by Masuji Ibuse
—
When Shigeko went to the Kuishiki Hospital to see Yasuko, she took the account with her so that the head of the hospital could make use of it in treating Yasuko.
If one is depressed, it actually helps to keep oneself occupied. Left alone, Shigematsu hastily shut up the house and went off to Shōkichi’s to see how the baby carp were coming along. It so happened that Shōkichi and Asajirō were by the pond. Asajirō’s bald pate was bent over a mortar, in which he was pounding cabbage. Shōkichi, of the lame leg, was scooping fry out of the hatching pond with a net, then sorting them and transferring them to the pond nearby.
“Hot, isn’t it?” said Shigematsu. “Hello there! Hot, isn’t it!” the others replied. This was the stock greeting in the village on a fine summer’s day. In the evening, it would change to “Tiring day, wasn’t it!” If it happened to be wet, both sides would greet each other with “Nice drop of rain!”
Shigematsu helped Asajirō with the mortar. They finished pounding all the cabbage, then put in some liver and pounded that, mixed in some chrysalis powder and flour, and rolled the result into small balls which they dropped into the hatching pond.
“This is just like preparing bait for fishing,” Shigematsu said. “They say that nowadays bait has salted fishguts in it. I wonder what would happen if you put fishguts in this?”
“No good at all,” said Asajirō. “They say the fry get all worked up if you put anything salty in. You have to bring ’em along gentle, like.”
Today, Asajirō wore yellow-tinted spectacles against eye strain, which might, he considered, give the radiation sickness a chance.
Approximately eighty percent of the fry hatched from the two lots of spawn they had gathered had perished. That left—assuming that one spawning produced about twenty-five thousand fry—some ten thousand in the hatching pond. They were about the same size as killifish. At this stage, they were called kego. About two months after hatching, their backs would begin to turn bluish and they would reach a length of from one to two-and-a-half inches. At this stage they were called aoko, and were released into the main pond. Those that were a year or more old were called shinko, and those that were big enough to eat were called kirigoi.
The three ponds into which the aoko were to be released had been ready for more than twenty days now. They had first been completely drained, then fish entrails, kitchen waste, and the like had been put in along with silage and other stuff, and the whole lot left to decompose in the heat of the sun. Only then had water been run in. Both Asajirō and Shōkichi agreed that the water had turned cloudy to just the right degree. It was not transparent like spring water, they explained, but had nourishment in it, producing vegetable plankton and water fleas. The water came from the stream nearby, and the pond was so arranged that it flowed gently through for five or six hours every day.
It was Asajirō’s and Shōkichi’s private ambition to rear the carp to from one-and-a-half to two-and-a-half ounces during the autumn, then the next year to fatten them up to two or three pounds or more, ready for eating. Then they would release some in the big pond at the foot of Agiyama, too. Thus they would have provided the carp in the big pond themselves, and the woman from Ikemoto’s wouldn’t be able to complain if they went fishing there. The only problem was what percentage of the ten thousand kego would actually grow into aoko. They were both sure that in a running-water pond even an amateur could count on fifty percent surviving. They had started with the hatching a little late in the season, admittedly, but so long as you regulated the water temperature and provided food, taking care to adjust from the old calendar to the new, it wasn’t too late, they said.
When he arrived home, Shigematsu got out an almanac—Daigaku Katō’s “Treasure Almanac,” it called itself—and studied it carefully. It was the seventeenth of the sixth month by the old lunar calendar—the “seventeen-day old moon,” when it was appropriate, according to the almanac, to sow certain varieties of giant radish, kidney beans, and a particular kind of Chinese cabbage on the soil where one’s carrots, marrows, and the like had been. A good piece of advice that, thought Shigematsu—it was obviously based on the farmers’ experience in taking advantage of the Indian summer that regularly occurred in September. On the same principle, carp fry should do nicely, too. It also occurred to him that there were only three days to go to the anniversary of the Hiroshima bomb, which occurred on the sixth and was followed on the ninth by the anniversary of the Nagasaki bomb.
“I’d forgotten,” he said to himself. “Only three days to go. I must get on with copying the journal.” He ate his lonely supper, then fell to transcribing his “Journal of the Bombing,” and was still at it when Shigeko arrived home off the last bus.
“You’re late,” he said. “You brought Mr. Iwatake’s journal back, I hope?”
She deposited the bundle containing the journal on the edge of the table, then went and fetched a cotton towel.
“The hospital director read the journal while I was there,” she said, dabbing inside her blouse to dry the sweat as she spoke. “It was interesting to watch the changes in his expression as he was reading.”
“Did he say anything about the treatment? That’s the important thing.”
“Twice while he was reading he said ‘Now this is useful.’ After he’d finished, he told me that he himself had gone into the Second Hiroshima Unit under the punitive medical draft. He joined the same unit as Mr. Iwatake, on the very same day.”
“But he’s alive, isn’t he?”
“It seems he was sent straight home the same day as a result of the physical examination. He had a plaster cast round his middle at the time, because of caries of the ribs. It’s funny what a difference such details can make, isn’t it? He was frowning all the time he was reading, and once he swallowed rather hard.”
“I’m not at all surprised,” Shigematsu said. “I shouldn’t wonder if he wasn’t fighting back the tears.”
Shigeko gave him a detailed account of Yasuko’s condition. Two hours or so after the evening meal, the head of the hospital had given her a blood transfusion and a Ringer’s injection, and she had gone off peacefully to sleep.
Shigematsu postponed transcribing the remainder of his journal of the bombing until the next day.
August 13. Fine, slight clouds in the afternoon.
I woke up at five the next morning, and immediately started to worry about the coal again. The works canteen wasn’t open yet, so I got the cook to pour hot water on some cold cooked barley mixed with bran, and ate it. For my midday meal, he gave me some rusks that he’d found in the bottom of an empty box in the warehouse. I’d no prospect of getting any coal, and no particular destination; in the body, I was simply drifting, yet mentally I still felt the same sense of urgency. I decided, at any rate, to get on the train for Hiroshima, and to do my thinking on the way.
It was still early morning, with no breeze at all, and smoke from the funeral pyres was rising in neat columns at the foot of the hills and from the river bed. The columns grew fewer as we drew nearer to the city area; the reason was plain: the badly hurt who had fled from the city as far as the outskirts had died off quickly, while victims who had fled from the outskirts into the surrounding country had been dying off yesterday evening.
The middle-aged man who sat next to me on the train was full of hot news. Item: the Soviet army had not only breached the Soviet-Manchurian border, but had rolled on in a great wave southwards and crossed the border between Manchuria and Korea too. Item: the Soviet Union might have a bomb similar to the Hiroshima one. Item: if the American forces occupied Japan, all Japanese men would probably be castrated. Item: the reason why healthy people who came to Hiroshima after the bomb were dying was there had been poison gas in the bomb. One parachute, in fact, had been equipped with poison gas, the other with the bomb. Item: of the one hundred and ninety doctors who had been in Hiroshima before the bomb, more than one hundred and twenty had died….
He was a perfectly ordinary-looking
man in worn, dark blue breeches, but he had an answer for everything I cared to ask about. (It transpired afterwards, though, that his information was full of errors.)
Among the ruins, the reflection of the sun on the pieces of broken glass on the road was so strong that it was difficult to hold your head up as you walked. The smell of death was a little fainter than the day before, but the places where houses had collapsed into tile-covered heaps stank vilely and were covered with great, black swarms of flies. The relief squads clearing the ruins seemed to have been joined by reinforcements, since I saw some men whose clothes, though bleached with frequent washing, were not soiled with sweat and grime as yet.
Walking on aimlessly, I came to the ruins of the Coal Control Company. There were seventeen or eighteen messages posted on the site, every one asking the whereabouts of the company’s “temporary office.” Nothing afforded the slightest clue as to the answer. Nothing was possible, yet I must do something. Racking my brains for some idea, I suddenly recalled seeing coal piled up by the side of the Hesaka road. It was at a place called Oda, about halfway between Hesaka and Yaguchi stations. I had been to and fro along the Hesaka road three times in spring and early summer that year, and each time I had noticed it—a great pile of good quality coal.
As raw material for the clothing it made, our firm used hemp, which had to be boiled and dried before use, and the Raw Materials Section always kept enough in stock for a week or ten days’ work. There was plenty of hemp, therefore, to keep going until past the twentieth of the month, but coal stocks had all but hit rock bottom. It was too late in the day to rush about trying to find what had happened to the head of the control company, so I decided to find the owner of the coal by the Hesaka road, and to try to make a deal with him.
The village of Oda lies on the mainstream of the Ōta River, on the opposite side from Furuichi, where our firm is. It would take me rather out of my way, but I could follow the Geibi Line through the cool areas at the foot of the hills, then cross the river at a point directly opposite the company in Furuichi. So deciding, I got onto the railway tracks and started walking.
It dawned on me that I had left the bundle containing my meal lying on a foundation stone at the Control Company, but I couldn’t be bothered to go back. By the side of the tracks, beneath trees, on vacant lots, and in the corners of fields as I walked, I could see temporary shacks that had been put up by the refugees. Every kind of material that could be scraped together had been used: old boards, scorched corrugated iron, old straw mats, old sacks, straw, rushes—even green grass. Clothing and washing were hanging on the living branches of trees, and in some cases the tree itself had been called into service as a pillar.
One shack had a cooking place made of piled-up stones, with a piece of corrugated iron twisted into a cone standing on it to serve as a pan. Another had a tall pile of dead branches beside it. At one shack—less a shack, really, than an arbor of branches—I saw something wrapped in a white cloth lying on top of a pile of stones, with some flowers arranged in an old can beside it. There was an old woman in this rude shelter, lying on her back on a bed of green rushes.
One thing common to all the shacks was the stock of fresh grass and fallen cryptomeria or cedar needles that stood by the entrance. This was obviously for use in warding off the mosquitoes. It is a method in use on farms, I believe, the same method that they use to make ash for fertilizer. They set fire to the dead needles, then pile fresh grass on them before they burn up completely, and leave them to smolder all night. I saw two or three shacks with injured people lying in them. One family was busily making smoke, even though it was broad daylight, with few mosquitoes about. It seemed to be a rather eccentric household altogether. They had dug a hole by the side of the house, lined it with a large piece of waterproof paper, and filled it with water, and a young woman was fishing stones out of the bonfire and dropping them one at a time into the water. I’ve heard the “mountain folk” use this method for making baths, but whether these people were really mountain folk or not I don’t know. If the aim was just to get themselves clean, the river nearby would have done perfectly well. Perhaps they were making a bath for the person who was hurt?
At Hesaka Station, there was a crowd of people waiting for a train. I left the tracks and, skirting the front of the station, got back onto them on the farther side. But the coal I had pinned such hopes on was gone, and the place where it had been showed signs of having been covered over. I asked at a neighboring farm, and the old man there told me that the coal had all disappeared in the course of a single night.
“When?” I asked. “The night after the raid on Hiroshima,” he said. I asked him who the coal had belonged to. At first, he said, it was supposed to have been an open-air store of the army’s, but actually nobody knew whose it was. One had only to spread word that something was an army store, and people hesitated to lay hands on it, which was very convenient. Probably somebody had been laying in a stock of black market coal, I thought to myself. When I suggested as much, though, the old man gave me a suspicious look. “But then, coal’s a vital commodity, isn’t it?” I said, and made off without further ado.
I walked on as fast as I could until I was directly opposite Furuichi. I made my way down to the dry river bed, thinking to ford the shallows of the river, and found a dying man on the ground where he had collapsed. He had fallen face upward. His eyes were turned up sharply showing the whites, his mouth was open, and his belly, covered only by a pair of pants, was rising and falling ever so faintly. A great rock to one side of this barely living creature threw shade over half his body; on the other side of the rock were two corpses, their heads badly burned.
I tried to walk softly as I passed, but I could not stop my shoes crunching loudly on the loose stones of the river bed. Since the bomb, I had seen my fill of dead bodies, but they still frightened me. The setting sun, reflected off the water of the river, got in my eyes unpleasantly.
The stones of the river bed gradually gave way to sand, then to running water with a slowly shelving bed. As I took my clothes off, I murmured to myself the “Sermon on Mortality”: “Sooner or later, on this day or the morrow, to me or to my neighbor….So shall the rosy cheeks of morning yield to the skull of eventide. One breath from the wind of change, and the bright eyes shall be closed….”
I undid my puttees, and took off my boots and trousers. I rolled them up in my undershirt, and tied them with my belt for ease in carrying as I crossed.
We had had a long spell of hot, sunny weather, and even at the deepest place the water only came up to my thighs, but more than once I slipped on a stone and sat down in the water.
In contrast to the left bank of the river, the right bank was dotted with countless makeshift crematoria. I could see them both upstream and downstream from where I was, any number of them, still smoldering and sending their smoke drifting towards the water of the river. I hurried straight across the sand, scaled the embankment, and clambered down beside a paddy full of rice plants, amidst the hot, heavy smell of summer grasses. My underpants were wet, so I left my other clothes off as I walked along the path between the fields, crossed the Furuichi road, and made my way back to our temporary home. It was still light, but nobody I passed showed any sign of surprise at my nakedness. There had been plenty of others like me, refugees who had fled with next to nothing on.
“I’m back,” I called, “I came across the river. The current’s surprisingly strong when you actually get in it. Shigeko! I’m starving!” I didn’t tell Shigeko that I had left my lunch behind among the ruins; that would only have doubled the sense of loss.
When I am hungry my voice tends to get hoarse, but louder than usual. As I washed myself in the stream at the back of the house, I recounted to Shigeko, in a loud voice, my walk back along the Geibi Line. I told her, too, about the people making a bath in waterproof paper, like mountain folk.
I was still there when she appeared from the house carrying a pair of underpants, a cotton kimono, and a sas
h. “The manager’s here to see you,” she said with an air of importance.
My first guess was that he had come to press me to do something about supplementary coal supplies. That must be it, I thought—it was only to be expected. Hastily, I donned the kimono and went back into the house, where I found Mr. Fujita sitting on the step in the entrance. He was dressed, most unusually for him, in Japanese clothes, and beside him stood a square wooden box of the kind fitted with shelves inside and used for carrying meals.
“Nice to see you, Mr. Fujita!” I said. “I was coming to see you after supper. Though I didn’t have any luck with the coal again today.”
“Look, Shizuma,” he began, ignoring my remarks. “Your wife told me this morning that she and your niece are going home to the country. They’ve been bombed out, so naturally there’s no difficulty about getting permission. But I thought the least I could do was to bring along your meal for this evening, and mine with it. Thought we could all have it here together. It’s the canteen stuff, of course, so it’s pretty meager fare….”
I got the point at once. Yasuko and I, who worked for the firm, ate our meals in the canteen. But Yasuko—and I too—felt awkward at taking Shigeko to the canteen with us. On the other hand, though, commodities were so scarce that it was hopeless for anyone without such connections to get hold of food. There was no telling how long the war would last, either; in fact, there had been a lot of talk lately about carrying the war onto Japanese soil, and “last-ditch stands.” So Shigeko had decided to go back to our home in the country for a while, taking Yasuko with her, and had said that she would suggest as much to the manager sometime today. I had agreed, of course. To me, therefore, the food box and the manager’s formal kimono meant only one thing: Yasuko was being granted an honorable discharge from the firm.
I showed the manager in, and thanked him formally for all he had done for Yasuko. Shigeko, and Yasuko herself also, thanked him in their turn.