People who never saw Hiroshima before the bomb must wonder what the city used to be like.
In the distant past it was called not Hiroshima, ‘broad island’, but Ashihara, ‘reed plain’. It was a broad, reed-covered delta. In the Warring States Era, some four hundred years ago, the powerful Mōri Motonari built a castle here. Driven out by the Tokugawa shogun, Motonari moved west to Hagi in present-day Yamaguchi Prefecture. He was succeeded in Hiroshima by Fukushima Masanori,1 who expanded the castle and made it his seat.
But the house of Fukushima, too, lasted only one generation. Its successor, the Asano, flourished for thirteen generations before its long rule came to an end in the Meiji Restoration; Lord Asano Nagakoto2 of the Loyalist faction was the last of the line. In that era of revolution, neighbouring Chōshū rose to a position of great power, but Hiroshima was unable to display similar brilliance. Although Lord Nagakoto was granted the new aristocratic title of marquis and was himself a fine and noble individual, those who served him were said to be wanting in ardour. This fact can be useful in understanding the psychology of Hiroshima people in modern times.
The Hiroshima personality can be as bright as the scenery, but it can also be irresponsible and unsociable. In the local dialect, words are spoken lightly at the tip of the tongue, in stark contrast to the heaviness of the Tōhoku accent of north-eastern Japan. Still, as long as you didn’t take things too seriously or become too deeply involved, Hiroshima remained a bright and cheerful town with a good climate and material riches: a good place to live.
In terms of its topography, Hiroshima fanned out between the mountain range to the north and the Inland Sea to the south. Seven branches of the Ōta River flowed gently among the delta’s various neighbourhoods, spanned by countless bridges, all of them modern, clean, broad, white and long.
White-sailed fishing boats and small passenger boats would navigate well up into the river branches from Ujina Bay. Upstream, the river offered vivid reflections of the mountains.
The rivers of Hiroshima were beautiful – beautiful in a way that made you feel sleepy. The blue rivers themselves could have been asleep as they spread across the broad, even landscape. You couldn’t see that they were flowing or hear the pleasant sound of rapids or spend time gazing at gentle shallows. Even on freezing winter days, when snow blanketed the area, the sight of the rivers could induce that sleepy mood.
I liked Hiroshima’s rivers best on days when a heavy snow fell. The snow sealed off the various parts of town from each other and turned the city into a silent and uniformly silver world. Yet the seven rivers still flowed, unhurried, the water so clear that the white sand and greenish pebbles on the bottom gleamed through as always. The fine sand of the dry river banks was white, the pebbles white and brown and dark green. On occasion, there would be one that looked as if it had been dyed a pale red.
The surface of the water was a quiet pale blue, like that of a lake deep in the mountains. In winter it appeared to be covered with a thin, blue sheet of smoky glass or overspread with a delicate layer of waxed silken gauze. Each flake of snow pouring down on to it was gently absorbed and disappeared.
The map shows Hiroshima lying towards the west, but the city had a southern warmth, a languid and carefree air, due no doubt to the rivers and to the way its neighbourhoods spread towards the south like an open fan. With the exception of that southern side facing the water, the city was surrounded by mountains. Low and gently rolling, the mountains ran from one into another like the humps of a sleeping camel. Wherever you looked, the mountains were right there, visible even from the middle of the bustling city centre. I had not always lived in Hiroshima, and the nearness of the mountains surprised me.
Hiroshima Castle, too, seemed very near viewed from all parts of the city, rising up on its crumbling stone foundations in bold relief against the mountains. In its quiet tones of white, black and grey, the tall old castle provided the flat city with one sort of variation.
The young women of Hiroshima do not have the white skin and bold faces of mountain women; their colouring is generally dark. Some say the rivers tan their skin. The tide comes straight into the rivers from nearby Ujina Bay, ebbing and flowing several times a day, so it may make sense to speak of ‘river burn’.
Most of the young women are stocky. With their black hair and white teeth, they brim with youth, but they have an odd way of swaying when they walk, they run when they don’t need to, they avert their vacant eyes as if making fun of people, and on the bus they let their mouths hang open.
Occasionally you do see a tall girl with a bold and beautiful face, but the sound of her soft chatter – using only the tip of the tongue, as I mentioned earlier – can put people off.
Including such easy-to-be-with young women as these, the population of Hiroshima was said to be 400,000. One also used to hear 300,000 and 500,000. The wartime evacuation to the countryside appears to have reduced the figure greatly. Meanwhile, large numbers of military men had poured into the city from all parts of the nation. On 6 August there were, I think, about 400,000 people here.
Using a conservative estimate of one house for every four people, Hiroshima had about 100,000 houses. Before the 6 August attack, houses in every quarter – even historic buildings – had been torn down ruthlessly to create firebreaks. Yet as I looked at the city from the roof of the four-storey Red Cross Hospital just before 6 August, the houses were crammed together so haphazardly I had to wonder where the firebreaks could be.
This was the city above which, one morning at the height of summer, without warning, an eerie blue flash came from the sky.
I was staying in the house where my mother and younger sister lived in Hakushima Kukenchō. Situated on the north-eastern edge of the city, Hakushima was an old, established residential area. Many military men and office workers lived in this very middle-class neighbourhood, which meant that during the day it was full of housewives keeping to themselves behind closed doors.
Ours was an all-female household: my mother, my sister, her baby daughter and myself. My sister’s husband had been called up for the second time at the end of June, and we had no idea where he was.
I had come back from Tokyo at New Year’s, intending to wait until March and then take someone with me to dispose of my Tokyo house. Until the weather warmed up a bit, it was impossible to accomplish anything in Tokyo, where day and night you had to hide underground from the constant air raids.
The very first bombing of Tokyo had taken place on the rainy night of 30 October. Hit repeatedly by bombs and firebombs, Nishi-Kanda and the Nihonbashi area burned from eleven at night until after five in the morning. In the next raid, on 2 November, seventy planes appeared suddenly in the sky over Nerima, where I was living, and scattered bombs and firebombs here and there over the Musashi Plain stretching off to the west, where the houses were spaced more sparsely. People said two hundred bombs were dropped, one per one and a half city blocks. All around me, houses I knew well went up in smoke or were demolished.
I often used to joke with a female friend who lived nearby, another writer, about Admiral Tōgō Heihachirō’s3 dictum, ‘The enemy will come when you least expect him.’ Exhausted by the round-the-clock bombing of Tokyo and the shortage of food, I had come back to Hiroshima.
I never thought of Hiroshima as a safe place to live during the war, but I couldn’t come back to my home town empty-handed, either, so I was planning to retrieve the belongings I had left in Tokyo. March came and went, April came, and the danger of travelling to Tokyo only increased. From Tokyo to the west as far as Osaka and Kobe, eastern Japan was being subjected to ferocious bombing without a day’s let-up.
In May I suddenly took sick and was admitted to the Red Cross Hospital. I was there until 26 July. While in the hospital, I rented a house in the country, but factors like these delayed my departure.
On the morning of 6 August, I was sound asleep. On the night of the fifth, virtually all night long, repeated waves of bombers had hit Ube in Yamaguchi Prefecture. As I listened to the radio reports, the flames seemed to rise up before my eyes.
To the west of us in Yamaguchi Prefecture, one city after another had burnt: Hikari, Kudamatsu, Ube. That very night, Hiroshima too might be turned into a sea of flames. The radio also reported that Fukuyama, on the other side of Hiroshima from Ube, was undergoing its own firebomb attack, although the announcer later retracted the report as erroneous.
The air-raid alarm sounded in Hiroshima, too, and the neighbourhood group sent around a warning to be ready to flee at any moment. So, on the night of the fifth, sleep was out of the question.
At daybreak the red alert was lifted, and shortly after seven o’clock the yellow alert was lifted too. I went back to sleep. I usually slept late anyway, and since I had just been discharged from the hospital, I often slept till close to noon, which is why the others left me alone until that bright blue light flashed.
I was sound asleep inside the mosquito net. Some say the bomb fell at 8.10; some say 8.30. In any case, I dreamed that I was enveloped by a blue flash, like lightning at the bottom of the sea. Immediately afterwards came a terrible sound, loud enough to shake the earth. It was like an indescribably huge roll of thunder, and at the same moment the roof came crashing down with such force it was as if a gigantic boulder had broken from the mountaintop and fallen on the house. When I came to, I was standing in a cloud of plaster dust from the smashed walls around me, utterly dazed, struck dumb. I felt neither pain nor fear but only a strange, almost light-headed sort of calm. The bright early morning sunlight had been replaced by a gloom like that of a rainy-season evening.
The air raid on Kure came to mind, where the firebombs were said to have fallen like large, fluffy snowflakes. Wide-eyed, I searched in vain for firebombs amid the bare skeleton of the dark upper floor, where the window glass, the walls, the sliding paper doors separating my room from the next, and the roof had all been blasted away.
I imagined that forty or fifty firebombs had dropped next to me where I lay. Yet there was no flame, no smoke. And I was alive. How could I still be alive? It was too strange. I looked all around me, half expecting to see my dead body stretched out somewhere.
But in this upstairs room there was nothing to be seen, just a little pile of dirt with dust rising from it, shattered glass fragments and a small mound of roof-tile chunks, but no sign of my mosquito net or bedding or my bedside possessions – my air-raid jacket and hat, my watch, my books. There was no trace of the twelve pieces of luggage we had packed for the countryside and stored in the next room, as if someone had made off with them. The several large glass-doored bookcases holding the 3,000 volumes of the library of my sister’s husband: I had no idea where they had flown off to.
Inside the house, there was nothing to be seen, but outside, as far as the eye could see – which was much further than usual – there stretched one ruined house after another. The same was true of far-off parts of town. The headquarters of the Chūgoku shinbun newspaper in Hatchōbori and the radio station in Nagarekawa looked to me like silhouettes, deserted and empty.
All that was left of the house across the street was its stone gate. The house itself had been ruthlessly flattened. A young girl stood in the gate, looking dazed and drained of energy. She stared up at me, in full view on the upper floor, and exclaimed, ‘Oh!’ Then, in a subdued voice, she said, ‘You should come down from there right away!’
But there was no way I could get down. The front and back staircases were still intact, but both were blocked partway down by piles of debris taller than I was: boards, tiles, bamboo.
I asked the girl to summon the other members of my family, but even as I pinned my hopes on them, I felt certain that no one would ever come up to get me.
Smeared with blood, her face monstrously transformed, my sister came climbing partway up the stairs. Her white dress had turned bright red as if she had dyed it. Her jaw was held up by a white cloth wrapping, and her face was as purple and swollen as a pumpkin.
‘Is Mother alive?’ I asked at once.
‘Yes, she’s fine. She’s looking at you from the cemetery out back. The baby’s alive, too. Quick, come down.’
‘How am I supposed to do that? It looks impossible.’
Hearing that my mother was alive was such a relief, I felt the strength go out of me. My sister tried pushing at the stuff blocking the staircase, but she closed her eyes and seemed about to collapse against it.
‘Never mind,’ I called to her. ‘Go ahead, I’ll be right down.’
‘You’re probably not injured as badly as I am,’ she said. ‘Get yourself out of there if you can.’
As she said this, I noticed for the first time that the collar of my kimono was drenched in blood. The blood was dripping from my shoulder to my chest. As I left the room, this room I would never enter again, this ten-mat room that had been home to me for several months, I took one last look around. There was not even a single handkerchief to be seen. Where the bed might have been, I finally made out our Singer sewing machine, lying on its side in pieces.
On the stairs, I made an opening in the pile of debris that was just big enough for me to crawl through. The ground floor was not as much of a mess as the upper storey. The chests and trunks and boxes that my sister had packed only two days ago to take with her when she left for the countryside were piled impossibly on top of each other. In the garden behind the house, my large trunk and my mother’s wicker trunk lay half buried, as if they had been hurled down with great force. The night before, we had set them out on the edge of the upper-floor concrete balcony, planning to throw them down to the cemetery at the back in case there was a firebomb attack.
The cemetery lay beyond the board fence that enclosed the back yard. A wattle gate led from our property to the large cemetery, on the edge of which we had dug an air-raid shelter and made a small vegetable garden. Now that the fence had been blown away, I could see the whole cemetery. My mother was going back and forth between the cemetery and the house.
The cemetery led to a raised stone embankment, and around the stone embankment stretched a board fence. That fence, too, was gone. Normally I could not see the stone steps of the embankment, but now they were clearly visible, and I could also see that my stepbrother’s shrine had been flattened, leaving only its torii gate standing.
I joined my mother and sister in the cemetery.
‘Could they have been aiming at the shrine?’ my mother whispered to me as if sharing a secret. But despite the fact that so many houses had been destroyed, there were no fires, so it couldn’t have been firebombs. Ordinary bombs were unthinkable as well. I had experienced both in Tokyo, and this was different. For one thing, no air-raid alarm had sounded, and we had not heard any planes.
How could everything in our vicinity have been so utterly transformed in an instant? I toyed vaguely with the idea that it might not have been an air raid but something quite different, something unconnected with the war, something that occurs at the end of the world when the globe disintegrates, as we read about in children’s books.
A hush had fallen over everything. (The newspaper later said there was ‘instant pandemonium’, but that was the writer’s preconceived notion. In fact, an eerie stillness descended as if people, trees and plants had all died at once.)
‘We kept calling to you from down here,’ my mother said. ‘Didn’t you hear us? We heard a scream, and then nothing. We called to you over and over, but when you didn’t answer, we thought you must be done for.’
I had no recollection of having cried out.
‘I was so happy when I looked up from the cemetery and saw you standing there looking around!’
‘Really?’ I replied. ‘We were lucky, weren’t we? All of us survived.’
Sitting on a gravestone, her face in her hands, my sister was barely staving off collapse. My mother handed me the sleeping baby. She went back into the house, which looked as if it might fall over at any moment, to get water. She walked through our house, through the house across the street, and kept going, receding into the distance.
The people from next door and other nearby houses gathered in the cemetery. Most were barefoot, and every single one of them was drenched in blood. Heavily wooded, the cemetery was a large and pleasant space. Curiously, not a single gravestone had been knocked over. Everyone was strangely calm. Their faces were still and expressionless, and they talked among themselves as they always did – ‘Did you all get out?’, ‘You were lucky you weren’t hurt badly’ and so forth. Everyone kept silent about bombs or firebombs, which were not permissible topics of conversation for loyal subjects of the empire.
Soon the large girl from next door started shouting, ‘Mother! Mother! Let’s get out of here now! The fires are coming. We’ll die if we start looking for stuff in the house. It’s no time to be greedy. That’s what’s been happening in all the other towns. Let’s get out of here now!’
She was right, we realized. It was too dangerous to just stay there hoping for the best. If we took our time, our mother would be like this girl’s, she’d keep going back inside to search for things. We should leave soon, if only to stop Mother from doing that.
Thin smoke started to issue from the eastern end of the flattened neighbourhood, creeping along the ground. I wanted to store the partially buried trunk and wicker suitcase in the air-raid shelter, but I didn’t have the strength to move them. And if I gave the baby to my sister to hold, the little thing would be smeared with blood. I gave up on the luggage.
My mother, who had no bloody wounds, brought out some cotton trousers for me and I pulled them on. Then I put on some old straw sandals we used for going out into the fields and shouldered my pack. Each evening we set all our packs in the entryway. Only the things in the entryway were undamaged. Each of us carried a bucket. I used a dark green umbrella for a cane, like an old woman. The shaft of the umbrella was bent in the middle, like the house. My mother had thrown several items out into the cemetery for me – a few pairs of shoes I valued, a summer overcoat and the like. I saw them as I fled, but I did not reach for them, as if I were beyond such desires.
It would be more accurate to say that I had lost interest in anything at all, rather than that I had given up on the luggage. For the same reason, even people who were normally attached to their possessions abandoned things they might well have carried. This numb emptiness lasted a long time, remaining almost unchanged thirty or forty days afterwards.
In the shrine compound, we caught sight of my stepbrother’s wife. She was wandering back and forth between the flattened shrine and her demolished house. Her husband had been called up for the third time in June and was now serving with the Hiroshima First Detachment, leaving his young wife alone.
By the time we got out on to the road in front of the shrine, fire was already crawling towards us from across the road on the right. Nearby on the left, where the embankment was visible, we saw five or six people walking along the railway tracks on top. They seemed in no rush. Seeing this, we figured the fire couldn’t be all that fierce yet.
We were walking through a neighbourhood that had been demolished, but it still aroused no feeling in us. As if this were an ordinary occurrence on an ordinary day, we felt no surprise, we did not cry, we were in no particular hurry as we followed people on to the nearby embankment. On one side of the embankment was a block of government-owned homes for officials. It, too, was part of the Hakushima district in which we lived, but the houses here were of far higher quality, far more grand and beautiful, than the ones in our Kukenchō neighbourhood. Every single one of these houses had been levelled as if flattened by a powerful force. My old friend Saeki Ayako lived here, but her house was one of those destroyed without a trace. What had become of Saeki Ayako herself? The question flashed through my mind and I looked around, but here, too, it was hushed, without any sign of people.
Each of the beautiful homes on the embankment had stone steps leading down from the back garden to the riverbed. There were vegetable gardens on the parts of the riverbed above the water line, with hedges separating one plot from the next. We walked between demolished houses and down the stone steps to the riverbed. It was about three blocks from our house to the riverbed. Perhaps forty minutes had gone by since we had experienced the blue flash, during which time we milled around, disoriented, in the cemetery before walking there. Only long afterwards did I manage to estimate the time it had taken.
The tide had ebbed. A band of blue water was flowing gently on the other side of the white sand. Here and there on the broad stretch of white grew clumps of weeds, while bundles of straw and such lay where they had come floating up the river at high tide.
We had managed to flee more quickly than those who had been pinned under their houses, and there were still a few flames rising from the ruins, so the river banks did not appear to be very crowded. People wandered about, searching for places to sit, like spectators at an open-air theatre. Individuals made seats for themselves as they wished – beneath the hedges’ lush foliage or beside trees that stood between the garden patches, or on the bank very close to the river itself. We chose a spot beneath a fig tree on the edge of Saeki Ayako’s garden. It was quite far from the water.
More and more refugees crowded into the area. Soon there were no more good places left, such as beneath a tree, where you could avoid the sun. Everyone who flocked to the riverbed bore wounds, as if only the injured were permitted to come here. Judging from the faces, hands and legs protruding from their clothing, it was impossible to tell what had given them their lacerations. But each person had a half dozen or more cuts, and they were covered in blood.
Some people had streaks of dried blood on their faces and limbs, while others still had fresh blood dripping everywhere on their bodies. All their faces had been hideously transformed. The number of people on the riverbed increased minute by minute, many of them now with severe burns. At first we didn’t realize that their injuries were burns. There were no fires, so where and how could they have been burnt so badly? Strange, grotesque, they were more pathetic than frightening. They had all been burnt in the same way, as if the men who bake rice crackers had roasted them all in those iron ovens. Normal burns are part red and part white, but these were ash-coloured, as if the skin had been grilled rather than burnt. Ash-coloured skin hung from their flesh, peeling off in strips like the skins of roast potatoes.
Virtually everyone was naked to the waist. Their trousers were tattered, and some people wore only underpants. Their bodies were puffy and swollen, like those of drowning victims. Their faces were ponderously swollen. Their eyes were swollen shut, the skin around the edges pink and split. They held their puffy, swollen arms out, bent at the elbows, like crabs holding up their two claws. Grey skin hung down from both arms like rags. On their heads some appeared to be wearing bowls; the black hair on top was still there, having been protected by their field caps, but from the ears down the hair had disappeared, leaving a dividing line as sharp as if the hair had been shaved off. Those who looked like this, we knew, were members of a unit of young soldiers, well built, with broad chests and shoulders.
With their strange injuries, these victims were soon lying down on the hot, sunbaked sand of the riverbed. Most of them had been blinded. Even though they were in such frightful shape, nowhere did pandemonium arise. Nor did the term ‘ghastly’ apply. This had partly to do with the fact that no one said a word. The soldiers, too, were silent. No one called out in pain or complained of the heat or spoke of their fear. As we watched, the broad riverbed filled up with wounded people.
Here and there on the hot white sand, people were sitting or standing or lying stretched out as if dead. The burnt ones vomited continually, a nerve-wracking sound. Saeki Ayako’s German shepherd prowled the riverbed. With people arriving all the while, the human mass on the riverbed grew still larger.
Each new arrival would quickly find a little spot and settle in.
In any situation, human beings are always impatient to find a place to call their own, it seemed. Even when the sky is their only roof, they prefer not to be jumbled together but instead want to take possession of a seat that is unambiguously theirs. Soon fires began to break out all over the city. Even then, people still did not dream that the whole city of Hiroshima had been set ablaze all at once. Each thought that only his or her own part of town – for me, it was Hakushima – had been hit by a major disaster.
One after another, pillars of fire rose up in our Kukenchō neighbourhood. Then the grand homes on the embankment, the residences of officials, began to burn. The houses on the opposite bank of the river burst into flames, and beyond a white fence over there, in Nigitsu Park, tall pillars of flame suddenly shot up. From out of the flames came terrible, loud reports of things exploding. Always short-tempered, I was now starting to get really angry and said to my mother and sister, ‘Why are they letting these fires start everywhere? Don’t they know it’s the end when that happens? Didn’t we go through all that training to put out fires? This is not from firebombs, so it must be carelessness. If only people had put out their stove and charcoal fires before they fled!’
My mother and sister kept silent as if to say that nothing could be done.
Resignation was an attitude I detested. As if blaming the two of them for not getting angry, I went on: ‘These fires are a disgrace for the people of Hiroshima. Now everyone will be making fun of us. We should never have let this happen.’
The sky was still as dark as at dusk. The roar of aeroplane engines had been audible up there for some time now, and word spread through the crowd to watch out for strafing. People rushed to conceal everything white or red. Some stuck their heads into the hedges while those who planned to jump into the river moved closer to the edge of the riverbed. The sparks and flames from the row of houses burning on the embankment were so hot we couldn’t stay by our fig tree and went out on to the sandy bank.
What with the heat of both the sun and the flames, we soon found ourselves at the water’s edge. The area was full of soldiers with burns, lying face up. Time and again they asked us to soak towels in the water for them. We made the towels sopping wet and spread them as asked on their chests, but soon the towels were bone dry once more.
‘What happened to you?’ my mother asked a soldier.
‘We were on a labour detail at the primary school. I don’t know what it was, but we heard this enormous noise, and the next thing we knew we were burnt like this.’
His whole face was swollen and torn as if with some kind of grey leprosy. The contrast with his broad, rugged chest and with the youthfulness of his well-built, handsome body was all too pathetic.
The fires spread fiercely, with irresistible force. Flames even began to spurt from the engine of the freight train stopped in the middle of the railway bridge close by on the right. One after another, the train’s black carriages burst into flame, and when the fire reached the end carriage, it showered sparks and belched powerful flames as if it had been crammed full of gunpowder. With each explosion, it spat fire, as if molten iron were gushing out of a tunnel. Below the bridge, we could see the shore of the elegant park, the Asano Izumi Villa, where demonic deep red flames were crawling on the other side of the river. Soon the surface of the river itself started to burn, and we could see groups of people crossing to the other side. Now the river was burning fiercely. The people around us on the bank tried to flee upriver. Overhead, the familiar incessant roar of circling B-29s told us that at any moment strafing, firebombs or conventional bombs might pour down on our dark gathering.
People felt certain that a second wave of attacks would be coming. But surely there was no need to drop any more of those things on us, a part of me was thinking.
While we hid in the grass or squatted beside the river in fear of a strafing, up in the sky they were taking photographs. Out in the open as we were, we were having our pictures taken from overhead, as was the entire devastated city.
Some sort of typhoon seemed to be blowing nearby, and we were getting the less direct gusts followed by large raindrops. I had heard that the burning of Osaka had also caused wind and rain and that people had emerged from their shelters carrying umbrellas even though the sun was shining. So I opened my green umbrella. The rain was a watery black colour, and along with it countless sparks poured out of the sky.
These ‘sparks’ that I assumed to be small grains of fire were actually bits of rag and scraps of wood glowing bright red as they were swept along by the high wind. The sky became darker still, as if night had come, and the red ball of the sun appeared to be plunging down out of a mass of black clouds.
My sister leaned against me, whispering, ‘Look, way up there in the sky, a firebomb! A firebomb!’
‘What are you talking about? Can’t you see it’s the sun?’ We tittered nervously, our first bit of laughter in all this. But by then neither she nor I could open our mouths easily.
‘We may not be able to eat anything for another day or more,’ I said to her. ‘Let’s drink some river water now and scoop some up for later.’ I filled the bucket, thinking that any time now dead bodies might come floating down the river. Still, there was a pale rainbow hanging in the distant sky. The rain had just let up. There was something eerie about that faintly coloured rainbow.
‘Water! Water! Let me have a drink!’ the burnt soldiers pleaded incessantly.
‘Burn victims die if you give them water. Don’t do it!’
The faint shadow of death could already be seen between those warning against giving water to the soldiers and the soldiers themselves, who went on pleading for it.
The fires swelled into hills of flame, beat back everything before them, and proceeded to destroy the city block by block. The heat was unbearable. We could see the fires spreading through distant neighbourhoods and hear endless violent explosions from all directions. Not one Japanese plane showed itself in the sky.
We could not conceive of the day’s events as being related in any way to the war. We were being crushed by a sheer force – an intense and one-sided force – that had nothing to do with war. Neither did we as fellow Japanese encourage one another or console one another. We behaved submissively and said nothing. No one came to tend the injured, no one came to tell us where or how to pass the night. We were simply on our own.
Saeki Ayako’s German shepherd was still wandering among the crowds of wounded on the riverbed, never making a sound. It was widely known in Hiroshima as one of the fiercer dogs of the city, but the way it came and went with its tail hanging down, it was like a human being in misery, having lost all powers of resistance. Saeki Ayako was nowhere to be seen. Since coming to the riverbed, I had been half consciously looking for her or for the mother-in-law or the sixteen-year-old daughter, Yuriko, who shared her home, but even after dusk, I saw no sign of them.
Night fell, but I was not sure when. The day itself had been so dark there was no clear break between day and night. When night did come, however, both city and riverbed were red from the reflection of the fires. We ate nothing during the day or the night, but we did not feel hungry. Each of us had taken pains to fashion a place for ourselves during the day, but we were unable to stay put for long. The sparks, the rain and the sound of enemy planes chased us away. People said that the tide would rise after dark, so we gathered in the vegetable gardens and by the clumps of trees below the gardens on the way down to the sandy riverbed. We fashioned a place to lie down in front of the hedge facing the riverbed.
Pulling up lots of weeds and spreading them out, we covered them with straw that the river had carried to the sandy bank and on top of that laid the coat that my mother had worn over the baby on her back. The four of us took our places on this makeshift theatre box. A chubby eight months old, the baby had slept all day and did not wake at night. My sister and I removed the kerchiefs that had protected our necks and faces through the day. This was the first good look we had had of each other’s angry faces, but smiling was an impossibility.
We couldn’t see our own faces, but looking at each other gave us the idea. My sister’s face was puffed up like a round loaf of bread, and her eyes, normally large, black and uncannily clear, had become mere slits, their edges dark as blue-black ink. A cross-shaped cut extended from the right edge of her lip into her cheek, twisting her whole mouth into a sideways inverted letter L, a sight so ugly I could not look at it for long. Her hair was caked with blood and the red clay of our house’s walls, as if she had been on the streets, begging, for years. Both of us had bound our wounds with odd bits of fabric. I can’t recall where we found it, but three or four days earlier, in preparation for autumn and winter, my mother had dyed a piece of crêpe – the broad collar of an old kimono. We had each wrapped the cloth under our chins and knotted it on top of our heads. I had a deep cut from the middle of my left ear, opening like a valley to a spot below the ear.
Our injuries were covered over with strands of hair caked with blood. Our mouths were swollen shut and difficult to open, not so much because of the pain as the feeling that they had been glued in place and locked.
‘What were you two doing yesterday morning?’ I asked, barely able to move my lips.
‘Yesterday? It was this morning!’ my sister said with a smile, her lips puckered as if she were trying to whistle.
My mother remembered what she was doing at the time and said with regret, ‘This morning I got out the salted bamboo shoots I had been saving for a special occasion. I boiled them in soy sauce with carrots and potatoes I had grown out back. It was delicious! I had just eaten a mouthful with rice when there was that blue flash.’
‘What did you think it was?’ I asked. ‘A bomb? A firebomb?’
‘That huge bang happened before I even had time to think what it was, and the cupboard fell over. I threw myself down when the flash hit, and the cupboard fell on top of me, but fortunately the closet behind me kept the cupboard from falling all the way. I was bent over in a kind of cave like being curled up under a desk or something, so nothing happened to me. Then I heard you give a shriek.’
My sister had been sitting across from my mother in the family room. She, too, had just eaten a mouthful of breakfast. When she saw the flash, she rushed to the baby in the next room. Because there were mosquitoes about even in the morning, she had put the baby to sleep under a mosquito net. She threw herself down on top of the baby, who was sound asleep but, thinking that a lot of firebombs must have fallen on the family room, she turned to look in that direction. At that moment there was a sudden gust of wind, and she immediately started bleeding.
‘The blue flash lasted only an instant, but I must have flown to the baby in the first instant of that instant. Still, I have no memory of ducking under the mosquito net.’
My mother spoke again: ‘That breakfast this morning – what a waste!’
I said, ‘So, what do you think happened this morning? I have no idea what that was. My umbrella shaft had no bend in it before.’
My sister seemed to think she had to say something. ‘Maybe it was iperitto.’
‘Iperitto? What’s that?’
‘That’s it, for sure. But poison gas couldn’t have knocked the houses down.’
‘They combined it – with conventional bombs.’
Having no clear idea what had happened, we talked nonsense. The fires continued to burn fiercely in the distance, soaring up into the sky. In the space of one night, all of Hakushima had burnt itself out: Kukenchō, nearby Higashimachi, Nakamachi, Kitamachi, the houses on the embankment, everything there had dimmed to an ashen grey. Two or three houses on the opposite river bank continued to burn out of control. Their wild flames writhed like giant snakes. The Ushita area had been on fire during the day, and when night came, the flames moved from peak to peak along the low, wavy range of hills, looking like lights in a far-off town. Chunks of flame flew continually across the space between one peak and the next like shooting stars, and then the second peak would start a new fire.
After night fell, we started hearing dull groans from the distance. The low, monotonous groans echoed all around us.
At around that time, someone brought word that food was going to be distributed. We hadn’t given the slightest thought to supper, so we responded with happy cries.
The energetic voice of someone passing among us, probably a soldier, called to those of us lined up along the hedges: ‘All those who can walk, please go to the East Parade Ground to pick up food.’ Everyone began to chatter, and for the first time you could tell that the silhouettes moving along the riverbed were in fact flesh-and-blood human beings. Of our little group, both my sister and I ached all over and were unable to stand or walk. My mother went, helped by the young woman next to her. It was a mile or more to the East Parade Ground. She came back with four white, triangular rice balls that were still warm, wrapped up in a square of cloth. She also received four bags of hardtack.
‘A feast!’
We gladly took hold of the rice balls and found them heavy to the touch. But neither my sister nor I could open our mouths wide enough to eat. Like a dentist, I forced my paralysed mouth open with the thumb and index finger of my left hand while, with my right hand, I pressed the rice through my lips a few grains at a time.
‘Is Tokiwa Bridge still there?’
‘Both railings were burnt away, but the road itself is still there, all bulged out. Things are really pretty bad everywhere. There’s nothing left unburnt.’
Listening to the conversations of people sitting lined up in front of the hedge facing the river, it became clear to us that today’s conflagration had consumed the entire city of Hiroshima, leaving no part of town untouched. This was no minor fire caused by some individuals’ carelessness; enemy planes had scattered sparks over the whole city.
‘They scattered sparks? No wonder the whole place burned! With bombs, it would have taken a hundred or two, even five hundred or a thousand. They didn’t just “drop” bombs – they sprayed the place.’
In the local dialect, ‘spraying’ meant they had rained bombs down in clusters, like a waterfall. There was not a single crater anywhere, though. People still didn’t realize it meant there had been no bombs. They had so little idea what had happened, they didn’t have a lot to say.
We stretched out on the ground. Owing to the surrounding forest fires and the conflagration on the other shore of the river, it was bright and warm. We heard groans from far and near like mournful musical instruments, and these were joined by the cries of insects. It was all so very sad.
My entire body numb with the sadness and pain, my tangled thoughts gave way to a somewhat clear idea: this numb feeling, this intensely odd numb feeling from an external shock, was my body’s direct physical response to the moment when the morning’s strange blue flash and powerful noise became one with the total destruction of the city. It crossed my mind that some kind of colourless, odourless intangible substance might have burnt up the air in a process involving physics or physical chemistry, not something that would stink or be visible or have a smell such as a poison gas. Out of a desire to pin something down, I tried to find it based on that physical sense of mine.
I fell easily, naturally, into a primitive mode of thought. Like a child, I recalled the nitrogen, oxygen and carbon dioxide gases in the air. Perhaps the enemy planes had sent electrons, via very high-frequency radio waves, into these things invisible to the human eye. Without giving off any sound or smell or exhibiting any colour, these airborne radio waves must have turned into huge, white flames. Unless I drew a mental picture of a new mystery world like that, I couldn’t conceive of how there could have been so many victims with such strange burns. I thought it fairly remarkable that I was able to formulate such thoughts – or perhaps I should say such instinctive feelings – before descending into an unbearably painful sense of defeat.
‘The war’s over,’ I whispered to my sister on the ground beside me.
‘What are you saying?’ she demanded.
‘There’s nothing more we can do,’ I muttered. ‘Japan’s got two months at the most.’
The fires in the mountains continued to burn spectacularly, spreading from peak to peak. The night deepened, but no one came to tend to the injured. We heard the cries of the insects among the low, heavy human groans that welled up all around us.