Something Like an Autobiography (11 page)

Because I understood and enjoyed reading descriptions of natural settings so much at this time, I was influenced by them. Later I wrote a composition that my grammar teacher Ohara Yōichi praised as the best since the founding of Keika Middle School. But when I read it over now, it’s precious and pretentious enough to make me blush.

As I think back, I wonder why I didn’t write about that long red wall I walked along as if being carried on a stream, on my left in the morning and my right in the afternoon. That wall protected me from the wind in the wintertime, but in summer it made me suffer with the
heat it reflected from the blazing sun. It’s too bad. When I try to write about that wall today, I cannot do it. And when the Great Kanto Earthquake came, the wall fell down; not a single brick of it remains.

IT HAD BEEN
a dark day for me, because it was the day after summer vacation ended. For most students it was a day full of enthusiasm for the resumption of school. Not for me. It was also the day of the ceremony opening the second term, an event I always found disgusting.

When the convocation ended, I set out for Maruzen, Japan’s largest foreign bookstore, in the downtown Kyōbashi district. My oldest sister had asked me to pick up a Western-language book for her. But when I got there, the store hadn’t opened yet. More disgusted than ever, I headed for home again, intending to try once more in the afternoon.

Two hours later the Maruzen Building would be destroyed and the horrifying photograph of its ruins sent around the world to show the kind of devastation wrought by the Great Kanto Earthquake. I can’t help wondering what would have become of me if the bookstore had been open that morning. I probably wouldn’t have spent two hours looking for my sister’s book, so it’s unlikely I would have been crushed by the toppling Maruzen Building. But how could I have escaped the terrible fire that engulfed and destroyed central Tokyo in the wake of the earthquake?

The day of the Great Earthquake had dawned cloudless. The sweltering heat of summer still lingered on to make everyone uncomfortable, but the clarity of that blue sky unmistakably foretold autumn. And then about eleven o’clock, without a stir of warning, a violent wind sprang up. It blew my little handmade bird-shaped weathervane right off the roof. I don’t know what relationship this wind may have had to the earthquake, but I remember climbing up onto the roof to put the weathervane back, looking up at the sky and thinking, “How strange!”

Just before the historic tremor, I was back home from Kyōbashi, in
the street in front of my house with a friend from the neighborhood. Across the way was a pawnshop. We were crouching in the shadow of its storehouse and throwing pebbles at a red Korean cow that was tethered by the gate of my house. This cow belonged to our nextdoor neighbor, who used it to pull the cart in which he carried feed for his pig farm in Higashi Nakano, then a rural suburb of Tokyo. The night before, he had for some reason left it tied up in the narrow alleyway between our houses, and it had lowed noisily throughout the entire night. As a result, I had not been able to sleep well and was hurling stones at the cursed beast with all my might.

At that point I heard a rumbling sound from beneath the ground. I was wearing my high wooden clogs, and in order to hit the cow I was moving my body, so I didn’t feel the earth move. What I noticed was that my friend who had been squatting next to me suddenly stood bolt upright. As I looked up at him, I saw that behind him the wall of the storehouse was crumbling and falling—toward us. I stood up in a hurry, too.

Because I was wearing high clogs I couldn’t keep my balance on the rippling ground, so I took them off and carried one in each hand. Like someone on a boat in heavy seas, I lurched and ran to where my friend stood with his arms wrapped around a telephone pole for dear life. I did likewise. The pole was waving around crazily, too. In fact, it was snapping its wires into thousands of little pieces.

Then, before our eyes, the two storehouses belonging to the pawnshop started shedding their skins. They shuddered and shook off their roof tiles and then let go of their thick walls. In an instant they were skeletons of wooden frame. It wasn’t just the storehouses that were doing this either. The roof tiles of all the houses, as if they were being put through a sieve, suddenly danced and shook and slipped off. In the thick dust the roof beams lay revealed.

Isn’t it remarkable how well Japanese houses are built? In this situation the roof becomes light and the house doesn’t collapse. I remember thinking these thoughts as I stood clinging to the violently shuddering telephone pole. But this doesn’t mean that I was calm and collected. Human beings are funny creatures—if they are too severely startled, one part of the brain is often left out entirely and remains strangely composed, thinking about something completely unrelated. But my poor brain, which in this moment contemplated Japanese domestic architecture and its capacity to withstand earthquakes, in the next moment became feverish with concern over my family. I set out at a breakneck run for my house.

The front gate had lost half of its roof, but it stood solidly without
even a list to one side. But the stone walk from the gate to the front entrance of my house was blocked by a mountain of roof tiles that had fallen from the buildings on either side. I could hardly see the front door. My family must all be dead.

Strangely enough, the feeling that came over me at that moment was not one of grief, but rather a deep resignation. The next thing that occurred to me was that I was all alone in the world. Looking around me and wondering what to do, I saw the friend I had left holding on to the telephone pole come bursting out of his house with all the members of his family. They stood in a group in the middle of the street. Thinking there was not much else I could do under the circumstances, I decided to stay with my friend, and I started walking toward them.

As I approached, my friend’s father started to say something to me, but then stopped suddenly. He walked past me and stared at the front of my house. Following his gaze, I turned around and looked back. There were all the members of my family coming out of the front gate. I ran like one possessed. Those I had thought dead were not only safe, but appeared to have been worried about me. As I ran to them, they welcomed me with relief visible on their faces.

You would think I would have burst into tears as I ran to them. But I didn’t cry. In fact, I couldn’t cry. It was impossible for me to cry because my brother began to scold me with a vengeance. “Akira! What’s the meaning of this spectacle? Walking around barefoot—what slovenliness!” Looking at them, I saw that my father, mother, sister and brother all had their clogs on. I hastened to put my high clogs back on, and I felt terribly ashamed. Of all the members of my family, I was the only one who had conducted himself in a disorderly fashion. To my eyes it looked as if my father, mother and sister were not in the least perturbed. As for my brother, he was not only calm in the face of the Great Kantō Earthquake, but appeared to be having a wonderful time.

THE GREAT KANTŌ EARTHQUAKE
was a terrifying experience for me, and also an extremely important one. Through it I learned not only of the extraordinary powers of nature, but extraordinary things that lie in human hearts. To begin with, the earthquake overwhelmed me by suddenly transforming my surroundings.

The street where the streetcar ran on the other side of the Edogawa River was badly damaged, heaving with fissures. The river itself had raised its bottom and showed new islands of mud. I didn’t see any fallen houses in the immediate area, but there were leaning ones here and there. The whole Edogawa River district was veiled in a dancing, swirling dust whose grayness gave the sun a pallor like that during an eclipse. The people who stood to the left and right of me in this scene looked for all the world like fugitives from hell, and the whole landscape took on a bizarre and eerie aspect. I stood holding on to one of the young cherry trees planted along the banks of the river, and I was still shaking as I gazed out over the scene, thinking, “This must be the end of the world.”

From that point on, I don’t remember very much about that day. But I do recall that the ground kept on shaking and shaking without respite. And I remember that eventually a billowing mushroom cloud appeared in the eastern sky, gradually towering and spreading to fill half the heavens with the smoke from the fire engulfing central Tokyo.

That night the Yama-no-te hill area, where we were and which escaped the fires, was of course without electricity like the rest of Tokyo. No lamps were lit, but the light from the fire raging in the low-lying downtown section cast an unexpected glow on the hills. That night every household still had candles, so no one was threatened by the darkness. What terrified everyone was the sound of the armory.

The armory grounds, as I have already mentioned, were bounded by a long red brick wall within which the factories stood in rows of huge red brick buildings. This plant served as an unforeseen barrier to the fires advancing from downtown and saved the entire Yama-no-te district. However, the arsenal itself, because it was a storage area for explosives, seems to have been touched off by the heat of the flames
licking their way from Kanda to Suidōbashi. From time to time, perhaps ignited by some kind of shell, a column of fire spewed forth from the armory accompanied by a terrifying roar. It was that sound that unnerved people.

In my neighborhood there was actually a man who explained, as if he really believed it, that this sound was volcanoes erupting on the Izu Peninsula a hundred miles south of Tokyo. They were setting off a chain of eruptions, he said, which was heading north toward us. “So if it comes to the worst,” this man continued, “I’m going to pack up what I need and get out of here with this thing.” And he proudly displayed a milk wagon he had found abandoned somewhere.

This little story has its charm and doesn’t really hurt anyone. What is frightening is the ability of fear to drive people off the course of human behavior. By the time the fires downtown had subsided, everyone had used up all the household candles and the world was plunged into the real darkness of night. People who felt threatened by this darkness became the prey of the most horrifying demagogues and engaged in the most incredibly reckless, lawless acts. It’s impossible even to imagine the magnitude of the terror brought by total darkness to people who have never experienced it before—it is a terror that destroys all reason. When a person can’t see anything to the left or the right, he becomes thoroughly demoralized and confused. And, as the old saying goes, “Fear peoples the darkness with monsters.”

The massacre of Korean residents of Tokyo that took place on the heels of the Great Kanto Earthquake was brought on by demagogues who deftly exploited people’s fear of the darkness. With my own eyes I saw a mob of adults with contorted faces rushing like an avalanche in confusion, yelling, “This way!” “No, that way!” They were chasing a bearded man, thinking someone with so much facial hair could not be Japanese.

We ourselves went to look for relatives who had been burned out in the fires around the Ueno district. Simply because my father had a full beard, he was surrounded by a mob carrying clubs. My heart pounded as I looked at my brother, who was with him. My brother was smiling sarcastically. At that moment my father thundered angrily, “Idiots!” They meekly dispersed.

In our neighborhood each household had to have one person stand guard at night. My brother, however, thumbed his nose at the whole idea and made no attempt to take his turn. Seeing no other solution, I took up my wooden sword and was led to a drainage pipe that was barely wide enough for a cat to crawl through. They posted me here and said, “Koreans might be able to sneak in through here.”

But there was an even more ridiculous incident. They told us not to drink the water from one of our neighborhood wells. The reason was that the wall surrounding the well had some kind of strange notation written on it in white chalk. This was supposedly a Korean code indication that the well water had been poisoned. I was flabbergasted. The truth was that the strange notation was a scribble I myself had written. Seeing adults behaving like this, I couldn’t help shaking my head and wondering what human beings are all about.