Masks of Whatchamacallit: A Nagasaki Tale

Hayashi Kyōko, born in Nagasaki in 1930, spent much of her childhood in wartime Shanghai. Returning to Nagasaki in March 1945, she attended Nagasaki Girls High School and was a student-worker in a munitions plant in Nagasaki at the time of the atomic bombing on August 9. Hayashi made her literary debut with the 1975 Akutagawa Prize-winning autobiographical story “Ritual of Death” (Matsuri no ba), which records her exodus from the area of devastation to eventual reunion with her family. Her atomic bomb novella, Masks of Whatchamacallit (Nanjamonja no men) appeared the following year, followed shortly by a sequence of twelve short stories anthologized as Cut Glass, Blown Glass (Giyaman biidoro, 1978). These works established her as an important chronicler of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and the lives of hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors), themes she would elaborate in future work. For example, her Noma Prize-winning reportage writing, From Trinity to Trinity (Torinitii kara Torinitii e, 2000), records her trip to Los Alamos, New Mexico, the site of the first atomic bomb experiment, the source of her fifty-five years of experience of living with the bomb.

This story was first published in the February 1976 issue of the literary magazine Gunzō and later anthologized in the Collected Works of Hayashi Kyōko (Hayashi Kyōko zenshū) (Tokyo: Nihon Toshosentā, 2005). The original title, Nanja monja no men, draws on the Kantō area dialectal expression “nanja mon ja,” a contracted form of “najō iu mono ja” (What sort of thing is this?), referring to a large, legendary tree.

By the little stream is a trapezoid-shaped stone. Sitting down on it, Takako looks around. There are no trees. No houses. No people on the streets at midday.

Fires burn along the rubble-strewn horizon. When will they be extinguished?

The sun is too hot. Takako wishes for the shade of a tree. She wishes to see life, alive and moving; even a small ant will do.

Takako died. In October 1974, when she was forty-five years old. The cause of death was cancer of the liver, or of the pancreas, according to some, from a-bomb after effects. Some said that the autopsy revealed the pancreas to be rotten, resembling a broad bean.

Takako was consecrated this year at the a-bomb ceremony in the memorial tower of Peace Park. Her name is bound into a single-volume death register along with those of over 1,000 others who died of illnesses caused by a-bomb radiation in the past year.

Our classmates who died in the atomic explosion thirty years ago are also consecrated in the park. Those girls, still fifteen or sixteen, must have frolicked around inside the dark monument as they welcomed Takako at this thirty-year reunion, saying, “We’ve been waiting for you!” I can see her troubled expression as she tilts her head not knowing what to do, surrounded by those innocent girls. She had become the age of their mothers.

Takako and I went to different girls’ schools. Hers was a missionary school, located halfway up the hill looking over Nagasaki Harbor. My alma mater was near Suwa Shrine. This locates her school in the southern part of Nagasaki, mine on the western outskirts of the city. Takako was also one grade ahead of me.

We came to know each other at an arms factory just beyond Urakami, where students were mobilized to work. Both of us were bombed there, but strangely, sustained no external wounds. The factory was not even one kilometer away from the Peace Park where Takako is now consecrated, just four or five hundred meters from the epicenter. Nearly everyone in town met an instant death.

On August 9, the day of the atomic bombing, both Takako and I ran desperately from that area. I worry that she may not be able to attain Buddhahood if brought back to the place from which she managed, at great pains, to flee; but perhaps she is simply resting in peace, not thinking of anything now.

I met Takako last about...