Hiroshima (10 page)

The treatment of bomb damage begins fourteen pages earlier and includes a striking variety of form: one panel fills the entire left half of a page (the explosion itself), one panel stretches across the top half of two pages (a scene of collapsed houses on either side of a highway down the middle of which run trolley tracks), and one panel fills a full page (a burning horse). This treatment of bomb damage completes volume I and extends through much of volume II.

The Deaths of Dad, Eiko, Susumu

Uncle T., Mom's youngest brother, was chief of the KP squad of his battalion, stationed in Hiroshima. Perhaps you could call it one of the perks of his job, but he could eat as much as he wanted. He was tall (about five feet nine) and of a large build, plump and sturdy. Uncle T. had been mobilized to clear away corpses and because he was coming to Eba, he visited the M. family, who were his relatives, and brought Mom hardtack. In our mouths, the army hardtack, with stars impressed in three parallel lines, was startlingly sweet.

Uncle T. told us how things were in the burned-out city. That to load corpses onto army dispatch boats, they placed sheets of metal between boat and shore, troughlike, slid the corpses down into a pile, and transported them to Ninoshima and other sites. That if in collecting the corpses you grabbed a hand or foot, the flesh would slip off and expose bone, making you feel terrible, as if you'd become a vulture. That the seven rivers flowing through Hiroshima were full of corpses and that when the corpses reached the mouths of the rivers, it was an exhausting job to hoist them out onto the bank. That the stench of rotting corpses was unbearable: no matter how many corpses you cleared away, there were always more. He grumbled to Mom then went back to his unit.

Two days later, Uncle T.'s buddy stopped by, and we learned that Uncle T. had died. We were all stunned. Uncle T., the very picture of health, had suddenly died. We simply couldn't believe it. He had been so very alive yesterday, and now he was already dead. It left us stunned. Mom kept saying, “Strange, strange.” In nearby houses, too, there were people who died as Uncle T. had died. Worried about whether relatives had survived, they'd searched the ruins of the city and come back; up until several days ago, they'd been so alive, and now suddenly they were dead.

At the time we had no idea that the “flash-boom” that was dropped on Hiroshima was an atomic bomb. We called it “flash-boom” because there was a bright flash, then a boom. Rumors were rampant: it contained poison gas, and you'd die if you breathed the poison; it contained infectious germs, and you'd die if you passed acute, bloody stool, as with dysentery.

Actually, people who'd been bathed in the radioactive black rain and healthy people who'd passed near where radioactivity had fallen to earth and pooled did have their bodies invaded and cells destroyed, and there were many cases of rapid leukemia and cancer and the like. The effects of radioactivity, this second, life-stealing terror of the atom bomb, began to appear rapidly, attacking many people one after another. And it ate away at surviving bomb victims forever. Among people terrified by the fear of dying, rumors flew to erase the unease, and people acted on them. Some said you wouldn't die if you pulverized human skulls and swallowed the powder or spread it on burns and wounds, so some people did just that.

Perhaps because she'd found sanctuary, Mom gained some emotional leeway, her face began to brighten, and she became more human. She asked K
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ji and me to go to the ashes of our house and dig up the bones of Dad and Eiko and Susumu—doing so had been on her mind every day. And she told us in great detail where and how they'd died. Staring at Mom's face in the flickering candlelight, K
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ji and I caught every last word that came from her mouth. So much had been happening that I'd not had time to ask about Dad and the others. Learning now for the first time how they died, I shook with the tension.

I learned, too, how Mom had survived the explosion of the atomic bomb so miraculously.

I remembered seeing Mom hanging up clothes that morning on the laundry porch off the second floor. Then, at the moment when she finished hanging out the clothes and went to enter the house and had just moved under the second-floor eaves, the bomb exploded. The violent rays, 9,000 degrees, were blocked by the single board of the eaves. Had she not been under the eaves, her whole body would have been burned black. And had she gotten a step farther into the house, the house that the blast struck from directly overhead and flattened, she would have been crushed by beams and killed. But even though the house itself collapsed, the drying porch floated up in the opposite direction, flew up, carrying Mom with her huge belly, and came to earth, just like an airplane landing, in the back alley. Thanks to the fact she was on the drying porch, Mom escaped without even a scratch. Survival truly is a matter of inches. Both Mom and I felt we'd been protected by something—“So we have to live!”

Miraculously spared, Mom became aware of Susumu's cries—“Ouch! Ouch!”—from the entryway of our collapsed house, and she rushed to the entryway. Susumu's head was pinned at the threshold by thick beams; his body protruded, and he continued to cry and kick his feet. He'd been sitting in the entryway playing with the model boat and singing, “Tater, tater,” so when the house suddenly collapsed, it pinned his head. She could hear Dad crying from the six-by-nine room beside the entryway, “Kimiyo! Do something! Do something!” She couldn't hear Eiko, who had been in the nine-by-twelve room. Crushed by the thick beams, Eiko had died instantly. Desperate, Mom pulled off tiles and pieces of crumbled wall to lighten the weight of the roof even a bit. She tried with all her might to lift the roof, but it wouldn't budge.

Susumu's voice cried, “Mommy! Ouch! Ouch!” Dad's voice called, “Quick! Do something!” Urged on by their voices, Mom did everything she could to try and lift the roof, but she couldn't move it an inch. Old houses have heavy beams, and one woman alone had absolutely no effect. Mom appealed desperately to the people who came fleeing along the road in front of the house. Prostrating herself, she appealed in tears to them, “Please give me a hand! My husband and children are pinned. Help me lift the roof!” One person tried several times to lift the roof, then said, “There's no way! Give up!” Then he ran off. Mom appealed desperately to passerby after passerby, entreating them to lift the roof, but as soon as they tried, they left.

Susumu was crying in the entryway. Half-crazed, Mom tried to save at least him. She inserted a piece of lumber between the beams pinning his head and put her shoulder to the lumber to try to lift, but the roof wouldn't move. Utterly at a loss, she could only sit in the entryway and put her arms around his body. Thinking that injuring him a bit wouldn't matter, she grabbed his legs and pulled, but no matter what she did, his head didn't come free. He cried sharply, “Ouch! Ouch!” So Mom stopped pulling at him. Susumu's body moved sideways, but his head simply wouldn't come free. Pounding on the beams in her frustration, Mom went on weeping.

Susumu had been crying, “Mommy! Ouch!” Then it changed to, “Mommy! It's hot! Hot!” When Mom looked at the far side of the collapsed house, tongues of flame were spreading and had gotten close to Dad and Susumu. Dad's voice became much more urgent, and he scolded Mom: “Can't you do something? Do something!” Susumu cried and groaned, “It's hot! Hot!” Mom was going mad. She squatted in the entryway, embracing Susumu's body and crying, “Mommy'll die with you! We'll all die together!”

As the flames began to engulf our house, a person who lived behind us came past and found Mom weeping that “Mommy'll die with you!” He said, “Nakazawa-san! Give up! There's no point in your dying, too!” Mom didn't want to leave the entryway, but tugging firmly at Mom's hand, the neighbor got her to flee the flames. When Mom looked back at our house, the flames had attacked the entryway and had become a pillar of fire. From out of those flames, she could hear clearly the cries of Susumu—“Mommy! It's hot! Hot!”—and Dad—“Kimiyo! Do something!”

The last anguished cries of Dad and Susumu rang in her ears and came back to her in her dreams as she slept; wiping away tears, Mom said that every day had become unbearable. She blamed herself for being unable to rescue them, and that thought continued to torture her.

That's how I learned that Dad and Susumu had burned to death. Mom muttered, “Eiko had an easy death, thank goodness.” Eiko had died instantly, crushed under the beams. Mom murmured forlornly any number of times, “Her suffering wasn't prolonged, so that was a blessing.”

Next day, through the sizzling August sun, on a bike borrowed from neighbors, K
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ji and I headed for the ruins of our house. Carrying a bucket, I climbed onto the rack on the back of the bike and watched as an utterly transformed Hiroshima went by.

Retrieving Their Bones

As we went toward the city, the air was filled with an intense, strange stench—of death and of all burned things mixed together—that tortured our noses; we held our breath against it. When we came to the road leading to our house in Funairi Hommachi and looked at the burned-out ruins, charred hands and feet poked up from the rubble, quite like the flowers in an artistic flower arrangement. Here and there were metal drying porches, twisted like taffy.

Standing in our entryway, we found unmistakable evidence that this really was the burned remains of our house. Dad was a painter, so in his workroom he had dozens of white ceramic palettes, some flat, some partitioned. Melted, fused and twisted, they were scattered about.

Taking the shovel we'd stuck into the bike frame, K
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ji began to dig in the entryway. I took a burned board and pried off pieces of the tile that covered everything. The soil was burned and utterly dry, white as bone. The dust swirled, and there was a small skull. K
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ji said, “It's Susumu!” He picked it up and handed it to me. Susumu's skull was pure white, absolutely clean.

As long as I live, I'll never forget the moment I held his skull in my hands. The August sun was still strong and stiflingly hot, yet a chill came over me, as if buckets of ice had been dumped on my back, as if all the blood in my body stopped flowing; the hair on my head stood on end, and I trembled. Susumu had been burned alive, pinned by the entryway's thick beams and crying, “Mommy! Ouch! Ouch!” and as that thought came to me, I put myself in his place—“How hot it must have been”—and the hair on my whole body stood on end. And I remembered my last sight of Susumu, as I left the entryway to go to school. He was sitting on the step, holding the model ship, and singing at the top of his lungs, “Tater, tater,” and making me promise to “Hurry home. We'll sail the ship on the river.”

One after another, happy times with Susumu came to mind. The time I shared the raw rice I'd stolen with Susumu, and he put the grains one at a time, carefully, in his mouth, and ate them with a happy face—“Keiji: it's delicious! Delicious!” The time we divided the staircase into upper and lower and staged sword attacks and uprisings. Seeing us, Dad cut up a board and made us swords complete with hilts, and we had great fun immersing ourselves in a swordfight that lasted for days. The times I ran about the field with Susumu hunting grasshoppers, and we headed for home as the bright red sun sank, singing a nonsense song at the top of our lungs. These scenes seemed to be superimposed on Susumu's skull. I put the skull in the bucket and, digging up other bones with my hands, added them to the bucket.

K
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ji was digging in the room next to the entry and said, “Got it!” I turned, and he had in his hands a skull a full size bigger than Susumu's. He gave it to me, saying, “It's Dad.” As I held Dad's skull, my hair really stood on end, and I trembled. Imagining Dad pinned under the beams and burning to death, leaving behind only his anguished cry—“Kimiyo, can't you do something?”—I broke out in sweat all over. I stared at Dad's heavy skull, and memories of Dad flooded over me.

Dad's many faces came back to me. His serious look when, shutting himself up in his second-floor workplace in winter, he put the charcoal heater between his legs, sat up straight, and stared fixedly as he worked up the structure of a painting. His satisfied smile when, after sketching several landscapes and hanging them on the wall, he shouted to me, often asking, “Which do you like?” and I pointed at one. His angry face after I'd scribbled, “Dad's a shit,” on the side of the staircase and, very upset, he threw me into the closet. His happy smile when he was in good humor and embraced me, his whiskers scratching my face, or to encourage me when I was hurting. His stubborn face: one time I got into a fight with the son of the neighborhood stableman, and his father intervened, hitting me and giving me a lump. Dad witnessed the scene, rushed over to the stableman, and argued angrily with him: “Parents shouldn't intervene in children's fights! Kids have their own world! Those experiences will be useful when they grow up! Don't do it again!” His serious face when he took me with him to Ebayama or Mitakeyama to sketch, and as we walked, hot, amid thick tall grass and trees murmuring in the wind, he observed the scene. His smile when, back from a trip, he put a souvenir, a model airplane, on our bed and saw how delighted we were. His look of contentment when I entered elementary school, and under a small electric light, cloaked in dark cloth for air-raid blackout, he drew hurried pictures of monkeys and rabbits and wrote my name on my textbook, notebook, pencil case, abacus, knapsack, and shoe bag, studying each item closely.

I felt chagrin that Dad had been killed in the war he'd opposed so strongly—how cruel! Around the now-empty eye sockets of his skull—perhaps brain matter had oozed out and been burned—blackened incrustations made it look as if he was crying. I rubbed these off with my finger and, having cleaned the skull, put it in the bucket.