The Street of a Thousand Blossoms (25 page)

Ever since his brother’s return, Hiroshi felt a change in him, and saw it in each quick, assured gesture. Unlike the shy young boy who left, Kenji exuded a newfound confidence.

“Ojiichan?”
Hiroshi asked.

“I’ll help them down to the shelter,” Kenji answered, hobbling quickly out of their room.

“I’ll get everything else,” he said, grateful that his brother was back to help. He gathered
the furoshiki
of meager supplies, the water and the first-aid kit, the cloth headgear his
obaachan
sewed for them, and one more thing this time, a fan for his grandmother to move the air when it became too thick and still. During the last air raid, he had watched her close her eyes, chanting something between her lips as she swayed from side to side.

They spent most of the night and morning huddled in the backyard air-raid shelter, cramped and stiff but otherwise unharmed. The air became so thick and solid Hiroshi thought they would suffocate. Relentless explosions shook the ground. Dirt sifted from the earthen walls around them as the planes droned overhead. All Hiroshi could think was that they had saved someone the trouble of burying them. And when they were able to emerge at last from their shelter hours later, it was into a fragile silence. Later, they would learn the greater shame of having survived a night in which so many had died.

Yanaka had been spared once again. Just as the area had been left virtually untouched during the Kanto earthquake of 1923, the winds had blown the firestorm in other directions. Hiroshi remembered the story his
ojiichan
told them when they were boys, how the temples surrounding the Edo castle were moved to Yanaka for safety after the earthquake. And when the roar of the planes finally vanished and the ground stopped shaking, the thick, acrid, smoke-filled air hovered, clearing just enough to see in shadows that the temples still
stood. Hiroshi wanted to know what god had protected Yanaka from the firestorm. What gave them the right to live when so many had perished?

The day after the firestorm was eerily quiet. It was as if the entire world surrounding them had turned to ash. Hiroshi went against the wishes of his grandparents and volunteered for the committee to help clear away the dead, with hopes of notifying their families and giving them a proper burial. How could he not help? he asked his grandparents. Before March 10, 1945, Hiroshi had never seen a dead body, now they lay all around him—some like blackened statues still in sitting positions, others with their skin melted away from a heat that burned like a furnace, leaving only fragments of bone in dust. The flames that had been swept forward by the winds left no escape for anyone caught in the storm. Amid the rubble, Hiroshi also found small miracles—some bodies untouched where they fell, or a wayward cloth helmet and baby’s sock that hadn’t burned.

The air was still thick and smoky as the neighborhood committees scattered in groups of four or five, his led by a man named Iwada-san. Hiroshi began coughing, his eyes burning from the smoke. One man, whom he recognized as the father of one of his classmates, passed out white handkerchiefs for them to tie around their mouths. They walked silently down the road toward the Onagigawa River looking like bandits. Once green and tree lined, there was nothing left on either side of the road. As they approached the river, it was as if the once lush landscape had been wiped clean, the blank surface covered in gray ash like snow. All that was left was the charred stone bridge. Hiroshi heard the water flowing below the embankment then saw the burned bodies that lay along the slope, while other bodies floated in the river. He heard one committee member, an older man, say that those who ran toward the river were trapped by a wave of fire, which suddenly had surrounded them from all directions. Many who jumped into the river to escape the fire were asphyxiated by the smoke and burning air. The man nudged one of the bodies with his foot and stepped quickly back when a large piece of the charred leg broke away. Hiroshi knew that so many bodies would never be identified.

It made Hiroshi sick to his stomach as he worked furiously to retrieve the swollen and bloated bodies from the river. He climbed back up, half-soaked, and retched on the bank, but knew that if he stopped, he would never be able to continue. He held down his next bout of nausea and faced his fear, or it would always return to haunt him. A sudden movement down by the side of the river caught his eye, a woman’s body floating against the bank, her clothes caught on some branches. Carefully, Hiroshi made his way back down the embankment until he reached the body, her back burned to the bone. When he turned her body over, her face was distorted, blackened and bloated but not burned. He checked to see if her name and address was sewn into her clothes as they’d all been instructed to do. And there, on the inside flap of her jacket, were the characters that told him her name was Noriko Tanaka.

Hiroshi’s
unmei
, the destiny his
obaachan
had told him about as a boy, came to light on that day when all else was steeped in darkness. It was Iwada-san the head of his search committee, who recognized the name Noriko Tanaka as they gathered to identify the multitude of dead found by the Onagigawa River. Hiroshi hadn’t known his heart could hold so much sadness, and wondered how to keep it from bursting. That morning, he had found the body of Tanaka-oyakata’s wife, though he didn’t know it was the great sumo coach’s wife at first. There were so many dead and dying, so many nameless bodies. But it was her face that struck him as he turned her body over, bloated in death, yet strangely calm. He tried to wipe her face of ash and dirt, picked the debris out of her hair. Even when he discovered the name sewn in her jacket, he didn’t make the connection to Tanaka-oyakata, thinking only what a terrible loss it was to the family waiting for her to return to them. Her body was wrapped in a sheet and lined up among the dozens of others until her family could be reached.

It wasn’t until Hiroshi and Iwada-san entered the still smoldering Katsuyama-beya later that afternoon that it was confirmed that Noriko
Tanaka really was Tanaka-sama’s wife. The
oyakata
stood before him, a big, defeated man. With him was a pretty girl Hiroshi assumed was his daughter, with her hands wrapped in white bandages like two thick gloves. Her dark, piercing eyes peered out at him from behind Tanaka. He looked away, his throat sore when he swallowed.

“Tanaka-san, if you could come with us to identify the body. We’ve set up a medical tent down by the river,” Iwada-san said softly.

“Hai,”
Tanaka answered. Without saying another word, he bowed low to Iwada-san.

“It was Hiroshi-san who found your wife’s body,” Iwada said, bowing back.

Hiroshi watched Oyakata-san’s lower lip tremble. His daughter stood there, her bandaged hands seeming to weigh her down, while tears streamed soundlessly down her cheeks.

Tanaka-sama touched Hiroshi’s arm and bowed low to him.
“Domo…,”
he began, his voice breaking.
“Domo arigato goziamasu
, Hiroshi-san, for finding my Noriko.”

“I’m very sorry,” Hiroshi said, bowing back. He wasn’t sure Tanaka-sama heard a word he said, or remembered him to be the young recruit whose sumo career had been cut short by the war. The wind had picked up again, a sudden rush of smoke swept by, and he heard the little girl whimper, step forward and raise her bandaged hands as if to protect her father. Tanaka put his arm around the little girl’s shoulders.

Once outside the gate, Hiroshi turned around to see that the main house still stood, but all he saw left of the Katsuyama-beya was one building, darkened by fire.

Everything else was gone.

The voices told what had happened after the atomic bombs fell, like the whispered words of ghosts.
Can you imagine a wind so strong that it ripped a man’s face away where he stood? Can you imagine how internal organs exploded, clothes and bodies burst into flames, disintegrated on the spot? Can you envision a mushroom cloud formed by smoke and debris that could be seen for miles by the naked eye, followed by a black rain falling, black tears they called it, radiation spreading in its wake? Those who died were the lucky ones
, the voices continued.
Those who lived through it would never be the same
.

Nine days after the atomic bombs fell, on August 15, Hiroshi and his family knelt in front of the radio and heard the static, high-pitched voice of the “divine god,” their imperial emperor, for the first time. Hiroshi was stunned; it was the calm voice of a mild-mannered man who sounded more like a scholar than a leader. The voice said the war “had not turned in Japan’s favor,” and they must now “endure the unendurable, and bear the unbearable.” Hadn’t they already lived through the unbearable? Died for it? It was the voice of a man who spoke in formal, stilted classical phrases, a voice that sounded very far away from the Japanese people.

Fumiko Wada hurried down the crowded alleyways to wait with other women in food lines that grew longer with each day of the occupation. At sixty-three years of age, she fought to keep her anger and sorrow at bay. The number of lives lost abroad and at home was staggering. And in the end, what was it all for?