Many of those who died that night were suffocated. The voracious fires literally snatched the breath from their lungs.
With no effective fighter cover left, the Japanese had no defense against the wave after wave of bombers that spread their jellied fire over the city. Firemen wept with frustration and shame as they dragged useless hoses toward the walls of flame. The burst and steaming water mains provided only limp trickles of water.
When dawn came, the city still smoldered, and in every pile of rubble little tongues of flame licked about in search of combustible morsels. The dead were everywhere. One hundred thirty thousand of them. The cooked bodies of children were stacked like cordwood in schoolyards. Elderly couples died in one another’s arms, their bodies welded together in final embrace. The canals were littered with the dead, bobbing in the still-tepid water.
Silent groups of survivors moved from pile to pile of charred bodies in search of relatives. At the bottom of each pile were found a number of coins that had been heated to a white heat and had burned their way down through the dead. One fleshless young woman was discovered wearing a kimono that appeared unharmed by the flames, but when the fabric was touched, it crumbled into ashy dust.
In later years, Western conscience was to be shamed by what happened at Hamburg and Dresden, where the victims were Caucasians. But after the March 9 bombing of Tokyo, Time magazine described the event as “a dream come true,” an experiment that proved that “properly kindled, Japanese cities will burn like autumn leaves.”
And Hiroshima was still to come.
Throughout the journey. General Kishikawa sat stiff and silent, his breathing so shallow that one could see no movement beneath the rumpled civilian suit he wore. Even after the horror of residential Tokyo was behind them, and the train was rising into the incomparable beauty of mountains and high plateaus, Kishikawa-san did not speak. To relieve the silence, Nicholai asked politely about the General’s daughter and baby grandson in Tokyo. Even as he spoke the last word, he realized what must have happened. Why else would the General have received leave during these last months of the war?
When he spoke, Kishikawa-san’s eyes were kind, but wounded and void. “I looked for them, Nikko. But the district where they lived was… it no longer exists. I have decided to say good-bye to them among the blossoms of Kajikawa, where once I brought my daughter when she was a little girl, and where I always planned to bring my… grandson. Will you help me say good-bye to them, Nikko?”
Nicholai cleared his throat. “How can I do that, sir?”
“By walking among the cherry trees with me. By allowing me to speak to you when I can no longer support the silence. You are almost my son, and you…” The General swallowed several times in succession and lowered his eyes.
Half an hour later, the General pressed his eye sockets with his fingers and sniffed. Then he looked across at Nicholai. “Well! Tell me about your life, Nikko. Is your game developing well? Is shibumi still a goal? How are the Otakes managing to get along?”
Nicholai attacked the silence with a torrent of trivia that shielded the General from the cold stillness in his heart.
For three days they stayed in an old-fashioned hotel in Niigata, and each morning they went to the banks of the Kajikawa and walked slowly between rows of cherry trees in full bloom. Viewed from a distance, the trees were clouds of vapor tinted pink. The path and road were covered with a layer of blossoms that were everywhere fluttering down, dying at their moment of greatest beauty. Kishikawa-san found solace in the insulating symbolism.
They talked seldom and in quiet tones as they walked. Their communication consisted of fragments of running thought concreted in single words or broken phrases, but perfectly understood. Sometimes they sat on the high embankments of the river and watched the water flow by until it seemed that the water was still, and they were flowing upstream. The General wore kimonos of browns and rusts, and Nicholai dressed in the dark-blue uniform of the student with its stiff collar and peaked cap covering his light hair. So much did they look like the typical father and son that passersby were surprised to notice the striking color of the young man’s eyes.
On their last day, they remained among the cherry trees later than usual, walking slowly along the broad avenue until evening. As light drained from the sky, an eerie gloaming seemed to rise from the ground, illuminating the trees from beneath and accenting the pink snowfall of petals. The General spoke quietly, as much to himself as to Nicholai. “We have been fortunate. We have enjoyed the three best days of the cherry blossoms. The day of promise, when they are not yet perfect. The perfect day of enchantment. And today they are already past their prime. So this is the day of memory. The saddest day of the three… but the richest. There is a kind of—solace?… no… perhaps comfort—in all that. And once again I am struck by what a tawdry magician’s trick Time is after all. I am sixty-six years old, Nikko. Viewed from your coign of vantage—facing toward the future—sixty-six years is a great deal of time. It is all of the experience of your life more than three times over. But, viewed from my coign of vantage—facing toward the past—this sixty-six years was the fluttering down of a cherry petal. I feel that my life was a picture hastily sketched but never filled in… for lack of time. Time. Only yesterday—but more than fifty years ago—I walked along this river with my father. There were no embankments then; no cherry trees. It was only yesterday… but another century. Our victory over the Russian navy was still ten years in the future. Our fighting on the side of the allies in the Great War was still twenty and more years away. I can see my father’s face. (And in my memory, I am always looking up at it.) I can remember how big and strong his hand felt to my small fingers. I can still feel in my chest… as though nerves themselves have independent memories… the melancholy tug I felt then over my inability to tell my father that I loved him. We did not have the habit of communicating in such bold and earthy terms. I can see each line in my father’s stern but delicate profile. Fifty years. But all the insignificant, busy things—the terribly important, now forgotten things that cluttered the intervening time collapse and fall away from my memory. I used to think I felt sorry for my father because I could never tell him I loved him. It was for myself that I felt sorry. I needed the saying more than he needed the hearing.”
The light from the earth was dimming, and the sky was growing purple, save to the west where the bellies of storm clouds were mauve and salmon.
“And I remember another yesterday when my daughter was a little girl. We walked along here. At this very moment, the nerves in my hand remember the feeling of her chubby fingers clinging to one of mine. These mature trees were newly planted saplings then—poor skinny things tied to supporting poles with strips of white cloth. Who would have thought such awkward, adolescent twigs could grow old and wise enough to console without presuming to advise? I wonder… I wonder if the Americans will have all these cut down because they do not bear obvious fruit. Probably. And probably with the best of intentions.”
Nicholai was a little uneasy. Kishikawa-san had never opened himself in this way. Their relationship had always been characterized by understanding reticence.
“When last I visited, Nikko, I asked you to keep your gift of languages fresh. Have you done so?”
“Yes, sir. I have no chance to speak anything but Japanese, but I read all the books you brought, and sometimes I talk to myself in the various languages.”