Black Rain

by Masuji Ibuse

  “Mr. Tashiro—” I said, “there’s not a single reply from anybody in the corporation. Look—some of the dates are three days old already.”

  “Then it seems as though the worst may have happened, doesn’t it?”

  “The worst?”

  “That the whole corporation was wiped out.”

  Tashiro had himself been the only one to survive of his family. His young second wife and his infant daughter, trapped beneath their house, had certainly perished in the flames, but at his age, he said, he could not summon the energy to hunt in the ruins for their ashes.

  “It can’t be helped,” he said. “I’ll leave them where they are. Wherever a person’s remains are, it’s the same in the end—so much organic matter in the soil.”

  What would he do if he wanted to erect a tombstone for them, I asked.

  “They still have a photograph of my wife and daughter at my wife’s home in the country. I’m thinking of burying that instead. But then, what if somebody at my wife’s home starts saying he’s coming to look for the remains? I can hardly tell him to leave them alone as they’re organic matter, can I…?”

  For a moment, the old scientist’s approach seemed too cut-and-dried, and I found it rather repulsive. But then another way of looking at it occurred to me. Tashiro was old, but his wife had still been young and attractive. His daughter too, of pre-school age, had been a charming child. Perhaps he was afraid that, if he were to go looking for ashes and find corpses, it would wipe out forever the image of them he cherished. He too, like myself, must have seen enough of bodies, mangled, half-burned, and decomposing, during the past few days.

  “Why don’t you have some third person look for the ashes?” I asked.

  “About the coal—” he said, ignoring my suggestion. “Why don’t we go to the Clothing Depot and negotiate with them about it? There’s nothing else left to try, so far as I can see. Besides, there aren’t so many bodies in that area, around Sagino Bridge, so I expect the smell will have died down to some extent.” And he set off walking, with an unexpectedly firm tread.

  The route to Sagino Bridge took us through almost the same scenes of desolation as before. Tashiro made no comment on his surroundings, but related to me what he had heard a while back at the city hall. Of the approximately nine hundred employees in the main offices before the raid, not many more than twenty were there at present. There was not one of them who had not suffered in some way or other.

  By now, two men like laborers, half-naked in the heat, had joined the soldiers in shouldering the corrugated iron sheets and disposing of the dead. As we passed by, they were gazing transfixed at a water-tank standing beside a collapsed clay wall. In the tank was a human figure with the head alone reduced to a skull and the rest of the body beneath the water, on the surface of which floated viscous, greasy brown bubbles. As the laborers reluctantly approached the tank with their corrugated iron sheets, the skull, without warning, suddenly tilted forward and sank amidst the bubbles. “Oh, my God!” exclaimed Tashiro, his composure shaken at last.

  The mayor, Mr. Kuriya, had died in the raid at his home, Tashiro told me. His deputy, Mr. Shibata, had been hurt on the sole of his right foot and could not walk on it properly. A fragment of glass had also penetrated deep into his left calf, so that he had to go to the city hall on crutches. The mayor’s house, being in Kako-chō, had of course been razed by fire. On arriving at work the morning after the day of the raid, Shibata had sent another official to inquire after the mayor at his home. In the ruins of what would seem to have been Mr. Kuriya’s living room were found the partly burned bodies of an adult and a small child, lying together. The mayor had always been extremely fond of his grandchild; probably just as the bomb fell he had been lifting the child up in his arms to say good-bye before he went to work.

  Deputy Mayor Shibata had taken charge of municipal affairs since Kuriya’s death, Tashiro said. The twenty-odd employees at their posts in the city office were dealing with business of every kind with the aid of a dozen or so chairs miraculously spared in the fire, one mimeographing machine, and files made by clipping together other documents and using the backs. None of them had anything but the clothes he stood up in, since they had all been burned out of their homes, and along with several dozen of the injured they were living a communal life, doing their own cooking, in the ruins of their office. They had cleared the litter of broken glass, charred wood, scrap metal, and the like into a corner of the room, and had rigged up a tent that they had borrowed from the army barracks in place of a window. For offices, they had the defense, health, and relief sections on the southeast of the first floor, which had survived the flames. (I later learned, from the personal account of Mr. Shigeteru Shibata, the deputy mayor, that Lieutenant-General Saeki, commander of the Akatsuki Corps’ shipping headquarters at Ujina, had called at the city hall at three on the afternoon of August 7 to explain that he had been appointed commander-in-chief for defense in the Hiroshima area, and to notify them that sometime between that night and the following morning a unit from Shimane Prefecture and part of the Akatsuki Corps would be arriving in Hiroshima. This gave Mr. Shibata and the other surviving senior city officers their first hope of taking some concrete emergency measures. On the eighth, an official message came from the West Japan Army headquarters ordering the officials concerned to report there, taking relevant documents on defense with them. Accordingly, a group including auditor Hamai Nakahara, head of the Rationing Section, and Isamu Itō, head of the Sanitation Department, proceeded to the headquarters, which was located in a dugout on the side of Mt. Futaba on the outskirts of the city.)

  At the Clothing Depot, I found two or three janitors standing talking at the entrance, but none of the usual coming and going. Together with Tashiro, I obtained an interview with Lieutenant Sasatake of the Control Section and tried to get a ration of coal, but we were told that permission to broach the reserves of coal at Ujina was absolutely out of the question. On all other matters, we met with nothing but equivocation, and our visit proved completely fruitless.

  The lieutenant was too overwrought even to listen seriously to our petition. “Concerning coal, as I have said many times already,” he said, “we must hold a conference before we can come to any conclusion. Anyway, I have to ask my superiors. The question of transport, for one thing, involves various technical considerations. And we have to weigh your request against the requirements of other firms, too. I’m afraid you’ll have to wait until we’ve held our conference.”

  Since there was nothing further to be gained here, we asked to see the chief of the Control Section, but he was equally equivocal. In the end, even the normally phlegmatic Tashiro seemed to lose his patience.

  “If you’ll excuse me,” he said to the section chief, “I’ll tell you quite plainly what our company would like. You go ahead with your conference, but we, for our part, would appreciate some emergency measures in the meantime. If it’s absolutely prohibited to touch the coal reserves at Ujina, why can’t somebody—seeing that this is a top-priority emergency—be sent direct to the mine at Ube? If they went now, they’d arrive there by the evening, I imagine. It’s unlikely, surely, that the control corporation in Hiroshima will be back in business for some time to come?”

  “We are in the process of considering such measures ourselves, of course,” the chief said. “But we must consult our superiors and get a definite ruling. That’s precisely why I say we have to hold a conference.”

  “If I may say so,” I ventured, “I can’t help wondering, if you wait until you hold your conference and come to some conclusion before sending someone to the Ube mine, just how long it will be before any coal gets through to this wasteland. We’ve no knowledge of any temporary office of the Coal Control Corporation, and we’re feeling very lost.”

  “How many days’ coal d’you have at your places?” he demanded.

  “Four or five days at ours,” I said. “Two days at ours, operating at the usual rate,” said Tashiro.
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br />   “Very well, then—how would this be?” he asked, as though a new idea had just struck him. “Considering that your firms are both producing military supplies, I don’t see why you can’t do just as you please, without waiting for the military. So why don’t you just try to be a bit more cooperative?”

  “We’re quite willing to try, and to cooperate too,” I said, “but on one condition. Could we have a letter of authorization from the authorities? Then we could go to Ube this very minute and negotiate for some coal.”

  “That would be difficult as far as the army’s concerned. But consider, now—your firm’s making cloth for army uniforms. You’re in a position to do just what you please, aren’t you? So I hope you’ll see your way to cooperating with us.”

  I was perfectly well aware that a large number of workers had been put into the mine at Ube in order to raise output there. At the Mine mine too, production had been stepped up to the point where there was not enough transport to handle the coal they turned out, and the anthracite already mined was lying around in heaps. I failed to see why they couldn’t agree to hold their precious conference but speed up the transport of the coal in the meantime. If only some coal came, the Coal Control Corporation could get started again in no time. But the section chief had already lapsed into what appeared to be silent meditation, and whatever we said went off him like water off a duck’s back. What he had told us, in effect, meant postponing further production of both clothing materials and canned food.

  Losing patience with such stupidity, I left the office. Tashiro stayed on; for his firm, which was engaged in processing raw meat and vegetables, a break in production of even a single day could be disastrous.

  It struck me that our firm, which undertook official work for the Clothing Depot, had let itself get into the habit of doing far too much for its client. A large part of the reason for this lay in the shortage of commodities. Lawful rations of both foodstuffs and other daily necessities being inadequate, we had to scrounge around for them here, there, and everywhere, trading on our association with the Clothing Depot in order to secure what we needed. This meant, in turn, that we had to provide an indecent degree of service for the Clothing Depot in order to ensure that the firm’s affairs kept running smoothly. We were bleeding ourselves white in the effort to please, while the other side sat pretty without lifting a finger.

  I had had many unpleasant experiences in this connection. The first time, not long after I joined the firm, was when we got in fifty large tubs of bean paste and were obliged to let the Clothing Depot have just half—twenty-five tubs. Then we bought a wagonload of mortars to present to the mine, and again had to let the Clothing Depot have half. Next, we bought two wagonloads of water jars, and again the Clothing Depot got one wagonload. The same thing happened to a boatload of charcoal cookers, and to thirty barrels of mandarin orange wine. On every occasion the Depot was most pressing.

  It occurred to me that rather than stay dependent on the army and get beaten and robbed for our pains, we would do better, at this stage, to devise some independent course of our own. I made up my mind to recommend that we do so to the manager, and cursed my stupidity at having trudged along four miles of road, all for nothing, for fear of a shortage of coal.

  Emerging from the main gate of the Clothing Depot, I was struck by the desolation of a lotus pond familiar to me from the old days. The leaves had all collapsed towards the south, and the worst affected looked like broken umbrellas. Not a single one remained whole. Before going to work in my present firm, I had worked for seven years at the Army Provisions Depot, living in rented rooms at the home of a policeman. I had gone to work on foot, taking my lunch with me, and the broad stretch of rice fields and the lotus pond that lay between Asahi-chō and Midori-chō were old friends. Every day on my way to work my eyes were delighted by the sight of crows settled on the dew-damp path between the fields. The glossy black sheen of crows’ plumage in the morning blends well with the green of the rice plants, and equally well with the rice fields after they have started to turn yellow. The sight is indescribably pleasant; at daybreak on a really fine morning it is enough to set your heart beating faster.

  But today, even the lotus pond had a dead body lying in it. Beside the pond, I noticed a white pigeon crouching in the grass. I went gently up to it and took it in my hands, but it was blinded in its right eye, and the feathers above its right wing were slightly scorched. For a moment, I felt a sudden desire to eat it broiled with soy, but I let it go, tossing it up and away from me into the air. It managed to flap its wings quite well, and flew off just over the tops of the lotus leaves, describing a horizontal parabola that curved steadily towards the left. But then, as I watched, it lost height and plunged into the waters of the pond.

  I decided to go straight ahead to the Miyuki highway, and set off along the same road that we had traversed on the sixth. The Mutual Aid Hospital, visible beyond the embankment lined with cherry trees, had lost the glass from its windows, but I could see people bustling to and fro along the corridors. It seemed to be jammed with people, some come to search for survivors, others seeking care for themselves. The houses along the road had tilted or collapsed, but there were some, leaning at an angle, where the owners had cleared away the debris and were putting back sliding doors with all the paper gone from the frames. I could hear people talking inside some of them. Some houses had been buttressed with burned, blackened timbers. I saw someone with a scorched, blackened chair in the unfloored entrance hall to his house, scraping off the carbonized surface with a piece of broken teacup. It reminded me of a clumsy, misshapen chair in a painting by Van Gogh that I had seen in a special issue of a magazine. For some reason, my throat suddenly felt dry.

  In the broad thoroughfare along the foot of Hiji hill, I saw two or three injured looking much the same as the refugees I had seen on August 6. They staggered along in the direction of Ujina, supporting themselves with their right hands against the wall of the Hiroshima District Monopoly Bureau. They were all half-naked, emaciated, and pale as ghosts. There was no sign of the tortoiseshell cat that had followed Miyaji on the sixth. The dead bodies at the north end of Miyuki Bridge had been cleared away, but dark, greasy-looking human silhouettes were left where they had lain.

  The area around the Miyuki highway was a waste of scorched fields and scorched residential land. The site where our house had stood was quite undistinguished save for the small pond that remained in what had been the garden. Its area was far smaller than I had realized. Shigeko and Yasuko had assembled our belongings from the air raid shelter and the pond, and had already left. A laborer had loaded them on a cart, and was just taking a rest prior to starting off.

  The only sign of life among the ruins of the neighborhood associations’ homes was a single shack set up on the space where the Nakaos’ residence had stood. All the others must have gone to stay with relatives or friends. The laborer told me that the man in the shack had come over to speak to my wife and niece, and had told them that he had lost touch with his son. Mr. Nakao, that meant, must be living there alone with his young daughter.

  The Nakaos’ shack, roof and walls alike, was constructed of corrugated iron from burned buildings, and occupied four or five square yards of space. The main building of their house—a palatial affair made entirely of cypress, with red glazed tiles—had alone covered more than 180 square yards. Mr. Nakao, who worked in a trading company, owned a lot of shares and bonds. He collected lacquerware as a hobby. The low table in his drawing room had been of black lacquer and was said, I believe, to date from the Muromachi period; it was the kind of table that would not have looked out of place with a Lady Murasaki or Sei Shōnagon leaning gracefully against it.

  I went to see how he was, taking with me as presents the eucalyptus leaves, the trowel, the paper fan, and some creosote tablets from my rucksack (I left the canned meat where it was). The firm had entrusted me with them as gifts for the people at the Coal Control Corporation, but since the Coal Control Corporati
on people were not to be found, I was left with them on my hands. I ought to have taken them home again, but I considered myself old enough to adapt orders to changed circumstances.

  Mr. Nakao knew the use of my primitive gifts without waiting to be told. The eucalyptus and the trowel in particular would be invaluable, he said. He was effusive in his thanks.

  The eucalyptus leaves served as a substitute mosquito repellent. If one kept them smoldering in the covered-hole kind of air raid shelter, they helped drive away the striped mosquitoes that were rampant even in the daytime. The people living in shacks on the ruins were using the farthest recesses of their air raid shelters as toilets. The onslaught of mosquitoes was terrible, but sometimes it was impossible, they said, to hold out until sundown. The problem must have been an awkward one at the Nakaos’, as his daughter was just at the most bashful age.

  The paper fan was invaluable in keeping the eucalyptus leaves smoldering. The trowel was an indispensable tool for scratching about in the soil or filling in holes, whether inside the shelter or in the open air.

  “Thank you so much,” Mr. Nakao repeated over and over again. He seemed to want to talk. “Before the raid, you know, our shelter used to be full of crickets—no end of them, in fact. Little brown crickets—‘rabbit crickets’ a man at the Geibi Bank told me they were called. But since the raid we’ve had a sudden spate of striped mosquitoes. Brutes, they are. Really, though, you couldn’t have brought us a more useful present…”

  “It wasn’t I who chose them in the first place,” I said, avoiding telling him that I had passed on something intended for other people. “The works manager at our place had heard about the striped mosquitoes, so he gave me these things to bring on the off-chance. I could bring you some more of the leaves next time if you like.”

  Mr. Nakao was busily sniffing at the eucalyptus. The manager had given me a weeding basket stuffed full of the leaves, and the young oval leaves with their whitish, powdery coating were wilting sadly, while the semicircular older ones were all bent a stiff, awkward shape.