by Masuji Ibuse
I tried to sit up in bed, but an excruciating pain shot through my shoulders and down my lower back and legs. Even assuming it was due to tiredness, the pain was different in quality from usual. To turn on my side was agony, but I had a bright idea. With my right hand, I tugged at the seat of my pants so as to turn my body on its side. Then I hunched up my body and got my buttocks in the air, then got onto my knees and so succeeded, little by little, in raising the upper part of my body. Sufferers from lumbago get up in the same way. One elbow goes on the bed, while one presses oneself up with the other hand. As one does so, the arm belonging to the elbow on the bed goes into just the same position as when someone doing a classical Japanese dance gets up off the floor. I found myself wondering: perhaps the originator of the Japanese dance had suffered from lumbago?
Having managed somehow to get halfway up, I put one hand on the window frame and, pressing on my back with the other, succeeded in standing upright. When I put my weight on my legs, I had jabbing pains in my toes. When I moved, it felt as though I was treading on needles, but I could hardly stay where I was. Clinging to the window, I went back and forth, back and forth, and only let go when my muscles had got used to the exercise. Finally, I found myself able to walk. It was lucky I had kept my trousers and shirt on in bed; the merits of informal sleeping habits impressed themselves on me most forcibly. But I began having severe belly pains. I went down the stairs on all fours, feet first. The method makes for easy going, since one can take one’s weight, as even the tiniest child will tell you, on all four limbs.
A visit to the toilet cured the pain in my belly. The pain in my shoulders and back eased considerably too, but my toes still had me nearly leaping in the air with pain when I walked.
Going to the entrance of the factory, I found that relief work had gone quite smoothly, and only about twenty people were left in the first batch. They were waiting for the truck to come back for them, with their rucksacks and larger belongings stacked on the ground at the foot of the stone steps. As I watched, one of them yelled, “I saw it! I saw it first!” and dashing out into the courtyard picked up what looked like a scrap of paper that came fluttering down from the sky.
“What’ve you got there?” said someone. “A five yen or ten yen note, I’ll bet.”
But it was only a scrap of paper after all, a burnt fragment of sheet music. It must have come from somebody’s home—or the teachers’ room, perhaps, at some primary school—and been carried up into the sky, alight, by the blast from the previous day’s raid, then roamed the void for a whole day and night before coming to earth again. Beneath the notes were printed the words: “Cherry blossom, cherry blossom, in the spring sky….” The manager took it from the other man and looked at it. “Terrible,” he said. “Really, of all the….” And he put it away in his pocket.
The truck came, and the last band of refugees said good-bye to the manager. “Best of luck,” they chorused, and as the truck left he waved his hand and called, “Never say die! Keep smiling!” A hollow mockery at such a time perhaps, but what else could one say?
The total number of refugees was around two hundred and fifty. Not only the lightly injured but the other employees as well, provided they had somewhere to go, were sent off to follow their own devices. This was the outcome of an on-the-spot decision by Fujita, the manager. As a result, something over a hundred souls were left—those too badly hurt to move, those who had volunteered to stay and look after them, those who had already been staying in the dormitory, and members of their families.
Employees who had been staying alone in the dormitory, leaving their families in Hiroshima, found themselves not only with no homes to return to, but with no way of searching for their families. They had nothing to do but stand around and wait. I decided to ask the works section to chop some boards into pieces about six feet long and three inches wide, so that we could write their names and addresses on them and set them up on the ruins of their homes. I calculated that fifteen or sixteen, one for each person, would be enough, but one middle-aged employee actually cut himself three extra ones, which he claimed he wanted to put up on the ruins of various aunts’ and uncles’ homes. According to a man in the works section called Ueda, the employee in question hadn’t an aunt or uncle to his name. Ueda, in fact, came specially to the office to tell me. “That’s what happens when you chase after ideals like the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” he remarked as he went out of the door. “War widows on the increase, young men on the decrease, while some people get unfair shares of certain commodities.” I hurried after him, though I knew my toes would hurt. “You ought to keep defeatist talk like that to yourself,” I warned him. Not that either of us had really made any attempt to conceal our defeatism from the other….
After lunch, I was drawing up a list of those who had gone back home when one of the factory hands, a man of about fifty called Nonomiya, came running to say that one of the seriously injured had died. “He was throwing himself about the place in his agony,” he said, “and spewed up a lot of yellow liquid. Then, all of a sudden, he just went limp.”
The dead man, aged fifty and one of our traveling agents, had been leaving for work from his home in Hiroshima City when the bomb fell. His cheeks had swollen up gray and discolored, but his sight and hearing had been unimpaired. I contacted the works section and told them to make the coffin as quickly as possible, and sent an employee called Fujiki to the town hall with a notification of death, and to get instructions on the disposal of the body. Then I dispatched Nonomiya to get a doctor and a priest.
They both came back before long. The town hall was virtually closed down, and refused even to accept notifications of death, much less give advice on things such as the disposal of bodies. The doctor was not at home, having gone to Hiroshima to look for his child. The only other doctor was out too, attending to seriously hurt patients. The priest, who had had three deaths among his parishioners, was too busy to come. Wherever they went, people were far too occupied with their own affairs to notice them.
I was at a loss what to do. I was discussing things with the manager when a janitor who had been out on business came back and reported that smoke was rising from funeral pyres all along the dried-up parts of the river bed. The crematorium was jammed, and there was no time for people to wait their turn.
If ever there was a time of emergency, of course, this was it. There was simply no time to wait for death certificates, cremation notices, and the like. Where jurisdiction over the census register and similar matters was concerned, Furuichi and Hiroshima were separate entities, and even in normal times such procedures required a considerable amount of time. The fact remained, nevertheless, that care was needed in the handling of dead bodies, so the manager sent someone from the general affairs section into town to make thorough inquiries. The manager was roughly the same age as myself, but, perhaps because his position was halfway between that of a government official and an ordinary citizen, he was, if anything, more of a stickler for regulations than the average bureaucrat. He was good at English, better at theory than practical business matters, and for his graduation thesis at college was rumored to have written a paper on the inventor of the automatic spinning machine.
On his return, the man from the general affairs section reported that even the police had conceded that burning the bodies on the river bed was an unavoidable necessity. The justifications, ultimately, were hygienic. In short, there was no one to write death certificates, and no one to receive them even if there had been. In this heat, a dead body soon decomposed. The crematorium was so full as to be useless. Haste then, was the order of the day: they must be burnt on the river bed, in the hills—anywhere away from human habitation.
The manager thought for a while. “We can hardly bury them, I suppose. Whether to bury people or to cremate them has always been a matter for the statesmen of the nation to decide, and we ought to go along with national policy. Yes—I suppose we’ll have to cremate them on the river bed, like the others.
” He turned to me. “But look here, Shizuma,” he said severely, “We can’t just simply cremate them. You can’t just say, ‘why, he’s dead!’ and whisk him off and burn him and have done with it. It’s a bit hard on the deceased, surely, unless he gets at least something more than that. Personally, now, I don’t believe in the immortality of the soul, but I do believe one should dispose of the dead with respect. Look, Shizuma—I want you to take the priest’s place and read the service whenever there’s a death.”
I was at a loss how to reply. Manager’s orders or not, reciting the sutras was quite beyond me.
“Quite impossible, I’m afraid,” I said. But the manager persisted. It looked, he said, as though the deaths were going to continue steadily, and he told me to go to some temple or other and make notes as to which scriptures the priest read at cremations. I was also told to take down the texts favored by the Shin sect, since many Hiroshima people belonged to it.
“But Mr. Fujita, I’m afraid I can’t. However many notes I might make, I’m just not qualified to attend to the welfare of the dead. I’m a complete novice where Buddhism is concerned.”
“Then who d’you think is qualified? There’s no such thing as an expert or a novice in such matters. It isn’t as if an amateur saying a service for the dead was the same as an amateur giving a sick man medicine. It doesn’t involve breaking the law, either. Even so, if you don’t fancy the Shin sect, Zen will do, or Nichiren—anything you like. It’s a nuisance for you, but I’m afraid this is an order I’ll have to ask you to carry out.”
I gave up any further attempt at rebellion, slung my air raid hood over my shoulder so as to be properly dressed for going out, and donned a pair of old tabi that I borrowed from the manager to make things easier for my painful feet. I got some name cards and a notebook, slipped on a pair of kitchen sandals, and set off.
I knew a number of temples in Furuichi. I called at one of them where there was a young priest rumored to have distinguished himself as a student at a Buddhist college, but the old woman who came to the entrance told me that he had been drafted and was with the Akatsuki unit. Next, I went to a Shin sect temple where there were an aged priest and a curate. The old priest was infirm and bedridden, and the curate had gone to a funeral. The middle-aged, rather stupid-looking woman who told me this retired into the inner regions with my message, then came back and conducted me to the room where the old priest lay.
In an old-style room twice the size it would have been in an ordinary house, he lay beneath a small, white, child’s mosquito net. The thin quilt covering him was almost flat, only the slightest hump betraying the human form beneath. The sliding doors were thrown open, and beyond them I could see pumpkins swarming all over a typical temple garden of craggy rocks and moss and sand.
The old priest listened as I detailed my errand, then turned to the middle-aged woman, who had seated herself on the tatami near his bed.
“My dear,” he said, “be good enough to bring the ‘Threefold Refuge’ and—let me see—the ‘Dedication’ and the ‘Hymn to the Buddha.’ And the ‘Amida Sutra’ and the ‘Sermon on Mortality’ as well.” His voice was thin and reedy. The woman got up and fetched them from the next room.
“Now, then,” he went on, “perhaps you would show them to this gentleman here.” Faint though the voice was, the woman moved about with alacrity at his bidding.
The five scriptures were printed from wooden blocks. As I set about copying them, the old priest got the middle-aged woman to help him up, and seated himself correctly on his heels, with his hands in his lap, on the tatami near me.
“I’m afraid this is most troublesome for you,” he said with infinite courtesy. I noticed how frail were the knees on which his hands rested. “They tell me that Hiroshima is no more. A dreadful thing. Truly a—dear me, how can one put it?—a lamentable thing….”
His voice was somewhat firmer now. I paused in my writing and let my gaze wander out to the garden, but the sight of the cheerful red pumpkins brought the tears springing unbidden to my eyes.
Much of the sense of the scriptures escaped me, but they were written out with signs showing the general intonation to help one in the reading. The “Threefold Refuge” and the “Dedication” were in measured Chinese phrases telling of the Buddha, the Law, the salvation of all beings, and countless aeons of time. The “Sermon on Mortality” was in gentler, homelier Japanese, in a beautiful language that struck home to the heart.
“In our sect at funerals,” the old priest said, “we read the ‘Threefold Refuge’ first, then the ‘Dedication,’ and then the ‘Hymn to the Buddha,’ in that order. Next comes the ‘Amida Sutra,’ and while this sutra is being read those present offer up incense. Then comes the ‘Sermon on Mortality,’ but this time one reads facing the congregation and not the departed one.”
To show me how to read the scriptures, he recited the “Threefold Refuge” and the “Dedication,” his voice unexpectedly strong as he did so. Listening, I made notes on the correct readings here and there alongside what I had copied. Then he read for me from the “Sermon on Mortality.” The room was perfectly quiet save for the monotonous chanting of his voice.
I had no qualifications for guiding the souls of the dead in their journey to the next world, yet at the very least, I told myself, my reading of the sutras should be a prayer for their salvation, and I resolved that I would read them with all my heart and soul. The peaceful atmosphere of the room had made it possible for me to feel that way.
On my way back from the temple, I started practicing reciting the sutras, reading them over and over again from my notes in a hasty attempt to get them into my head. At the factory, I found the coffin ready to leave. Some thirty people had gathered in the tatami-floored waiting room of the employees’ dormitory. The coffin rested on a low stage normally used for entertainments and speeches, and incense was burning in a toy bucket that someone had found and filled with fine ash for the purpose. There was even a branch of the sacred tree used in Shintō rituals, stuck in a large saké bottle. The manager came in wearing a suit.
Just before I was due to read the service, I put on the jacket of the suit that Fujiki, one of the employes, had lent me. As I seated myself before the coffin, I felt my muscles tense a little, but as I read on, with my eyes on my notebook, I ceased to bother any longer about the congregation. Yet my frame of mind was far from the ideal state of tranquil selflessness, and was much closer to a sense of vacancy and unreality. Two or three times I stumbled in my reading, but at last I got through to the end, turned to those assembled, and bowed.
“Thank you, Mr. Shizuma,” said the manager, and a chorus of “thank you’s” and “very good of you’s” rose from the others. My cheeks flamed and, intolerably embarrassed, I pushed my way through their ranks and retired to the office.
Before long, someone came to report another death. I was telling the works section to make one more coffin, when yet another was reported. As soon as the next body was in its coffin, I went to read the service, and this time, I felt, managed it a little better.
Toward the end of the afternoon, there were four more deaths. The first and second times the message was “Mr. Shizuma, I wonder if you could read the service,” but this gradually deteriorated to “Another funeral, Mr. Shizuma—will you come?” Before long, I came to feel that I preferred it that way myself.
When we ran out of wood for coffins, I had to recite the scriptures directly in front of the body. The face was always covered with a white cloth, but the limbs, with the characteristic discoloration of the dead, were in full view. When they were not, they were bound with bandages stained dark red with blood. Properly speaking, one should always read the service after the deceased has been placed in the coffin. So long as this idea persisted in my brain, things tended to go wrong when I was reading before an uncoffined body. Fortunately, I had my notebook to rely on.
The manager facetiously remarked that he would have to give me the “offering” that is a priest’s usual re
ward for conducting a funeral service. What, was worse, some of the relatives of the deceased, or those who had tended them, actually brought me money, discreetly folded in white paper as custom demands. “Don’t be silly,” I would say, thrusting it back at them. “No, please,” some of them would say, looking at me earnestly, “if you don’t take it, the soul will never attain release.”
The office girls apparently took turns to come and hear me read. Three of them actually asked me to let them copy the “Sermon on Mortality.” When I asked why, one of them said she liked the language. “I want to memorize it,” said another. “I want to learn what comes after ‘Sooner or later, to me or to my neighbor, on this day or the morrow….’ ”
These were the more acceptable of the visits I received between funeral services. I was no match, though, for those who came to discuss the bombing. Little by little, their talk would drag me back unwilling to the reality, till my hair stood on end, my scalp tingled, and the urge to flee became all but irresistible. I cannot well describe the feeling it produced—whether it was distaste or fear—but the result, invariably, was an overwhelming desire to run.
Late that afternoon, as dusk was falling, I went up to a second-floor room looking out in the direction of the city. There were no lights as there had always been before. One lone house, over in the east, showed an uncertain glimmer, but I resented it: it was merely depressing. Utter darkness would have been far less disturbing.
From dawn to dusk, it had been a day given over to funerals.
August 8. Fine and sweltering.
We had changed our lodgings the previous night to a small building, in the grounds of someone’s home, that had originally been built for their aged parents. It stood about two hundred yards from the house where Mr. Fujita the manager had rooms. That morning, I was awakened by a voice calling my name from the garden. I got out of bed, and found one of the factory hands, a man called Utagawa, standing outside.