by Masuji Ibuse
Sometimes the asphalt, softened by the heat, stuck to the soles of our shoes and made walking difficult. There were dozens of places like this. However much I tightened my shoelaces, my shoes came off, and—maddeningly at such a moment—precious time would have to be spent getting them on again.
The wind gradually dropped, and the smoke ceased moving, which made breathing more and more difficult. I was foolhardy, perhaps, to have brought my wife and niece into such heat. I could not be absolutely certain, even, that we should come through alive, though occasionally people would come walking from the opposite direction, which gave me a certain reassurance. Yasuko, at least, I wanted to see through it all safely. To bring her to Hiroshima in order to escape mobilization had been my own ill-considered idea. I could not consider her in the same way as my wife. Once when we were brought to a halt, blinded by the smoke, the smoke and heat pressed in on us, and breathing would have become unbearably difficult if the wind had not changed just at that moment. Yasuko gave a shrill, suffocated cry, and I had to shout at her: “Don’t move! If you move, you’ll fall into the fire. That’s hell, right there ahead. You’ll be burnt to death!”
Reaching Sagino Bridge, we found that the smoke there was already thinning, since the northeastern districts of the city had been burned earlier than the rest. Over to the right, we could dimly discern Mt. Futaba. The mushroom cloud had disappeared.
“We’re safe!” I called back to them, hoping to give them heart. “We shall live! Live!” But they were too exhausted to reply. Both of them had bloodshot eyes, eyes like crimson pools of blood. This was no time to think of resting, though, so I led the way on again.
All around was a sea of charcoal. Innumerable pieces of half-burned timber were still smoldering, and small columns of smoke were climbing lazily into the air. A great fire was still raging to the northeast, around Yokogawa, and huge columns of flame were swirling up into the sky.
Nothing was left of the Hakushima Shrine but its stone wall. The camphor trees at the Kokutaiji Temple, which must have been easily six feet in diameter, had all three been uprooted and had fallen to the ground, where they lay, burned through and carbonized but still preserving the shape of trees, with their great roots thrust upwards into the air. The memorial tablets to the loyal samurai of Akō, which had stood nearby, had all fallen over backwards to the south, but the tombstones of the Asano family opposite them had been sent tumbling in all directions, and lay mingled in confusion on the ground. The camphor trees were said to have been more than a thousand years old, but today they had finally met their fate.
Even here, the asphalt sticking to the soles of our shoes made it difficult to walk. The lead of the power cables had melted and dripped down onto the ground, where it lay along the roadside in a procession of silver droplets. On the main road, the iron poles supporting the overhead wires for the streetcars had been bent over, snapping the wires and leaving them hanging down loose. I would not go near them, having the feeling that one or the other of them must still be live.
In this area, the bodies in the roadway were rather fewer. They lay in a hundred and one different poses, but most of them—more than eighty percent of them—were alike in lying face down. One exception was a man and woman who lay face up by the safety zone at the Hakushima streetcar stop, with their knees drawn up and their arms stretched out diagonally to their bodies. The bodies were completely naked and scorched black, and the buttocks of each rested in a great pool of feces. Nowhere else had I witnessed such a scene. The hair on their heads and elsewhere was burned away, and it was only by the contours—of the breasts, for example—that I could distinguish man and woman. How had they come to meet such a grotesque death? The question continued to trouble my mind. Shigeko and Yasuko passed by the two corpses without so much as glancing at them.
Still we came upon corpses, and yet more corpses. Driven by the heat and trapped by the smoke, they had flung themselves face down in their suffering, only to be unable to rise again and to suffocate where they lay. So much was certain from the experiences of our own flight. Had not we ourselves hovered on the brink of a similar fate?
CHAPTER 7
Still Shigematsu continued the transcription of his “Journal of the Bombing.” This month, he reflected, was a succession of festivals. The Mass for Dead Insects had gone by already; the Rice-Planting Festival came on the eleventh, and the Iris Festival, by the old lunar calendar, on the fourteenth. On the fifteenth there was the River Imp Festival, and on the twentieth the Bamboo-Cutting Festival. In all these countless little festivals he seemed to sense the affection that the peasants of the past, poor though they were, had lavished on each detail of their daily lives. And as he wrote on, and the horrors of that day came back to him ever more vividly, it seemed to him that in their very insignificance these farmers’ festivals were something to be loved and cherished….
—
We reached the streetcar stop at Kamiya-chō. The streetcar tracks crossed each other here, and broken overhead wires and cables hung down in tangled profusion over the road. I had a terrifying feeling that one or the other of them must be live, since these were the same wires that one usually saw emitting fierce, bluish-white sparks. The occasional refugees who passed to and fro had the sense to crouch down as they passed beneath them.
I wanted to take the left-hand edge of the road across Aioi Bridge to Sakan-chō, but the heat from the still-smoldering fires seemed likely to bar the way. I tried turning to the right, but a blast of hot air swept over me with an authority that would have made the bravest man waver, so I turned back again. Even so, as I approached a Western-style brick building, a great lump of glowing charcoal came hurtling down from what had been the window frames.
The only alternative was to go along the middle of the road. Since the overhead wires were cut at various points, there was no likelihood of their being live, but the very fact that they were crossing and touching each other made one fear some display of the mysterious properties of electricity. Beneath one of the dangling wires lay the blackened bodies of a man and two women. We, too, numbered two women and one man.
“Come on, under the wires after me!” I called. “Whatever you do, don’t touch the wires. I’ll hold them out of the way. If I get a shock don’t touch anything except my clothes. Do you understand?—you get hold of the end of my trouser leg and drag me away.” I followed the example of the other refugees, and pushed the wires away to either side with a piece of stick, crawling on all fours when necessary, crouching down when necessary.
“Look,” I yelled back again. “Wrap a towel round your left elbow like those people have done. Your left elbow goes on the ground.”
Time and again it was necessary to crouch down beneath the wires, but at last we were safely past. We stopped and took stock of each other. Shigeko was completely unscathed, but Yasuko, who had wound the towel round her arm in the wrong way, had a painful-looking graze on her elbow.
Shigeko sat down beside her on a stone by the roadside and attended to her elbow with mentholatum and a triangular bandage. Suddenly, it occurred to me that we were directly in front of an entrance that I knew.
“Just a moment—” I said, “Surely that stone’s one from Mr. Ōmuro’s garden?”
The Ōmuros in question were an old family, said to date back to the Edo period, and the present head was engaged in chemical research on spinning thread. He was a man of property, owning mills in three different places, as well as dabbling in calligraphy, painting, and art-collecting. I had visited the house myself several times during the past year for the benefit of his advice on matters concerning textile products. It had been an imposing mansion, with a splendid old-style garden. Now, however, it was completely razed to the ground. Where the main building and clay-walled storehouse had once stood was an arid waste scattered with broken tiles. The stone on which Shigeko and Yasuko were sitting was almost certainly a rock from the garden inside the grounds. Rock though it was, a thin layer had been burned away all ov
er it.
“That rock’s granite, you know,” I said. “I expect it was covered with moss only this morning.”
“Do you think the whole household was wiped out, then?” said Shigeko.
I did not reply. It was a scene of cruel desolation. Where the ornamental pond had been was an uneven stretch of blackish mud, and at the foot of a rounded hillock of earth lay the blackened skeletons of three large pine trees. Beside the trunk of the thickest of the three stood a narrow, square pillar of stone. Why it alone should have remained standing was a mystery. Mr. Ōmuro had once told me that an ancestor of his, several generations back, had had it erected there. It was somewhat over ten feet tall, and instead of the usual long inscription it had the single character “Dream” carved on it, about two and a half feet from the top. Some high-ranking priest was said to have written the original, and the effect was doubtless considered stylish and rather sophisticated in its day, but at present, style and sophistication alike failed utterly.
Both Shigeko and Yasuko were deathly pale. My throat was so dry it felt as though it might close up entirely, and a slight tic affected my eye as I walked.
We reached the entrance to the West Parade Ground. The grass on the west side of the embankment had been burned away, leaving the earth smooth and bare. The trees seemed to have been carbonized where they stood, and retained their branches, but not a single leaf. The divisional commander’s residence, the temporary army hospital, the Gokoku Shrine and, of course, the keep of Hiroshima Castle, were all gone.
My eyes began to hurt, so I massaged them as I walked by rubbing the eyelids with my fingers. They smarted, and at the same time felt as though there was grit in them. Shigeko and Yasuko had cheered up a little, and were talking about the now vanished mushroom cloud—its size, its shape, its color, the shape of its stalk, and the way it had moved. Concluding that my eyes hurt because I had too much blood in the head, I had Yasuko give me the treatment they used to give children who had nosebleed. It consisted of no more than pulling out three hairs from the back of the head, but it helped the pain a little.
The West Parade Ground was an unbroken expanse of sand. It reminded me of a vast desert I had seen in a movie called “Morocco.” Even in the film, the desert had seemed to exhale a smell of sand, and it had been quite empty, with not a single footprint visible. The sandy waste of the parade ground, however, was rather different: the hot breath it gave off stank of smoke, and there were a number of human trails leading away in the direction of the hills. It must have been raining. The sand was fine enough for holes the size of broad beans to be visible all over its surface, and the newspapers scattered here and there were covered with countless bean-sized black spots. The black rain had evidently fallen here. I had realized that the stalk of the mushroom cloud was a shower, but I had not imagined that the drops were as big as this.
At the western edge of the ground, we found a number of what looked like round black balls lying in the sand. At first I could not identify them, but as I got closer I realized they were lumps of what had been tin sheeting. They must have been torn away by the blast and have risen up into the sky, where they had been softened by the intense heat, then kneaded into balls by the wind before falling. To have gone quite round, like dumplings, they must have been sucked up into the great whirlwind of flame and have spun round and round furiously before finally descending to earth.
I glanced back across the sandy waste. A solitary figure—a boy wearing his underpants and an undershirt that flapped in the breeze at the front, exposing his naked belly—was walking rapidly in the direction of the hills. “Hi!” he called, turning in our direction and waving his hand at us. It seemed a peculiarly pointless gesture.
We walked on northwards. By the bank skirting the Gokoku Shrine a sentry stood with his rifle at order. Closer to, we found he was dead at his post, his back propped against the embankment, his eyes wide and staring. The badge on his collar showed him to be a private first-class in the army. He was about thirty-seven or eight, and old for a ranker, yet his features had an indefinable air of breeding.
“Why—just like the soldier with his bugle,” said Shigeko.
“Come woman, mind your tongue,” I said sternly, though if the truth be told I, too, had been reminded of the same story—of the bugler found dead at his post during the Sino-Japanese War, with his bugle still held to his lips.
The area was near the point where the bomb had been dropped. We saw another of them at the west corner of the grounds of Hiroshima Castle: a young man, still on his bicycle and carrying a wooden box as though on his way to deliver an order from a restaurant, propped dead against the stone ramparts. This one was a mere youth, and as skinny as a grasshopper.
We had often been taught during air raid drill that one must always breathe out steadily while a bomb was falling. Perhaps the sentry and the delivery boy had been breathing in at the moment the bomb burst? I did not understand the physiology of it, but it occurred to me that a blast just as one had filled one’s lungs to capacity might well press on them and cause instant death.
We were taking a rest just this side of the embankment when we were hailed by an acquaintance, Police Sergeant Susumu Satō.
“Hello—I’m glad to see you safe,” I said.
“Why, your face has caught it, hasn’t it?” he said.
I spoke to him for a while before joining the others, and he told me that Superintendent-General Ōtsuka of the Chūgoku District Commissary had been trapped under his home and burned to death.
I had not known that Satō had been transferred from the police station to the Chūgoku District Commissary. I had not even known, in fact, that there existed a government office of that name. It was most remiss of me. I learned for the first time from Satō that the enemy’s attacks had grown so fierce recently that it had been decided that Japan must prepare to do battle on home territory. Local governing agencies known as “district commissaries” had been set up, so that the struggle could be continued in each region independently should the country be split up by enemy forces. With the same objective, war materials had been stored at factories and primary schools throughout the area in which Hiroshima stood.
“So that’s what it meant—” I said, “the slogan about the war only just beginning.”
“Yes,” said Satō, “the idea is to go ahead with the grand policy of a wealthy and militarily powerful nation launched over half a century ago. It’s not for you or me to assume that this is a kind of tragic finale. This is precisely what we’ve been brought up for. It’s fate.”
The Chūgoku Commissary, located in the Hiroshima University of Liberal Arts and Science, had had responsibility for the five prefectures of the Chūgoku district. The Superintendent-General himself—Isei Ōtsuka, a man with the bearing of an old-time samurai—had been in the Superintendent-General’s official residence at Kami-Nagaregawa-machi when the bomb fell, and had been caught beneath the house. His wife had managed with great difficulty to crawl out of the wreckage, but the Superintendent-General had been hopelessly trapped. The good lady had been beside herself, but the Superintendent-General had insisted on her leaving him. “I’m ready for whatever comes,” he had said. “Get yourself away, woman, as fast as you can.” The flames were already close at hand, so she had had no choice but to flee.
“The Superintendent-General was cremated where he lay. A ghastly business,” Satō said. “I myself didn’t know which way to run from the flames.” His eyes filled with tears. Normally, his manner of speech was cheerful and his face gave an immediate impression of openness and sunniness, but today his eyes were bloodshot and his face grim.
Arriving on the embankment, we found the middle section of Misasa Bridge missing. Changing my plan, I set off along the embankment downstream with the idea of crossing Aioi Bridge. Countless dead bodies were lying in the undergrowth at the foot of the embankment on our right. Other bodies came floating in steady succession along the river. Every so often, one of them would catch on th
e roots of a riverside willow, swing round with the current, and suddenly rear its face out of the water. Or one would come along rocking in the water, so that first its upper half then its lower half bobbed to the surface. Or another would swing round beneath a willow tree and raise its arms as though to grasp at a branch, so that it almost seemed, for a moment, to be alive.
We had sighted from some way off the body of a woman who lay stretched out dead across the path on top of the embankment. Suddenly Yasuko, who was walking ahead of us, came running back with a cry of “Uncle! Uncle” and burst into tears. As I drew closer, I saw a baby girl of about three who had opened the corpse’s dress at the top and was playing with the breasts. When we came up to her, she clutched tight at both breasts and gazed up at us with apprehensive eyes.
What could we possibly do for her? To ask ourselves this was our only recourse. I stepped gently over the corpse’s legs so as not to frighten the little girl, and walked briskly on another ten yards or so downstream. Here I spotted another group of four or five women dead together in the undergrowth, and a boy of five or six crouched on the ground as though caught between the bodies.
“Come along,” I called waving with both arms to the others, who were still hesitating. “Just step over it as quietly as possible and come on.” Shigeko and Yasuko stepped over the body and joined me.
At the end of Aioi Bridge we found a carter and the ox harnessed to his cart both seated, dead, on the electric car tracks. The ropes around the load had come undone, and the goods had been rifled.
Here, too, the corpses came floating one after the other down the river, and it was a sickening sight to see them butt their heads against the piers of the bridge and swivel round in the water. Near its center, the bridge reared in a hump about a yard high, and on what one might have called the crest of the wave a young foreigner with fair hair lay dead with his arms clasped about his head. The surface of the bridge was distorted and undulating.