Anyone who studies Hiroshima and the atomic bombing is likely to encounter the story of a girl named Sadako.

Sadako Sasaki experienced the atomic bombing at the age of two. Struck by leukemia ten years later, her short life ended. Sadako was one of the many children who suffered and died because of the atomic bomb.

On the morning of August 6, air-raid sirens sounded just after 7:00 a.m. After a while, the all-clear sounded, and people began to move about their daily lives again. Sadako, her grandmother, her mother, and brother Masahiro were eating breakfast together.

The walls of the house toppled, and Sadako and the others were thrown. Masahiro and grandmother were injured but, miraculously, Sadako and her mother were unharmed. Somehow, all escaped from the collapsed house and fled toward the river. Along the way, Sadako’s grandmother turned back to get something from the house. She was never seen again.

Someone helped the family into a small, decrepit boat to save them from the fires. Though only four at the time, Masahiro remembers desperately bailing water. While the family was on the boat, rain began to fall. The rain left black splotches on Sadako’s clothes.

The war ended. Gradually, buildings were erected and people returned to the city where the rumor had spread that “nothing will grow for 75 years.” The Sasaki family reopened their barbershop in the heart of Hiroshima.

Ten years after the atomic bombing, life returned to normal for Hiroshima City and its people. However, something was wrong with Sadako’s body.

Though an atomic bombing survivor, Sadako had a healthy, energetic child who never missed a day of elementary school due to illness. She was a gentle caretaker of her younger sister and brother. She loved singing and sports-in fact, Sadako could outrun anyone in her class.Soon after winning the relay on Field Day, there were signs that something was wrong with Sadako. She caught a cold and felt a stiffness in her neck. When the cold went away, the stiffness stayed. By early 1955, Sadako’s face looked swollen.

After undergoing various tests, the doctor told Shigeo in February, “Sadako has leukemia. She has a year left at the most.” Sadako was admitted to the Hiroshima Red Cross Hospital.

In August, 1000 paper cranes folded by high school students in Nagoya were delivered to the patients in the hospital. Sadako’s room, too, was brightened by cellophane cranes folded in many colors.

Receiving those cranes and hearing the legend, “Fold 1000 paper cranes and your wish will come true,” Sadako began to fold paper cranes herself. She threw herself into the task, folding into each crane the desire: “Let me get well.”

On the morning of October 25, Sadako’s life finally ended. She was 12 years old. It was exactly a year since the her Bamboo class had won the relay on Field Day.

Sadako’s former Bamboo classmates began a movement to raise funds for a monument. Their call elicited a huge response that they had not anticipated. More than 3000 schools around Japan sent money and letters saying, “Please use this to help build the monument.” In January 1957, it was officially decided to build the Children’s Peace Monument in Peace Memorial Park. The statue was completed on Children’s Day ( 5 May ) in 1958, two years after Sadako Sasaki’s death.

Though Sadako and the other children who had passed away would not return, the inscription carved into the stone in front of the monument at least carried the hope, “Let no more children fall victim to an atomic bombing.”

This is our cry.
This is our prayer.
For building peace in the world.

Shigematsu looked up. “If a rainbow appears over those hills now, a miracle will happen,” he prophesied to himself. “Let a rainbow appear - not a white one, but one of many hues - and Yasuko will be cured.”

Masuji Ibuse,
Black Rain, chapter 20

A jabbing pain in the stomach forced me to seat myself on some stone steps, heedless of the thick layer of ash settled on them. It was a dry, powdery ash like buckwheat flour. Dabbing at it with my finger, I found I could draw scrolls and write letters in it. I wrote all kinds of things. I visualized the blackboard at school in my childhood, and started to draw the diagram for Pythagoras’ theorem, but gave up halfway. I turned around to see where I was, and found it was the front entrance of the city hall, littered now with pieces of charred timbers lying here, there and everywhere. It was a desolate sight: the outer wall, a tasteful shade of cream until only the other day, was burned to a grayish-brown, and all the window frames, not to speak of the windows themselves, were gone.

Just then, I was surprised to hear someone call my name: “Mr. Shizuma! Where are you going?”

It was Mr. Tashiro, an elderly technologist from the Ujina canning factory.

“I’m supposed to go to the Coal Control Corporation, but I’ve not the faintest idea where it is.”

“They’ve had it, the same as everybody else. I don’t even know where the employees have gone to. So I tried coming to the city hall.”

“So the upshot is that I’ve come to the city hall to complain,” Tashiro said. “But you know,” said Tashiro as we walked, “it puzzles me why an important place like a control corporation still hasn’t put up a notice saying where it’s moved to. There must be some explanation for it, don’t you think?”

Together with Tashiro, I obtained an interview with Lieutenant Sasatake of the Control Section and tried to get a ration of coal, but we were told that permission to broach the reserves of coal at Ujina was absolutely out of the question.

“Concerning coal, as I have said many times already,” he said, “we must hold a conference before we can come to any conclusion. Anyway, I have to ask my superiors. The question of transport, for one thing, involves various technical considerations. And we have to weigh your request against the requirements of other firms, too. I’m afraid you’ll have to wait until we’ve held our conference.”

Masuji Ibuse,
Black Rain, Chapter 12

Kuroi Ame (Black Rain), by Masuji Ibuse, was hailed in Japan as the first true work of art to be inspired by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The title refers to the radioactive rain and fallout from the explosion.

Ibuse began serializing Black Rain in the magazine Shincho in January 1965. On the publication of the work, Ibuse received the Order of Cultural Merit, Japan’s highest honor to a writer.

On that morning - the morning of August 6 - the Service Corps of the Second Middle School in Hiroshima had been listening to an exhortatory address on Temma Bridge, or some other bridge in the west of the city, when the atomic bomb fell.

In that instant the boys were burned from head to foot, but the teacher in charge had got the whole party to sing, pianissimo, a patriotic song: “Lay Me Beneath the Waves.”

When they had finished, he gave the command “Dismiss!” and himself led the way in jumping into the river, which happened to be running high with the tide at the time. The whole party followed suit.

Image: Robert Motherwell, Beside the Sea #24, 1962

Black Rain is based on contemporaneous diary and journal entries of the bombing. We follow the principal narrator Shigematsu, in the days after the destruction of his home, when the black rain begins to fall. Shigematsu begins re-writing his poignant journal of the events in the hope of finding a husband for his niece, Yasuko, who has been scarred by radiation sickness. Shigematsu, his wife Shigeko, and Yasuko reassure prospective husbands that Yasuko was not affected by the radiation, although she was under the black rain that followed the destruction. Shigematsu reads his wartime diary to understand his own life, and Yasuko gives up all hopes of marrying and falls ill with radiation sickness.

The talks on my niece Yasuko’s marriage, which were rapidly approaching an agreement, have quite suddenly been broken off by the Aonos - the young man’s family. Yasuko has begun to show symptoms of radiation sickness. Everything has fallen through. By now, it is neither possible nor necessary to go on pretending. Yasuko, it seems, has sent the young man a despairing letter saying she has started having symptoms. I wonder whether it was love for him that made her decide on this honest course? Or did she do it in despair, on the impulse of a moment?

Her sight has deteriorated rapidly, and she complains of a constant ringing in her ears. When she first told me about it, in the living room, there was a moment when the living room vanished and I saw a great, mushroom-shaped cloud rising into a blue sky. I saw it quite distinctly.

Black Rain is never melodramatic.Sometimes his characters criticize the wartime government but otherwise Ibuse expresses his views at an everyday level. Subtly, Ibuse tempers horror with gentle humour. Alongside the horrifying wastes of the ruined city, he sets the gentle Japanese countryside with its unchanging people and traditions. Against the threat of universal destruction, he sets the small, unimportant - and hence infinitely touching - human things which triumph in the end. The narration alters between Kobatake, a rural hamlet some distance from Hiroshima, at a time several years after the end of the war, and Hiroshima itself in the days immediately after the bombing.

Shigematsu fastened this account away as an appendix to his “Journal of the Bombing.” Then, at Shigeko’s request, he set off for Kotaro’s place with rice dumplings for The Mass for Dead Insects. The lacquer box containing the dumplings was inside the metal wash-bowl in which Kotaro had brought the loach, and the whole was encased in a wrapping-cloth.

The Mass for Dead Insects was a rite performed on the day after the festival, when farmers would make rice dumplings as an offering to the souls of the deceased insects they had inadvertently trodden on as they worked in the fields. On the same day, custom also demanded that they should return any articles that they had on loan from their neighbours.

Image: Pamela Bannos, Perils of Time 1899/1999, 1999

The book’s microscopic view initially seems to avoid the larger political and moral questions that surely such an atrocity demands, but a more nuanced understanding soon dawns: these larger questions cannot be asked of any situation if one cannot comprehend simple human misery and pride.

Black Rain’s awful beauty is brilliant.