Hiroshima (11 page)

As for the nine-by-twelve room behind the entryway where Eiko had been, we had a hard time digging it out because the second story, utterly destroyed, was piled atop it. K
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ji kept digging, and a graceful, girlish skull and bones emerged. I said, “That's Eiko,” and K
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ji nodded silently. As I transferred her bones to the bucket, I remembered times I'd spent with Eiko.

We'd always gone to school together. Eiko's voice seemed even now to be calling to me to hurry up: “Keiji! I'm leaving!” Looking very serious, she said she'd teach me the songs she'd learned in music class, and I could hear her singing, “Beautiful flowers, mums white and yellow.” When we set off for Ninoshima with a note of introduction from a neighbor to try to buy potatoes, she saw me dressed for the excursion, hugged me, and said, “Keiji, you look cool!” Worried she'd never let me go, I screamed, “Let me go! Hands off!” A scene at the entryway floated up, a day when snow fell and piled up. It was a cold morning. When Eiko opened the window and exhaled, her breath turned white. She shouted for joy; it was pretty, so she wanted me to join her and made me stand at the window and exhale with her. Eiko crying when she was suspected of being the thief at school. The times we went to catch grasshoppers or buy dumplings in Eba. The time Eiko hid and—perhaps because of malnutrition on account of the food shortage—took an afternoon nap, and Mom found out and scolded her: “Sleep this much, and you'll die early!”

As I stared at Eiko's skull, I thought that everything had happened just as Mom had predicted. I pondered Mom's words: “Crushed by the beams, Eiko didn't utter a peep. It was an instant death, so it was an easy death—I'm glad for that.”

The three sets of bones filled the bucket. Exhausted, K
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ji and I squatted in the ashes. The sun sizzled. The neighborhood air raid trench in front of our house had caved in, and on a whim I peeked inside. The fierce flames must have blown clear through the trench. Where usually there were puddles of water, the dirt had been baked white, like desert sand.

Suddenly, in a corner of the doorway, I saw something I hadn't expected: dried cat. It was our cat, utterly transformed. It was thin, only fur. I wondered what had happened. I'd been told that if you feed dogs for three days, they never forget you, but that cats, no matter how you dote on them, are unfeeling, forget you, and run off. But I realized that cats remember you even longer than dogs. Blackie had found her way home through the fierce flames. But unable to escape the raging sea of fire, she'd run to the air raid trench and been baked, the liquid part of her sucked out. She had died and become desiccated cat. You'd have thought Blackie's fur would have blown away in the wind, but now it was only the fur that remained. How sad!

When it rained, Blackie would come in from outside and leave her paw prints—they looked like plum blossoms—on the floor mats. Smiling wryly—“Flower-viewing! Flower-viewing!”—Mom would take a rag and wipe them away. One winter night, she crawled up under my blanket, and when, having difficulty breathing, I woke and rolled back the blanket, Blackie was lying across my warm chest, asleep. Late one night the whole house woke to Eiko's shrieks, and when we looked at Eiko's blanket, Blackie had a mouse in her teeth and was playing with it. Mom chased her away with a broom, and the house was in an uproar. It was fun to watch Blackie react when she sniffed a fart. We had Susumu hold Blackie's neck and blew farts her way; Blackie sneezed a lot, then ran off in distress. We'd heard that if in a dark room you rubbed a piece of hard rubber over the cat's fur, you'd generate static electricity and it would look like an electric current was flowing. So we had Susumu hold Blackie, and I stroked Blackie's back for all I was worth. But we didn't see any static electricity, and Blackie stretched and as if saying, “Enough already,” grew angry and mewed. All these memories were happy ones. I said goodbye to the flat, desiccated cat Blackie had become and left the trench. I realized that our family was no longer the same.

In the City of Death

During the war, concrete cisterns stood in every entryway. They were three by three feet, filled with water, and labeled “fire-fighting water.” The tanks were for putting out the fires started by bombs; they were required. In the twinkling of an eye, with the dropping of a single atomic bomb, Hiroshima, biggest city in the region, was burned out. The only things still standing in the burned-out waste as far as the eye could see were the tanks of “fire-fighting water.” Tanks beyond counting lay scattered way off into the distance. Approach these tanks thinking to use their water to wash off your dirt-smeared body, and you were in for a shock.

The tanks held horrific corpses—red, half-burned, swollen, eyes glaring at the sky. Staring again at the corpses, I was surprised: people burned and dead in water—well, that's how they swell up. Faces had swollen, round like melons a foot in diameter; bodies swelled three times normal size. Every single tank held corpses—red, swollen, like the giant guardian gods at temple entrances. Examine these corpses closely, and you noticed that with all the mother-and-child corpses, the mother's arms were wrapped around the child, holding it close. The embrace was tight so that when the corpses swelled up, the child's face was engulfed by the mother's breasts. Mothers had protected their children desperately to the very last. With brother-and-sister corpses, brother wrapped his arms around sister and died holding her tight. They were deaths befitting older brothers—the desire to save their sisters was evident.

I went around looking at cisterns, thinking, “How hot it must have been.” When the atomic bomb exploded 750 yards above Hiroshima, the temperature at the center was millions of degrees, and its heat rays of 9,000 degrees consumed those who were outdoors. It smashed the houses with a blast of more than 140 miles an hour, and people fortunate enough to be indoors crawled their way out of flattened houses. Just when they thought they'd escaped, they were surrounded by the flames, chased by the fire, and cornered. Unable to endure the heat, they'd jumped into the three-foot-square tanks and burned to death. When I realized all this, I trembled with rage at the cruelty of the atomic bomb.

At last I found a tank that contained no corpses and, with the water remaining in the bottom, washed the dust off my body. The city had become a burned-out plain as far as the eye could see. Nothing moved except smoke rising from where the corpses were cremated. Shifting with the wind, the nauseating stench of death waxed and waned in the air above the scorched earth. K
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ji suggested we take a look downtown before we went home, and holding the bucket filled with the bones of Dad, Eiko, and Susumu, I got on the back of the bike. K
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ji said, “I'm going to fly. So hold tight!” and started pedaling. He steered the bike toward Dobashi, Hiroshima's western business district.

The telephone poles to left and right were scorched but still standing and suspended from them, quite like long snakes, were the thick lead tubes of telephone wires; apparently fused at high temperature, they sagged from the poles off into the distance. Seeing a trolley car charred and blown a full five yards off its track, I marveled at the force of the blast: “Such heavy metal objects—even they went flying!” K
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ji steered his bike through a city of death in which there was no trace of a living person. When we neared Dobashi, the stench of death was the worst of all. The smell was so bad we had trouble breathing. Red light district, movie theaters, and restaurants were clustered in Dobashi; most people were still asleep when the atomic bomb fell, and they were crushed instantaneously in their houses. That's probably why the number of corpses was especially large throughout Dobashi. The smell of these corpses decomposing was something else. Water tanks in this part of town were filled with a dozen or more corpses, piled one atop the other. Surrounded by flames and unable to bear the heat, people had jumped into the water tanks simultaneously, so it was natural that the corpses had piled up.

On the asphalt road sloping up into the wartime entertainment quarter, a caricature had been drawn of U.S. President Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Churchill, and beside it was written, “U.S.-G.B. Beasts.” On entering or leaving the entertainment quarter, you were supposed to trample on the hated “U.S.-G.B. Beasts.” I thought back to happy memories of days when Dad had taken me up this slope to see movies. The powerful scene in
Sugata Sanshir
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when the hero and his nemesis duel in the field. The final scene with Sanshir
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on his feet facing the hill at sunrise. The scene in
Tange Sazen
where Sazen panics after throwing the precious urn into the river.
[1]
Dobashi was full of happy memories of my infancy. That Dobashi had disappeared, become a town of rubble. I took a last look, and we left.

Entering T
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ka-machi, we turned left, and passed the city trolley stops—Sakan-ch
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, Aioibashi—and there was the Honkawa, the central river running through Hiroshima. The T-shaped bridge over the Honkawa is Aioi Bridge. Its railings had fallen, the roadway was twisted and undulating, and holes had opened up. This bridge was at the epicenter of the atomic bombing; the blast hit from directly overhead. It hit the surface of the river and bounced back, and the bridge was swollen and twisted as if by pressure from beneath. I looked down from the bridge at the river, and from one bank to the other it was a mass of corpses, red and swollen, their big bellies piercing the surface of the water; with the ebb and flow of the tide, they floated upstream and down. Their intestines were rotting, and gas built up in their stomachs. Swollen bellies popped from the pressure of the gas, water poured into the stomachs, the corpses grew heavy, and one after the other, trailing bubbles, they sank to the bottom. Burned tree trunks clustered on the surface, and the fat-bellied corpses drifted and bumped into those trees, veered and went floating off, just like pinballs in a pinball machine. These were people who, pursued by the raging fires, jumped into the river or, throats dry from burns, waded in seeking water and died.

At Kamiya-ch
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we turned right, onto the city trolley street connecting Bank Street and City Hall. Reaching the Hakushima Shrine trolley stop, we were astonished. The camphor tree at Kokutaiji, so huge that five adults joining hands couldn't reach around it, was down, fallen onto the trolley street. K
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ji steered the bike all over the ruins of the city. Crossing Sumiyoshi Bridge, we went along the bank of the lower Honkawa toward Eba. As if racing with us, corpses were being pushed down the river toward its mouth. The bucket I was holding shook as the bicycle bumped along, and the skulls inside clattered against each other. That sad sound—like the cries of Dad, Eiko, and Susumu—echoed in my ears ever after.

K
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ji pedaled hard, and the bike sped up. His back trembled, and I realized he was crying. Mom greeted us on our return with, “Thank you.” When I gave her the bucket I was carrying, she put it in a corner of the room: “Now my heart's at ease.” That night, exhausted, we turned in early.

The burns on the back of my head and my neck hadn't healed, so I slept face down. I couldn't sleep on my back because the burns would open. The burns suppurated and broke, and I closed my mouth against the odor of oozing pus. In the night, a beam of light fell on my eyes, and I awoke: in the unsteady lamplight, I saw Mom. Face full of grief, she was staring at the skulls of Dad, Eiko, and Susumu. That face with its thousand emotions frightened me, and I was quick to pull the blanket up over my head. Poor woman, repressing her desire to raise her voice and weep and cry!

The Fires Burning the Corpses

Every single day was a struggle to ensure that we had food and could survive. Mom worked herself to the bone helping the M. family and in other ways, urged us on desperately in our search for food, and staved off hunger by making stew when she could get potatoes or other vegetables. Because of malnutrition, my legs developed many boils. Legs dragging, I went every day in search of food. One day my aunt (Mom's younger sister) who had married into the Tsutsui family dropped by unexpectedly.

She came because she'd heard from neighbors that Mom had survived. This Tsutsui aunt had a weak constitution; simply by looking at her, you could tell she was sick. Her Tsutsui in-laws had been pinned under their house and burned to death, and her husband and three children were missing. To try and learn whether they had survived, she searched daily, going by foot to the Hiroshima relief stations and refugee sites. That day, having turned up hopeful news, she said she was really happy and sat down on the floor. She'd heard from a classmate of her oldest daughter, Reiko, who went to a girls' higher school, that Reiko had fled to the suburb of Kabe. She told Mom, “I'm going tomorrow to Kabe. Can I stay here tonight?” and lay down.

My aunt went to sleep beside me. She slept on, snoring loudly. I awoke in the middle of the night because of a strange sound, as if someone were spraying water, and all around her was bloody stool. On seeing her own bloody stool sprayed about, she jumped up in shock and rushed to wipe it up with a cloth and kept apologizing, “Sorry! Sorry!” She said she herself had been utterly unaware that she'd been passing stool. She complained, “How strange!”