by Masuji Ibuse
Mr. Nakao told me he intended to stay there for the time being, until he found his son. The city hall was providing them with food, dealing out one large rice-ball a day, with pickled sour plums or pickled radish to go with it. I bade him farewell for the time being and rejoined the laborer. Taking over my shoulder one end of the rope fastened to the cart, I set off, dragging it behind me. At once, I realized that dragging a cart from the front was a stiff task. Every time a wheel rode over a piece of broken tile, the rope gave a vicious heave upwards at my shoulder. I was leaning forward at an angle of forty-five degrees, resting the weight of my body on the rope, but the jerks it gave me seemed to be tugging me backwards rather than upright.
“I can’t manage it like this, Rokurō,” I said to the laborer. “This rope’s got no give in it. Scientifically speaking, it’s no wonder it’s difficult. Four or five miles like this, and the flesh’ll be rubbed off my shoulders.”
“You should pull with the weight of your body, not your shoulder,” he said. “Try it like this.” He tied the end of the rope in a loop.
Following his instructions, I slung the loop over my right shoulder and around under my left arm, so that the knot came just in the center of my back. Things were a little better like that, since the shock when the cart went over a bump was absorbed by a larger area of the body.
It looked as though ours was the first cart to pass along the road since the sixth. I looked back, and saw that the wheels had crushed the broken glass scattered everywhere into a powder, leaving two tracks in the debris that glittered white in the sunlight.
The laborer had filled two bottles with water and put them on the cart. We would go a way, then stop to wipe off sweat, start again, then stop to wipe off the sweat again, and every time we stopped we took a pull at the water, which had all disappeared before we even got out of the town. The constant bumping and jerking and the stink that lay over the streets seemed to double the heat from the blazing sun overhead. Once I called back to my companion: “Rokurō! Why don’t we have a proper rest somewhere around here?”
But he said, “No—not till we’re out of the town.”
I pulled the cart along behind me, concentrating my mind on estimating the distance we had already covered. Now we’ve done two miles, I told myself; now we’ve done two-and-a-half, or two-and-three-quarters perhaps….After about three miles, we stopped at a house by the roadside and begged some water from their well. We filled our bottles, and enjoyed a leisurely rest. The laborer with me, Rokurō Masuda by name, was a lean man in his early fifties who had undertaken the job at the introduction of a woman in the works kitchen. He was a hardy kind of man, with a good-natured face.
Off again. Around the three-and-a-half-mile mark, the road ceased to be littered with fragments of tile, and to my great relief the jolting ceased. When we at last reached our temporary home, the lights were already on. I was about to seat myself with a sigh of relief on the edge of the veranda when, to my great surprise, I saw two of my brothers-in-law lying sprawled out on the tatami under the electric light, both of them snoring.
I gave Rokurō his wages, then went round to the back, by the well, to look for Shigeko.
“Back from the forced march!” I announced. Yasuko was lighting the fire for the bath in the landlord’s house. Shigeko was beside the stream that ran at the back of the house, rinsing the washing in the dark.
“When did our visitors arrive?” I asked.
Shigeko and Yasuko had apparently arrived back from Hiroshima to find the two visitors in the garden, sitting disconsolately on the edge of the veranda. They had come all the way from their village deep in the hills, solely out of concern for our safety. Finding Senda-machi burned to the ground, they had inquired where I worked, and after much wandering had finally arrived.
“I just cried and cried for joy,” said Shigeko. “They had all been so concerned about us. And the two of them had a dreadful time getting here. They even had to walk over the railway bridge across the Ashida River.” She wept openly and unashamedly, like a child.
CHAPTER 13
August 11.
Last night I put off attending to our visitors from afar and went first to report to the manager, over dinner in the works canteen, on the coal situation in the ruins of Hiroshima. I also recommended that our firm should take steps to secure coal on its own initiative. And I told him, incidentally, what I had done with the trowel and the eucalyptus leaves.
“Perhaps I shouldn’t say so,” he said, “but if you ask me, you’ve been fooled around with. Why on earth can’t the army people in the Clothing Depot release the coal reserves at Ube? That’s the question. Don’t you think you should have demanded some explanation? It’s not as though you were a kid sent on an errand. If they say they can’t release it, you’ve no business taking it lying down. Whatever do the military think they’re up to at any rate, in the middle of a colossal emergency like this? It makes me sick.”
He was so excited that his hand shook as it held the can-opener to open a can of beef. The meal was good, despite everything. There was no rice, admittedly, only a mixture of seven parts of barley to three parts of bran, but to go with it we had the beef that should have gone as a present to the Coal Control Corporation. It was many a month since I had eaten anything so good. The rich-looking marbled brown of the meat, the thick, luscious amber of the gravy, the mouth-watering aroma…
It would have been a waste to eat anything so good amidst the ruins of the city. A great swarm of flies would have been sure to gather the moment one opened the can. Tashiro from the Ujina cannery told me yesterday that when he ate his lunch among the ruins he had hardly got a can open before the flies flocked round and turned the meat yellow. They laid yellow eggs all over the surface. The tremendous number of flies was enough to put you off your food completely, even without the dreadful smell everywhere. Seen from behind, the washed-out linen rucksack on Tashiro’s back had looked as though it was embroidered all over with black wool, on account of the flies clustering thick all over it. I expect mine was the same.
The manager and I divided the meat equally between us. We each had a second bowl of the substitute rice. We were still eating when a worker called Nishina from the Works Department came to ask me to read another funeral service. The death had only just occurred.
“Then I’ll come after I’ve finished,” I said. “I’ll be there in half an hour or an hour’s time.”
Nishina directed an accusing glance at the empty can standing on the table. At this point, the manager could well have explained that it was a can of beef that he had been keeping as a present for our customers, but instead he just said affably, “When the meal’s over, you see, Mr. Shizuma will have to go and gargle to purify himself before he comes, having eaten meat. I expect he’ll give you the ‘Sermon on Mortality’ today.” Nishina gulped, but said nothing.
The deceased was Nishina’s sister-in-law, a widow of thirty-six called Saki Mitsuda. According to what she had told Nishina herself, she had been working in the fields at a farm inside the city when the bomb fell. She had been weeding a field full of taros, and was squatting on the ground at the time, with a cotton towel tied over her head. The broad leaves of the plants had served to screen her from the flash. She had not been killed outright, but probably had temporarily lost the ability to move.
For a while, she lay face down amongst the taros. The sky when she looked up was quite dark. Hakushima Nakamachi and Nishi-Nakamachi were a sea of flames. She told herself she must not stay where she was. She crawled towards the river bank. The water was a dark purplish color, and she felt frightened, as though the end of the world had come. The fire was spreading rapidly. But a widow has to be tough to keep going, and, gathering up all her courage, she jumped into the river and, grabbing hold of a bamboo raft, immersed herself in the water. (The raft was one of those that the city authorities had urged the inhabitants to have ready for use in getting away to safety in the event of an air raid.) The tide was in, and there w
as something over four feet of water in the river. Before long there was a shower and it got terribly cold. She clambered up onto the raft, and covering herself with a quilt that came floating down the river, used a piece of drifting plank as a paddle to take her downstream out of danger. She had burns on her left earlobe, her neck, and her shoulder.
She had arrived in search of her brother-in-law two nights previously. At that time, she had still had the strength to walk without aid, but the night before she had suddenly weakened, and had been groaning in constant pain until she had died a short while previously.
As the person in charge of the funeral of an outsider, I made a memorandum of all these details.
The farm in the city where she had been working had formerly been the Riverside Park. In spring the previous year, almost the whole of it had been put under cultivation, in line with the government’s policy of making use of all available space, and eggplants, cucumbers, tomatoes, taros, and other vegetables were growing there. All the other people in the area at the time of the raid were said to have been wiped out, including the girls from the First Girls’ High School and the Municipal Girls’ High School who were doing war work there. In living until today, in fact, she had been cheating death of its due.
The manager was still preoccupied with his own obsession. “Shizuma,” he said to me, “Make sure you go to bed early tonight after the service is over. We need you to go to the Clothing Depot again tomorrow to put in another application for coal. Your ideas about getting supplies on our own initiative sound fine, but if you ask me they’re really a case of giving up too easily. It’s a nuisance, I know, but you must try to be a bit more determined.”
“It’s no use,” I said, rather put out. “The only thing we can do now is to get a letter of introduction from Captain Nozu of the Signal Corps and go direct to the Ube mine to negotiate with them there. We can hardly be expected to obey the control ordinances if the Coal Control Corporation has disappeared, can we?”
“It’s all very well to say that, but Captain Nozu is away on official business. I looked in at the Signal Corps’ temporary office upstairs five or six times today, and there was only one NCO there. When I asked where the captain had gone, he said it was a military secret. He said the same thing when I asked when he’d be back. A while ago I went to the warehouse, and there’s only two days’ supply of coal left. What are we supposed to do?” He clasped his head in his hands in despair.
“In that case, I’ll go early tomorrow morning,” I said. “Even if it does no good.”
I resigned myself to going to the Clothing Depot once more, though I knew it was quite pointless.
—
Returning to our temporary home after the service was over, I was greeted by an aroma of toasted rice cakes that penetrated to the outside even though the shutters, on account of the blackout, were all closed. I could tell that they were being dipped in soy and cooked over charcoal.
I went in through the back entrance. Our two visitors were awake now, and seated at the table with Yasuko and Shigeko. On the table (a splendid affair in ebony that our landlord had lent us), saucers and other receptacles contained the toasted rice cakes. The visitors must have brought them as a present from the country. Yasuko and Shigeko were eating ravenously.
“Why, here he is!” said Shigeko in a cheerful voice, noticing me standing there in the unfloored entrance. “We didn’t wait for you, I’m afraid.”
“Hello, uncle,” said Yasuko. “I’m sorry we started first. The rice cakes were too much for us once we started toasting them. They brought us some parched rice, as well. And there are some rice balls left over too.”
“It was very good of you to bother about us,” I said to the visitors, then seated myself on the wooden step between the entrance and the room, arranging myself so that the burns on my left cheek didn’t show. The two guests stared at me with red-rimmed, startled eyes like rabbits, and both of them started shedding great tears. (One of them, Masao Watanabe, was Shigeko’s elder brother; the other, Yoshio Takamaru, was Yasuko’s real father.)
Takamaru, who had been sitting cross-legged, had hastily redisposed himself more formally on his heels, and sat now with his hands tightly clasping his knees, gnawing at his mustache and sobbing. This set off both Shigeko and Yasuko, who suddenly screwed up their faces and stopped chewing at their rice cakes. Watanabe sat quite silent, alternately wiping his eyes and peering at my face. I steeled myself against tears, but emotion welled up unbidden in my breast and my nose started to drip onto my upper lip. I shifted my position so that I was sitting with my back turned to them.
“I’m so glad to see you all safe, so glad!” said Watanabe. “To see all of you safe and alive! We were sure we’d never see you again. The most we hoped was to find the spot where you had died.”
“I’m so happy too, indeed I am,” joined in Takamaru. “We’d given up Yasuko for lost. You’ve always taken such good care of her that we all thought she’d gone with you to the other side. The whole family, in Kobatake and in Hirose too, had given up hope for you.”
I stayed seated where I was, sipping at the tea Yasuko had poured out for me. “You’ve had a lot of worry on our account,” I said.
Bit by bit, Watanabe conveyed to us something of the shock the folk back home had received, with Takamaru joining in from time to time to supplement his account. Verbal reports of the bombing had begun to reach Kobatake village early on the evening of the sixth, they said. An extraordinarily high-powered bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima. One-third of the entire population, including troops and voluntary war workers, had been wiped out instantaneously. Another third were badly injured, and the remaining third had all without exception suffered some kind of injury. This, it was claimed, was not defeatist rumor but sober fact. Further reports followed on August 7 and 8. This time, they were still more alarming.
Now, people who had been injured in Hiroshima began to arrive back in the villages in a steady stream. Some died shortly after reaching home. Some suffered excruciating agonies. In Hirose there was a doctor, a specialist in children’s diseases, who had fled to the country from Kobe. He came to look at the patients, but declared that the only diagnosis he could give was of an unknown disease, one for which there was no known treatment. He gave them ointment for their burns, and injected those who complained of violent pain with “Pantopon,” but he had only been able to secure a dozen ampules of the latter, and there were so many patients that there was not enough medicine to go around after the first day.
There were two injured men who came back to Kobatake, both with burns and broken bones. Our visitors had been to ask them about the damage in the Senda-machi area of the city, but all they could say was that the houses had been burned down and that all the survivors were injured; there was not the slightest clue as to whether we were alive or not. If we had been injured, though, we should almost certainly have come back to the village by now, so our failure to arrive might well mean that we were dead. And either way, we obviously could not be living in a burned-out waste. It was agreed, in short, that we must have perished.
Yet even if we were dead, something ought to be done about it. Somebody must go to look for the remains, at least. Watanabe was debating in his own mind what to do about it when, at almost exactly the same time on the morning of the tenth, five relatives turned up at his place as if by preaccord. They conferred together, and decided that, as a first step, Watanabe and Takamaru should come to Hiroshima on everybody’s behalf. So they set off, taking with them some rice cakes and parched rice—the most suitable things they had at hand in the way of offerings for the presumably deceased.
As they were leaving the village, they called to inform my old mother, and found my younger sister there with her two children. My mother, convinced that all three of us had either been blown to pieces or crushed beneath the house, had got our three photographs arranged on the home altar, with three cups of water placed before them, and some dahlias in a vase.
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�If you’re going to Hiroshima,” she said to them, “I’ll trouble you to take some incense, at least. And some water and fresh leaves from the village. You can burn the incense on the place where the house was, and sprinkle the water and scatter the leaves there for them. And while you’re about it, take some kemponashi nuts for Shigematsu—he was always fond of the kemponashi trees.”
She put some water from the well in an empty vinegar bottle, wrapped some incense sticks and some fresh green leaves in a piece of paper, and gave them all to Watanabe. Then she picked up two or three kemponashi nuts that had fallen while still green, and put them in the small pocket of his rucksack.
The village of Kobatake lies approximately 1,800 feet above sea level. On a tableland surrounded on three sides by mountains, it stands at the watershed of the Ashida River, which runs southward through the eastern part of Hiroshima Prefecture, and the Oda River, which waters Okayama Prefecture. In the old days, the area had belonged to the Nakatsu clan in Kyushu, and there had been a clan office there. Even now, what were once samurai mansions still stand in the village, but nowadays the village is in a steady decline, and lacks transport facilities. Watanabe and Takamaru had to walk for about two hours down the road that follows the Ashida down the valley, and had reached a place called Uokiri before an empty charcoal-driven truck came by and they got a lift. It was past ten at night when they arrived in the ruins of Fukuyama.
Fukuyama had been bombed on the eighth, and all but one section in the north of the town had been burned down. There was not a light in the place. Going along a road, straining their eyes to see in the dark, the two of them hit on the Sanyō Line, and followed the tracks westward until they came to what seemed to be a station. They wanted to buy a ticket, but could not find a station official anywhere. They did, however, bump into a stranger in the pitch dark, and they stood talking with him for a while. Judging from his voice, he was a man of fifty or thereabouts, and he had what they took to be a Tokyo accent. He had come to Fukuyama a month previously to escape the raids, he told them, but had been burned out of his home.