This negative sort of concern for the feelings of others can wear a man out. I borrowed the six-mat room facing the rear garden to work and sleep in and arranged for my wife and children to sleep in the room that housed the Buddhist altar. I paid a fair rent for the rooms and made sure that I contributed our share to the purchase of food and what not, and when I had visitors I took care not to use the parlor, but showed them into my workroom. I am a drinker, however, and visitors from Tokyo were not infrequent, the upshot of which was that, even as I maintained every intention of honoring the privileges due the actual owners of the house, I in fact ended up taking any number of inexcusable liberties. My sister-in-law actually treated us with considerable diffidence and was a great help with the children, but, though there was never an unpleasant, head-on confrontation, we were a family that had lost its home, and while oversensitivity to that fact may have been the true cause of my discomfort, there was, nonetheless, the feeling of forever walking on thin ice. What this all added up to was that, thanks to our evacuation to the country, both the sister and ourselves were put under a debilitating strain. Still, our situation was better than most, it would seem; one can only guess what it was like for those evacuees in even worse circumstances.

“Don’t evacuate. Stick it out in Tokyo till your house is burned to the ground: you’ll be better off.”

I wrote this advice in a letter to a close friend who remained with his family in Tokyo.

We’d come to Kōfu in early April, when it was still chilly and the cherry blossoms, considerably later than those in Tokyo, had just begun to open. We were there throughout May and June, when the heat unique to the Kōfu basin began to make itself felt. The deep green leaves of the pomegranate trees took on an oily sheen in the intense sunlight, and soon their bright red flowers burst into bloom, and the little green grapes grew plumper each day, gradually forming long, rangy bunches that hung heavily from the trellises; and it was just at about that time that a commotion began to sweep through the city of Kōfu. The entire town was abuzz with the rumor that the bombings were to be directed at small and medium-sized cities, and that Kōfu, too, would burn. Everyone began making preparations to flee, loading their carts with household goods and dragging their families off into the mountains; you heard the sounds of footsteps and carts incessantly, even late at night. I had from the beginning been resigned to the fact that Kōfu too would eventually be hit, but to load our belongings on a cart and evacuate to the mountains with my wife and children to beg lodging from strangers when I’d scarcely had time to enjoy the relief of sleeping without air raid gear—that was asking too much.