Black Rain

by Masuji Ibuse

  The temporary headquarters of the relief squad was a private residence overlooking the East Parade Ground on the side towards the foot of Mt. Futaba. On weekdays the head of the family, a schoolteacher or something of the kind, left home in the early morning, while on Sundays he went off somewhere to do volunteer war work. Since he was never at home in the daytime, the relief people scarcely ever saw him. His son, a boy called Minoru, was a naval officer on a warship somewhere at sea. His wife was a well-bred, intelligent woman, and there were two attractive daughters of marriageable age. The whole family was extraordinarily kindhearted, and on no occasion made the slightest objection either to the members of the relief squad or to the injured from the Kōjin Unit.

  The relief squad had first noticed the house as they happened to be going past and—because it looked as though it had plenty of space—had promptly asked, without any introduction or other formality, for use of its rooms as a reception center for survivors from the Unit. The husband had been out at the time, and the wife and daughters alone, but the wife had immediately agreed, as though it was something they had been expecting all along. She was an unusually thoughtful woman, they said, with an extraordinary sense of service to others.

  The squad was using four large rooms on the first floor. Together with the survivors of the Kōjin Unit they numbered, in all, some fifty persons. Some of these were dying of raw burns, others groaning and excreting blood, and the same, foul odor hung over them all. Even so, the wife and daughters insisted on sleeping downstairs, in the kitchen, as though they felt it would be wrong to sleep upstairs in the circumstances. The husband, Tamotsu said, might be sleeping upstairs alone for all he knew.

  I sat on the veranda facing the garden and discussed tomorrow’s plans with Tamotsu as I ate the food I had brought with me. We sat near the uncovered, projecting part of the veranda, by the ornamental stone basin, so that our voices should not disturb the injured, but the stench of sickness reached us even here. From where we were, we could hear two or three who were groaning incessantly, and, from time to time, a sudden cry of “Take cover!”

  The lady of the house appeared with a pot of cold barley tea. “You’ve been working so hard,” she said with unaffected courtesy. “I’ve brought you some tea. It’s not very cold, I’m afraid, but do help yourselves.” She bowed and disappeared again. Not liking to stare, I had only a glimpse of her face, but I had a good look at her from the rear, and her bearing was as well-bred as I had expected.

  I promised Tamotsu that I would go to Ōnoura by noon tomorrow. Today, a message came from the reception center for victims at Ōnoura (in the hall of the Ōnoura National Elementary School) to inform emergency headquarters here that they were caring for two members of the Kōjin Unit, a man called Torao from Kobatake and another called Chōjūrō from Takafuta. Both wanted to go home for treatment as soon as possible, but one was so badly hurt that it was very doubtful whether he could as much as turn over in bed. They had let us know at any rate—the message went—thinking it might help us in drawing up a list of survivors of the Kōjin Unit. Since this meant that someone from the emergency headquarters would have to go to Ōnoura, I took on the task myself.

  CHAPTER 15

  August 12. Light clouds in the morning. A spell of pain in my leg. Fine in the afternoon.

  I left the temporary headquarters of the reception center in Nagao-chō at something after five yesterday, and on my way back home followed the railway tracks of the main Sanyō Line to a point near Yokogawa Station. On the way, a middle-aged woman who overtook me glanced round as she was passing, then suddenly stopped and put herself in my way.

  “Surely it’s Mr. Shizuma? Why yes—it’s Mr. Shizuma!” she exclaimed. “Well! Whoever would have thought it, here like this! Is your family all safe?”

  It was Teiko, an old childhood friend of mine. Her surname was Fujita, and we had been in the same class at primary school. On finishing higher elementary school, she had gone to work in a spinning factory at Kurashiki, then had married the son of a farmer whose home was near the Hosokawa Clinic in the village of Yuda, outside Fukuyama. She had saved up to buy her wedding kimono herself. But her husband had died shortly after, so she had transferred responsibility for the family to her husband’s younger brother and his wife, and gone to work as a maid in an inn in Kurashiki. Around the time of the Manchurian Incident she had come back to Kobatake for a while, but had left again, and since then had been working as a resident maid at the Kagami Inn in Fukuyama. When I started working in Hiroshima, I had got into the habit of stopping off for a while at the Kagami Inn on my way home for the Bon and New Year holidays. I made use of Teiko for my own convenience, using the telephone at the inn, getting her to take messages for friends, leaving baggage in her care, and in many other ways.

  Last New Year, I was suffering from a painful case of piles, and stayed the night at the inn. Teiko knew a doctor who could cure the most stubborn cases, and wrote me an introduction to the Hosokawa Clinic in Yuda village. She even telephoned personally to the head of the clinic and told him I was coming. I put in a long-distance call to the works, got permission from the manager to take some time off from work, and entered the clinic. It took more than two weeks before I was completely cured. I learned from Teiko yesterday that she had been to the Hosokawa Clinic to see how I was doing, but found I had left a few days earlier.

  I felt guilty. “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  “No no,” she said, “I was going to my brother-in-law’s at any rate, to buy some black market rice…But fancy, though, meeting you today in a place like this!”

  Like so many others, Teiko had come to search the ruins of Hiroshima for survivors. Her brother-in-law had been called into the reserve in spring this year, and had been working in the kitchen of the Second Army Hospital. Several days had passed since the bomb fell, but they had had no word from him. It looked as though he might well have been killed. His wife at home in Yuda was in bed—having sprained her ankle a few days previously on an expedition to dig up pine roots for the armed forces—and was good for nothing but lying and weeping all day long. Her brother-in-law’s mother talked a lot but was too old to be any use outside the house. At a loss what to do, Teiko had eventually gone to consult the head of the Hosokawa Clinic.

  Dr. Hosokawa had a brother-in-law called Iwatake who ten days previously had been called up for duty in the Second Army Hospital. Also a doctor of medicine, he had been drafted not as a cook but as a medical reservist, under the so-called “punitive draft.” From this, Teiko deduced that he must have been in the same barracks as her brother-in-law, and she wondered what had happened to him in the raid. There was a nephew of Mr. Iwatake’s, too, who had been attending the First Hiroshima Middle School; they must certainly be worried about the boy’s safety. Teiko began to wonder what they were doing about it all at the Hosokawa Clinic, and in the end went to see the doctor, partly to inquire after the safety of his relatives and partly to consult with him about her own.

  “I just don’t know—it’s terrible,” he told her. “I’ve resigned myself to the thought that both my brother-in-law and his nephew are so much charcoal by now. It’s a dreadful thing, but there’s no help for it but to face facts. I’ve told my brother-in-law’s wife to resign herself too, but it’s not so easy, you know, with someone you’re married to, or of your own flesh and blood. She went off to Hiroshima in tears. I saw her as far as Fukuyama Station myself. That was the morning of the ninth.

  “Two days have gone by already, but I’ve not even had a telegram or letter….Not that the mail or telegraph and telephone services are much of a reality nowadays for us civilians, of course. It’s the same with the newspapers—one supposes they’re being published every day, but whenever you go to the agents’ to get them they haven’t come yet. No papers at all for five or six days at a stretch—then on the seventh day, perhaps, you’ll get a whole week’s issues in a lump. One patient I saw yesterday was pining because he hadn’t had so much as a postcard f
rom anyone for over three weeks. He said the owner of the place where he lives goes fishing for dace on the quiet, to help out with an invalid diet, and he complains that even the bluebottle grubs he uses for bait are undernourished these days. One depressing thing after another, he said….You know, they say the new type of bomb they dropped on Hiroshima can pack the power of several thousand ordinary fifty-kilogram bombs into the space of a matchbox. Some really frightful chemical must have been discovered. If they’re going to go around using it to kill people with, I just don’t know what things will come to. As for my brother-in-law, though, I’ve given him up: he’s dead and burned by now.”

  The tears rolled down his cheeks. Nothing more could be got out of him, and Teiko was left still wondering whether she should go to look for her brother-in-law or not. But when she told him she had determined to go to Hiroshima, he gave her a small bottle of creosote tablets as a parting present.

  Arriving in Hiroshima, she eventually found the site of the Second Army Hospital by asking the way of people clearing away the debris. A single tent stood in the ruins. She got hold of one of the soldiers in the tent and asked him what she wanted to know.

  “I’m sorry,” he said after leafing through three ledgers in turn, “but there’s no entry here for the person you’re seeking—no army cook, that is, who fits in with the particulars. I’m very sorry. However, the survivors from this unit have been sent to reception centers at Hesaka and Shōbara on the Geibi Line, and some to the center at Kabe on the Kabe Line. Hesaka is not much more than six miles from here. The Kabe Line isn’t running between Yokogawa and Yamamoto stations, but you can get to Yamamoto Station by getting onto the tracks beyond the Communications Bureau and following them to the left. Let me just show you—Yamamoto Station lies roughly in that direction….”

  Could the absence of any name in the records mean that the body had not been found? Or had he made off quite unharmed, under his own steam? Could the records be incomplete? She was standing there at a loss what to do when a young man sitting next to the soldier spoke to her.

  “I think I should warn you,” he said, “that almost all the injured from this unit are so swollen in the face with burns that even their closest relatives can hardly tell who they are. Some of them can’t even answer when called by name. So they have a label giving their name and home address attached to the belt of their uniforms. You must take a tight grip on yourself, you see, and look for the label.” His way of speaking was not like that of a soldier.

  Teiko vacillated between going to Kabe and going to Hesaka, but before long she pulled herself together, told herself it was no time for wavering, and decided on Kabe. Thoughtlessly enough, though, she left the tent without remembering to ask about Dr. Hosokawa’s younger brother. After that, she said, she had just walked on in the direction the soldier had pointed out to her, until she came across me on her way along the tracks.

  As I walked along by her side, she told me all kinds of things about life under wartime conditions in the area around Fukuyama. She also gave me snippets of confidential information, things that guests at the inn had passed on to her privately. One had told her that the twenty-odd kilns that traditionally made Bizen ware in the town of Imbe were now making hand grenades and water-flasks of the same ware, under army orders. Some days ago, a group of noncommissioned officers had turned up in Imbe from somewhere or other and tested the performance of the hand grenades. They had proved every bit as powerful as orthodox grenades, blowing a hole in a half-inch piece of pine board and bringing all the fish to the surface in a nearby pond.

  Another had told her about some American-made tanks that the British were using on the Burma front. When one of these fired at a Japanese tank, the shell went clean through, but when the Japanese tank fired, the shell did nothing more than take a little paint off the enemy tank. “It’s awful,” the man had said. “What would have happened to the Japanese army if the British had had even a couple of those tanks in Malaya?” True or not, such talk was rumor-mongering and defeatism of the most barefaced kind.

  We had to wait at Yamamoto Station, and it was already quite dark when we finally got on a train. Teiko declined to stop by at our temporary home, and we parted company at Furuichi Station. She had a rucksack on her back, and was wearing baggy trousers and a white shirt with a Red Cross armband, which Dr. Hosokawa’s wife must have advised her to wear. Probably it was the armband that had made the soldier in the tent treat her so civilly.

  Before going home, I went to the factory and reported to the manager, whom I found in the canteen, on the state of the coal situation. Whichever way one turned, I explained, one came up against a blank wall; there was simply nothing that we could do.

  He gazed dejectedly up at the ceiling. “I see,” he said. “So that’s that, is it? We’re caught whatever road we try, aren’t we. Thanks all the same for trying, though.”

  I told him about the Kōjin Unit and got his permission to go to help at Ōnoura, then went home.

  Shigeko and Yasuko had finished supper and put the mosquito net up, and were now sitting on the veranda enjoying the cool of the evening. My meal was laid out for me on a small individual table inside the mosquito net. The intention was probably to make things look cool and pleasant, but the only effect was to make me feel half suffocated. Our two visitors from the country, they told me, had gone home on a train sometime before noon.

  —

  This morning I was awakened by pain in the toes of both feet. The pain, which was excruciating even though there was no external injury, was not an intermittent throbbing but continuous, as though both sides were being twisted on some instrument of torture.

  “They say moxibustion is good for people affected by the bomb,” Shigeko said. “Why don’t you try it? I’ll go and find someone to let me have some moxa.”

  She went out without even putting on the regulation cotton breeches and air raid hood, but it was over two hours before she came back. She had tried here, there, and everywhere, until in the end she had got some moxa in exchange for a new hand towel at a farm just outside the town. It was in a paper bag printed with a picture of the god of agriculture holding a leaf between his teeth.

  They say that to stop pain in the feet one should burn moxa on the spot known as sanri. Even I, however—much less Shigeko and Yasuko—did not know exactly where the sanri was, so Shigeko went to ask the landlord’s old father.

  “The sanri,” she announced on her return, “is the dent just below the kneecap on the outside. Here—” And having no work breeches on, she hitched up her skirt—unnecessarily high, I thought—in order to show me. I found her behavior rather improper. At the same time, this reaction reminded me of something I had heard at the reception center. Tamotsu and Rikuo had been saying that those injured by the bomb, even if only slightly hurt, had all lost interest in sex. My own “injuries” consisted of nothing more than a burn on the cheek; even so, I asked myself whether I had felt any sexual interest just now, and my conclusion gave me an uneasy feeling that I, too, might have been poisoned by the bomb.

  I applied the moxa myself on the designated spot, then forced myself to stand up despite the pain in my toes. I groaned aloud, which relieved the pain somewhat. Going to the toilet was a major undertaking. When I was ready to go out, I ate my breakfast sitting on the edge of the raised section of the floor in the hall entrance. It was a late breakfast. By the time I got out, it was past ten.

  Luckily enough, the pain in my toes had abated by the time I got to Ōnoura. It seemed better to stay either lying down or on my feet, one or the other.

  At Ōnoura I found that the National Elementary School was being used as a reception center for army and civilian injured alike. On my way there from Ōnoura Station, I passed a handsome woman of around thirty, and at the same time detected a most offensive smell. It was the same smell as yesterday in the reception center at Nagao-chō, the smell of the victims of the bomb.

  “Excuse me,” I said, stopping her. “May I as
k if you’re from the center for victims of the bombing—a doctor, or a nurse perhaps?”

  “No, I’m not,” she replied with great composure. “I’m a member of the Women’s National Defense Association at Ōnoura. I’m doing voluntary nursing for the victims. Somebody else I passed yesterday asked me the same question. I expect I smell bad, don’t I?”

  “Yes—if you don’t mind my saying so, you stink to high heaven.”

  “You’re going to look for someone among the injured, I expect,” she went on. “Let me take you there. Stay a little way away from me if I smell.”

  There were still some decent people left in the world, I thought. I determined not to worry about the smell and walked beside her, asking her about the reception center as we went.

  (Note: I found later that she was Tamiyo Ōshima, a member of the women’s association who showed great kindness in nursing the bomb victims. Her husband, who was with the army in Manchuria, was taken prisoner in Siberia at the end of the war, but returned to Japan before very long. No doubt it was the thought of her own husband, far away on the battlefield, that kept her working so selflessly for the welfare of the victims. The young soldiers and civilians among the patients were all fond of her. Those who itched unbearably from maggots in the burns on their backs would even wheedle her into scratching for them. Those lonely on the verge of death would call for her, and several of them died with their heads cradled on her lap. Shortly after the war ended, she went all the way to Takafuta and Shōge, in Jinseki county, to take the remains of two members of the Kōjin Unit to their families. No buses went there at that time, so she came to Kobatake first of all, then got a man called Tomonari Torao to take her up the path through the hills to Takafuta and so on to Shōge. Torao was the only survivor of the local inhabitants who had been taken to Ōnoura. The two others, a man called Fukushima from Takafuta and one called Maebara from Shōge, came home from Ōnoura as two boxes of ashes clasped in Mrs. Ōshima’s arms. To this day, Torao still refers to her as the “Ōnoura Nightingale.”)