Black Rain

by Masuji Ibuse

  “Two people died last night,” he said. “Can you come as quickly as possible?” Before I could reply, he was off back to the factory. I was being treated just like a priest, except that a priest would have been summoned less peremptorily.

  I had no real preparations to make. I merely had to wash, eat, go to the factory, and borrow a jacket from one of the hands. Even the funeral required no preparations; once the service was over, the body was taken straight to the river bed and burned. I had sworn that I would put my whole being into reciting the sutras, but my heart was hardly in the task as I set out that morning.

  Arriving at the dormitory, I found that the daughter of the factory hand whose funeral service I had conducted yesterday had died. She had been at their home in Temma-chō when the bomb fell, I was told.

  The dead girl’s mother had raw burns all over her body and seemed to be past caring what was happening. The dead girl’s sister, to all appearances unharmed, sat by herself, staring vacantly before her with her mouth open. When I murmured “I’m so sorry,” she said “Thank you” mechanically, with no change of expression. There were no tears, no defiance.

  The dead girl was laid out face up, dressed in a tattered white shirt. In the hollow between her breasts, someone had laid a few wild flowers doubtless picked in the nearby fields. Small, yellow blooms, they were wilting and drooped as though in grief against one breast. They were the final touch of sorrow. I read the “Threefold Refuge,” and was on the “Sermon on Mortality” when my voice finally choked.

  The service over, one of the factory hands said to the younger girl, “Now they’re taking your sister to be cremated.” “Yes,” she said, and gave a slight shake of her head. The mother remained motionless. It was a lonely last journey, attended by neither kith nor kin. The bearers transferred the body onto a straw mat, lifted it onto a handcart, and set off. I followed.

  On both sides of the river, the dried-up part of the bed had the aspect of a crematorium. Wherever I looked, upstream or downstream, the columns of smoke were rising. Here, the blaze would be fierce and the smoke thick; there, mere wisps of smoke would be rising from still smoldering embers.

  The handcart I was following came to a halt on top of the embankment, and the men went to look for a suitable spot. “Hey,” called one. “The fire’s out in this hole. It looks as though they’ve already taken the ashes home.” “We’ll use that, then, shall we?” said another, and they took the body and carried it over.

  In the center of the hole were two stones, each about one foot in diameter. They laid the body on these, and under and beside it they put coal, which they had brought in two buckets. They propped pieces of timber and old wooden packing cases against it, and on top of it they piled more. The head and face they covered with sawdust, and stood pieces of board on either side. Finally, they swathed the whole in dampened straw and straw mats, and the preparations were completed.

  I could still glimpse the girl’s hair and forehead through a gap where one of the mats curled upward, and the stony pallor of her face. They were squatting around her on the sand. “Light it, someone,” one of them said, and stood up. I read the “Threefold Refuge,” and left before the flames began to rise.

  From the top of the embankment, countless holes were visible, dug in the sand. I could see bones in most of them, and the skulls especially stood out with strange clarity. The ash that covered the bones after the fire had fallen in must have been cleared away by the breeze blowing across from the river. Some of the skulls gazed fixedly at the sky with empty eye-sockets, others clenched their teeth in angry resentment. In olden times, I suddenly recalled, they used to refer to skulls as “the unsheltered ones.”

  In some holes, only the head and the legs had been consumed. In others, bright red tongues of flame still flickered fitfully. I remembered the other body awaiting me, and set off back along the embankment, murmuring the “Sermon on Mortality” to myself as I went. This time, I got through it without so much as a glance at my notes.

  CHAPTER 10

  The next day, Shigematsu continued transcribing his “Journal of the Bombing.” By now, he was halfway through the entry for August 8.

  —

  All the way back to the factory I continued to recite the “Sermon on Mortality” to myself, but its precepts had no real meaning for me; in my mind’s eye, like a waking dream, I could still see the tongues of fire at work on the bodies of men. Only when I arrived at the entrance to the office did I realize that I was drenched in sweat.

  I found the downstairs office deserted. Going to the manager’s room, I discovered the kitchen superintendent and a kitchen help, a woman called Mrs. Ariki, seated facing the manager.

  “Hello, Shizuma!” said the manager, seeing me. “You’ve been hard at work!” He listened to my account of the funeral, then directed me to read a service for another victim who had just died. Her name was Taka Mitsuda, and Mrs. Ariki the kitchen help had been looking after her. She was a black market woman, who used to come to the works kitchen from somewhere in the city to sell clams and various small, poor quality fish. She had been caught in the raid two days before. Injured in the face and on both hands, she had finally arrived at the kitchen early that morning to seek Mrs. Ariki’s help. Mrs. Ariki and Mrs. Mitsuda were not related, but Mrs. Mitsuda had always sold things to Mrs. Ariki—so the latter said—a great deal cheaper than the usual black market prices.

  I took down details of Mrs. Mitsuda’s background in my notebook, just as Mrs. Ariki related them. If we were going to hold a funeral for an outsider, it was necessary to take down her name, address, status, and the names of any relatives, so as to prevent complications later.

  Unfortunately, no one knew much about her background, so I had to content myself with the following scrappy notes:

  Concerning the Late Mrs. Taka Mitsuda

  Address: A side street near the Sumiyoshi Shrine, Kako-chō, Hiroshima City.

  Age: 48 or 49.

  Height, etc.: About 5´ 2˝. Stout; health normally good. Chromium-plated false teeth in upper and lower jaws at the front, four or five in all.

  Cause of death: Burns incurred in the raid on Hiroshima. Her face and hands were burned raw and the skin on her left hand was peeling off. She was just taking off her air raid hood at the time, and her hair was not burned.

  Time of arrival at the works: About 8 a.m., August 8, 1945. She came staggering into the kitchen and called to Mrs. Ariki to give her water. Mrs. Ariki knew her by her voice, and gave her water in an aluminum cup. Her face was unrecognizable. She drank the water and went into a state of collapse. She made no further response when her name was called, though Mrs. Ariki felt her chest and found her heart was still beating faintly. She must have passed away around ten o’clock that morning.

  Family: According to various remarks made when she came to sell black market goods, her husband had died of disease while on service in China during the Manchurian Affair. Her only son is at a “kind of school” connected with the army, near Yanai in Yamaguchi Prefecture. She always avoided saying just what kind of institution this was, but the fact that her son was there seems to have been one thing of which she was inordinately proud.

  Possessions found on deceased by person who tended her: A large leather purse containing nine ¥10 notes, twelve ¥5 notes, twenty-two ¥1 notes, and ¥3.49 in coins. One old cotton towel and an imitation leather commuter’s pass holder containing photographs of her husband in army sergeant’s uniform and her son in a short-sleeved shirt.

  All the above details were given to me verbally by Mrs. Ariki and the chief cook.

  The money found on the deceased, together with the commuter’s pass and the two photographs with it in the case, were placed in the safe in the manager’s office in the presence of Mr. Fujita himself, the kitchen superintendent, Mrs. Ariki, and Shigematsu Shizuma, and the manager wrote in the ledger: “One hundred and seventy-five yen, forty-nine sen only, in trust from Taka Mitsuda of Kako-chō, Hiroshima City.”


  A sum of over ¥170 must have represented the money she was taking with her to buy the clams and fish she would later sell on the black market. Or again, it may have been her total worldly wealth. Either way, the proper thing would be to send it to her son, but since her home at Kako-chō was said to have been burned down, we should have to try to contact him at the school near Yanai in Yamaguchi Prefecture.

  “Look here now, Mrs. Ariki,” said the manager, “a ‘kind of school near Yanai’ must mean the place where they train human torpedoes, don’t you think? It’s a top secret military establishment, I believe. What was the barracks there called, now…?”

  “I really can’t say, I’m sure, Mr. Fujita,” she replied uncertainly. “The clam lady was always saying how it was a military secret. All she would let on was that it was a kind of special college. And sure enough, when you go through in the train they keep all the blinds down on the windows on that side—strict security, you see.”

  “Fine security it is, too!” put in the cook, a balding, middle-aged man. “With the windows in the toilets all wide open! All this talk of security is so much show, if you ask me. A lot of theory, without the real will to do anything…”

  “Anyway,” the manager said to Mrs. Ariki, ignoring these last observations, “the black market woman’s son is on his way to becoming a human torpedo. That means the boy’s got courage at least, and a sense of duty to his country. If such a man’s mother chooses to pass on at our factory, then we must accord her all the proper rites. And we must have Shizuma here recite the scriptures at her funeral. Mustn’t we now, Mrs. Ariki?”

  “Why, of course, Mr. Fujita, sir. It’s so kind of you, I’m sure, Mr. Fujita. And Mr. Shizuma—you’ll read the service for her, won’t you?”

  Mrs. Ariki had obviously been particularly well disposed toward the woman with the clams. She told me—perhaps to encourage me to take special care in reading the sutras—how, when the clam lady’s son had entered the “kind of school” in Yanai, she herself had put one of the stitches in a “thousand-stitch belt” that the women-folk had made for him. She had even joined the rest in signing her name, “Kane Ariki,” in her own poor hand, on a Rising Sun flag wishing him good fortune in battle.

  They told me that things were ready for the service so, though I was still sticky all over with sweat, I put on the borrowed suit and went to the big room in the dormitory. The dead woman lay on her back on a board, with her face, arms, and legs wrapped in cloths and looking like cloth bundles. I took my place before her, but my throat seemed to choke up, and my voice would not come smoothly. Presumably it was because I had walked home under the blazing sun and had had nothing to drink since. Or again, it might have been because of the fragments of the deceased’s life history I had heard. Had this woman who lay dead here—I kept asking myself—made no move to stop her son from volunteering to be trained as a human torpedo?

  War, I concluded, paralyzes people’s power of judgment. From the first word to the last, the “Threefold Refuge” came out in a hoarse voice, while the “Sermon on Mortality” was no more than a faint whisper. Even so, at the end, as I finally left my place by the body, Mrs. Ariki—chief mourner in the absence of anyone else—came up to me and said “Thank you so much, Mr. Shizuma” in a voice charged with emotion.

  I went to the wash-place, drank some water, and rubbed myself all over with a wet towel. I could not wipe the burned left cheek, since it was still covered with a piece of bandage. The cloth felt as though it were stuck fast to the wound. Not having felt the slightest pain since I first received the injury, I had left it as it was, but now I decided to attend to it and to wipe off the sweat at the same time. Fetching my first-aid kit, I stationed myself before the mirror.

  I peeled off the sticking plaster holding the bandage in place, and cautiously removed the cloth. The scorched eyelashes had gone into small black lumps, like the blobs left after a piece of wool has been burned. The whole left cheek was a blackish-purple color, and the burned skin had shriveled up on the flesh, without parting company with it, to form ridges across the cheek. The side of the left nostril was infected, and fresh pus seemed to be coming from under the dried-up crust on top. I turned the left side of my face to the mirror. Could this be my own face, I wondered. My heart pounded at the idea, and the face in the mirror grew more and more unfamiliar.

  Taking one end of a curled-up piece of skin between my nails, I gave it a gentle tug. It hurt a little, which at least assured me that this was my own face. I pondered this fact, peeling off skin a little at a time as I did so. The action gave me a strange kind of pleasure, like the way one joggles a loose tooth that wants to come out, both hating and enjoying the pain at the same time. I stripped off all the curled-up skin. Finally, I took hold of the lump of hardened pus on the side of my nostril with my nails, and pulled. It came away from the top first, then suddenly came clean off, and the liquid yellow pus dropped onto my wrist.

  I could not tell whether the infection was getting worse or better. The only thing I could do was to cleanse the affected spot and apply powdered medicine to the infected place, then cover the whole left cheek with cloth and fasten it with sticking plaster. I had prepared the medicine myself from a formula, consisting mostly of leek leaves, given me by a carpenter back home in the country, who said it was especially effective for cuts and infections.

  It was nearing noon. I set off back to our temporary home to get a meal, but as I went up the hill the pain in my leg became so bad that I could only walk gingerly and with great effort. Stopping to rest at a corner of the slope, I glanced up, to see my wife Shigeko looking down at me from the top of the bank.

  “Your poor leg seems to be giving you a lot of trouble,” she said. “Shall I bring a stick or something?”

  She went away and brought back a bamboo spear of the kind people used for training in hand-to-hand fighting. The landlord’s wife, she said, had made it for her only a little while before. Leaning on my spear and with one arm around my wife’s shoulders, I climbed on up the hill, feeling rather like a defeated remnant from one of the peasant risings of the last century. It was then that I first noticed Shigeko’s hair was scorched. I asked her when it happened. It must have been in the air raid on the sixth, she said.

  For lunch we had parched rice from our emergency rations, with fermented bean paste fried in rapeseed oil, and tea made from salted cherry blossoms to wash it down. That was all, but for us at the time it ranked as haute cuisine.

  According to what Shigeko told me now, it was only that morning that she had first noticed her hair was scorched. On the morning of the sixth, the all-clear had sounded, but she could still hear explosions, so she had peered up at the sky out of the kitchen window. At that instant, there had been an intense flash of light, and before she realized it she had thrown herself flat on the wooden floor. (It was then, it seems, that her hair was burned.) After a while, she got up and found everything in the kitchen scattered in disorder. She went out to the back of the house, and found the brick wall collapsed. It looked as though a fire had started somewhere.

  Convinced that something awful had happened, she rushed upstairs to get a better view. The window panes were blown out, the sliding doors were all lopsided, and the top branches of the pine tree in the garden, together with the transformer on the telegraph pole next to it, were spurting flames. A tremendous column of smoke was rising from the direction of the city hall. Here and there, other smaller clouds of smoke were rising. The fire seemed to be spreading steadily. Concluding that she should get out, she went first of all to get the silk bag containing the family ancestral tablets, but it was not hanging on its usual pillar. Nor was it on the pillar in the next room.

  Giving up the search, she set about seeing to the other things. With the idea of sinking them in the pond for safety’s sake, she started carrying bowls and dishes, bedding, mosquito net, shoes, and so on out into the garden—where she found, floating on the surface of the pond, the white bag containing the ancestral tabl
ets. It must have been blown there from inside the house. She fished it out, put it in her rucksack, and threw some of the things she had brought out into the pond, in any order, just as they came to hand. Others she put in the air raid shelter, piling up lumps of brick from the collapsed wall to block the entrance. It was then that she heard cries for help coming from the Nittas’ house next door.

  She rushed to the house and was horrified to find Mr. and Mrs. Nitta both badly hurt, he in the side, she on the face. She ripped up a “thousand stitches belt” and gave them first aid, then went to fetch the neighborhood association stretcher. She was on her way back when she found that Mrs. Nomura, who lived on the opposite corner, was also badly hurt and seeking help. She dropped the stretcher and bandaged her with a cotton towel. The casualties were far worse than she had realized. The Nakanishis, the Hayamis, the Sugais, the Nakamuras—all the families belonging to the neighborhood association had, she realized, suffered casualties in varying degrees, and she herself was going about alone, the only one left unhurt. There was no hope of being able to use the stretcher.

  Before long, Mrs. Nozu’s husband, who was a captain in the army, came home with some soldiers and took her off somewhere. Mr. and Mrs. Nitta said they were going to the Mutual Aid Hospital and went off together, a pitiful sight as they helped each other along, both of them covered with blood.

  Shigeko went back to the house and put a few more pieces of furniture and other household belongings in the air raid shelter, then took refuge at the university sports ground.

  There were some things in Shigeko’s story that refused to make sense, either in scientific terms or in terms of common logic. In our district, the blast had passed through from north to south. Yet although the trees in the garden, the house itself, and the doors in the house were all leaning to the south or the southwest, the bag containing the ancestral tablets must have flown from the south towards the north-northwest, traversing some eight yards within the house and about five outside, in order to end up floating on the surface of the pond. It was simply not logical—though it is just possible, I suppose, that it was blown out of the house in a southerly or southwesterly direction, then pulled back to the northwest by the backdraft that followed the blast.