Hiroshima (6 page)

The fact that no attack on Hiroshima came caused rumors to circulate. An older boy gathered us children and told us that according to a shortwave transmission from the U.S. military his father had listened in on, Hiroshima had to be left untouched so it could be an important U.S. military base. So there's no way they'd attack. Hiroshima, he said complacently, was safe. We believed him and nodded. When the sirens sounded, we took refuge in the trench, but we agreed among ourselves, “It's only an observation plane. It's not an attack.” We watched with no apprehension as B-29s high in the sky flew over. That comforting thought spread among the kids and the Hiroshima residents. We had no idea that the U.S. military was saving Hiroshima to be the stage, making preparations step by step, on which to create a this-worldly hell. We had become wholly accustomed to thinking we were safe.

For a particular period on summer evenings in Hiroshima, there was no wind, and it was hot and humid, suffocating, and disagreeable. Time passed, with the city's residents still feeling both secure and insecure.

This first excerpt appears one quarter of the way through volume I. It depicts Gen, his mother, his older sister, and his younger brother (in the cartoon Shinji, not Susumu) hunting grasshoppers in the tall grass at the Army Firing Range. Despite the extreme shortage of food of which Nakazawa writes, his images show strikingly well-fed people; perhaps artistic convention trumped real-life emaciation. (The same holds true of the stunning Hiroshima murals of Maruki Iri and Maruki Toshi; see
The Hiroshima Murals: The Art of Iri Maruki and Toshi Maruki
, ed. John W. Dower and John Junkerman [Tokyo: Kodansha, 1985].) The sun is a major leitmotif of
Barefoot Gen
, as is grass, especially wheat. On the first page of this excerpt, the vertical panel that includes only the sun provides a transition from hunting for food to the father's return from jail. This is the tenth time in the first seventy pages that Nakazawa devotes a panel entirely to the sun. Despite the bruises on his face that testify to police torture, the father, too, is remarkably sturdy in appearance. These scenes of hunger and the return of the father segue into a scene in which the Korean neighbor, Pak, appears with a large bowl of rice to offer the family and then a lengthy discussion of Japan's prewar and wartime mistreatment of Koreans and Japanese.

For a discussion of the presentation of these excerpts, including the reasoning behind flipping the pages, see the editor's introduction. This and the following excerpts are from the fine ten-volume
Barefoot Gen
(San Francisco: Last Gasp, 2004–2009). They appear here by permission.