“Where are your footsies, baby? Where are your handsies?” When she was feeling happy she’d play with her baby brother like this, groping for him blindly. What if there were an air raid now, with her in this condition? The thought made me shudder. We’d have no choice but to run for it, with the baby on my wife’s back and this child on mine. But it would be impossible for my sister-in-law to protect the house all by herself. She, too, then, would have to flee with us. Judging by what the Allied planes had done to Tokyo, one had to assume that the city of Kōfu would be completely destroyed, including, surely, the doctor’s office we were taking the girl to. And the other clinics as well; there wouldn’t be a single doctor left in town. Then where would we be?

“I don’t care what they do to us. It just seems to me they might be so kind as to wait another month or so before they do it.”

Later on the very night I’d smilingly announced this opinion at the dinner table, we heard the air raid sirens for the first time, simultaneous with the familiar thundering explosions and a lighting up of the sky all around us. They’d begun dropping the incendiary bombs. I heard a series of splashes: my sister-in-law was throwing tableware into the small pond near the veranda.

It was the worst possible time for the attack to come. I boosted my blind child up on my back. My wife did likewise with the baby boy, and we each ran outside clutching a futon. We ran about ten blocks, taking shelter in ditches two or three times along the way, before we came to open fields. No sooner had we spread both futons out on a field of freshly mown barley and sat down to catch our breath than a shower of fire fell from the sky directly overhead.

“Get under the futon!” I shouted to my wife and threw my own futon over me, lying face down with my daughter still clinging to my back. I thought how painful a direct hit would probably be.

We were spared that, but when I threw off the futon and sat up for a look, I saw that we were surrounded by a sea of fire.

“Get up and put out the fire! Put out the fire!” I yelled, not only to my wife but in a voice loud enough for all the others lying on the ground around us to hear, and we began smothering the flames with our mats and blankets. It was almost amusing how easily they went out. Though my daughter could see nothing, she must have sensed that something extraordinary was going on; she clung silently to my shoulders, without uttering so much as a whimper.

“Are you all right?” I asked my wife, walking up to her once the flames were pretty much under control.

“Yes,” she said quietly. “Let’s hope this is as bad as it gets.” For her, apparently, incendiary bombs were nothing compared to the explosive variety.