Story
Two children in a famous book
In 1948 Takashi Nagai, the Catholic radiologist of who was dying of leukaemia, published Kono ko o nokoshite (Leaving These Children).It opens not with the bomb but with his small daughter. "I was dozing when Kayano, back from play at some moment I had not noticed, pressed her cold cheek to mine, and after a while said: 'Ah... Father's smell.'"The book is about her and her brother Makoto, and about what would become of them when he was gone. This page gathers what the sources say about the two children themselves. Their father's life is told on our Nagai Takashi page.
Born to a Catholic household
Makoto was born on 4 April 1935, the year after his father's baptism with the name Paul and his marriage to .Midori came, nippon.com reports, from a family that had kept the hidden Christian faith for seven generations.Kayano was born on 18 August 1941; the museum's chronology calls her the second daughter.There had been a younger sister too: in Kono ko o nokoshite Nagai, watching Kayano play alone with an old sake bottle wrapped in a scrap of cloth, calling it "Sasano, Sasano," wishes that "her little sister Sasano had lived."In the same book he names the two children he had already lost: "I have already sent two children, Ikuko and Sasano, to heaven." He remembers one of them, a child he could not bring himself to examine as it lay dying, who "was sent away buried in white lilies."The sources here do not give their dates (Unverified).
Away in the hills on 9 August
In the summer of 1945 the children were sent with their grandmother, Moriyama Tsumo, to Mitsuyama in the hills outside .On 9 August their mother was at home in Urakami and was killed; their father was badly wounded at the medical college and, after three days of relief work there, went out on 12 August to run a relief station at Mitsuyama for two months.Kayano's own book, written forty years later, has chapters headed "To Kōba," "That day, Urakami," "The Eleventh Relief Team" and "The Angelus bell remained," which follow that same road.
On 15 October 1945 Nagai went back to the burnt site of his house in Ueno-machi to begin again.In The Bells of Nagasaki he describes the nights in the hut on the atomic plain, where there was no light and the family went early to their blankets. Makoto, then in the fourth grade, asked how big an atom was, and his father explained the nucleus and the electrons. "Makoto and Kayano are people of the atomic age," Nagai told him, and the child fell asleep murmuring "atomic age, atomic age."At Christmas the bell of , dug out of the rubble unbroken, was hung again; when it rang the Angelus, "Makoto and Kayano jump up, sit on the blanket and offer their prayers."
The sisters of Junshin
The Catholic world of Urakami looked after the children in small ways. The sisters of Junshin, whose convent and school had been destroyed, had moved with their wounded to the Catholic hamlet of Kōba, where Nagai's team treated them.When the family was shivering in summer clothes in the hut, the sisters came unexpectedly with clothes they had made out of blankets. "Kayano loved the red flower embroidered on the collar. Makoto was delighted, doing up the buttons of his jumper and undoing them again. They were the Father Christmas of the wilderness."Years later, when the children had started at middle school and primary school, the sisters invited them again so that they would have new clothes, knowing that without a mother no one would sew for them.
One mat beside the bed
In 1948 Nagai moved into , the hut of two mats that the people of Urakami built for him, and one more mat beside his bed was where Makoto and Kayano lived.His spleen was so swollen that a knock could cause internal bleeding, so he could not let them near."To guard against that I make my heart deliberately cold, and pile books and line up medicine bottles round my bed, building a barricade between my love and them," he wrote.That was why Kayano crept up only when she thought he was asleep. "I went on pretending to sleep, and Kayano settled down with her cheek against mine. Her cheek grew warmer and warmer. As if secretly enjoying some small treasure she did not want anyone to know about, Kayano said in a small voice, 'Father.' She was not calling me; it was a thought shut up in her little breast that had faintly slipped out."
The same pages show how much the barricade cost him. Feeling his daughter's cheek, he wrote, "for the first time in a long while something warm began to flow in my veins." He wanted to hug her hard, to romp with her the way a dog plays with its pups, wrestling and tumbling until she could not breathe for laughing. "If my spleen bursts, let it burst. If only this child could have even a moment's joy from her father's love..." Then: "But that is not allowed me."Their mother, he added, had left them nothing of herself; even the photographs of her had burned.
He wanted to live for them. "I must live a month longer, a day longer, an hour longer, and put off the time when this child becomes an orphan," he wrote; "I must be granted a minute or a second more, to shorten the time this child will be lonely."
A father's worry, a father's faith
Much of Kono ko o nokoshite is a father thinking about orphans. Makoto came home from school one day and asked whether the sugar ration had come; his teacher had told the class to hurry home, because their mothers would surely be making something sweet with the new sugar. Nagai saw how many children in post-war classrooms had no mother to go home to.He thought of the children's homes, of the newspapers speaking of "rounding up" street children, and wrote that if he had died on 9 August with his wife, Makoto and Kayano would be there now.He would not have anyone pretend to replace their parents: "No one, whoever it may be, is permitted to stand before these children calling themselves father and mother," he wrote, asking instead that each person give them true love in their own place.The happiness of living with father and mother, he wrote, was a blue bird that had flown away, and could not be painted back: "Will Makoto and Kayano, who are no Tyltyl and Mytyl, find the blue bird again only in the flower garden of heaven?" What orphans needed was not pretence but real love, given from where each person really stood: the director as director, the teacher as teacher, the aunt as aunt.
In the end he gave them to God. Watching sparrows on the washing pole, he quoted the Gospel: not one of five sparrows sold for a few coins is forgotten before God, and "you are worth more than many sparrows." "If only I leave them in God's hands, Makoto and Kayano will be perfectly all right."God, he wrote, "will be right beside Kayano after I am gone. Makoto is held in God's arms, always held, even when the two of them are an old woman and an old man."
His last book for them, Itoshigo yo (My Beloved Children), begins with the words he chose as his legacy: "My beloved children. 'Love your neighbour as yourself.' With this sentence I wish to begin the words I leave you, and probably to end them, so that in the end everything is contained in it."
After their father
Nagai died at the university hospital on 1 May 1951, aged forty-three.Makoto was sixteen and Kayano nine.
Both children wrote about what they had lived. Makoto's book Nagasaki no kane wa hohoemu: nokosareta kyōdai no kiroku (The Bells of Nagasaki Smile: A Record of the Brother and Sister Left Behind), published by the Daughters of St Paul, carries chapters with titles such as "Gentle mother," "Father, mother, children and fate" and "The bell of the atomic plain."He also wrote a life of his father published by San Paolo, which nippon.com cites on the censorship of The Bells of Nagasaki.Kayano, under her married name Tsutsui, published Musume yo, koko ga Nagasaki desu (My Daughter, This Is Nagasaki) in 1985, telling the story of the bomb and her father to her own daughter; a new edition in 2007 carried a foreword by her brother.
Makoto, who after retiring from Jiji Press had become director of the Memorial Museum, died in office on 4 April 2001, his sixty-sixth birthday, and Kayano on 2 February 2008.The museum in Urakami that grew from their father's children's library has since been directed by Makoto's son Nagai Tokusaburō, who told an interviewer in 2015 that his grandfather "did not wish to be called a saint," and hoped young people would take up his love of neighbour as a way to lasting peace.