Jigoku: hell. The image they had in mind was not the conventional landscape of lurid demons and extravagant, fiery tortures. There are other hells in Japanese iconography – hells of ice and water, mud and excrement, in which naked figures, stripped of all dignity, lie scattered across a broken plain. ‘What stays in my memory,’ Abe said, ‘is pine trees, and the legs and arms of children sticking out from under the mud and the rubbish.’ Abe was a village leader, a construction boss, an active, practical-minded man in his early sixties. He began to pull bodies out and to lay them out on the
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