by Masuji Ibuse
“I’m sorry, I must get on….” And he had made to run on past Yoda. But it was useless. Wherever he looked ahead of him the fires were rising.
“You mustn’t, you mustn’t! Come away!” said Yoda, tugging at his hand, so he threw everything to the winds and fled with him as far as Koi-machi.
Yoda had been in his home at Temma-chō when the bomb fell, and had no visible injuries, but was bleeding at the mouth. The man with deep-set eyes looked inside his mouth, and found two teeth were missing. His hands and legs felt chilly too, he complained. What had he hit his teeth on? He hadn’t hit them, he said—they’d been blown out. It was funny how they wouldn’t stop bleeding….
Yoda had relatives in Koi-machi. They called in at their house, and the relatives were applying a bandage soaked in rapeseed oil to his burned cheek, when Yoda’s cousin had turned up with his back badly burned. He had been at Temma-chō when the bomb fell. His back was red and lumpy like a turkey’s comb, and the skin had come off like a sheet of oiled paper.
“It must hurt dreadfully,” Yoda had said to him. No, it wasn’t painful, he said, but if it got too dry the flesh pulled and he had a stinging sensation. The only treatment for him, too, was to apply rapeseed oil.
“I wonder what it means?” concluded the man with hollow eyes. “I don’t feel any pain, either.”
“Nor do I—not the slightest,” I said.
If our burns had been due to hot water or fire, the pain would have been unbearable for two or three days at least. In fact, all we felt was a kind of stinging in response to any particularly strong stimulus. It was rash to generalize from this, but I suspected that the intense heat had numbed the nerves under the burnt skin so that no pain was felt. Those passengers on the train who were suffering pain from burns were all people who had been burned in fires other than the direct heat of the bomb. (I found later that there were in fact others who felt intense pain from burns inflicted directly by the bomb.)
A passenger standing next to me suddenly said, “Excuse me,” and vomited from the window. Then—resigned, it seemed, to the fact that he was going to vomit again—he went out onto the platform of the coach. By then, most of the passengers with diarrhea were already assembled out there. No doubt the people who had climbed out of the windows earlier had been having frequent attacks of the same symptoms. I was suffering slightly in the same way myself, but counting from the morning my attacks seemed to come only once in about three hours. The man with deep-set eyes said he was having diarrhea at about the same rate. My wife and niece said they had no such symptoms at all.
I myself put it down to a sudden epidemic of dysentery, but the man said he imagined it was an after-effect of the bomb. According to him, whenever human beings or animals had drunk or eaten too much, or ingested something bad for the system, the body expelled the offending substance by means of physiological phenomena such as vomiting and diarrhea. It also expelled things in the same way when the body was too tired for the digestion to work properly. Many of those exposed to the bomb were suffering from diarrhea, even though their cases did not seem to fit either of these circumstances. In his opinion, therefore, some substance harmful to the body had penetrated through the skin and upset the working of the various organs, inducing indigestion. The juices inside the stomach and intestines would probably expel it from the body along with the food.
“You see,” the man with deep-set eyes said, “the organs of the body are obviously organized like a clever piece of mechanism. So if you have an attack of diarrhea, you should yield to it. If you try to hold out for the sake of holding out, the mechanism will probably get upset.”
—
A boy who had been sitting down gave up his seat to an old woman standing next to the man with the deep-set eyes. He would have been in his third or fourth year at middle school. The old woman, presumably out of gratitude or in a fit of curiosity, insisted on talking to the boy—who showed no inclination for conversation—trying to get him to tell what had happened to him when the bomb fell. She pressed rather too hard, I felt.
Quite suddenly the boy, with an expression of great revulsion, came out with his story. He had been at home when the ball of fire had burst. There had been a sudden flash and a mighty roar, and he had started to run outside. On the instant, the house had collapsed and he had lost consciousness. When he came to, he found himself trapped between beams or other timbers, and his father trying to get them off him. He was using a log as a lever to raise the timbers trapping the boy’s leg, urging him all the while to be brave. The flames were drawing in on them and the wreckage of their own house had already caught fire.
“Come on, pull your leg out, boy,” his father said. But his ankle was held fast by the wood. By now the fire was closing in on three sides. His father took one look about him and said, “It’s no use. Don’t think ill of me—I’m getting out. You won’t think ill of me, son?” And flinging the log away, he fled. The boy shouted, “Dad, help me!” but his father only looked back once before vanishing from sight. In despair, the boy sank down among the timbers—whereupon, quite suddenly, he no longer felt the restraint on his ankle, and found himself free to crawl out from between the timbers. His leg had slid out from the timbers, just like one of those Chinese puzzles that seem impossible to undo until one chances on the solution. So he ran along a road that led toward a gap in the fires, then all the way to an aunt’s house in Mitaki-machi, where he found his father. The reunion of father and son produced such mixed feelings that all of them, the aunt included, had been at a loss for words. The father had looked acutely uncomfortable. The boy had fled the scene and had got on the Kabe-bound train with the idea of going to his dead mother’s home in the country.
His story told, the boy wrinkled his forehead in a frown and clamped his lips tightly together. The old woman sat primly with her head bowed, and said no more, almost as though she had been reprimanded. She was a genteel-looking old person of sixty or thereabouts, with a cotton towel tied round her forehead.
—
In a seat next to the window on the side from which the highway was visible sat a woman of around thirty and a man of about fifty. The woman wore a white shirt with a pattern of small dark blue crosses, and baggy wartime breeches of a stiff yellow material. She had a plump face, with rather nice eyes. The man was wearing a linen shirt with a family crest on it, apparently made over from a kimono that had belonged to his great-grandfather or somebody. He wore baggy breeches also in the same material, and rubber boots. Both seemed to come from families that carefully preserved old clothes even when they were no longer fashionable.
“Why—surely that’s young Yukio?” the man in the crested shirt said to the woman. She looked, and started calling after a child, a boy of eight or nine, who was walking along the highway.
“Yukio! Say, Yukio! Where’re you going? Aren’t you going by train? Why don’t you get on the train?”
The boy halted and looked in her direction, then, without so much as a nod or shake of the head, went trudging on again. On the fire bucket he was carrying I could make out the words “Squad 3, Nakahiro-machi.” In all likelihood he had grabbed the bucket without realizing what he was doing when the bomb fell, and had clung to it ever since.
“Yukio! Hey! This train’s going to Kabe, don’t you know? Yukio! What’s the matter with you!” The woman hung out of the window calling to him, but there was no response.
“Well—he’s gone,” said the man in the linen shirt. “Fancy, carrying a bucket like that, too!”
Conversation had sprung up in various parts of the coach, but I could hear what the man in the linen shirt said particularly clearly. He was complaining that the Defense Section of the Municipal Office had been slack in its duties at the time of the bombing. The officials of the section, he was saying, had neglected even to report to divisional headquarters after the attack. (The Truth About the Atomic Bomb, a work by Shigeteru Shibata published later, on the tenth anniversary of the bomb, has something rather diff
erent to say: “In the afternoon of the day the bomb fell, it occurred to Mr. Noda, chief of the Defense Section, that in accordance with prearranged plans for wartime emergencies, he ought to report to Fifth Divisional Headquarters on the extent of destruction at and around the City Hall, and he dispatched an official message. As yet, of course, he had no idea that the whole city was destroyed. In time, the message came back again. ‘There is no divisional headquarters,’ the messenger reported. ‘What do you mean—no headquarters?’ ‘Just that—there’s nothing there.’ ‘What’s happened to it?’ ‘I don’t know.’ The messenger also added that the moat around the divisional headquarters—it was near the castle keep, inside what had, in feudal days, been the inner moat—was full of the charred corpses of soldiers. At this, it dawned on the Defense Section chief for the first time that this had been no ordinary calamity.” The man in the white shirt, in other words, would seem to have been misled by inadequate information. The author of the book, incidentally, subsequently died of radiation sickness himself.)
The linen-shirted man’s dislike seemed to extend not only to the bureaucracy, but to the military also. “Only a few days ago,” he was saying, “I saw a little scene that just about summed up relations between the military and civilians.”
On a train on which he had come back to Hiroshima from Yamaguchi two or three days earlier, an army lieutenant had taken his boots off and was sprawled out over a whole seat, even though the train was jammed with passengers. The outrageousness of his conduct was plain, yet nobody took it upon himself to remonstrate with him. Even the conductor who came to inspect the tickets pretended to have seen nothing. Some time passed, and the train was drawing into Tokuyama, when one of the passengers tipped half a cooked rice-ball into each of the officer’s boots, then proceeded to get off with the most innocent air in the world. At this, another passenger carefully shook each boot in turn, to make sure the rice had gone right down to the toes, before alighting from the train in his turn. He had shaken the boots, of course, to make sure that a sacrifice so noble—considering the scarcity of food—should have the very maximum effect. The army man remained fast asleep. The passengers standing nearby who had witnessed the scene looked at his sleeping form with grins on their faces, though several of them moved along to other coaches for fear of getting embroiled. The soldier awoke around Ōtake, and shortly after, as the train approached Hiroshima, stood up, put on his boots, donned his peaked cap, and threw out his chest. An odd expression crossed his face, as though something inexplicable had occurred. Hastily he took his boots off, gave one look at the grains of rice sticking to his socks, and let out a bellow….
Feeling the woman’s elbow nudging him, the man in the linen shirt stopped. But he seemed to feel the need to round things off with dignity, and turned to a woman, a shopkeeper type, who was sitting near him.
“Excuse me, madam,” he said. “How far are you going?”
The woman nodded with a look of resignation and explained that she had nowhere to go. Her husband, a workman, had been killed in the war, and so had his younger brother. Her own younger brother was at the front, and she had no one to turn to. Her only child, a boy of eight, had been blown off a stepladder and killed by the bomb that morning.
She had been living in one of a row of poor houses standing next to the clay wall of a restaurant. The branches of a pomegranate tree in the grounds of the restaurant, which spread out over their side of the wall, had borne five or six fruit. The boy happened to have come home from the place in the country where he was evacuated, and before he left he had carried out a stepladder that had belonged to his father and placed it under the branches of the tree. As she watched, wondering what he was up to, he climbed the ladder and, putting his lips to each of the fruit in turn, whispered, “Don’t fall, pomegranate, till I come back again!” But then a ball of fire had blazed in the sky and there had been a great roar. The wall had collapsed, the stepladder had overturned, and the child had been killed outright, hit by a flying tile or a lump of clay from the wall.
The year before, she said, the branches leaning over their side had had three or four fruit on them, but they had all dropped while they were still green. The boy had been giving them encouragement to make sure that this year, at least, they would grow up safely. She supposed it was his childish way of dropping them the hint, in case it hadn’t occurred to them. The mere thought of it made what had happened seem all the more pathetic. And she started weeping brokenheartedly.
Generally speaking, opinion in the coach was divided between those who believed that the noise that accompanied the flash was a single bang, and those who had heard it as a great roar. Personally, I should not have described it as a bang, but definitely as a roar. The center of the explosion must have been in the area of Chōji Bridge. People who had been within a radius of two kilometers said they had not heard any bang. Even those who had been as much as five kilometers away were agreed that they had heard a roaring noise a few seconds after a flash. Simultaneously with the roar, windows had been blown out and buildings had tottered.
—
It felt as though the train had been stationary for nearly two hours, but when I asked someone with a watch, I found it had not been much more than thirty minutes. It could not have been so long as I thought, in fact, since I had felt no symptoms of diarrhea. Indeed, I was free of the symptoms all the way from there until we finally reached the works.
At the Furuichi works, the manager and foreman appeared personally in the visitors’ room to mark our safe arrival. The tears flowed uncontrollably, inordinately. An office girl drew water from the well for us and brought it in wash bowls and a bucket. A janitor brought me a clean suit. I wrung out a towel and wiped myself all over, but however many times I changed the water in the basin it still turned black, so I called a halt after a while and changed into completely fresh clothes. Shigeko and Yasuko went off into the kitchen.
I went into the office and reported to the manager on the damage to Hiroshima, then, although the sun had already set, went to have a look at the factory. Almost all the windows were broken and the glass scattered about the place, but the building itself and the spinning and weaving machines were intact. The rooms with the cotton scutchers and gins were as usual save for the missing window panes. The kitchen I found not so steamy as usual, since the vapors were escaping from the hole where the ventilator had been blown out. I asked the cook whether there had been any damage. A few nine-inch plates stacked on a shelf had fallen down and broken, she said—that was all.
At the workers’ dormitory, I saw a heap of broken glass lying, covered with a newspaper, in a corner of the corridor into which it had been swept. Some of the women workers were getting their belongings out of closets and packing them.
The dormitory supervisor informed me that the management was giving leave to workers commuting from within the city, so that at least those whose injuries were not too serious could go back to their homes in the country. The heads of the various sections, who stayed at the works, had all gone to Hiroshima, fearful for the safety of their families, and only the manager and foreman remained, apart from the factory hands and janitors. True enough, operations under such conditions were impossible. What was more certain still, though, was that everybody, myself included, was apprehensive of the next air raid.
CHAPTER 9
June 30th was the day of the Sumiyoshi Festival in Onomichi harbor. In Kobatake village, the occasion was marked by a festival at which lanterns were set afloat on the river to call the attention of the god of Sumiyoshi and invoke his protection against flood. Four small floats, named after the four seasons, were made of plain, unvarnished wood, lighted candles were placed inside them, and they were set afloat on one of the pools of calm water that occurred along the mountain stream. The longer they drifted about the dark surface of the water, the more favorable the omens were said to be. If the autumn float, for example, was promptly carried away out of the pool, it was believed that there would be a danger
of floods in the autumn.
That day, Shigematsu was getting the fire going under the bath when the postman brought an express letter addressed to Yasuko. Yasuko herself had gone to Shinichi to do some shopping. The sender of the letter was Gentarō Aono of Yamano village, the young man who had proposed marriage to Yasuko. This was the first time that he had made any approach to Yasuko other than via a go-between. The writing on the envelope was exceptionally neat. It was not a bad sign, thought Shigematsu.
“Put this letter on Yasuko’s desk, will you?” he said, giving it to Shigeko. “I don’t know what it says, but the fact he’s written at least shows that the young man himself is interested. I wish everything was done in the same way….”
He abandoned the bath and went off to his room. He must get the copying of his “Journal of the Bombing” completed quickly. He worked at it all the evening, without even going to see the Lantern Festival.
August 7. Fine.
I awoke to find the morning mist blowing in through the broken window and curling about my face. It was a heavy mist, and the fact that I felt its touch equally on both cheeks suggested that sensation had returned to the left, burned side. Both my wife and Yasuko were already up, and their beds lay empty.
A clamor of voices reached me through the mist. “Hey, you with the truck,” said a loud voice, “you can still get another one or two on!” “What’re you wasting time for?” said another. “It’s half-past five already.” It seemed that after I had gone to sleep the previous night, a large number of injured had arrived from Hiroshima. In line with the manager’s announcement yesterday evening, those employees whose injuries were only slight were to be sent back to their homes, and relief work was to have started before five this morning, two trucks being used for the purpose. The trucks were to deliver the refugees and their belongings to Furuichi Station, and on the way back bring any badly hurt employees of the company who might be at the station or lying by the roadside.