Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [141]
I looked in the can. They were half melting, but not completely melted. Thick and muddy, there was no sign of their having put up resistance to this sole primitive measure... I had begun to suffer from an association. It was about human beings heaped up in a mound of death, half burnt but not completely melted, with no energy to show any sign of resistance. They were so alike.
She cannot see the slugs die without remembering ‘the pale white radioactive flash [that] burnt H City as though to toast it’. An ordinary act of pest extermination is transmuted into a vivid metaphor for the annihilation of human beings.61
Poetry, especially in its Japanese forms, seemed to lend itself to the expression of shock and lamentation. Haiku in particular captured the intensity of the bomb experience. Herewith three haiku by Hiroshima survivors:
An empty shell I walk flowers hit my eyes (Isami Sasaki)
To the jeep that quickly came I refused autopsy (Nobuyuki Okada)
God suddenly averted His eyes at 8:15 (Genshi Fujikawa)62
The hibakusha poet Eisaku Yoneda caught the pathos of hope deadened by despair, of ‘winter sunshine’ overmatched by ‘cold wind’:
Going along the dirt road,
I see the winter sunshine brightly;
The young shoots are through already,
Steadily pushing between the ashes.
And yet I look in vain for my young one,
Hearing only the far sound of a cold wind.
I stand on the Aioi Bridge, sick at heart.
In the deep water something flashes!
Ah! It is but an image,
An image of his childhood.63
And finally, the unalloyed bleakness of Hiroshima, the dead city, in ‘Ruins’. The poet is Sadako Kurihara:
Hiroshima: nothing, nothing—
old and young burned to death,
city blown away, socket without eyeball.
White bones scattered over reddish rubble;
above, sun burning down:
city of ruins, still as death.64
Last, and hardest, are the stories of survivors, related in letters or memoirs or told to journalists, psychologists, or historians (often Americans), not in soaring or bitter literary phrases but in the straightforward, significant prose of ordinary people. One of these was Fumiko Morishita, a waitress at a Hiroshima restaurant who seemed on 6 August unharmed by the bomb. But she had been exposed to radiation and soon sickened. Her fiance, a soldier who had been away for years, against all odds returned intact and renewed his suit, despite Fumiko’s illness. Having watched from her hospital bed as pregnant women gave birth to visibly damaged babies, she turned him away: it was not fair, she said, to subject him to the likely trauma of having retarded offspring. He persisted, holding her erect as they walked in the hospital garden, insisting that he still wanted to marry. But she would not be swayed and at last they parted company. She would never wed.65
Masao Baba was 5 years old and living in Hiroshima on 6 August. ‘The atom bomb wrecked our big house and killed my father,’ he recalled five years later. ‘My brother lost an ear and my little sister lost an eye.’ Masao’s family left for the countryside but had moved back to the city when his mother received permission to build a ‘shelter’ there. His mother was running a second-hand store and his brother went to work each day. His sister got teased for having just one eye. Masao told her tormentors off, which temporarily put a stop to the teasing. It was harder for him when adults teased her too. ‘If our father were alive, he would take her to the hospital and her eye would get better, but we don’t have enough money to do that,’ he said. ‘I always worry about her and it’s hard to