Hiroshima by Nakazawa Keiji

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    I felt chagrin that Dad had been killed in the war he’d opposed so strongly—how cruel! Around the now-empty eye sockets of his skull—perhaps brain matter had oozed out and been burned—blackened incrustations made it look as if he was crying. I rubbed these off with my finger and, having cleaned the skull, put it in the bucket.
    As for the nine-by-twelve room behind the entryway where Eiko had been, we had a hard time digging it out because the second story, utterly destroyed, was piled atop it. K o ¯ ji kept digging, and a graceful, girlish skull and bones emerged. I said, “That’s Eiko,” and K o ¯ ji nodded silently. As I transferred her bones to the bucket, I remembered times I’d spent with Eiko.
    We’d always gone to school together. Eiko’s voice seemed even now to be calling to me to hurry up: “Keiji! I’m leaving!” Looking very serious, she said she’d teach me the songs she’d learned in music class, and I could hear her singing, “Beautiful flowers, mums white and yellow.” When we set off for Ninoshima with a note of introduction from a neighbor to try to buy potatoes, she saw me dressed for the excursion, hugged me, and said, “Keiji, you look cool!” Worried she’d never let me go, I screamed, “Let me go! Hands off!” A scene at the entryway floated up, a day when snow fell and piled up. It was a cold morning. When Eiko opened the window and exhaled, her breath turned white. She shouted for joy; it was pretty, so she wanted me to join her and made me stand at the window and exhale with her. Eiko crying when she was suspected of being the thief at school. The times we went to catch grasshoppers or buy dumplings in Eba. The time Eiko hid and—perhaps because of malnutrition on account of the food shortage—took an afternoon nap, and Mom found out and scolded her: “Sleep this much, and you’ll die early!”
    As I stared at Eiko’s skull, I thought that everything had happened just as Mom had predicted. I pondered Mom’s words: “Crushed by the beams, Eiko didn’t utter a peep. It was an instant death, so it was an easy death—I’m glad for that.”
    The three sets of bones filled the bucket. Exhausted, K o ¯ ji and I squatted in the ashes. The sun sizzled. The neighborhood air raid trench in front of our house had caved in, and on a whim I peeked inside. The fierce flames must have blown clear through the trench. Where usually there were puddles of water, the dirt had been baked white, like desert sand.
    Suddenly, in a corner of the doorway, I saw something I hadn’t expected: dried cat. It was our cat, utterly transformed. It was thin, only fur. I wondered what had happened. I’d been told that if you feed dogs for three days, they never forget you, but that cats, no matter how you dote on them, are unfeeling, forget you, and run off. But I realized that cats remember you even longer than dogs. Blackie had found her way home through the fierce flames. But unable to escape the raging sea of fire, she’d run to the air raid trench and been baked, the liquid part of her sucked out. She had died and become desiccated cat. You’d have thought Blackie’s fur would have blown away in the wind, but now it was only the fur that remained. How sad!
    When it rained, Blackie would come in from outside and leave her paw prints—they looked like plum blossoms—on the floor mats. Smiling wryly—“Flower-viewing! Flower-viewing!”—Mom would take a rag and wipe them away. One winter night, she crawled up under my blanket, and when, having difficulty breathing, I woke and rolled back the blanket, Blackie was lying across my warm chest, asleep. Late one night the whole house woke to Eiko’s shrieks, and when we looked at Eiko’s blanket, Blackie had a mouse in her teeth and was playing with it. Mom chased her away with