Extract: The Bells of Nagasaki by Takashi Nagai

Chimoto-san was cutting grass on Mount Kawabira. From where he worked he could see Urakami three kilometers down to the southwest. The hot summer sun was shin- ing lazily over the beautiful town and its hills. Suddenly Chimoto-san heard the familiar, still faint sound of a plane. Sickle in hand, he straightened his body and looked up at the sky. It was more or less clear, but just above his head there floated a big cloud the shape of a human hand. Yes, the sound of the plane came from above that cloud. And as he watched, out it came. “It’s a B-29.” From the tip of the middle finger of the hand-shaped cloud, a small, flashing silver plane appeared. It must have been eight thousand meters up in the sky. “Oh! It’s dropped something. A long, narrow, black object. A bomb! A bomb!” Chimoto-san threw himself to the ground. Five seconds. Ten seconds. Twenty seconds. One minute. As he held his breath, an eternity seemed to pass.

Suddenly there was a blinding flash of light; an awful brightness but no noise. Nervously Chimoto-san raised his head. “A bomb! It’s at Urakami.” And in the area above the church he saw an enormous column of white smoke float upward, swelling rapidly as it rose. But what struck terror into his heart was the huge blast of air like a hurricane that rushed toward him. It came from under the white smoke and rolled over the hills and fields with terrifying speed and power. Houses and trees and everything else collapsed before it. They fell to the ground; they were smashed to pieces; the debris was blown this way and that. Clumps of trees disap- peared before his very eyes as this violent force rushed up the slopes of Mount Kawabira. What was it? He could only think of an enormous, invisible bulldozer moving forward and leveling everything in its path. I’m going to be crushed to powder, he thought. Joining his hands in supplication he called out: “My God! My God!” and again he pressed his face to the ground.

Then a deafening noise struck his ears, and he was thrown into the air and hurled five meters against a brick wall. Finally he opened his eyes and looked around. The trees were torn from their roots. There were no branches, no leaves, no grass. Everything had vanished. All that remained was the smell of resin.

Furue-san was returning by bicycle from Michi-no-o to Urakami. Just as he was riding past the munitions factories, he seemed to hear the sound of a plane. He looked up and somewhere in the clear sky above Matsuyama-machi, about the height of Mount Inasa, he saw a ball of red fire. It was all red like strontium burning in a huge lantern, but it was not so bright as to blind the eyes. Down, down it came toward the earth. What is this? he thought. And just as he put one hand above his glasses to shield his eyes and see more clearly, there was a sudden blinding flash of light like the explosion of magnesium, and he was hurled into the air. Many hours later he regained consciousness and found himself lying in a rice field, pinned under his bicycle. He realized that he was totally blind in one eye.

At Kogakura Elementary School, seven kilometers from Urakami, a teacher, Tagawa, was writing an account of the morning’s alert in his air-raid journal. He looked up and his eyes rested on the scene outside the window. In front of him was the foot of the mountain and above was the blue sky of Nagasaki harbor. Suddenly, the sky was illuminated by a flash of blinding light. The noonday sun in the height of summer would have seemed terribly dark compared with what he saw. This light was certainly many times brighter than the sun.

“Are they using flares during the daytime?” Tagawa murmured to himself, and he leaned forward to see what was happening. He saw a strange and marvelous spectacle. “Look! Look!” he shouted. And all the teachers in the room rushed to the window.

In the sky above the Urakami district of Nagasaki, some- thing like a piece of white cloud moving sideways and upward with tremendous power began to swell . . . and swell . . . and swell. “What is it? What is it?” they shouted wildly as it formed itself into a huge mushroom a kilometer in diameter. And then came the rushing blast of wind. The faculty room was shaken to its foundations. The teachers were thrown to the ground and buried beneath an avalanche of broken glass.

“A bomb! A direct hit on the school! Shelter!” Tagawa shouted at the top of his voice as he struggled to his feet and groped his way to the shelter dug into the hill behind the school. And as Tagawa sat all alone on the cold ground, he did not know what God alone knew— that at that moment, at his home in Urakami, his wife and children, calling his name, drew their last breath.