Pathway to Japanese Literature

The place was a farmhouse annex rented by my younger brother, though my sister and I had essentially tumbled into it along with everyone else from our evacuation site. Flies from the cowshed invaded the rooms without restraint. Flies clung immovably to my young niece’s burned neck. The niece flung down her chopsticks and screamed as though aflame. We hung mosquito nets even in daylight to ward off flies. My younger brother lay inside a net with a grim expression, his face and back burned. Across the garden on the main house’s veranda—where I’d grown weary of seeing such faces—appeared a man with horribly swollen features; deeper inside lay more gravely injured persons on spread-out bedding. By evening came strange delirious voices from that direction. He won’t last much longer, I thought. Soon after arose Buddhist prayer chants. The dead man was that household’s eldest daughter’s husband—a Hiroshima survivor who walked back here only to develop encephalopathy after unconsciously scratching his burn scabs in bed.

The hospital was crowded with injured persons no matter when we went. A middle-aged woman, her entire body lacerated by glass fragments, was carried in by three people working together—since treating her would take a full hour, we were made to wait until past noon. —A severely injured elderly man brought in on a handcart; a middle school student with burns on his face and hands—he was said to have been caught in the disaster at Higashi Renshojo—and others; these were faces we always saw. When her gauze was changed, the little niece cried out like a mad person.

“It hurts! It hurts! Give me yōkan!”

“'Give me yōkan'—now that’s problematic,” the doctor said with a wry smile.

In the tatami room next to the examination room, it seemed more of the doctor’s relatives who were disaster victims had been carried in, letting out eerie death throes. Even while transporting injured persons, air raid sirens kept sounding frequently, and the roar of planes overhead persisted. That day too, since my turn showed no sign of arriving, I left the car parked at the hospital entrance and decided to return home to rest for a while. When my younger sister—who had been in the kitchen—saw me return,

“The Kimigayo has been playing for a while now—I wonder what’s going on,” she inquired curiously. Startled, I strode briskly toward the radio in the main house. The voice from the broadcast couldn’t be heard clearly, but there was no longer any doubt about the words announcing a ceasefire. Driven by an impulse I couldn’t suppress, I went out again and headed toward the hospital. At the hospital entrance, Younger Brother was still being made to wait blankly. When I saw that figure,

“What a pity… Even though the war has ended…” I called out. If only the war had ended a little sooner—this phrase would be repeated by everyone afterward. He had lost his youngest son, and all the belongings he had prepared for evacuation here had been completely burned.

I crossed the path through the green rice fields in the evening and made my way down toward the embankment of Yahatagawa. It was a shallow stream, but the water was clear, and on the rocks, black dragonflies rested their wings. I soaked in the water still in my shirt and let out a deep breath. When I turned my head, the low mountain range quietly absorbed the hues of dusk, and the peaks of distant mountains glittered as sunlight bathed them. This was a landscape so unreal it seemed a lie. There was no longer any fear of air raids, and now the vast sky held profound tranquility. Suddenly I felt like someone who had newly fallen to earth from that atomic blast. Even so—against this quiet view—what had become of those burned ruins now? On that day people had struggled desperately for life at Nuitoru’s riverbed and Izumi-tei’s banks. Newspapers reported the city center would stay uninhabitable for seventy-five years; people said ten thousand unprocessed corpses remained, will-o’-the-wisps burning nightly in the ruins. River fish floated up dead two days later—those who ate them soon died too. Even people who’d seemed healthy beside us then fell to sepsis later, while some unresolved wretched anxiety still clung to us.

Food supplies grew scarcer with each passing day. Here, no warm hands reached out to disaster victims. Having to subsist on thin porridge day after day, I gradually felt my life force draining away, becoming unbearably drowsy after every meal. From the second floor window, rice fields stretched unbroken from the mountain foothills all the way to our shelter. Lush green stalks swayed beneath the blazing sun. Was this earth's bounty meant to nourish us—or mock our starvation? To hungry eyes, even the sky and mountains and verdant paddies seemed hollow illusions.

At night, lights began to appear from the mountain foothills across the fields. The lights I saw after so long were gentle, making me feel as if I were traveling far from home. After cleaning up from dinner, my younger sister came upstairs utterly exhausted. She still seemed not fully awake from that nightmare, trembling violently each time she recalled every detail of that moment. Just before it happened, she had considered going to organize luggage in the storehouse—had she entered, she likely wouldn't have survived. I too survived by chance, but the young man who'd been on the neighboring house's second floor—separated from where I was caught by nothing more than a fence—died instantly. Even now she would vividly remember that neighborhood child crushed beneath a house and shudder. That child had been classmates with her own son—evacuated to the countryside earlier with others but brought back after failing to adjust. Whenever my sister saw that child playing in the streets, she wished she could summon her son back even briefly. When flames first appeared, she saw him pinned under timber lifting his head—"Auntie! Help me!" he pleaded. But with her limited strength there was nothing she could have done.

There were many such stories scattered about. My elder brother too, at that time, had crawled out from under the collapsed house and stood up when he recognized the face of an old woman from across the road—her house now crushing her beneath its debris. The instant he thought to go save her, he found himself unable to tear away from the students' wailing voices coming from the factory.

What was even more tragic were my sister-in-law’s relatives. Mr. Maki’s house was a quiet dwelling facing the river in Ōtemachi, and I had gone to pay my respects once when I returned to Hiroshima that spring. Ōtemachi might well have been called ground zero of the atomic bomb. Though he heard his wife’s voice crying for help in the kitchen, Mr. Maki had no choice but to flee alone. When Mr. Maki’s eldest daughter went into labor at the evacuation site, her condition suddenly worsened; the needle marks from her blood transfusion became infected, and in the end she could not be saved. As for the Maki family in Nagarekawa-cho—where the husband was away on military service—the whereabouts of his wife and children remained unknown.

Though I had lived in Hiroshima for less than half a year and had few acquaintances, my sister-in-law and younger sister were constantly gathering news from somewhere about the subsequent whereabouts of various neighbors, swaying between hope and despair.

At the factory, three student workers died. It seemed the second floor had collapsed onto them; the three were left as skeletal remains with their necks aligned in a posture as if looking at a photograph or something similar. By mere identifying marks, their full names were ascertained. But Teacher T’s whereabouts remained unknown. Teacher T had not yet appeared at the factory that morning. However, Teacher T's house was at a temple in Saikumachi; whether she had been at home or en route, she likely could not have survived.

Teacher T's neat figure remained vividly etched before my eyes. When I went to see her about some business, she handed me a note scrawled in hasty characters, her face showing faint traces of disarray. On the factory's second floor, I had been teaching English to students during lunch breaks as air raid warnings grew increasingly frequent. There were times when the radio would report engine roars and plane sightings over Hiroshima without any air raid siren sounding. "What should we do?" I asked Teacher T. "I'll alert you if danger approaches," she replied. "Until then, keep teaching." Yet planes circling over Hiroshima in broad daylight already signaled grave circumstances.

One day, when I had finished teaching and came down from the second floor, Teacher T was sitting alone in a corner of the deserted factory. Beside her, something kept making persistent chirping sounds. When I looked into the cardboard box, chicks were squirming all over. “What’s going on here?” I asked. “The students brought them,” Teacher T replied with a gentle smile. The girls would sometimes bring things like flowers. They were arranged on the office desks and placed on Teacher T’s desk as well.

When the factory was vacated and the students filed out toward the front to line up on the road, Teacher T would always supervise from a slight distance. In her palms was a bundle of flowers, and her neat, petite figure exuded a dignified air. If she had been caught in the disaster along the way, her figure would have transformed into one as horrifying as the faces of the many severely injured—a sight too dreadful to even imagine. I often went to the East Asia Transportation Bureau regarding commuter passes for students and workers, but since spring, due to building demolitions for firebreaks, the transportation bureau had already relocated twice. The last relocated place was also at the center of that calamity. There was a dark-complexioned girl who had memorized my face—a girl who spoke with a lisp yet looked intelligent. She probably did not survive either.

There was an old man over seventy who often appeared in the office regarding war injury insurance. This old man had a brother in Hatsukaichi-cho, and it was reported that he had later been seen looking well. At times, my ears would be startled by perfectly ordinary voices. Someone was letting out a shrill scream near the cowshed, and immediately that scream made me associate it with the voices in death throes that had been wailing at the riverbank that night. The voices that wrenched the gut and the shrill, absurd jokes seemed separated by nothing more than a sheet of paper. I became aware of an abnormal phenomenon occurring in the corner of my left eye. It was four or five days after moving here. As I walked down the sun-drenched road, I sensed something like a winged insect—a fluttering glimmer—at the corner of my left eye. I thought it might be a reflection of light, but even when walking in the shade, glimmering things would still appear in my eyes. And then, even when evening came and night fell, glimmering things would flicker every time something happened. Was this due to having seen such an overwhelming blaze, or was it because I had received a blow to the head? That morning, because I had been in the toilet, I did not see the light everyone else witnessed; suddenly darkness slid down, and something struck me on the head. There was bleeding on my left eyelid, but the injury was so light it could almost be called unharmed. Was that shock still echoing in my nerves? Yet it had been an event so brief—a matter of mere seconds—that it could hardly even be called a shock.

I was troubled by severe diarrhea. The sky that had been turbulent since evening turned into a violent storm when night fell. The howl of the wind scattering over the rice fields could be heard clearly from the unlit second floor where I was. Because there was a possibility that the house might be blown away, my younger brothers and sister who were downstairs evacuated to the main house. I lay alone on the second floor and drowsily listened to the sound of the wind. Before the house collapsed, the shutters would fly off and the roof tiles would scatter; everyone seemed to have become hypersensitive due to that abnormal experience. Occasionally, when the wind abruptly ceased, the croaking of frogs would strike my ears. Then, with full force, another fierce gust of wind struck. I too lay there thinking about what to do in an emergency. The only thing I could take to flee was the bag right beside me. Whenever I went to the downstairs toilet and looked at the sky, the pitch-black sky showed no sign of lightening. With a crackling sound, something tore. From the ceiling, gritty sand came falling down.

The next morning, the wind completely died down, but my diarrhea showed no sign of stopping. The strength in my lower back gave out, and my legs staggered. Though my middle school-aged nephew had gone to assist with building demolition for firebreaks and met with disaster, he miraculously survived—only to lose all his hair afterward and gradually waste away. Then small spots appeared on his limbs. When I examined my own body, I found spots as well—though only a very few. Just to be safe, I visited the hospital to have myself examined at least once, only to find patients overflowing all the way to the front garden. There was a woman who had returned from Onomichi to Hiroshima and met with disaster in Ote-machi. Her hair had not fallen out, but she was passing clots of blood since that morning. She appeared to be pregnant, her listless face filled with unfathomable anxiety and signs of approaching death.

News had come from my brother in Hatsukaichi that my sister’s family in Funairi Kawaguchi-cho had survived. My brother-in-law had been bedridden since spring, and everyone had assumed he would not survive, but it was said that even though the house had collapsed, it had avoided fire. Because their son was now suffering terribly from dysentery, they had come to ask my younger sister for help. My younger sister wasn’t in very good health either, but she decided to go visit them anyway and set out. And the next day, after returning from Hiroshima, my younger sister told me how she had unexpectedly encountered Nishida on the train.

Nishida was a man who had been employed at the shop for twenty years, but since he hadn’t yet left for work that morning, people assumed he wouldn’t have survived if exposed to the rays en route. My younger sister saw a man on the train—his face charred black and swollen into a crumpled mass. All the passengers were staring in that direction, but the man remained composed as he asked the conductor something. Thinking his voice resembled Nishida’s, she approached, and upon recognizing her, he called out loudly. He explained it was his first day leaving the camp…… When I saw Nishida over a month later, his facial burns had dried. He’d been thrown clear with his bicycle and taken to the camp, where his ordeal continued. Most injured people around him had died, and maggots now teemed in his ears. “They kept trying to crawl into my earholes—I couldn’t stand it,” he said, tilting his head as if amused by his own suffering.

When September came, nothing but rain kept falling. My nephew, who had lost his hair and vitality, suddenly took a turn. His nose bled, and he violently vomited clots of blood from his throat. Because it was feared tonight would be critical, the brothers from Hatsukaichi also gathered by his bedside. The hairless boy lay limp, his pallid face clad in a small striped silk kimono, his form resembling some ghastly Bunraku puppet. In his nostrils, cotton plugs were soaked with blood, and the washbasin was stained crimson from what he had vomited up. “Hang in there,” my younger brother encouraged in a low, forceful voice. He forgot that his own burns had not yet healed and devoted himself to nursing him. When the anxious night passed, the nephew miraculously held on.

From the parents of a classmate who had fled and survived together with my nephew came a notification that this friend had died. The energetic elderly man from the insurance company, whom my elder brother had seen in Hatsukaichi, also began bleeding from his gums and soon died. The location where this elderly man had met with disaster and the spot where I had been were no more than two blocks apart.

My stubborn diarrhea had finally begun to ease, but there was no stopping my body's relentless decline. My hair had also visibly thinned. The low mountain visible nearby stood completely shrouded in white mist while rice fields rustled and swayed.

While drowsily sleeping, I had been having aimless dreams. Whenever I saw the night light spilling onto the rain-soaked surface of the rice fields, I would be reminded of my wife’s final moments. The first anniversary of her death was approaching, yet somehow I still felt as though we were living together in that familiar rented house in Chiba, shut in by the rain. The state of the Hiroshima house reduced to ashes was something I could hardly recall. But in dreams at dawn, the house immediately after its collapse would often appear. Even as they lay scattered, there were all sorts of valuables there. Books, paper, desk—all had turned to ash, yet I felt an inner uplift. I wanted to write something and throw myself into it with all my strength.

One morning, when the rain stopped, a cloudless blue sky spread over the low mountains, but to eyes long tormented by ceaseless rains, that azure expanse seemed nothing but deception. True enough, the clear weather lasted merely a day; from the very next morning, grim rain clouds began drifting back. On the tenth day, a death notice for my brother-in-law arrived by express mail from my late wife's hometown. He had been commuting to Hiroshima by train when it happened—there had been a notification stating he'd sustained not even minor injuries and remained active thereafter—yet now this death notice came, leaving me utterly dumbfounded.

It seemed there were still harmful substances in Hiroshima; people who had left the countryside in good health would return staggering back. The elder sister in Funairi Kawaguchi-cho had grown utterly exhausted from nursing both her husband and son; having taken to her bed herself, she once again came to ask our younger sister for assistance. It was the day after my younger sister had left for Hiroshima. The radio had been warning of a typhoon since daytime, but as evening fell, the wind grew stronger. The wind, accompanied by heavy rain, turned into the roar of a pitch-black night. As I was dozing off on the second floor, there came a clamorous sound of shutters being opened below, and voices grew frequent in the direction of the rice fields. There was a gushing, groaning sound of water. The embankment collapsed. Before long, my younger brother and the others woke me up to evacuate to the main house. Carrying my nephew—still unable to stand on his own and wrapped in his bedding—they moved along the dark corridor toward the main house. Everyone there was awake, their faces filled with anxiety. The collapse of that river’s embankment was apparently something that had not occurred in a very long time.

“Does losing the war make everything turn out like this?” the farmwife sighed. The wind violently shook the main house’s front door. A thick supporting pole was propped there.

The next morning, the storm had completely cleared. In the direction the typhoon had departed, all the rice ears bowed, and at the edge of the mountains, a murky red cloud drifted.

It was two or three days later that I heard things like the railway had become impassable and that most of Hiroshima's bridges had been washed away.

As the first anniversary of my wife’s death approached, I wanted to go to Hongo-cho. The temple in Hiroshima had burned down, but in her hometown was her mother who had nursed her until the end. However, they said the railway had become impassable, and the extent of the damage remained unknown. To better understand the situation, I went to Hatsukaichi Station. On the station wall was posted a joint newspaper describing the damage conditions. Trains currently seemed to be running a shuttle service between Ōtake and Akinakano. While full restoration prospects were unclear, the Happōmatsu-Akinakano section’s expected reopening on October 10th meant trains would remain unavailable here for half a month. The newspaper had also published flood damage statistics for the prefecture, but trains not running for half a month was utterly unprecedented.

Because I had managed to buy a ticket to Hiroshima, I found myself deciding to visit Hiroshima Station on impulse. This would be my first time returning there since that calamity. Up to Itsukaichi, nothing seemed amiss, but as the train approached Koi Station, glimpses of war's devastation gradually came into view beyond the windows. The pine trees felled haphazardly across mountain slopes stood as silent witnesses to that day's terror. Roofs and fences lay frozen mid-collapse in jagged black lines while hollow concrete shells and rusted rebar tangled together indiscriminately. Yokogawa Station retained only its boarding platform. The train then pushed deeper into zones of total annihilation. First-time passengers gaped in mute shock at the sights, but for me, those smoldering ruins still radiated the visceral heat of memory. We crossed an iron bridge where Tokiwa Bridge came into sight. Charred giants along the banks clawed at heaven with scorched limbs as endless dunes of cinders rippled beneath them. There at that riverside I had once witnessed suffering beyond language's reach - yet now those same waters flowed serene and crystalline. Survivors now trudged single-file across this bridge stripped of railings. Beyond Noritsu Park stretched Higashi Drill Ground's scorched fields, while on a distant rise Toshogu Shrine's stone steps flickered like shards from some fevered nightmare. I had slept in those temple grounds amidst endless processions of dying wounded. That ink-black memory now seemed etched with acid clarity into those very steps ahead.

When I got off at Hiroshima Station, I joined the line for the Ujina-bound bus. If I could take a steamship from Ujina to Onomichi and then a train from Onomichi to Hongo—but whether there even was a steamship was something I wouldn’t know unless I went to Ujina to check. Though this bus departed every two hours, the line of people waiting stretched for blocks. The blazing sun beat down overhead, and in the shadeless plaza, the crowd stood motionless. If I went to Ujina now, I wouldn’t make it back in time for the return train. So I gave up and left the line.

Thinking I would go see the remains of my house, I crossed Enkōbashi Bridge and headed straight down the road toward Noborichō. The ruins on either side somehow still evoked that panicked feeling of fleeing from that time. When I reached Kyobashi Bridge, I could take in the entire embankment of burned ruins at a glance, the distances between everything now far shorter than they had been before. Come to think of it, I had noticed earlier how clearly the outline of mountain ranges stood beyond the piled-up ruins. No matter how far I walked, the burned landscapes stayed similarly desolate—though here and there lay unsettling remnants like countless glass bottles or clusters of steel helmets blown together into piles.

I stood blankly at my house's remains and tried to recall the direction I had fled that day. The garden stones and pond remained vividly intact, while the charred trees made it nearly impossible to tell what species they had been. The kitchen sink's tiles stayed unbroken. Though the faucet had been blown away, water still flowed from the iron pipe. Right after the house collapsed back then, I'd washed blood from my face using this water. On the road where I now stood, occasional passersby came by, but for a while I felt possessed by some force. When I turned back toward the station again, a stray dog appeared from nowhere. Its burning eyes—terrified of their own existence—held an uncanny expression as it followed me, wavering between approaching and retreating.

There was still an hour until the train’s departure, but the shadeless plaza overflowed with the blazing western sun. The station building—only its outer shell remaining—stood as a black void that seemed ready to collapse at any moment, though someone had strung wire around it and posted a notice reading “Danger: Keep Out.” The ticket booth’s tent-like roof stayed anchored by stone blocks. Tattered men and women crouched here and there, each surrounded by flies buzzing relentlessly. The flies should have dwindled after the recent downpour, yet they persisted in their onslaught. But the men sat legs splayed on bare earth, chewing some blackened substance with utter indifference now. “Walked five ri yesterday,” they remarked about where they’d sleep tonight as if discussing strangers’ affairs. Before me approached a blank-faced old woman,

“Has the train not left yet? Where do I get a ticket?” she asked in a cheerful tone. Before I could tell her, the old woman said “Oh, is that so?” with thanks and walked away. She must be out of her mind. An old man with feet terribly swollen from wearing geta was saying something weakly to his elderly companion.

That day on the return train, I happened to hear that trial operations would begin on the Kure Line starting the next day. So two days later, intending to reach Hongo via the Kure Line, I set out again toward Hatsukaichi. But having miscalculated the train timetable, I took an electric train to Koi. Having come this far, I considered proceeding directly to Ujina. However, beyond this point, the railway's iron bridge had collapsed—the connection was maintained by ferry instead—and I heard boarding that ferry would require a solid hour's wait. Thus I resolved to return to Hiroshima Station and settled onto a bench at Koi Station.

That narrow space was teeming with all sorts of people. There were those who had come by steamship from Onomichi that morning, and others who had been put ashore at Yanai Port and walked all the way here. What people said was inconsistent and unclear—ultimately you couldn’t know how things stood anywhere unless you went to see for yourself—and even as they said this, they kept asking one another about their destinations. Among them were five or six demobilized soldiers shouldering large bundles; a man with piercing eyes opened a sack and thrust socks stuffed with white rice into the hands of a woman standing nearby.

“It’s pitiful—hearing they’re going to retrieve remains now, I can’t just abandon them,” he muttered to himself. Then,

A man appeared, saying, “Could you sell me some rice too?” The glaring-eyed man said, “Don’t be ridiculous! We’ve just come back from Korea and still have to get all the way to Tokyo—we’ll have to walk ten ri here, twenty ri there along the way,” as he pulled out a blanket and muttered, “Maybe I’ll sell this instead.” When I came to Hiroshima Station, I found out that the news about the Kure Line reopening was a false report. I was stunned, but then it occurred to me to visit my sister’s house in Funairi Kawaguchi-chō. There was a single-track train line from Hatchōbori to Dobashi. From Dobashi toward Eba, I traced the burned ruins. Apart from a single burnt-out streetcar left abandoned, I could hardly find anything that resembled a house. Finally, fields came into view, and in the distance, a section of remaining burned area appeared. The fire had apparently advanced right up to the edge of the fields, but by a narrow margin, my sister’s house had survived. However, the wall was warped, the roof was split, and the front entrance lay in disarray. I went around from the back entrance and emerged at the veranda. Then, inside the mosquito net lay my sister, nephew, and younger sister—the three of them side by side on their pillows, ill. The younger sister who had been helping out had also taken a turn for the worse there and had been bedridden for two or three days now. When my sister realized I had come,

“What face are you making? Come show it to me here—I heard you’ve been ill too,” she called from within the mosquito net. Our talk turned to that time. Back then, my sisters had escaped injury by luck, but since my nephew had suffered minor wounds, he went to Eba for treatment. Yet this proved counterproductive. Each time he saw those horrific burn victims along the way, my nephew grew thoroughly sickened, losing all vitality thereafter. That night, with flames licking close, my bedridden brother-in-law couldn’t be moved—my sisters kept trembling in the shelter. Then came that recent typhoon’s devastation here. The damaged roof threatened to blow away any moment; water leaked through as wind rushed mercilessly through gaps—they said living felt impossible. Even now when I looked up, a great hole gaped in the exposed attic where ceiling had fallen. Here still ran no water, glowed no electric lights—days and nights alike remained unbearably fraught.

When I went to the next room intending to visit my brother-in-law, in the corner of a room with peeling walls and warped pillars hung a small mosquito net where he lay. When I looked at him—perhaps from fever—his red swollen face appeared dazed; even when I called out, my brother-in-law could only gasp repeatedly, "It hurts... it hurts."

I rested at my sister’s house for two or three hours, returned to Hiroshima Station, and upon arriving back in Hatsukaichi in the evening, stopped by my elder brother’s house. To my surprise, my younger sister’s son Shirō had come there. The place where he had been evacuated had its transportation cut off by the recent flood, but led by the teacher, he had managed to return here after three days. From his knees down to his heels were countless scars from flea bites, but his face looked relatively lively. Having decided to take him to Yawata Village the next day, I had my elder brother let me stay at his house that night. However, for some reason, it was a restless night. The detailed scenes of burned ruins and figures of dazed people revived in my sleepless mind. When I took the bus from Hatchōbori to the station, I suddenly remembered there had been a strange smell in the wind blowing through the bus window. That must have been the stench of death. The sound of rain had been there since dawn. The next day, I took my nephew and returned through the rain to Yawata Village. The nephew trudging along behind me was barefoot.

My sister-in-law lamented her deceased son ceaselessly every day. In the drenched narrow kitchen, what she muttered while working was always about that. "If only we'd evacuated sooner, our things wouldn't have burned"—this had nearly become her refrain. My younger brother listened in silence but would occasionally shout when overwhelmed. My younger sister's son shook with hunger as he caught and ate locusts. Two of my younger brother's sons had gone for student evacuation too but hadn't returned yet due to halted trains. When the prolonged bad weather finally lifted, a crisp autumn day came. Rice ears swayed while village festival drums throbbed. Villagers feverishly carried palanquins along the embankment road while we hungry ones stared vacantly. One morning came notice that my brother-in-law in Funairi Kawaguchi-chō had died.

My younger brother and I exchanged glances and prepared to attend the funeral. Along the riverbank, the two of us walked briskly down the road stretching over a ri to the train station. He had finally passed away—I found myself unable to suppress being overcome with emotion.

The memory of when I returned home this spring and visited my brother-in-law’s office rose first before my eyes. He wore a frayed overcoat and clung fiercely to a brazier where green wood smoldered, trembling as he muttered “It’s cold, it’s cold.” Both his speech and bearing had grown terribly frail—he had aged beyond recognition. Not long after that, he took to his bed. Though the doctor diagnosed lung damage, those who knew him from before found this utterly inconceivable. One day when I visited him, he suddenly lifted his head—now streaked with more white—and began talking feverishly. He predicted this war was nearing catastrophic defeat and faintly voiced bitter resentment that the military had deceived the people. Hearing such words from him was beyond anything I could have imagined. Around when the Second Sino-Japanese War began, this man once got drunk and harassed me relentlessly. To someone who had long served as an Army engineer like him, a person like me must have always seemed intolerable. I remember countless details about his life. To write of him would be endless.

When we arrived at Koi, we transferred to the city tram. The city tram ran as far as Tenmachō; from there, we would cross a temporary bridge on foot to reach the opposite bank. This temporary bridge had apparently only just become passable around yesterday, and people were cautiously making their way across the three-shaku-wide plank that allowed only one person at a time. (Even after that, the iron bridge remained unrepaired for a long time, and a black market prospered in this pedestrian transit area.) We arrived at my sister’s house just before noon.

In the guest room where the ceiling had collapsed and walls were split apart, four or five relatives had gathered. When my sister saw everyone’s faces, she sobbed, “All because I wanted to let the children eat that too—I didn’t bring a lunchbox and just went around to gruel cafeterias for my midday meals.” My brother-in-law lay covered with a white cloth in the next room. His dead face evoked white charcoal remaining in the brazier.

If it got late, the trains would stop running, so we had to complete the cremation while it was still light. Neighbors carried his corpse and finished preparing. Eventually everyone left my sister's house and walked toward fields four or five blocks away. At a vacant lot on the field's edge lay my brother-in-law - no coffin, just wrapped in straw matting. This place had burned countless corpses since the atomic bombing; kindling came from piled debris of shattered houses. When they formed a circle around him, a monk in national uniform chanted sutras before lighting straw. Then his ten-year-old son wailed. Flames spread solemnly across timber. The rain-thickened sky darkened by degrees. After farewells there, we hurried back.

My younger brother and I emerged onto the river embankment and hurried along the path toward the temporary bridge in Tenmachō. The river at our feet had grown completely dark, and not a single light could be seen in the burned ruins stretching out on one side. The dark, slightly chilly road stretched endlessly. From somewhere indistinct, the wafting stench of death could be perceived. I had heard long ago that countless corpses remained here, left uncollected beneath collapsed houses and becoming breeding grounds for maggots, but the pitch-black burned ruins still loomed ominously over people even now. Suddenly, I faintly heard a baby’s cry. It was not a trick of the ears; gradually, as we walked on, the voice grew clearer. A vigorous yet sorrowful voice—what an innocent sound this was. Could people already be living in this area, with even a baby crying? An indescribable emotion wrenched my guts.

Mr. Maki had recently returned after being demobilized from Shanghai, but when he came home, his house, wife, and children were all gone. So he took shelter with his younger sister in Hatsukaichi Town and would occasionally go out to Hiroshima. By now, four months having already passed since that time, if those who remained missing still did not appear, there was no choice but to resign oneself to their deaths. Even Mr. Maki had tried visiting places like his wife’s hometown where he thought she might be found, but everywhere he went, he was only met with condolences. He had also gone to see the burned ruins of the house in Nagarekawa about twice. He heard accounts of survivors here and there.

In reality, even now in Hiroshima, somewhere, someone was constantly, repeatedly recounting the events of August 6th. There were stories such as that of a man who, while searching for his missing wife, picked up hundreds of women’s corpses to check their faces—yet not a single one wore a wristwatch; accounts of a woman lying dead before Nagarekawa Broadcasting Station, her body sprawled as if shielding her baby from flames; and there was also the story of how, on an island in the Seto Inland Sea that day, every village man had been mobilized for compulsory service in building demolition for firebreaks—leaving the entire village widowed, after which the wives stormed into the village head’s home. Mr. Maki enjoyed listening to such stories in train cars and station corners, but his frequent trips to Hiroshima had, before he knew it, become a habit. Naturally, he also stopped by the black markets at Koi Station and in front of Hiroshima Station. But more than that, walking through the burned ruins became a kind of solace for him. Previously, unless he climbed to a considerable height like a tall building, he couldn’t survey the Chugoku Mountain Range; now, no matter where he walked, it lay fully visible before his eyes, and the shapes of the Seto Inland Sea islands appeared right before him. Those mountains looked down upon the people in the burned ruins—what on earth had happened? ...wearing expressions that seemed to demand, "What on earth had happened?" However, in the burned ruins, eager people had already begun building crude shacks. Mr. Maki tried to imagine what form this city, once flourished as a military city, would be reborn into in the future. Then, the image of a peaceful city surrounded by green trees would hazily appear. As he walked absently along, lost in thought after thought, Mr. Maki was often greeted by strangers. Long ago, Mr. Maki had been a practicing doctor, so it was thought that perhaps his patients had remembered his face, but even so, it felt somehow strange.

The first time he noticed this was certainly when he was walking along the muddy road from Koi to Tenmabashi. Just as the rain was pouring down, a beggar-like man—wearing a piece of rusted corrugated iron on his head and wrapped in tattered clothes—suddenly revealed his face from beneath the corrugated iron fragment he was holding up instead of an umbrella. Those glinting eyes stared suspiciously at Mr. Maki’s face with an expression that seemed on the verge of announcing his name. But soon, his expression abruptly shifted to one of despair, and he hid his face behind the corrugated iron.

Even when riding crowded trains, there were faces across from him that kept nodding incessantly toward Mr. Maki. When he carelessly nodded back, there would be cases of mistaken identity—someone saying, "You were Mr. Yamada, weren’t you?" When he told this story to others, it became clear that being greeted by strangers wasn’t unique to Mr. Maki. In reality, in Hiroshima, someone was constantly trying to find people—even now.

(From the November 1947 issue of Mita Bungaku)