Nagai Midori

"On the third day, when the dead and wounded among the students had been dealt with, I went home in the evening. There was nothing but ash. I found it at once: a black mass where the kitchen had been. It was what was left of the pelvis and the lower spine, burned through. Beside it lay the chain of a rosary, with its cross."¹

Nagai Takashi wrote these lines about his wife Midori in the title essay of Rosario no kusari, The Chain of the Rosary, whose preface he signed on 25 March 1948 as "a dweller of Urakami, Nagasaki"; it was published that June.¹²He gathered her into a burnt bucket. "She was still warm. I held her to my breast and carried her to the grave." Around him, in the evening sun, he saw the same black bones scattered over the ash. "It was supposed to be my wife who would carry my bones before long. Who can know what fate will bring?" In his arms, he wrote, she made a dry rustling sound, and he heard it as her saying, "Forgive me, forgive me."¹

The museum built beside his last home keeps that rosary today. Its exhibition calls it "the rosary left by his late wife Midori."³This page is about the woman who wore it.

Midori was the only daughter of the Moriyama family of Urakami.⁴When Nagai came from Shimane to study at Nagasaki Medical College in 1928, he lodged in her parents' house.⁴⁵The family's faith went back far beyond the Meiji era. nippon.com, in an interview with the museum's director, reports that Midori came from a devout line that had kept the hidden Christian faith for seven generations.⁶The scholar Miwa Chishio, as summarised on our Nagai Takashi page, writes that the Moriyamas descended from the leaders of the hidden Christians of Urakami, and that Midori was a great-granddaughter of Kichizō, the seventh and last chōkata, the keeper of the church calendar, who died in prison in the crackdown of 1856.⁵

The museum itself stands, its guide explains, near the place where the chōkata of the hidden Christians once lived, and a stone in its forecourt marks the site of the chōkata yashiki.⁷Our chokata-mizukata page tells how those men kept the calendar of feasts and fasts for the whole village through the centuries without priests.⁸Midori was born into the last generations of that line, and grew up a Catholic in Urakami after the faith came into the open.⁵⁶

Nagai was not a believer when he came to the Moriyama house. In 1933 he was called up as an officer cadet and sent to Manchuria, and in a comfort parcel he found a Catholic catechism, the Kōkyō yōri, which moved him deeply.⁴Back in Nagasaki in February 1934, he was baptised in June 1934, taking the name Paul after Paul Miki, and in August he married Midori.²⁶

The Chain of the Rosary is the fullest picture of her that we have, and it comes from her husband's pen. He married three years after graduating, as an assistant earning forty yen a month. "Even so," he wrote, "I never once heard a complaint from my wife. I did not buy her a single new kimono. We never went to the theatre. We never went out to eat together." The forty-yen life lasted seven years.¹

She made all the family's clothes, he remembered, from his socks and shirts to his overcoat. She wore no face powder, though Paris lipstick and Italian scent were easy to buy. On fine days she carried the manure buckets to the fields; on rainy days she sewed and knitted. And she served as head of the joint women's association of the eighteen districts of Urakami.¹

He was not an easy husband. Absorbed in a piece of research, he wrote, he would answer when spoken to and eat what was put in front of him and remember none of it; twice he passed her on the road home from the university without knowing her. "It is like nursing a sleepwalker," she told him once.¹All he gave her in return was to show her his papers in the journals. Others might skim such a magazine lying on the mats; Midori would sit up straight, raise it respectfully, and read the pages she could not understand with tears in her eyes, because she knew her husband's life was shaved into them.¹

Once a colleague, the anatomist Nakamura, sat in their little garden explaining his experiments on the eggs of frogs and salamanders, and called out to her: "Madam, it seems a husband isn't needed to have children." She laughed and answered, "Is that so? Even so, the purpose of a married couple is surely not only to have children."¹

"The happiest time for my family," Nagai wrote, "was Sunday morning, when we all went together to Mass at the cathedral." He led the elder child by the hand, and Midori carried the younger on her back, along the path between the fields to the red cathedral on the hill, while the bells rang. In the coloured light through the stained glass, "my voice and my wife's voice, the stumbling voices of the little ones, and the rough voice of the old farmer beside us became one voice, praising our Father in heaven. Such happy days will not come to me again."¹

Their son Makoto was born in 1935 and their daughter Kayano in 1941.⁹Nagai later wrote of two other children, Ikuko and Sasano, whom "I have already sent to heaven."⁹

In June 1945 Nagai learned that he had leukaemia, caused by years of radiation in his work, and was given about three years to live.²He told Midori everything that evening. "She heard it without flinching," he wrote. "As I had expected, my wife was strong, and I was glad." He trusted her to raise the children after his death, and felt free to give himself to his last research. "My wife cared for me with an ever deeper love." Once, he wrote, when air-raid warnings came and the steel helmet made him stagger, she carried him on her back to the university.¹

On the morning of 8 August 1945 she saw him off to work as usual, smiling. A little way down the road he realised he had forgotten his lunch and went back, and found her lying in the entrance hall, weeping. "That was our parting."¹That night he was on air-raid duty and slept at the college.¹

The next morning the children were away. With their grandmother, Moriyama Tsumo, Makoto and Kayano had been sent to Mitsuyama in the hills.³Midori was at home in Urakami.³Then the bomb exploded over the valley. Nagai, in the radium room of the hospital, was badly cut, and worked for hours among the wounded. After five hours, he wrote, he collapsed in a field, "and at that moment I knew in my heart that my wife was dead," because she had not come. It was a kilometre from his house to the university: even crawling, even badly hurt, "as long as she had life she would have come to find me."¹

On 11 August he found her and buried her.¹²He wrote that he then went up into the hills to the children with blood all over him.⁹On 12 August he and his surviving staff went up into the valley at Mitsuyama and opened a relief station for the burned at a mineral spring there.¹⁰When that work ended he came back to the ruins of Urakami on 15 October, and squeezed into a hut that Midori's cousins had put up: nine people in about four square metres.¹

He mourned her in his own way. In Kono ko o nokoshite he tells how, for six months, he did not cut his hair, shave or bathe, in mourning for his students and his wife, so that many people thought him eccentric; his hut was built for him on the burnt ground where he had gathered her bones.¹¹Friends urged him to remarry for the children's sake, and he admitted that a second marriage seemed the sensible course. What held him back was the thought that the new wife would also have to become the children's mother. He chose to stay a widower, so that Makoto and Kayano would keep one father and one mother, and the memory of her, unshared.¹¹

The song "Nagasaki no kane" of 1949, which took its title from his book, speaks in its second verse of a wife called to heaven and of a rosary left as a keepsake.¹²In 1950 the Pope sent Nagai a rosary of his own, brought by the papal envoy, Archbishop Furstenberg; he died the next year.²

Midori left no writings of her own in our sources. We see her through her husband's grief: a woman of the old Urakami faith, who made her family's clothes, kept a difficult scholar's house on forty yen a month, led the women of the parish, carried her sick husband on her back, and took her rosary with her into the kitchen on the last morning.¹Nagai named his book after that chain.¹For the people of Urakami, whose ancestors had kept the beads hidden for two and a half centuries, there could hardly be a truer emblem of her life.