Black Rain

TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE

When I was first asked to translate Masuji Ibuse’s Kuroi Ame I had considerable doubts. I knew that the work had been acclaimed in Japan, but suspected the critics of prejudice in its favor on account of its subject. Could the author possibly have avoided stridency, sentimentality, melodrama, monotony, and all the other pitfalls? Could such a theme yield, in the widest sense, beauty? Could it, in short, be fashioned into a work of art?

In my ignorance, I underestimated Ibuse. My work has left me with a sense of deep respect for the author, a new understanding of some aspects of the Japanese novel, and fresh insights into a country in which I have lived for fifteen years. However difficult it may have been to render the subtlety of Ibuse’s language into English, I believe that the work itself is important both for Japan and for the world.

The work is woven from many different strands. Given such a theme, a lesser author might—to borrow a metaphor from music—have produced no more than a steady, discordant fortissimo. In Black Rain, we have a subtle polyphony. That is not simply to say that Ibuse weaves together, around a central theme, the stories of several different people. More important, he creates an interplay between varying moods and between his main and secondary themes. It is from this interplay, rather than from the significance of its theme, that the work derives its value as literature.

The basic material, of course, is drawn from actual records and interviews—to the extent that Black Rain might even be called a documentary novel. It is interesting to know, for example, that Shigematsu Shizuma and his journal really exist, and that Dr. Iwatake is, indeed, alive and practicing today in Tokyo. The horrors, too, are described as they were, without exaggeration (the author, in fact, has been accused of playing them down; but to set down more than he has here was unnecessary and irrelevant to his purpose).

Against its basic theme, the work creates many contrasts. These serve to give the work variety; they are also, I feel, the essence of its success as art. It is the distillation of these conflicting elements that gives it its depth—its beauty, even. A typical example is the way the author invariably balances the horrors he describes with the wry humor for which he has long been famous. At times, the effect this creates is quite indescribable; indeed, until one has become attuned to the characteristic flavor of the work it is sometimes difficult, almost, to accept the humor as really intended. In the same way Ibuse, with infinite nostalgia, sets against the violent destruction of the city the beauty of the Japanese countryside and the ancient customs of its people. Against the mighty, brutal purposes of state, he lays the small, human preoccupations and foibles. Against the threat of universal destruction, he sets a love for, and sense of wonder at life in all its forms. Significantly, it is often at the points in the narrative where one feels these contrasts most strongly—where humor and horror, gentleness and violence come into sharpest conflict—that there occur those moving human vignettes that linger so strongly in the memory after one has finished reading.

It is a truism that the Japanese are not much given to the explicit statement of personal feelings or to extravagant emotional gestures. Ibuse, one of the most Japanese of authors, is no exception. The scene of Shigematsu’s reunion with his wife after the bombing may seem at first almost brutally casual to the Western reader. Yet to the sensitive Japanese reader, the spare exchange of questions and answers will be immensely moving, and the rice-cooking pot and small pan that stand by Shigeko’s side will symbolize a whole world of traditional values and feeling.

Not only is this approach intensely Japanese—and here, probably, artistically necessary—it is also most effective if one considers the work as a protest against the bomb. More than twenty years later, the author has succeeded in ordering the violent emotions that, as he himself has admitted, the subject once aroused in him. On the one hand, he avoids all emotional political considerations, all tendency to blame or to moralize. On the other, he refrains from bludgeoning the senses into apathy with an unvaried repetition of horrors. In a way that no other book has done, Black Rain succeeds in relating the bomb to our own, everyday experience, wherever we may live.

The skill with which the varied elements making up the work are organized becomes more and more apparent as one’s reading progresses. The narrative moves backwards and forwards in time, the moment of the bomb’s dropping, the crucial point around which the whole work revolves, occuring to great effect in many different guises throughout the book. The Imperial broadcast ending the war, mentioned in the very first chapter, is reintroduced in the last chapter in a moving scene that creates the effect of a wheel that has turned full circle. In the same way, themes at first apparently irrelevant—such as the carp-rearing scenes—gradually reveal their symbolic significance for the author as the work progresses. The work is in the tradition of the discursive I-novel—a chunk of life is presented for our inspection without overt comment or a very obvious plot—but its discursions are peculiarly well organized. And the suggestion of life going on after the novel is finished has, in this context, a fresh significance, together with an added poignancy in the awareness that, for the first time, that continuity is actually threatened.

Black Rain is a portrait of a group of human beings; of the death of a great city; of a nation crumbling into defeat. It is a picture of the Japanese mind that tells more than many sociological studies. Yet more than this, it is a statement of a philosophy. Although that philosophy, in its essence, is neither pessimistic nor optimistic, it seems to me to be life-affirming. Dealing with the grimmest of subjects, the work is not, in the end, depressing, for the author is ultimately concerned with life rather than with death, and with an overall beauty that transcends ugliness of detail. In that sense, I would suggest, Black Rain is not a book about the bomb at all.

JOHN BESTER

CHAPTER 1

For several years past, Shigematsu Shizuma, of the village of Kobatake, had been aware of his niece Yasuko as a weight on his mind. What was worse, he had a presentiment that the weight was going to remain with him, unspeakably oppressive, for still more years to come. In Yasuko, he seemed to have taken on a double, or even a triple, liability. That no suitable marriage was in sight for her was a circumstance simple enough in itself. The real trouble was the rumor. Towards the end of the war, it ran, Yasuko had been working in the kitchens of the Second Middle School Service Corps in Hiroshima City. Because of that rumor, the villagers of Kobatake, over one hundred miles to the east of Hiroshima, were saying that she was a victim of radiation sickness. Shigematsu and his wife, they claimed, were deliberately covering up the fact. It was this that made her marriage seem so remote. People who came to make inquiries of the neighbors with an eye to a possible match would hear the rumor, would promptly become evasive, and would end up by breaking off the talks altogether.

On that morning—the morning of August 6—the Service Corps of the Second Middle School in Hiroshima had been listening to an exhortatory address on Temma Bridge, or some other bridge in the west of the city, when the atomic bomb fell. In that instant the boys were burned from head to foot, but the teacher in charge had got the whole party to sing, pianissimo, a patriotic song: Lay Me Beneath the Waves. When they had finished, he gave the command Dismiss! and himself led the way in jumping into the river, which happened to be running high with the tide at the time. The whole party followed suit. Only one pupil had struggled home to tell the tale, and he too, it was said, had died before long.

It seemed likely that this account had come from a member of the Patriotic Service Corps from Kobatake who had got back alive from Hiroshima. Even so, the story that Yasuko had been working in the kitchens of the Service Corps of the Second Middle School in Hiroshima was pure fabrication. Even had she been in the kitchens, it was hardly likely that a girl would have been on the spot when they sang Lay Me Beneath the Waves. The truth was that she had been working in the Japan Textile Company works at the town of Furuichi outside Hiroshima, where she served as messenger and receptionist to the manager, Mr. Fujita. Between the Japan Textile Company and the Second Middle School there was no connection whatsoever.

Since starting work at Furuichi, Yasuko had been sharing the Shizumas’ temporary home at 862, 2-chōme, Senda-machi, Hiroshima, and had traveled to and from the factory on the same Kabe-bound train as Shigematsu. There was no connection whatsoever either with the Second Middle School or with the Service Corps. The only link, if any, was that a former pupil of the school—an army man with the forces in northern China—had written Yasuko a rather fulsome letter of thanks for a gift parcel, and had followed it up with five or six poems, all written by himself. Shigematsu still remembered how, when Yasuko had showed them to his wife, Shigeko had blushed inappropriately for someone of her age, and had said, "Yasuko, these must be what they call ‘love poems.’ "

During the war, of course, irresponsible rumors had been forbidden by an army edict controlling freedom of speech, and topics of conversation were regulated by means such as the bulletin boards that were circulated among the inhabitants of each district. Yet once the war was over, rumors and stories of every kind—of holdups, robbery, and gambling, of army stockpiles and men who became rich overnight, of the occupation forces—ran wild, only to be forgotten again, rumors and stories alike, with the passage of time. All would have been well had the rumors about Yasuko likewise passed away once they had had their day. But they refused to do so, and whenever somebody came with inquiries relating to a prospect of marriage, the same well-worn story that she had been in the kitchens of the Hiroshima Second Middle School Service Corps would be served up yet again.

For a while, Shigematsu had entertained an idea of hunting out the arch-villain who had first touched off the irresponsible talk. But apart from Shigematsu and his wife and Yasuko, the only people from Kobatake who had been in Hiroshima when the bomb fell were young men belonging to the Patriotic Volunteer Corps and members of the Service Corps. The Patriotic Volunteer Corps was organized from young men drafted from country districts of the same prefecture to work as laborers on the compulsory dismantling of houses, which was carried out to create fire-breaks in the built-up areas of Hiroshima. The young men from Kobatake were incorporated in a unit known, rather pompously, as the Kōjin Unit, because it drew its members from the two districts of Kōnu and Jinseki. Their job was to pull down people’s houses. They would saw about four-fifths of the way through every pillar of any size in the house, then attach a stout rope to the ridge-pole and tug, twenty or thirty of them, till the house came tumbling down. Single-storied houses were hard work, and came down piecemeal, with much fuss. Two-storied houses were more obliging, and collapsed in one mighty crash, though the cloud of dust they sent up made approach impossible for a good five or six minutes at least.

Unfortunately, the members of the Kōjin Unit and the Service Corps had barely got down to work, having arrived in Hiroshima only the day before, when the bomb fell. Those who were not killed outright were taken, their bodies burned raw all over, to reception centers at Miyoshi, Shōbara, Tōjō, and other places round about Hiroshima. The first party sent from Kobatake to the ruins of Hiroshima consisted of the village firemen, who went there in a charcoal-burning bus. They were followed, early on the morning of the day the war ended, by a party of volunteer workers from the Young Men’s Association, who went to the temporary reception centers at Miyoshi, Tōjō, and elsewhere to search for injured from the village.

The members of the Young Men’s Association who were offering their services were given an official send-off by the village headman, in the presence of the acting president of the Association.

Gentlemen, he said, you have our deepest gratitude for giving thus of your services in these busy wartime days. I scarcely need to remind you that the injured whom you will be bringing back with you are blistered with burns over their entire bodies, and to request you, therefore, to take every care not to cause them yet further suffering. It is said that the enemy used what is referred to as a ‘new weapon’ in his attack on Hiroshima, which instantly plunged hundreds of thousands of blameless residents of the city into a hell of unspeakable torments. A member of the Patriotic Service Corps who escaped with his life from Hiroshima has told me that at that moment when the new weapon wiped out the city he heard countless cries for succor—the voice of those hundreds of thousands of souls—seemingly welling up from beneath the earth. Even the Fukuyama district, which he passed through on his way back, was a burnt-out waste; the keep and the Summer Gallery of Fukuyama Castle had been destroyed in the flames. His heart was wrung, he told me, by the realization of the awfulness of war….Be that as it may, however, it is an unquestionable fact that a war is in progress, and you, as members of a voluntary labor unit, are proceeding henceforth to bring home your comrades-in-arms. I must request you above all, therefore, to take care not to drop those symbols of your invincible determination to fight on to the bitter end—your bamboo spears. It is most unfortunate that I should have to see you off in this hole-in-the-corner manner, addressing my parting words to you in the predawn darkness without so much as a light, but in view of the prevailing situation I feel sure that you will understand.

His speech over, he turned to the eighty-odd people who had come to see the party off. I hope you will join me, he declared, raising his arms ready to beat time, in three rousing cheers to speed the members of the voluntary labor unit on their way!

The party split into three groups as it set off, one to go to Miyoshi, one to Shōbara, and one to Tōjō. They walked in silence in the wake of the horse-drawn carts carrying their baggage. The members of the unit bound for Tōjō stopped to eat their lunches at Yuki, about halfway between Kobatake and Tōjō, seating themselves for the purpose on the veranda of a farmhouse that stood by the roadside. As they were eating, an unprecedented broadcast by His Majesty the Emperor came over the radio inside the house. When it was finished, they sat for a while in silence. Then the man who was leading the horse by the reins said:

The headman’s parting speech this morning was rather long, wasn’t it?

This led, in the natural course of events, to a discussion on what to do with their bamboo spears, and it was finally decided, by unanimous agreement, to leave them as a parting gift to the farmer whose veranda they had made free with.

The reception center at Tōjō was an old building that had happened to be available. It had two superintendents, but no one had the least idea of how to set about things. The victims were sprawled about on the tatami; visual identification was impossible since their faces, without exception, were burned raw. One of them was as bald as an egg where he should have had hair, with a single band of normal skin left; he had apparently had a cotton towel round his forehead. His cheeks were dangling like an old woman’s breasts. Fortunately, the injured could all hear, and people went round asking each of them his name, which was written in Chinese ink on his bare skin if he was naked, or on any tatters of cloth he might have retained about him. This method, though crude, was necessary if identification was to be possible, since the injured were constantly shifting about in their suffering, groaning all the while.

What does the doctor think he’s up to? one of the volunteers demanded of a superintendent. Isn’t he going to do anything for them?

But the doctor himself was reluctant to risk touching patients whose sickness he did not know how to treat. Having no idea of the source of their suffering other than the pain of the burns, he injected six of the injured with a medicine called Pantopon, which relieved their suffering temporarily. After that, he said, he had no more of the medicine left.

This account had been given to Shigematsu later, after he had come back from Hiroshima, by a member of the volunteer work party. By that time, Shigematsu himself was showing symptoms of radiation sickness. Whenever he applied himself too enthusiastically to working in the fields, he would be overcome by sudden lethargy, and small pimples would appear on his scalp. If he tugged at his hair, it came out, quite painlessly. At such times, he would take to bed for a while and eat plenty of nourishing foods.

The symptoms of radiation sickness usually began with an unexplained lethargy and heaviness of the limbs. After a few days, the hair would come out without any pain, and the teeth would come loose and eventually fall out. Finally, collapse set in and the patient died. The essential thing if one felt lethargy in the early stages of the sickness was to rest and eat well. Those who forced themselves to work gradually wilted, like a pine tree transplanted by a bungling gardener, until finally they expired. In the village next to Kobatake, and in the village beyond that, there had been people who had come home from Hiroshima in the best of health, congratulating themselves on their escape, and had worked their hardest for a month or two, only to take to their beds and die within a week or ten days. The sickness would set in in one particular part of the body, producing the excruciating pain so characteristic of it. The pain in the shoulders and back, too, was incomparably worse than with any other disease.

The visiting doctor diagnosed Shigematsu’s case quite explicitly as radiation sickness. Dr. Fujita in Fukuyama pronounced the same diagnosis. Yasuko, however, was a different matter: Yasuko was in no sense sick. She had been examined by a reputable doctor, and she had submitted to one of the periodic check-ups for survivors of the bomb that were given at the local health center. Everything was completely normal—corpuscle count, parasites, urine, sedimentation, stethoscopy, hearing, and so on. This was four years and nine months after the end of the war, when Yasuko had the chance of a match which seemed, if the truth be told, almost too good for her. The prospective husband was the young master of an old family in Yamano village. He must have seen Yasuko somewhere, for a tentative proposal was duly made via a go-between. Yasuko herself had no objection to the match. Shigematsu, who was anxious to ensure that for once things should not be spoiled by rumors of radiation sickness, had a reputable doctor draw up a certificate of health for Yasuko, which he mailed to the go-between.

This time it’ll be all right! he said somewhat self-importantly. There’s nothing like making doubly sure! People nowadays like to exchange health certificates before they get married. I’m sure they won’t think it at all odd. The go-between’s the wife of a former army officer, it seems, so she’s sure to be used to the modern way of doing things. It’ll be all right this time, you’ll see!

In the event, though, he proved to have shown more care than wisdom. The go-between must have come to someone in the village to inquire about Yasuko’s health, for a letter came asking about Yasuko’s movements in Hiroshima from the day the bomb fell until her return to Kobatake. This was only for the go-between’s own information—the letter hastened to add—and was not the result of any contact concerning the subject with the prospective husband.

It dawned on Shigematsu that he had incurred yet another liability. His wife read the letter and handed it to Yasuko without speaking; she herself sat still for a while, gazing down at the tatami, then got up and retired to the box room. Yasuko followed her there. After a while, Shigematsu went and peered in. His wife’s face was buried in Yasuko’s shoulder, and they were both sobbing quietly to themselves.

All right, then—I was wrong for once, he said. But it’s disgraceful, to treat someone like a chronic invalid just because people gossip. Let them gossip, then! We’ll rise above it. We’ll find some way out, mark my words!

But he knew, even so, that he only said it to make himself feel better.

Slowly and wearily, Yasuko got to her feet and, taking a large diary from the chest of drawers, handed it silently to Shigematsu. It was her private journal for 1945, and the cover had a design of two crossed flags—the national flag, and the Rising Sun flag used by the navy. During their stay in Senda-machi in Hiroshima, she had written up the day’s events in it every evening after supper, using the round meal-table as a writing desk. She had written it up unfailingly every day, however tired she might be.

Her way of keeping a diary was to deal with the day’s events in a brief five or six lines for four or five days, then, on the fifth or sixth day, to devote one entry to describing the past few days in greater detail. In this she was carrying on Shigematsu’s own method, which he had followed for many years past and which he had taught his niece. He had first devised this scheme, which he liked to call his stopstart method, so that on evenings when he was late home from work and too sleepy to do anything more, he could allow himself to dismiss the day in a few lines.

It occurred to Shigematsu that he must copy out the relevant parts of this diary of Yasuko’s and send it to the go-between. Setting to work, he transcribed several days’ entries just as they stood, beginning with August 5.

August 5

Gave notice to Mr. Fujita, the factory manager, that I should be absent tomorrow, and went home to get our belongings ready for sending to the country. List: Aunt Shigeko’s summer and winter formal kimonos (one of them—very precious—a yellow-striped silk which great-grandmother is supposed to have worn when she first came as a bride), and four summer kimonos; Uncle Shigematsu’s winter morning coat, winter and summer formal kimonos and a formal haori, two winter suits, one shirt, one tie, and his graduation diploma; my own summer and winter formal kimonos, two sashes, my graduation diploma. Did them all up in a straw mat. In a bag to carry over my shoulder, I put three measures of rice, my diary, a fountain pen, my seal, mercurochrome, and an all-purpose triangular bandage. (Note added by Shigematsu: Our belongings were sent back to us from the country, still done up, more than a year after the end of the war.)

An air raid warning in the middle of the night, and a B-29 squadron flew over without doing anything. All-clear around three. When Uncle Shigematsu came back from night watch he said he’d been told that the other day the B-29’s dropped propaganda leaflets saying Don’t think we’ve forgotten to raid Fuchū-machi, will you? We’ll be there before long. The phrasing manages to sound affable yet threatening at the same time. Will they really bomb Fuchū, I wonder? According to someone who came from Yamanashi Prefecture, the other day, the B-29’s dropped a kind of propaganda pamphlet printed on real art paper before raiding Kōfu. One passage apparently claimed that on Saipan or some other island occupied by the Americans the Japanese were living quite contentedly, with plenty to eat. One never even sees art paper in Hiroshima these days. To bed at 3:30.

August 6

Mr. Nojima came in his truck at 4:30 to take our belongings to the country. At Furue there was a great flash and boom. Black smoke rose up over the city of Hiroshima like a volcanic eruption. On our way back, we went via Miyazu and thence by boat up as far as Miyuki Bridge. Aunt Shigeko was unhurt, Uncle Shigematsu injured on his face. An unprecedented disaster, but it is impossible to get any overall picture. The house is tilting at an angle of about 15 degrees, so am writing this diary at the entrance to the air raid shelter.

August 7

We decided yesterday to move to the workers’ dormitory at the Ujina works, but it proved impossible, and at Uncle Shigematsu’s suggestion we took refuge at Furuichi. Aunt Shigeko accompanied us. Uncle Shigematsu shed a few tears in the works office. Hiroshima is a burnt-out city, a city of ashes, a city of death, a city of destruction, the heaps of corpses a mute protest against the inhumanity of war.

Today, inspection of damage done to the works.

August 8

Frantically busy cooking rice for everybody’s breakfast.

The main points which were decided on at a conference on the running of the works have been published.

August 9

More survivors arrived seeking refuge today. Among them, some people who are quite unconnected with any of the workers here. Almost all of them are injured. Not one of them has any proper clothes. One of them came clasping a parcel containing a box with somebody’s ashes, which he hung on a cord under the eaves over the window, muttering a prayer to himself as he did so. There was a middle-aged man too, with his throat bandaged in a grubby cloth, and a heavy, coarse face. He had a kind of desperate humor, and distributed three unused postcards each to everybody, saying Don’t hesitate, now. Drop a line to the people who’ll be worrying about you. You can have as many of these cards as you like—I make them at my place. But keep it to yourselves, will you? I imagine he had found the cards lying around at a bombed-out post office or somewhere.

It is 1 p.m., and most people are resting, fast asleep. Today, I feel I have recovered the power to think somewhat, so will go over again in my memory what has happened since the sixth. At 4:30 on the morning of the sixth the truck came with Mr. Nojima driving and loaded our belongings to take to the country. Our party were all from the same district association, or from the next district—Mrs. Nojima, Mrs. Miyaji, Mrs. Yoshimura, and Mrs. Doi. Everyone got in next to her own belongings. Off at 5:30.

On the main road on the way from Koi to Furue, we saw a dark brown, life-size figure of a man set up as a scarecrow in a tiny vacant lot being used to grow millet. Mr. Nojima slowed down the truck and tapped on the bar of the partition, as if to say Look at that! There’s something queer for you! It was only a figure, but the face, hands, and feet were done in detail, as though modeled in clay, and it had a straw mat wrapped round its hips. It may well have been papier-mâché, but Mrs. Nojima said: Do you think it’s a scarecrow made by natives that somebody’s brought back from the South Pacific? And Mrs. Miyaji said, I expect it’s a wax dummy from a department store that got blackened with smoke from an oil bomb or something. But Mrs. Doi said, "It gave me a proper turn. I thought it was a real human being all burnt black!"

It was 6:30 a.m. when we reached Furue. The farmhouses still had their shutters closed, but at Mrs. Nojima’s parents’ home the old lady and gentleman had got the doors of the earthen-walled storehouse open ready for us. We unloaded our belongings and put them in the storehouse. Mrs. Nojima wrote out a receipt for us—just to make sure, she said—then took us into a room in the main house and gave us each a small cucumber with some bean-paste, since there weren’t any proper cakes for serving with green tea, she explained. They were all very nice to us. Mrs. Nojima’s father seemed to prefer to leave things to his son-in-law, Mr. Nojima. Our peaches are still rather green, he said with old-fashioned politeness, but I hope you’ll try them. They’re still cold from the night dew, you know. He disappeared outside and was back in no time with about ten peaches in a basket. A variety called Ōkubo, he said. They were still rather green, but Mrs. Nojima peeled them for us.

Both Mr. and Mrs. Nojima are always doing things for the other people who live in the same district. People say that Mr. Nojima has been friendly for years with a left-wing scholar called Mr. Matsumoto, and that since the war got more serious he’s been making himself especially nice to everybody in the district so that the authorities won’t get suspicious. Mr. Matsumoto, who went to an American university and used to correspond with Americans before the war, has been called before the military police any number of times. So he, too, is always on his best behavior with people at the city hall, the officials of the prefectural office, and the members of the civilian guard, and whenever there’s an air raid warning he’s always the first to dash outside and rush around calling out air raid! air raid! He’s never been known to take off his puttees, even at home. They say he even offered to take part in bamboo spear practice with the women. It’s really pathetic to see a reputable scholar like him trying so hard to please. Once, when we were talking about his behavior, Uncle Shigematsu said: It shows there’s something wrong with the world when a man like Mr. Matsumoto can let himself be put on so by officials. It reminds me of the saying that ‘the finest barge sometimes conceals a load of turnips’—but I don’t feel that quite fits his behavior. Or you could compare him to that story of the great hero, the man of action, whom circumstances obliged to turn to growing flowers for a while—but that’s not quite it, either. Nor is he one of those ‘political turncoats.’ No, it’s spy phobia—that’s what’s the matter with people like him! But what I say is this: there’s a time for every man to show his true colors, and when that time comes he should do it like a man!

Although Mr. Matsumoto could be evacuated any time he liked, he’s too afraid that he might be suspected as a spy, and dashes around all day frantically doing things for other people in the district. Even supposing that Mr. Nojima is acting on the same principle, I wonder whether we really ought to take advantage of it and get him to drive trucks and look after clothing for us? I expect my kimonos, graduation