The people, too; I haven’t even begun to mention the hundreds, the thousands, of benumbed victims, so awfully burned, their clothes in shreds as they tottered aimlessly through the streets. There is so much to say about them that I hardly know where to begin; I will try to do them justice later. But as I looked about me that I noticed the fire for the first time. Within minutes of the blast, there had been little outbreaks of fire all over Hiroshima, as power cables and kitchen stoves had set light to the tinder-dry houses. There had also been those will-o’-the-wisp flames, puffing in the air, as the radiation burnt itself out. What I saw about me, though, was much, much more than a series of individual fires across the landscape. It was a wave of fire that was sweeping north through the city, whipped up by the sea-breeze.
At first it had seemed quite far off, over a kilometre away, but as I looked, I saw the firestorm moving towards at us at the most incredible rate; galloping, devouring everything in its path.
We could already smell the sharp tang of the smoke, a harbinger of death as it flew ahead of the flames. Worse though was the noise, that crackling roar of ten thousand Hiroshima dwellings being consumed by fire.
“Quickly!” I yelled to Shinzo. The pair of us lunged again at the end of the beam. I pulled till the tears squeezed out of my eyes. Shinzo grunting, mewling, beside me as he tried to heave that massive spar of wood. The girl, even though she was only seven, straining to push beside us.
We might as well have been heaving against those oncegreat walls of Hiroshima castle – although even those had been destroyed by the bomb.
I scrabbled back to the hole that we had burrowed down to Sumie. Easing myself down through the masonry, I braced my feet on the rubble and grabbed her by the armpits. I pulled – how I pulled. I pulled so hard that I was on the verge of dislocating her shoulders.
All the while Sumie was staring up at me, silently willing me on. She bit savagely down on her lip, trying to stay silent through the pain. But she would not budge, the lower-half of her body trapped tight in the rubble.
“Shinzo!” I screamed. “We need rope! Get me rope!” I thought we might slip it around her chest. Together, Shinzo and I might have had a chance of pulling her out.
I bent down to caress Sumie’s head. I stroked a lock of long hair out of her eyes. “It will be fine,” I said, and at the time I still believed what I was saying.
She smiled up at me and stroked my leg below the knee. “Do you still think it was a good idea to have taken me to Miyajima yesterday?” Oh, how she smiled through the pain. She must have known she was minutes from death.
“Perhaps not.”
“I forgive you.”
I stooped and kissed the top of Sumie’s head. Over the smell of the dust and the smoke, I could even catch a trace of the oil that she used on her hair.
Sumie clasped my hands briefly. “Thank you,” she said. I struggled to climb back out of the hole and gazed down at her beautiful face. It was as if she was drowning in a well of tiles and rubble.
“Will you –” she swallowed. “Will you live for me?”
“I –”
“You will live for me?”
She gazed up at me, a solitary tear rolling down her dusty cheek.
As I poked my head out of the wreckage, I caught the sound, that terrifying sound, of the firestorm. It was closer than I could have dreamed possible. In all but three minutes, it was practically upon us, tearing through the wreckage of the houses and jumping from one street to the next.
And that was when the simmering panic bubbled over and all but consumed me. I tore at the wreckage above Sumie, lunging desperately at the tiles and the snapped shards of wood. I hurled myself at the beam, screaming with rage as I tried to shift it. Trying desperately to free her; the smoke so tight in my throat I could hardly breathe; that infernal roar of the firestorm; Shinzo and the girl crying at me to save myself; and the tears of rage as I realised my utter impotence.
For a moment I stood there on the ruins of Sumie’s house and howled at my own folly. She was going to die, burned alive, and there was nothing I could do to prevent it.
But the worst of it was the realisation that perhaps Sumie had been right. Perhaps it was I who had killed her. Perhaps it was I who had brought this whole disaster upon my love by taking her to the Miyajima shrine the previous day. I don’t know, I don’t know. But what I do know is this: that just 24 hours earlier, my dear Sumie had been cursed – and I had been the cause of it.
I should never have gone to Miyajima. At least, I should never have taken Sumie to Miyajima.
No-one should ever take their lover to Miyajima.
Which is a shame, because Miyajima is the perfect place for lovers. To my mind, this little island shrine is the most romantic, the most picturesque spot in the whole of Japan. In fact, I go further: I have travelled to many countries in the world, but I have yet to see a place of such outstanding beauty as Miyajima. It is a perfect synthesis of man and nature, with a cluster of shrines on stilts that nestle on the shoreline. It is most famous for its towering Torii Gate, a vast camphor wood gate that stands in the water, 100 metres out from the bay. At high tide, the lacquered orange gate and the vermilion shrine seem to be actually floating on the water. Behind the shrine are the verdant green woods that rise up 530 metres to Mount Kisen.
From the first time my father took me there, 25 years earlier, I have thought it quite magical. It is better still at night, when the visitors have departed and the candles shimmer in the shrine.
My father was a merchant seaman and an immensely practical man. He would have laughed in your face if you had accused him of being superstitious. Yet even he, that most capable and straightforward of men, would not have dreamed of taking my mother to Miyajima. There are some things you just do not do.
Only a maniac would think to take his lover to Miyajima; and only a woman who was brimful with love would accede to her man’s demands and accompany him there.
It was a brilliant blue Sunday and, especially in times of war, you take your chances when you can. You seize every moment of happiness exactly as it comes along, for who knows what the morrow will bring.
How ironic that phrase seems now. Although we do not know what tomorrow will bring, we usually have a good idea of what is going to occur: tomorrow, more than likely, will be just like today, and likewise the day before it. But every so often, something really different does happen. Something so extraordinary, so outside your experience, that it changes your entire world-view. And, perhaps once a century, something occurs that changes not just your world-view, but the world’s view. Something so monumental that no single human being’s perception of life will ever be the same again.
If there was one single benefit to our country being at war, it was that it had heightened my desire to live in the moment. This attitude, to savour every single taste of happiness that passed me by, had been forming throughout my life. But after four years of war, it had crystallised into the position where I snatched at everything that came my way, whether a kiss, a joke, a shot of Sake, or the delicious ecstasy of sex. Yes, especially that sweet delight.
I should mention, by the way, that I was very different from my fellow citizens. Perhaps they were just like beasts of burden, bowed down by the war. For we were in the middle of not just a war, but the war of wars – the biggest war the world had ever seen. There was no end in sight. There was never any end in sight.
All we had was this relentless barrage of propaganda from the papers and the radio, which claimed that we were driving the Yankees off the face of the earth. But all we knew for certain was that food was scarce, the Nazis were finished, and that even the children had stopped going to school in order to join the war effort.
When Japan had launched her attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941, Sumie had been as much of a proud patriot as anyone else. But since we had become lovers, some of my natural cynicism had rubbed off on her. She had started to be more sceptical of what she read in the papers. She had become greedy to seize not just the day, but every minute, every second; she wanted to grab every magical moment.
Even so, even considering the fragile state of our existence during those climactic closing stages of the war... only the most foolhardy would have deliberately courted misfortune by travelling to Miyajima.
“Come on!” I said. “The ferry is leaving in five minutes!”
Sumie laughed at me. “I’m not coming!”
I had leaned out over the side of the boat and beckoned her with my little finger. “But it is beautiful!”
“I know it is beautiful!” She giggled as she stood not five metres away on the dock at the far end of the gang-plank. “I know it well.”
“Come on!” I said. “You are feeble!” I was laughing, but I was still desperate for her to come. Around me were 30 daytrippers, lining the decks of that battered old ferry as they made the most of the summer sun. There were clusters of benches to the fore and aft, as well as a small functional cabin. Black wood smoke spumed out of the funnel.
“I said I would come to wave you off and that is what I am doing,” she said. “You will enjoy yourself without me and I will be waiting here for you when you get back.”
“I want you to come. Come! Come with me!”
She laughed at the thought of it. How fine it was to be in the middle of that most gruesome of wars and yet still to be able to laugh.
“You are incorrigible!”
“That is why you adore me!”
“I adore you despite that, not because of it!” She looked quite lovely, standing there laughing in the sunshine. Even though she was wearing just a simple patterned shirt, frayed trousers and straw-sandals, on that day, with her long oiled hair curling back over her shoulders, she seemed more beautiful than I had ever seen her. Not a line on her face, not a bag under her eyes, an exquisite porcelain doll that I longed to cradle in my hands. And just to the side of her mouth, a beautiful black mole. To some it might have been a blemish, but I loved to kiss that little beauty spot as much as I loved to kiss her glistening lips.
“Dearest one, there is a war on,” I said. “I am sure the Goddess has more important things on her mind.”
“After all – why should she be jealous over you?”
“You are right,” I said, “I would not be to her taste.”
Sumie stepped aside to allow the last of the passengers on. A girl, barely a teenager, was readying to cast off. She was one of the tens of thousands of schoolgirls who’d been forced to join the war effort. Other children had been put to work doing hard manual labour, but this girl, with her quick easy movements and her deft fingers, was serving her time as a cabin-girl. I observed with cool professional detachment how she coiled the ropes; she had the makings of a competent sailor.
Sumie, hand still on the plank-rail, stared down as she placed her toe onto the ground, suddenly coy. Or more precisely, she was playing at being coy. “And why do you want me to come?”
“Why? Because you are beautiful; because it will be a wonderful day; and... because when we make love, I feel that I am savouring a little taste of heaven.” Yes, I could be quite the charmer when I was so minded. It is a very useful tool for manipulation. And I may as well be candid: women liked me. I had a breezy patter which never dried up in the face of beauty.
Two elderly men, bent and bald, shuffled onto the boat, staring at me as they walked past. I did not care what they thought. I did not care that, in those days of thrifty hardship, it was not considered seemly for a man and woman to be in love. But then I did not care much what anyone thought.
“A taste of heaven?” Sumie asked, echoing my words. One foot strayed onto the gang-plank.
The captain, oily and belligerent, had limped out of his rathole of a cabin and was standing beside me.
“Are you coming or staying?” he yelled at Sumie, spitting over the side of his boat. “Either get off the gang-plank or get on board.”
Sumie stared at the surly captain for a moment. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I think I will come.”
“With your boyfriend?” The captain shook his head as he slunk back to the cabin. The ship’s whistle blew, the lines were cast off, and just as the gang-plank was about to be raised, Sumie scuttled over onto the ship and took my hand. How we laughed, like a pair of truants who had skived off school to go exploring in the woods.
Few ferries were then operating out to the islands. Fuel was scarce and what little there was left was needed, as always, for the bottomless pit that was the war effort. But occasionally at the weekends, an old boat might steam out from Ujina, in a little bit of make-believe that some vestiges of our lives were still continuing as normal.
As we glided out of Hiroshima City, we could see squads of soldiers digging holes for their wretched boats. How astonishing it all now seems – that while America was on the very verge of dropping the world’s biggest bomb, Japan had in her turn devised our very own top-secret weapon. Like many of our inventions, this weapon was uniquely Japanese, and spoke volumes about both our country and our ideals. No-one but a Japanese General could have dreamt up this extraordinary machine, combining as it did Japan’s warped sense of patriotism with the most ludicrous impracticality. So I ask in all seriousness, was there ever such a senseless weapon as the suicide boat?
By now the Yankee invasion of Japan was an absolute certainty; even the most sanguine patriots knew it was going to occur before the end of the year. We did not have much to fight the Yankees with, apart from our bamboo spears, which even the schoolgirls were learning to master.
It was still hoped, however, that we might yet take the fight to the Yankees with our scores of suicide boats. The Special Attack Forces, who were in charge of Japan’s Kamikaze pilots, had been building hundreds of the wretched things. We may not have had many conventional weapons, such as guns or warships, but we did have whole fleets of those rickety suicide boats.
Each boat was packed with 250kg of explosives. I suppose that if they had hit a US warship plumb, then a few GIs might have been killed. But, even though I was a mere merchant seaman, I had always believed there to be a fatal flaw with the very concept of a suicide boat. The Kamikaze pilots, at least, were almost unstoppable. Once they started in on their final death-dive, they arrowed in on the US ships like a guided missile.