Pathway to Japanese Literature

In the early days after moving to Yawata Village, I was still in good health, transporting the injured to the hospital by car, going out to collect rationed goods, and keeping in touch with my elder brother in Hatsukaichi Town. It was a detached house that my younger brother had rented from a farm family, but my younger sister and I had ended up crowding in with everyone else from our evacuation site. The flies from the cowshed swarmed relentlessly throughout the room. The flies clung motionless to my young niece’s burned neck. The niece threw down her chopsticks and wailed as if set ablaze. To keep the flies away, mosquito nets were hung even during the daytime. My younger brother, burned on the face and back, lay inside the mosquito net with a gloomy expression. Across the garden on the veranda of the main house, I could make out the figure of a man with a severely swollen face—a sight I had grown weary of seeing—while further inside, more seriously injured persons seemed to be present, bedding laid out for them. In the evening, strange delirious voices began to drift over from that area. That one would die soon, I thought. And before long, the voices of Buddhist prayers were already being heard. The deceased was the spouse of that household's eldest daughter—having survived the Hiroshima catastrophe and walked all the way back here—but after taking to his sickbed, he unconsciously scratched at his burn scabs and abruptly developed encephalopathy, or so they said.

The hospital was perpetually crowded with injured people regardless of visiting hours. A middle-aged woman carried in by three people—her entire body lacerated by glass fragments—required a full hour of treatment, keeping us waiting until well past noon. An elderly man with critical injuries brought by handcart; a middle school student burned on face and hands—he’d apparently been caught in the disaster at Higashi Renpeijo—these became our daily procession of familiar faces. The young niece wailed with maddened intensity whenever her gauze was changed.

“It hurts! It hurts! Give me yokan!” “Asking for yokan now isn’t helping,” the doctor said with a strained smile. In the tatami room adjoining the examination space lay more of the doctor’s relatives—disaster victims who’d been carried there—their eerie death rattles seeping through walls. Even during patient transports now came frequent air raid warnings and thunderous booms overhead. That day too showed no sign of my turn arriving—I left our cart abandoned at the hospital entrance and resolved to return home first for rest. When my younger sister spotted me entering from her kitchen post—

“The Kimigayo anthem has been playing for a while now—I wonder what’s going on?” she asked with a puzzled look. Startled, I strode briskly toward the radio in the main house. The voice from the broadcast couldn’t be clearly heard, but I could no longer doubt the word “ceasefire.” Unable to stay still, I went out again and headed toward the hospital. At the hospital entrance, my younger brother was still being made to wait blankly. When I saw that figure,

“What a waste… 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 luggage he had prepared for evacuation here had been completely burned.

In the evening, I crossed a path through green rice fields and descended toward Yahata River's embankment. It was a shallow stream with clear water where black dragonflies rested their wings on rocks. Submerging myself in the water still wearing my shirt, I released a deep breath. When I turned my head, low mountains quietly absorbed dusk's hues while distant peaks glittered under sunlight. This landscape felt utterly unreal. No air raid alarms remained now—the vast sky held only profound stillness. Suddenly I felt like someone newly fallen to earth from that atomic blast. Yet what of those who'd fought for life at Nottori Riverbed and Izumi-tei's shore—how did those ruins compare to this peace? Newspapers claimed Hiroshima's center would stay uninhabitable seventy-five years; people whispered of ten thousand unburied corpses and nightly ghost fires smoldering in ashes. River fish floated dead days after—those who ate them soon perished too. Even those who'd seemed healthy beside us later fell to sepsis, leaving us tangled in unresolved dread.

Food supplies were becoming increasingly scarce day by day. Here, not a single warm hand was extended to the disaster victims. Having to survive day after day on meager gruel, I gradually exhausted my vitality and would feel unbearably drowsy after meals. When I looked out from the second floor, the rice fields stretched continuously from the foothills of the low mountain range all the way to here. The verdant rice stalks swayed beneath the blazing sun. Was that the earth’s sustenance, or was it meant to starve humanity? The sky, the mountains, the verdant rice fields—all appeared hollow in the eyes of those starving.

As night fell, lamplight began to appear from the foothills of the mountains to scattered spots in the rice fields. The lamplight I saw after so long was gentle, and I felt as though I were traveling.

After finishing cleaning up after the meal, my younger sister, completely exhausted, came up to the second floor. As if she had not yet fully awakened from that nightmare, whenever she reminisced in minute detail about that moment, her body would tremble uncontrollably. Just before that, she had thought about going to the storehouse to organize their luggage, but if she had entered it, she likely would not have survived. I too had survived by chance, but the young man who had been on the second floor of the neighboring house, separated from where I was caught in the disaster by nothing more than a single fence, died instantly. Even now, she would vividly recall the figure of the neighborhood child crushed beneath the house and tremble. That child had been a classmate of my sister’s son. They had joined the group evacuation to the countryside earlier but were taken back by their parents after being unable to adjust to life there. Whenever my younger sister saw that child playing on the street, she would wish to call back her own son, even if just for a little while. When the flames became visible, my younger sister saw that child pinned beneath lumber, lifting his head as he pleaded, “Auntie, help me!” However, given her strength at that moment, there was nothing she could have done.

Stories like these were scattered everywhere. At that time too, when Elder Brother crawled out from under the collapsed house and stood up, he noticed across the road the face of an old woman from the opposite house similarly trapped beneath debris. In that instant he thought to go save her, but couldn't bring himself to abandon the voices of students wailing from the factory.

Even more tragic was my sister-in-law’s kin. Mr.Maki’s house stood facing Ōtemachi River—a tranquil dwelling I had visited once that spring when returning to Hiroshima. Ōtemachi might well have been called ground zero. Though hearing his wife’s cries from their kitchen begging rescue,M r.Maki had fled alone. His eldest daughter went into labor at their evacuation site only to sicken suddenly; infection spread from transfusion needle marks until she perished. As for Mr.Maki of Nagarekawa-cho—though her husband remained absent on military deployment—his wife and children’s whereabouts stayed unknown.

I had lived in Hiroshima for less than six months and had few acquaintances, but my sister-in-law and younger sister were constantly gathering news from somewhere about the subsequent fates of this or that neighbor, swinging between hope and despair.

At the factory, three students had died. It appeared that the second floor had collapsed onto them; their skeletal remains were found with heads aligned in a posture as though gazing intently at a photograph or something. Through mere identifying marks, their names had been ascertained. However, Teacher T's whereabouts were unknown. Teacher T had not yet appeared at the factory that morning. However, Teacher T’s house was at a temple in Saikumachi, and whether she had been at home or en route, she likely hadn’t survived.

Teacher T’s refined figure remained vividly imprinted before my eyes. Having business to attend to, when I went to Teacher T’s place, she handed me a note written in rough characters, her face bearing a faint look of confusion. On the second floor of the factory, I taught English to students during lunch breaks as air raid alarms gradually grew more frequent. There were times when no sirens sounded even as radios reported explosions and aircraft sightings over Hiroshima. “What should we do?” I asked Teacher T. “If danger approaches, I’ll notify you,” she said. “Until then, continue your lessons.” Yet aircraft circling Hiroshima in broad daylight had become an undeniable crisis.

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 was making incessant cries. When I peered into the cardboard box, it was full of chicks that were wriggling. “What happened here?” I inquired. “The students brought them,” Teacher T responded with a faint smile. The girls would sometimes bring flowers. They were arranged in vases on office desks and placed upon Teacher T’s desk as well. When the factory was cleared out and the students filed toward the front to line up on the road, Teacher T would always supervise from a slight distance. In Teacher T’s palm was a bundle of flowers, and her neat, petite figure had a dignified air. If she had met with disaster along the way, then like the faces of those many severely injured people, even imagining it would have transformed her form into something horrifying.

I often went to the East Asia Transportation Bureau regarding commuter passes for students and factory workers, but since spring that year, due to building demolitions for firebreaks, the Bureau had already relocated twice. The Bureau’s final relocated location too had been at the center of that calamity. There was a dark-complexioned girl there who spoke with a slight lisp yet appeared intelligent—she had come to recognize my face. She too had likely not survived. There was an old man over seventy who frequently appeared in the office regarding war injury insurance matters. As for this old man, it was said that his brother in Hatsukaichi-cho had later been spotted looking well.

At times, my ears would startle at perfectly ordinary human voices. From the cowshed direction came someone's shrill cry - immediately conjuring memories of those death-throes wails that had wept along the riverbed that night. The gut-twisting screams and absurdly shrill jokes seemed separated by mere tissue paper. I became conscious of an abnormal phenomenon manifesting in my left eye's corner. Four or five days after moving here, walking a sun-baked road, I sensed something faintly glimmering - a gnat perhaps - at my eye's periphery. Though I thought it light's reflection, even in shade these gleams would sometimes catch my vision. Then as dusk deepened into night, these flickering lights persisted with every turn of events. Was this from witnessing too many flames? Or that blow to my skull? That morning I'd been in the toilet - missing the light others saw - when darkness came crashing down and something struck my head. Though blood seeped above my left eyelid, the wound proved slight enough to call unharmed. Could that momentary shock still reverberate through my nerves? Yet it had lasted mere seconds - scarcely warranting the name 'shock'.

I began to be plagued by severe diarrhea.

The sky that had been stormy since evening turned into violent wind and rain by night. The howl of wind scattering across rice fields could be heard clearly from the unlit second floor where I lay. Fearing the house might blow away, my younger brothers and sister who'd been downstairs evacuated to the main building. I remained alone on the second floor listening drowsily to the wind's roar. Before any collapse would come shutters flying off and roof tiles scattering - everyone seemed hypersensitive from that abnormal experience. Whenever winds momentarily stilled, frog croaks pierced through. Then full-force gales would assault us anew. Lying there I too pondered emergency plans. The only salvageable item was my nearby satchel. Each toilet trip downstairs revealed an obstinately blackened sky resisting dawn. A crisp ripping sound erupted. Gritty sand rained from ceiling cracks.

The next morning, the wind subsided completely, but my diarrhea showed no signs of stopping. The strength left my hips, and my legs tottered. Though my middle school-aged nephew had gone to assist with building evacuation only to meet with disaster and miraculously survived, afterward all his hair fell out as he gradually lost his vitality. Then small spots appeared on his limbs. When I examined my own body, I found spots too—very few, but present. To be cautious—or rather, to get examined once—I visited the hospital, where patients overflowed all the way to the front garden. There was a woman who had returned from Onomichi to Hiroshima and was said to have met disaster in Ōtemachi. Her hair hadn’t fallen out, but she was passing blood clots since that morning. She appeared pregnant, her listless face filled with bottomless anxiety and the signs of death’s approach.

The news that my sister’s family in Funairi Kawaguchi-cho had survived had been conveyed by my brother in Hatsukaichi. My brother-in-law had been bedridden since spring, and everyone had imagined he could not be saved; yet even though the house had collapsed, they said it had been spared from fire. Because his son was suffering terribly from dysentery at that time, he had come to ask my younger sister for help. Although my younger sister wasn’t in very good health either, she decided to go visit him anyway and set out. And then, the next day when my younger sister returned from Hiroshima, she 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 left for work that morning, we assumed he must have been struck by the rays en route and couldn’t have survived. My younger sister saw a man on the train—his face grotesquely swollen and charred black. All the passengers’ gazes fixed on him, yet he nonchalantly asked the conductor something. Thinking his voice resembled Nishida’s, she approached, and he too recognized her figure, calling out loudly. He had just emerged from the camp that day……When I saw Nishida over a month later, the burns on his face had dried. Blown away with his bicycle and carried into camp, Nishida endured relentless torment. Nearly all surrounding casualties died, and maggots infested his ears. “The maggots kept trying to crawl into my ear canals—it was unbearable,” he said sheepishly, tilting his head.

When September arrived, rain fell without cease. My nephew - hair gone and vitality lost - suddenly worsened. His nose bled ceaselessly while he retched up clotted blood from his throat. Fearing this night critical, brothers from Hatsukaichi gathered at his bedside. His shaven pallid head and small striped silk kimono made him resemble some ghastly Bunraku puppet lying limp. Cotton plugs soaked crimson in his nostrils; vomit stained the basin scarlet. "Hang in there," Younger Brother urged through clenched throat. He nursed obsessively despite unhealed burns. Dawn broke anxious - yet miraculously,the nephew endured.

A notification arrived from the parents of my nephew's classmate who had survived alongside him, informing us of his friend's death. The vigorous old man from the insurance company whom my elder brother had seen in Hatsukaichi also began bleeding from his gums and soon died. The place where that old 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 subside, but there was nothing to be done about my body's continued weakening. My hair had thinned visibly.

The low mountain visible nearby was completely enveloped in white mist, and the rice fields swayed restlessly.

I lay in a deep stupor seeing aimless dreams. Whenever I saw lamplight leaking onto the rain-soaked surface of rice fields at night, I would compulsively recall my wife's final moments. Though the first anniversary of her death approached, I still felt as though I remained confined with her by ceaseless rains in that familiar Chiba rental house we'd long inhabited.

The state of our Hiroshima home reduced to ashes was something I could hardly recall. But in my dreams at dawn, the house immediately after its collapse would often appear. There, while scattered about, lay various valuables. Books, papers, desks—all had turned to ash, yet I felt an inner exhilaration. I wanted to write something and hurl myself at it with all my might.

One morning when the rain cleared, a cloudless blue sky spread over the low mountains, but to eyes that had been tormented by endless rains, that azure seemed nothing but deception. Sure enough, the clear skies lasted but a single day; from the next day onward, gloomy rain clouds came and went once more. 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; immediately after there had been a notification stating he had sustained not even minor injuries at that time and had remained healthy and active thereafter, this death notice left me utterly dumbfounded.

It seemed there were still harmful substances lingering in Hiroshima; people who had ventured out from the countryside in good health would return unsteady on their feet. My sister in Funairi Kawaguchi-cho, utterly drained from tending to both her husband and son, had herself taken ill, so she came once more to seek help from my younger sister here. This occurred the day after that younger sister had departed for Hiroshima.

The radio had been warning of a typhoon since daytime, but as evening approached, the wind intensified. The wind became the roar of a pitch-black night accompanied by torrential rain. When I was drowsing on the second floor, there came a clamorous sound of storm shutters being opened below, and voices grew frequent toward the fields. There came a gushing, grinding sound of water. The embankment collapsed. Before long, Younger Brother and the others woke me to evacuate to the main house. They carried my nephew—still unable to stand on his own and wrapped in his bedding—along the dark corridor to the main house. There, everyone was awake with anxious expressions. The collapse of that river’s embankment was something that apparently hadn’t occurred in a very long time.

“Is this what happens when we lose a war?” sighed the farmer’s wife.

The wind violently shook the main house’s front door. A thick supporting pole was propped there.

The next morning, the storm had vanished without a trace. In the direction the typhoon had departed, every last rice ear bowed low, while along the mountain’s edge, clouds tinged a murky red drifted restlessly. It was two or three days later that I heard reports—the railways rendered impassable, nearly all of Hiroshima’s bridges washed away.

Because my wife’s first death anniversary was approaching, I thought of going to Hongo-cho. Though Hiroshima’s temple had burned down, her hometown still held her mother who had nursed her until the end. But with railways rendered impassable and damage assessments unclear, I went to Hatsukaichi Station regardless. On its walls hung a community newspaper detailing destruction—trains shuttling only between Otake and Akinakano now, full restoration prospects unknown. Even Yahatamatsu-Akinakano’s October 10th reopening meant half a month without through trains. The paper listed prefectural flood statistics too, but trains halted for fifteen days—this was unprecedented.

Having managed to purchase a ticket to Hiroshima, I found myself impulsively deciding to visit Hiroshima Station. This would be my first time returning there since the calamity. Up until Itsukaichi, nothing seemed amiss, but as the train approached Koi Station, traces of wartime devastation gradually revealed themselves beyond the windows. The pine trees lay felled across mountain slopes in chaotic heaps, their prone forms testifying to that day's cataclysm. Roofs and fences remained frozen mid-collapse, their blackened forms stretching endlessly onward, while hollowed concrete shells and rust-red steel rods tangled together in disarray. Yokogawa Station survived only as disembodied boarding platforms. The train then pushed deeper into zones of intensified ruin. First-time travelers through this wasteland could only gape in shock, yet for me, the dying embers of that day still burned vividly close. As we crossed an iron bridge, Tokiwa Bridge came into view. Along charred embankments, giant scorched trees raked at the sky with splintered limbs while endless drifts of cinder shifted like living things. At this riverside on that day, I had witnessed human agony beyond language's reach—yet now the water flowed clear and untroubled. Survivors shuffled in lines across the bridge's rail-less span. Beyond Norio Park lay Higashi Renshojo's scorched training grounds, while on a distant rise Toshogu Shrine's stone steps flashed before me like shards from some fevered nightmare. There, amidst endless processions of dying casualties, I had once bedded down in that shrine's precincts. That pitch-dark memory now seemed etched indelibly into the stone steps looming ahead.

When I alighted at Hiroshima Station, I joined the queue for the Ujina-bound bus. If I took a steamship from Ujina to Onomichi, I could reach Hongo by train from there—but whether any steamships still operated couldn’t be known without traveling all the way to Ujina to confirm. This bus departed only once every two hours, yet the line of waiting passengers stretched for blocks. The scorching sun beat down overhead, and in the shadeless plaza, the queue showed no movement. Were I to go to Ujina now and return, I’d miss my train back. So I abandoned the attempt and stepped out of line.

Thinking I would go see the remains of the house, I crossed Sarukobashi Bridge and proceeded straight along the road toward Noboricho. The ruins on both sides somehow still evoked the feeling of fleeing from that time. When I came upon Kyobashi Bridge, the embankment of the featureless burned ruins spread out before my eyes, and all distances seemed drastically shortened compared to before. Now that I thought of it, I had noticed since earlier how clearly the silhouette of mountain ranges stood out beyond the endless heaps of ruins. Though everywhere I went there were similar burned ruins, there were places where countless glass bottles remained eerily intact and spots where nothing but iron helmets had been blown together.

I stood vacantly at the site of my house and tried to recall the direction I had fled in that time. The garden stones and pond remained vividly intact, though the charred trees were nearly impossible to identify by species. The kitchen sink tiles had survived unbroken. Though the faucet had been blown away, water still flowed steadily from the iron pipe. At that time, right after the house collapsed, I had washed the blood from my face with this water. On the road where I now stood, occasional passersby came and went, yet I remained in a trance-like state for some time. Then when I turned back toward the station again, a stray dog appeared from nowhere. Its eyes—burning as if terrified of their own existence—bore an uncanny expression, and the creature kept following me, wavering between walking ahead or behind.

There was still an hour until the train’s departure, but in the shadeless square, the western sun blazed brightly, flooding the area. The station building—only its outer shell remaining—stood black and hollow, giving the impression it might collapse at any moment. Yet barbed wire had been stretched around it, and a sign reading “Danger: Keep Out” had been posted. The tent-like roof of the ticket booth was secured with stones. Tattered men and women crouched everywhere, and around each person flies swarmed persistently. The flies should have decreased considerably due to the recent torrential rain, but they were still wreaking havoc. But the men sitting with their legs splayed out on the ground, munching on something black, seemed to have grown indifferent to everything now. “I walked five ri yesterday,” “Where on earth will we sleep tonight?” they discussed as if it were someone else’s problem. Before my eyes, an old woman with a bewildered look approached and asked in a lighthearted tone, “Hasn’t the train left yet? Where do you buy tickets?”

“Has the train not left yet? Where do I get a ticket?” she asked in a jocular tone. Before I could tell her, the old woman said “Oh, is that so?” thanked me, and walked away. She must be unhinged. An old man with feet swollen from wooden clogs was murmuring something weakly to his companion. That day on the return train, I’d happened to hear the Kure Line would begin trial operations starting tomorrow. So two days later, planning to reach Hongo via the Kure Line, I set out again toward Hatsukaichi. But with train schedules suspended, I took a tram to Koi. Having come this far, I considered heading straight to Ujina—but beyond here, the tram’s iron bridge had collapsed. Ferries maintained the connection instead; boarding one would take a full hour, I heard. So I resolved to return to Hiroshima Station and sat down on Koi Station’s bench.

That narrow space was teeming with all manner of people. There were those who had come by steamship from Onomichi that morning, and those who had been put off their boat at Yanai and walked here. People’s accounts were varied and unclear—ultimately you couldn’t know what was happening where unless you went to see for yourself—and as they said this, they asked one another about their destinations. Among them were five or six demobilized soldiers carrying large bundles; a man with glaring eyes opened a bag and forcibly handed white rice stuffed in a sock to a middle-aged woman standing nearby.

“It’s pitiful—hearing she’s going to retrieve remains now, I can’t just abandon her,” he muttered to himself.

Then,

“Won’t you sell me some rice too?” a man appeared and asked. The man with glaring eyes,

“Don’t be ridiculous! We just came back from Korea and still gotta get all the way to Tokyo—gonna have to walk ten, twenty ri all along the way,” he said while pulling out a blanket, then muttered, “Maybe I should sell this too?”

When I came to Hiroshima Station, it became clear that the Kure Line's opening was a false report. I stood stunned, then suddenly thought to visit my sister's house in Funairi Kawaguchi-cho. There was a single-track tram running from Hatchobori to Dobashi. From Dobashi toward Eba, I traced my way through the burned ruins. Apart from one fire-damaged tram left abandoned, there was scarcely anything resembling a house to be found. At last fields came into view, with a section of surviving ruins appearing ahead. The flames seemed to have surged right up to the field's edge, but by some narrow margin my sister's house had been spared. Yet its fence stood warped, roof split open, front entrance strewn with debris. I circled around from the back entrance and emerged at the veranda. There inside a mosquito net lay my older sister, nephew and younger sister—all three lying ill with pillows aligned in parallel. Even my younger sister who'd come to help had fallen sick here and been bedridden these past two or three days. When my older sister realized I'd come,

“What kind of face are you making? Come over here and let me see. I heard you’ve been ill too,” my sister called out from within the mosquito net.

The conversation turned to those events. At that time，my older sisters had escaped injury，but since my nephew sustained minor wounds，they took him to Eba for treatment. Yet this proved misguided. Each time they encountered horrific burn victims along the way，my nephew grew increasingly unwell，and from then on he lost all vitality. That night，as flames encroached nearby，they couldn’t move their bedridden brother-in-law，so my sisters kept trembling inside their shelter. Then came that recent typhoon—utterly devastating here. The damaged roof threatened to tear away any moment；water seeped through，wind invaded every crevice without mercy—they said it felt like living death. Even now when I looked up，a great gap yawned in the exposed attic where ceiling panels had fallen. Here still，they told me，no water flowed from taps，no lamps glowed，and unrest plagued both night and day.

When I went to the adjacent room intending to check on my brother-in-law, I found him lying in a small mosquito net hung in the corner of a room with peeling walls and warped pillars. Seeing him—perhaps due to the fever—his red, swollen face was dazed; even when I called out, my brother-in-law merely gasped, "It’s unbearable... unbearable..."

After resting at my sister’s house for two or three hours, I returned to Hiroshima Station, and arriving back in Hatsukaichi in the evening, stopped by my eldest brother’s house. To my surprise, my younger sister’s son Shirou had come there. The area where he had been evacuated had been cut off by the recent flood damage, but led by his teacher, he had managed to return here after three days of travel. From his knees down to his heels were countless scars from flea bites, yet his face looked comparatively healthy. Having decided to take him to Yawata Village the next day, I stayed at my eldest brother’s house that night. Yet somehow it became a sleepless night. Fragmentary scenes of burned ruins and figures of dazed people kept reviving in my wakeful mind. When I had ridden the bus from Hatchobori to the station earlier, I suddenly recalled noticing 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 falling since dawn. The next day, I took my nephew and returned to Yawata Village in the rain. My nephew, trudging along after me, was barefoot.

The sister-in-law lamented her lost son ceaselessly every day. In the narrow soaked kitchen, whatever she busied herself with, her murmurs were always about that. "If only we had evacuated a little sooner, our belongings wouldn’t have burned"—this had become almost a mantra. Younger Brother, who listened in silence, would sometimes lose control and shout. While trembling from hunger, my sister’s son caught and ate locusts and such. Younger Brother’s two sons had also gone on student evacuation, but due to the train suspension, they still hadn’t returned.

When the long spell of bad weather finally cleared up, a clear autumn day arrived. Rice ears swayed, and the sound of the village festival’s drum resounded. Along the embankment road, the villagers carried the palanquin about in fervor, while we who were starving could only watch blankly.

One morning, there came a notification that my brother-in-law in Funairi Kawaguchi-cho had died.

Younger Brother and I exchanged glances and began preparing to attend the funeral. We walked briskly along the river on the path stretching a little over one ri to the train station. He had finally died, I thought, unable to keep from being struck by emotion. The memory of when I returned home this spring and visited my brother-in-law’s office rose first to my mind. He was bundled in a worn-out overcoat, trembling and muttering “Cold, cold,” as he clung fiercely to the brazier where green wood smoldered. Both his words and demeanor had grown terribly feeble—he had withered away with age. Not long after that, he took to his bed. According to the doctor’s diagnosis, his lungs had been afflicted, though those who had known him before found this nearly impossible to believe. One day when I visited him, he suddenly raised his head—now more streaked with white—and began talking about all sorts of things. He had already anticipated this war was nearing disastrous defeat and let slip a faint voice of bitter indignation—that the people had been deceived by the military leadership.

Hearing such words from this man’s mouth was something I had never anticipated. At the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, this man had once gotten drunk and picked a fierce quarrel with me. To him—who had long served as an army engineer—someone like me must have always seemed an unpleasant presence. I remember various things about this man’s life. Were I to write about him, there would be no end to it.

When we arrived at Koi, we transferred to the city tram. The city tram ran as far as Tenmacho, and from there, one had to cross a temporary bridge on foot to reach the opposite bank. The temporary bridge had apparently only just become passable around yesterday, and people were cautiously making their way across the three-foot-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 began to thrive 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 were gathered. When my sister saw everyone’s faces, she burst into tears. “Just because he wanted to let the children eat that too, he never brought a lunchbox himself—he’d walk around gruel shops to have his midday meal,” she cried.

My brother-in-law lay covered with a white cloth in the next room. His lifeless face evoked white charcoal remnants smoldering in a brazier. If it grew late, the trains would stop running, so we had to finish the cremation while daylight remained. Neighbors carried the corpse and made preparations. Soon everyone left my sister’s house and walked toward fields four or five blocks away. At an empty lot on the field’s edge lay my brother-in-law—wrapped in a burial cloth without a coffin. This place had burned countless corpses since the atomic bombing; its fuel was piled debris from shattered houses. When everyone formed a circle around him, a monk in national uniform chanted sutras and lit straw ablaze. Then my brother-in-law’s ten-year-old son wailed aloud. Flames spread solemnly across timber and burned on. The rain-heavy sky darkened moment by moment. After bidding farewell there, we hurried back.

My younger brother and I emerged onto the river embankment and hastened along the path toward Tenmacho's temporary bridge. The river beneath our feet had turned utterly dark, with not a single light visible across the scorched ruins stretching on one side. The dim, chilly road stretched endlessly. A death stench seeped through the air from indeterminate origins. I had long since heard how countless corpses remained buried beneath collapsed houses here - maggot-breeding grounds left uncleared - yet these pitch-black burned ruins still loomed ominously over us. Suddenly I caught the faint wail of an infant. No auditory illusion this; the voice grew distinct as we advanced. Vigorous yet plaintive - what startling freshness carried in that cry. Could people truly be rebuilding lives here already, with babies crying anew? An unnameable emotion twisted through my bowels.

Mr. Maki had recently been demobilized and returned from Shanghai, but when he came home, his house, wife, and children were all gone. So he took refuge with his sister in Hatsukaichi-cho and would occasionally go out to Hiroshima. Today, four months had already passed since that time, and if those who had been missing until now had not appeared, there was no choice but to resign oneself to their death. Even for Mr. Maki, he had gone around to his wife’s hometown and other places he could think of, but everywhere he went, he was only met with condolences. He also went to see the burned ruins of his house in Nagarekawa about twice. He was made to listen to survivors' accounts in various places.

Indeed, even now in Hiroshima, somewhere, someone was constantly repeating the events of August 6th over and over again. There were stories of a man who had lifted hundreds of women’s corpses to check their faces while searching for his missing wife—not one wore a wristwatch; of a woman lying dead before Nagarekawa Broadcasting Station, her body prone as if shielding her baby from flames; and of an island in the Seto Inland Sea where every village man had been mobilized for demolition duty that day, leaving a village of widows who later stormed the mayor’s office. Mr. Maki found himself drawn to hearing such accounts in train compartments and station corners until his frequent trips to Hiroshima gradually became routine. Naturally, he would visit the black markets at Koi Station and Hiroshima Station’s entrance too. But more than anything, wandering through the scorched ruins brought him solace. Where once you needed to scale towering buildings to glimpse the Chugoku Mountains, now their ridges met your gaze wherever you walked—the islands and hills of the Inland Sea looming near enough to touch.

Those mountains looked down upon the people of the burned ruins as if demanding: What in the world had happened? Their very countenances seemed to ask this question. Yet amid the ruins, enterprising souls had already begun erecting crude shacks. Mr. Maki found himself imagining what form this city—once thriving as a military capital—might take in its rebirth. Then there materialized before his mind's eye a hazy vision of a peaceful town embraced by verdant trees. As he wandered absently through these thoughts, strangers frequently greeted him. Though he supposed some former patients might still recognize him from his days as a practicing physician long ago, something about these encounters felt profoundly unnatural.

The first time he noticed this phenomenon was when he was walking along the muddy path from Koi toward Tenmabashi Bridge. The rain was pouring down when a beggar-like man approached from the opposite direction—his head covered with a rusted scrap of corrugated iron, his body wrapped in tattered clothes. From beneath another scrap of iron held up as a makeshift umbrella, he suddenly thrust his face forward. Those gleaming eyes stared fixedly at Mr. Maki with suspicion, wearing an expression that seemed ready to announce a name. But then they abruptly clouded with despair, and he hid his face behind the corrugated iron.

Even when riding crowded trains, faces from across would keep nodding at Mr. Maki. If he absentmindedly nodded back, there would inevitably be cases of mistaken identity—"You’re certainly Mr. Yamada, aren’t you?" and such. When I told this story to others, I realized that being greeted by strangers wasn’t unique to Mr. Maki. Indeed, in Hiroshima, there were those who ceaselessly sought others—even now.

(From the November 1947 issue of Mita Bungaku)