by Masuji Ibuse
Every bench without exception was occupied by raid victims. On the one nearest the ticket barrier, two children were sprawled on their backs completely naked, with not so much as a pair of underpants between them. An old man and woman, their eyes closed, were squatting beside them. The old man’s face was turned towards the children, and occasionally he would half open his eyes. The old couple, I suspected, had been left with their grandchildren, with no resources and no one to turn to.
The stationmaster’s conference ended before long, and an “up” train passed through carrying a formidable load of passengers. No coal wagons were attached to it. I secured an interview with the stationmaster and asked him about coal trains, but he told me that not one had arrived since August 6, nor had there been any word about the next arrival. Since the sixth of the month, it had been all they could do to transport passengers; freight trains were out of the question for the time being.
The only thing I could do was to explain how things were with our firm and beg the stationmaster and his assistant, as eloquently as I knew how, to make inquiries over the railway phone as to when the next shipment might be expected. As I was talking, the military policeman came into the room without a word, and clumped around the room scrutinizing each of the notices on the walls. Finally he went out again, still without saying anything. In all probability he had been sent from some unit in another district to inquire into the state of public morale in Hiroshima. He wore a sergeant’s badge.
“Quite human, for a military policeman, wasn’t he?” said one of the assistants. The stationmaster said nothing. The policeman had, in fact, been comparatively mild for one of his kind. It struck me that, ever since the bomb, the military had been uncertain whether they could throw their weight around as much as they had done before.
The stationmaster agreed in general terms to my request and I took my leave, promising to come back in a day or two’s time to find what had happened.
Here too, the houses still standing in the streets were “standing,” but that was all. Bricks had been blown away, eaves were tilting, and not a single pane of glass was left in the windows. Even the window frames were askew and looked as though they would not open. Some families had had to remove the sliding doors facing the street so that they could get in and out.
I walked back along the main road that skirted the higher, residential districts. On the way, near the road, I noticed a house of painted board. From its modern, Western-style entrance ten or more bomb victims were spilling out onto the road. All were injured, with congealed blood on their wounds; some had faces swollen like balloons, others had scorched hair, others only the barest indications of human features. There was no noticeboard outside, but I took it to be a doctor’s residence. The office, I realized, was full, and these people were awaiting their turn. They were people who had failed to get into a reception center, or who lacked the strength or the will to get themselves herded in with all the rest.
I hurried past. I saw several more injured in the entrance of another building that looked like a warehouse. They were all lying flat out on the ground, but among them was a child holding its hand up in the air. Again, I hurried past as quickly as I could.
The cloth I was using to wipe myself with was black with sweat and grime. Thinking to wash my face, I walked along a road next to some paddy fields, but none of them had any water left. The irrigation canals had dried up too, and the dead loach that lay piled up in hollows in the muddy beds were almost all reduced to bones by now. I saw a sparrow lying dead by the canal. Part of its wings were burned, and it gave off the familiar stench of corruption. It was lying with its body half plunged into the mud, at an angle, with a trail behind it as though it had slid some seven or eight inches. Unlike the pigeon I had caught by the lotus pond, it had not escaped, it seemed, but had been slammed down into the mud at the instant of the blast.
I ate my lunch as I walked through the paddy fields. I was near the hills now, and I could see the smoke rising from the crematoria.
Back at the works, I found the manager drinking cold barley tea in the canteen with several of the factory hands. Everybody had an unusually pensive air.
I reported to him, avoiding any mention of the previous night’s party in front of the men. “I asked the stationmaster at Kai to contact them about the coal,” I said. “They’ll know something, for better or for worse, by tomorrow or the day after. At least, I’m fairly sure they will.”
“Thank you,” the manager said glumly. “Incidentally, Shizuma, how do people in Hiroshima interpret it?”
“I didn’t go into Hiroshima today,” I said. “But what do you mean—interpret what?”
“The important broadcast tomorrow, of course. The radio said there’d be an important broadcast beginning at noon tomorrow. We were just wondering what it could be about.”
I felt a faint tingling at the tip of my tongue. I had no idea what the “important broadcast” was, but most likely it meant either peace talks, or surrender, or an armistice. Calls for last-ditch stands on Japanese soil were too familiar by now to warrant a special broadcast.
The workers tended to stay silent, but occasionally one of them would suddenly start speaking as though something had just occurred to him. Someone would answer, then another would chime in, and another respond in turn. The result was disconnected, but the general drift was as follows.
Another squadron of enemy planes had flown over that day unmolested, but they had dropped no bombs, and none of our guns had fired at them either. Nor had our guns fired at them yesterday. With the exception of the raid on Iwakuni today, things had been different during the past two or three days. It probably meant that the powers-that-be had already come to some kind of terms with the enemy, and were going to make them public at noon tomorrow. Even so, neither a peace conference nor an armistice seemed very probable, considering the way enemy planes were flying about as though they owned the place. The only possibility, therefore, was surrender, which would probably mean that the enemy—just as the Japanese Army had done in places it occupied overseas—would land in Japan, occupy the harbors, and disarm all Japan’s armed forces….Or could it be that the important broadcast was going to be a declaration of war on the Soviet Union? If so, it was tantamount to Japan’s taking on most of the world singlehanded. What was going to happen to Japanese forces serving overseas? To civilians at home? So far, it had seemed that no life could be worse than that of the moment, but if it was a question of the whole nation being wiped out, a man was ready to do his bit. (Just what that bit was, though, no one was quite sure.) The enemy had military might on his side. In all likelihood, every single Japanese male would be castrated….Wouldn’t it have been possible to surrender before the bomb had been dropped? No—it was because the bomb was dropped that Japan was surrendering. Even so, the enemy must have known that Japan was beaten already; it was hardly necessary to drop the bomb. Either way, those responsible for setting up the organization that had started this war….
At this point, the conversation threatened to stray into forbidden territory, and conjecture went no farther.
I recounted to the manager again my dealings at Kai Station.
“Well,” he said, “perhaps you’d get the documents for submission to the Kai stationmaster ready by noon tomorrow, would you? There’s this important broadcast coming, and I want everything down in writing so that things are all cut-and-dried, whoever cares to investigate later on. We don’t want any misunderstandings such as we had before, do we? That’s an order from the manager, by the way.” He spoke very clearly, so that the workers nearby could hear too.
The “misunderstanding” we’d had before had occurred in the spring, when a carload of coal had been sent to another firm by mistake and we’d been suspected of letting them have coal on the quiet. Later, it was proved to have been a mere mistake, but for a while the Coal Control Company had tried to find a scapegoat at our works.
I told the manager and the factory hands about the white r
ainbow I’d seen on my way to Kai. “Well—so you’ve seen one too!” exclaimed the manager, giving the table a great thump. “I saw one too when I was in Tokyo, on the day before the February 6 Incident. A white rainbow, mark you.”
His rainbow, like mine, had crossed the sun horizontally. He’d been walking near the Imperial Palace at about eleven in the morning on the day before the incident, and he’d told himself the sea must be rough that day, as hundreds of gulls were gathered on the palace moat. It was late February, and there was a flock of wild ducks on the embankment too, but the number of gulls was quite extraordinary—it might have been hundreds, or even thousands. He was thinking how strange this was when—stranger still—he had seen the white rainbow in the sky, cutting across the middle of the sun.
“It’s an omen, you see,” the manager said in all seriousness, “an omen of something unpleasant. The very next day, the February 6 Incident occurred, so the omen obviously appears the day before it happens. When I told one of the high-ups at a government office that I’d just seen a white rainbow, he was shocked. A ‘white rainbow that pierces the sun’—it was a sign from heaven that armed disturbance was imminent, he said. It’s apparently a quotation from the life of somebody or other in the Chinese Book of History. I told myself it was a lot of nonsense, but at dawn next day the trouble started.”
“The one I saw was narrow,” I said, “and it kind of skewered the sun.”
“That’s right—it’s not very wide, but it’s very streamlined, and white. I’m not being superstitious, but a white rainbow bodes nobody any good. There’s no doubt about it, it appears to me.”
I’d been walking all day, and was tired. I decided to do the documents about the coal trains the next morning, and had supper in the canteen with the manager and the factory hands.
“There’s some of last night’s alcohol left,” I informed the manager privately. “Fine!” he said. “That’s real news! I may be along tomorrow evening, depending on how the important broadcast turns out.”
August 15. Fine.
My tiredness the night before must have made me sleep particularly soundly, for I woke up early. It seemed that the time for me to set off for the works canteen would never come. As usual, I drank some water in the attempt to deceive my stomach. Even when I was ready it was still too early, so I sat myself down in the entrance hall to wait. I was still there when the old gentleman who owned the house appeared.
“What would this ‘important broadcast’ be, now?” he asked, handing me something wrapped in a piece of newspaper. It was some coffee beans from Brazil, he explained. His nephew, who had gone to work in Brazil twenty years ago, had sent them a few years back. He hadn’t known how you ate them, so he’d been keeping them in a paper bag tucked away in a closet. I myself had never seen real coffee beans before, and had no idea how to roast or grind them, but I accepted them gratefully, and, calling up something the manager had once told me, said, “I wonder if these are the mocha or a Brazilian variety? They say the most common kind being cultivated in Brazil these days is a hybrid of the two strains, don’t they?”
The old man had not come to see me under any impression that I was well versed in the progress of the war. He was simply disturbed about the important broadcast, and wanted someone to talk to. I was strictly noncommittal in expressing my views.
He told me that fish were still dying in the Temma River in Hiroshima. They weakened and floated to the surface, belly uppermost, and if you took them in your hand the scales came off and the dorsal fins fell out. Most of the carp in the lake at Asano had been killed outright in the raid, but now some of those that had survived were losing their scales and beginning to swim groggily. He’d also heard that people who’d walked about the ruins without having been in the bombing itself were getting blotches on their skin, or losing their hair, or finding their teeth coming loose.
As for myself, there was no telling what the future would bring, but at the moment I could tug at my hair without it coming out, and there were no blotches on my skin. Nor was there anything wrong with my teeth. (Two years after the raid, though, when I’d begun to think I was safe, two of my teeth began to wobble, and I found that I could pull them out without any trouble. Next, four others began to move, and I took them out myself, without the slightest pain, simply by holding them in my fingers and tugging. Today, I have a complete set of false teeth in my upper jaw. If I tire myself with manual work, I get eruptions the size of beans on my scalp. Shōkichi, who had started the carp farming with us, had all his teeth fall out, quite painlessly, in a space of two months the year after the bomb, and now has nothing but false teeth in both his lower and his upper jaws. Shōkichi’s upper gum is so low that it’s almost flush with the roof of his mouth, and the dentist made the plate of his false teeth as high as was technically feasible, so as to improve the appearance of his lips. Even so, the upper lip still looked as though it was turning inward, into his mouth, so he grew a mustache, which he still has. It’s a fine, bushy, manly mustache. Sometimes the villagers, who ought to know the story behind it perfectly well, forget and say that Shōkichi has a mustache above his station. As far as Shōkichi is concerned, though, social vanity plays no part in it at all. He is the most humble and worthy of men, and I hereby speak up on his behalf.)
When the old man had gone, I set off for the works, had breakfast with everybody else in the canteen, then set about drawing up the required papers—the documents to be submitted, at the manager’s orders, to the stationmaster at Kai. A great deal of thought was required, since, besides setting down the amount of coal the firm needed for one week and our production figures for clothing, I also had to give a minute account of our recent negotiations at the Hiroshima Branch Clothing Depot, as well as the state of nonexistence affecting the Coal Control Company. It would not do for me to say that the officer in charge of coal rations at the Clothing Depot was irresponsible. On the other hand, if I said he had cooperated with us, our appeal would lose all its effect. It took me much labor to produce the necessary periphrases and evasion. I decided to intersperse the text with a few purple patches, too; “in such a grave emergency”—went one of my better efforts—“a lump of coal is the equivalent of a drop of blood.” With the Control Company gone, personnel and all, and a system of controls still in effect, to write like that was probably the only policy that offered any hope.
I had finished the papers and was reading over what I had written when the sound of the factory machinery suddenly stopped dead. It was five minutes to twelve, time for the important broadcast. I put the documents in a drawer, and went out into the corridor. I ran down the stairs, then, on a sudden impulse, turned out through the emergency exit into the courtyard at the back. The works radio was in the canteen, but I shrank from the important events that the words emerging from it would initiate. The feeling was just the reverse of the common compulsion to look at something one is afraid of. Everybody seemed to be walking along the corridors in the direction of the canteen, and the dull murmur of their footsteps came to me where I stood.
The courtyard was silent and deserted. Three sides were enclosed by company buildings, while the other faced the slope of a hill where oak trees grew. An irrigation canal some six feet wide flowed from among the oaks into the courtyard and out again via the gap between the office building and the building housing the engineering section, bringing a cool breeze with it. The damp soil on this side of the canal had thick-growing clumps of moss and liverwort, and beyond the canal I could see a cluster of tall plants with small, pink flowers. Here and there, there were tall white flowers with large yellow pistils.
I peered into the office from outside, but there was nobody there. I considered going to the canteen, but changed my mind. I looked into the factory hands’ room: nobody. Putting my nose in at the back door of the improvised kitchen next to the office, I saw a large kettle boiling on a stove, its lid leaping merrily. The clerks who brought their own lunches had obviously put it on to boil, then gone off to l
isten to the radio, leaving it untended.
The broadcast had begun, but all I could hear from the courtyard was fragments of speech in a low voice. I made no effort to follow the sense, but walked up and down by the canal, occasionally stopping and standing still for a moment. The canal had solid stone banks about six feet deep, and the bed was flat and paved all over with stones. The water was shallow, but absolutely clear, and the effect was immensely refreshing.
How had I never realized there was such an attractive stream so near at hand? In the water, I could see a procession of baby eels swimming blithely upstream against the current. It was remarkable to watch them: a myriad of tiny eels, still at the larval stage, none of them more than three or four inches in length.
“On you go, on up the stream!” I said to them encouragingly. “You can smell fresh water, I’ll be bound!” Still they came on unendingly, battling their way upstream in countless numbers. They must have swum all the way up from the lower reaches of the river at Hiroshima. Newborn eels usually swim into the rivers from the sea in mid-May. Within the first mile from the estuary they are still flat and transparent, like willow leaves, and the fishermen of the bays around Hiroshima call them “sardine eels,” because of their likeness to sardine fry. By the time they reached here, though, they looked like real eels, about as big as a large loach but far slenderer and more graceful in their movements. I wondered where they had been swimming on August 6, when Hiroshima had been bombed. I squatted down by the edge of the canal and compared their backs, but all I saw was different shades of gray. None of them showed any signs of harm.
I wondered if one could fish for them, and if so what kind of bait they’d take. I walked away, and was making my way back towards the emergency exit when a factory hand emerged from the door and came jogging past me.