Hiroshima (13 page)

The Struggle to Survive

Autumn breezes blew, and in the evenings goose bumps arose on bare arms; the season was changing. Before we knew it, it was September.

Defeat brought about a sudden change in the Japanese people. The town of Eba was set in its parochialism. It was a closed town in which people like us who came from the city were called “Outsider! Outsider!” and rejected absolutely. We outsiders were viewed with hostility. It wasn't easy to get work or food. Hunger oppressed us. For wages and for food, Mom and K
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ji worked day and night doing odd jobs for neighborhood farmers and fishermen.

In front of our three-family tenement was a field of barley, and the road on the far side of the field led to the crematorium halfway up Ebayama. Even though a month had passed since the dropping of the bomb, there was a continual procession of coffins, day in and day out, on the road to the crematorium. They were in plain sight from our door: bereaved family and friends, fore and aft, carrying the coffin on their shoulders, bundles of wood in their arms, heading for the crematorium.

When processions to the crematorium appeared, I accompanied them and carried the bundles of wood for the old people. The crematorium was shaded by huge cryptomeria trees, so it was dark even during the day. The entry had bars over the windows, all rusty and bent and sprung. When you went inside, there were three open ovens, surrounded with stones, where coffins rested. To the side were piles of bones and ashes, discarded. You set the coffin on the designated spot, stuck the wood you'd brought around it, lit the fire, and watched as the corpse burned.

I sat on a rock and watched the coffins burning and became completely inured to the sight. As the flames rose, the air inside the coffins expanded and swelled, the wood blew apart with a loud noise, and you could see the corpses inside clearly. As the smell of burning hair grew strong and the flames reached the corpses, their sinews contracted, so the bodies appeared to sit up. Then they fell back, flesh burned, and fat bubbled and flowed. I saw this any number of times and thought that cremating human beings was just like roasting fish on a grill. When one side starts to burn, the fish curls up: the principle is the same with human beings.

I helped out at cremations because in return they gave me rice balls and mugwort dumplings. Seeing a procession heading for the crematorium, I was happy: “This means food!” I was really wretchedly hungry.

One day Uncle Y., repatriated from the Navy, dropped in with his young son. The dashing mien of his officer days was gone, and he was haggard. He had a knapsack on his back. Uncle Y. took a can of beef from the knapsack for us to eat. I savored the taste of the meat: “Never dreamed anything could be this delicious!” That night I listened in on the conversation between Mom and Uncle Y. When the talk turned to his family, Uncle Y.'s expression fell. With the infant in his arms, he said: “In the flash-boom, my wife was protecting this boy when she was pinned under the house, caught by large beams. She couldn't free herself, so she asked a neighbor who was fleeing to take the boy along, and she entrusted the child to him; she burned to death.” His shoulders sagged. He spoke forlornly of learning of his wife's death from the neighbor who had escaped with the child.

Uncle Y.'s house was in Koami-ch
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, and once when Mother was busy, my sister Eiko and I went to visit. I remember being struck by how beautiful Uncle Y.'s wife was. As we were leaving, she gave us several summer tangerines. That this gentle, beautiful woman desperately protected her child and then was burned to death. . . . Uncle Y. told one happy memory of his wife after another. He had truly loved her.

Uncle Y. asked Mom if he could leave the child with us because he was going to look for work and couldn't take the child with him. In return, Mom asked him to go to the temple on the border between Hiroshima and Shimane to which Akira had been evacuated and bring him home. He was on her mind every day.

The next day Uncle Y. and K
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ji set off to get Akira. There was no public transportation, so they walked. It took three days to get Akira and bring him back. If they had gone two or three days later, they said, Akira would have been sent to an orphanage. Families had already come for the other children who had evacuated with him, one after the other, and they had gone off joyfully. How forlorn Akira must have been, seeing them leave! Only a very few children remained, the temple was empty, and the chief priest—“Your families were wiped out in the atomic bomb. Resign yourselves to that fact.”—had addressed the ceremonial last words to the dead. At first Akira blamed Mom for having caused him bitter, sad thoughts, but when he learned from Mom of the deaths of Dad, Eiko, and Susumu, the tears came streaming. He cried on and on, his shoulders shaking.

With Akira and N., whom Uncle Y. left with us, the one six-by-nine room that was our household held a family of six; our postwar life started once again. Hunger was on the prowl, as always, and the whole family fought it. The milk in Mom's breasts dried up, and in her desire for milk, the baby—we had named her Tomoko—chewed frantically on Mom's empty breasts as she cried. In the neighborhood Mom inquired about rice desperately and finally obtained four pounds. She made a thick broth and covered absorbent cotton with gauze shaped into a nipple. Soaking it in the thick broth, she put it in Tomoko's mouth. Because Mom went out to work, the task of feeding Tomoko the ersatz milk fell to me. Tomoko's face had been like a monkey's, but with each day it became more expressive and cute. Nestling my cheek to hers, I quickly made the broth and fed her.

On the night of September 17, Typhoon Makurazaki came ashore on Kyushu's Cape Makura and raged over the Ch
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goku region and Shikoku. The roar of the wind and the heavy pelting rain kept us awake; we were drowsing when we heard noises at the back wall and knew someone was breaking into the shed in back. We all worried and couldn't sleep a wink. Time passed. The typhoon departed, and next morning we peeked into the back shed, and there was a man, dead. He had died on the road, away from home. I thought, how sad! Pursued by the storm, he'd broken into the shed to rest his weakened body and had died a painful death. Such road deaths were occurring all over Eba. People who had been hit by the atomic bomb and found their way here from the city, exhausted, died. Typhoon Makurazaki caused Hiroshima's rivers to flood, washed out bridges, swept away dirt and sand, flooded people's houses, and left behind major damage. The dead: 1,997 people who'd been burned out by the atomic bomb and were now assailed by wind and water. Houses completely destroyed: 2,101. Bomb victims had been set a harsh, twofold trial: the houses they'd built with a sense of relief at having survived the bomb, were blown away, and they were left homeless.

To feed our family of six, Mom couldn't make ends meet with her part-time jobs, so she decided to stave off crisis by selling the belongings we'd entrusted to the acquaintance in the town outside Hiroshima. Mom, K
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ji, and I begged and borrowed a cart in the neighborhood and set off with it to retrieve the belongings. The house of the acquaintance was in a farm village called Iimuro, far from the city. We left early in the morning and pulled the cart hour after hour. It was after noon before we got there.

When Mom announced that we'd come, the acquaintance was surprised and nervous. Mom said, “Thanks for helping us out. We've come to retrieve the household effects we left with you.” The woman's attitude changed abruptly, and she replied curtly, “The river flooded in Typhoon Makurazaki. Your things all washed away!” We looked at the wall of her house, and a waterline was still visible about three feet above ground level. No matter how you figured, it didn't make sense that all the stuff we'd entrusted got washed away. Mom persisted, “It can't all be gone.” The acquaintance bared her anger and shouted at Mom: “If I say it's gone, it's gone!”

As this vigorous back-and-forth—“It's here!” “No, it's gone!”—was going on in the entry, a child of about first-grade age came home. Seeing him, I was astonished. The clothes he had on were my best clothes. I pointed that out: “The clothes this kid is wearing are mine!” Flustered, the acquaintance said, “I bought those clothes!” and continued to feign innocence. I replied, “There's a hole in the right pocket and a candy smear in the left pocket!” Saying nothing, Mom turned out the pockets. There, just as I'd said, was the hole and the smear. The acquaintance who'd feigned innocence got all flustered and made the excuse, “Now that you mention it, my child's clothes wore out, so—sorry—but I borrowed it.”

Mom said, “I'll just check inside!” Pushing past the woman who was blocking the door, she went inside. In her determined action, I thought, I was seeing a mother's strength. Household effects were piled helter-skelter at the back of the dirt-floored room, and among them were several items we'd entrusted to them. A box in a drawer pulled out of the dresser was stuffed with Mom's clothes. Mom said they were hers. The acquaintance admitted it reluctantly, but this time she barked at Mom, “Those are the only things I was barely able to save from the flood! You should thank me!” Figuring other stuff was still hidden, Mom made as if to search, and the woman tried to throw us out: “There's no more! Leave!” Mom ran her eye quickly around the room and spotted three things that Dad had been at work on—a lacquered ink box and two clasps to wear with fancy kimono. She grabbed them. Cursed by the foul mouth of the acquaintance, we carried out the boxes with dozens of Mom's clothes, loaded them on the cart, and left.

What a bad taste that left! On the way back, Mom kept grumbling: “When she was in trouble, Dad really helped her out. I'd never have expected such ingratitude.” That acquaintance had concluded that the whole Nakazawa family was wiped out in the flash-boom and took for herself the stuff we'd entrusted to her. Japan's defeat caused sudden change in all the Japanese. Yesterday's friend became today's enemy, and a sordid struggle to survive raged throughout Japan. War was the greatest evil, robbing us of even our hearts.

The unfinished ink box we'd retrieved had a design, a sailboat advancing among moonlit waves, and half the gold leaf had been applied. The
clasps had pictures: a hawk sitting in a red maple, a carp leaping. These three are the only examples of Dad's work that survive.

Among the phrases popular after the war was “bamboo-shoot living.” It means stripping away layer after layer until you get down to
the very core. One after the other, Mom's precious clothes that we'd retrieved from the acquaintance's house disappeared and turned into food—rice, potatoes.

Outsiders

People said nothing would grow in the ashes of Hiroshima for seventy-five years and thought that it had become wholly a city of death. But weeds flourished, and on October 11, trolley cars went into operation on all the routes, beginning to run among the ruins. The vital force of human beings is an amazing thing. One day Eba was thrown into an uproar. The rumor spread that the U.S. army would come ashore, fully equipped, at Ujina Harbor, that all males would be castrated, all women raped. The report spread instantaneously, even among us children, and people reported to each other where the U.S. troops were at any moment. Curiosity overcame fear, and one among the local brats, I went to watch.

On first sight, the American soldiers truly shocked me. Red faces, white faces, black faces, blue eyes, brown eyes. Huge, goblinlike noses, golden hair, silver hair, enormous height. No matter which one I looked at, I was agog. As they approached, children screamed and fled. But quickly we grew accustomed to chocolates and chewing gum thrown from jeeps and were amazed—“This candy doesn't disappear no matter how long you chew it!” We ran after the American jeeps, calling for chewing gum. The rumor that “males would all be castrated, women would all be raped” died quickly. I boasted among the kids about the chewing gum I got and chewed it all day. My jaw swelled up so much I couldn't move it. When I went to bed, I wrapped the gum in newsprint and kept it carefully by my pillow. Next morning when I unwrapped it, the newsprint stuck fast to it and the ink transferred onto the gum. I chewed the mixture of gum, newsprint, and ink for nearly a week. Back then, every day was a hungry day.

Uncle H., the second of Dad's brothers, had built a shack in Takaj
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-machi. He was opening a business painting clogs, the Nakazawa family's craft for generations, so he came to ask Mom to work for him. Uncle H. had lived in Zaimoku-ch
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, right at Ground Zero. On the day of the atomic bomb, he had set out by bike for the town of Koi, on business, and en route was bathed in the hot rays of the atomic bomb. The left side of his body was burned, and he was sent flying, but miraculously he survived. The house directly below the atomic bomb disappeared instantly, his wife and all; he couldn't even find her bones. Uncle H. was living with his oldest daughter A., who'd been evacuated and survived—just the two of them. When Dad was imprisoned as a thought criminal, it had been Uncle H. who came forward as guarantor and secured his release. He was an optimist—“The things of this world end here. They're not to be carried over into the next world” was a favorite saying—who drummed, sang, danced, and enjoyed life.

Uncle K., the third brother, came to live next door to Uncle H. His wife, too, had been burned to death, and he lived with his daughter S., the same age as I—just the two of them. S. had been bathed in the radioactive rain; her hair fell out, and she became as bald as a monk. Especially for a girl, that was both pathetic and weird. Aunt M., the oldest of the Nakazawa daughters, built a shack in Funairi and settled in. The surviving members of the Nakazawa clan began to gather in the ruins. But the day the atomic bomb was dropped, six relatives on my father's side and seven on my mother's side had been wiped out instantaneously.