by Masuji Ibuse
The food box was of the outsize variety they used in the canteen. When Shigeko removed the lid, there stood revealed, in addition to the canteen meal, a one-and-a-half pint saké bottle and a can of corned beef—gifts for us, it seemed. There were two rather aged tomatoes, too. I judged the contents of the bottle to be shōchū. It was many a day since I had seen such a luxury.
“I really don’t know how to thank you,” said Shigeko, giving her deepest bow and speaking in Tokyo dialect out of deference to the manager.
“Thank you very much indeed,” said Yasuko, bowing in the same fashion.
I was itching to get down to the meal. I’d never seen the manager in Japanese dress before. He was sitting formally, on his heels, and I could see a white patch about two inches square where his kimono had been mended at the knee. That pint-and-a-half bottle must have meant an enormous sacrifice for him. Every time I looked at the patch on his knee I felt unutterably selfish at accepting it. My fondness for a drink was well known to him, and he himself shared the same taste.
“What’s in the bottle, Mr. Fujita?” I asked.
“Alcohol, of course!” he said. “Made from gentian bitters. There’s medicinal syrup in it, too.”
In the Japanese pharmacopoeia, he explained, what was called “simple syrup” was a solution of something over three parts of white sugar in something over six parts of distilled water. Doctors used it to make medicine more palatable. “Gentian bitters” was made by putting powdered gentian root, orange peel, and other ingredients in medicinal alcohol and filtering the mixture under pressure. Nowadays, the drugstores in the towns refused to sell either gentian bitters or syrup, but at country stores they’d sometimes sell it to you, at a negotiable price. The manager had been to his home in the country the previous Sunday, and had got a drugstore friend of his to distill some bitters for him. He had bought some syrup too, which he was keeping as a sugar substitute.
“It’s really precious stuff, with all the trouble you’ve taken to get it,” said Shigeko. “But I’d better get some water if it’s alcohol, hadn’t I?” She went out into the kitchen.
“Gentian bitters is awfully bitter unless you distill it,” the manager said, shifting to the informal, cross-legged position. “But if you don’t mind that, and wash it down with water, you only need a third of a pint or so to get quite happy. This New Year I drank two-thirds of a pint of the stuff undistilled. I got happy all right, but the next day I had diarrhea—odd, considering it’s supposed to be good for the stomach and intestines.”
One at a time, Yasuko took the dishes out of the box and set them on the table. The meal that the works canteen had conjured up today consisted of five mulberry leaves made into tempura, bean paste and salt, two slices of pickles, and a bowl of boiled barley mixed with bran. This was repeated four times, for four people. The idea of the mulberry leaves had been hit on by someone working in the kitchen. They had got them from the mulberry orchard next door to the works. The farmers had stopped rearing silkworms because of the war; they had pruned back the branches of the mulberry trees, and were growing vegetables on the ground in between. Around this time of year the mulberries sprouted late buds from the sawn-off stumps of their branches, and by now were bearing young leaves just right for eating.
The tomatoes were carried off to the kitchen by Yasuko, who brought them back cut in half, one half on each of four dishes. The can of corned beef she shared out on the four plates she had brought for the purpose.
The four of us sat down to our meal. Under the manager’s watchful eye, Shigeko poured water and alcohol into glasses, seven parts of one to three of the other. The movements of her hands were somehow deferential, as though she was handling something of great value. The manager stirred the liquid in his glass with the wooden chopsticks, so I followed his example.
“I’ll bring spoons,” said Shigeko, starting to get up. “We’ve got some we use for curry, if they’ll do.”
“No, no, Mrs. Shizuma—” the manager said, “I never use anything but fragrant wooden chopsticks for stirring drink. I’m strict about these things. In mixing water with alcohol, too, I’m a firm subscriber to the ‘seven parts to three parts’ theory. But as you see,” he added cheerfully, pouring a little more of the drink into his own glass, “theory and practice don’t always go hand in hand!”
“Here goes then, Mr. Fujita,” I said, taking up my glass. “But first, to your health!”
“To our health,” he said, clinking his glass against mine.
The faint bitterness in the drink may have been my imagination. The aroma was certainly good—the alcohol was the pure stuff, after all—and the syrup in it seemed to give just the right amount of sweetness.
Neither Shigeko nor Yasuko drank, so the manager persuaded them to start eating before us. A thirty percent proportion of alcohol was too strong for me, but instead of pouring in more water I drank it in very small sips. I’d never had mulberry leaf tempura before, but I found that, dipped in salt, the leaves went very well with the drink. I’ve had similar tempura made of chrysanthemum leaves or young persimmon leaves on a number of occasions since the war.
The manager had provided what was intended, one might say, to be a cosy little dinner for our family. But it turned out to be a farewell party, devoted for the most part to working over and over the same, depressing topics. The manager himself, I found, had also been to the site of the Coal Control Company in Hiroshima. Then he had gone to see Lieutenant Sasatake at the Clothing Depot, but he had found himself frustrated at every turn. He had gone to call on Dr. Koyama, an acquaintance of his at the Communications Hospital. However, finding that the doctor was rushed off his feet attending to the patients in the hospital, he had not insisted on meeting him personally, and had been lighting a cigarette at the exit to the hospital when a conversation he overheard between two nurses taught him, for the first time, the correct name for the thing that had caused the monstrous flash-and-bang over the city.
“An ‘atomic bomb,’ ” he said, his face pale from the effect of the drink. “That’s the name for it, apparently. It gives off a terrific radiation. I myself saw some bricks in the ruins that were all burnt away, with bubbles raised on the surface. The tiles, too, had gone a kind of flame color. A terrible thing they’ve produced. They say nothing’ll grow in Hiroshima or Nagasaki for another seventy-five years.”
The name of the bomb had already undergone a number of changes, from the initial “new weapon” through “new-type bomb,” “secret weapon,” “special new-type bomb,” to “special high-capacity bomb.” That day, I learned for the first time to call it an “atomic bomb.” But I couldn’t believe that nothing would grow there for seventy-five years. Hadn’t I seen weeds running riot all over the ruins?
“Now that you mention it,” said the manager when I told him, “I saw them, too. I saw a plantain drooping over at the top because it had grown so tall.”
I remember reading an essay by the novelist Hakuchō Masamune. It appeared in the Yomiuri Shimbun, I believe, around the time that Germany, Italy, and Japan formed the Axis, and in it the author remarked that a film of Hitler addressing the Hitler Youth had reminded him of nothing so much as the roaring of a dangerous tiger. It was very unusual at that time for anybody to say anything unfavorable about Hitler in public. Some members of the Hitler Youth had paid a visit to Japan, and the governor of one prefecture had even organized his own youth corps in exact imitation of them. The article made a very strong impression on me; I found it refreshing that somebody should write like that at a time when everybody else was jumping on the bandwagon. Going to work in a factory producing military supplies, and preoccupied every day with increasing production, I slipped into the habit of hoping, for our sake, that Hitler would win. But from the time the bomb was dropped, my ideas had suffered an abrupt about-face, and I began to feel that what I had been believing was a lot of nonsense.
On the surface, even so, I went along with the same official line as before, and I mysel
f had made a copy of an appeal to the inhabitants of Hiroshima Prefecture issued on August 7 by Governor Kōno, and had posted it at the entrance to the works.
“The latest disaster,” it read, “is part of an enemy plot to destroy the fighting spirit of our nation by means of air raids of appalling savagery. Citizens of Hiroshima—the losses may be great, but this is war! Undeterred by any eventuality, we are already devising relief and reconstruction measures, and the Army is providing us incalculable aid. Go back to work without delay—not a day must be lost in waging the struggle!”
It was August 9 when I put this notice up on the board—not long before the moment, between 10:50 and 11:00 in the morning, when the second bomb fell on Nagasaki. I only realized this after I had seen a bulletin about the Nagasaki bombing and had heard a detailed report. By then, someone in an idle moment had penciled a ring around the word “incalculable” in the sentence “the Army is providing incalculable aid.” The next day, the notice had gone, torn down by unknown hands. On the painted board where it had been, someone had penciled in large letters: “You can’t wage war on an empty stomach!”
(The manager must have noticed the writing too, but he said nothing. Nor did I rub it out. It stayed there until August 15, then, after the Imperial message ending the war, I found it had gone—rubbed out with a cloth, as far as I could tell. The penciled ring, the writing, and the way the same writing had been erased all seemed to me to epitomize the feelings of the factory workers during the war.)
I drank three glasses of alcohol with water and ate my fried mulberry leaves. It was the first drink I had had in ages, and I got slightly drunk. Yet somehow I couldn’t get into the right mood. The manager drank three times as much as me. The more he drank, the paler he got, and the more savagely he attacked Lieutenant Sasatake at the Clothing Depot and all his ways. We had both had the bitter experience of being forced to grovel before the people at the Clothing Depot in order to keep the factory running smoothly. One hated oneself for the way it brought out the meaner human qualities. To them, we must have seemed like so many funny little wooden puppets, moving at their bidding.
The manager emptied his bowl of boiled barley quite clean, then started to take his leave. As he was going, he suddenly announced with a kind of grim abandon that he was going to sell his best national uniform on the black market tomorrow. Then, plumping himself down on the step in the entrance, he observed, with the cheerful inconsequence of the blind drunk, that it was exactly the same as the uniform the members of some new religious organization had been wearing for years. In the garden of the religious organization’s headquarters, he announced next, he had seen a bunting’s nest, with the parent birds busily bringing grubs for their young.
“Say—” he demanded abruptly in a loud voice, rolling up the sleeves of his kimono like a workman. “D’you know what the bunting says when he sings? I’ll tell you—he says Just a line or two, that’s what.” He turned to Yasuko. “Now, young lady, when you get home, be sure to write me a letter like that—Just a line or two.”
“I certainly will, Mr. Fujita” said Yasuko. “But the buntings where I come from sing Bring a cup, big boy, let’s have some vinegar.”
“Come off it, now—that’s far too long.”
“When I was a little girl, though, they used to go Cheep, cheep, twenty-eight days.”
“Good! That’s much shorter!” He got unsteadily to his feet, and took his leave.
When I was a child, too, the buntings had always said, Cheep, cheep, twenty-eight days. The children used to imitate it. They’d repeat the phrase over and over again, and at the end they’d chant: Carrots and burdock are fit for a pig, Fried bean curd twists but it’s better big. To this day, I have no idea what it meant.
CHAPTER 20
August 14. Cloudy, later fine.
Shigeko and Yasuko set off for our home in Jinseki county at a little after five in the morning, leaving me with a letter for our landlord. I made them take some parched rice to eat on the way, together with a little salt and a flask of water. There was absolutely nothing else in the way of food or drink in the house. According to regulations, they should have got a certificate from the head of the neighborhood association, showing that they had been bombed out, but they went without as they were taking the train north via Kabe and Shiomachi without passing through Hiroshima. No restrictions were being placed on people traveling away from the ruined city.
I went back to sleep after seeing them off, but dreamed that a one-legged man in a kimono too long for him came hopping after me with a long spoon over his shoulder, and woke up. I was sweating slightly. Taking off my nightwear in order to dress for going to work, I found I was wearing my wife’s red belt and her bathrobe. After the manager had gone home the night before, I had cleared the table and gone straight to bed, but finding that Shigeko and Yasuko had taken my undershirt and night kimono to wash in the stream at the back, I must have put on whatever came to hand.
The one-and-a-half pint bottle was still one-third full. Should I drink it or not? I took out the cork, smelt it, put the cork back again, went to the kitchen, and was looking for a glass when an air raid alert sounded.
A few days previously, the West Japan Army authorities had issued a warning that the entrances to air raid shelters should be covered and exposure of the body avoided, since the enemy bomb depended for its main effect on blast and a wave of intense heat. They also said that one should take cover even when there were only one or two enemy planes. Unfortunately, our landlord’s shelter was a simple hole dug in the ground. I went outside, but could see no sign of a plane, either in the sky between the hills in the Kabe direction or in the direction of Hiroshima. I locked up, and set off in the direction of the works. Now, though, the air raid warning sounded, and I heard a number of explosions like bombs falling. The ground shook. “Iwakuni!” I heard someone shout in a house by the roadside. I walked past the workers’ dormitory and into the office building. Not a soul was there yet. At a loss for something to do, I put a cigarette butt into a small-bowled pipe, and was smoking it when two or three of the factory girls came rushing along. “Good morning, Mr. Shizuma,” they said, all out of breath. “What’s up?”
“Nothing special,” I said. “Why—is something wrong?”
“The dormitory superintendent told us to come and ask what’s happened. He said something must have happened, as you had arrived at work in such a hurry, and we were to come and ask you.”
As they were talking, another three or four factory hands came up with uneasy looks. “Good morning, sir,” they said. “Has something serious happened?” One of them went on, “The noise during the raid a while ago was ordinary bombs, I think. Everybody’s saying it was Iwakuni, actually….”
I felt awkward. “Nothing unusual’s happened,” I said. “I’m going to Kai Station to negotiate for some coal today. I came to get something to take for my lunch.” It was the first thing that came into my head, but I decided privately that I really would try going to Kai Station.
They were right, I reflected: it was unnaturally early for me to come to work. I should have known better than to behave so irregularly. Before, when I was commuting from Hiroshima, I had arrived at the works between twelve and twelve-thirty on as many as twenty-seven or twenty-eight days in a month. Why did I have to arrive in the early morning today of all days? Small wonder it had made the workers nervy. Ever since the Hiroshima bomb, no one had known just when the enemy might land, or the whole nation be called to lay down its life, and at heart the factory workers must be just as frightened as I was. The trouble was that all of us, spiritually, were bound hand and foot, and fiercely suppressed every urge to express anxiety, let alone dissatisfaction. Such was the power of the state.
Breakfast consisted of boiled barley with bran, and bean paste soup with chopped parsley; the lunch I was given to take with me consisted of cakes of the same boiled barley, together with some shellfish boiled in soy. Normally, one didn’t eat parsley after April
because of the leech eggs and grubs that stuck to it. An elderly worker called Tanaka, sitting next to me, said to the woman who brought the food:
“Did you boil this soup well?”
“Yes, twice as long as usual,” she said.
“What’s the shellfish in my lunch?” I put in, “Clams?”
“No, they’re shiofuki. The black market woman brought some boiled in seawater, so the cook did them down in soy. Everybody’s getting them for lunch.”
In the fishing towns along the Miyajima Line—so Tanaka told me—they’d taken to cooking shiofuki in seawater, or pounding them into a paste and making round cakes of them, for sale on the black market. They used seawater because their official salt ration also went on the black market. Salt was growing more precious every day. If you went too many days without salt—according to Tanaka—a fly could settle on your right hand and your left hand would be too weak to swat it.
I set off for Kai. As on the previous morning, the columns of smoke from the funeral pyres grew steadily fewer as we passed from Furuichi, through Gion and Yamamoto, and on to the ruined city. Again, the only way of getting from Yamamoto to Yokogawa was on foot. It is only one stop from Yokogawa to Kai-machi, so I walked along the tracks. I had no definite knowledge of any coal train on the sidings at Kai Station, but such was my sense of urgency that I felt I was chasing after my own shadow, which fell faintly on the ties ahead of me.
Glancing back for no particular reason, I suddenly saw a white rainbow, stretching across the morning sun that gleamed dully in the thinly clouded sky. A rarity of rarities. I clearly remembered marveling, as a child, at a silver rainbow seen late one night stretching into the sky from the near side of the hills, but this was the first time I had seen one in the daytime.
At Kai Station, the stationmaster and his assistants were holding an emergency conference. I decided to wait until they were through. The walls of the waiting room were plastered with inquiries for missing persons, and a member of the military police was going round inspecting each of them in turn. There was something self-important about his appearance that irritated me.