The Delta of Hiroshima

Piercing pains throughout my whole body awoke me.  Humming noise like the sound of a rotary printer was running deep in my ear, and my probing eyes found me standing on my head, with my lower body mercilessly bent in two.  I don’t remember how much time had passed before it dawned on me that I was in a tight grip of something big, as if put at the bottom of a well.

A fine shaft of dim light coming from nowhere showed me surrounded all over my body with broken, split or crashed things of all descriptions.  I, like a game caught in a cage, writhed, swayed and thrashed; however, the iron grip never relented, tightly holding my body.  My head, in a whirlpool of pains, felt something chilly like ice.

My further violent thrusts and plods continued.  The dim light gradually revealed pieces of furniture, decorated transoms, ceiling panels and everything else dear to me. They were all split in pieces and showed new barks in big unruly piles.

My left half of the body was in a giant grip of a big lumber piece, cushioned only by a summer seat cushion which looked like a torn rug of white linen.  My hand tore the cotton cushion out -it fell in fresh hunks as though proudly shining in cotton fields.

Perhaps this piece of cushion freed me from captivity.  Like a puzzle ring suddenly coming off on the spur of a moment, the firm grip of the lumber relented and released my left half of the body at last.

I blindly tried my utmost to come back to the normal standing posture, moving my limbs like puddling water, jumping over waves, spitting all around and gasping wildly.  Then, all of a sudden, my head came out to the free space.  Trying to shake off the coma, I violently shook my head and looked around.

Whatever I saw then, I didn’t see an object as anything meaningful in life.  My eyes, astonished beyond belief, were mere lenses without emotions, permanently printing the horrible images on the retina.

All houses, clustered together as far as I could see before my eyes, have collapsed like toy blocks and scattered around.  They turned into piles of broken bits of panel boards, columns, roof tiles, slate tiles, etc.  And — what’s more — there was not a single living soul there!

All lively streets with horse-drawn carts, bicycles and trucks were gone.  No more daily work of several hundred thousand people who had thought, worked, walked around and ate meals. This was a fantastic dream-like reality!

Happening top of this lifeless piles of houses and buildings, raging fire — forming a 200-meter circle right on them — was drawing close to me in solemn silence — like a group of beasts coming close, with their horns low on the ground ready for an slaughtering attack.

Suddenly awake from a doze, I realized after several seconds that this devastation was not a dream or illusion but stark reality.

My ears failed to recognize either the sound of flames steadily eating away debris or the pathetic cries of the debris, but my body trembled uncontrollably due to bottomless solitude which assailed me.

Fog-like strange air currents and approaching hot, dense and oppressive smoke were encircling me and found me petrified with a thought that I was somehow still alive.

As soon as my eyes caught sight of a gray space through breaks of raging fire, my feet took me toward it blindly, crashing roof tiles under my feet, stumbling at broken furniture, straddling beams, and ducking under electric wires.  I stumbled at pieces of furniture, kicked away household utensils and ran recklessly over hills of rubble — tumbling head over heals many times.

“I’m alive, still alive!!” my heart cried out, beating violently, my body bent forward.  Voices of people from under the piles of debris reached my ears many times on my run; some of them seemed to drag me into the bottom of the earth.  Some voices were frail and whispering.

Barely breathing the suffocating air, I ran and ran over these voices, trampling them mercilessly, because the solemn and unbreakable will of mine to stay alive myself rang in my ears and plodded me to run and run above everything else.  At last, I ran up to a solitary brick wall left out of destruction.

Flames were right on my track, emitting devilish sounds of flame consuming debris.  It meant that, under the circumstances, I had to be on the other side of this high wall — whatever danger was taking place there, though.  Without hesitation, I climbed up to the top of the wall, taking advantage of lumber which had leaned toward the wall.

On the other side of the wall there was some open ground between the wall and a building.  On the ground there were no high piles of wrecks.  Unexpectedly my body fell, with a mighty thud, from the 4-meter-high wall right onto a concrete base splintered with broken glass bits.

For an indeterminable time after the fall, I lay on my stomach, motionless.  The building there stood with its skeleton steel structures only, completely stripped of windows, doors, wall panels, ceilings and roof tiles.  Unsteadily I stood up and approached the other side of the building, where people’s voices were heard.

There, in an open space there were many people!  The first person I saw was yelling at the top of his voice as though insane, and was running about, dripping blood from his head. Also the space was littered, here and there, with motionless people.

At this moment I was brought to realize at last where the place was.  This was where Y middle school was, merely a little over 300 meters from where I lived.

There was a pond which looked like a water reservoir or pool on the southern part of the school ground.  Inside the pond were many people, all squatting in water up to their necks, silent.

I plunged right into the pond, waded through these people and squatted down in the dirty water filled with multitude of alien objects such as wooden boards, straw bits, rag bits and other multitude of objects floating on the water surface, sticking my neck above water.  I then looked around me.

What met my eyes there was a nearby endless sea of blazing flames in furious coils, getting bigger, longer and shorter.  Soon afterward, the fire closed into the school site, blowing in whitish or yellowish smoke coils, heavy with oily odor, whereby we couldn’t keep our eyes open even for a moment.  Water in the pond instantly became lukewarm due to the encircling, scorching heat.  Bits of broken lumber, roof-slate beds, etc. showered on our heads, sizzling on water surface.

I seized a torn straw mat floating close to me, and covered my head with it.  After exhaling a big breath, I closed my eyes.  Gradually the maddening heart beats calmed down — and I found myself unable either to think or move.

My brain refused to recognize any of the roars of annihilating fire, chaos and cacophony, noises, save the sound of water dripping from the tip of the straw mat on my head. 　Before I realized, I fell into a pit of comma.

Perhaps my remaining will power not to collapse in water and drown was strong enough.  When my consciousness returned a few hours later, I found myself still stooping in water, alive.  As though awakened from a dream, my eyes caught sight of the sun of that morning — in eerie colors and shape, devoid of the brilliant colors marred by gases, trash and smoke.  The sun, devoid of its volume in an unevenly oval shape, hung in the gray sky.

Fire which had encircled the school play-ground waned, and dusty smoke rising from smoldering embers was wafting thereabout.  I remained unconscious for hours of the fire which burned down everything around me.  Moreover, I was not aware of what had happened only one meter or less apart from me!  The man beside me was found dead, clinging to the edge of the pond.  Another man, an old man who had just been beside me, was found dead also, looking like a gray rock with only his gray-haired head shown above water.

I tried to get out of water, but couldn’t climb up the edge of the pond at the end of a mild slope, a mere meter above water.  My chest, abdomen, waist and legs were all numb as though tight-bound by an iron ring, and wouldn’t move at my command, “Raise the body.!”  My legs were tightly bound by water — now a solid object to keep me immobile, though I wanted to hook them onto the edge of the pool to raise me.

While I was clumsily clinging to the edge of the pond, somebody took notice of my dull movements and understood my all-out effort, though futile, to climb out, and extended to me his helping hands.  Like a rag out of a bucket of laundry, my body was lifted out of water in a rough motion and dumped beside the pond.  I grew unconscious again amid contaminated air with a strong mixture of smells coming from embers.

When I came to for the second time, the eerie winter sun had set, and the neighborhood was in evening dusk.  I couldn’t move any part of my body as though firmly clutched in a vise; in the dusk which surrounded me, the shapes of somebody lying, whose heels were feebly kicking sand like a domestic animal pierced for a kill, and of others crawling over the bare earth here and there like insects came into my blurred view.

After a while, there was a sound of automotive engine somewhere, and noisily chatting voices followed.  Vigorous footsteps scattered.  Several army soldiers in tunics came running.  Amid gray atmosphere their khaki tunics stood out.  They walked about among people lying on the ground everywhere like worms, and picked up anybody still breathing.

I must have appeared dead, lying by the edge of the pond without stirring an inch. Though I waited and waited, they never picked me up onto a stretcher.

When the soldiers looked ready to leave, my desperate voice, “Take me, too!”, sounded loud even to startle me.  “Well, still alive!” the men said and came to rescue.

With a chant my body was swiftly put on a stretcher and squeezed into a small space on the open floor of a truck with many wounded.

Though the main street looked barely passable, the truck full of wounded citizens had to duck logs, tiles and other obstacles right and left.  Every time the truck violently swayed, I felt pain all over like being torn to pieces.

Amid this endless agony — which signified that I was still alive, I looked up at the evening sky heavily clouded.  Around 8 o’clock, the night air was rose-colored perhaps, due to reflection from embers or something still aflame, and starless.  The midair was filled with a buzzing sound like a swarm of insects flying all over.

When the truck arrived at its destination, we were all lined up on a mild stone slope.   A sound of waves came toward my feet, and strong scent of seaside met my nostrils: we had been brought over to Ujina on the south end of Hiroshima.

Close to where my head lay, hurried footsteps of shoes and wooden clogs went here and there, and endless arrivals of trucks full of wounded civilians were accompanied by muscular shouts, infantile cries and soldiers’ loud commands.  There on the stone-covered harbor, like a stage empty without lights, we wounded were left alone for nearly two hours, surrounded only by noise and shadows.

Thereupon we were placed onto small, shallow and flat watercraft.  More than a dozen small boats formed a group and left Ujina harbor, their engines humming in a high pitch like aircraft’.

Mukai-Ujina island, in a soft dark shadow, was floating on the sea.

Aboard my boat darkness reigned, and a smell of blood hit my nostrils.  Weird moans were muffled by engine noise.

“Please, water — water!” a woman cried.  As if on a cue, voices, frantic calls for water rose from everywhere.  A soldier, standing by the gunwale with his hand gripping the engine-room roof, said in a rough voice, “There’s no water here.”  Another soldier chimed in and said, “Even if we had water, we couldn’t give it to you.  One gulp would send you away dead.”  Again the woman pleaded in a wringing voice, “Water — water –water.”  A man’s voice followed. “Do give me water, please.  I wouldn’t mind dying for that.”  The soldier remained mum.

The middle-aged man lying beside me, puffing hard with both hands numbly thrown on his chest, said in a local dialect under painful breath, “Yanekoi-nou”.  This local expression was rich in its meaning far above “unbearable or difficult,” well suited to this desperate occasion.  The woman pleading for water was still crying for water incessantly, but afterward the voice gradually became feeble, and — she died aboard the boat.  The boats cruised on, with some wounded who met their ends of life en route.

The sound of the engine became low, and the boats arrived at a dark, small inlet in the bosom of mountains.  On the jetty made of logs were many servicemen running to and fro like a shadow picture.  Seriously strained atmosphere prevailing there meant that it was a military facility.

Each casualty was once again placed on a stretcher by soldiers, who received us, in total silence and with no outward show of surprise at the bombardment casualties, swiftly in a quick and orderly manner as though in a long-practiced routine. 

Stretchers, with pocket lights to secure footsteps, left the jetty and went upward in total silence much like a funeral procession.  The beautiful night sky of the unknown beach met my eyes on my stretcher.  Through transparent air, the sparkling Galaxy welcomed me.  I heard a soldier whisper, “Four …”  That must mean the number of sufferers who met their respective deaths while on board.

A row of big-sized barracks lined up along a sturdy wharf, and there was an open area in the center.  At the entrance to a pitch-dark barrack, which looked like a big cove, was a candle light swaying somberly on a big desk.  Inside the single-story barrack, the whole floor was covered by straw mats, on which were lined up army blankets folded in oblong shapes in four rows.  I was carried into a spot close to a window near the seashore.

Casualties, endlessly carried in, appeared under dim candlelight one after another, and made me gasp at their unbelievably eerie wounds. 

In the dark, a perplexed old man whispered in darkness, “Why were human-beings scorched alive like this?”  My own thought also ran wildly in my worn-out head without any answer. When the afflicted were all placed in the big room to cover nearly 100-mat open space, soldiers came to each and every casualty to write down his/her name and registered him/her by a patient number.  

In spite of excited noise of soldiers’ hurried footsteps to and fro and the low whispers heard outside the window for a long time, there was no sign whatsoever to indicate necessary medical treatment.  Each of us was only allowed the comfort of a straw mat, a blanket and tranquility in darkness.

For one, I — severely torn by unspeakable fatigue, which deprived me of all will power to piece together in orderly fashion stray bits of ideas — found myself merely lying on the mat in stupor as though standing to watch my own fortune decided.

Although my left chest felt as though something heavy was pressing on it, before I knew I was drawn into bottomless sleep in mud and was not able to witness the solemn last moments of some twenty lives in the room.