“Everything can be beauty”. Even after the atomic bomb. Even in the midst of a terminal illness. Even if you just lost the love of a lifetime. “Everything can be beauty” if you look for it in what “cannot die”. The life of Takashi Paolo Nagai tells this to the many people who knew himdirectly or through his writings.
His story also reached Ravenna last Wednesday, thanks to the Il Sicomoro association who organized the meeting, sponsored by Risveglio at the Ragazzini room, with Paola Marenco, well-known hematologist and founder of the “Friends of Takashi and Midori Nagai” association. The occasion was the presentation of “The One Who Does Not Die,” an autobiography of Nagai’s lifewritten by radiologist who survived the atomic bomb in Nagasaki a year after that tragic 9 August 1945 in which hundreds of thousands of people died and, among them, his wife, Midori.
“His life was a passionate search for the truth – he explained at the beginning president of the Il Sicomoro association, Leonardo Babini -. So why are we here? To talk about what, as the book says, ‘never dies’. Our association has this aim: to raise awareness of bright places and people so that hearts can open through light.”
Twitnesses, just like Takashi Paolo Nagai. “A realist man”, how he defines it Paola Marenco: “capable of being questioned by the questions of reality”. The first that life presents to him is the one that is born from his mother’s eyes who, suffering from a brain aneurysm, watch him on his deathbed. Takashi is a young medical student, in a country, like Japan at the beginning of the 20th century, which had just opened up to the world and believed in “magnificent progressive fortunes” and in a future of development without shadows. Shinto by family tradition, over time and with the climate of Japan at the time, he had become materialistic and oriented towards atheism. But his mother’s eyes that greeted him forever question him: “That look – he writes – changed my materialist vision”. “You realize that that look, that of his mother, cannot die – explains Marenco -. That man is a little more than what meets the eye.”
The second question mark that makes him walk, continues Marenco, is the meeting with the Christians and the family of his wife Midori. Christianity in Japan since the 1600s has a history of martyrs and persecution. A Church that resisted even after the death of the last priest, with small communities of lay people who for two hundred years kept the flame of faith and Catholic traditions alive despite the impossibility of professing their religion in public. “Christians? Takashi describes them like this – explains Marenco -. They take care of orphans and widows, after prayer in the morning they go to work happily and feel no resentment for the persecutions they have suffered.” A style that questions, too. To the point that, in view of her marriage to Midori, she decides to ask for baptism which he describes like this: “I felt all my cells renewed”.
Takashi does not have a simple life: enlisted twice in the war in Manchuria, he loses two children but above all he experiences illness. “Due to anaphylactic shock, he risks dying – says the doctor -. From here he comes to the conclusion that if you can die in an instant, you need to live every moment as if you were about to die.”
He understands it and puts it into practice. Even in the darkest page of her life, that of the atomic child. On August 9, 1945, Takashi found himself in the radiology bunker where he worked. He goes out and sees his city, Nagasaki, destroyed. He goes to his house and finds his wife’s rosary next to her bones. “Everything he lived for is no longer there -explains Paola Marenco -. The book ends like this: with a prayer at dawn and a voice repeating the words of the Gospel to him: ‘Heaven and earth will pass away. My words will not pass’. From here a reflection arises in Takashi: what is no longer there was mortal. Instead we must look for what cannot die.”.
In those tragic circumstances he finds it. Nagai was already suffering from leukemia, an illness that led him to live bedridden for the last two years. As long as the disease gives him the opportunity to walk and move, he visits the sick, diagnoses and studies, first, the “atomic disease” and “does those small gestures of good that can be done even in the worst evils: he goes back to live in the atomic wasteland, with the money from the first prize he gets he plants cherry trees, tries to rebuild the church”. When he can no longer walk, he moves to a Nyokodō, i.e. the “place of self-love” and hundreds of people start coming to him. “A new horizon opens up for him – concludes Marenco. ‘Everything can be beauty’ he says. And the people of Nagasaki understand this. For his funeral, the city stops: because everyone understood that it was he who restored hope.”
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