Black Rain

by Masuji Ibuse

  A rifle in your hand, a hammer in mine—

  But the road into battle is one, and no more.

  To die for our country’s a mission divine

  For the boys and the girls of the volunteer corps!

  The girls were employed at the steel works, turning anti-aircraft shells on the lathes. They worked in two shifts, and the later shift would be turning shells until ten at night. None of them, I am sure, ever dreamed of the horror that was waiting to descend on them.

  CHAPTER 14

  The number of people searching for bodies or cremated remains among the ruins was considerably greater than yesterday. Along with the people walking about in tatters or half-naked, I noticed quite a number of men dressed like firemen, with armbands inscribed “Special Relief Squad.” Some of them were carrying megaphones, or bamboo stretchers. They had come from the country to give aid to the victims.

  At the Clothing Branch Depot, I got precisely the reception I had expected.

  “Yes, I quite see, Mr. Shizuma,” Lieutenant Sasatake began slowly when he had heard my petition through. “But for the moment, I’m afraid, you’ll have to carry on somehow as things are. The thing we most want, you see, is for soldiers and civilians to act as one, using their imagination and resourcefulness in finding a way out of each difficulty as it occurs. In an extreme emergency of this kind, we want the public as a whole to have a feeling of working together for the sake of the cause.”

  The only thing I was interested in was getting a ration of coal; abstract phrases of this kind were no comfort at all.

  “Then will you write a letter of introduction to the Ujina mine, Lieutenant?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t answer you there till I’ve mentioned it to my superiors and we’ve had a conference. Even so, though, something must be done, I do agree.”

  “Couldn’t you perhaps release the coal reserves at Ujina?”

  “That’s quite out of the question, as I explained to you once already yesterday. It’s outside our jurisdiction, you see.”

  In just the same way as yesterday, I was left with a feeling of helplessness. The only difference was that today the phrasing of the refusal was somewhat less rigid and the manner rather less pompous. I decided there was no point in pressing any further.

  Leaving the Clothing Branch Depot, I made my way through the ruins of Fukuro-chō and was walking along the road with the streetcar tracks, in the direction of the Communications Bureau, when a soldier with an armband inscribed “Relief Squad” overtook me. As he walked, he was shouting “Hello, there! Is there anybody from the Kōjin Unit about?” I glanced at his profile, and at the same moment he turned round to look at me.

  “Good Lord, Tamotsu!”

  “Why, if it isn’t Shigematsu!”

  It was an extraordinary coincidence, indeed, for Tamotsu came from Kobatake. A few years previously he had joined the Himeji regiment, and sometime the year before last, people in the village had been saying that he had been made corporal of a sanitation platoon. Now, however, he was wearing a new sun-helmet, with a military sword at his side, and had a sergeant-major’s badge on the collar of his shirt.

  “My, Tamotsu—you’ve gone up in the world, haven’t you?” I exclaimed in surprise. “Carrying a long saber like that!”

  “Well,” he said, “a while back, I was transferred to the Fukuyama regiment, then on August 7, I was transferred here again. I’m a sanitation NCO attached to the special relief squads clearing up the ruins.” He looked thoroughly out of temper at the idea.

  The two men he had with him were also familiar to me by sight. One of them, Rikuo, was a member of the Kobatake fire brigade, an extremely taciturn man, generally held to be a master of firefighting techniques. The other, Masaru, came from a different district of the village, and was also a fireman, rumored to be not a whit inferior to Rikuo in his job. Both had been called out by police order the day after the bomb fell on Hiroshima, and had come to the ruins, as members of a special relief squad, to look for the members of the Kōjin Unit who had been at work pulling down houses.

  Rikuo had a megaphone attached to a cord slung round his neck, and he and Masaru were carrying a stretcher with handles of still-green bamboo.

  “Those bamboo handles came from the grove at the Kannon temple back at Kobatake, I’ll be bound,” I said. “It makes me homesick just to see them.”

  “Don’t be silly,” said Masaru. “The police at Miyoshi gave them to us.”

  The members of the relief squad, I learned, had not come direct to Hiroshima from Kobatake. First they had assembled at the village hall in response to a summons from the headman of Kobatake, then they had gone to Yuki to report to the local office there (the order had simply said that they were to report in their firemen’s uniforms). At Yuki, they joined forces with men from other villages in the district and were addressed by the mayor on the subject of “Boosting the Morale of the Public Behind the Lines.” From there, the whole company had been dispatched to Shōge, where they joined more men from other villages and were addressed by the mayor, then sent on to Miyoshi. Here, they joined forces with still more men from neighboring villages and listened again to an exhortatory address by the mayor, who declared them to be brave heroes, sallying forth to the ruins of Hiroshima to do their duty at a time of national emergency.

  From Kobatake on to Yuki and then to Shōge there was no train, and they had gone by charcoal-driven bus, but from Shōge as far as Yaga-machi they had been taken by train. Not one had either complained or dropped out on the way. Their work was not to give aid to ordinary victims of the bomb, but to seek out members of the Kōjin Unit from their own or neighboring villages who had been in Hiroshima when the bomb fell.

  “We’re all grateful to you,” I said formally to Rikuo and Masaru, with a little bow. I bowed to Tamotsu too, and said, “Thank you.”

  “But isn’t it a coincidence, though?” said Tamotsu. “Quite an extraordinary coincidence—that I should happen to be assigned to the relief squad for Kobatake and Takafuta. We’re just on our way to the Communications Hospital to look for survivors.”

  “We’ve only found five from Kobatake so far,” said Masaru. “Rikuo’s been shouting steadily through this megaphone here till he’s made himself hoarse. So I’m going to take over soon.”

  I set off walking alongside them in the direction of the Communications Hospital. Somehow, it seemed the right thing to do. The curfew at the works did not apply to me, and I felt that today it was natural that I should join forces with them.

  Rikuo walked with the megaphone to his lips, shouting “Hello there! Any Kōjin Unit members from Kobatake? Any Kōjin members from Takafuta? Hello there! Members of the Kōjin Unit….” I gazed about me as I walked, looking for some response to his cries, but the only things that met my eyes were fragments of tile, crumbled brick walls, the skeletons of automobiles, electric wires hanging in festoons like nets hung out to dry, streetcar tracks, charred timbers, scorched safes, and blackened window frames.

  Suddenly the sergeant-major stopped in his tracks. “Look—that may be an official notice,” he exclaimed, straightening his sun-helmet as he spoke.

  Looking where he pointed, I saw a number of sheets of paper stuck up on the burned-out iron frame of a streetcar. The sergeant-major started walking toward the wreck, and I followed, with considerable trepidation, in his wake. It was a bulletin made by cutting rectangular strips off a roll of paper and pasting them onto the iron. In Hiroshima at such a time, only a newspaper company would have used paper like that.

  I copied down one of the notices into my notebook:

  “Announcement from H.Q., West Japan Military District,” it said. “At approximately 11:00 hours on August 9, two large enemy aircraft penetrated the skies over Nagasaki and dropped what appeared to be a bomb of the new type. Details of the damage are still under investigation, but it is expected to prove comparatively light.”

  Another sheet bore the following notice:

  “Aug
ust 10, from the commander in charge of the defense of Hiroshima to the citizens of Hiroshima: Should burns have been incurred, it is recommended as a temporary measure that the person affected bathe in a mixture of one part of sea water to one part of fresh water. This method will ensure adequate protection against the effects of this type of attack. Electric car tracks and major roads are now passable on foot.”

  The piece of paper adjoining this one declared:

  “From Imperial Headquarters: (1) Yesterday, August 6, Hiroshima City suffered considerable damage as the result of an attack by a small number of enemy B-29 aircraft. (2) The enemy appears to have used a new type of bomb in this attack, but details are still under investigation.”

  On the blank space at the bottom of the paper somebody, an idle scribbler presumably, had written in charcoal, “August 10: Soviet Union enters the war.” He seemed to have written on the paper when it was already fastened against the streetcar frame. I felt sure, from the crude writing and the use of charcoal—of which there was plenty immediately to hand—that it was not an official announcement, yet I also found it impossible to dismiss it as an unfounded rumor.

  The news affected me with the feeling, not so much that the end of the road had at last been reached, as that it had been passed some while ago. For a moment, I feared that my legs were going to give way beneath me. The left side of my face, the side with the burn, was twitching uncontrollably. I could feel it myself, numb though the burned surface was. At the same time, I was puzzled; the bulletins must have been posted at various points in the ruins two or three days ago, and I wondered why I had not noticed them before.

  The sergeant-major and his companions trudged on again in glum silence. For some time, all four of us walked straight ahead without speaking. We had reached the entrance to the Communications Hospital when Rikuo finally said, as though to himself, “A nice bath of one part of sea water to one part of fresh, eh?”

  The hospital was no more than the shell of what had been a Western-style building, but it was apparent even from outside the entrance that it was full to capacity with victims. People in surgical smocks were walking busily along the corridor, and injured patients were tottering to and fro on unsteady legs. A woman who seemed to be out of her mind was standing by the stone steps shouting something unintelligible. Nearby, there stood a group of people come from the country to look for the missing. Telling me to wait at the entrance, Tamotsu, as the sergeant in charge, led the other two into a room that seemed to be serving as the reception office. After a while he came out and said, “We’ll look through the wards. You’ll have to stay here, as you’re not a member of the relief squad. I think we shall find some victims from Kobatake here.”

  So saying, he went off down the corridor with Rikuo and Masaru. The woman who seemed to be out of her mind began shrieking after Rikuo and his companion as though calling down curses on them.

  By the stone steps at the entrance, a couple of women were sitting, talking busily. Neither looked like victims. They were about forty, and both wore grubby blouses, with baggy cotton trousers and long rubber boots. Judging from what she said, one was the wife of a victim in the hospital, while the other was his younger sister. Both of them were talking excitedly.

  A large unit of the Soviet army, they were saying, had breached the Manchukuo border and come pouring into the country in great waves. The Japanese army in Manchukuo had therefore decided to drop on them a bomb similar to the one the B-29 had dropped on Hiroshima. The army had also, it seemed, determined to drop the bomb on the Pacific islands occupied by American forces, by way of reprisal for the Hiroshima raid. The bombs were being manufactured secretly at this very moment, on an island off Takehara City. The thing was that the enemy must be made to realize that Japan had a formidable navy as well as an army….

  Their conversation, apart from confirming the Soviet Union’s entry into the war, also gave me some information about the state of affairs in the hospital. At the time of the explosion, the hospital’s director, Dr. Michihiko Hachiya, had been hit by flying glass and splinters in more than thirty different places all over his body. He had, almost literally, been cut to ribbons. Since then, unable to stand, he had been directing the hospital’s emergency operations from a bed in the ward. The symptoms of the patients, and of the director himself, were all the same: loss of appetite, vomiting, and diarrhea, with bloody stools in many cases. The director had concluded from this that the bomb must have contained either poison gas or dysentery germs. He had accordingly directed the doctors in charge of internal medicine to take measures as for an infectious disease, and had told Dr. Koyama, the acting director, to have an isolation ward constructed with all speed.

  It soon occurred to Dr. Koyama, who was a man of action and great resourcefulness, that the only people in the ruined city who were capable of building anything in practice were the army. So he had conferred with the officer in charge of the troops stationed in the Communications Bureau close by, and as a result it had been decided that soldiers should be set to work building an isolation ward to the south of the hospital proper. The work was proceeding apace. The only drawback was that vital military establishments such as the headquarters of the West Japan Army, the Second West Japan Unit, the Military Preparatory School, the divisional headquarters, and the engineers were all situated in the vicinity of the hospital. They had all been wiped out by the bomb, it was true, but the area was certain to become the focus of a battle for the whole district in the event of an enemy landing. For the same reason, many of the patients became alarmed and called “Airplane!” or “Take cover!” in panic every time there was an air raid warning….

  I sat waiting on the stone steps for nearly an hour. Eventually, I began to feel that something must be wrong, and stepped into the entrance hall to see if there was any sign of the others. Inside, my attention was caught at once by a dish that had been placed on a ledge inside a small window to serve as a lamp. It contained vegetable oil, with a piece of bandage for a wick, but the dish itself, which must surely have come from somebody’s safe, was a magnificent piece of san-ts’ai ware.

  “Shigematsu!” said a voice. “Sorry to keep you waiting.”

  I turned round. The man on the stretcher carried by Rikuo and Masaru was all but dead, with no strength left even to moan. Dark, blackish stains showed on the bandages around his hands. His face was unrecognizably swollen and empurpled. From the tattered remains of his shirt, to which it was fastened with a safety pin, dangled a name-card. On it was written by hand, “Chūzō Hata, member of the Kōjin Unit, Kobatake Village, Hiroshima Prefecture.”

  When I was a boy, this same Chūzō’s father had taught me how to sniggle for eels. He had also initiated me—as an adjunct to the more serious art of fishing—into the delights of bamboo shoots dug from a nearby grove and baked over a fire kindled on the dried-up part of the river-bed. You baked them with the skin on, then peeled them and ate them steaming hot, basted with bean paste begged from the nearest house.

  A peculiarly offensive, fishy stench came from Chūzō as he lay on the stretcher. It may have been caused by pus, or by the fever in the body; either way, it was indescribably unpleasant. I offered to take one end of the stretcher from Rikuo, but he refused. “Don’t be silly,” he said. “Leave the stretcher-carrying to the relief unit people.”

  From time to time Tamotsu the sergeant-major, who walked in front of the stretcher, would bellow through his megaphone: “Hello there! Is there anybody from the Kōjin Unit? Hello there! Anybody from Takafuta?” I walked by his side so as to stay to windward of the stretcher. The sky was horribly blue.

  A doctor called Norioka, Tamotsu told me, had hunted out Chūzō for them from all the many patients in the ward of the Communications Hospital. There were so many injured that all could not be accommodated in the ward proper, and they spilled out into the corridor, so that people who had come to tend to the sick or look for the missing had to pick their way between them. What was worse, their fever was extra
ordinarily contagious. It sometimes happened, even, that a healthy person caring for a patient would die before the patient himself. Such things were happening all around all the time. Yet despite the indescribable chaos, Dr. Norioka had found Chūzō for them.

  Dr. Norioka, said Tamotsu, was head of a relief squad sent from the Communications Hospital in Osaka, and had arrived at the hospital in charge of a party bearing rucksacks stuffed with relief materials the previous day. Two days earlier, on the eighth, troops had turned up from somewhere and made a clean sweep of the hospital’s medicines and bandages, and the relief squad from Osaka had come—as one nurse had put it—as “Buddhas to hell.”

  By the time we arrived at the relief squad’s temporary headquarters, Chūzō was dead on the stretcher.

  “He’s quite dead,” said Tamotsu as the stretcher was lowered onto the veranda in the garden, and he saluted as a mark of respect for the deceased. Masaru brought a leaf from a spear-flower that grew by an ornamental stone basin, and placed it by the dead man’s head, then he and Rikuo stood together and, pressing their palms together, bowed briefly in silent prayer.

  I recited the “Sermon on Mortality.” As soon as I had finished Rikuo spoke. “Shall we cremate him, then?” he said. “I feel kind of bad towards old Chūzō about it, but it can’t be helped.” And he and Masaru took up the stretcher once more. The crematorium for the people here was a piece of vacant ground near the railway.