Black Rain

by Masuji Ibuse

  He described the raid on Fukuyama for them. Around midnight, sixty B-29’s had come and dropped large numbers of flares over the hills round the town, then had switched to the attack, sweeping in over the town in waves.

  “Incendiary bombs make a kind of swishing noise as they fall,” the man said. “Then, when they hit the ground, it’s not a proper bang but a series of thuds. And they give off a terrific glare. I remember that with one of them there was a tinkling sound, like a pane of glass breaking.”

  According to the man, incendiary bombs came done up in a bundle inside some material like corrugated iron, which was fastened with a brass wire. As they fell, the brass melted, the corrugated iron—or whatever it was—opened up, and the bombs spread out in midair and fell separately, which was what made the swishing sound. The tinkling, he claimed, was the sound of the wire falling on the rockery in his garden.

  Fukuyama Castle had been hit, too. An incendiary had gone through a third-floor window of the keep, and the whole five stories had gone up in a pillar of fire, then collapsed. The structure housing the Lady Yodogimi’s bathroom, brought there from the celebrated Fushimi Castle in Kyoto, had been destroyed, together with the adjoining corridor and terrace, and the surface of the stone ramparts had been burned white and flaky. All that was left standing was a three-storied turret and a gateway known as the “Iron Gate.”

  “Actually,” he said, “there are anti-aircraft emplacements at the castle and by the bridge over the Ashida, but even so our side didn’t fire a single shell, not even when the whole sky was crawling with B-29’s. However low the B-29’s came, we didn’t fire at them, not once. Dark and silent as the forest, that’s how it was down here. The strong, silent mountains, and all that…After all, they do say that the wise hawk hides its claws, don’t they?” It was hard to tell whether he was taking the army’s part or being sarcastic.

  A lot of people who had been burned out of their homes seemed to be sheltering in the station, but it was difficult to tell for sure in the pitch darkness. Walking out onto the tracks, they could see lights in the direction of a small village called Gōbun to the west, and at Akasaka Station—the lights, one might say, of a people too dispirited by now even to trouble about the blackout regulations. They decided they would try to buy tickets at Akasaka Station, and set off groping their way along the tracks.

  To cross the railway bridge over the Ashida, they had to get down on all fours, feeling their way forward with their hands, one tie at a time. One of them used the up line and the other the down line, the idea being that one could give the other a hand to haul him to safety in the event of a train’s coming. They called out again and again to reassure themselves as to each other’s whereabouts as they crossed. The things that gave them most trouble were their rucksacks, which flopped down on top of their necks if they kept their heads down, and swung around under their arms, or by their sides, if they kept their backs horizontal. Every time one thing or the other happened, their bodies swayed perilously, and they would clutch at the rails in alarm. Time and time again they were in a cold sweat of fear, but eventually they succeeded in reaching Akasaka Station without mishap.

  A middle-aged railway official at the station, hearing their story, sold them a ticket for Hiroshima, but could not tell them when a train would come. All they could do was to be patient and wait, so they set about eating their packed meals as slowly and deliberately as possible. They were still at it when a Tokyo-bound train arrived and about thirty people alighted onto the platform. About half of them were injured, the rest being people who had been to Hiroshima to look for friends and relatives. There were loud exchanges between the latter and about twenty people who had been waiting for the train to arrive: “No luck!” “Did you find them?” “What happened to the house?” “Did you meet anybody we know?” “I stuck a notice on the railing of the bridge…”

  Not one of them seemed to have been successful in finding those he sought. Mingling with the people already waiting there, the arrivals, injured and the uninjured alike—a man with a child, a woman carrying an infant in her arms, a couple who looked like brother and sister—made their way along the platform, through the barrier, and disappeared into the darkness beyond.

  “We won’t be much luckier, by the look of things,” one brother said to the other. “We may at least find their ashes in the ruins,” said the other. “After all, we can hardly go back now, can we?”

  They got a train at something after one in the morning, and arrived in Hiroshima at something after five. It was a little after seven when they finally found the ruins of our house in Senda-machi. I had not put up any notice saying where we had gone, but Watanabe, who had been to see us there two or three times, recognized the place by the remains of the pine tree and the pond. Once there, though, they were at a loss: it was no use calling our names when there was nowhere left for us to be, and they had no implements for digging in the ashes. The one thing they felt sure of was that we were dead, wherever it had happened. And wherever it had been, they agreed to settle for here. So they lit the sticks of incense and stuck them in the earth by the pond, then they set the vinegar bottle containing the water for the dead beside it, and scattered the fresh green leaves beneath the charred remains of the pine tree. The kemponashi nuts they set in front of the incense.

  Just then, a stranger came up and hailed them: “Would you be looking for the Shizumas?” When they said they were, he introduced himself as a Mr. Nakao who was living in a shack that stood nearby. Mr. Shizuma and his wife and their adopted daughter Yasuko had all gone, he told them, to the firm at Furuichi. “Weren’t any of them hurt?” they asked. “Mr. Shizuma burned his cheek a little,” he said. “Just a slight burn.”

  Mr. Nakao gave them general directions for getting to Furuichi. He traced a map in the ashes with a piece of charcoal, and Watanabe copied it into a notebook. With its aid, and that of countless people whom they asked on the way, they walked as far as Yamamoto Station, and came by train from there to Furuichi, where they were given our address at the works. This was just after half-past twelve, they said. Then why—it occurred to me to wonder—had Mr. Nakao not told me that someone had been inquiring after us? I could only conclude that living among the ruins had fuddled his brains temporarily.

  Shigeko and Yasuko had indeed noticed some green leaves lying at the foot of the pine tree, they said. They had also seen a vinegar bottle standing by the pond; the label was a rather gaudy affair, with a picture of a country lass wearing a bright red sash. It had puzzled Shigeko very much to see the bottle standing there undamaged among the ruins, especially with the green kemponashi nuts on the ground near it. I myself had noticed nothing, but, hearing the story now, I was amazed by my mother’s thoughtfulness. She had obviously meant the nuts as a special offering for the repose of my soul. As a child, I had always been impatient for the kemponashi nuts to fall. I used to throw stones at the branches to bring them down, for which my father would roundly scold me. Sometimes, a stone went too far, and would land on the roof of the bathroom. Mother, it seemed, had never forgotten.

  According to our visitors, a steady stream of neighbors and other friends in the village were coming to my old home to ask after us. In theory, at least, it was to ask after us; but from the tone of what they said, it was plain that they had really come to offer condolences. Only one of them, the proprietor of the local sundries store, had differed from the rest. “You should know better than to put their photos on the altar,” he told my mother. “It’s asking for bad luck. Wait a bit and see—they’ll come back safe and sound.” And he left without even saying the usual polite things.

  I excused myself, as I had to get up early the next morning, and I went to bed in the small room next door. But I could still hear them talking. People in Kobatake, like everywhere else, they were saying, were going out digging for pine tree roots. Even my old mother was tottering off to dig in the hills, and had given herself blisters on her hands. Oil was extracted from the roots by steami
ng, and was used—so a naval officer had come specially to the village to tell everybody—to oil the engines of the planes whose job it was to shoot down B-29’s. Pine-root digging had been organized as a type of voluntary war work, and a hut for steaming the roots had been erected by the river in the valley….

  —

  This morning, I got up early and started to write a letter for them to take to my mother, but so many emotions crowded in upon me that I gave up the attempt. Leaving our visitors still asleep, I left to catch the first train. The train, as before, stopped at Yamamoto, and from there I set off on foot in the direction of Yokogawa Bridge. A distance of about two miles.

  The ruins were very much as they had been yesterday. The human figures searching for remains among the rubble looked like people seen searching for shellfish on the beach. Stooped and motionless with their backsides up in the air, they would quite suddenly straighten up from time to time, only to return to their original position almost immediately. As I crossed Yokogawa Bridge, I looked for the horse that had lain burned and quivering below the bridge on the sixth. There was little more than the skeleton left by now. Just downstream from the bridge, a pair who seemed to be father and child were scooping up water in pieces of tin bent into a funnel shape. Above the bridge, too, two middle-aged women were scooping up water in similar containers fashioned from tin; they scooped busily for a while, then leaned against the stone embankment as though tired. They had stuck pieces of bamboo and sticks of wood into the embankment between the stones, resting pieces of board, matting, and corrugated iron on top to form a kind of shelter. I saw a number of similar shanties much further up the river.

  In Sorazaya-chō at the northern end of Aioi Bridge, I saw two women seated on the ground amidst piles of broken tiles, weeping silently. They were both about twenty, and looked like sisters.

  The Industrial Exhibition Hall and Industrial Promotion Hall had their upper stories shattered and dangling by the framework. Aioi Bridge, which was made of reinforced concrete, had a great hump almost a yard high in the center. The concrete was cracked like crazy paving, with rifts an inch or an inch-and-a-half wide running all over it. A water pipe that crossed the river beside the bridge was snapped, and one could see deep down inside its gaping ends.

  As I reached the southern end of Motokawa Bridge, it was low tide, and among the pools left on the river bed I saw several fish like mullet lying badly decomposed, with their backbones visible. Here and there, crabs lay dead where they had crawled out from the stones of the embankment. The weeds on the river bank, with the exception of the tall, ear-bearing grasses, were proliferating wildly. However much I thought about it, I couldn’t see how light and sound could make weeds start growing so furiously.

  The balustrade of every bridge I crossed bore messages written on pieces of paper stuck on the stone, or scrawled on the bridge with charcoal. The number was astonishing. Some of the pieces of paper were fluttering in the breeze. Large numbers of people were scanning them, like the crowd that gathers before the bulletin board outside a newspaper office. Very occasionally, somebody would stop, write something, and go off again in a great hurry. The messages were all simple in the extreme, yet they seemed to convey something of the feelings and circumstances of the people who had written them. I jotted down a few of the sentences from pieces of paper stuck on the balustrade of Motokawa Bridge:

  To Kōnosuke: Come to your Aunt’s home at Gion—Father.

  Father and Mother: Let me know where you are now—Mayumi, c/o Mr. Abe, Sakurao, Hatsukaichi.

  Papa: The boy is worrying where you are—Hasue, c/o Yaichi Shintaku, Happonmatsu.

  Shinzō Watanabe is alive and well. Present address: c/o Shigeki Sehara, Midorii.

  Worried about members of the class. Will come here every day at ten—Taizō Ogawa, Class IIA, Industrial High School.

  Grandfather, Grandmother, and Emiko missing. To Shōji and Natsuyo: Come to Mr. Tokurō Ida’s in Ōkawa-chō—Yasuoka.

  To Mr. Ikuo Nishiguchi of Kamiya-chō: Please leave your present address and I will return the debt. Thank you. From your acquaintance in Nakahiro-chō.

  To Yaeko: Stop in at Mihara on your way back to Fuchū—from your Father.

  I set off again at a run, beating about me with my cotton towel to get rid of the flies trailing me, but was soon out of breath and had to slow down to a walk. Along this road, too, I could see, between the broken stone walls and the ornamental rocks where people’s houses had been, wood sorrel and vetch drooping under the weight of new shoots that had sprouted too quickly for them to support. I wondered whether the shock of the raid could have affected the cell structure of plants in the same way as with human beings.

  I recalled something that an agricultural expert visiting the village had once told us. If rice in a paddy field was grown in water that was too deep, the part of the stem in contact with the water was weakened structurally, and the plant tended to topple over later. This, he said, was accepted scientific fact. But I had never heard anyone say that a sudden shock from light or sound or heat could set plants growing unusually fast. The bomb seemed to have encouraged the growth of plants and flies at the same time that it put a stop to human life.

  Insects and plants, indeed, were thriving as never before. Yesterday, I had seen a new shoot a foot and a half long on a plantain tree in what had been the back garden of a noodle shop. The original stem had been snapped off by the blast and had disappeared without a trace, but a new shoot, encased in a sheath like bamboo, was already growing in its place. Today, the shoot was a good two feet long. Familiar with trees as I was, after a childhood spent on a farm, I was astonished.

  The noodle restaurant in question had been an old haunt of mine. In the days when I was working at the Army Provisions Depot, I had come there to have dinner every Sunday, and the proprietor used to call me “the boss.” When food started to get scarce, I sometimes traded on our acquaintance to persuade him, on the quiet, to part with some of his official ration of noodles.

  He had done a very nice dish of noodles with meat and vegetables, flavored with curry. Many such details came back to me now, as I stood estimating the length of the plaintain shoot with my finger. Just then, I caught sight of the noodle shop terrier peering out at me from behind a stone. I called to it and whistled, but today it would neither come to me nor wag its tail. It simply stood and stared. It must have run off somewhere during the fire, then come back when the fires died down to look for its master. I wondered how it could have survived in the middle of this scorched desert, without a scrap of food. It was thin and scraggy, and its coat was a dark gray all over. I had a mind to give it a piece of my rice ball, but in the end left it to its fate, persuading myself that if I gave it food it would only tag along behind me.

  About four or five sites past the noodle shop, I heard a metallic hammering, and saw a man attacking a large safe, now burnt a rusty brown, with a chisel. He was middle-aged and wore a topee, with khaki shorts and a short-sleeved shirt of the same color. Moved by idle curiosity, I went up to the man and spoke to him.

  “You’ve got plenty of energy I must say, in this heat. Won’t the door at the front of the safe open?”

  He glanced sideways at me without ceasing his banging, “Can’t get the damn key to budge,” he said. “So I’m having to get in from the back.”

  “Why don’t you smash in the lock with a hammer or something?”

  “I wonder, now? I wonder if a hammer would do the job? If I leave the contents inside it, safebreakers will make off with it before long.”

  A vast swarm of flies was dancing about him, frustrated in their attempts to settle. The man did not look like a thief himself, so I said, “Sorry to have disturbed you at your work,” and left him at it.

  In the ruins of what had been the district’s shopping center, there were rusty safes whenever I looked. We had no safe at Senda-machi; the only people possessing them in our neighborhood seemed to have been Mr. Nakao and Mr. Miyaji—not that I knew until
I saw the safes in the ruins. In Miyaji’s case, of course, it was only around the middle of July this year that he had bought one, when enemy planes first started flying over Hiroshima, across the central mountain range and on to the Japan Sea. There was a sudden increase in the number of people moving to the country, and one was able to pick up second-hand pianos, harmoniums, and safes for the merest song. From late July on, enemy raids became far more frequent; there were air raid warnings in Tokuyama, Iwakuni, and Kure, and mines began to be dropped in the Japan Sea, whereupon the pianos and the safes were joined by a flood of chests-of-drawers, ornamental pots, bamboo poles, miniature trees, checker boards, framed pictures, washing boards, wash-tubs, tennis rackets, and hanging scrolls, all at bargain prices.

  Hiroshima was always said to be the army’s city, whereas Kure was the navy’s. Kure was raided on June 22, then on July 1 a great incendiary raid razed the flat, central area of the city to the ground. There was another raid on July 24. On this occasion, the enemy was met by anti-aircraft fire from a Japanese battleship anchored out of sight behind an island, where it was marooned for want of fuel oil. Not enough pine root oil was being produced to replace the normal fuel, and it had found itself in the peculiar situation of being able to fight but unable to move. On that day, enemy planes also dropped bombs on Ujina. The next attack was the raid on Hiroshima on August 6, when the mysterious bomb was dropped, reducing the city to ashes.

  Not a word, not a rumor had led us to suspect the existence of such a bomb. It was the same with most people, I imagine. One can usually tell the way things are going by watching the children, who are more simple in their reactions than adults. The middle-school pupils doing war work, who were almost without exception wiped out by the bomb, were helping to pull down houses to make firebreaks almost every day right up to August 5. Not one of their faces betrayed the slightest desire to play truant or to hide away. The schoolgirls in the voluntary labor units wore white cloths round their foreheads, and armbands proudly labeled “School Volunteer Unit.” On their way to the steel factory, and on their way home again, they marched together, singing in chorus as they went: