Hiroshima (12 page)

Walking about Hiroshima, she'd been contaminated with radioactivity, and the disintegration of her cells had already started. The next morning she said she had to get to Kabe. Mom stopped her: “In your weakened state, that's impossible! Regain your strength first!” But she was worried about her daughter, so she wouldn't listen. She set out, and Mom saw her off, saying again and again, “I'm worried . . . worried.”

Three days passed. She didn't return. That evening, very worried, Mom suddenly spoke about going to look for her. She picked up the baby. K
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ji and I both got ready, and all of us headed for Kabe. There was no public transportation, so we walked, trudging along the trolley street that runs from Eba to Yokogawa. Passing the site where the concrete wall of Kanzaki Elementary School lay rippled and fallen, I saw the wall again: “Yes, except for that wall. . . .” Near the playground an air raid trench had been dug; I peeked inside and was astonished. It was filled with small slim skeletons—one glance told me they were the bones of children. The kids had gone to school, and the school building had collapsed in the blast. Those lucky enough to survive had rushed for safety to the air raid trench and, engulfed in the fire, they'd burned to death. Among these bones lying around were the bones of my first-grade classmates. I shuddered.

Darkness fell, the city of rubble was painted pitch-black, and the way ahead closed in. Rain began to fall, and Mom quickly wrapped the baby in towels. We walked on through rain that continued to fall softly. There was virtually no light, and we guided ourselves by the trolley tracks, which gave off a dull gleam. When we got to Dobashi, the stench of death was fierce, and it nauseated us; it was so bad we had difficulty breathing. Then a fearsome thing happened.

It felt like countless pebbles were being hurled against my body; I couldn't even open my eyes. When I squinted and looked closely, the white short-sleeved shirt I was wearing blackened even as I watched; my whole body turned black. Quickly I looked at Mom, the baby, and K
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ji, and before my very eyes the white towel in which the baby was wrapped, the white apron Mom was wearing, and K
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ji's white shirt were all dyed black. When the feeling of being bombarded by pebbles ended, a black wave started wriggling all over me. “What's this? What's this?” I looked closer and was shocked. Round fat flies had leapt onto our bodies, stuck there, and our bodies had turned black all over.

In Dobashi in particular, there were so many piled-up corpses decomposing that larvae bred, quickly matured into flies in the heat, and swarmed. Mom and K
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ji both shrieked at the onslaught of the horrific number of flies that had bred on human bodies. Frantically brushing off flies, we dashed through Dobashi. We even had the illusion the flies would eat us alive. Thinking it strange that charred corpses should be wearing white shirts, I looked closer and saw it was larvae breeding. Such corpses were everywhere. In the death streets of Hiroshima, the only things moving energetically were the flies.

We walked on silently through Teramachi, through Yokogawa, and then toward Kabe along the
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ta, chief of the seven rivers running through Hiroshima. In a bamboo grove on the riverbank at Gion-ch
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, lots of people who had fled there were lying on the ground, moaning. Toward dawn we got to Kabe and napped on the roadside. When K
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ji pushed me to waken me, the morning sun hit my eyes. I hadn't had enough sleep and wasn't feeling well, as if my stomach was full of vinegar. We walked around to the schools and assembly points for bomb victims
who'd fled there. Tottering among people suffering from the burns and injuries we'd become entirely inured to, we asked after the Tsutsui aunt and her daughter Reiko. Mom went from one site to the next, inquiring of those in charge. Seeing her desperate search, I sensed the bond that unites sisters.

Walking all around Kabe, we became exhausted. Complaining about the fruitless effort, Mom said, “If we can't find her after all this searching, she may have died on the way and never got here.” We gave our tired legs a rest at the gate of a temple that fronted the bus road. When we entered the temple precincts, smoke was rising: they were cremating corpses. Bones were piled up at the side, and a foul stench like that of burning hair filled the air. Dozens of white slips, pasted on temple pillars and wall, were fluttering in the wind.

Mom looked up at the slips of paper fluttering overhead and let out a shocked, “Oh!” She pointed to a spot where there were lots of slips. Lo and behold, there on a slip was the name and age of the Tsutsui aunt, stating that she had died and that her body had already been consigned to the flames. I felt a strange connection, as if the dead aunt had called to us. We told the temple people we wanted to take her bones back with us, but her bones had been mixed in with the pile of bones, and it wasn't possible to know which bones were whose. Our only course was to choose some bones from the pile, wrap them in paper, and carry them home. The fate of Reiko, said to have fled to Kabe, remained utterly unclear. With all five members dead, the family line of the Tsutsui clan had come to an end. Dragging our exhausted feet, we found our way back to the rubbled city of death.

A crowd had gathered on the trolley street near T
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ka-machi and was raising a ruckus, so we went to see and found a round water tank fifteen feet in diameter, towering fifteen feet high. One side of the tank had split, and naked men were climbing up into that crack and jumping down into the tank. “What on earth are they doing?” They were spearing dozens of pickled white radishes with a pole, throwing them out, and taking them home. The huge round tank was for storing pickled radishes. This area was the site of a market. Mom told K
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ji to go get some. K
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ji stripped to the skin, crawled up the tank, and jumped in. We waited for the radishes he threw out and grabbed them. K
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ji emerged from the tank with his whole body drenched in vinegar; he smelled like a drunk and looked so strange I had to laugh. Mom laughed along with me. It was the first time she had felt like laughing since the atomic bomb fell.

Dashing about the burned-out waste, I found a charred baby buggy—only its metal parts remained—and piled the radishes onto it. Digging in the burned ground, Mom found usable bowls, plates, pots, and axes, and added them. The iron wheels clattered on the asphalt, and the scorched baby buggy—metal only—served its purpose well. In the surrounding
ruins, people had put up a forest of tin and wooden placards to tell missing family members where their families were now. Lots of people were still seeking information about their families.

At the Eba rifle range, as always, the flames from the cremations shot up into the air, scorching the night sky, and the stench of death filled the air. These cremation fires continued night and day for nearly two months after the surrender. So you know they trucked in a huge number of corpses. Some said one hundred thousand people died in Hiroshima with the dropping of the atomic bomb, some said two hundred thousand; the exact figure is unknown.

But one thing was certain: in an instant a bustling city was wiped out and buried in corpses. And another thing, too: for the bomb victims who survived, the suffering and unease that began that day, August 6, last forever.

Late in volume II, Gen, his mother, and the baby, Tomoko, flee to Eba, the village at the southern tip of one of Hiroshima's fingers of land. The mountain Nakazawa depicts in the fourth panel is really only about one hundred feet high, but perhaps he emphasizes its size to reflect the perceptions of the child he was in 1945.

The three surviving Nakaokas (in the cartoon version, Nakazawa becomes Nakaoka) find refuge with an old friend of Gen's mother. But the old friend's mother-in-law and the two children of the Hayashi family immediately cast a pall on the welcome. Within a few pages, the children are tormenting Gen, making fun of his baldness, making Tomoko cry, and blaming their own thefts from the family pantry on Gen's mother. After a trip to the police station and the confession Gen's mother is forced to sign, Gen catches the thieving Hayashi children red-handed and then starts to take his revenge on the mother-in-law. Once more, the Nakaoka family sets out to find a place of refuge.