Page 40 of Daikon

The cicadas were quiet. Their droning had given way to the chirping of crickets, joined by the croak of a frog hidden in a crevice nearby.

Noriko closed her eyes and rested her head on her knees and allowed herself to be carried along by the night sounds.

As she relaxed, images began to race through her mind—the Toad’s face leering through the cell door grating, the stranger who interviewed her, green fields passing the train, the conductor’s stern look—and looming behind them, the Tokkō captain with his sword and his mock execution.

She could still feel and even taste her terror as she waited to die.

And then that moment when the blade was descending, that moment when she rose into the air and was looking down at her own mortal body, that moment when she saw that there was something inside her, a second light, a second spirit.

The nausea she had been feeling made sense to her now. The realization had been there all along.

She was pregnant.

She lay down on the bed of pine needles and curled up.

She was drifting away now.

She fell asleep.

It had been the coldest winter in forty years, people were saying.

February 25 had brought a blanket of snow, transforming Tokyo from wartime bleakness into a vision of sparkling white.

It lasted until the afternoon, when squadrons of B-29s appeared high overhead and began dropping bombs, the biggest raid yet.

It razed a large swath of the city between the Imperial Palace and the Sumida River and started a dozen smaller fires elsewhere, one scarcely a kilometer from the Umamichi neighborhood in Asakusa-ku, where their house was located.

By the end of the day ash was drifting over the city and the cobalt-blue sky was obscured by a haze of black smoke.

Noriko agreed to evacuate to the countryside after that, to bow to the danger that had been steadily increasing since the end of November.

She would give her employers at NHK appropriate notice, then take Aiko to live with Keizo’s parents in Kanagawa Prefecture in the middle of March.

She had put off going for as long as she could, for she dreaded living under the same roof as Keizo’s mother, a sour-faced woman with an inexhaustible capacity for criticizing her American-born daughter-in-law.

This was what she told Keizo, and it was entirely true.

She didn’t mention that she was also reluctant to give up her job and her identity as an NHK announcer, a valued position for which she was paid as much as her husband.

The thought of going from that to existing under her mother-in-law’s thumb was almost more than she could bear.

The ruins were still smoking on February 26 when the cable was sent to Keizo’s parents. Notice was given at the radio station. Train tickets were purchased. Then, five days before the planned departure, the American bombers returned.

The sirens began wailing shortly after midnight.

They were sounding almost nightly now, warning of dangers that didn’t come, so there was no panic.

Everyone was growing accustomed to the drill.

Noriko wearily rose and carried Aiko out to the shelter Keizo had dug in the garden, a chest-deep hole with a roof of tin sheeting covered with dirt where the flowers had been.

If this was like the warning of two nights before, or the night before that, they would spend an uncomfortable hour or two in the hole, then the all-clear siren would sound, releasing them to return to their beds.

They hunkered down with Rie, their maid, all three of them with padded hoods shrouding their heads and shoulders, a government recommendation for surviving explosions and flying debris.

Aiko went back to sleep, huddled in the quilts they had brought, for it was a cold night and a stiff wind was blowing.

The firefighting equipment was close at hand—water-filled barrel, straw matting ready for soaking, sand pail, grappling hook, long-handled broom, ladder for climbing up onto the roof to douse any flames.

Noriko had practiced the procedure several times with her neighbors, rushing to put out hypothetical fires on rooftops before they could take hold.

She hoped she would not have to do so in earnest. She hoped that tonight was just another false alarm.

It wasn’t.

The B-29s when they came sounded different, their droning louder than before.

This was because they were flying lower, at an altitude of scarcely two thousand meters.

Their arrival was heralded by searchlights piercing the night sky, then the barking of anti-aircraft guns, the batteries in the park at Shoten-cho and farther west at Korakuen and Ueno.

Then the bombers were passing overhead, hundreds of them, a deafening roar.

They did not leave high-explosive blasts in their wake.

What Noriko heard instead was an approaching whisper, followed by what sounded like a sudden downpour striking the roofs.

It was the sound of thousands of small metal cylinders raining down from the sky to release jellied gasoline on impact.

Within moments the sky was glowing crimson.

Houses were burning, showers of sparks dancing up to spread the conflagration.

The sky grew brighter, as bright as day.

Noriko emerged with creeping dread from the shelter.

The fires seemed to be all around them, choking smoke in the air, the temperature rising like on a hot summer day.

She heard shouts from neighboring houses and the narrow alley out front and knew instinctively that their only hope was to run.

She dashed inside, a thousand thoughts flooding her mind, their house full of possessions, everything they owned, what she should take.

The interior was eerily bright, as if daylight was shining through the windows.

She stood there for a shocked moment, not knowing what to do.

She grabbed her ration book and a small bag of rice and ran back outside.

“We have to leave,” she said, thrusting the rice at Rie and sweeping Aiko up in her arms. She led the way back through the house and out the front door into the street, Rie following with the rice and the quilts.

The writer who lived next door, Mr. Ukita, was frantically loading things into a cart—books and dishes and mosquito nets, utterly useless.

He gave Noriko a wild look and plunged back inside.

Noriko turned and hurried away. They had to get out of this narrow alley, away from these wooden houses, out of this tinderbox maze.

The main street was full of people, most loaded down with suitcases and bundles, everyone heading west toward Ueno, where the fires seemed less intense.

Noriko joined the exodus as more B-29s were passing over, the roar of their engines deafening, their undersides illuminated red from the flames, then blue when they were caught in the beam of a searchlight.

More steel cylinders filled with jellied gasoline rained down, thousands upon thousands of them.

Soon the way ahead was blocked by flames.

Panicked people were turning back now, transforming the street into a struggling, screaming mass of bodies as they tried to flee in the opposite direction.

Noriko was becoming tired carrying Aiko but didn’t dare set her down in the crush.

She turned south, thinking of the local middle school, now closed.

It was the most substantial building in the neighborhood, an island of concrete in a sea of wood.

She reached the railway overpass, the school a hundred meters farther on, only to find the way blocked by an inferno.

A firebreak had been cleared on both sides of the tracks, but it made no difference.

Flames leaped up all around. Several large shelters had been dug in the underpass but were already full, people squeezed in tight.

“Please take my child,” Noriko pleaded. No one responded. There was no room.

The furnace heat was now so intense that Noriko’s clothes were sparking, on the verge of catching fire.

There seemed nowhere left to flee now, but they couldn’t stay here.

She wrapped herself and Aiko in one of the quilts and plunged onward, going she didn’t know where.

She pushed past people wailing in terror, people on fire and screaming, people sitting on the ground chanting to the Buddha for mercy.

The updraft was so strong that it was difficult to hang on to the quilt that was their only protection.

Now it was on fire. Noriko beat it out with her hands. She heard a shriek and glanced back to see Rie burst into flames. She kept running.

Her desperate flight brought her to a large tank filled with water, one of many that had been placed around the city for firefighting.

It was already packed with people, hunkered down so that only the tops of their heads were showing.

One man had dragged in his bicycle and was hanging on to it as another tried to wrest it from his grasp so he could climb in.

Noriko tried to lift Aiko into the water.

“My child!” she cried. “Let in my child!”

It was no use. There wasn’t room. Noriko pushed past the arms trying to fend her off and thrust the quilt into the water.

She draped it back around her and Aiko dripping wet, a momentary relief from the heat, and raced on into a tide of trapped people surging back toward the west. She ran into a house, its door hanging open, hoping to escape through the back, but was driven back by more flames.

She tried another, then one on the other side of the street.

There, in a courtyard, people in line at a hole in the ground leading down into a sewer or drain.

She rushed to join them. When her turn came, she lowered Aiko into the stink, then followed, crawling through what felt like filth, praying that the way ahead led under and away from the fire.

The heat inside the concrete blackness was intense.

Whimpering and moaning and gasping close in her ears.

“Keep moving, keep moving,” a hoarse voice was saying.

A ring of light framing Aiko’s body in front, growing to meet them, illuminating the sides of the drain. Just another few meters. Then they were out.

She put Aiko on her back and scrambled out of the ditch, stepping on trampled dead bodies. She no longer had the quilt. Where was it? She looked around. It was gone.

A glimpse of water ahead, glowing red. The Sumida River.

She ran toward it. She arrived to find hundreds of people fighting to get onto Kototoi Bridge.

The opposite side of the river was a wall of fire, so there was no point crossing over.

There was no escape there. The goal seemed to be to get to the middle of the bridge, as far as possible from the wind-fanned flames leaping up on both sides.

Noriko left the roadway and headed for the bank of the river, intending to wade into the water. Thousands of others were doing the same. She was carried along by the press of bodies, Aiko, frozen with fear, clinging tight to her back.

Pushed from behind, Noriko entered the water, warm from the fires.

The pressure forced her in deeper, past her waist, until she was up to her chest. Splashes farther out in the river, strangled cries of “Help me! Help me!” People were jumping from the bridge above to escape being crushed against the superheated steel railings.

“Please,” Noriko gasped, for she was being pushed in deeper. The water was up to her chin now. She was fighting to keep her head above water.

Aiko was starting to struggle.

“Please…”

Her toes were barely touching the bottom.

“Please…”

The bottom dropped away.

She awoke to the sound of seagulls. It was morning.

She rose from her bed of pine needles and looked about at her surroundings, unseen in the darkness the previous night.

The immediate vicinity was ravaged, pine trees cut down for firewood, roots dug up for fuel.

The glint of water beckoned in the distance.

Walking toward it, she came to a large lake, an expanse of marsh extending out from the shore, herons wading in the shallows, smaller birds flitting about.

A dozen or more boats were out on the water beyond, scudding along under rectangular white sails that were so immense they made the vessels look inconsequential.

Noriko recalled seeing a picture of these unique crafts, using the wind to trawl for fish on Lake Kasumigaura.

She stared out at the lake.

She felt Aiko’s hands clutching at her neck, at her shoulders, pushing her down.

Yellow grass rising above her, swaying in a hush of breeze.

A green grasshopper clinging to a stem, hanging on.

The white of an egret traversing a bowl of gray sky.

Her clothes were muddy and wet with rain. How long had she been lying here? Was it hours? Or days?

She winced as she got to her feet, her whole body aching. She looked out at the lake, at the boats moving along under their giant sails. They had been out there fishing for centuries.

She continued on along the shore until she came to a stretch of beach where clear water was lapping.

No one was around apart from the crews on the boats, who were too far off to see.

She removed her shoes and her clothes and waded into the lake and started bathing, caressing her abdomen, the life growing inside her.

How was it possible after what she had suffered? And yet it was. She could feel it.

She lay in the long grass and let the warm air dry her before getting dressed.

Refreshed, she turned away from the lake and headed west toward the train line.

The path led her past a series of lotus ponds, a riot of green with pink flowers scattered on top, then on into fields.

The town to the north—she knew now that it was Tsuchiura, seventy kilometers north of Tokyo.

She came to the train tracks and turned south.

She kept walking.