Hiroshima (23 page)

We'd been through so much together—fleeing the hell of the atomic bomb, her giving birth on the sidewalk, overcoming with great difficulty the postwar shortage of food. Yet even in those hard days, I'd never once seen Mom cry. As long as I live, I'll never forget the sight of her, tears pouring down her face. I encouraged her, “Concentrate on your therapy and learn to walk again. I swear I'll come get you from Tokyo.” And I left. It was a trip home enveloped in dark thoughts.

The only redeeming feature of this trip was that I met with the group from my sign-painting days and was introduced to a young woman. Destiny is strange. After returning to Tokyo, I exchanged letters with her, and we started dating. And when I told Akira I was thinking of her as a marriage partner, before I knew what was happening, marriage talks were under way; Akira took charge of everything. But I had one worry about marriage. I was uneasy: would the fact I was a bomb victim break up the talks? In both Hiroshima and Tokyo, I'd heard many stories of marriages that had been called off when it was learned that one party was a bomb victim and of the man and woman committing suicide. Fortunately, both she and her family were understanding, and I breathed a sigh of relief. In later years my wife confessed that when she married me, she was uneasy and worried about the marriage because of the issue of aftereffects of the atomic bomb.

February 1966. With Uncle H. serving as go-between, I became a married man. At the ceremony Mom said any number of times, “Keiji! Wonderful! Isn't it wonderful!” Her beaming face pleased me even as it turned me shy. And to the people about her, she said, “Well! Now I can die!” I took alarm and said angrily, “Don't tempt fate!”

Little did I know how right I was.

“MOM DEAD”

After the wedding ceremony, we went to Tokyo; the trip doubled as honeymoon. We rented a one-room, nine-by-twelve apartment near Shiina-machi Station on the Nishi-Ikebukuro Line and started our married life. I carried on, earning wages as an assistant during the day and drawing my own manga at night. On October 9 of that year, about 10 p.m., I was summoned from downstairs: “Nakazawa-san, you've got a telegram!” I had been drawing manga, so I went downstairs to get the telegram thinking, “Maybe it's from a publisher.”

I opened it and read: “MOM DEAD. COME AT ONCE.” I was stunned. I read it over and over again. Then, as the message sank in, my legs started to tremble uncontrollably, and it seemed to take a very long time to get back to our room on the second floor. My wife, who was pregnant, wept that we'd never be able to show Mom our child. I crawled under the blanket and struggled to control my shivering. I simply couldn't believe Mom wouldn't be here any more. In Hiroshima twenty-one years earlier, I'd seen the corpses of many who'd died in the atomic bombing, and I'd seen how they burned. Thinking Mom had become like them, I was intolerably sad.

I reached K
o
¯
ji's house the next evening. The coffin sat in front of the altar, and when I peeked inside, I saw Mom's face, faded and shrunken. In a daze, I studied Mom's face. I realized the truth of the adage, “By the time you want to be filial, your parents are already gone.” I thought for a moment that Mom's long tension had eased when she witnessed my wedding, that it had hastened her death. She had collapsed and died in the bathroom of Akira's house. While holding the wake and keeping incense burning through the night, I gazed at her commemorative photo. The days Mom and I had been through together materialized and dematerialized, as in a kaleidoscope. Every last image of Mom that floated up was a cruel scene: of being knocked down by the atomic bomb and fighting desperately to live. I kept thinking of Mom's life: had the war and the atomic bomb not happened, I'd probably have had plenty of very happy memories. I'd expressed my appreciation to Mom for having protected and reared us brothers. The regret remained that I hadn't been able to carry out my promise to show her Tokyo.

Akira was upset, and when I heard why, the blood in my body suddenly stopped flowing, and I got hot. Immediately after Mom died, the ABCC came running with wreath and incense and pressed him: “For the sake of medical progress, please let us conduct an autopsy on your mother's body!” They wouldn't move from the entryway, saying they only wanted to remove Mom's organs as specimens, that they'd sew her up and give us back a beautiful corpse. Akira got angry and chased them away, shouting, “What makes you think we'll let you ABCC people cut up our beloved Mother?” I frightened myself wondering what I'd have done had I been there. I might have knocked those ABCC guys head over heels.

I couldn't forgive the ABCC. It didn't offer bomb victims a single bit of help. It treated them as specimens, guinea pigs. Always hot on the trail of bomb victims for the purposes of their own country's nuclear war, it took the data it collected back to the United States. The existence of a spy network to report to the ABCC as soon as bomb victims died surprised and terrified me. In Hiroshima a network of contacts extended in every direction, on the lookout for the deaths of bomb victims—those jackals hunted corpses. Today the ABCC facilities have been turned over to Hiroshima, the name changed to “Radiation Effects Research Center,” and the center operates under joint Japanese–U.S. management. But what happened then gravely wounded me, and I have serious doubts that it's actually being operated for the sake of Japanese now.

My name, too, had been entered in the ABCC records, and documents came to me in Tokyo any number of times, asking that I respond to follow-up studies. But I always ripped them up and threw them away. Deep in my heart I was angry: “Why should I put up with always being observed like a guinea pig, under cover of the euphemism ‘for the sake of medical progress'?” How our lives were deranged because one atomic bomb was dropped! I couldn't help hating the America that dropped the bomb. That night of the wake, Akira and I were united in our anger.

The next day we headed for the city crematory on the hill behind Hiroshima Station and consigned Mom's body to the flames. As we sat in the waiting room, waiting for Mom's ashes, we stared at the smoke rising from the crematory chimney. I had seen many corpses burning in the atomic ruins, so I could picture Mom's body burning. Skull, shoulder blades, sternum, arm and leg bones would remain, whitened, just like the bones of Dad and Eiko and Susumu when we'd dug them up. I looked up at the smoke rising from the chimney and watched it dissipate and vanish.

“Please pick out the bones.”
[10]
At the attendant's direction, we all gathered in front of the oven in which Mom had been cremated. The doors opened, and the dais on which Mom's coffin had sat was pulled out and set in front of us. The dais was covered with the embers and ash of coffin and body. Uncle H. had instructed us that when we picked out the bones, we should take the Adam's apple and put it in the urn first. I searched with bamboo chopsticks the spot where the skull had been. But it was disconcerting: I couldn't find the skull, let alone the Adam's apple. When we searched the ashes thoroughly and there were no bones, I was shocked. All we found was small bits of bone, an inch or two long. Akira said, “The fire really completely consumed her,” and he admired how well the furnace functioned. But pretending a calm I didn't feel, I opened my eyes wide in astonishment and asked myself: “How can this be? When human bodies burn, skull, sternum, arm and leg bones clearly keep their original shape.” I grumbled, over and over. In my mind's eye, I contrasted Mom's bones-become-ashes with the bones of Dad and the others who were burned to death. And I remembered a Tokyo conversation.

I'd heard from a member of a bomb victims' group that when they'd cremated the bodies of a bomb victim couple living in Tokyo, absolutely no bones had remained, and I'd said, “That can't be!” Rebutting the story that there'd been no bones, I'd mentioned my experience retrieving the bones of Dad and the others and said I'd seen many charred bones. But it came as a severe shock when so few of my own mother's bones were left after cremation. In the twenty-one years since the atomic bomb was dropped, Mom's bones had been penetrated by radioactivity, eaten away, and turned brittle through and through. Cremate them, and they turned instantly to ash. As we picked out the small fragments of Mom's bones and put them in the urn, my stomach was churning with anger. “That damned atomic bomb! It made Mom's life go haywire and made her suffer, and now it's even stolen her bones—she who had been reduced almost to crawling!” I was trembling with anger and had a hard time pretending to be calm. The next day we interred Mom's urn in the Nakazawa family grave. Standing in front of the gravestone and lighting a cigarette from the incense, I drew a deep breath.

We took the night train back to Tokyo. I couldn't get to sleep. To the clickety-clack of the train, the days I'd lived through with Mom floated up one after the other, then faded. I tried once again to get to the bottom of the causes—the war and the atomic bomb—that tormented Mom's life and had now stolen even her bones. I thought and thought, and it always came to this: “Have the Japanese pursued and settled responsibility for the war?” “Have the Japanese pursued and settled the issue of the atomic bomb?” I realized that both issues had been rendered ambiguous, that neither had been settled. So long as we didn't pursue and settle these issues, the deaths of Dad, Eiko, Susumu, Tomoko, and now Mom were without meaning. I came to want to avenge our Nakazawa family. I resolved to fight a one-man battle: “Say who—the Japanese government? the U.S. government?—was responsible for the war and the atomic bomb! Speak! Speak! Speak! Never forgive!”

Courage welled up: “The only thing I'm good at is manga. I'll do battle through manga!” As if demons had fallen away, I calmed down: I don't have the time any more to run around hating the words “atomic bomb.” If each single Japanese person who was dealt a grave blow by the war and the atomic bomb musters all his bitterness to wage an angry struggle, he can smash those guys who rejoice at war and the atomic bomb. It's not something a group of people can do.

The Birth of Atomic Bomb Manga

Returning to Tokyo, I shut myself up in the nine-by-twelve room and began to draw feverishly, pouring out all my anger. In one week I completed
Pelted by Black Rain
, the first atomic bomb manga. Usually I was slow at drawing, needing about a month to compose a short, single-issue manga. But I surprised even myself by immersing myself and drawing
Pelted by Black Rain
at one go. The main character, a young bomb victim, tracks an American arms smuggler to Hiroshima and kills him. In turn, the main character runs into someone who avenges his victim, and as he lies dying, asks that his corneas go to a blind woman, a second-generation bomb victim. He hopes she'll set her new eyes firmly on never allowing the tragedy of war and atomic bombing to be repeated, and then he dies. In writing so hard-boiled a story, I vented my own anger at the atomic bomb.

I hoped high school students, the next generation, would read this work. Shooting for major publisher S.'s magazine for the high school audience, I took the work in. The editor who read it showed a friendly feeling for it and said he'd submit it to the editorial board; he wanted to publish it in the magazine, so he asked me to leave the manuscript with him. I went home hopeful.

At the time I wanted to put an end to my dual life of working as assistant and doing my own work, and I asked my wife, “We won't have as much money. Will you mind?” She said, “If you expend all your effort on a book of your own, I won't complain.” The birth of our child was approaching, and I realized we'd need money, but I feared becoming inured to the life of an assistant. If you were an assistant for a long time, you were paid a reasonable amount of money, but with your welfare assured, you got lazy and lost the energy to do your own work, and your resolve to become a manga artist weakened and died. There were many of whom that was true. If only for that reason, I wanted to end my time as assistant soon. And I was fed up with the slick cleverness of manga
artist K.: he had me create stories and draw the under-drawings, too, then published many volumes under his own name and made a tidy profit. If you inquired, the manga world was filled with sad tales that could not be told or heard without tears
.

I continued to wait for word about
Pelted by Black Rain
, which I'd left with publisher S., but word didn't come, and having grown impatient, I went back. The editor returned my manuscript: “Sorry, we can't run it.” I asked him, “What's wrong with it?” but I couldn't get him to respond. Discouraged, I set out for home. Wanting above all to publish
Pelted by Black Rain
in a major magazine, I took the manuscript around to publishers. The editors all said, “the content's good, but it's a bit too intense,” and refused to run it. I lost all hope and simply stared at the manuscript, depressed. The subject matter—sharply-worded political criticism, scathing indictment of the atomic bomb—was too much for the normal commercial magazines: that's what I'd learned shopping the manuscript to major publishers. I put the square envelope holding the manuscript of
Pelted by Black Rain
beside my desk, and there it sat, gathering dust.

1966 came to a close. During the year I'd experienced simultaneously the happy and the sad: marriage, funeral, total independence. And it was the year that became in every way possible a turning point for my work. I resolved to rework my concept of atomic bomb manga.