by Masuji Ibuse
About ten o’clock the director of the hospital comes on his round. Tuberculin reaction negative, temperature 100°. I go out until he has finished attending to the abscess. I stand watching the carp in the ornamental pool for a while, then go back. I meet Dr. Kuishiki in the corridor and stop talking to him for a while.
He tells me that in the middle of last night a nurse on her rounds found Yasuko kneeling on the wooden floor, leaning against the bed and sobbing. Asked what was the matter, she said the place where the abscesses were itched so badly she couldn’t endure it. The nurse told her to lift her night kimono and, peering with her torch, saw a wriggling mass of seat worms. A type of small worm that lives as a parasite in the human body, they crawl out of the anus during the night to lay their eggs. It seems likely that they had laid their eggs in the putrefying tissue of the abscess. Anyway, the doctor would like to take a piece of the tissue for examination under the microscope, then perform surgery to remove it completely. Just now, he has found another abscess developing right beside the anus.
“If you remove the bad tissue as you say, what will happen to the place afterwards?”
“The flesh will gradually fill in.”
“There’ll be some scarring of the skin, won’t there? Won’t it be a little hard on her?”
“Well, now,” he replies, “I suppose there might be a certain tendency for that to happen….” The doctor is about fifty years old.
Yasuko seems tired, and the lunch bell rings, so I take it as a signal to leave.
I pass them bringing lunch in the corridor: dried mackerel, french beans in sesame oil, egg, pickles, a round lacquered container holding the rice.
July 30. Fine.
In the afternoon my husband goes to the Kuishiki Hospital.
Yasuko’s temperature was 98.6°, he tells me when he gets back. She had violent pains in the night. She had a sulfadiazine tablet at noon today, and is to have more every four-and-a-half hours. When he cut up a peach he had brought and gave it to her, she tried to bite it with her side teeth instead of the front ones. He asked why, and she said that two of her front teeth were getting rather loose, and seemed to move when she ran her tongue round them.
Telling the doctor that Yasuko complained of lack of appetite, my husband was informed that whatever she ate or didn’t eat, she must at least take the sulfadiazine regularly at the prescribed time, as the most urgent thing of all was to put a stop to the abscesses. New ones are forming and old ones breaking all the time. I wonder what it can really be? “Whatever can it all mean?” I say to my husband. “I don’t know,” he says, “but there doesn’t seem to be anything right with her, what with her teeth loose, and pain in the buttocks, and a temperature, and violent pains every day.”
A sudden, squally wind this afternoon. The wife of the man at the watermill drops in saying she happened to be passing and wondered if we’d been all right in the wind. Then she starts talking about the atomic disease. She tells me what happened at Dr. Hosokawa’s place in Yuda village. The doctor’s younger brother, himself a doctor of medicine, was at the army hospital in Hiroshima when the bomb fell. He got maggots in the places where his cheeks and ear-lobes had festered from the burns, and they ate away the lobe of his right ear. His hand was so terribly burned that the fingers coagulated and it looked like one big palm without fingers. His body wasted away to skin and bone. Even with three or four thick quilts under him he still complained that the hardness of the tatami made him ache unbearably. Once he even stopped breathing, and seemed to be dead. But Dr. Hosokawa went on looking after him, and in the end restored his health remarkably.
No sooner has the woman from the water mill gone than Yasuko’s father arrives. He’s thinking of paying all Yasuko’s medical expenses out of her marriage portion, he says. My husband looks outraged but says nothing, sitting with folded arms, gazing at the floor. One might call him taken aback.
CHAPTER 17
Shigeko had begun to suffer dizzy spells from the strain of tending to Yasuko, so a nurse was hired to stay with her, and it was arranged that Shigematsu should go to see her on the odd days of the month; on the even days, Yasuko’s father was to go. Shigeko, it was found, had strained her heart.
The middle of August brought a spell of weather unusually hot for the upland area where Kobatake lay, and it became obvious, even to the ordinary onlooker, that Yasuko’s condition was becoming almost hopeless. She complained of ringing in the ears, she had no appetite, a lot of hair fell out whenever she combed it, and the puffy red patches on her gums became more pronounced. Dr. Kuishiki diagnosed a probable case of peridontitis. He tested her Mantoux reaction, took blood samples, and gave her another day’s supply of sulfadiazine. The tablets were similar to those she had had on her second day in hospital, and she was to take one every four-and-a-half hours.
“Do I really have to take this medicine again?” she asked, looking doubtful. “Yes, you must,” Shigematsu said.
The nurse told them that the patient invariably had an attack of violent pain once a day. During these attacks, she suffered unbearably, writhing and tossing in agony, her whole body filled with pain. They came chiefly late at night.
She grew pitifully emaciated; her dry, flaky lips were the same color as her skin, and her nails a dull, muddy color.
One day, Shigematsu asked to see inside her mouth. He found then for the first time that her upper front teeth were missing, although the roots were still there. Until a few days previously, the looseness had affected the whole tooth, root and all, yet now they had broken clean off at the base, above the root. Her gums were swollen and constantly stained with fresh blood. Rinsing the mouth with a solution of boric acid was not enough to stop the bleeding. If she kept her mouth closed for a while, a thin thread of red would gradually form along the line where her lips met.
Two new abscesses had formed on her buttocks, and being close to each other were beginning to spread and run together like creeping plants in a garden. The old ones had all been excised, but the places would not heal. The flesh remained red and puffed up like a split water melon. The skin around them was a dark, bluish-green, putrid color. Shigematsu, of course, did not see this himself, but the nurse, who came with him to the bottom of the stairs as he was leaving, told him.
Wherever he turned, no ray of hope offered itself. Running into the hospital director, he began to question him, but could get no straightforward answers.
“The sedimentation rate is not good, I must admit,” said the doctor. “There’s something up with the blood. There are a lot of unidentifiable shadows on the slide, and the red corpuscles are less than half what they should be.”
This was tantamount to saying that he had thrown in the sponge. The “unidentifiable shadows,” he said, might possibly be abnormally shaped white corpuscles, but if they were, then there were far too many of them. Abruptly, Shigematsu’s mind revolted against all these vaguely menacing medical terms that only aggravated the sense of guilt he felt towards Yasuko. The cause of her radiation sickness was almost certainly not only the black rain, but also the way they had wandered through the still-hot ashes of the ruined city. He remembered, too, how she had grazed her left elbow on the way from Aioi Bridge to Sakan-chō, when they had crawled beneath the dangling power wires. That graze could hardly have failed to offer an opening to the deadly radioactive ash. He had been wrong—though recriminations were pointless at this stage—to drag them all the way from the Japan Transport branch at Ujina to the works at Furuichi. If he had only asked Mr. Sugimura, the branch manager, he would surely have put Yasuko up for two or three days. Shigematsu felt very much to blame on this score. And it was he, he could not forget, who had brought Yasuko to Hiroshima in the first place.
One day, a letter with an enclosure came from the Hosokawa Clinic in Yuda village. Dr. Hosokawa was an elderly man, and the letter had an old-fashioned formality:
My Dear Sir:
May I thank you once again for the gift of dried sweetfish which you wer
e so kind as to bring us on your recent visit? Since that time, I have given the most careful consideration to the matter you mentioned, and am writing now to present you with my conclusions.
I should state first of all that my brother-in-law’s recovery was due to the most remarkable good fortune. The whole sum of my “treatment” was a few injections of Ringer’s solution together with blood transfusions. For the rest, I stood by with folded arms, as it were, helpless to do anything but watch. In the hope that you will appreciate this fact, I have had my brother-in-law send me the notes which he made on his experiences, and am sending them to you under separate cover. One of my reasons for doing this is to escape the charge, as a doctor, of having refused to treat a patient. Another is the hope that you will perceive how essential for the patient is the determination to fight his sickness. It also shows, I might add, that one should never despair of a miraculous recovery even in the most gravely ill.
I should be grateful if, after perusal, you could return the manuscript to me. And may I offer my earnest prayers for the patient’s comfort and well being?
The account was entitled “Notes on the Bombing of Hiroshima, by Hiroshi Iwatake, Medical Reserve.” Quite probably Dr. Hosokawa, not knowing what to do in the face of Shigematsu’s request for the impossible, had telephoned Tokyo especially to ask Iwatake to send it.
Shigematsu read it seated by Shigeko’s bedside, exclaiming “A miracle,” “Yes, a miracle” over and over again as his reading progressed. “We must let Yasuko read it too,” said Shigeko. It was all there, just as the woman from the water mill had said. Iwatake had been far more seriously hurt than Shigematsu. His body had shrunk to a mass of skin and bones, his fingers had fused together, and maggots had eaten away one of his earlobes. Yet he had come through. Plastic surgery had even restored his fingers to normal. Today, he was working as a general practitioner at a place called Suzaki-chō in Mukōjima, Tokyo.
The notes began in the following fashion:
My draft card, summoning me to the Second Hiroshima Unit barracks, arrived on July 1, 1945. I hastily set my affairs in order and boarded a westbound train from Tokyo. Nagoya and Osaka were badly damaged by the raids. At Okayama, the station as we went through was still burning from a raid the night before. It had begun to drizzle, and I saw a group of bombed-out people walking along beside the tracks half-naked, holding cushions over their heads to keep off the rain.
I got off at Fukuyama and went to see my wife and children, who had been evacuated to Yuda village out of the way of the raids, and changed into the regulation garb for the new recruit. I went to the barber’s and got him to take off my mustache and shave my head. Then I donned a field service cap and puttees, shouldered my rucksack, and boarded a Fukuen Line train, my wife and brother-in-law coming to the station to see me off. The age limit for the latest draft is said to be forty-five. I was a C-grade recruit called to the colors on the verge of my forty-fifth birthday. I could not bring myself to follow the usual custom and have my photograph taken in case I got killed in battle.
I stayed the night with relatives in Hiroshima. At eight a.m. on August 1, I passed through the portals of a military barracks for the first time in my life. I was one of over fifty recruits who assembled in the yard outside the barracks’ medical office. Everybody was from Hiroshima Prefecture or Okayama Prefecture. They say that people like us from Yamaguchi Prefecture went into the Yamaguchi regiment, while the doctors from Shimane Prefecture went into the Hamada regiment. We were told we should be sent, first of all, not to the army medical training center but to an infantry unit. We were kept waiting for more than an hour in the yard under the blazing sun, then were sent to sit in a wooden-floored room about 25 feet square. Eventually a Lieutenant-Colonel Washio, commander of the First Army Hospital, a great brute of a man fully six feet tall, came in with two other army doctors and took his place in front of us. A quick muster was called, then without preliminary he launched into a violent harangue.
“I’m Lieutenant-Colonel Washio,” he said. “What d’you think you’re up to, hanging back without volunteering at a time like this, when the nation’s fighting for its very life? You’re little better than a pack of traitors, if you ask me. That’s why the authorities have rounded you up, every man-jack of you, just to let you know what’s what! From now on, your lives are in my hands. So far, you’ve had it pretty soft, and I expect you’ve got yourselves into some pretty cushy positions. But nothing you know will get you anywhere in the army. As far as we’re concerned, your heads are stuffed with a lot of crap, and you’ve got about as much of the proper military spirit as a flea’s turd. From now on, the emphasis is going to be on instilling the right military outlook into you, so you’d better keep that in mind!”
Next, each one of us was made to stand out before the lieutenant-colonel, report his name and past career, and submit to cross-questioning as to why he hadn’t volunteered for the reserve. As proof that I had in fact volunteered, I produced a document out of my rucksack which I had already sent to the First Division and the Hiroshima Regimental District in January last year. This had the effect of cutting the questioning rather short. And in fact, those who came before me, and after me too, had all sent in their applications. Many had actually been drafted both this year and the year before, but had been sent home again on the same day because of physical defects.
Sure enough, when the physical check-up began, there was scarcely one whose physique anyone would have envied. There was one man who’d brought a corset with him because of spinal tuberculosis, another who wore a bandage round his neck for inflammation of the cervical glands, another who had a hollow where he had been operated on for caries of the ribs, and another with one leg that would not bend properly at the knee because he had broken it at a sports meet in his school days. Lieutenant-Colonel Washio, new to the command, had not been told the facts by his colleagues—or possibly the documents showing who had volunteered and who had not had been lost. Either way, his blustering began to seem peculiarly pointless, and he was just beginning to look a trifle foolish when one doctor from Hiroshima City was rash enough to smile mockingly and give a great yawn. The commander walked straight up to him and hit him full across the face with his open palm, then, as he reeled from the blow, swept his hand back to hit the other cheek. This was repeated two or three times. The brutality of the action gave me a depressing presentiment of what was in store for us.
As a result of the X-rays and sputum tests, a number of the new recruits were sent home the same day. Others were sent back because their absence would have left their hospitals without a doctor. I envied them as they shouldered their rucksacks and went off with pious expressions on their faces, barely able to restrain their glee….
—
In due course, Iwatake was posted to an infantry unit, where for fifteen days he received basic infantry training. The main aim seemed to be to master the technique of throwing themselves, holding bombs, in front of enemy tank units in the event of an enemy invasion of Japan proper. Dozens of times a day, they practiced charging dummy tanks made of wood, flinging beneath them bomb-shaped pieces of timber attached to ropes, then throwing themselves flat as rapidly as possible. He discovered later, after he had been posted to the training center, that it was planned to post the “punitive draft” unit to the coastal defense forces, where each would be considered to have done his duty if he disposed of one enemy tank at the cost of his own life.
On July 14, an order came for them to transfer from the infantry unit to the Second Army Hospital training center, and they moved to a two-story barracks beside the Ōta River in Hiroshima. They found about eighty recruits from the Yamaguchi and Hamada groups already arrived there, so that in all they totaled more than one hundred and thirty men.
Lieutenant Yoshikawa, the education officer, was only twenty-three, an army doctor who had done an abbreviated course at Pyongyang Medical College. In content if not in manner, his address was still more virulent than Lieutenant-Colonel Wa
shio’s.
“These barracks are well known,” he said. “ ‘The Devil’s Barracks,’ they call them. Now you’re coming in here, you’ll have to change your thinking. Soft stuff with the likes of you, and you begin to get above yourselves. We’ve got orders from above to put you through the hoop, so you’d better be ready for it. In the first place, you (the next fifty words or so were omitted).” The people who gave such addresses referred to them as “pep-talks,” but the only effect in practice was to plunge their hearers into the heaviest gloom.
When this talk was over, they were summoned to the unit commander’s office, three at a time, and questioned about their families and family finances, doubtless for later reference in deciding which men to post to dangerous areas.
The next day, the really intensive training began. “It was more like a forced labor camp than a training unit,” Iwatake wrote. “Often in the mornings, partly for the fun of it, they would give us what they called an ‘emergency call,’ which meant running two or three miles through the morning mist at the crack of dawn. We went through the Gokoku Shrine, over Aioi Bridge, then around behind the Honganji branch temple to the north, past Aioi Bridge again to the Nigitsu Shrine, and so back to barracks. It goes without saying that a lot dropped out on the way. The number of men with persistent slight fever or diarrhea increased, and some had to report sick. The thing that really soaked your uniform with sweat, so that you could almost wring it out, was the crawling course. If you stuck up too much at the rear you got a heavy boot on your backside; if your rifle was pointing too low you got jabbed in the shoulder with a parade sword. Your elbows got scraped till the blood began to run. There was one reserve man called Nakamura who had a maternity home back in Tokuyama. A middle-aged man weighing 190 pounds, with a big protruding belly, suffering from an enlarged heart, he had been sent straight back home the year before, but taken into the army this year. To work his way forward on his belly holding a rifle in his hand was more than he could manage, and Lieutenant Yoshikawa kicked him several times in the backside as he lay squirming, far to the rear of all the others. Nakamura shed tears of mortification; he even considered killing himself, he declared later.” It was as though a man were to be kicked by his own offspring, somehow transformed into an unmanageable ruffian. As Iwatake himself put it, “His face displayed unconcealed perplexity and disappointment, like a father being bullied by his own son.”