Did I feel any guilt? Not then. Not one iota. Though later, in the reflective calm of post-war Japan, I did evaluate my actions. And what I realised was that, when it came to it, when my mettle was tested, I had behaved like a perfect fiend. Most of us, in the fast-flowing 21st century world, are never tested. Our courage is never put to the task. Our loyalties are never heated in the crucible of life. And our hearts, which rule our empathy and our capacity for fellow-feeling, are rarely given the chance to grow.
Many of us claim that we would relish the chance to shine. The world’s leaders, I gather, thirst for a crisis so that they can make their mark on history. And in our own lives, we all perhaps wonder how we will fare when that great adventure comes along. Will we, to borrow an expression from the Yankee game of baseball, step up to the plate?
On that day in Hiroshima, my courage, my loyalties, and my shrivelled heart were all finally put to the test. And I failed on every count.
In those early stages after the bomb, I was still able to delude myself that, even as I ignored those girls’ pleas for help, I had a higher goal. There were so many thousands of injured and how was I going to help them all? Should I just have helped out the first people that I had come across? No – I was going back to the boarding house to see how the two people that I cared for most in Hiroshima, Sumie and Shinzo, had fared in the bomb.
With most of the major landmarks destroyed, it was difficult to find my bearings. Even the roads had been blown to bits. I would arrive at a bridge, would look at it, stare at it – and, though I might have crossed it a hundred times, I could still not be certain that I had ever seen it before. Through the grey dust, I would sometimes glimpse the mountains on the horizon and I roughly knew that I was heading north. But the maze of waterways and pulverised houses had turned Hiroshima into a labyrinth. One wrecked building looks much like another.
All of a sudden, I came across a place that I did recognise and realised I was nearly home. It was the East Drill Field, which only three hours earlier had been alive with activity as my fellow countrymen prepared for the final defence of the Motherland. Girls and boys had been stabbing at straw sacks with their bamboo spears, urged on to ever greater ferocity by the barking drill sergeants. Old soldiers, the wrecked and the infirm who were the last dregs of Japan’s population to be mobilised, had shambled about the parade ground in ill-fitting clothes.
Now, as I gazed at the Drill Field, it was like staring at an old friend whose face had been savagely mutilated. You recognise small parts, the face looks slightly familiar, yet the whole has been so horribly altered that you cannot believe it is the same person.
All about that flat, dusty quad were groups of people, all of them with the most shocking burns after being caught outside in the full glare of the bomb. Like so many of our soldiers, those raw troops had been slain before they had even had a chance to raise a weapon in anger.
Hard by the Drill Field was Hiroshima’s main railway station and that also was a shadow of what it had been at break of day. The dead littered the tracks like so many rag-dolls, carriages upended and on their sides, the very rails turned into the twisting shoots of a vine. How quickly I became inured to it. I had only been on this dreadful death planet for a few hours and could already view a dismembered corpse with all the dispassion of a mortician. Scorched children mewling for their mothers, charred men begging for water, and women calling out with melted faces and their breasts shorn clean from their torsos. They all of them left me cold. I could walk past every one of them without a second glance, without turning a hair.
And finally, amidst all this death, I arrived back at Sumie’s house. Finally I could stop ignoring the mutilated and the sick. Finally I could help.
Sumie’s house, like all the others on the street, had been razed to the ground. From being a handsome two-storey building it was now a disjointed heap of rubble. I would not have known one house from the next, but from some way off I had seen Shinzo and the girl crawling over the ruins.
Shinzo was tugging at a beam, worrying at it, his great flanks wobbling as he wrenched it from side to side. He was wearing patched trousers and a frayed shirt which had had the arms ripped off. On his battered feet, were what was left of two straw sandals. The girl was by his side, face grimaced as she added her gnat’s worth of weight onto the beam.
For a moment I stood there watching the pair of them, so very focused on the task at hand – so very different from my own behaviour that morning. Shinzo had let go of the beam, rubbing his hands to clear off the sweat, and as he did so he caught sight of me for the first time.
“He is alive!” Shinzo called delightedly, his blubbery face wreathed in a great smile. There was such affection in that one look. It is odd to think that there could have been joy in Hiroshima that morning, but all over the city were erupting these little outpourings of ecstasy as parents were reunited with their children, husbands with wives.
Shinzo clambered down through the debris and engulfed me in a monstrous bear-hug. How reassuring it was to be held like that; if only I had thought to do the same with the victims that I had met along the way.
“You are alive!” Shinzo said, now holding me at arms’ length as his eyes raked over my face. “We didn’t know. The city looks as if it’s died. It’s good to see you.”
“And you too,” I said, clutching at him. “And you too!” I was pleased to see him, of course I was, but I could not mask my worry any longer. “Where is Sumie?”
The girl looked up from the rubble she was trying to shift. “She is here,” she called out. “Come and help. We still have time.”
“The girl is right.” Shinzo led the way through the rubble, before winking at me. “How refreshing it is to meet a girl who is always right.”
“Thank you, Shinzo-San,” said the girl. “And you would do well to remember that.”
The girl was standing at the very apex of the rubble, her blue skirt and top grey with dust. But what a jaunty little pose she struck, hand on one hip, and feet in one of those finicky ballet positions.
I ruffled her hair. “You survived,” I said. “Well done.”
Shinzo knelt next to where the girl was standing and gestured for me to follow. “We think Sumie is here,” he said, pointing to a little hole that they had just started to scrape out. “She must have been in the kitchen. The whole house is on top of her. But if you listen carefully, you can hear her knocking.”
We knelt in silence, watching the dust drift in from the wind on the sea. You could taste the smoke in the air. Over towards the centre of Hiroshima, sharp jags of flame were flickering up from the murk. Individual ruined houses, spontaneously bursting into flame. It would be perhaps an hour yet before the fires linked up into one single devastating firestorm, so vast that not even our rivers could prevent it from eating everything in its path.
And then I heard it, a little tap-tap-tap from directly beneath us. Three knocks and a pause, followed by another three knocks. Was that her voice I could hear? It was dreadfully muffled, from deep, deep within the rubble, but I was certain that I could hear that one word, “Help”.
Immediately I set to work, set to work with a will, as if trying to make amends for my utter self-centredness of the previous hours. Previous hours? Why not make that a lifetime. All that the bomb had done was to magnify the gaping character defects that had been with me since childhood.
I started hurling tiles and handfuls of house rubble onto the street.
“Be calm,” said Shinzo. “We are only trying to dig a small hole, not move the entire house. Just throwing a tile four metres should suffice. Watch how the girl does it.”
I rested on my haunches to scrutinise the girl.
“Watch and learn,” she said, daintily tossing a tile a few metres down the slope.
As we laboured, we discussed the one single fascinating topic that was to dominate the city’s conversations for weeks: how we had survived the bomb.
I told them about the events in the warehouse.
“And Major Akiba is dead?” said Shinzo, sweat dripping off him as he eased up a large piece of timber.
“The bastard was dying, I know that,” I replied.
“You did not think to help him?”
“He had been sprayed with glass shards. He was caught by the windows when they exploded. There was nothing I could do.”
“Perhaps,” said Shinzo, “I would have put him out of his misery.”
“That, dear Shinzo, is because you always see the best in every one – even bastards like Akiba and Motoji ”
“And let us not forget your good self.”
The girl laughed merrily at that. Such a tinkling laugh, she had – a laugh that could, for a minute, even make you forget the bomb.
“And you two?” I asked. “How did you escape?”
“Staying in bed this morning saved my life!” Shinzo said, as he came over to help me shift a beam. With our combined weight, we were able to nudge it back and forth before finally dragging it free. “The flash woke me up. I could see it clear through the blackout blinds. I just wrapped myself in the bedding and rolled onto the floor. The next thing, the windows were blown out, the house had fallen down and I was somewhere near the top of the heap –”
“And I saved him!” said the girl.
“That is so,” said Shinzo, not letting details spoil the story. “And I am sure you will save many more. She was here within minutes, digging away like a hound.”
“And you?” I nodded to the girl. “Lucky you were not still on your roof-top.”
“I was in a ditch behind a wall. When I felt the flash, I threw myself flat. I buried my thumbs into my eyes and my fingers into my ears, just like I had been taught at school.” She smiled, twisting a lock of hair between her fingers. “It was fate. For two hours, I had been out in the open. But when the bomb came, there I was in the ditch.”
She carried on talking. Even at the age of seven, her natural mode was to chatter. Such incessant chatter. “I wonder what has happened to grandmother. I do hope she is alright. But I think she might be dead. How was it in the city?”
“Terrible,” I said. “I cannot believe a single bomb could do so much.”
“And the Shima Hospital? The place where my grandmother works?”
“I -” I paused in a rare moment of delicacy. In truth, I had all but walked past what was left of the Shima Hospital, and it had seemed to have taken the full force of the explosion. It would be months later before analysts were conclusively able to determine that, give or take a few metres, the Shima Hospital was at the very hypocenter of Hiroshima. Little Boy had exploded directly above its rooftop. Not a single person left alive.
“I did not see the hospital,” I went on. “But most of the buildings have collapsed.”
“Oh,” said the girl. “Oh.” I can still remember how she stood there in the midst of that rubble, staring vacantly at her feet, twisting a lock of her hair around one finger.
“I am sorry,” said Shinzo, breaking off from his work to cradle her shoulder.
“It’s alright. I must be strong, otherwise we will not win the war. That is what my grandmother would have said, anyway.” She turned her face to stare up at the grey mushroom cloud, which still smeared the sky. “My grandmother is gone. My house is gone. I have nothing but the clothes I am wearing.”
“Don’t worry,” said Shinzo, hand still clapped round her shoulder. “We’ll look after you.”
Fine words – but I never thought he meant them. I believed he was just trying to comfort the girl. And yet how costly these little promises, given without a second thought, can prove to be.
The girl had walked off to be by herself for a few minutes and Shinzo was continuing to dig with rhythmic stolidity. “How did it look by the Tsurami Bridge?” he asked.
“The one by Hijiyama Hill?”
“My sister Tamiko, you have met her, has been working around there for two weeks.”
“I did not see it,” I said. “She may have had more luck than the people in the Shima Hospital.”
“If there is a chance later, I’ll try to find her.”
“Very well.” It was not exactly a ringing endorsement. At the time, I felt that if Shinzo wanted to search for his sister among the numberless victims, then that was his decision; I certainly did not feel obliged to accompany him. Searching for one single person among that chaos? That carnage? It would have been like searching for a single grain of sand on a beach; and a grain of sand, mind, which you might not even recognise. Many of the dead were only distinguishable by the stopped watches on their wrists, or the blackened rings on their fingers.
By now, our hole down to Sumie was so deep that I had to squat inside it and pass the bits of debris up full height to Shinzo and the girl. It was awkward because although the hole was wide at the top, it tapered inwards. At the bottom, there was barely room enough to stand.
I could hear Sumie’s voice quite clearly now. “Help,” she said. “Please help.”
“I’m coming,” I replied.
With my feet on makeshift steps, I tugged and clawed at three pieces of tile which were so tight-wedged they appeared to be interlocked. But I was unable to prise them up.
“Taking your time?” Shinzo called.
The girl also looked down. “The hole must be bigger,” she said, her grandmother now seemingly already out of mind. “We must make it wider at the top.”
As I worried at those three stubborn tiles, I could hear the dull clonking sound of Shinzo and the girl removing debris from directly above me. I wormed my fingers around the edge of one tile and put my full force on this one point. I felt it move fractionally. I tried the tile next to it, and that too had an imperceptible amount of give. I pulled at each tile in turn, working one after the other, and then with a rending crash one of the tiles cracked in my hand. The other two tiles burst upwards and suddenly I found that I was looking straight down at the top of Sumie’s hair.
She was able to lean her head back a little and, when she saw me, she smiled. “I hoped it would be you,” she said.
“I came as quickly as I could,” I said, reaching down to brush the caked grey dust from her face and hair. I stooped to kiss the top of her head.