Pathway to Japanese Literature

O my beloved one, hasten your plea.

On the fragrant mountains above, [be] like a roe deer’s—

Be like a roe deer, like a young fawn.

I went out into town to buy flowers, thinking to visit my wife’s grave.
In my pocket lay a bundle of incense sticks taken from the Buddhist altar.
August 15th would mark my wife’s first Bon memorial service, yet whether this hometown would remain unharmed until then seemed uncertain.
Though it was precisely a scheduled power outage day, from morning onward I saw no other man walking through town carrying flowers.
I never learned what those flowers were called—their small yellow petals held a delicate wildness about them, unmistakably blossoms of summer.

When I splashed water on the gravestone exposed to the scorching sun, divided the flowers into two bunches, and placed them in the vases flanking either side, the front of the grave seemed somehow revitalized, and I stared intently at the flowers and stone for a time. Beneath this grave were interred not only my wife but also my parents' remains. After lighting the incense I had brought with a match and offering a silent prayer, I drank water from the adjacent well. Then I took the path circling Nuten Park back home, but both that day and the next, the scent of incense lingered stubbornly in my pocket.

The atomic bomb struck two days later.

Because I was in the toilet, I narrowly escaped death.

On the morning of August 6th, I left my bed around eight o'clock.
The previous night had seen two air-raid warnings with no incident, so before dawn I took off all my clothes, changed into my nightwear for the first time in a long while, and went to sleep.
So when I got up, I was still only in my underpants.
When my younger sister saw me like this, she grumbled about me sleeping late, but I silently entered the toilet.

It remains unclear how many seconds passed after that when suddenly a blow struck my head, and darkness slid down before my eyes.
I let out a guttural cry without thinking, clutched my head, and stood up.
Apart from the sound of something like a storm crashing down, there was only darkness—I could discern nothing.
Groping blindly, I opened the door to find a veranda.
Until that moment, I had clearly heard my own voice crying out amidst the roaring clamor, tormented because I couldn't see.
However, when I stepped out onto the veranda, the destroyed houses soon emerged in the dim light, and my mind began to clear.

It bore an uncanny resemblance to some repulsive nightmare from which I couldn't awaken.
When that initial blow struck my head and robbed me of sight, I knew I hadn't collapsed.
Then came the infuriating realization that everything had become impossibly tangled.
My own voice crying out now rang foreign to my ears - a stranger's guttural howl.
But as shapes began emerging through the haze, I felt myself thrust onto tragedy's stage.
This tableau felt rehearsed; hadn't I witnessed such scenes flickering through projectors?
Beyond billowing curtains of dust, patches of blue sky multiplied like expanding wounds.
Light stabbed through cavities where walls should've been - through ceilings become sieves.
Picking through tatami shards and splintered floorboards, I froze as my sister came barreling toward me with apocalyptic urgency.

“We weren’t hurt! We’re okay!” my younger sister shouted. “Your eyes are bleeding—go wash them now!” She informed me that water was still coming out from the kitchen sink.

I realized I was completely naked, so when I turned to my younger sister and asked, “Do you have anything to wear?”, she deftly retrieved a pair of pants from the partially destroyed closet.

Just then, a figure came barging in with bizarre movements. The man with his face smeared in blood, wearing nothing but a shirt, turned out to be from the factory. When he saw me, he tossed off a "Glad you're unharmed," then muttered "The phone—I have to make a call—the phone," before hurriedly disappearing somewhere.

The house, with gaps formed everywhere and fixtures and tatami mats scattered about, now revealed only pillars and thresholds clearly, and lapsed into an eerie silence for some time. This must have been the house’s final form. According to what I later learned, while most houses in this area had been flattened in collapse, this house retained both its second floor and firm flooring. It must have been remarkably sturdy construction. Forty years ago, my nervous father had it built.

I stepped over the disordered tatami mats and fusuma sliding doors to search for something to wear.
The jacket was quickly found, but as I hunted everywhere for pants, the positions and appearances of chaotically scattered objects suddenly arrested my hurried gaze.
The book I had been reading until last night lay fallen with its pages splayed open.
A decorative frame that had fallen from the nageshi beam blocked the small alcove with ominous presence.
Suddenly a canteen materialized from nowhere, followed by a hat emerging.
Since no trousers could be found, I now began searching for something to put on my legs.

At that moment, Mr. K from the office appeared on the zashiki veranda.
When Mr. K noticed me,

“Ah, I’m done for—help me!” he cried out in an anguished voice, then plopped down right there.
Blood was spurting slightly from his forehead, and his eyes were brimming with tears.

“Where were you hit?” I asked. “My knee,” he groaned, clutching the spot as his wrinkled, pallid face contorted.

I gave him a nearby scrap of cloth and pulled on two layers of socks.

“Ah, smoke’s started—let’s flee! Take me with you!” Mr. K kept urging me.
This Mr. K, though considerably older than me and usually far more vigorous, now seemed oddly unsteady.

Looking out from the veranda, there lay a mass of collapsed houses stretching endlessly—save for a reinforced concrete building in the middle distance, there remained no discernible landmarks.
Beside the overturned earthen wall in the garden, the trunk of a large maple tree had been snapped cleanly midway, its crown thrown onto the hand-washing basin.
Suddenly, Mr. K crouched by the air-raid shelter,

“Let’s hold out here—there’s a water tank,” he said, his suggestion absurd.

“No, let’s go to the river,” I said. Mr. K looked doubtful,

“The river? Which way do we even go to reach it now?” he muttered.

In any case, even if we were to flee, the preparations still weren’t in order.
I took out a nightgown from the closet and handed it to him, then tore apart the veranda’s blackout curtain.
I also gathered floor cushions.
When I flipped up the tatami mats on the veranda, the duffel bag for escape emerged.
I resolutely slung the bag over my shoulder.
From the neighboring pharmaceutical company’s warehouse, small red flames began to appear.
It was finally time to flee.
Finally, I stepped over beside the maple tree that had been snapped off cleanly and made my way out.

That large maple tree had stood in the corner of the garden since long ago, a tree that had been the object of my boyhood reveries.
Since returning to live at my family home in my hometown this spring after a long absence, I had found it truly strange that even this tree no longer seemed to hold the lushness it once possessed in days past.
What struck me as strange was how this entire hometown had lost its soft natural harmony, now feeling like some cruel aggregation of inorganic matter.
Every time I entered the tatami room facing the garden, the phrase "The Fall of the House of Usher" would float up unbidden.

Mr. K and I climbed over the collapsed houses, removing obstacles as we went, proceeding cautiously at first.
Before long, the ground beneath our feet became level, and we realized we emerged onto a road.
Then, this time, we walked hurriedly down the middle of the road.
From the shadows of the flattened buildings, a voice suddenly called out, “Mister!”
When I turned around, a woman with a bloodied face was walking toward us, crying.
“Help me!” she followed desperately, her face twisted in terror.
After walking for a while, we encountered an old woman standing in the middle of the road, wailing like a child, “My house is burning! My house is burning!”
Smoke was rising from collapsed houses everywhere, but we suddenly came upon a place where the flames’ fury raged violently.
When we ran past there, the road became flat again, and we arrived at the approach to Eibashi Bridge.
There, evacuees were streaming in and swarming together.

“Those who can move, grab buckets and put out the fires!” someone kept shouting from the bridge.
I took the path toward Izumi residence’s thicket, where I became separated from K.

The bamboo grove had been scythed flat, fleeing crowds carving a natural path through the wreckage.
The trees overhead were mostly sheared at mid-trunk, leaving this historic riverside garden mutilated beyond recognition.
Beside a shrub crouched a middle-aged woman, her voluptuous limbs splayed limply.
Her vacant face—staring at it made me fear some contagion of despair might seep into my own soul.
This was my first encounter with such a visage.
But I would later confront countlessly stranger faces in the days ahead.

At the thicket leading to the riverbank, I encountered a cluster of students.
They had all sustained minor injuries after fleeing the factory, yet despite quaking at the raw immediacy of what had just materialized before their eyes, they chattered away with incongruous vigor.
Then my eldest brother's figure appeared.
Clad only in a shirt and clutching a beer bottle in one hand, he seemed largely unscathed.
The opposite shore too—as far as one could see, buildings had crumbled, leaving only utility poles standing amidst flames now sweeping across everything.
I settled onto the narrow riverside path and yet felt that matters had somehow stabilized.

That which had long been feared—that which was destined to come—had finally arrived.
With a clear-minded detachment, I contemplated having survived.
All along I had thought survival might be a fifty-fifty chance, but now—the reality of being alive, its very significance—suddenly pierced through me.

"I must write this down," I murmured to myself.
Yet at that moment, I still knew almost nothing of this air raid's true nature.

The fires across the river intensified their fury.
As the scorching heat reflected across to our side, I kept soaking a floor cushion in the high-tide river water and pulling it over my head.

Before long, someone shouted, “Air raid!”
“Those wearing white, take cover under the trees!” a voice barked, and everyone crawled single-file deep into the thicket.
The sun blazed down mercilessly, while beyond the thicket flames appeared to be raging.
We held our breath for some time; but finding no immediate threat present, returned to the riverside—only to discover the fires across the shore still raged undiminished.
A scorching wind tore overhead as black smoke billowed to the river’s midpoint.
At that instant, the sky turned pitch-dark before unleashing a deluge of heavy raindrops.
The downpour momentarily eased the blistering heat around us, but soon gave way to stark clear skies again.
The conflagration across the river continued unabated.
Now visible on this shore were my eldest brother, my younger sister, and a few familiar neighborhood faces—all clustered together exchanging fragmented accounts of that morning’s cataclysm.

At that time my eldest brother had been at his desk in the office when a flash streaked through the garden; moments later he was flung over six feet away and lay trapped beneath the collapsed house, thrashing about for some time.
Eventually noticing a gap and crawling out through it—at which point he found students at the factory screaming for help—my eldest brother exerted himself tremendously to rescue them.
My younger sister saw the flash of light at the entrance and hurriedly hid under the stairs, so she did not sustain major injuries.
Everyone initially believed that only their own homes had been bombed; when they went outside, they were aghast to find everywhere uniformly destroyed.
Moreover, even though the ground-level houses had collapsed, it was strange that there were no bomb-like craters.
That occurred shortly after the all-clear siren had sounded.
"There was a sudden flash of light," my younger sister recounted, her voice trembling, "and with a faint hissing sound like burning magnesium, the ground beneath our feet spun violently in an instant... It was just like magic."

When the fire on the opposite shore began subsiding, a voice called out that the grove in this garden had caught flame.
A wisp of smoke started appearing high above the thicket behind us.
The river water stayed stubbornly at high tide with no sign of ebbing.
I edged along the stone cliff down to the water's edge.
There at my feet floated a large unvarnished wooden crate, onions spilling from its gaping mouth to drift lazily about.
I hauled the crate closer, plucking onions from within and passing them toward shore.
This had come from a freight train derailed at the upstream iron bridge—the box thrown clear to float downstream.
As I gathered onions, a desperate cry pierced the air: “Help!”
A lone girl came bobbing through midriver, clinging to splintered timber as she alternately sank and surfaced.
Selecting a hefty log, I pushed it ahead of me and struck out swimming.
Though years had passed since last I swam, I found myself rescuing her with unexpected ease.

The fire on the opposite shore, which had lain quiet for some time, began raging again without warning.
This time, within the crimson flames swirled murky black smoke—a dark mass that spread ferociously outward until the very heat of the conflagration seemed to intensify before our eyes.
Yet even that ominous fire eventually burned itself out, leaving only an empty husk of ruins.
It was then that I noticed a monstrous transparent layer of air undulating through the downstream sky, positioned precisely at the river's midpoint.
No sooner had I thought Tornado! than the furious wind came roaring overhead.
Every blade of grass and every tree trembled violently—then whole groves were ripped from the earth and hurled skyward.
Trees spun madly through the air before plunging arrow-swift into the turbid chaos below.
To this day, I cannot clearly recall what hue tinged the atmosphere around us.
Yet I remain convinced it must have been bathed in a ghastly greenish gleam—the faint radiance of some hell-scape tableau.

As this whirlwind passed, an evening-like quality already permeated the sky when my second brother, who had remained unseen until now, abruptly appeared before us.
His face bore streaks of ash-gray shadow, his back shirt torn open.
What had been mere sunburn from that day at the beach would later become suppurating burns requiring months of treatment, yet at this moment my brother still maintained remarkable vigor.
He had just returned home on an errand when he spotted a small plane overhead, then witnessed three uncanny lights.
Thrown some six feet across the ground, he pulled his wife and maid from beneath their collapsed house, entrusted the two children to the maid to flee ahead, then labored to rescue an elderly neighbor.

As my sister-in-law anxiously worried about the children they had been separated from, the maid's voice called out from the riverbank on the opposite shore.
Because her hands hurt and she could no longer carry the children, she pleaded for them to come quickly.

The grove of the Izumi residence was burning bit by bit.
We couldn't risk the fire spreading to this area by night, and I wanted to cross to the opposite shore while it was still light.
But there were no ferry boats to be found around there.
My eldest brother and his group decided to go around via the bridge to reach the opposite shore, while my second brother and I once again went upstream in search of a ferry boat.
As I proceeded along the narrow stone path following the water's edge, I saw here for the first time a crowd of people beyond description.
The already slanting sunlight cast a pallid hue over the surroundings, but both on the banks above and below, such people were present, casting shadows upon the water.
What manner of people they were...
Their faces were swollen into grotesque shapes that made distinguishing men from women nearly impossible; their eyes had narrowed to thread-like slits, their lips were split wide open, and they lay there exposing their agonizing limbs, breathing faintly.
As we passed by them, those strange people called out in thin, gentle voices.
"Please let me drink some water," or "Please help me"—nearly everyone had some plea.

“Uncle,” came a shrill, mournful voice calling me to stop.
Looking over, there in the river lay a naked boy fully submerged with only his head above water in death, while on stone steps less than a meter from that corpse crouched two women.
Their faces had swollen to nearly twice their normal size—grotesquely distorted masses where scorched tangles of hair alone remained to indicate their gender.
This sight inspired more horror than pity at first glance, making one’s hair stand on end.
But when the women noticed I had stopped,

“The futon by that tree is mine—could you please bring it here?” they implored.

When I looked, there was indeed something resembling a futon by the tree.
However, on top of it lay a mortally wounded person who was already beyond help.

We found a small raft, untied the rope, and rowed toward the opposite shore.
When the raft reached the sandbar on the opposite shore, the surroundings were already dim, but here too, numerous injured people seemed to be gathered.
A soldier crouching at the water’s edge pleaded, “Please give me hot water to drink,” so I let him lean on my shoulder as we walked.
He staggered unsteadily across the sand with evident suffering when suddenly he muttered dismissively, “I’d be better off dead.”
I too nodded somberly; no words came out.
An unbearable indignation toward something idiotic seemed to bind us in silence at that moment.
I left him waiting midway and looked up at the water distribution point atop the embankment from below the stone cliff.
Then, at the platform where steam now billowed upward, a massive charred head was slowly drinking hot water while clutching a bowl.
The enormous, grotesque face seemed composed entirely of black soybean grains.
Moreover, the hair was cut straight across around the ears.
(Afterward, whenever I saw burn victims with hair cut straight across like that, I came to realize this was where their hair had been burned off at the hat line.) After some time passed, I received a bowl and carried it over to where that soldier had been.
Glancing over, I noticed a severely injured soldier kneeling in the river, gulping down the water with abandon.

As the sky above Shukkeien Garden and nearby flames emerged vividly in the dusk, some on the sandbar had begun burning wood fragments to prepare their evening meals.
A woman had been lying right beside me since earlier, her face swollen and bloated, but it was only when she pleaded for water that I realized this was the maid from my second brother’s household.
She had been holding the baby and leaving the kitchen when exposed to the rays, which burned her face, chest, and hands.
Then, taking both the baby and eldest daughter, she had fled ahead of my brothers only to become separated from the girl at the bridge, arriving at this riverbank with just the infant in her arms.
The hand she had used to shield her face from those initial rays—that very hand—now throbbed with pain as if being wrenched from its socket.

As the tide began coming in, we left this riverbed and moved toward the embankment.
The day had grown fully dark, but voices madly crying "Water, give us water!" could be heard everywhere, and the commotion of people left behind on the riverbed seemed to grow increasingly violent.

The top of this embankment was windy, and it was a bit too cold for sleeping.
Immediately across was Noutsu Park, but now it too was shackled in darkness, with only the broken forms of trees faintly visible.
My elder brothers lay in a depression in the ground, and I found another hollow to crawl into.
Immediately beside us lay three or four injured female students.

“The grove over there has started burning—shouldn’t we escape?” someone worriedly said.
Emerging from the hollow and looking ahead, flames glittered on trees two or three blocks away, but showed no signs of spreading in our direction.

“Is the fire going to spread this way?” the injured girl asked me fearfully.

“It’s all right,” I told her, and she asked again, “About what time is it now? It can’t be past twelve yet, can it?”

At that moment, the air-raid alert sounded.
Somewhere an undamaged siren must have remained—its faint wail was barely audible.
The city still seemed to burn fiercely downstream, a dim glow visible through the haze.

“Ah, will morning never come?” sighed the female student.

In faint, quiet voices, they chanted, “Mother... Father...”

“Is the fire going to spread this way?” the injured girl asked me again.

From the riverbank came the death throes of what sounded like an unnaturally vigorous young man.
The voice echoed in all directions, racing endlessly.
"Water... water... please... Ah... Mother... Sister... Hikaru-chan"—the voice burst forth as if tearing through its owner's entire being, feeble gasps of "Ugh... ugh..." driven by pain weakly entwined with it.—In my childhood, I had walked along this embankment to fish in that riverbed.
The memory of that sweltering day remains mysteriously vivid.
On the sandbar stood a large billboard for Lion Dentifrice, while trains would occasionally roar past over the iron bridge.
There had once existed a scene of peace like a dream.

When dawn came, last night's voices were silent.
The gut-wrenching death throes still seemed to linger in my ears, but all around flowed the pale morning wind.
The eldest brother and younger sister went toward the burned ruins of our house, while the second brother and his group set out for East Drill Ground where a treatment center was said to exist.
As I too prepared to head toward East Drill Ground, a soldier nearby asked to accompany me.
The large soldier—likely gravely wounded—leaned on my shoulder while timidly advancing his own feet, as though transporting fragile cargo.
Moreover, the ground beneath us—whether debris or corpses—still smoldered with residual heat, rendering it terrifyingly treacherous.
When we reached Tokiwa Bridge, the soldier collapsed from exhaustion. "I can't take another step—leave me behind," he said.
There I parted with him and advanced alone toward Noutsu Park.
Here and there stood houses partially collapsed yet unburned, everywhere bearing what resembled claw marks of light.
In a certain vacant lot, people had gathered.
Water trickled from a tap.
Just then, I caught wind that my niece was being sheltered at the Tōshōgū refuge.

Hurriedly, I went to the Tōshōgū Shrine precincts. There, my little niece was now reuniting with her mother. She had become separated from the maid at the bridge yesterday and fled following strangers afterward, but when she saw her mother’s figure, she suddenly burst into tears as though unable to endure it any longer. Her neck was blackened by burns and appeared painfully raw.

The treatment center had been established below the torii of Tōshōgū Shrine. First came routine checks by a police officer recording hometown registrations and ages—even after receiving their information slips, the injured still waited in a long line under the scorching sun for nearly an hour. Yet those well enough to join this queue might still consider themselves fortunate. From somewhere came a voice screaming frantically, “Soldier! Soldier! Help me, soldier!”—a girl collapsed by the roadside, writhing with burns. Then a man in civil defense gear lay nearby, his head swollen from burns resting on a stone, pleading through blackened lips in a broken whisper: “Someone help me… Ah, nurses… doctors…” No one paid him any heed. The police officers, doctors and nurses had all come from other cities to help, but their numbers were limited.

I had joined the line accompanying the maid from my second brother’s house, but now she too had swollen terribly and kept wanting to crouch on the ground.
When our turn finally came and treatment was completed, we then had to create a place to rest.
Throughout the precincts, the seriously injured were sprawled everywhere, but neither tents nor shade could be seen.
There, we laid thin lumber across a stone ledge to serve as a makeshift roof and crawled beneath it.
In this cramped space, we six endured for over twenty-four hours.

Right next to us, a similar makeshift space had been set up, and a man twitching restlessly on its straw mat called out to me.
He had neither a shirt nor a jacket, with only one leg’s worth of his long trousers remaining around his waist, and both hands, both legs, and his face had been injured.
This man had apparently been caught in the blast on the seventh floor of the China Building, and despite being reduced to such a state, he must have been tenaciously resilient—using only his words to beg and command others until he finally managed to escape here.
Now, into this place wandered a youth covered in blood, wearing a cadet candidate armband.
Then, the man next to us jerked upright,

“Hey! Get out of here! My body’s torn to pieces—touch me and you’ll pay! Plenty of space elsewhere—no need cramming into this hole! Eh? Scram now!” he growled, looming over him.
The blood-drenched youth staggered upright in confusion.

Two meters from where we lay stood a cherry tree with scant leaves, two girl students collapsed beneath it.
Both faces charred black, their gaunt backs baking under the fierce sun as they whimpered endlessly for water.
They were commercial school students who’d come potato-digging nearby when disaster struck.
Then a woman arrived—face cured like smoked meat, wearing work trousers—dropped her handbag and sprawled limp-legged on the ground... Daylight already fading toward dusk.
The prospect of enduring another night here filled me with peculiar desolation.

Voices chanting Buddhist prayers had been incessant since before dawn.
Here it seemed someone was perpetually dying.
When the morning sun stood high, both students from the Girls' Commercial School too had breathed their last.
Having finished examining the corpse lying facedown in the ditch, the policeman approached the woman in work trousers.
She too had collapsed into an unnatural posture and now appeared lifeless.
When the policeman opened the handbag, passbooks and government bonds emerged.
It became clear she was a traveler caught in disaster while still dressed for journeying.

When noon approached, an air-raid alarm sounded, and the roar of explosions could be heard.
Though we had grown somewhat accustomed to the horrific grotesqueness surrounding us, fatigue and hunger were gradually intensifying.
The eldest son and youngest son of my second brother's household had both been at schools in the city, and their fates remained unknown.
People kept dying one after another, and corpses were left where they fell.
People walked restlessly with no hope of salvation.
And yet, over at the drill ground, a trumpet was now being blown resoundingly in reckless abandon.

The burn-injured nieces were crying out terribly, and the maid kept pleading for water.
By now, when everyone was utterly exhausted, the eldest brother returned.
He had stopped by Hatsukaichi-cho yesterday—the evacuation site of his sister-in-law—and today had gone to Yawata-mura to negotiate and secure a horse-drawn cart.
There, having boarded that horse-drawn cart, we decided to withdraw from here.

The horse-drawn cart carried the second brother’s family, me, and my younger sister, departing from below Tōshōgū Shrine toward Nozu. It was when the cart was approaching the entrance to Izumi-tei from Shirahima. Near the vacant lot adjacent to the West Drill Ground, the second brother caught a glimpse of a familiar corpse clad in yellow half-pants. He stepped down from the cart and walked away. My sister-in-law and I too left the cart and gathered there. On the familiar-looking trousers was fastened an unmistakable belt. The corpse was my nephew Bunbun. He had no jacket; a fist-sized swelling on his chest oozed liquid. His face had turned pitch-black, with white teeth faintly visible; the fingers of his outstretched hands were rigidly clenched inward, nails dug into flesh. Beside him lay a middle school student’s corpse; further away, a young woman’s corpse—both frozen rigid in their final poses. The second brother peeled off Bunbun’s nails, took his belt as a keepsake, attached a name tag, and left the place. It was an encounter where tears had long since dried up.

The horse-drawn cart then headed toward Kokutaiji Temple, crossed Sumiyoshi Bridge, and proceeded to Koi, so I was able to survey nearly all the major burned ruins.
In the silver expanse of void spread beneath the glaring sky, there lay a road, a river, and a bridge.
And here and there were positioned corpses with raw, swollen flesh.
This was undoubtedly a new hell realized through precise methods; there all that was human stood eradicated—even the corpses' expressions replaced with something model-like and mechanical.
The limbs that seemed to have stiffened after moments of agonized thrashing contained an eerie rhythm.
Amidst fallen power lines and countless fragments, convulsive patterns emerged from the void.
Yet when I saw streetcars overturned and burned mid-motion, horses with massive torsos thrown sideways, I felt thrust into a Surrealist canvas.
Kokutaiji's great camphor tree lay uprooted completely while gravestones scattered like dice.
The Asano Library—only outer walls remaining—served as a corpse repository.
The road still smoldered in patches beneath death's thick stench.
Each river crossing brought fresh surprise at intact bridges.
These impressions demanded katakana's angular violence.
Therefore next I inserted this passage:

GLARING FRAGMENTS AND—
ASH-WHITE BURNT REMAINS AND—
LIKE A SPREAD-OUT PANORAMA
SCARLET-SEARED TATTERED HUMAN CORPSES' BIZARRE RHYTHM
WAS IT ALL REAL—OR MERELY POSSIBLE?

RIPPED AWAY ABRUPTLY—THE WORLD AFTER

OVERTURNED STREETCAR BESIDE—

THE BELLY OF A HORSE—OR SOMETHING—HOW IT SWELLED

THE SIZZLE-MELT STENCH OF POWER LINES

The horse-drawn cart advanced along the road that stretched endlessly with traces of collapse.
Even as we reached the outskirts, collapsed houses lined the road, but once past Kusatsu, the surroundings at last turned lush green, liberated from the hues of calamity.
And the sight of dragonflies gliding effortlessly over the green rice paddies pierced my eyes.
Then there was a long, monotonous road to Yawata Village.
We arrived at Yawata Village when the sun had completely set.
And from the next day onward, the wretched existence in that land began.
The recovery of the injured made no progress, and those who had been healthy gradually weakened from food shortages.
The maid’s burned arm had become severely infected; flies swarmed until finally maggots began to seethe.
No matter how much they disinfected them, the maggots kept seething forth one after another.
And then, a little over a month later, she passed away.

Four or five days after moving to this village, my missing nephew, a middle school student, returned.
He had gone to school that morning for building evacuation and was in the classroom when he saw the light.
In an instant, he dove under a desk; then the ceiling collapsed and buried him, but he found a gap and crawled out.
Only four or five students managed to crawl out and escape; all the others had been killed instantly by the initial blast.
He fled to Hijiyama Hill with four or five others, vomiting white liquid along the way.
Then he went by train to the home of a friend he had fled with and was apparently cared for there.
However, when this nephew returned here as well, after a little over a week, his hair began to fall out, and in about two days, he became completely bald.
By that time, a theory had become widely circulated among the victims of this disaster: once you lost your hair and developed nosebleeds, you most likely wouldn’t survive.
Twelve or thirteen days after losing his hair, my nephew finally began to have nosebleeds.
The doctor had declared that night would likely be perilous.
However, he gradually persisted in his critical condition.

Mr.N was on his way by train to the evacuation factory for the first time when, just as the train entered a tunnel, he experienced that impact.
Exiting the tunnel and looking toward Hiroshima, three parachutes were drifting gently away.
Then, when the train arrived at the next station, he was shocked to find its glass windows severely shattered.
By the time they finally reached their destination, detailed information had already been relayed.
He immediately turned on his heel and boarded a train back.
Every passing train was packed with grotesquely wounded people.
He could hardly wait for the city's fires to subside and resolutely pressed forward across the still-hot asphalt.
And first, he went to the girls' school where his wife worked.
In the burned ruins of the classroom were students' bones, and in what remained of the principal's office lay a skeleton that appeared to be the principal.
But he could not find anything resembling his wife.
He hurriedly tried to return home.
There, near Ujina, only the houses had collapsed; they had been spared from fire.
But there too, his wife's figure could not be found.
Then this time, he checked each corpse lying on the path from his home to the girls' school one by one.
Since most corpses were lying face down, he would lift them up to inspect their faces, but every woman, every single one, bore features so altered—yet none were his wife.
In the end, he even staggered around to areas in entirely different directions.
In the water tank, there were also over ten corpses folded over and submerged.
Gripping the ladder hanging from the riverbank, there were three corpses frozen rigid in that posture.
The corpses in the bus queue remained standing, having died with their claws dug into the shoulders of those before them.
He also saw groups who had been mobilized from rural areas for building evacuation labor service, now completely annihilated.

The horror of the West Drill Ground defied description.
There lay a mountain of dead soldiers.
Yet nowhere could he find his wife's corpse.

Mr.N visited every internment camp and peered into the faces of the severely injured.
Every face bore the utmost wretchedness, but none were his wife’s.
And so, after spending three days and nights looking at corpses and burn victims until he was sick of them, Mr.N finally visited the burned ruins of the girls' school where his wife had worked.

(June 1947 Issue of "Mita Bungaku")