“Beauty?” I said. “Beauty? If there is any one thing I have come to understand, it’s that beauty is a total irrelevance when it comes to deciding your life partner. Beauty matters for a few months, a year; beauty is useful for engendering envy in others. But beauty is a hopeless basis for a marriage. It’s not rational. It doesn’t make sense. Yet, still you get idiots like me who decide to marry a woman because they like the tilt of her nose, or the swing of her hips as she walks. Is that good enough reason to cleave yourself to another? It’s madness! I must have been out of my mind. I tell you Shinzo, I would rather marry a woman blind! I would rather she had a bag over her head, so that I had talked to her and got to know her, instead of being spurred on by the awesome power of my own libido!”
Shinzo shrugged and scratched at his belly button, digging his fingers in through the folds of his shirt.
“Whereas you... ” I paused. “I am not saying that Sakae is not beautiful, but your marriage is based on so much more than looks. You have a comradeship, an affection, that I have never known.”
“And the sex is not bad either.” He was making light of my seriousness – and I followed his lead.
“I don’t doubt it!” I laughed. “I’m sure that the very moment you step through your front door, Sakae will be briskly escorting you to the bedroom and the girl will be left out in the garden to amuse herself.”
“I had forgotten about her. But you’re probably right. The girl will just have to look after herself for a few minutes.” Shinzo smirked at the thought. “Though unlike you, Sakae and I are having sex in order to procreate.”
“I remember those days,” I said. “It was a long time ago.”
Shinzo rooted through the paper bag in his lap and pulled out another rice-ball, which he stared at admiringly. He ate it in a single bite, realised that he was still hungry and had another look in the bag before this time producing a red onion. I have never seen anyone take such delight in a single vegetable; in that moment, as he peeled off the outer skin, he was the very picture of contentment.
The darkest hour had already passed us by and, over eastwards in the direction of Nagasaki, I could make out the sky pinking overhead. We pulled into a station and the hubbub was just as it always is, a little reminder that for the past two days, life outside Hiroshima had continued as normal. A woman came along the platform selling tea. A luckless few clambered on board to travel the final kilometres into Nagasaki before that city was transformed into a smoking ruin. They were literally boarding the last train to hell.
Shinzo grimaced, massaging at his stomach. “That really hurts,” he said, both hands smoothing from his flanks to his front. “I’ve swallowed something bad.”
“The river?” I asked.
“The river,” he said bleakly. “It must have been the river. The water must have been thick with disease.”
He probed at his stomach and the next moment his face had started to go a shade of green. “I have to go,” he said, getting up so quickly that the girl was jolted awake. “I have to go right now.”
Shinzo lumbered down the aisle and the next thing I saw him getting out onto the platform and looking left and right for any place to relieve himself. For all his girth, he looked quite like a little boy, hands pressed tight into his gut.
The girl rubbed the sleep out of her eyes. “Where has Shinzo gone?” she asked.
“He has a bad stomach,” I replied. “From swallowing all that river water.”
“He’ll be back in time?”
“Certainly.”
But he wasn’t. The whistle blew, the girl screamed at the guards, and the train began to pull out.
Leaning out of the window to see Shinzo waddling after us, his hands clutching at the waistband of his trousers.
The girl yelling at Shinzo to run faster.
He breaks into a slow trot, desperately trying to catch the last carriage; fingers fumbling at the handle, failing to quite connect; the girl in total despair, calling out the one word, “Shinzo!” And the train chugs into the dawn light and, as the girl and I both crane our heads out of the window, Shinzo stands forlorn on the platform, one hand holding up his trousers and with the other he gives us a little wave. What a sad sight he made, and from that day he would never change for me. When I recall my dearest friend, I remember the laughter, the food, and the interminable scratching. But with all those memories is now entwined that last vivid picture of Shinzo on the platform, stark against the station light as he waved a plaintive farewell.
The girl was quiet for some time, arms folded tight about her as she contemplated the loss of her friend. Of course we thought we would soon be meeting up with him in Nagasaki. But as she already knew, nothing is ever as simple as it seems, especially in times of war; anything can go wrong; bombs can be dropped, and loved ones can be snatched away in a matter of moments. So although we might – should – ought – to see Shinzo again, the only certainty in those days was that everything was in a state of flux.
The girl dug into the bag and pulled out a riceball, which she ate in silence, cross little lines on her forehead. I realised I would have to take the girl home. It was bound to cause a row.
“Poor old Shinzo,” I said.
She looked up at me, still angry with life. “You’ll have to look after me, Beast.”
“Yes,” I replied.
“Will your wife like me?”
“Her name is Mako.” I tugged at my lower lip. “She doesn’t like me. She might take to you though.”
“And you have a baby boy? Will he like me?”
Just at the mention of that dear boy, a smile unconsciously came to my face. “My boy is called Toshiaki. He likes every- one. He’ll certainly like you.”
“That’s good then. I’ll try living with you, Beast, and then I’ll try living with Shinzo.” A happy thought came to her. “I will have two families, not one. That’s sensible in a time of war.”
I smiled again and continued to smile as the girl eased out of her shell and began to talk – talk about any inconsequential thing that came into her head. “I think I will enjoy Nagasaki,” she said. “I’ll make new friends and I’ll continue to dance. If you like, Beast, I will dance on your rooftop. And are you still going to make me a kite? You promised to make me a kite on the day the bomb was dropped, I’ve not forgotten that, you know. And you will have to teach me how to fly it. Is Nagasaki really the kite-flying capital of the world? I’m sure all the other children can fly kites, so I’ll have to learn fast to catch up with them... ”
How quickly the girl could bounce back – from losing her grandmother, or Shinzo, and yet within a few minutes she could be prattling away with barely a pause for breath. It was, I suppose, an indirect consequence of the war that our children had become surprisingly resilient. They could tolerate any amount of hardship, from poor food and living conditions to family catastrophes. And now that I think of it, I believe that our children were natural-born optimists: whatever came their way, they accepted it without complaint, though always at the back of their minds was this unspoken hope that things might get better.
Which they did – eventually.
But first of all they had to get a whole lot worse: Nagasaki.
I had just two hours in Nagasaki before my appointment with Fat Man, and my abiding memory is that the city was looking tired and unloved. Its pristine parks, which had once been as verdant an oasis as ever I had set eyes on, had become little more than a series of parched vegetable plots, with enormous swathes of land turned over to growing sweet potatoes, pumpkins and any hardy plant that could survive being left untended for weeks on end.
And the people too. When we arrived at Urakami station, they looked as if they were doing little more than existing. The news had just come in from the previous night that our tepid allies the Russians had declared war. The only surprise was that our leaders had expected anything else. At times, I think their naivety was almost a match for that of the populace.
Stalin’s hand had been forced by the bombing of Hiroshima. He had realised that if he did not attack immediately, then Russia would be allowed none of the spoils; one outraged writer described them as being like wolves slavering for a morsel of Japan’s carcase. So two days after Hiroshima, Russia launched a blistering assault on our western front. Armies of battle-hardened veterans swept through our conquered territories in Manchuria. It was a battle that had been brewing for some months. Ever since the fall of Germany, Stalin had been shipping millions of troops all the way across Russia to the Chinese border. But our leaders never once had the eyes to see it. Even to the last, they were sending our bemused ambassador off to Moscow for yet more peace talks.
It all stems, I fear, from Japan being such an insular nation. We had our own goals and had doggedly set about attaining them. But we never once paused to consider the actions and the motives of our enemies and so-called allies.
We did not dream that America would have the stomach for a full land-battle on Japanese soil. We accepted all Joe Stalin’s smiling protestations of peace. And since we had been incapable of building our own atomic bomb, we could not conceive that our most hated enemy might succeed in that same venture. At every turn, the Japanese were wrong-footed – and yet, as the girl and I walked out of Urakami station, all we could hear was that interminable refrain: ‘Victory will soon be ours’. The country had no food, no raw materials and we were being bombed out of existence – yet still we clung to that single defining mantra: ‘Victory will soon be ours’.
You could not question it though. To question the war effort would have been tantamount to questioning your own parentage, your very existence.
How odd it was to leave the station with no luggage. We had eaten the last of the rice-balls and red onions, and had nothing left but the clothes on our backs. After Hiroshima the city was like another world. We could once again savour the sight of trees verdant with green leaves; buildings that stood as tall as the day they were built; and adults, children, all of them eating, walking, talking, without a trace of pain. In place of the maimed and the dead, people were going about their normal everyday affairs. Everyone was busy, doing something – anything – for the war effort. It did not matter what they were engaged in, just so long as they were up at dawn and working themselves to the bone.
I had made that journey from the station to my home so many times over the years. As I have already mentioned, Nagasaki is split by a steep ridge into two valleys, and my home was in the longer one, the Urakami valley, on the western side. It was in this valley, naturally, that Fat Boy was due to explode in an hour – where else did you expect that damnable bomb to detonate?
We caught a street-car two kilometres up through Nagasaki, past all the Mitsubishi industries that had made the city such an acceptable target for the Yankees. Many of the more important buildings, like the prefecture and the shipbuilding yard, had been camouflaged with black paint. How strange it was to be there standing shoulder-to-shoulder with those smooth-skinned civilians, none of them burnt, none of them pleading for water. It was like waking up from some gruelling nightmare.
A kilometre from home, we quit the street-car to walk and after Hiroshima, I revelled in every step. Along the way, I told the girl stories, though I was never able to finish them, for always she was on to me asking the next question.
“That is where I went to school for five years,” I said, pointing out the place that had taught me boredom and how to deal with it. “Shinzo lives just round the corner. We’ll try to see him tomorrow.”
“Yes, we must! Dear Shinzo. I miss him,” said the girl with a sigh, before finding something else to distract her. “What’s that big building there?”
“Urakami Cathedral,” I replied. “It’s our Christian capital. There are more Christians here than anywhere else in Japan.”
“And if they are Christians, does that mean they’re more likely to survive the war?”
One of the things that I love – truly love – about children is that they ask the unthinkable. And – as I now endeavour to do with all children’s questions – I carefully weighed up my answer. “This is only my view,” I said. “I’m sure many would disagree. But I don’t think your survival will depend on whether you’re a Christian, Buddhist, Jew, Muslim or atheist. Look at all those Christians walking in there. In a few minutes, they’ll be praying for peace and victory and whatever else they want to pray for – and yet on the other side of the world in America, there will be millions of Yankees praying to the exact same Christian God – and yet they will be praying for our total annihilation. So what do you think? Is God going to listen to one side and ignore the other? Or is it all meaningless?”
I was exploring my way through a series of nebulous thoughts, seeing if they could somehow coalesce, before I batted the question back to the girl. “Religion is a personal matter of faith. Believe what you want – but always, I hope, respect other people’s beliefs, or even their lack of them. Tell me what you think.”
The girl looked over at the white cathedral, where a troupe of young women were walking in past a large statue of the Virgin Mary. “I think that if they believe their prayers work, then that’s a good thing. The prayers may help them – even if they’re not answered.”
I laughed and clapped her on the shoulder. Truly, she had more wisdom between her ears than any number of adults I have known. “Yes, you’e right. Praying may well bring them some small solace – even if it doesn’t help them survive the war.”
And sadly on that day, the Christian God – if you so believe in him – decided to listen to the Yankees’ prayers and to ignore those of the Japanese. It was another unsettling little irony of the atomic bombs that Fat Man’s epicentre was almost directly above Urakami Cathedral, wiping out more than 10,000 of the Yankees’ so-called Christian brethren.
We had arrived – back to the street where I had played as a child and the home where I had been born and where both my parents had died. It was a wooden bungalow with a tiled roof and was of a decent size. It nestled in the lee of one of the steep wooded mountains that surround the Urakami Valley. They are always referred to as mountains, by the way, even though the highest is only 330 metres. But to those of us in Nagasaki, these green hills so totally dominate the skyline that they always seem like mountains, and so that is how they have come to be labelled.