Hiroshima Maidens Read online

  The news sent a wave of hysteria over the community. An enormous range of complaints was suddenly attributed to the bomb, some real and some fanciful. There were wild rumors of babies born to survivors without brains, with eyes on the top of their heads. And it was in this highly charged atmosphere of paranoia and possibility that Hiroko noticed an unusual swelling in her feet. She ignored it at first, hoping it would go away. When it did not, she made an appointment with a doctor who diagnosed it as a simple infection caused by an ingrown toenail, which he removed. But the condition persisted, and when a rash of tiny red spots bloomed between her toes, he asked her to come to the hospital for a second opinion from a celebrated specialist in radiation effects, who had come to Hiroshima for the sole purpose of examining A-bomb survivors.

  By the time Hiroko arrived, the waiting room was packed to capacity with more journalists than survivors. In compensation for the censorship policy enforced during the Occupation, which had restricted all references to the A-bomb, the media was taking an intense interest in what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki now that control of the country had been returned to the Japanese. Conspicuous with her white mask and her contorted arms, Hiroko was instantly noticed by reporters, who sidled up to her for an interview. She answered their questions cordially but was relieved that her name was called soon after her arrival.

  In the examination room a group of grim-faced physicians huddled around her.

  “Very strange,” commented the specialist.

  She could not have been more alarmed. “What is it? What’s the matter with me?”

  When the examination was completed the medical men conferred privately. She heard someone say, “I’ve been waiting for this kind of trouble to show up, and now it has come.” The rest of the conversation was conducted in hushed tones.

  The whole thing could not have taken more than several minutes, but it seemed like hours. After a prolonged pause, the doctors returned with their judgment.

  “I’d rather not go into it now because if this gets out, then others will worry,” the specialist began. And he went on to say some things too medically cryptic for Hiroko to quite get straight, but yes, her affliction was related to the atomic bombing, it was something that had not been seen before, and at the moment there was no known treatment. The doctor’s advice was to go home, get plenty of rest, and wait and see what happened next.

  Despite the much-publicized studies that indicated there remained much to be understood about the consequences of the bombing, Hiroko had had great faith in the future because she could not believe that she had survived the acute effects only to succumb to the late effects. This news made her realize how vulnerable she was, and her composure was totally undermined. She did not even think to ask how much time she had left before a nurse ushered her out of the examination room.

  The journalists circled her immediately, asking questions, their voices raising when she refused to speak. Above her mask her black eyes seemed to bulge and roll in terror as she pushed her way past. Too upset to go back to school, she hurried to the place where she was boarding; sitting by herself in silence, she tried to collect her thoughts. Although the symptoms amounted only to a scaly itchiness between her toes, the message the doctors had imparted was chillingly clear, with overtones of imminent death. It was true they had not been able to diagnose the problem with medical certainty, but that was the insidious character of atomic diseases — they showed up in unexpected forms. No one could be sure that the slightest ache or pain or itch did not signal the early stage of a malignant growth.

  Hiroko decided to keep the results of the consultation to herself and act as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Then, early the next morning as she was preparing to leave for school, there was a knock at the door. It was her neighbor, calling to extend her sympathies. At first Hiroko didn’t know what she was talking about, and then the woman handed her the morning edition of the daily newspaper that featured an article about the latest manifestation of the “atomic disease,” and its first victim, Hiroko Tasaka.

  The newspapers had as much as printed her obituary, but Hiroko did not die. With the cooler weather of autumn, the rash cleared up as mysteriously as it had appeared. Nor was her confidence in doctors shaken. She wanted to believe they knew what they were doing more than she was willing to accept that nothing could be done. For that reason, when she read about a local surgeon who was getting rave reviews for the work he was doing in his own small private hospital, she went for a consultation. After looking at her arms and face, he told her about a new and intricate technique of transplanting skin that had been newly mastered and proven successful in 99 out of 100 cases, and a date for surgery was set.

  His facility was not equipped for general anesthesia, so Hiroko was awake throughout the procedure, sitting slumped forward on the edge of an operating table. The surgeon had decided to take a large flap of skin off her back, and after the shots of novocaine took effect, he reached for his scalpel and she closed her eyes. For the better part of an hour he worked, talking to his nurse all the while and explaining what he was doing. And it was while listening to his running commentary that Hiroko realized her enormous misunderstanding: When he had said this new technique was 99 percent successful, he had been quoting a statistic in an article on plastic surgery he had seen in an American magazine. This was an experimental attempt to duplicate a procedure he knew only from a written source.

  As though suddenly awakened from a troubled sleep, her eyes snapped open. Looking left, she saw a tube of bloody flesh draped over her shoulder, with a pair of forceps clamped to one end to weight it down. Realizing it was too late to stop now, she suppressed her nausea and did her best to pretend this was not really happening to her.

  The graft did not take hold. The day after it was attached to her face it started to discolor. She was given an injection to stimulate the flow of blood to the area, but it did no good and a second operation was required to remove the dead transplant.

  So long as there was any hope at all that the resources of medicine could help, she was willing to take a chance. But after eleven unsuccessful attempts at a graft over the next six months, Hiroko realized she now had as many wounds on her body from surgeons’ knives as from the atomic bomb, and decided there would be no more cutting.

  *

  Shigeko Niimoto was eased onto a stretcher improvised out of boards and carried to her parents’ summer house along a river on the western edge of the city. Her charred clothing, singed hair, and scorched skin made it difficult to distinguish the front of her head from the back, so with ruthless efficiency her father pruned everything loose away. Three days of heat and filth had infected her wounds, but with no other means of treatment available, all her mother could do was anoint the burned parts with cooking oil.

  For a girl who had so recently measured her life by the hours between dusk and dawn, Shigeko’s recovery was remarkable. By the middle of October she was sitting up in bed. She required assistance at mealtimes — the hands she had held up so she could see what was falling from the airplane had caught the lightning flash, leaving her with two clusters of stiff nubbins bunched at the knuckles — but she was no longer in danger of dying.

  Like a child who has been on her best behavior indoors too long, she soon grew restless with nothing to do. One morning when she was alone, she disobeyed her mother’s instructions to stay in bed and crawled over to the dressing table. Picking up a mirror, she glanced at her reflection, and for a moment thought a trick was being played on her. She could not bring herself to believe her eyes. Understanding came at her with a sickening rush, giving her a delayed, frightened start. Instead of the little imp she expected to see grinning back at her, a beast held her gaze. A hideous red-faced beast without hair, brows, or lashes whose eyes stared dully from sunken, drooping circles, and whose chin...a moan escaped as she realized her chin had all but melted into her neck.

  With a deep, choking breath and a wanting beyond hope, she looked aw
ay, prayed “Please, God, let it be a bad dream,” and glanced back. Once again the mirror refused to reflect the face she was used to seeing.

  At just that moment her mother entered the room. Trying to smile in an unbearably pathetic way, Shigeko ventured, “Oh mother, it must be they aren’t finished healing yet.”

  Convinced that her condition was temporary, Shigeko stayed indoors while waiting for her wounds to heal. She occupied herself by reading books, making up stories, and doing things with her older sisters, both of whom had been out of the city on the morning of August sixth. When she finally did gather the courage to take a walk down a neighborhood street, a funny thing happened. This was about the time that the American soldiers moved into the region and were frequently seen strolling through the ruins of Hiroshima. Few Japanese had ever seen live Americans before and found them odd-looking with their bulging eyes, prominent noses, and pink complexions. All the weight Shigeko had lost showed most in her face, so she, too, appeared all eyes and nose and there was a fiery glow to the raw tissues of her face. When the neighborhood children saw her coming, they ran up to her shouting things she did not understand but was sure were insulting, and turning, she sprinted home. For some time afterward she considered going for a walk a perilous journey, and it wasn’t until one of her sisters saw her lingering at the front window gazing apprehensively out at the road and heard her version of what had happened, that it was explained to her that she had probably been mistaken for the daughter of an American soldier. The neighborhood children had not been hurling insults, but had been using English words to beg for chewing gum and candy.

  Shigeko was able to pass the episode off as an example of how ludicrous it was for her to let her fears get the upper hand. Perhaps the implications of her disfigurement would have been more disturbing if she had been older; but she was just thirteen, and she had always been a free spirit for whom impulse and play were primary. When something upset her or made her unhappy, she had only to go to sleep and when she woke up it was all better; and even though that would not be the case this time, and she had no real idea how drastically her life was about to change, she was unable to think of personal setbacks in less than hopeful terms. Likening herself in her mind to the dharma doll, that small figure on a rounded base that bounced up again when it was knocked over, Shigeko made a promise to herself that from that day forward she would be the same pixyish girl, full of pep and piquancy, she had always been. Though deformed in body, she was determined not to let her spirits suffer.

  There were times when it seemed her life was going to be one long trial putting that pledge to the test. When she walked down the street, children call her “Pika-don,” slang for atomic bomb, and when she entered a store adults would make excessive room for her, as though she had something that was somehow contagious. She so often returned home with tears in her eyes that her mother finally pleaded with her to wear a veil that would hide her scars from public view. Adamantly she refused, saying, “I didn’t do anything bad, Mother, so why should I hide? If there hadn’t been a war I would look like everyone else. Let them look, I don’t care.”

  Most of all she missed her girl friends. Few had survived and she had not returned to school — what was the point when her hands could not even hold a pencil? — so she had made no new friends. More and more, with nothing else to do, she would take

  long, solitary walks, wandering down dusty, shadeless streets and across old bridges in partial disrepair, hoping that along the way she would encounter someone she knew. But nothing was familiar. Approximately 140,000 people were estimated to have died by the end of 1945 from the bombing, and many of the surviving residents, having lost their homes, assets, and places of work, and suffering from acute and lingering chronic effects, had relocated in their ancestral homes in inland villages and never returned. Meanwhile, a new Hiroshima was growing on the grave of the old dead city; a shantytown of sheetmetal sheds and scrapwood shacks knocked together by demobilized soldiers and repatriotees who were staking their claims on the wasteland like pioneer settlers. And here, where one would think that deformed was the natural state of the people and the scarred would far outnumber all others, she did not once meet someone else like herself, while often she was made to feel like the trespasser.

  On one of her sojourns she came upon several young men who started conversing in abnormally loud voices when they saw her approaching. “Looks just like a damn monkey, doesn’t she?” “I wouldn’t have her for my wife if they gave me a million yen.” An abrupt hush fell over them as they pretended they had just noticed who was coming, but it ended in mocking laughter when she had passed.

  Another time she saw a group of girls her own age who were smartly decked out in the latest Western fashions, and she was so taken by their stylish garb that she went straight toward them for a closer look. With disarming innocence she extended a friendly smile, forgetting completely about what she must look like to them until they recoiled — eyes wide with terror, mouths open to shriek.

  Sometimes in her reveries a magical transformation gave her back her original looks; it would happen just like before, in a bright flash from the sky.

  Shigeko was seventeen when her older sisters married. It being the custom, both marriages were arranged by a go-between who introduced the prospective partners and planned the wedding ceremonies. Although she too was approaching marriageable age, Shigeko’s prospects were never the topic of family discussions, and inquiries from the outside never got very far. Matchmakers continued to come to the house because it was listed on the family register that the Niimotos had three daughters, but the conversation never included Shigeko. Crouching on the other side of a closed sliding door, she would listen to the exchange. “Good afternoon. I’m inquiring as to the status of your daughter.” “Thank you,” her mother would reply, “but my daughters are married.” “Oh really? Even the youngest?” The voices would lower to a murmur, and though she strained to hear her mother’s response, she could make out nothing, and soon the matchmaker would depart.

  Those years after the war were bearable somehow as long as she had her sisters around for company, but once they were gone she felt a strange and desolate kind of loneliness. For the first time she began to think about herself and her life, and to realize just how restricted a sphere her existence had become. Not only had she depended on her sisters for a social life, she had entrusted them with her education, for most of what she knew they had told her.

  Disenchanted and bored, Shigeko was smart enough to know that if she didn’t do something about it, nothing would bring about a change in her circumstances, and she began to seek out opportunities to make new acquaintances. And that was her frame of mind the summer afternoon in 1951 when she was returning home from the city by bus and mistakenly got off at the wrong stop. While waiting for the next bus to come along, she found herself staring at a church diagonally across the street that, from its dilapidated appearance, seemed to be a structure that had somehow survived the bomb. She crossed the street, pausing at the door of the chapel because she had never entered a strange door in her life, then pressing it open to peer inside. A small congregation was in assembly, their attention focused on a preacher who stood before an altar delivering a sermon. Out of curiosity, she slipped in and took a seat in a back pew.

  The preacher was talking about the Christian message of hope, love, and belonging offered by a man called Jesus whose story was written in a book named the Bible; and sitting in the cool, dark chapel and hearing about someone who had devoted his life to comforting the wretched of the earth so they would not feel forsaken gave Shigeko a sense of serenity she had never felt before. When the service ended she was in such a state of euphoria that she did not have time to sneak back out before the preacher approached her. He introduced himself as Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto, and his friendly manner had the effect of putting her instantly at ease. They talked briefly, and when she said this was the first time she had ever been inside a Christian church, he gave her a
Japanese language Bible to take home with her and asked her to come again.

  But it was he who called on her. She was in the middle of reading the Old Testament as if it were a school assignment (and was surprised to find how similar the stories were to the neatly crafted moral tales she had heard the Buddhist monks recite in temple) when the Reverend Tanimoto stopped in on his way to a meeting in a neighborhood of Hiroshima people injured by the atomic bomb. He invited Shigeko to come along and without even bothering to consult her parents, she did.

  It was an evening of far-reaching import, though it did not start out that way. The meeting was held in the sitting room of a private residence that was crammed to capacity by the time they arrived. From the back, Shigeko searched the crowded room for others as young as she. Finding none, she settled down to listen to the discussion that was already underway and quickly realized this was going to be no fun at all. The people present told how miserable their lives had been since the bombing and talked of schemes to get money out of the government. It was all too political for Shigeko, and when she determined there was no one in attendance she was interested in getting to know, she whispered to the Reverend, “Let’s go.”

  It was on the way back that the point of the evening was made. Shigeko was explaining why that was not a group she wanted to be part of, and that she had come seeking friendships, when it suddenly occurred to her, “Wouldn’t it be neat to form a group of just girls hurt by the A-bomb?”

  It was an idea that appeared to impress the Reverend greatly, for after thinking about it for a minute, he said he knew of at least a dozen others who might be interested. Before saying good night, he promised to let her know as soon as he had arranged such a meeting.

  That night, Shigeko fell asleep dreaming of a roomful of girls, all of whom bore the characteristic scars. When they first came together they eyed each other’s deformities with solemnity, but by the end of the evening they clung to each other, laughing.