The Delta of Hiroshima

Endless suffering continued day and night.  At dawn of the fourth day, the eastern sky was tinted, and the small island ahead began to show gentle undulations, when fully armed soldiers came into the ward, highly tense.  We were told that the ward here could well be the next target of air raid, that we were to move out.

With the threat of air-raid dangling over us, the removal had to be quick and efficient.  The soldiers, tireless, tackled the job of shifting all wounded to another safer place. Nobody was concerned as to where they would be taken to or what would happen at a new place.  It was a big relief from the unbearable smell of death and sting of puss, sweat and excretion all mixed and permeating the ward.

Unnoticed, our boats were ready at the jetty.  On the quiet rosy sky the morning star was barely noticeable, and clear seaside air was sweet to breathe and gulp like a liquid.

When nearly ten boats, with all of us on board, left the log-piled jetty, the sun was ready to rise from the horizon.  We passed the islands’ hills shining brown and pine trees with freely crooked branches.  After a nearly twenty minutes’ cruise, perhaps, the boats came to a beach with a high mountain in the back.  When the boats came directly ashore, soldiers, each carrying a wounded on his back or lap, waded shallow water to the shore, mindless of their combat shoes immersed in water.  A soldier gave me a new pair of straw-sewn slippers; with the new slippers on, I crunched my way through white sand which yielded without any resistance.  The dune came to an end at a cliff.  On top of the cliff was an open ground with a pool, encircled by shabby structures purported to adorn a bathing beach.  The front open space was adorned with several pine trees with branches bent by constant salty wind, forming cool shadows covering the open ground.  Stretchers were laid under the tree shadows, and those who could walk sat at the edge of the pool.  All waited until sickrooms were allotted.

In the large open space, all possible calamities that befall on human-beings were exposed under the bright sunlight.  A leg wound like an over-ripen fig; black pupils innocently focusing on the top of a pine tree through a hole in the gauze colored yellow by pus; a head which looked like a scull bone freshly dug up from a new tomb; a head hanging limp like a chicken’s of which feathers were all plucked out; a leg with burns in vertical stripes; an ear which had shrunken to  Jew’s ear size; downcast gloomy pair of eyes like those of a lone toad…  Amid boundless torture of human-beings, the wounded had only one thing in common: boundless pains and sufferings, away from rich/poor distinctions and social class differences.  They, on one hand, appeared to help out each other and congregate, whether rich or poor.  On the other hand, each sufferer also looked devoid of pity toward everybody else, lying alone in his or her ground.

I was assigned to the second floor of the building close to the seashore.  I found myself in a double 10-mat room with an alcove full of cracks.  This was a summer house devoid of any fittings seen in ordinary houses.  From where I lay, I could see a part of the deep blue sky through a low window.

There had been big changes in room-mates.  In my room I couldn’t see any of the acquaintances of the first emergency first-aid station, except the former next-bed mother and her beautiful daughter, next to whom I lay again.  Lying on freshly laid blanket free of dust and wrinkles comforted me.

When all the injured had settled down, initial medical treatment began.  Those who could walk were instructed to go to where the pool stood.  Beside the pool was a big wisteria trellis, under which was a stone floor of granite, with a water tap and an artesian well with gushing water probably used before for cooling watermelons and beer.  Shabby tables, uneven folding stools, old chairs with stuffing partly coming out from the torn black, waxed seat covers and the like had been laid out to form a semblance of a medical aid station.

Soldiers carried in big crates after crates marked with Red Cross symbols.  Out of nowhere several army surgeons clad in white gowns appeared.  Sharp smells of medicines permeated the air.  A shiny sterilizing apparatus belched forth steam, and on the table were laid out various medical tools.  It was a very assuring sight.

However, patients waiting there for their turns with their eyes twinkling with relief and expectation were limited to those with mild injuries.

East of the wisteria trellis was a big structure, which looked like a big bath house with two doors and a small window, was for the seriously wounded.  Ferocious cries like howls of wild animals reached our ears.  They were relatively quiet while being carried about or treated on, whereas once laid on the ward floor their cries seemed to redouble due to new torture.

As though urged by the crying wounded, army surgeons were hastily coming in and out.

However, it was evident in everybody’s eye that, even if first-class medical equipments and wellnoted surgeons were available, it was beyond human skills to do anything to help the wounded out from the gruesome pains they were in.  To pluck off all decomposed muscles and expect for new granulations for one with too extensive burns?  To suture big gushes too late for treatment?　How on earth can human-beings cure such sufferers?

Until death comes and sets the sufferers free and at peace, until their flesh cannot resist it, until their hearts stop painful beating, they cannot get away from the gruesome torture.

The ward has turned into a graveyard of the still-alive.  Human beings cannot do anything about human flesh atrociously destroyed by the wisdom of human beings, the New Bomb.

In our daily life here I have found that the customary rice-balls had become noticeably smaller, and kaoliang mixed in the rice-balls had increased.  It brought us to somehow feel in our bones the very tense air of the fate of entire Japan. 

A day after we had moved in, a young giant of a man joined company in our ward, accompanied by his peasant-looking mother.  As the room was full, he slept on the corridor, dressed in a well-starched, chess-pattered yukata (*after-bath kimono).

The flames of hell that scorched human skins, naturally, burned their clothes.  Here everybody’s clothes were shredded miserably and it was difficult to tell the colors and patterns prior to the fire.  Therefore, the well-starched yukata was a gorgeous attire.  Furthermore, the young man lay on a futon of Iyo Kasuri,(*splashed pattern produced in Matsuyama, Ehime Prefecture) thin but colorfully bound by light green colored threads.  His face looked sickly drunk and was swollen like a ball.

His mother, with her agile hands coarse from lifelong hard farming, cooled her son’s head.  The youth, a soldier belonging to the 2nd Detachment, was showered with the New Bomb with his colleagues.  He was the only survivor.  He fled to a high point called Mount Koi in the western suburb of Hiroshima city, and then wondered about for the ensuing five days until this morning, finally coming back to his home near this seashore, I was told.  “As I heard that many injured people were housed here, I brought him here,” the mother said to me in a difficult-to-comprehend countryside dialect.

The youth with languid eyes didn’t speak much but, when inquired by others from time to time, he haltingly spoke about the time when he had met the calamity and the after-scenes of Hiroshima.

Everybody seemed to feel that his/her experience was different from others’ depending on the circumstances he/she was in.  However, even if others’ experiences were hard to accept, he/she couldn’t assert his/her own experience because what he/she suffered could perhaps be an illusion.  Everybody had been stricken by an eerie monster called a “new-type bomb,” and in the end everybody became silent.

…..

As days went by, death tolls increased.  Every morning in the open space outside, corpses were stacked high.  These dead were already put in eternal repose mercifully after days of boundless agony and fierce fight against death.

The attending soldiers, stripped to the waist, cut a bit of hair from the dead, put it in an envelope and wrote something on it.  Then each corpse was tightly bound by straw sheets and address-tagged.  These packages, with heels looking like smoked fish, heads looking like earthenware, etc. all sticking out from side, were stacked high under a pine tree — much like railway cargo.

Every day after mid-day a lot of villagers came with two-wheeled carts.  The soldiers loaded the carts with the straw-sheet-wrapped corpses and secured them tightly with straw ropes.  The villagers, with squeamish reluctance, took the yolks and pushed from behind.

The flower-less hearses came every day and left the gate fully laden with corpses, the big wooden wheels kicking pebbles and swaying over stones.  Afraid to put people on alert by too much smoke for cremating, the villagers opted to bury the remains in a hill behind the village, they said.  The dead were not even permitted to be properly cremated.

Perhaps the news got around, and after a few days people began to call our field hospital one after another to inquire after their kinsfolk.  To indicate that they must have been luckily away from Hiroshima by chance, or relocated to rural areas, some of the callers were free from bodily harms.  Every visitor was clad in the regulation “anti-air-raid attire,” carrying a luggage in hand. Although their gloomy, sun-tanned and sweaty faces showed fatigue and apprehension, they carried with them healthy atmosphere from their world, a refreshing and cheerful sight.

“Is so-and-so from Kaniya-cho in?”  “Anybody from Nagare-kawa in?”  A man with a teacher’s look, whose head was cloth-wrapped, called around desperately in a biting tone, “Any student of the Second Municipal Middle School here?”

An old man came into our ward and examined every face, nearly gripping each shoulder to make sure, calling, “Tsuneko, for God’s sake Tsuneko!” (*a female name)  An old couple sat down at a corner of the ward corridor, fatigue- and despair-stricken like a rag, and whispered, “No, she isn’t here, either.”  “After all, I wonder if she may have been dead somewhere.”  They had visited every emergency aid station in Hiroshima suburbs and furthermore many mountainside villages and each and every small island to find out about their dear daughter.

In another case, kinsfolk were lucky to come here where the victim was in, but were only  told that the victim had died the previous night or just buried in the morning. There was also other cases where people came in to witness the victims dying at that very moment.

A woman clung to a remain — a clod of flesh already packed for burial but unpacked by a kind soldier — and cried, “Oh my dear, you must have suffered terribly.”  “How cruel!  Not only you, but Father, Mother, your teacher, friends and everybody else are dead.  Pray go to Heaven with them in good company.”  A group of old people was also seen, some of them gripping the dead’s hard and cold hands like porcelain ware, complaining in torrents of tears.

Thus several times a day sutra-chanting and wild despair were heard and incense fumes wafted into our ward from the front yard.

In one of the few extremely rare cases, a young man visited his wounded uncle in our ward, an old man.  The old man, with his face contorted, cried out in flood of tears, mumbling something and repeatedly calling his nephew’s name.  Some sixty years seemed to have slipped away from his face — and he was crying and sobbing like a baby!

Whenever the wounded heard a caller’s voice in the corridor, they all would raise their heads in bed.  Even those whose badly disfigured faces were all but unrecognizable even by their next of kins extended their hands as though to swim in the air, so that they wouldn’t be overlooked.

One day the young man’s mother called out to others in the ward, saying, “I’m on my way home and see how things are now.  Does anybody need anything?”  I asked her to get me a small saucer.

In the evening, she came back with a little coarse red saucer on which were painted three thick-necked cranes flying around a Chinese character “kotobuki” denoting happiness, and also fresh tomatoes.  This shabby saucer was, to me, even more precious and valuable than the much respected china-ware Banreki Akae saucer, because from that time onward I could eat the issued kaoliang-mixed rice balls from that saucer, not from my bare hand.

Another thing.  I happened to find a little nail file in a slit of the window frame I always leaned on.  Perhaps left there by somebody, this file with reddish rust became my toy to play with.  I would enjoy carefully polishing the ten nails of my hands or tell my fortune counting the number of grinding grooves in an even-and-odd play.  This file gave me an unrealistic moment of comfort away from the harsh reality.  Thus the little saucer and the file eventually became the initial possession of mine, reborn from ashes.

….

“I’ve heard that in this ward there is a private from the Second Detachment,” a man in a dirty white shirt came into our ward, speaking with an oddly domineering air.  The young man, perhaps half-asleep in bed, suddenly sprung up, threw away the wet towel on his forehead and sat up squarely on his futon.

The man asked the young man the latter’s military rank, the name of the detachment he was assigned to, how he had met the calamity, places he had gone to, etc. in minute detail, and wrote down all answers in his pocket book.  Then the inquirer barked in a severe reprimanding tone over and over that the young man should be ashamed of himself for running away for a trifle matter(!) without official permission and mixing with civilians.  Before leaving he amply threatened the poor mother who sat squarely beside her son.  What kind of authority did he have?  The mother kept bowing to the man, tearfully faltering.

The Castle of Carps (the Hiroshima Castle had long been known as “Rijou”, The Carp Castle) which had stood high grandly in wind and snow for centuries was reduced to rabbles, and only the foundation rocks and stone walls remained, people say.  Perhaps the rows of army barracks therein must have been destroyed without leaving any traces.  Yet, does the iron discipline of the military still demand that this poor bloated youth, the only one left alive out of hundreds of soldiers, march alone, a weapon in hand?  It’s nothing but a laugh!

There was an old man, always leaning against an alcove post with a stuffy blanket covering his body from head to toe, who didn’t like to lie down although injured considerably in the right shoulder.  He, clad in the blanket like Bodhidharma, was staring at the tense sight between the injured young soldier and the reprimanding man, jiggling his knees, said to the poor mother, “Don’t worry, don’t worry a bit, mother.  Everything has gone up in smoke, yes, everything!” and cheerfully laughed and encouraged her times and again.  He was glaring with his dark-pit eyes, and his calm old-man’s voice sounded dignified and somewhat suggestive.

The sergeant, whom I hadn’t seen after we had left the first first-aid station at Saka, came to our ward, perhaps visiting here on an official mission, and visited the young girl next to me on the third evening.  He took out some apparatuses from the dangling leather waist bag and applied injections of some kind to the daughter and her mother.  The way he cut the medicine ampules and applied the injections was nothing but amateurish.

The sergeant, who had acted with a lot of nerves at the Saka first-aid station, seemed a way self-conscious.  I, who was the only one who knew the relationship between the three, turned my back to them and closed the eyes.

In the middle of the night, I came to and sensed some object close to my body.  My hand, stretched toward the object, touched a cold metal object.  Annoyed, I opened my eyes and found the sergeant lying stretched in his custom tunic, with his bayonet and gaiters intact, in between me and the young girl.  With his face squarely upward and hands clasped in front on the tunic, he was breathing peacefully with his lips a bit apart.  His sturdy forehead, minus combat cap, shined white in the moonlight.

The sergeant, whom I thought was in sound sleep, suddenly got up in the dark.  The sweaty body odor of a soldier, characterized by the smell of animal hide and sweat, assailed my nostrils.  In the dim light he was doing something at his feet; then I heard some liquid flowing out from the mouth of a jar and then the smell of sweat-and-sour fomentation liquid wafted.

From the embankment in the back of the barracks insects’ frail chirping was heard all night long.  In the following morning the sergeant was long gone when I woke up.  Perhaps he left early.

In the room next to ours a boy about six years old was with his father at first.  After his father died, he was found trotting around alone within the compound and was adored and petted by soldiers.  The child was to leave the station early in the morning, and came to me to say goodbye.  When I asked him where to go back to, he answered me boringly that he was going to live with his grandfather in the countryside.  He took out a ticket from a pocket and showed it to me, saying, “It’s a free ticket, oh it’s free,” and cracked a smile.

His hair, not bushy and unkempt as seen everyday but was cut neat and tidy for the occasion by the hand of a caring soldier.  His crescent bold patch in the back of the head seemed to foretell his miserable future ahead.

The boy, clad in the dead father’s trousers with rips and tears and with a pack of hardtack given by soldiers in hand, left our barracks, with soldiers at the gate seeing him off.

After a while, from the second floor of our barrack I saw him squatting by the edge of a canal ten meters or so from the gate, munching something and playing with something.  I saw him take something out from his mouth and scatter it to the ground.  Then, with a pair of new straw sandals, he stood up and, like a puppy, went flying toward the railway station.

Among us was an old woman whose whole body had become numb.  She was confined to bed all day.  She kept calling, day and night, “Toku, my dear. Toku!” — somebody in her family perhaps.  When I saw her trembling hands stroking the mat surface, I asked her, “Water?”  She responded, saying “Huwo-i” (meaning “Yes” somehow).  As though awakened from a dream, she kept staring at me and then said in the local dialect, “Please, tell Toku when you encounter her, ‘Why do you leave me in a place like this?  Come now and take me home.  I want to die!”  Then tear slowly welled up in her gray pupils and flowed out to her cheeks in half-transparent whitish drops like molten candle wax.  I went down to fill up an empty bottle with water.

Early in the morning I went downstairs and found several brand new wooden grave markers resting against the staircase wall.  They were about 4 inches wide, coarse, unseasoned and not properly planed.  On the markers were written in rather good handwriting the secular names of the deceased.  Among them I found the name “Junko Shinagawa.”  I was told that she had died while “Private Kawabata” was away in Hiroshima on an official mission.  Her joy of absolutely possessing him seems to have been marred by his “official mission.”

By chance, something white squirming in an old man’s head wound — maggots — came into my sight.  The ivory-colored maggots were moving in red flesh.  Maggots in the bomb wounds were but commonplace, given the poor disinfection due to man/materials shortage.  Even sterilized gauze and bandages to cover wounds were scarce.  Although it wasn’t the first time when I saw maggots in wounds, this was the first time when I noticed maggots squirming here in this very place — a truly nauseating event shaking up my whole body.   

This drove me to find a refuse in seaside calm.  The Prussian blue sea was glittering in gentle breeze.  My eyes were comforted by the sight of a shoal, black sea-weeds caught by logs used to keep sand in the dune, the dune covered by dead seashells as white as flowers and the peaceful atmosphere of a wet tideland.  I sat down on a rock on which sea slaters were crawling about.  Through crystal clear air I could see everything far down to the horizon.

By the waterside where a canal meets the sea a solitary, small house — perhaps engaged in small-scale salt making, stood.  The house had an oblong salt pan of approximately 15 square meters.  A woman covering her head with a hand towel was slowly tilling the pan with a spade with a long handle.  Zinnias and marvels-of-Peru colored the peripheries of the pan just like a Yuzen broad sash.

Sitting without a hat in mid-summer sunlight was comfortable enough and without pains.  Already numbed by all kinds of stimuli, even the scorching sun light no longer affected me.

When I turned my head to voices in the back, I saw two servicemen, each with an armful of blankets, coming near me in bare feet, with rolled-up trousers.  They stepped into the beach with rough steps and threw all blankets onto the water.  The blankets, after swaying on the water surface a while, then became all wet by sea-water and sank.  After stepping on them a while, the soldiers occasionally picked up one and slapped the water surface with it.  The dirty blankets, with fat, blood, sweat and puss soaked in, swung in dark blue seawater as though alive with eternal life.

In the meantime, a burning wish to go back to the outside world has begun to torment me. What I would do once outside didn’t matter.  I only wanted to get out of this place soonest.

Although my left chest still felt as though somebody’s hand were touching it, my body seemed all right to me as long as I kept away from taking unnatural postures when lying down or raising up.  Besides, little cuts and scratches over me appeared reasonably cured.  Whereupon I reported to the serviceman in charge to obtain a permit to leave this medical station.

As anyone leaving the station was welcome, he promptly issued to me a permit without ado.  I picked up a hair-pin from the corridor, stretched it and broke it in half, making 2 pins out of it. One went to close up a hole in my blouse in the side, and the other to pin a torn spot of my trousers.  This made me ready to go.

The soldier who issued me the permit thoughtfully told me that there still was a chocolate-colored bruise in my jar.  Nevertheless, I left the gate, with a fare-free certificate and a fresh pair of straw sandals.

Outside the gate, the mountain behind the village, where there were crude and primitive tombs, the full scene of the exclusive green trees covering its folds caught my entire vision.

The air I was breathing outside the gate after the seven-day stay at the medical station was so fragrant (I was inwardly ashamed of my selfish move).  Summer clouds floating overhead and scarlet roses of Sharon pushed away the other grim and sorrowful world toward oblivion.  A horse was drawing a cart in earnest, and a chicken was pecking the earth under a fence. Everything alive was beautiful.

About four hundred yards west on the Kure Highway, there was a small railway station. With its compound strewn with coal ashes, the station had an eerie stir with people coming in and going out.  As there was plenty of time until my train’s arrival, I walked toward the foot of a mountain commanding a view of the sea.  Then I heard pitterpatter footsteps approaching me behind.  It was a young girl with a bandage in the head which looked like a headband.

She said in an overly familiar manner, “You too were in the field hospital, weren’t you?” However, I couldn’t recognize her.  The girl had reddish hair, a robust chest and a well-built body, while her eyes were strangely timid, sparkling with strange animal fear.  Her flower-patterned dress was all discolored and muddy, with only dark cores of flowers remaining here and there.  Her footwear was the same as mine, a fresh pair of straw sandals.

Producing reverently an envelope containing hair, she suddenly said, beginning with a light stutter, “This is Masako’s hair.  She was a beauty.”  Then she smiled.  I sat down with her on a hewed stone on the roadside.

She said with a childish look on her face, “What did you think of the rice ball served there?  It would’ve been better if a bit bigger.”  She rattled on, licking her eerily colored lips.  I feared, however, that perhaps at any moment a sudden screech would come out from her mouth with these ghostly lips.

Her totally self-contradictory, chopped-up conversation told me of her tragedy she had been through far and far beyond her normal nerves.

Prior to the calamity, the woman had quietly lived with her mother and a one-year-shy baby, away from her husband who was in the military service in the south.  On that fatal day, she was seated at the veranda with her baby in her lap.  The explosion sent her flying to safety, while her mother in kitchen couldn’t get away from under the wrecked house’s beam pinning her down, whatever she tried.  She could see her mother’s white face between a house column and the beam, but her desperate effort couldn’t pull her mother out from the vise of the fallen lumber.  Meanwhile, the mother heard the bursting flames coming close and said, “Don’t mind me.  You take the baby and run!”  After a lot of frantic arguing back and forth such as “Let me die with you, Mother” and “No, you must keep the child alive,” the mother suddenly turned her face away and wouldn’t speak another word.  Not responding to any further calls, the mother wouldn’t stir or utter another word, either.  Though the woman kept shouting to her mother, approaching fire finally drove her away to safety.

“My mother was alive but feigning dead!  Alive!  A parent doesn’t leave his or her child, but a child runs away, forsaking his or her parent.”  With that, the woman began sobbing.

From behind a mountain on the right hand side, a train whistle sounded.  I told her the approaching train was not Hiroshima-bound, but the woman nevertheless stood up, singing, “The train has come.  The train has come!”  She hurried down the slope toward the station without looking back at me.

The train didn’t stop at the station.  Another train bound for Hiroshima — was crowded.  I, attired in torn clothes with blood spots and with a black trace of head wound, was a happy person in the past world, but here aboard the train I was a miserable figure to attract other passengers’ attention.  The passengers cast me indiscreet glances half in pity and half with curiosity.  From my side, though, I stared at these clean, odorless and healthy passengers as people coming from another world.