Read Nagasaki for Free Online Page B

in the trees outside, the kites were going
kiii, kiii, kiii.
I have never really got used to their cry, any more than the way they fly. How were you to know if those
kiii, kiii
calls were hostile and meant they were about to dive-bomb you, or were merely lookout calls?
    All day long my colleagues carried on gently poking fun at me until eventually I gave in and agreed to go out with them after work.
    ‘Seeing as you’re single now …’
    ‘A few beers will do you good, Shimura.’
    Once the night shift had taken over, I left with the others. Their usual haunt was a tiny establishment near the shopping arcades at Hamanomachi. Five seats at the bar, that was it, and they must have known that because there were five of us. I had never joined them there before in spite of their best efforts.
    ‘Here we are at last!’ the leader of our little group burst out, raising his glass to me with a smile that narrowed his eyes. Was he ever going to stop smiling and looking at me like that? The need to contain a burp eventually cut short his bliss.
    We drank. I drink very little when I’m on my own, and since I’m on my own every day of the year …
    ‘Aah,’ they sighed one by one. ‘You’re right of course, Shimura. If only we had your courage …’
    ‘What courage?’
    ‘The courage to chuck our wives out!’
    And we went on drinking, having lost all sense of time, in this place called Torys Bar, in conditions more cramped than a cattle truck. Two fans spluttered opposite each other, slowly turning 180 degrees in one direction and then the other as though disapprovingly shaking their heads at the amount of beer we were consuming or how much noise we were making – it could have been either. The colleagues who had dragged me to this dive were young, much younger than I, who am no longer young at all. They exchanged banter with a woman they introduced as the owner, a smiling, wrinkled lady by the name of Machiko with a scarf tied oddly around her head, giving her a pair of rabbit ears. It wasn’t Machiko’s fault, but her presence was making things worse. How could the others have guessed what a miserabledrunk I was? Every gulp took me further away from them, while their laughter was becoming so deafeningly loud that it sometimes drowned out the music entirely.
    Yukio, the most talkative member of the group, began telling a true story he had heard on the radio: on the morning of 6 August 1945, a businessman had woken up in a hotel room in Hiroshima, having arrived the previous day. The blast which devastated the city a few minutes later miraculously spared him, but he was left in a state of shock. He managed to make his way home, to Nagasaki; but two days after his return, on 9 August, the force of the second bomb threw him across his bedroom. Well, wouldn’t you know it, the fellow’s still going strong today, at the age of 93. And to top it off he has just been awarded substantial damages, having been the only known survivor of two atomic bombs in the space of three days.
    The story met with guffaws of laughter. As for me, I found myself thinking the poor sod could use his payout to buy a multifunctional robot to look after him in his final years. Or months, as the case may be.
    I went on smiling for a long time after the conclusion of the tale of the man and the two bombs (as was expected of me) and then I got up, blaming my age: can’t hold my alcohol like you youngsters, it’s back to work bright and early in the morning! Drawing back the
noren
curtain, I slipped out with my sadness. The Torys Bar sign carried on blinking orangey-red behind me and the last tune I heard coming from the place, a refrain familiar to all of my generation, was still going round in my head when I reached my front door. The last thing I felt like doing was going straight to bed. I could have wandered down by the river where there are a number of bars of varying repute, but I didn’t have the heart for it. I didn’t have the heart for