Hiroshima Joe: A Novel

by Martin Booth

  The road wound through paddyfields and vegetable farms, many of them partially harvested. The few hamlets he pedalled through contained knots of people talking excitedly to each other. Everyone was facing the city.

  The nearer he came to the city limits the more people he found to be travelling with him. Some were on cycles, some on foot, a few in cars or on lorries. As he came alongside the railway line to Kure the road took a bend. Here he decided to stop, to regain his breath. He squeezed on the brake levers and halted by the kerb under the shade of a tree that grew over a stone wall.

  From around the corner he could hear a mysterious sound. More accurately, it was a great number of disparate sounds melding together to make one orchestration, much as many notes join in unison to make a complex chord. He tried, leaning over the handlebars, to recognise any one of the noises but he was unable to do so, for whatever they were they registered in his brain as unlikely to unite. They did not fit into a pattern – much as a cawing crow would not be expected to join in harmony with a harpsichord.

  His breath regained, Sandingham shifted the pedals and took the pressure of the chain. He rode away from the kerb and around the corner.

  Ahead of him on the road, half a mile away, there was what appeared to be a tide coming in his direction. As he pedalled on and approached it, he saw it was a multitude of people. Behind them was the smoke of what Sandingham took to be the burning city.

  When he caught sight of them he assumed the crowd he was riding up to was made of refugees from the air raid. He had seen Chinese in droves leaving a district under fire in Hong Kong. As he got closer, he saw that he was only partly right.

  Within easy sight of them, he stopped again. He could not quite believe what he witnessed in front of him.

  The crowd was silent except for the shuffling of their feet and the creaking of the axles on their handcarts. A few moaned but none spoke. Many of them were injured. Cuts about the face and hands had bled into streaks upon their clothing. Some limped, while others were riding on the handcarts, sitting on an assortment of mundane household belongings. As they passed by, he saw that they were all stunned, bemused even. Refugees were usually more alert than this, eager in their escape. These people were strangely apathetic.

  He was about to set off the way they had come when an elderly man in a dirtied ukata – a light indoor kimono used by Japanese much as Europeans might use a cotton dressing-gown – touched his arm. Sandingham looked down at the man’s hand. It was badly grazed as if he had rubbed it along a rough surface. Straw-coloured plasma was weeping from the wound.

  The man said nothing but looked Sandingham straight in the face, then shifted his eyes to the bicycle. He pleaded through the telepathy that pain brings to the injured. Without a thought Sandingham lifted his leg over the saddle and relinquished his machine. The old man said nothing at all; he did not even smile his thanks. He steered the bicycle through the crowd and, propping it by a pedal to the opposite kerb, helped a middle-aged woman on to the saddle, precariously balancing a child on the crossbar between her arms.

  Sandingham watched them rejoin the crowd.

  Walking was easier for him than cycling. His legs, after initially feeling weakened as he dismounted, set back into the stride to which they were accustomed.

  It was not long before he reached the outer limits of the blast damage. House walls were askew, trees leafless: windows were blown out and fences down. Debris littered the road.

  The more he walked, the worse the damage became.

  All the while, from the city, there rose the vast pall of smoke and dust. It was so wide and huge now that it entirely cut off the sun. The head of the tree-cloud over-toppled him and was widening its branches.

  Sounds increased. From the city came the noise of human turmoil, of burning, of disintegration and the musical tinkling of metal bending or breaking, glass shattering. In the firestorm were the popping detonations of houses igniting in an instant and exploding. It was the symphony of destruction.

  He walked with his head lowered, his brain struggling to recall the instructions from Mishima on reaching his Japanese friend’s home. If he looked up, what he spied wiped his thoughts clean with horror.

  Around him, few buildings stood. They were heaps of wood and tiles, cloth and glass and metal. Some smouldered. Brick or stone edifices were cracked and leaning. Everything had collapsed. The narrower sidestreets between the houses were filled with rubble. Further on, the sides of buildings were burned as if scorched. Telegraph and power poles were charred down one side. Flimsy upright objects, like some of the street lamp-posts, were bent over. The air was filled with the acrid stink of the ruination of war.

  Everywhere, there were the people. Or what was left of the people.

  * * *

  To one side of the street was a shambles of wooden planks, beams and plates. Shattered roof tiles underfoot hurt his soles through his tabi. Woven into the fabric of the wreck of the building were bicycle frames, wheels, chains, mudguards – a carton of saddles lay strewn on the pavement like an obscene dried fruit. Opposite was a stone building: most of it had collapsed but enough had survived to assure Sandingham that it was a temple. The smoke rising gently from the ruins was scented with incense.

  ‘Eighteen doors down on the left,’ Sandingham uttered.

  He shut his mouth up promptly. To speak in English was to commit suicide. He tugged the peak of his cap down further and stepped over a tangle of power cables and began to clamber over the first hillock of rubble that had been the cycle-repair shop.

  It was impossible counting off the houses: they were all so utterly destroyed that there was no way to discern one from the next. He tried to guess how wide each property might be and then assess how far down the street he had gone; but there was little to guide him.

  He kept his face lowered, studying where next to step or balance. Often he stumbled or slipped over splintered wood, torn cloth and more tiles. Pieces of furniture stuck out from the wreckage like decorations in a macabre sculpture.

  When he had gone what he estimated to be one hundred yards, he sat on the protruding end of a cupboard and shouted.

  ‘Mishima? Mishima? Mishima-san?’

  He scanned the destruction around him, oblivious to everything but a sign of his friend.

  ‘Mishima-san … wa doko desu ka?’

  Nothing moved except a hot wind. The only sound was the wind in the crannies and around the tangled wires of the ruins, and the murmur of the fire raging in the centre of the city.

  Smoke drifted towards him. It choked and confused him, cut into his lungs and made his eyes and nose run. It was pungent and foul.

  He clambered further over the ruins, keeping to the street. Another fifty yards and again he halted, precariously standing upon the ridge of a roof that had slid sideways into the street.

  ‘Mishima-san!’

  He was quiet, listening for a reply.

  It came from a place below and to his right, out of his line of vision. It was not a voice so much as a grunt. Someone was tugging at debris under a nearby roof, partly fallen in and smouldering.

  Sandingham skidded and slithered down his roof and up the next until he could see into the roof space. At first he could make out little: the smoke from the depths of the building was digging into his eyes and he had to keep rubbing them and screwing them up to keep them from being blinded.

  When he saw the person, he knew it was not Mishima. This was a younger man. His hair was matted with blood and one of his eyes was shut. The lid was closed and sunken in over an absent eyeball. He was buried to the chest in a cross-hatchery of wooden planks and earth. One of his hands was pinned under him. The other was free and, in this hand, he held a single chopstick. With this, he was uselessly trying to prise up one of the planks pinning him down. He was mumbling unintelligibly.

  There was little Sandingham could do for him. He lowered himself to the man’s level and lifted the obstruction against which the man himself was fighting.
As it came away, a shower of dust and rubble caved in along the man’s side and clattered into an empty space below him that had been the main room of his home. The tumbling debris intermingled with his intestines that were hanging half out of his stomach.

  Retching, Sandingham turned his head away.

  As he did so, the ceiling upon which the man was standing gave way and he fell into the room below. He dropped like a doll discarded by a wanton child. He hit the wooden floor with a drumming thud and lay, grotesquely twisted, upon a low table. Smoke wraithed over him.

  ‘Sandingham?’

  He jumped. Above him, on the roof ridge, was Mishima. He was covered from head to foot in what looked like flour. He was bare to the waist and his ill-fitting trousers were torn. His feet were also bare and badly lacerated. His hands were red.

  ‘Mishima!’

  It was with relief as well as love that Sandingham spoke his name. He reached his friend’s side and touched his elbow.

  ‘What on earth has happened?’

  ‘Look about you.’

  For the first time, Sandingham extended his horizon. Now that he had found Mishima somehow everything would be all right.

  As far as he could see in any direction, there was utter desolation. Not a building remained that was less than three-quarters demolished. Streets and lanes were mere dips in the landscape of rubble. Some were catching alight. In the distance, the city was a blazing inferno.

  ‘Can you help me?’

  It was a rhetorical question and Sandingham followed Mishima over the remnants of two houses that had been set back from the street, one behind the other.

  The first had simply dropped upon itself but the second had folded sideways before accepting a third on top.

  To assist him down a drop of ten feet into what had evidently been a small, neat garden, Mishima gave Sandingham his hand. As he lowered him down, Sandingham gazed up at the Japanese’s face. It was then he saw that the dust and grime was besmirched with tears. And he knew what it was he was going to help him to do.

  Mishima had dug a tunnel into the house from beside a willow tree that was stripped of its foliage. The tunnel was angled upwards and bent through fifty degrees at the same time. Sandingham crawled into it and hoisted himself up with his knees and elbows. At the end of the tunnel was a bulbous cave and in the side of that was a woman’s face. It was bloodied but had obviously been wiped, for the blood was smeared with sweat that had stiffened with the powdered plaster that had dusted everything. The rest of the body was hidden completely.

  Sandingham thought the woman was dead. He started to edge backwards when the eyes in the face opened wide and the mouth moved.

  ‘Ak-arm-ast-ute-di,’ it said.

  Then the eyes closed but the mouth stayed open, avidly and awkwardly sucking in the stale air of the tunnel.

  Once out, Sandingham gripped Mishima by his shoulder. He knew who the face belonged to, though it was unrecognisable from the photograph he had in his pocket.

  ‘Your jacket,’ he explained needlessly. ‘It was hanging in the office.’

  He felt for the wallet, closed his fingers on it and gave it to Mishima. He opened it and quickly glanced at the photograph of the three of them before flicking it shut and tucking it into his clothes.

  ‘What is best?’ Sandingham asked. ‘You know the house better than I do.’

  What a stupid thing to say, he realised. Of course he did. Sandingham had never been there before. He had hardly been invited to dine in their home. It was, he knew then, a miracle that he’d located the house in any case.

  ‘Nothing,’ Mishima replied. ‘There is nothing to do.’

  ‘Bollocks!’ Sandingham’s barrack-room slang seemed oddly in place in such a situation.

  Mishima stoically shook his head.

  ‘What about a room underneath? Isn’t there the possibility of a cavity underneath her?’

  The woman at the end of the tunnel was no longer a person, a human in trouble, but an objective, a goal towards which to strive. Sandingham had missed having something to aim at in his years of imprisonment. All he had had to keep him going was the will to see it through, to survive. Now that he was out of the camp, he wanted to transfer that to Mishima’s wife. He was desperate that she should also pull through.

  Mishima shrugged, saying, ‘There is a room, but it will be flat now or filled with…’

  ‘Show me! Quickly!’ Sandingham saw the smoke that was wafting through from beneath the wreckage. ‘We have not much time.’

  Pointing to an indentation in the cliff of shattered wood, he jumped down on to a section of black roof tiling that had somehow toppled in one piece, and now leaned over the indentation. Instead of digging horizontally, he began tearing the tiles free until he was through to the ceiling beneath. This he kicked inwards and discovered a large space beneath it big enough for him to stand doubled up in and certainly to move.

  ‘Here!’

  Carefully, Mishima stepped on to the roof and gave his hand to Sandingham who let himself down into the hollow. It was filled with an aroma of foodstuffs and pinewood. Looking up to Mishima’s face framed by the entry he had booted through, he saw the man’s features marbled through dusty smoke. He coughed to rid his lungs of the clinging fumes he had disturbed with his arrival.

  ‘What direction?’ he asked his friend. Mishima seemed blankly uncomprehending. ‘Which way?’ This time Mishima tipped his head and vanished from sight.

  A solid bank of plaster, glass, wood and tiles dissected what had been a kitchen. Some of the split wood had buckled and, behind him, Sandingham saw the cause of the smoke. Cloth and wood had fallen into the hibachi on which Mishima’s wife had cooked their breakfast. The charcoal had not yet died and was now a dangerous fire hazard. As he regarded it with fear, a small flame licked free and smoothed its tongue around a thin beam. Having nothing to extinguish the fire with but his own resources, Sandingham pulled himself free of his fandushi and urinated over it. The steam was foul but it put out the fire.

  He estimated that Noriko Mishima was above him and to the left, about six feet into the rubble. He began yanking and scrabbling away at the debris, piling up to his rear whatever he pulled free, but making quite certain that he did not cut off his exit.

  For twenty minutes, he worked solidly and with speed, thinking of nothing. His brain kept reissuing to his mind’s eye the panorama of the city interspersed with a vision of the old man who had silently begged his bicycle of him, but his consciousness wiped it away as soon as it appeared.

  He was making some progress when Mishima shouted down to him from the hole in the roof.

  ‘You stop, Sandingham. No need.’

  He ceased digging and hauled himself out of the ruins. Mishima’s face was expressionless. The anguish and pain were gone. In its place was an emptiness that stretched down to the very foundation of his soul.

  Sandingham reached out for his hand and took it in both of his own, stroking it in a futile attempt to comfort him. He knew he was crying but through his tears he saw Mishima merely stand and show no reaction whatsoever, gently pulling his hand free.

  ‘I’m sorry … Mishima.’ He wiped his eyes on the sleeve of the other’s borrowed jacket. ‘Maybe it’s for the best. This city is…’

  He lifted his head. The vortex of the firestorm that was roaring in the city was edging nearer. It was already up to a low hill less than a mile away.

  ‘It will not burn this far,’ Mishima whispered, divining what Sandingham was considering. His voice was hoarse and dulled by sorrow. ‘It cannot cross Hijiyama Park or the river.’ He sat on the roof, bringing his hands to his brow, forcing the furrows into a frown. ‘My first name is Tadashi,’ he said after some moments. ‘Please do not forget that.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘And your name?’ His softened voice choked as he spoke.

  He knows my name, Sandingham thought. Why does he want it again? Yet he answered.

  ‘Joseph,’ he confirmed.
‘But they call me Joe. My friends call me Joe.’

  ‘Wait here, Joe.’

  Mishima made his way down the roof and went into the remains of what had been his home. Sandingham could hear him shifting things about as if he were searching for something: then he was quiet. Finally, he reappeared with a white cotton kerchief tied round his forehead. In his hand was a square of white paper with black characters upon it. He bent and knelt on the roof tiles beside Sandingham.

  ‘Joe,’ he said, ‘I am sorry for what my people did to you and your people; just as you will one day be sorry for what your allies, the Americans, did to the Japanese people. Never forget that it is men who are mad, not nations. Men make wars. Nations do not. Leaders do – who need never fight but send others to die. Politicians are the corrupt ones. They decide but it is we, the common men – the innocent people of the race – who act for them. And suffer in their place.’

  He unfolded the paper.

  ‘This is my jisei,’ he explained. ‘Do not take it away from me.’

  Sandingham was nonplussed. Why he should take away a sheet of notepaper did not occur to him. Perhaps it was a prayer sheet, he thought.

  ‘I won’t,’ he said again.

  Mishima moved on his knees to the far end of the roof, near to the entrance to his tunnel.

  Half-turning away from Sandingham, he said over his shoulder, ‘Sayonara, Joe. Tengoku de aimasho.’

  With his elementary knowledge of camp Japanese the words meant nothing to Sandingham.

  Mishima held the paper at arm’s length and read it in a murmur to himself. He then slipped something out of his clothing and wrapped it in the white square.

  Sandingham, who thought Mishima was about to pray for his wife, respectfully averted his eyes and stared up instead at the thick clouds of smoke that canopied over him several thousands of feet high.

  A spluttering snapped his thoughts.

  Mishima was still kneeling but leaning a little to one side. The white scarf round his head was awry.