Hiroshima by Nakazawa Keiji Page A

a broom, and the house was in an uproar. It was fun to watch Blackie react when she sniffed a fart. We had Susumu hold Blackie’s neck and blew farts her way; Blackie sneezed a lot, then ran off in distress. We’d heard that if in a dark room you rubbed a piece of hard rubber over the cat’s fur, you’d generate static electricity and it would look like an electric current was flowing. So we had Susumu hold Blackie, and I stroked Blackie’s back for all I was worth. But we didn’t see any static electricity, and Blackie stretched and as if saying, “Enough already,” grew angry and mewed. All these memories were happy ones. I said goodbye to the flat, desiccated cat Blackie had become and left the trench. I realized that our family was no longer the same.
    In the City of Death
    During the war, concrete cisterns stood in every entryway. They were three by three feet, filled with water, and labeled “fire-fighting water.” The tanks were for putting out the fires started by bombs; they were required. In the twinkling of an eye, with the dropping of a single atomic bomb, Hiroshima, biggest city in the region, was burned out. The only things still standing in the burned-out waste as far as the eye could see were the tanks of “fire-fighting water.” Tanks beyond counting lay scattered way off into the distance. Approach these tanks thinking to use their water to wash off your dirt-smeared body, and you were in for a shock.
    The tanks held horrific corpses—red, half-burned, swollen, eyes glaring at the sky. Staring again at the corpses, I was surprised: people burned and dead in water—well, that’s how they swell up. Faces had swollen, round like melons a foot in diameter; bodies swelled three times normal size. Every single tank held corpses—red, swollen, like the giant guardian gods at temple entrances. Examine these corpses closely, and you noticed that with all the mother-and-child corpses, the mother’s arms were wrapped around the child, holding it close. The embrace was tight so that when the corpses swelled up, the child’s face was engulfed by the mother’s breasts. Mothers had protected their children desperately to the very last. With brother-and-sister corpses, brother wrapped his arms around sister and died holding her tight. They were deaths befitting older brothers—the desire to save their sisters was evident.
    I went around looking at cisterns, thinking, “How hot it must have been.” When the atomic bomb exploded 750 yards above Hiroshima, the temperature at the center was millions of degrees, and its heat rays of 9,000 degrees consumed those who were outdoors. It smashed the houses with a blast of more than 140 miles an hour, and people fortunate enough to be indoors crawled their way out of flattened houses. Just when they thought they’d escaped, they were surrounded by the flames, chased by the fire, and cornered. Unable to endure the heat, they’d jumped into the three-foot-square tanks and burned to death. When I realized all this, I trembled with rage at the cruelty of the atomic bomb.
    At last I found a tank that contained no corpses and, with the water remaining in the bottom, washed the dust off my body. The city had become a burned-out plain as far as the eye could see. Nothing moved except smoke rising from where the corpses were cremated. Shifting with the wind, the nauseating stench of death waxed and waned in the air above the scorched earth. K o ¯ ji suggested we take a look downtown before we went home, and holding the bucket filled with the bones of Dad, Eiko, and Susumu, I got on the back of the bike. K o ¯ ji said, “I’m going to fly. So hold tight!” and started pedaling. He steered the bike toward Dobashi, Hiroshima’s western business district.
    The telephone poles to left and right were scorched but still standing and suspended from them, quite like long snakes, were the