said, there was no reason why we shouldn’t share the same boat.

  “Just the thing!” I said, mentally jumping for joy. “In the first place, I expect this area will be burned down as you say, and besides, I have to contact Japan Transport at Ujina just as soon as possible on some business. Do you think you could get my wife and Yasuko on board too?” Nojima agreed readily. “They’re probably safe enough in the university sports ground,” he said, “but then, I expect this area will be burnt down at any rate.”

  According to Nojima, Mrs. Doi and Mrs. Yoshimura had both, on arriving home, taken refuge in the sports ground. Mrs. Miyaji, however, had found a note from her husband waiting for her, and had rushed off to their relatives in Kichijima-chō. Not for the first time, I was astonished at Nojima’s ear for the latest news.

  The idea that we would get a ride in the boat raised my spirits. I went back home and announced in a loud voice: “We’re going by boat to Ujina to take refuge for a while. Nojima’s taking us with him.” Shigeko and Yasuko were overjoyed.

  Together with Nojima, we left Senda-machi behind us and followed the road along the embankment to the place, downstream from Miyuki Bridge, where the boat should have been. But there was no boat.

  “What can have happened?” said Nojima, clucking to himself in embarrassment. “The way the tide’s running, it can’t have gone any farther upstream than this. Perhaps it’s a bit farther downstream, then? Will you come along with me?”

  “Would that be it?” I asked, pointing to a boat visible downstream.

  “No, that’s not it. That one’s waterlogged. The Miyazu boat is a two-and-a-half ton Japanese-style one. Now, I wonder if I’ve been taken in?” He trudged off again.

  We tagged along after him. As we went farther west, the angle at which the houses in the road below the embankment leaned became progressively smaller. Even so, the damage to roof tiles and the glass of sliding doors was not proportional to the angle at which the house tilted. There were some new, solidly constructed houses, for example, whose roofs were very badly damaged. Others had a single hole yawning in the roof.

  Nojima doubtless took the affair as a blow to his personal pride. He had fallen quite silent, though every now and then he would mutter, as though it had just occurred to him, “This is dreadful, you know,” or, “I really feel terribly bad about this.” Sometimes it was, “I’ve let myself down badly—at such a time, too.”

  Many other refugees were walking along the top of the embankment. Nojima went so fast that my throat got dry and my legs hurt. Before long I found myself quite incapable of keeping up with him. Shigeko’s knapsack began to look heavier every moment. My own rucksack got heavier. Even Yasuko’s rucksack looked heavy.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Nojima,” I said, coming to a halt. “I shall just have to drop out.”

  Nojima stopped too. “I’m sorry—really I am,” he said with an expression of extraordinary discomfiture. “It’s too bad, to lead you on a wild goose chase like this at such a time. But you can see what’s happened.”

  “How could you help it?” said Shigeko. She paused. “Well, then, take care of yourself, Mr. Nojima.”

  “Well then,” he said. “I feel awkward hanging about here, so I’ll get a move on. My apologies again. Look after yourselves.”

  His hand went briefly to his air raid hood, then, swinging around, he walked off at a brisk pace. It seemed all wrong, somehow, to take leave of the most educated and best-informed man in our neighborhood association in such embarrassing circumstances. To make it worse, he was a proud man, who had always been set up by others as a model of foresight and thoroughness.

  My throat was stinging, so I got a bottle of water from the rucksack and drank directly from it. As soon as Nojima had disappeared from sight, I shouldered the rucksack again. “Even so,” I said with the idea of sounding out Shigeko’s feelings, “It seems we’ve got to thank Nojima for persuading us to get away to Ujina. The great thing is that we’ve made a definite decision.” Indeed, the fires of Hiroshima were spreading wider and wider, and it was only sensible to get out of their way for a while.

  At the Japan Transport branch at Ujina we found almost every pane of glass in the offices broken. Sugimura, the manager, asked me about the Furuichi works of the Japan Textile Company. I told him I knew nothing, since I had turned back halfway on my way to work. Nor could I give him anything but a fragmentary idea of what had happened to Hiroshima. When I told him Miyaji’s story of how the keep of Hiroshima Castle had been blown a distance of more than a hundred yards, he gulped and said “Eh? The keep?” I handed him a notification to Japan Transport from the Furuichi works, got a receipt, and transmitted verbally a few confidential matters.

  The manager was good enough to provide sufficient food—rice balls made with freshly cooked rice, together with pickled radish and vegetables boiled down in soy and sugar—for three people. It seemed the height of luxury. The meal over, we thanked him, went outside, and set off home together along the road with the streetcar tracks.

  The procession of injured had not diminished in the slightest, and the number of severely injured was rather greater than in the morning. Among those I particularly noticed were a man whose shoulder bone seemed almost to be showing; another clutching a bamboo stick and walking on one leg, with the other leg done up in a splint; a man and woman carrying a dead child, covered with blood, on a door panel; and a woman with her hair caked with blood, her face, shoulders, and arms covered with blood too, and only her eyes and teeth showing white.

  As we passed each of them, Yasuko would stare compulsively. “Oh uncle! Look at that woman,” she would say. “Aunt Shigeko—do look at him!” Again and again, I had to tell her: “It’s not a show. Anyhow, there’s nothing we can do for them, so keep quiet and come on. Keep your eyes on the ground.”

  When we reached Miyuki Bridge, there was no longer a single house visible in the direction where ours had stood. Smoke was drifting, hugging the ground, toward the east. We had done well to clear out to Ujina for a while. To avoid the residual heat, I led the way through the sports ground, over the small bridge without a name, through the vegetable gardens, and out behind our home. Shigeko and Yasuko followed in silence.

  Our house was no more. Beyond the heavy drift of smoke, a grove of camphor trees showed in the distance, green and luxuriant as ever. The only thing in the foreground between us and them was a willow tree, drooping what looked like black needles over the embankment of the river. Again and again, as we walked away, I turned to look at where our home had stood. I must have turned round, literally, seven or eight times.

  The crops in the vegetable gardens were scorched by the heat and hung withered and lifeless. A telephone pole in one corner of the field, half burnt down, was spouting smoke, with a flame about a foot high as though someone had set up a huge candle there. Now and then, when a hot gust of wind sprang up, the flame would emit a faint humming sound, and the blackened timbers on the burned-out ruins of our house would suddenly glow red. Smoke would billow up, only to be dispersed at once by the wind.

  “Aunt Shigeko, where are we going to sleep tonight?” asked Yasuko.

  Shigeko did not answer.

  “The only thing possible is to go to the works,” I said. “If we can’t get there, we’ll have to spend the night on the river bank or somewhere. There’s no other alternative.”

  We crossed the field to the river bank. We followed it upstream, and were approaching the grounds of the Senda Primary School when we caught sight of a horse lying on the bank with its four legs stretched out in front of it. From time to time, its blackened, unnaturally large belly gave a heave, then subsided again. It was breathing—short, sharp breaths, as if to prove t
hat it was still, if only just, alive. In the school grounds, we found a fire-fighting bucket with water in it, so we decided to moisten our towels and cover our noses and mouths with them when the smoke came billowing against us.

  Giving careful thought to the shortest route to the firm at Furuichi, I led the way to the main street leading from Hijiyama Bridge through to Sagino Bridge. Whenever the wind cleared the smoke away, the ruins of the large Western-style buildings would loom into sight and spew smoke out of their windows on one side. Then, when the wind changed, smoke would float lifelessly out of the windows on the other side too. There were other concrete buildings with their window frames dangling, and yet others still on fire and spouting smoke. Whenever there was a strong gust of wind, the smoke would thin out and the street would appear, with dim human forms moving here and there on it. At one moment, we would be able to see far into the distance; at the next, we would be enveloped in smoke and forced to put the towels over our mouths and noses. By the time we had walked a quarter of a mile or so, all the moisture in the towels had gone.

  Whenever the smoke completely enveloped us, it was too dangerous to go ahead. To blunder into red-hot cinders lying on the ground would mean getting badly burned. “Don’t move! You’ll get hurt,” I would shout, stopping and signaling to the others to halt too. We would wait until the smoke cleared, then walk rapidly on again as soon as we could see what lay ahead. Quite possibly we spent more time standing still than walking.

  Once, Yasuko stumbled on something and fell forward with a cry of “Uncle!” When the smoke cleared again, we found that the obstacle was a corpse clasping a dead baby in its arms. I took the lead henceforth, and watched out carefully for anything black that lay in the way. Several times, even so, we stumbled on dead bodies, or fell forward, jamming our hands into the hot asphalt. Once, when my shoe caught on a body half consumed by fire and the bones of the legs and thighs scattered in all directions, I shrieked despite myself and halted, petrified with horror.