AT A QUARTER PAST EIGHT THE FOLLOWING MORNING, when the B-29 Enola Gay, named in honor of the pilot’s mother (exactly what kind of feelings did he harbor toward his creator?), dropped its uranium bomb Little Boy at the beginning of the working day, Yoshie was walking with his father some three kilometers from the center of the blast.
They had just crossed Kanko Bridge. People were doing their best to go about their business as usual. Shops had opened, though they had few goods to sell. His father moved with the urgency of Mondays. Or perhaps, seen from the point of view of Mr. Watanabe’s memory, with a degree of anxiety. Yoshie had difficulty keeping up with him. Two steps of his equaled one of Tsutomu’s. What was worse, his shoe was chafing him.
Not long before, the air raid sirens had sounded again. No one paid them much attention. Almost every day, enemy planes flew over, dropping pamphlets, which he was forbidden to read. In those days, such things didn’t prevent people from doing what they had to. They simply took precautions (water, fire extinguishers, first aid kits) and carried on. In fact, the sirens had already sounded twice the night before. His father had continued to undress (flesh folds on his tummy, armpit hair), and Yoshie had helped him into his yukata. Then they had both fallen asleep. Tsutomu’s snoring had protected them. With that racket, nothing and no one would’ve dared come near.
Suddenly, Yoshie could hear engines in the distance. He looked up, cupping his hand to shade his eyes. It was an aircraft. Just one aircraft. It didn’t make much noise. It didn’t even frighten him. Nothing like those squadrons that terrified him so much. Nor did Tsutomu show signs of fear. But Yoshie felt, or perhaps Watanabe now thinks he did, his father squeeze his hand.
Yoshie saw it fly by for a few seconds. Like a model airplane. A four-propellered one. With a sheen of silver. He loved it.
His shoe was hurting his foot more and more. Yoshie stopped in his tracks. Tsutomu ordered him to keep walking. Yoshie wriggled free of his father’s hand. Ran to lean against a wall, and bent over to adjust his shoe. That wall painted yellow. His father was waiting for him up ahead, at the corner, a look of impatience on his face. He called his name. He ordered him to hurry up.
The aircraft let something drop. A trace in a sky with no clouds. No more than a trace in the sky.
The flash filled the horizon. X-ray light. The skeleton. The blindness.
Swept off his feet by a wave of heat, Yoshie flew through the air. The blast spread and seemed to have no end.
Afterward, an emptying. Darkness in broad daylight. The negative of the sky.
When Yoshie opened his eyes and saw the blackness, he thought he was dead. That this was death. But around him things started to clear, and soon he recognized his father’s body a few yards away, his head beneath an uprooted tree, and then he knew that he was still alive.
He coughed. He spat. Felt his limbs. He could see only a few cuts on his hands and arms. The skin on his back was burning. His muscles ached, as if he’d been straining them for hours.
His disbelief stunned him more than the hit. The wall. That yellow wall. His shoe, his father, his disobedience.
Then he saw the mushroom and a glow ascending.
He tried to shift the tree trunk off his father. For some reason, Watanabe reflects, possibly because of the comics he used to read, he was sincerely astonished to find he couldn’t do it. He tried to rouse his father. He called out his name several times. He couldn’t bring himself to look at his face.
Soon enough, he realized that there would be no reply. No reaction. Zero movement. He lay down next to his father, and for a while copied his stillness, hoping this gesture might unite them.
Only then did he become aware of the screams all around him, the fire, the crackling, the crunching, the collapsing. There was more. Much more. All of a sudden his focus widened.
Deafened by so many things shattering, Yoshie wandered in search of assistance. He wanted help moving the tree. The buildings weren’t there anymore. Only a few were left, in positions he had never seen before. There was a hole, Watanabe remembers, where the city had been. A map erased. Hiroshima was now a scar the size of Hiroshima.
Yoshie scanned the horizon. He could see, mysteriously in place, the dome of the Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall. The same one his father had proudly pointed out to him the previous afternoon. Still a long way from becoming a symbol.
Everything made of wood was blazing. Every house burning in its own way. A wind of a hearth, or of an open oven, began to blow. As a precaution, or perhaps instinctively, Yoshie skirted around the most devastated area. He couldn’t have known it, but it was also the one most exposed to radiation.
On his search for the help that nobody could give him, he saw charcoal shadows. Shadows on walls. He saw burnt objects that he didn’t even know could burn. Nothing had kept its color; the mushroom had drained it away. Debris and bodies were intermingled. Everything was in pieces. A type of jigsaw puzzle that, Watanabe can see now, was never meant to be assembled. He saw the same expression on every face he passed. The same corpse, over and over.
He had no saliva, and he couldn’t find his tongue. He heard the babble of a spring. He walked toward some children more or less his age, their heads surrounding a pipe from which flowed a stream of water. The sound was music. When Yoshie tried to approach, the other children barred his way with pushes, scratches, kicks. Their tongues lapped ceaselessly. One boy raised his head and glanced sidelong at him. His lids were so swollen that he couldn’t open his eyes.
Yoshie discovered that few of the faces left looked like faces. He touched his own brow, his nose, his chin. Everything appeared to be in place. The only pain he felt was from the cuts on his arms. And the stinging on his back. Many people ran past him. Hair like firewood. Cheeks like balloons. Eyes like slits. They dived headfirst into the river. Others stopped short, plunging instead into the water tanks. He still remembers feeling revulsion rather than compassion for them. Not so much sympathy as disgust.
He considered returning to the tree to watch over his father’s body. He glanced about. Realized he couldn’t even see where he’d set off from. With each step, he could hear Tsutomu’s voice among the other voices. His scream among all the screams. When he tried to follow the sound, it faded until it vanished. Everywhere, he came across people crying for help, arms flailing amid the wreckage. Yoshie didn’t stop to help anyone. He simply passed by, in a trance, walking along the river.
Something glistening on the ground caught his eye. A pot shone in the August sun. The sun roasting itself inside there. Slowly, Yoshie peered into the pot and saw that his face was still his face. Among the debris, he also discovered a pocket watch, with arrow-shaped hands. He stooped to pick it up. The glass front hadn’t a scratch on it, but the mechanism had stopped. He tried to wind it up. Stare as he might, the hands indicated the same time. A quarter past eight. A quarter past eight. He has kept it since. He hasn’t tried to fix it.
In the distance, Yoshie saw a black rain begin to fall, as though painted drop by drop. Mr. Watanabe can barely admit his fascination with that rain back then, not knowing what it meant. Can it possibly retain any beauty in his memory? Does it deserve to be remembered as he saw it?
The air began to cool. A rainbow enveloped the remains of the city, its ends tying them up like a garbage bag. When Yoshie lowered his gaze again, he saw a horse in flames galloping by.
On the banks of the Ōta, Yoshie at last found refuge in a school. The ruins of the building were being turned into a first aid post. A hospital without beds or doctors, where people came to lie on the ground. Or, in the more serious cases, on a desk. Yoshie felt reassured by it being a school. It was the only place with which he could identify. The students’ drawings still hung on one wall. His little sister Nagae could draw better than that, he thought.
A woman offered him water. Without alarm, she said, There’s blood in your eye. Although it didn’t hurt, Yoshie ran to rinse it in the river. The blood washed away easily. It wasn’t his. Bodies drifted slowly past him.
He’d entered the first aid post to seek help for his father. He soon saw that no one was in a condition to provide it. Mr. Watanabe has never been able to convey what he saw in that place. Not for a lack of words, but rather of meaning.
More than the suppurations, which he avoided looking at, what shocked Yoshie most were the women’s backs. Many bore the marks of the clothes they had been wearing at the time of the blast. Dark-colored clothes, he learned, had been imprinted on their skin, while lighter colors absorbed less energy and therefore left fewer traces. And so he discovered that, as well as the yellow wall he’d leaned against by chance, dressing in white had protected him.
The tangles of clothing and skin repulsed him more than the wounds themselves. He noticed many men who looked like they had bowl cuts, because they were wearing hats when the bomb exploded. Skin had become a focal point of horror. It felt, they cried, as if they were tearing it off.
Few doctors were left. Many seemed in a similar state as the patients they were treating. Spots that had hot running water and strips of cloth, two luxuries in short supply, were turned into makeshift operating rooms. The wounded got worse after being treated. They caught infections that festered in the summer heat. Reduced to chemistry, they died uttering the word water. Yoshie couldn’t understand why the worst affected were left to die instead of being tended to first.
Piles upon piles of them were cremated beside Sakae Bridge, Kyo Bridge, Hijiyama Bridge, at the rate of matches. The stench of those bonfires would disturb his sense of smell forever.
Contrary to what one might think, Watanabe recalls, many people in the refuge were concerned with details of seemingly no importance. Finding some geta among the debris, or at least a pair of socks, was enough to bring solace. Any trifle could take on, for a moment, the significance of a lifesaver. And also talking to someone. Telling them. Making sure that this had really happened. Each person recounted, over and over, the same minute. Like the watch that Yoshie had found.
A clerk was thrown against a filing cabinet, which acted as a barricade.
A teenager ignored his mother’s protests, as he did every morning, and stayed locked in the bathroom, which became a bunker.
An old woman managed to cover her head with the pan she was going to use to cook vegetables.
A police officer stepping out of his house had time, as the flash spread, to roll under the stairs.
Two boys, who were sweeping the fire walls at their school, collapsed on top of one another and were able to help each other out of the rubble.
A woman was hanging out her family’s laundry and the walls surrounding her flat roof protected her. She was still clasping a T-shirt.
A civil servant managed to get out of the carriage of the streetcar he was on, only to discover a line of corpses digging their nails into the shoulder of the person in front of them.
A music teacher was saved by her piano while she waited for a student who never turned up. Some of her neighbors had accused her of high treason when they heard her playing.
One man said nothing and just walked around and around in circles, not listening to anyone.
Everyone talked about the whistling. The whistling before it happened. A subtlety heralding the destruction. Some people’s eardrums had been pierced and even then, they could hear it.
At the time, each person believed that their house, their office, their factory, their school was the only one that had been bombed. After the explosion, they explained, they couldn’t understand why no one came to help them. How could they be so completely ignored? Maybe that’s how tragedies work, reflects Watanabe. We make them ours to the point that we are incapable of believing there are others. The fact that there are is both a comfort and an affront.
When the survivors managed to dig themselves out and look around them, there was no name for what they saw. Where were the craters? What was all this nothingness? There was no framework. Only a fear of everything and an understanding of nothing. This they said without words, even as they continued to search for them.
Yoshie saw a young girl curled up taking notes. She was perhaps the only person in the refuge who had found a corner where she could observe her own suffering. Watanabe remembers her well because that night she got him a blanket to sleep on. And because she was called Sadako, like one of his sisters.
Rumors began to spread like the fires outside. Some spoke of fifty thousand or a hundred thousand dead, possibly more. Figures Yoshie was incapable of imagining with any accuracy. And which years later, when he was a numbers expert, he still found impossible to comprehend.
And yet none of this was mentioned in the war communiqué that day. They were forced to resist until the end of something they didn’t know. In the shelter, the same questions were passed back and forth. What type of weapon had attacked them? What had they done to deserve such punishment? Nothing, they repeated to themselves, nothing whatsoever. They had simply obeyed their parents. Who had obeyed the authorities. Who had obeyed the emperor. Who had obeyed what was written in the stars.
What was most needed were water and shade. A human chain was formed to fill receptacles from the Ōta. Yoshie went over and was immediately handed a bucket, which was too heavy for him. Someone took it from him and the chain continued.
Jostling at the river’s edge, the flames had the shape of waves. A tsunami of fire.
Many people gazed toward where a grove of trees had always stood. The earth was a naked body. The pines now looked like folded umbrellas.
The burn victims needed shade. They piled up wood and other debris, which promptly collapsed. No cloud softened the rays. What constituted good weather? The sun beat down. The sun.
As the Enola Gay retreated from the skies above Hiroshima, the copilot, Captain Lewis, whispered: My God, what have we done?
The pilot, Colonel Tibbets, replied: We did what we had to do.
An entire nation occupied one seat or the other.