“Please do not joke.” She gazed into the monkey’s pulped face, searching for any sign of life. “That was awful.”
I did not know what to say, or how to handle the situation. I had just killed a dumb animal and I felt like an idiot. So, not knowing what else to do, I continued to joke. “Bush-meat,” I said. “We should take it home. I’ve not eaten meat in months.”
“I should never have come,” Sumie said, walking back to the path.
I hurried after her, the screams of the other monkey following me through the trees. “I’m sorry,” I said, snatching at her elbow. “Sumie, I’m sorry.”
“I am cursed now. I know it,” she said. “I was cursed when I set foot on the island and now I am doubly cursed.”
“I’m sorry,” I repeated, as I followed her down the path and back towards the shrine.
“Those monkeys are messengers!” She stopped suddenly on the path, turning to me. “Do you not understand?”
I reached out and tried to pull her close, but she slipped from my fingers and continued down the hill. How I hated her for crying like that. “What more can I say? What do you want me to say?”
“I should never have come,” she said once more, though it was almost as if she were talking to herself. “Why could I not have followed my instincts? Why did I have to listen to you?”
How I squirmed, how I writhed, as I scuttled after her down the hill, only too aware of how badly I had behaved. I also knew that I had blown any chance of having sex on Miyajima. Perhaps it was that which irked me more than anything else.
Sumie strode on ahead of me, arms swinging briskly as she bounded back to the shrine.
“It is only an old wives’ tale,” I called out after her. “It is just a superstition!”
“So I am superstitious,” she called back. “What are you going to do? Throw a stone at me?”
“Sumie – please.”
“The shrine has been here for over a thousand years!” She stopped and turned again, the tears still bright on her cheeks. “And I let you bring me here. We even had sex.”
“It is all right.” I stretched a hand, trying to soothe her.
“I should never have come.”
She was still seething as we climbed onto the ferry later that afternoon – but by then not so much cross with me as angry with herself for being cajoled into visiting Miyajima. On the way back, I made a few conversational sallies and tried to be bubbly, but it was as if she’d had a glimpse of her own death because nothing could rally her.
Back at her home, that lovely old guest-house where Shinzo and I had spent the last three months, she busied herself putting some rice onto the brazier. It was so unlike her to be like that. Normally after a disagreement, she bounced back in a matter of minutes. But this time, she was so dispirited that soon after our desultory supper she went to sleep.
I went for a walk by myself on that last evening in Hiroshima. Like everywhere else in Japan, there was a total black-out; the little light that there was came from the stars and the new moon. It was a cool, delicious evening, the mountains bathed a gorgeous vermillion red in the dusk light.
Despite the war, Hiroshima had still retained a few cinemas – and a few brothels, now that I think of it. What better way for a soldier to spend his wages than to buy a few minutes of love? In those harsh days, you took what you could get.
I joined the queue at the Kotobuki theatre to watch a movie. I still remember the name:
Four Weddings
– a comedy, I think, about four sisters all desperate to marry the same eligible bachelor. I was not in the mood for humour; still annoyed, in fact angry, about the dead monkey.
I might have enjoyed walking back through Hiroshima’s sedate streets with its mass of waterways if Sumie had been at my side. It was a heavenly night, the perfect night; as if the city somehow knew that she was about to take leave of her citizens. Without anyone to share it, though, and with no hand to hold, no lips to kiss, the evening left me unmoved.
Shinzo was already snoring on his futon in the room that we shared. Occasionally in his sleep he would scratch at his groin or his head. We all of us were infested with lice in those days, though I think Shinzo had them worse than most. Even if you did get the lice out of your hair, your clothes would still be riddled with them, lying snug in the seams.
I undressed silently, leaving my clothes on the floor where they fell, and slipped across the landing to Sumie’s bedroom. She was asleep on the futon, her back curled to the door, but a gas-lamp was burning low for me on the table. Her clothes were hung up neatly by the door. I was about to turn out the light when I paused. I wondered. Was it still there?
I padded back to the door and went through her pockets. At first I thought she had thrown it away, but then my fingers touched it, crushed into a crisp ball at the bottom of her trouser pocket.
I took the fortune-slip over to the lamp, flattening it out between thumb and forefinger. I could not imagine what had made her so tearful.
There was no getting round it. Even I would have been unnerved. Some fortune slips are ambiguous, but this was quite unequivocal: “Very bad luck”.
Though now I think of it, the fortune slip was more than just a prediction for the future. It was also a note of sympathy, or regret, as if to say how unfortunate it was that Sumie was about to be caught up in the hell that was Hiroshima.
I wrote earlier that those pitiful suicide boats were Japan’s most useless invention of the war.
I correct myself. There was, I believe, one other weapon that was even more ridiculous – and I was one of the few men who were helping to make it.
I was a kite-maker.
The irony of it all still amuses me. Sometimes I laugh so much that the tears run down my cheeks; so much that my wife will come hurrying out to the balcony as if I am in some terrible pain. But I am not in any discomfort. More often than not these days, I am deliriously, senselessly overjoyed to be alive, and to still find myself with the ability to laugh at the stupidity of it all.
I used to be told that my humour was inappropriate and out of place. But now I am an old man and am perceived to have wisdom, I can laugh at whatever I please. To my mind, one of the more hilarious facts about the end of World War II is that, while America was spending approximately $2 billion building the world’s first atomic bomb, we had gone into overdrive with our production of bamboo spears. In the last few months of the war, we may not have had the steel to produce many guns or conventional ordnance, but our production of bamboo spears had sky-rocketed. Never before in recorded history had we produced so many of the things, and everyone, right down to the fresh-faced 15-year-old schoolgirls, was being trained how to use them.
And along with our millions of spears, we were also hoping to fend off the Yankee offensive with our hundreds of box kites. The kite scheme had been dreamed up by the Tiger of Malaya, General Tomoyuki Yamashita, as a means to protect our convoys from Yankee fighters. Yamashita’s plan was that each ship would have up to 20 heavy-duty kites, which would be attached by strong twine and then sent spiralling 500 metres into the sky. Rather like the great barrage balloons that flew over Europe in World War I, each kite was to have a number of grenades attached to its underbelly. It was hoped that when the Yankee fighters swooped to attack, they would hit the kites and be blown out of the sky.
I do not believe that a single one of our kites was ever used in action. For a start, we did not have any ships. The few ships that were left in the Combined Fleet, including the great battleship Yamato, had been sunk off southern Kyushu four months earlier.
But aside from not having any ships, there were so many flaws to the kite bombs I would have been staggered if they had killed a single Yankee. Apart from anything else, the kites were largely made of bamboo, paper, paste and string: hopeless in the wet.
Still, we all of us had to play our part in the war effort, even the 12-year-old girls who were put to work as telephonists. And since I was not just a kite-maker but a Nagasaki kitemaker, I was deemed to have the necessary levels of expertise to be allowed to make kites for the service of the Emperor.
My love affair with kites had started when I was just six years old, ever since my father had first put a little square Hata kite into my hands. Kite-flying is a national hobby in Japan, but in Nagasaki it has risen almost to the level of a religion. We’re so fanatical we even have our own kite festival every March; what a sight for my tired old eyes to see those thousands of kites, a riot of colour, bobbing in the breeze.
My kite-making had only ever been a hobby and for the previous seven years I had been a merchant seaman. But as the tide of war had turned against Japan, I was out of a job. We had no ships left, no fuel to power them – and next to nothing that was worth transporting in the first place.
That spring I had arrived back in Nagasaki after my final tour to China and, like everyone else in Japan, was immediately put to work. The whole country, young, old and infirm, was doing its bit for the war effort. For me, this meant making kites to protect our ships.
I know it sounds completely crazy; welcome to the insane world of Imperial Japan during the last few months of the war.
Three months earlier, in May, Shinzo, I and a handful of other Nagasaki kite-makers had taken the train 240 kilometres North-East to Hiroshima. We were billeted out to various boarding houses around the city and spent our days mired in bamboo, string and paste. It was strange to think that those little works of art were not going to be used for play but as weapons of war. For the first time I was an arms manufacturer and therefore a legitimate enemy target. But I was one of the few Japanese who enjoyed my war work. For me, kite-making was a joy in its own right. Once the kites were finished, the army could have used them for firewood for all I cared.
From the start, it was apparent that the whole kite scheme was ridiculous. But it would not have been politic to have mentioned my scepticism to anyone except Shinzo and a few select friends. Every town and every work place was infested with secret informers, who were just thirsting for the chance to report you to the Kempai-Tai – as if that would somehow prove their patriotism. So, although we all had our doubts about the kites, in public at least we pronounced our delight at finally being able to play our part in the great war that would bring such glory to the Emperor.
Hiroshima, with its neat streets of wooden tiled houses and its seven arterial waterways, was a gem of a city; very different from how it is today. And that bright, clear Monday morning – Monday 6th August 1945 – I had never seen it so beautiful. I was up at 6.40 and, as I threw open the first-floor shutters, the glistering city was spread all before me, like a rolling patchwork of brown and beige that slipped into the sea. Little tendrils of grey kitchen smoke were already puffing up from its hundreds of chimneys, as our daily fare of unpolished rice was boiled up on the charcoal burners. Far off, I could make out great flocks of seagulls, a flurry of white against a clear blue sky; could smell the salt tang of the Inland Sea, even though it was perhaps five kilometres away. Our waterways were tidal, so wherever you were in Hiroshima, you always had that scent of the sea.
Compared to Japan’s other great cities, Hiroshima was in a fabulous state of repair – but that was solely so the full potency of Little Boy could be properly tested on virgin bombing ground. Or, as the man in charge of America’s atomic bomb project, General Leslie Groves, pithily recommended to his superiors: ‘The targets should not have been previously damaged by air attacks, to enable us to assess accurately the effects of the bomb.’
The only obvious damage to Hiroshima had been an epic piece of self-mutilation. Three enormous fire-breaks had been carved out East-West across the city, as some 70,000 houses, cafes, shops and offices had been razed to the ground. Over 7,000 school-children had been put to work, pulling down our houses with nothing more than ropes and brute force. It was hoped that the breaks might stem the firestorm when the inevitable bombing raids finally rained down on Hiroshima.
I still find it astonishing to think that not one of us had realised the true import of why we had never been bombed. There we were imagining that somehow we had been blessed; that Japan’s seventh largest city, ripe with its munitions factories and army installations, had somehow just slipped beneath the Yankees’ radar. We believed that if we kept quiet, kept our noses down, then we might be allowed to carry on going about our mild-mannered business. Whereas in we had been the primary, or ‘AA’, target for the world’s first atomic bomb for at least the previous three months. Oh yes, they knew all about Hiroshima. We had been hand-picked by a special ‘Target Selection Committee’, before being personally approved by the President; as Truman said, the buck stopped with him.
On almost every count, Hiroshima was the perfect target. We had over 43,000 troops which qualified us as an army city; we had scores of munitions and explosives factories (not forgetting, of course, our lethal kite-bomb warehouse); and, unlike the only other ‘AA’ target, Kyoto, we had no especial ‘religious significance’ to save us.
In fact, the more the Target Committee studied Hiroshima, the better she looked. The city had the perfect dimensions, roughly five kilometres by seven kilometres, to be totally annihilated by a 13.5 kiloton bomb such as Little Boy. Even our mountains, those breathtaking mountains, were against us with the Target Committee deeming them ‘likely to produce a focusing effect which would considerably increase the blast damage’. And then, the icing on the cake, our distinctive pat- tern of waterways meant that the Yankee bombardier Tom Ferebee could have spotted us blindfold.
No, our destiny had been decided long ago in Washington, and there was only thing that could have saved us that Monday: thick cloud cover. Tom Ferebee could only make his drop if he had visual contact with the city nine kilometres beneath him. The clouds were certainly thick enough to save Kokura three days later. But that morning, with the wind calm and temperatures already soaring into the 80s, I can hardly remember seeing the sky so blue. It was going to be another glorious summer’s day.