The Delta of Hiroshima

Upon arrival at Hiroshima Railway Station (app. 2.2 km from the bomb cite) the train spewed forth a flood of passengers.  The platform was roofless, with only warped steel stays standing like winter copse, and dirty water at the bottom of the concrete floor splashed onto people’s feet.  It seemed that people were all being drawn to Hiroshima as though possessed by the charm of that horrible day.  Pitiable people, driven in a fit of frenzy at the cold-blooded insane bombing, came to the devastated city, looking for kin folks and dear friends.

I exited a makeshift wicket set beside the smoke-stained main station building christened by fire and fumes, and stood in view of a piece of empty land — Hiroshima some days after the atrocity.  Struck dumb like Noah coming out of his ark, I stood there voiceless, transfixed for a while.

My eyes caught a desolate scenery of the vast scorched earth dotted with burned-down, shapeless buildings much like excavated terra cotta.  This is Hiroshima – a totally destroyed city only some days after the bombing.  Much like Noah when stepping down from the Ark, I was stupefied at the scene for a while.

What a desolate scene!  The horizon ran south to the city’s western suburbs and lined with the mountain range extending far to the shore opposite to Miyajima.  Above the silver mountains were the spotless, deep cobalt-blue sky – likely to suck in casual watchers — with thick white clouds.

The city in ruins and the cobalt-blue sky — two separate pictures forcibly joined together.  They, in total disharmony, made a well harmonized scene, though.

Streets were dotted here and there with burnt-out buses and bicycles disfigured by fire, and overturned street cars, which had turned into rusty iron scraps, were lying on their sides on the uneven pave stones.  Inside the hulks of cars were human bones like oyster shells scattered.

The railings of the Enkou (*monkey) Bridge, as though wiped out in a vast swing, were seen in the river.  The bridge itself, extra-wide for the short span, were still in good shape, connecting two deltas.  The seven rivers of Hiroshima, as I heard the story from a woman at the medical camp, had been all covered with dead bodies floating downstream one after another, much like a bunch of radish’s fine slices thrown into water.  There had been no open water surface left because of the floating corpses, she said.  Her description of the issue, based on her everyday life, was a bit dreadful.

As of now, the river has carried away everything to the sea, like “time” which sends everything — be it unhappiness or pains — away toward “past.”

The Enkou River, the east-most river full of graceful curves, was gently flowing, whispering its eternal song, even showing twinkling silvery sand of the river bed.  I was looking vacantly at the river, when an air-raid siren blared out to the whole expanse of the bare streets now devoid of anything to block a view.

Several small planes, possibly carrier-based, flew north low from behind Hijiyama hill.  In a flurry I jumped into a crumbling air-raid shelter and, mindful of my “white” blouse being the only attractive target on this entirely scorched earth, and also felt my body swelling up as a sizable target for the enemy plane bullets.  Whereupon I drew toward me a burnt-out galvanized iron plate strewn nearby with a big rattling sound, and covered my head with it.  

Standing in ashes and dust here made me think that this living world, streets, friends, even lifework and any other aspects of life looked empty.  Still, the sound of an enemy airplane sent me flying into this big hole where I covered myself with a dirty iron sheet.  What a pity!  In the hole, I felt the full impact of fear of losing life alone on the roadside, with my fingers pushing each of strewn bone bits into the ground.

On the side of the Hijiyama Park hill facing the city streets, tree leaves have already turned to dark winter-green and some have gold-brown tints of autumn.  Among these trees, burnt-out pine tree trunks looked black here and there. 

In the city, people were scarce, and only quietness reigned like an empty sand dune. I kept trudging alone.

Like a pilgrim on her way to the Holy Land, I was slowly walking, step by step in unsteady gait, unsure whether I would be able to stand up once I fall down, and heard a vigorous footsteps overtaking me.  The source of the footsteps was a young student with a furoshiki (*wrapping cloth) package in his hand.  Then, two or three steps ahead of me, he turned back and stared at me.  He then put the package on a stone wall and did something I couldn’t clearly see.  When I passed him with frail steps, he extended his hand with a bunch of green grapes toward me and said, “Take this, please.”

Taken by surprise, I stood with my mouth agape, when a bunch of grapes — like jade stones with a frost-like whitish shade — appeared on my open palm.  I heard him mumble, “I thought you were Mommy.”  He grinned to me shyly, aware of his baby language.  Then, saying no more, he sped ahead in assured steps with the wrap in hand.

While walking I looked at the bunch of grapes in my hand that looked as cool, transparent and fragile as a piece of glassware, and bit each grape by teeth hungrily.

In the vast ravaged field, there were a few shacks made of burnt GI sheets here and there, perhaps inhabited by people who had come back to their original house sites this early and begun living their humble life.  These “houses” were all unshapely, covered with miscellaneous kinds of GI sheets with half-gone coal tar paint, flattened-out sheets, enameled signboards with unreadable burnt descriptions, etc.  These sheets looked like having been just blown to hut frames, rather than carefully fit to them.

These huts wore natural camouflage.  Without human voices or smoke coming out of a camping rice cooker, no airplanes or even no walkers passing nearby would know that these huts were inhabited.

I noticed my house site from afar.  It had a distinctive mark: several pine trees in the garden stood out, supported by crooked charred stakes that looked like dancing nude figures.  One of the concrete gate poles stood as straight as a totem pole, while the other was found cut in half, with the cut-off portion lying on the ground.

Although the ground on which my house used to stand was flattened scorched earth with no intelligible boundaries, the trace of the garden was apparent.  The pond of approximately 33 square meters had turned smaller to a half its original size, with the old three-legged lantern and natural big rocks filling the pond.  Only blue water in it reminded me of the bygone days.

Unexpectedly, I found behind a rock several lively water lily leaves afloat.  Even two pink blooms, wrapped in calyxes, were dozing off, with their petals lightly closed.  Thin rolled-up calyxes with blossoms inside were gently swinging close to water surface, waiting for a show in two or three days.

When I stepped on a crumbling stone, something — a frog — jumped into water with a splash. A live frog!  It swiftly swam in the pond diagonally and hid behind a rock. Our house, located pretty close to a red-light district and amusement quarters, was near the center of the city, yet frogs had come to live in the pond.  They noisily sang at nights in summer, disrupting the neighbors’ sleep.  While I had never expected anything to be alive in this charred land, water lilies were dozing and a frog was cruising freelzy! 

On that fateful day this water lily must have been deep in the bottom of the pond with a short bud; the frog, out of a group, probably was safe alone deep in the bottom of the pond.

 I slid a hand into the muddy water and playfully stirred it up, thinking of the mystery of the destiny of every such small creature.

In the open space where the house used to stand, a sewing machine and a wall clock, both mercilessly smashed, were scattered.  Each of them told me of the wrecked memory of my parents and siblings.  Where the bathroom was located, city water was dripping from a hideously bent lead pipe and disappeared in between scorched roof tiles.

At the site where the Temple K– had stood, there was a small hut covered with curtains and straw mats, where I could see some persons moving in and out.  For no special purposes I went closer and found a dashed-off sign board “Provisional Town Block Office.”  On a tombstone miscellaneous cooking utensils presumably picked up from the ruined neighborhood were lined up, and in a big, warped iron pot water was boiling up.  When I walked up there, flies suddenly fluttered up from all tableware, with a loud noise.

A man coming out from the hut, pushing out a drop curtain, cried out, “Oh, you, my God…  You are ALIVE!”  He was Mr. M of our town block who had frequently visited us.  Much surprised to see me alive, he kept staring at me for a while, repeating, “So you came back alive!”  I outlined the course of events up to date. “Well, how good of you to come back alive!”  His surprise was etched on his face.  He said they had opened a temporary town block office to be of service to those who had no place to go, and also to those who visit here in increasing number day by day who want to find out what had happened to their acquaintances.

“All those who survived the bomb within our town block fled for life from the calamity to Hijiyama Park.  As nobody there saw you at the park, I thought you had been pinned under your house and died.  Tomorrow I was to dig up your house lot to pick up your bones, if at all,” he said.  

He produced a ledger which showed all information about those in the administrative bloc.  The very first name on the list was mine!  My name in kanji characters which I’ve long been used to for many years — looked somewhat cold and distant — gazed at me like a stranger.  I borrowed a pencil and struck out my name from the list, laughing.

The notebook list showed most of my acquaintances and of those whose names were familiar to me although I have never met as “deceased.”  People around me congratulated me with a bit illogical logic, “Inasmuch as your name was listed as ‘deceased,’ you are bound to live long.”

—

Mr. M invited me, “Stay here tonight.”  But I noticed in the confined space a half-naked man, a child with his whole back painted with red mercurochrome and others all lying down — the sight which didn’t encourage me to stay overnight.  Thus I decided to tread over to the house of a farmer to whom I had entrusted my things.  Although the place was around 12 kilometers away, I wouldn’t mind a walk even on a pitch-dark night. 

Also I happened to remember a porcelain water jar which I had buried under a stepping stone in our garden, into which I had thrown in some cash and personal belongings. This was for the worst emergency in which not even the prescribed “emergency bag” could be taken out.  This, under those worst circumstances I was in, encouraged me immensely.  So, I decided to go back to my garden first and then proceed to the farm house afar.

As I ventured back into the center of the used-to-be busy shopping area, electric wires, like spider’s webs, coiled together on roughly cracked pavement covered with stones and cracked roof tiles, impeding me.  My feet, in straw sandals I wasn’t used to, would be full of scratches going this way.  I was afraid that, with this slow gait, daylight would be soon over even before I cross the city limit.  That would make it truly impossible to reach the farm house before sunset.

Along the way to my house garden I noticed white human bones, just like cram shells breached by breakwater waves, scattered here and there among crushed roof tiles and porcelain ware. There I no longer found corpses piled up in mounds along the streets despite what had been talked about in the aid station.

Close to Block “O”, only one corpse came into my view.  There was an air-raid shelter in a lane end away from the street.  There I found a woman’s body, clad in green work pantaloons “mompe” (*the standard woman’s wear of those days), with her hands on her knees as though in her nap, tired, sitting immobile on a stone near the entrance to the shelter.  Her lead-colored face and hand were covered with a swarm of flies.  As her hair was not in disarray, and her clothes looked somehow undisturbed, my assumption is that she had arrived at this shelter after an air-raid and died unexpectedly.

After walking a while I looked back at her body and only caught sight of her green pantaloons on gray earth, like a green shrub.

A big burnt-down building, with its entire second-story floor that had slipped down, had a black cove in which rear windows were stripped of glass panes, showing a line of the blue sky cut off like square handkerchiefs.  Under the collapsed floor, I surmised, there were corpses of bank employees sitting at their desks set in orderly lines in early morning work with pens and abacuses.

The Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall  (*Hiroshima-ken Sangyo Shoreikan. Now noted as the “Atomic Bomb Dome”) with a round dome looking like an Islamic temple has been reduced to a skelton steel frame, casting its hollow shadow on the waters of the Motoyasu River.  The T-shaped Aioi Bridge, connecting the apex of the main delta and two branched-out rivers, was disfigured beyond recognition with its road surface hideously bloated out, sunk and dented. However, the sight of the Motoyasu River, sedately flowing, and of the beautiful sunset remained unchanged. 

I walked up to the edge of a side of the bridge with the hand-rail blown off and sat down. Perhaps in high tide water with crepe ripples reflecting rosy clouds was flowing towards jetty steps made of flame-treated stakes piled up sideways.  I picked up a stone, swung it into the river, which responded with its eternal silent flow.

It was near sunset.  There was no person around on the bridge.  From where I sat, the burned ruins with putrid smell of dead human bodies extended in the evening mist as far as the suburban areas.  The idea of a long walk — 8 to 12 kilometers — at night without light depressed me.  I, undetermined, looked down at the flowing river, wondering if I would go back to the Town Block Office and stay overnight there or else to Hiroshima Railway Station. Somebody walked up toward me with clicking sounds.  It was a man, dragging his bandaged legs, holding in his arms a freshly cut bamboo stick taller than himself.

He came behind me, and the clicking sound stopped.  And I felt that the man was staring at me.  I didn’t move.  Neither did he move.  When I couldn’t stand any further to be stared at from behind long, I stood up.  “What happened to you, Miss?” a gentle 60-ish face inquired. “Not thinking of jumping in here, are you?”  The man, serious-faced, said, “I was very close to death myself, and have seen a lot of dead bodies.  Thus I wouldn’t be moved by any serious happening easily, but I do hate to see you here jump into water.”  I was close to laughing out at his misunderstanding of my behavior.

“Nice of you to say so,” I said and bowed to him.  Seemingly still in doubt, the old man spoke again, “Now that you’ve come out alive out of thousand or ten thousand people, don’t ever think of killing yourself.”  He added, “Be careful wherever you’re going,” and he slowly crossed the bridge, clinging to his long bamboo stick.

It was quite natural for anybody to see me lost in thought, squatting down and staring at the water surface at this hour at a place like this as one just before committing suicide.  When the old man finished crossing the bridge, I took the way I had come. 

I just remembered that, when I had gone back to my house, the air-raid shelter we, the members of the Town Block Unit (*tonari-gumi, organized during the war), had made had remained intact.  Resolved to stay in the shelter overnight, I quickened my pace.

As the sun was completely down and darkness reigned, creepy quiet reigned.  Even the pattering of my straw sandals following me at the same pace sounded like someone shadowless on my tail.

The scene of the night street with street-car rails was anything but hideous.  Whitish broken pieces of electric pole insulators or perhaps human bone pieces were scattered and molten motors and other steel objects were all squatting in the dark like corpses.  I kept walking steadily on the road with the “F” department store building (*Fukuya Department Store) on one side and a bank building on the other, with their black menacing shadows like large cliffs. 

When I came up to the front of the deteriorated department store building, a distinct cry of a baby came from above — from the 6th floor or thereabout.  The cry spread inside the empty building with a gloomy twang.  The cry in the black-smeared empty building in darkness!  Was it an illusion or auditory hallucination?  Yet, a realistic smell of disinfectant was wafting thereabout.

—

Our air-raid shelter built by our Town Block Unit was sturdy enough, with several steps going down to the shelter door, remained intact.  It had approximately 7 square meters inside.  With a board placed on chairs arranged on both sides, it could easily accommodate several persons lying down for a night.

Shelves hang on the walls, and a clay-made portable cooking stove and other cooking tools were found.  I struck a match and found the portable stove with remaining ashes, and a tea kettle with used tea leaves dry and sticking inside.  Perhaps, I thought, somebody had stayed there the night before.

I lit a candle and placed it on a chair.  The candle light, aslant from under my face, expanded my profile on the wall.  Even my disfigured profile, because of the aslant candle light swinging on the wall, made me feel as if I met somebody — my heart missed companionship.

I flopped down on the board, but couldn’t stay in that position any more than a few minutes. Mosquitoes!  They breed in any puddle at an amazing speed in stone cracks, concrete hollows, broken earthenware cavities and everywhere else.  They were swarming over this god-forsaken land for human blood.

They instantly swarmed over me, jumping into my mouse and nose as I breathed.  I hastily covered my head with a cloth wrapper, yet hungry mosquitoes fiercely attacked me through the cloth.

I got up and hurried out of the shelter.  I stretched heartily and sucked in damp night air. Everything I saw looked blueish under dim starlight, and grayish hills extended far toward the sea.  The unobstructed hills were dotted with white concrete buildings, as if in a dream.

Suddenly a fire started afar in darkness.  As I noticed a shifting human shadow there, the little fire became a big bonfire.  As though it were a signal fire, similar fire started in far and near places.  Cremating fire – much like guards’ all-night vigil fire — was ablaze.  The flames swayed with gentle breeze, writhing like snakes for more victims.  Fishy smell wafted with wind, and burning fat crackled, popping like fireworks.

I was standing on the street, pondering over flesh decomposing in fire.  Gazing at the most simple but solemn ceremony, I reflected on my life.  I stand here, undefeated by any attempt to try my capability — either by the grace of God or due to good fortune.  I was strong enough — by what force or rule?  What is, in essence, my l-i-f-e?  In the solemn night, I became modest — and then grew conceited.

Captivating thunderbolts sparkled overhead and disappeared.  I gathered pieces of wood that had escaped fire, built a fire and stayed awake all night, driving tenacious mosquitoes away. —

After the long, long night, a dawn broke.  When I heard footsteps in morning mist, a man appeared.  He was an old man D… who had lived across the street.  “Well, by God!  You of all people!  Glad to see you a-l-i-v-e!” the old man, full of surprise and blessings, uttered a shrill cry.

I in turn, looking at the same-as-ever face of the old man with a broad forehead, bushy eyebrows and childish lips, congratulated him on his own safety.

On the day preceding the day of the atomic bomb calamity, he and his wife had gone to their relative’s house to stay overnight, and experienced no damage whatsoever, except that their grandson who had stayed alone in their house had not been heard of.  Therefore, he had been searching for their missing grandson every day, he explained.  “When the catastrophe began, the grandson must have been on his way to school and met it.  But God knows where he was or what happened.  Though it is too much of a task for an old man like me to go around looking for him, my wife has been insistently asking me to search every day,” he told me. 

The man listened to my side of the story, uttering, “Is that so?  Oh, really?”  Then he said, “Well, you have been quite lucky.  Glad to know you are safe and alive.  From what you told me, you spent a night here alone?  What a brave woman!”  So saying, he stared hard at me smiling an innocent smile.

“I have grown to fear nothing, except perhaps live people,” I said.  “True, true.  You’ve said it!  The dead are not so fearful than those who are alive,” he agreed and laughed with his toothless mouth wide open.

We washed rice with running water from the broken faucet, and hung two mess kits over a fire. By the time the sun began to rise from beyond the Hijiyama Hill, I dug up a food can which I had buried deep in the garden and took breakfast together.  It was a rather respectable breakfast after a week following the horrible disaster.

The old man has been coming here almost every day to meet somebody here as usual, it seemed.  He told me a lot about how our neighbors had been, busily moving only the muscles around his mouth — without moving the lower jaw at all.  He talked, unlike other old people, to the point without his personal sentiment, impressing me with his deep grief hidden in his heart.

“Truly it was an atrocious event.  How come they dropped the terrible thing on, of all cities in Japan, Hiroshima?  A bad luck for Hiroshima people,” the old man said, drinking tea from the lid of his field mess kit and glanced around with sad eyes.

It was essential for me to go to the countryside within today for picking up daily necessities.  Around 9 in the morning (my guessing from the sun’s position) I said farewell to the old man and began trudging north along the road which I had come yesterday.

At the foot of the embankment running along a river, where several temple’s halls and towers had been, nothing remained except foundations — cracked stones and rocks — left in disarray. Now that the whole city has turned into a vast graveyard with smells of death, this old area is now the cleanest, driest and most cheerful graveyard. 

Once out of the city area, the road looked rather ordinary, except that all plants — roadside glass, rice in the rice fields and even bamboo bushes that ran parallel to the suburban railway -were burnt and charred on the south side.  On two train carriages lying sideways in grass sparrows were playing in groups.

5. Country Farm House

By the time I at last arrived at the foot of the Mount T…, the sun had long set.  When I stepped into the farmhouse with stone walls through its dark entrance without a word, the whole people of the house nearly screamed.  “You, Madame, were alive!” the wife, a small stature, came out and cried out.  An old farmer with a tanned face came out from darkness of the cowshed and uttered, “You’ve been all right?!”  The entire family surrounded me and screamed. 

They had thought all along that I had been dead, because I had never showed up even two days or three after the atomic bomb disaster against my promise to come as soon as I became homeless.  I summed up the story of my saved life but they were not satisfied.  Tired out, I was hazily looking at the ceiling, ancient-looking and blackened with soot, while they kept asking me questions after questions.

No member of this family went to Hiroshima on that fateful day, whereby the entire family was safe, I was told.

“This girl of mine, on that very day, happened to have a sty on the eyelid and didn’t go to her office.  That saved her life.  Those at the desks in the office all ended up as dead bones, they say.”  The farmer’s wife gesticulated a lot as she told about her oldest daughter, and poked her lightly with her finger.  The daughter grinned herself, squinting at me with her eyelid with the “life-saving” sty.

“As every household except ours in this village has one or more members dead or injured, my heart is heavy for greeting others,” said the farmers’ wife with a perturbed face.

Told that bath was not available because of frequent air-raid warnings, I went down to the brook in the rear of the farmhouse — no wider than 1.8 meters but blessed with crystal clear water rapidly running from the mountains — and sat on the river-bed, enjoying splashes of cold water to clean my body.

Every time the moon emerged from clouds, wet rock surfaces sparkled, and each willow leaf on the bank shined as though silver-plated.  Faint night wind passed overhead, gently swinging a fig branch on which my clothes were hung. The earth’s pungent fragrance softly touched my nostrils like mellow sake.  Awash in the rapid shallows, my sandal thongs stung sore toes, but that was unexpectedly soothing.

In bed, futon — after days of slumber without it — felt a bit damp, and noisy chatting of the farmer’s family awoke me from dozing.

The farmer’s son, who seemingly came back home from a town along the highway, was informing something to the family.  His rapid, shouting words were difficult to comprehend, but one word “surrender” caught my attention.  His talk was followed by the farmer’s agitated voice and his wife’s shrieking, mixed with the frightened voices of children.

The farmer’s wife came around the garden and said to me, “Madam, this is serious — quite serious!  Japan, after all, was defeated and surrendered.”  She was expecting me to jump up from the bed and join her family in the kitchen, but I just felt languid and cold, with the eyes closed, and remained silent in bed.

The farmer’s wife spoke excitedly, “This — ah means no air-raids hereafter, and my two elder brothers will surely return from the front.  Oh, I’m relieved!”  The farmer retorted, “You fool!  What’s good about losing a war?  Just think of what will come hereafter.  After all, this is catastrophic!”  While the farmer and his wife exchanged hot comments, I heard small boys sobbing.

In the following morning I got up and realized that the farm house was naked, without even a sliding door panel or paper screen in place.  When the flash-bang assailed the vicinity, it wiped out all house fittings and furniture, sending them all flying north, crashing them, I was told.

The roof tiles, likewise, had all been clustered on one side to north, whereby a hole in a ceiling board gave me an exquisite sight of the beautiful sky.  I went out to the house well and found other houses in sight — a house with pumpkin fields, another house with a watermill, and still another one beyond a hemp field — were also stripped bare, entirely open to view.  I could clearly see what people there were doing. 

My breakfast table was luxurious with a variety of fresh and young vegetables the farmer’s wife picked from her vegetable garden.  A fresh egg warm enough to feel the hen’s body temperature was mixed with plenty of grated summer white radish which stung my tongue, and roughly seasoned with soy sauce.  As for tomatoes and cucumbers, I ate them only with a pinch of salt.  Inquisitive little children, rudely watching me at an arm’s length and twitching their noses, laughed at me, calling me “a grasshopper.”

I slept in a room completely empty of any doors, panels or screens, counted not-yet-ripe persimmons hanging from branches, listened to the brook’s murmur, and enjoyed raw vegetables like a grasshopper.  I was made aware of quick passage of time only by the regular beat of a mortar heard from time to time.

There was no family in the village free from misfortune.  As told by the farmer’s wife, each villager’s family was troubled by either someone hurt or ill due to the new bomb explosion. Worse, after ten days or twenty following the blast, these unfortunate sufferers died one after another.

Every time a victim passed away, the farmer’s son, a bundle of fire wood in hand, would join many villagers and walked over to the village crematorium through footpaths between rice fields.  This ritual happened almost every day — at times twice or thrice a day.  “The bonze is enjoying good business every day,” a child chided.  Added another, “He ate too much offering and gobo-no-shiraae (*burdock mixed with crashed tofu) that he is troubled with loose bowel, they say,” and ridiculed the only priest of the temple in the village.  Even his family has the only son, a middle-school student, who is in a critical condition close to death with an atrocious burn, I was told.

In early September, it became rainy, after nearly two months of dry weather.  For a while we found comfort in rain, until it brought profuse black clouds covering the sky and turned into a persistent rain with strong wind.

The farmer’s son climbed up the roof to stop leaks, with no success.  With all roof tiles broken or chipped, the farm house began leaking everywhere.  All pails, buckets, and other containers such as an18-litre rice measure pail were mobilized to no avail.  The house soon turned into a raining open field.

The family removed all tatami mats and held umbrellas in the house, struck dumb. Lead-colored mist covered the earth, blocking the view of the field.  Monstrous dark clouds flew overhead; nobody could tell when it would stop.

Rain gutters at the eaves flashed down rain with thunderous noise of a waterfall in rage. Buckets at regular intervals rang, and so did the pails.  Leaving themselves to ravage of rain, every member of the house got wet and sat silently in sweat and water.  There was no dry place left in the house.  I thought I had lost the feel of what was dry.

At night we all slept in the extremely confined storeroom in the northern corner of the farm house, the only place intact without leaks in the house.  Every time a child’s face moved close to me leaning to a thoroughly wet futon, the child’s hair with the smell of the sun touched my cheek.

“You didn’t cover the roof with galvanized iron sheets while the weather was fine.  That’s why we have this trouble,” the old farmer’s wife repeatedly complained to her son.  The old farmer admonished, “Don’t be noisy!  It’s too late, anyway.”  The old man must have nudged his wife; she retorted, “It hurts!,” and nudged back the husband.

The old woman was holding dear in her bare bosom a large match box like a hen with her eggs. However, whatever she did couldn’t keep her match sticks dry. Every time she had to make a fire in the earthen cooking stove, she flew into a rage with damp match sticks.

The rain lasted on and on if not for eternity, and the sky with thick rain clouds wouldn’t show even a speck of the blue sky.

—

On such a dismal rainy day, I happened to realize my abnormal physical condition.  I first attributed my dull and feverish condition to either rain or accumulated fatigue; however, later I began to sense with apprehension that something serious was coming up.

The sores on my insteps suddenly began to hurt me with increasing pricks.  I had always thought that I was free from deterioration of light wounds; however, the pricks had begun to be more painful every minute until they stung me like a bumblebee sore.  Soon enough, the sores turned purple and then puckered.  On the third day, I found it hideously swollen to a ball 9 cm thick.

Almost simultaneously, a wart as small as a pencil tip appeared on the right inside wall of the mouth. Feeling uneasy, I prodded it with the tongue tip.  Then it suddenly swelled up twice and then thrice until it swelled up as big as a pea, with pain as though drilling a gimlet into the mouth.

Overnight my face swelled up like a football, and I could neither drink water nor move my lips.

As though my heart had moved into the foot soles and the mouth, they ached with each pulse. Listening to dismal rainfall with saliva running uncontrollably from my mouth, I was in a moldy closet, and became a prisoner of an eerie thought.

Whereupon all images of death began to recur to my mind.  Although my incorrigible inner power so far had always dominated my life, although I had felt sure, like a boy, that I was alive in spite of everything else — even if the earth and heaven would crumble, such conviction became empty and null, leaving me gradually reduced to nil while breathing and blinking.  The farmer’s wife and others treated me with unchanged good-natured indifference and kindness.

In the morning of the fourth day, the old farmer barked, “Rain’s gone.  A nice weather!” and woke up everybody.  I found a hole in the ceiling, which gave me the blue morning sky of early autumn, and went outside. 

The brilliant sky was open with bottomless paternal warmth; it was giving me hopes, courage and power to live; it was whispering into my ears, “You must go on living.”  I tied sandals to my swollen feet and went down toward the town on the highway.

On the road surface small pebbles were exposed on the rain-soaked road surface, and big pools with rainwater were here and there.  My straw sandals soon soaked up water and became hefty.  Brooks ran thundering with torrents of rain water, and ripe ears of rice were found miserably blown down to the earth.

When I stood at the entrance to a clinic with white walls along the highway, I was surprised — and disheartened at the sight of hand-carts, perambulators, rear-cars, and even one-wheeled farm carts all with patients on waiting for their turns for consultation.  The dim-lit entrance hall was covered with countless wooden clogs, and the waiting patients flooded all space right from the first step onto the wooden floor.  I gave up the idea of consulting the physician and sat down vacantly on a stone inside the gate, and began talking with another woman standing alone.

There was nothing impressive about this woman’s face except her pale, dull lips. I found her with much better knowledge about the “poisonous gas” accompanying the “bomb” explosion this time and also about the related treatments than what I knew.

I couldn’t comprehend what effects the “bomb” explosion had brought, while she taught me that the white blood corpuscle counts of all bomb victims showed alarming decreases.  “In spite of whatever attempts to cure this, all Hiroshima people may be bound to die because of this, I am afraid,” she said.  This thought exposed her innermost worries, adding to our increasing apprehension.                  

—

I came back to the farm house at the foot of the hill, and tried a variety of cures the woman at the clinic spoke about.  First of all, I asked the old farmer’s wife to burn a big, big ball of moxa* (Chinese medicine: dried mugwort ignited over afflicted parts) on my back, assuring her that I would endure whatever pain of the possible skin burns.

I recalled what I had heard in the old days: the moxa treatment enhances an increase in white corpuscle count.  When moxa burned and the skin sizzled, I endured the stinging pain, imagining — in a sort of a religious belief — that my one white blood cell splits into two and then to four and so on.

Then  I went to the bank of the brook and reaped a big handful of dokudami (*Hauttuynia cordata) with cross-shaped white flowers, and had this medical herb brewed in a big tin kettle.  I took in the blackened herb extract in big gulps.

Though the white wart in my mouth remained in pea-size and the perimeter inflammation stayed unchanged, I wondered and wondered whether I could leave it as it was or whether it would develop into a more serious case if left in such a state.  At last, I decided to resect it all by myself.

I boiled water in a caldron of the house and sterilized a small nickel scissors in it, and sat at the house veranda overlooking the garden with an old hand mirror with blurred reflection.

The old hand mirror vaguely showed an ugly, contorted face dripping saliva from the whitish, moss-coated tongue.  The sight was unpleasant, even to me, to look at.  I raised the gray lump of swelling in my mouth, applied the scissors to it, glanced at the sky and then closed my eyes.

I didn’t realize which came first, a blinding pain running through my whole frame or my fingers’ pressure on the scissors.  My hand felt the resection, and a sticky lump of meat like fish gills dropped down onto the tongue.

Annoyed by my wild cry, my contorted face and the cracked hand mirror showing the reverse side coated with scarlet mercury, the old wife ran up to me and found me lying flat on my face in the veranda.  After a quick glance she understood what I had done and frowned at me, saying, “See what a horrible thing you have done!”

A big hole, almost showing a bore on my face, appeared inside my mouth.  I grated cucumbers hard to obtain the juice.  It eventually served as my gargle as well as disinfectant.  Fresh vegetables seemed to be linked with my life.

A roadside pharmacy wouldn’t sell me, a stranger, even a drop of Oxydol* (a drug, containing hydrogen peroxide).  Therefore, cucumber juice was the only primitive disinfectant.  After four or five days of this wild self-cure, I began to feel in my whole frame a song of triumph of my life welling up, although I wasn’t sure whether the sour dokudami juice or rough treatment had hit the target. Day by day the wound in my mouth became smaller with less swelling, and the wound on my sole also healed, leaving an ugly gleaming sore.  Relieved, I looked at the sky so full of blessings and friendship.

However, a contusion in my chest which ached occasionally and also a bruise on my face seem to require a medical check-up.  So I decided, anyhow, to go to O– city for it.  With words of thanks and farewell to the farmer’s family, I left this village at the foot of a mountain on an early October morning on an ox-cart bound for Hiroshima. 

On the highway, an endless line of cars and carts fully laden with household effects and people on foot were moving toward Hiroshima.  In less than two months after the disaster, Hiroshima has become considerably lively.  Street stalls were lined up in the former busiest quarters, and old jazz music was heard at an eating shack.

Here and there lively nail-hammering sound reached my ears, telling me the vigor of incorrigible human beings bent on rebuilding our town.  Amid all such noises my ox-cart proceeded sedately with slow but sure steps like an ancient palace cart.

—

I had to line up at the Hiroshima station at night to obtain a ticket to O– city. To kill time until my turn for the ticket came, a neighbor, a Mr. S–, who had built a little shack in a lot next to my old premises was kind enough to let me rest a while.

The shack was a small 4.5-mat* (app. 15 square meters) affair built with lumber which had somehow remained tolerably intact and roof tiles once under fire, but a considerably well-built one at the hands of a professional carpenter, with a 1-meter square furnace in the middle of the room and a hanging adjustable hook seemingly made of an old nail.  The furnace had a pair of tongs made out of electric wires.

Mr. S–, who had been away in Kyushu on business on the day of the fatal blast, told me, “I asked at all places for the whereabouts of my family and finally found my wife and baby dead in our house.  Their bones were discovered under a thick wall, in a breast-feeding posture.”  He pointed to a small box at the top of a small shelf, then suddenly got up and reached for the box, in which I saw small pieces of bones like dried flower petals.  The bones crinkled on the palm of the baby’s father.

After sundown a furnace fire was made with beams and roof ridges that escaped the fire. White smoke coiled at the ceiling and left through cracks in the door.  Each of us hung a portable cooker in the furnace.

An old man Mr. Y– sat in front of a piece of paper, hung on a column in the room, on which was written “Tenri-ou-no-mikoto” (*Lord of Natural Laws” of the Tenri Sect) and began his evening worship.  With his back ram-rod straight and clad in a velvet vest, he raised and flattered both hands and earnestly repeated his prayer, “…… sekikomu … ichiretsu sumashite kanrodai …” (*incomprehensible sound)

My eyes were pasted to his back, my mind wondering what characters fit this mysterious prayer.  Mr. Y–, I have heard, had wondered about from his young age as a ship stoker, visiting various ports, and also was an itinerant patent medicine salesman in the old-time hand-covers and gaiters singing old melodies in far corners of the country.  He had long kept himself away from his family, I was told.  So I hadn’t known anything about his religion at all.

With his family gone because of the bomb, this old man was left all alone and may have found this religion as the only rope to cling to.  His flashy — almost comical — carriage in his prayer left me wondering a lot.  Anyhow, he was at least a happy man believing in the existence of the divinity based on a mere piece of paper.  After his prayer with repeated hand-flattering, he slowly bowed three times and then prayed in clear words understandable to me for the peaceful rest of those who had perished and for the heavenly grace bestowed on himself.

—

In my moments of relief after the meal, I heard foot steps trampling on gravels and broken pieces of roof tiles.  Somebody has come.  The fishmonger I had known came in, saying “Good evening, everybody finished his meal?”  Not located close enough before, he and the two in the cottage hadn’t been intimate, but now that only a small number of “houses” stand scattered, the inhabitants are all neighbors.  Before the bomb people lived all differently, but now survivors all live in small shacks and, as I saw, they now talked very frankly to each other.

The jocular and good-hearted fishmonger, it seemed, was even enjoying the present easy-going, free and changing lifestyle.  He visited our shack with no constraint like a country young man who calls on somebody casually for fun, crossing over a mountain pass.  He said, “Today I have something good. Please take one each”, taking out a foreign cigarette pack from his pocket.  Mr. Y– took the pack in his hand, brought it close to the tip of his nose and examined it cross-eyed.  He said, “Looks like a foreign cigarette pack.  How did you get it?” and handed it to the person seated next to him.

“When I went over to the “K” Bridge today, I happened to stop over where my woman (my wife) had died and prayed for her, when a jeep approached and the driver seemed to have watched me intensely for a time.  Then an American soldier came out and began speaking yakity-yaks.  I surmised that he was asking me what I was doing, sitting on the burnt ground and praying.  Hence this is what I did.”  So saying, the fishmonger clenched his right hand, then put out the little finger, opened the eyes wide and cried, “PIKA-DON!!” (*flash-bang), and stretched his arms as if grasping thin air and laid himself down by the fire place, “dead.” He went on, “Then I pointed my finger to the earth where my wife had died, and mimicked crying.  Whereupon the soldier kept his eyes on me as if saying, “Poor thing!” and then gave me this,” and laughed loudly.  Everyone listening laughed too.

“Do you think the American would take the little finger as your woman?” asked Mr. S.  “Well, the little finger wouldn’t mean a woman or lover, eh?  How inconvenient!”  S laughed again.  This reminded me of the poor timid woman always going this way and that in the small shop under the thundering commands of the fishmonger.  

When alone, this man’s sole body would be thrown into biting solitude, and would shed tears over the untimely death of his poor wife.  Yet this man, he — even for a short moment — openly laughed with extravagant gestures when in company with others.  Perhaps his power to momentarily forget deep sorrow and be friendly may be the only treasure left to the poor man.

—

To buy a train ticket to “O” (*Onomichi, app. 60 kilometers from Hiroshima) city, I walked over to Hiroshima Station in the deep of night, looking at the three lights shining at the station entrance.  It was comforting to see small shacks here and there with lights on and people moving.  When I was at the end of a long, long line to wait for the ticket office to open, someone tapped me in the shoulder.  I turned back and found the daughter of an acquaintance. Both of us cried out, hugged and went into long story-telling of our respective courses of unnatural, painful and sorrowful dozens of days we had been through.  It had become fashionable in Hiroshima to exchange such information on and on.  Anyhow, this session calmed us down.

She said, “All my hair was gone and at last it has begun to grow now,” and turned up a part of the green neckerchief. 

On her white bare skin of the head was soft fluffy hair, like a baby’s, a centimeter long.  She pointed to her hair shapely coiled on her forehead and revealed, “This is a hairpiece,” sticking out her pretty tongue, which looked like a shellfish foot, for a split second.

The train I was on crossed a dark bridge under which a whitish water streak sparkled, blowing a long whistle and left the Delta City, leaving behind my memory of the dream-like two months.  (End)

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