by Ivan Morris
But the idiot’s anguish did not bear the slightest resemblance to the wide-eyed reaction that children show at times of danger. It was merely an instinctive fear of death, a single ugly movement. Her reaction was not that of a human being or even of an insect. If it could be said to resemble anything, it was like the writhings of a small three-inch caterpillar that has swollen to about six feet—and that has a teardrop in its eye.
There were no words, no screams, no groans; nor was there any expression. She was not even aware of Izawa’s existence. If she were human, she would be incapable of such solitude. It was impossible that a man and a woman could be together in a closet with one of them entirely forgetting about the other. People talk of absolute solitude, but absolute solitude can exist only by one’s being aware of the existence of others. Absolute solitude could never be such a blind and unconscious thing as what Izawa was now witnessing. This woman’s solitude was like a caterpillar’s—the ultimate in wretchedness. How unbearable it was—this anguish entirely devoid of any thought!
The bombing ended. Izawa raised the crouching woman in his arms. As a rule she reacted amorously if Izawa’s finger so much as brushed against her breast, but now she appeared to have lost even her sense of lust. He was falling through space with a corpse in his arms. Nothing existed but the dark, dark, endless fall.
Immediately after the bombing Izawa took a walk past the houses that had just been mowed down. In the ruins he saw a woman’s leg that had been torn from her body, a woman’s trunk with the intestines protruding, and a woman’s severed head.
Among the ruins of the great air raid of March tenth, Izawa had also wandered aimlessly through the still rising smoke. On all sides people lay dead like so many roast fowl. They lay dead in great clusters. Yes, they were exactly like roast fowl. They were neither gruesome nor dirty. Some of the corpses lay next to the bodies of dogs and were burned in exactly the same manner, as if to emphasize how utterly useless their deaths had been. Yet these bodies lacked even the pathos implied in the expression “a dog’s death.”2 It was a case, not of people’s having died like dogs, but of dogs lying there in the ruins next to other objects, as though they were all pieces of roast fowl neatly arranged on a platter. Those four-legged things were not really dogs; still less were those two-legged objects human beings.
If the idiot woman should be burned to death, would it not simply mean that a clay doll had returned to the earth whence it came? Izawa imagined the night that might come at any time when incendiary bombs would rain down on his street, and he could not help being conscious of his own form, his face, his eyes, as he lay there strangely calm, sunk in thought. I am calm, he thought. And I am waiting for an air raid. That’s all right. He smiled scornfully. It’s merely that I dislike ugly things. Is it not natural that a body which has no mind should burn and die? I shan’t kill the woman. I am a cowardly and vulgar man. I don’t have the courage for that. But the war will probably kill her. All that is necessary is to grasp the first opportunity to direct the unfeeling hand of war toward this woman’s head. I shall not really be concerned. It will probably be a matter of having everything automatically settled by some crucial instant. Very calmly, Izawa awaited the next air raid.
* * *
It was April fifteenth. Two days before, on the thirteenth, the second great night-bombing had taken place, inflicting immense damage on Ikebukuro, Sugamo, and other residential districts in Tokyo. As a result of that raid, Izawa had managed to obtain a calamity certificate. This enabled him to take a train to Saitama Prefecture and to return with some rice in his rucksack. The air-raid alarm had started the moment he reached home.
By examining the areas of Tokyo that still remained unburned, anyone could surmise that the next raid would be directed at Izawa’s neighborhood. Izawa knew that the fatal moment was near; at the earliest it would come on the following day, at the latest within a month. The reason Izawa thought it would not happen before the following day was that the tempo of raids until then indicated that at least another twenty-four hours would be necessary to complete preparations for a night attack. It never occurred to him that this might be the day of doom. That is why he had gone food-hunting. The main purpose of his trip, however, was not to buy food. Since his school days he had had connections with a certain farm in Saitama, and his principal objective in going to the country had been to deposit his belongings, which he had packed in a couple of trunks and a rucksack.
Izawa was tired out. He had made the trip in his air-raid uniform and when he reached his room he lay down as he was, using his rucksack as a pillow. When the crucial moment came, he had actually dozed off. He awoke to the blaring of radios. At that moment the front of the attacking squadron was approaching the southern tip of Izu Peninsula. A moment later, the bombers were over the mainland and the sirens started to shriek out their warning. Instinctively Izawa knew that the final day for his neighborhood had come. He put the feeble-minded woman in the closet and went outside to the well with a towel in his hand and a toothbrush in his mouth. A few days before, Izawa had managed to obtain a tube of Lion toothpaste and he had been enjoying the astringent taste that had been denied him for such a long time. When it dawned on him that the fatal moment had come, he was for some reason inspired to brush his teeth and wash his face. But first it took him a while—it seemed like ages—to find the tube, which had been moved a small distance from where he remembered having put it; then he had trouble finding the soap (it was a perfumed cake of a type that was no longer obtainable in the shops) because it too had been slightly misplaced. “I’m getting rattled,” he told himself. “Calm down, Izawa, calm down!” Thereupon he struck his head against the closet and stumbled over the desk.
For a while he tried to gather his wits by suspending all movement and thought; but his entire body was flustered and refused to respond to orderly control.
Finally he found the soap and went to the well. The tailor and his wife were throwing their belongings into the shelter that they had dug in the corner of the field, and the duck-like girl from the attic was bustling about with a suitcase in her hand. Izawa congratulated himself for his persistence in having found the toothpaste and the soap, and wondered what fate really had in store for him that night.
While he was still wiping his face, the anti-aircraft guns started banging away. When he looked up, he saw that a dozen or more searchlights were already crisscrossing overhead. In the very center of their beams an American plane showed up clearly. Then another plane and yet another. When he happened to glance in the direction of the station, he saw that the whole area was a sea of flames.
The time had finally come. Now that the situation was clear, Izawa calmed down. He put on his air-raid hood and covered himself in his bedding. Standing outside his hut, he counted up to twenty-four planes. They all flew overhead, clearly exposed in the beams of the searchlights.
The anti-aircraft guns boomed crazily, but there was still no sound of bombing. When he had counted the twenty-fifth plane, he heard the familiar rattling sound of incendiary bombs, like a freight train crossing a bridge. Apparently the planes were passing over Izawa’s head and concentrating their attack on the factory area behind. Since he could not see from where he was standing, he went to the pigpen and looked back. The factory area was bathed in flames, and to his amazement Izawa saw that, apart from the bombers which had just passed overhead, planes were approaching in quick succession from the exact opposite direction and were bombing the entire area to the rear. Then the radios stopped. The whole sky was hidden by a thick, red curtain of smoke, which blotted out the American planes and the beams of the searchlights.
The tailor and his wife were a prudent couple. Some time before, they had made the shelter for their belongings and had even provided mud to seal up the entrance. Now they briskly stored everything in the shelter as planned, sealed it, and covered it with earth from the rice field.
“With a fire like this,” said the tailor, “it’s absolutely hopeless.” H
e stood there in his old fireman’s clothes, with his arms folded, and gazed at the flames. “It’s all very well their telling us to put it out,” he continued, “but when the fire gets as bad as this there’s nothing to be done. I’m going to run for it. What’s the use of staying here and being choked to death by the smoke?”
The tailor heaped his remaining belongings onto a bicycle-drawn cart. “Why don’t you come along with me, sir?” he said to Izawa.
Izawa was seized with a complex form of terror. His body was on the verge of running away with the tailor, but he was checked by a strong internal resistance. As he stood there immobile, he felt that a splitting shriek was rising in his heart: because of this moment’s delay I’m going to be burned to death! His terror almost benumbed his mind, yet somehow he managed to withstand the urgings of his body as it staggered into the motions of flight.
“I’ll stay a little longer,” he said. “I’ve got a job to do, you see. After all, I’m an entertainer and when I have an opportunity to study myself in the face of death I’ve got to carry on to the very end. I’d like to escape, but I can’t. I can’t miss this opportunity. You’d better run for it now. Hurry, hurry! In a minute it’ll all be too late.”
Hurry, hurry! In a minute it’ll all be too late. In saying “all,” Izawa was, of course, referring to his own life. “Hurry, hurry” was not aimed at urging the tailor to escape, but came from his own desire to get away as soon as possible. For him to get away, it was essential that everyone in the neighborhood should leave ahead of him. If not, people might find out about his feeble-minded woman.
“Very well, then,” said the tailor, “but be careful.” He started to pull his cart. But he too was thoroughly flustered and as he hurried along the alley he kept bumping into things. That was Izawa’s last picture of his neighbors as they fled from their dwellings.
A ghastly rustling continued without pause or modulation. It sounded like the roaring of waves as they beat against the rocks, or like the endless pattering on rooftops of splinters from anti-aircraft guns; but it was the footsteps of a mass of evacuees scurrying along the main road. The sound of the anti-aircraft guns now seemed out of place, and the flow of footsteps had a strange vitality. Who in the world could possibly have imagined that the endless flow of this uncanny sound—this sound without pause or modulation—was produced by human footsteps? The sky and the earth were filled with countless sounds: the whirring of American planes, the anti-aircraft guns, the downpour, the roar of explosions, the sound of feet, the splinters striking the roofs. But the area immediately surrounding Izawa formed a quiet little realm of darkness in the midst of the red sky and earth. The walls of a strange silence, the walls of a maddening solitude, surrounded Izawa on all sides.
“Wait another thirty seconds…. Now just ten more.” He did not know who was ordering him nor why; nor did he know what made him obey. He felt that he was going insane. He felt that at any moment he would start running along blindly, screaming in agony.
At that moment something started to fall immediately above his head and seemed to churn the insides of his eardrums. Frantically, he threw himself to the ground. The sound abruptly vanished and an incredible quiet once more descended on the surroundings. “Well, that gave me quite a fright,” thought Izawa. He arose slowly and brushed the earth from his clothes. When he looked up, he found the madman’s house in flames. “Oh, so it’s finally been hit.” He was strangely calm. Then he realized that the houses on both sides and the apartments opposite were also in flames.
Izawa rushed into his hut. He sent the door of the closet flying (it slipped from its groove and fell with a clatter) and rushed out covered with his bedding and holding the feeble-minded woman in his arms. For the next minute or so he was in a daze and had no idea what he was doing. As he reached the entrance to the alley, he once more heard the falling sound overhead. He threw himself down. When he stood up, he saw that the tobacco shop was burning, and that in the house opposite, violent flames were gushing from the family Buddhist altar. Looking back as he left the alley, he noticed that the tailor’s house had also caught fire; no doubt his own hut was already in flames.
The entire neighborhood was burning and sparks of fire were swirling all about. Izawa felt that the situation was hopeless. When he reached the crossroads, he found that all was in utter confusion. Everybody was pressing forward in a single direction—the direction furthest from the flames. It was no longer a road but just a deluge of people, baggage, and screams, a deluge of hustling and jostling, shoving and pushing, stumbling and staggering forward. As people heard the swishing sound of bombs overhead, they would fall to the ground at once and the deluge would come to a complete standstill. A few people would run on, trampling over the others. But the majority had their personal belongings and were accompanied by children, women, and aged people. They were calling out to the members of their party, halting, turning back, bumping into one another.
The flames drew close on both sides of the road. Izawa reached a small intersection. Here, too, the entire deluge was pressing forward in one direction, again because it was farthest from the flames. Izawa, however, knew that in that direction there were neither open spaces nor fields: if the next batch of incendiary bombs from the American planes were to block the way, that particular road would lead to certain death. The houses on both sides of the other road were already burning, but Izawa remembered that some way ahead there was a river, and that a few hundred yards farther upstream one came to a wheat field. Not a single person seemed to have chosen that road, however, and for a moment Izawa hesitated. Then he noticed that about a hundred and fifty yards up the road a man was standing by himself, throwing water on the raging flames. Though he was throwing water on the flames, he certainly did not cut a valiant figure. He was merely a man with a bucket; occasionally he would throw some water about, but most of the time he stood there vacantly or wandered up and down. His movements were curiously sluggish and Izawa wondered whether he was not deranged. At any rate, thought Izawa, a man can stand there without burning to death. I’ll try my luck. Luck, one thread of luck and the resolve to try it—that was all that remained.
At the crossroads was a ditch, and Izawa soaked his bedding in the muddy water. Then he pulled the woman close to him and, covering both their bodies with the bedding, left the mass of people with whom they had been walking. But as they approached the road that was lined with raging flames, the woman instinctively stopped and falteringly tried to return toward the human deluge as if she were being sucked back into a whirlpool.
“You fool!” cried Izawa, pulling the woman with all his might. He hugged her shoulders and held her close to his breast. “You’ll only die if you go that way,” he whispered. “When we die, we’ll be together—just like this. Don’t be frightened! And don’t leave my side whatever you do! Forget about those flames and those bombs! The road of our two lives will always be this road. You just look straight ahead along this road and rely on me! Do you understand?”
The woman nodded. It was a childish nod, but Izawa was overwhelmed with emotion. For this was the first sign of volition, the first answer, that the woman had shown in these long, repeated hours of terror during the day and night bombings. It was so touching that Izawa felt quite dizzy. Now at last he was embracing a human being, and he was filled with immeasurable pride about that human being.
The two of them rushed through the wild flames. When they emerged from under the mass of hot air, both sides of the road were still a sea of flame; but the houses had already collapsed in the fire and as a result the force of the conflagration had decreased and the heat was less intense. Here again there was a ditch full of water. Izawa doused the woman from head to toe, soaked the bedding, and covered her and himself with it once again. Burned belongings and bedding lay strewn on the road, and two dead bodies also lay there. They were a middle-aged man and woman.
Izawa again put his arm around the woman and the two dashed through the flames. At last they reached
the stream. The factories on both sides were sending up furious jets of flame. Retreat and advance were equally impossible, nor could they stay where they were. Looking around, Izawa noticed a ladder leading down to the stream. He covered the woman with the bedding and had her walk down, while he himself jumped for it.
People were walking along by the stream in little groups. Now and then the woman dipped herself in the water of her own accord. The situation was such that even a dog would have had to do so, but Izawa was wide-eyed at the sight of the birth of a new and lovable woman, and he watched her figure greedily as she immersed herself.
The stream emerged from beneath the flames and flowed beneath the darkness. It was not really dark because of the glow of the fire that covered the sky; but this semi-darkness, which he could see once again inasmuch as he was still alive, filled Izawa with a sense of vacancy—vacancy that came from a vast, ineffable weariness, from a boundless feeling of nothingness. At the bottom of it all lay a small sense of relief, but that struck him as strangely insignificant and absurd. He felt that everything was absurd.
Upstream they came to the wheat field. It was a large field enclosed on three sides by hills; a highway ran across the middle, cutting through the hills. The houses on the hills were all burning; and the buildings around the field—the Buddhist temple, the factory, the bathhouse—were also burning. The flames of each fire were a different color—white, red, orange, blue. A sudden wind sprang up and filled the air with a great roar, while minute, misty drops of water showered all around.
The crowd was still meandering down the highway. There were only a few hundred people resting in the wheat field—nothing in comparison with the crowds that stretched along the road. Next to the field was a little thicket-covered hill. There were hardly any people in this grove. Izawa and the woman spread their bedding under a tree and lay down. At the side of the field below the hill a farmhouse was burning. A few people could be seen throwing water on the flames. At the rear was a well where a man was working the pump handle and was drinking water. Seeing this, about twenty men and women rushed toward the well from all directions. They took turns in working the pump handle and drinking. Then they crowded about the burning house and stretched their hands toward the flames to warm themselves. As burning fragments fell from the house they sprang back and turned away from the smoke. Then they went on talking. Nobody lent a hand to try to put out the fire.
