Black Rain

by Masuji Ibuse

  “One other incident—it was the thirteenth of August, I remember, and my husband began to suffer really unbearable earache in his right ear. The next afternoon, a draft lieutenant called Kutsubara—an ear, nose, and throat doctor from the Red Cross Hospital at Shōbara—came along. He had an extremely arrogant manner and overbearing way of talking, and examined Hiroshi’s ear in a very ungentle way. When he took the gauze off the ear lobe and removed the cotton wool, a thick, oily liquid came oozing out of the earhole, and the area from the scab up to the entrance to the ear could be seen crawling with maggots—about two hundred, each a millimeter or so long. At the lieutenant’s instruction, I washed the maggots on the lobe off into a basin. Then the lieutenant himself got out the maggots inside the ear.

  “Thanks to this treatment, the source of the irritation to the eardrum disappeared, and the earache stopped. The fever, too, began to show signs of going down, and I poured a drop or two of the saké I’d brought for Hiroshi into his mouth. He’s lost the lobe of his ear for good, eaten away by the maggots, and he still complains of ringing in his ears, but even so, he was so grateful to Lieutenant Kutsubara for getting rid of the maggots that he told me to take a bottle of saké to the lieutenant, as a token of his gratitude. I got my aunt in Shōbara to spare a bottle somehow, and took it wrapped in a wrapping cloth. When I gave it to him, though, he just put the bottle away in a closet, and flung the cloth down on the floor. ‘Here, I don’t want this,’ he said, ‘take it away with you.’ When I got back, I told Hiroshi what had happened. He put it down to the war. That was the kind of thing war did, he said—produce that kind of person; what was quite sure was that it never did anybody any good.

  “While I was in Shōbara, I slept at my aunt’s and went to the reception center in the daytime. My brother Dr. Hosokawa stayed only one night at my aunt’s, then took the nurse and our daughter back to Yuda. On August 15, the day the war ended, my husband suddenly got a high fever and nearly died, but the next day his temperature began to go down gradually. But he was terribly debilitated, and the treatment was very poor, so we decided to take him to the Hosokawas’. So on the twentieth we hired a charcoal-driven truck at the black market rate to take him there (by this time it was permitted for patients to go anywhere they liked). He and I got in the front, and we drove to Fuchū sitting by the driver, who had a pad over his mouth and nose to keep out the smell that the bomb victims gave off. My husband stood up to the journey better than me—I was all in!

  “The day after he entered the clinic at Fuchū, Hiroshi showed signs of atomic disease. If he’d stayed only one day more at Shōbara, he’d probably never have left there alive. It wasn’t a question of his relaxing now that he was home, or having kept going on will-power up to then. It seems there’s a certain time after exposure to the bomb when the sickness catches up with you, and his time had come. Mr. Nagashima in the same room at Shōbara, for example, was far less badly hurt than Hiroshi, but he passed away on the very day we arrived in Fuchū.

  “We were only at the Fuchū branch clinic for a couple of days and nights, then went on to my brother’s home at Yuda, but even so the room at the clinic where my husband had been smelled so bad that they had to leave it open for more than ten days.

  “In Yuda village there’s a peach orchard growing a particularly famous local variety. We bought two lots of 80 pounds each from them, and my husband ate the lot, 160 pounds in all. His lips and gums were all burned, and the whole of his mouth inside was inflamed, so that he could only take liquid foods. I’d grate the peaches on a horseradish grater, fill a bowl with them, break two or three eggs into the mixture, and more or less pour the result into his mouth. It was remarkable—he would finish the bowl to the last drop; it couldn’t have taken a month for him to get through the whole lot.

  “We got back to Yuda on the twenty-second, and the radiation sickness set in in earnest on the twenty-third. The worst time of all, the time when he seemed to stop breathing and I broke down in tears, sure that it was all over, came around the twenty-third of September. It was at that time, in a barely audible voice, that he made his will. The dying can talk all right when it comes to their wills, and they take notice of what you say to them, too. I said to him: ‘I’ll do as you wish if, in exchange, you’ll agree to us treating you as we think fit from now on, so that we don’t have any regrets afterwards.’

  “He agreed, but when we gave him blood transfusions and Ringer’s solution he developed a terrible fever and suffered a great deal. He asked us to stop, but I insisted for once. ‘Let us try just this, and if it doesn’t work we’ll give up,’ I said. And we went on with the Ringer’s solution and the transfusions. Whether that did the trick or not I don’t know, but he gradually began to pull through. Even then, his left leg developed an infection. He insisted it was not the fault of the Ringer’s solution, but probably a kind of septicemia. He wouldn’t let anybody else operate on him, either, but cut the place open with a scalpel by himself, while my brother was away at the branch clinic in Fuchū. He’s awfully stubborn, and won’t let anybody else do surgical operations. He still has the scar to this day.

  “At that time he was just like a mummy, all skin and bone and nothing else. There was a dummy skeleton standing in my brother’s place, and Hiroshi was just like that. It was still hot, so we kept the mosquito net up to keep off any flies that might cause maggots, and when you looked at him through the white gauze he and the skeleton were as alike as two peas in a pod. It made my sister-in-law so uncomfortable that she shut the skeleton away in a closet or somewhere.

  “At this period, my husband didn’t have a single day free from pain. His muscles had all wasted away, leaving only skin and bone, and he complained that he could feel the hardness of the tatami on his bones, right through the quilts. We piled the quilts up high, as high as a bed, and put two feather mattresses on top. We thought that was sure to make things easier for him, but still he could tell whether or not there was a joint in the tatami underneath the quilts. You’d hardly credit it, would you? Later, we found that the tatami underneath were rotting.

  “The only doctor he would see was my brother, Dr. Hosokawa. After all, it was my brother who had given him Ringer’s solution and blood transfusions when other doctors had thrown in the sponge and everybody had written him off. His blood type is ‘O’, and in our family the children are ‘O’ too.

  “We were comparatively well off for food. When we asked some neighbors if they could get us some liver, for example, they brought a whole cow’s liver—as if anybody could get through all that much! The mainstay of his diet, even so, was peaches and eggs, which were what he seemed to take best. I was afraid we wouldn’t be able to get them once the season was over, so I got two big lots and stored them at the bottom of a deep well. Yuda is a traditional peach-growing district, and its white peaches are famous for their flavor. In those days, though, the growers didn’t like to be paid in money, so I had to take along my kimonos and things. I sacrificed two wicker trunks full of kimonos in that way.

  “It was generally accepted at the time that you could tell whether a victim of radiation disease was going to die or not by whether his hair fell out. My husband’s hair did in fact come out, the whole lot, but I expect the symptoms varied very much from patient to patient. I can’t talk from experience of anybody except my husband, but I do know that his appetite went down sharply from the time the radiation sickness set in. On top of the disease itself, the patient won’t take proper nourishment, so it’s impossible to make up for the wasting, and he begins to look like someone with cancer. The white corpuscle count goes down steadily too, but in my husband’s case it stopped at a little under two thousand.

  “Another symptom was that he was constipated for about ten days after the bomb fell. And he could only pass water a few drops at a time. It really must have been a terrible bomb—to have taken all the skin clean off his wrists like that, for one thing. ‘Penetrating rays’ they call them, apparently. It seems they affect the
internal organs as well as the outside of the body. In my husband’s case, the membrane lining the bladder came clean away and stopped up the urethra, so that he couldn’t pass water. You know the kind of filmy white stuff you find inside when you split open a piece of dry bamboo? Well, the stuff that came off the inside of the bladder was just like that. The rays from the atomic bomb make mucous membranes peel off, you see. This was after we went to my brother’s, so I’d say it was about three weeks after the bomb fell. All the same, he could make himself pass water by straining downwards and then, when the urine went into the urethra, pressing down on the sphincter muscle. You press with both hands on the lower part of the abdomen. Each time he went he’d pass it into a cup and examine it, then he’d show me how much of the stuff like bamboo film had come out. There was always quite a lot.

  “No—I don’t imagine it’s only the bladder. The stomach and the intestines and the liver—all the organs—are affected to some extent, I suppose. The surface between the teeth and the gums is affected in the same way, I believe. That’s why the teeth come loose, isn’t it? Some people I heard of had bloody stools, and others got diarrhea. With my husband, it was constipation. The bladder trouble clears up once you’ve finished passing all the membrane. A new membrane forms in its place, I imagine.

  “Our nephew was in his first year at Hiroshima First Middle School at the time. It was to find what had happened to him, as well as my husband, that I went to Hiroshima, but when I got to the city and asked the soldier in the tent in front of the station, I was told that all the pupils at the school had been wiped out. I felt as though my chest would burst—it was so cruel. When I found my husband, I didn’t tell him for the time being. I wonder now if it wasn’t the shock of losing our nephew, working on my nerves, that helped drive me all the way to Hesaka, and then on to Shōbara, looking for my husband. But what a horrible end for the poor boy, though….

  “The special relief squad that went to Hiroshima the day after the raid on the city cleared away the ruins of the Hiroshima First Middle School. They came to the Hosokawas afterwards to report on what they found. The remains of our nephew, who was in Hiroshima doing war work, were found in a classroom, where he was burned to death at his desk. He must have been killed by the rays. Every middle school pupil in those days wore an identification tag, and somebody brought his back; it was the only thing of his left, they said. It was made of tin, with nothing but the name on it, and it was hard to make out even that.”

  —

  These reminiscences of Iwatake’s wife, taken together with Iwatake’s own account of his experiences, suggested that no proper treatment for radiation sickness had been discovered yet. The only measures taken in Iwatake’s case were blood transfusions and large quantities of vitamin C, with a diet of peaches and raw egg. With him, that seemed to have done the trick—that, and an enormous will to beat the disease. Such, at least, was Shigematsu’s conclusion after finishing his perusal of the document.

  CHAPTER 19

  The most important thing of all was to prevent Yasuko from losing her determination to survive. She must be given confidence that she would live. In fact, to keep her going on food and willpower was the only course open to them, since she was growing weaker every day, and there was no known treatment.

  According to Shigeko, Yasuko had been to see two doctors in Kobatake on the morning of the day she entered the Kuishiki Hospital. Both, of course, had given her medicine to take, but she had thrown both lots away in a ditch, without so much as touching them. The woman from the sundries store at the bottom of the hill had seen the names and date on the packets. She had had a look inside, too, and there was no doubt, she told Shigeko, that Yasuko had thrown them away without taking a single dose. It showed what a despairing frame of mind she had been in. She must be provided with a good example in Mr. Iwatake’s determination to conquer his disease.

  Iwatake himself related the events around the time he left the Army Branch Hospital as follows:

  Perhaps because of the removal of the maggots in my ear, the earache and the fever got better, but I became more and more debilitated every day. However, I didn’t want to die just then, in that hospital; I’d decided that I’d rather die somewhere else, of some proper disease that I could account for.

  On August 23, permission to go home was given for those who felt they were up to it, provided it was not too far off. I didn’t feel up to it, but my one idea was to get home all the same, and with Dr. Fujita’s permission I got a certificate of emergency discharge. I gathered my strength for the journey, not as far as Tokyo, which was impossible—but at least to the Hosokawa Clinic in Yuda—and we contracted with a charcoal-driven truck normally used for carrying charcoal to take us the thirty miles or so to the outskirts of Fukuyama.

  They dressed me in my white hospital smock, with my army cap on my head. Thus attired, scarcely knowing who I was or what I was doing, I somehow got to the Hosokawa branch clinic in Fuchū. The route took us over an appallingly bumpy road. Nobody who went over it could have failed to get the implications of such a terrible state of neglect. Several times, in that stiflingly hot cab beside the driver, I drifted off into a state of delirium. Even my wife, who sat in attendance on me, fainted twice with fatigue. The three hours of the journey seemed like a year.

  I was precisely at that crucial juncture where the merest hairsbreadth separates life and death. The next day, the twenty-fourth, I developed radiation sickness. If I had stayed one day—half a day, perhaps—longer, my call to eternity would have come, beyond all doubt, at Shōbara.

  I was still only half-conscious when I was shifted from the Fuchū branch clinic to the Hosokawa Clinic at Yuda. Blood transfusions, injections, injections, and still more injections…that much, at least, I remember. Gradually, I became a little more aware of my surroundings.

  Every day I had a temperature of 104°. My white corpuscle count was two thousand, and the flesh steadily fell from me till I was a very skeleton, a living mummy. The burns on my back were inordinately painful—not to speak of those on my wrists and ears. Even when one is only skin and bone, one still feels pain. My wife told me that the place where my back had been burned was dark and hard like a beef steak, and the “steak” came off in chunks till the ribs were almost showing. Medically speaking, it’s the state that precedes nephrosis and gangrene. At the time of the explosion and flash, the rays had struck me at an angle, but even so, this was the result. I expect it’s related in some ways to bedsores. As likely as not, the circulation was bad too, which would have encouraged the phenomenon still further.

  The debility reached an extreme pitch; time and time again I lost consciousness. At times my heartbeat was inaudible and my respiration seemed to have stopped: a great sore developed on my back, and the membrane of the bladder came away, leading to anuria. Neither my brother-in-law nor any other doctor gave me any chance. The doctors who stood in at the examinations gave me up for lost. The hair of my head came out in handfuls, with scabs attached at the roots and looking like pieces of a wig.

  Making up my mind that this was the end, I told my wife my dying wishes. But I didn’t die. It was my wife’s cry of anguish at my bedside that brought me back. She was sure my heart had that moment stopped, she told me later. The skin of my face twitched, my eyes turned up, and I showed signs of the death throes, with cyanosis symptoms. Yet all the while I myself felt as though I was floating somewhere bright and spacious, with no particular pain. People talk of the death agony, but the person most concerned is surprisingly free of suffering. To everyone else, even so, I must have seemed to be in mortal agony.

  During the two weeks following the onset of radiation sickness, I survived largely on the juice from a full 80 pounds of peaches. The injections of vitamin C and the transfusions may have helped, too. From then on, over a period of a year and a half, my ulcers, which resembled X-ray burns, gradually healed. While I was sick in bed, I was the merest framework of a human being—but it was like the iron framework o
f a building under construction, for later, when I got new muscles and flesh, I acquired, more or less literally, a new body. Today, I have one earlobe missing, and when I take a drink the scars on my cheek and wrists turn red, but apart from a stubborn ringing in my ear I have no after-effects at all. The one thing that troubles me is the ringing; it persists in my ear day and night, like the tolling of a distant temple bell, warning man of the folly of the bomb….