Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [209]
Haruyo could not grasp what had happened, and kept murmuring to herself: “Where am I? What has happened?” They began the search for her brother. Her parents were badly burned, their eyes almost closed by blisters, so that the children had to lead the way, picking a path between blackened corpses. Haruyo was fascinated by the number of dead mothers and infants; by the sight of one girl whose entire upper body was black and shrivelled, while by some freak her lower limbs were untouched. Five-year-old Mitsuko whimpered quietly, saying again and again: “My leg hurts.” They recognised the site of their own home only when Haruyo glimpsed a fragment of much-loved family china. An iron pipe alone protruded aboveground. To their amazement, its tap delivered a feeble trickle of water, with which they sought to wash away the oily blackness which coated their faces and bodies.
Then there was another miracle. They saw a ragged, forlorn figure standing before them. It was the boy Soichiro. He was uninjured. He had crawled into a sewage pipe and lain in its shelter through the hours of destruction, soaking his body in damp filth. Mr. Wada sighed with passionate emotion: “We’re all together again.” In the shelter where, a few hours earlier, Mrs. Furuhashi had tried to hold back Haruyo from flight, they found their neighbours’ family heaped, charred corpses. Indeed, every one of Haruyo’s street playmates had perished. Among the Futamis, just two adults survived of a family of nine.
After a time, as the flames died, Yoshiko Hashimoto and the two boatmen who had saved her life steered their boat to the riverbank, and ventured ashore. They were stunned to behold the emptiness of a great urban landscape denuded of all buildings save a few lonely concrete survivors. The other landmarks were iron safes, standing forlorn amid the ashes of the homes and offices to which they once belonged. The only discernible colour in the scene was a dull, dead brown. Fallen phone and power lines hung like spiders’ webs over the debris. Yoshiko was bewildered to perceive how little human life was visible. The great mobs which had thronged the streets during the night had vanished. Only a few lonely figures plodded through the desolation. Her rescuers, the boatmen, set about delivering her and her child, both exhausted and badly burned, to a hospital. They found a cart—or rather, its iron frame and wheels, for all the woodwork was gone. They laid mother and child upon it, and somehow dragged them through the ruins, the passengers frequently falling to the ground as Yoshiko lost her feeble purchase on the iron skeleton. Later, when she recovered her wits in hospital, she found that her saviours had vanished. “They saved our lives,” she said in wonderment, “but I never knew their names. All I could tell from their talk was that one was a postman, the other a rice-seller.”
Ryoichi Sekine, at the Suwa Shrine, was dimly aware that the overhead sound of aircraft was receding. Violent noise made by falling debris persisted, but there was little screaming, because people’s breath was too precious. The injured sometimes groaned; that was all. The Sekines lingered perhaps two or three hours before moving. When they dared to rise, they perceived that most of those around them were dead. Ryoichi noted with blank curiosity the phenomenon of flickers of flame rising from corpses, fuelled by their body oils. While it was still dark, the Sekines tried to pick a path towards their home, but found the heat underfoot too great. They lingered awhile longer, then set off. Around dawn they reached