As Tachibana broke down in tears, Koichi found himself unable to muster any halfway-decent excuse. When he looked down at one of the corpses lying in front of him, its hollow eyes seemed to be begging the exact same question: “Why?”
Just a few days later, the Japanese Empire offered its unconditional surrender to the Allied forces.
For the next six months after that, Koichi did everything he could to stay completely out of Tachibana’s sight and just try to survive on his own. After a while, he began to worry that perhaps they’d been abandoned on this remote island, and he was doomed to live out the rest of his days sleeping outdoors while his body wasted away to nothing—but then at last, a demobilization ship arrived to finally take them home.
It was by no means a comfortable voyage, as the ship was already carrying far beyond its maximum capacity by the time it made a stop at Odo Island. As such, Koichi wasn’t even able to share a room and instead had to sit crammed shoulder-to-shoulder with all of the other late boarders on the vessel’s windswept deck for several days and nights. By the time they finally pulled into port back at the mainland, he couldn’t wait to get back on dry land. But his eager excitement was quickly quashed when just before it was time to disembark, Tachibana appeared before him.
Tachibana had sought Koichi out, not to reprimand him one last time as Koichi expected but to simply hand him what looked like a small parcel wrapped in oilpaper then walk off without another word. When Koichi unwrapped the bundle, he found it to contain a handful of photographs. As he flipped through them and realized what they were, his breath caught in his throat—and he hurriedly wrapped them up again and stuffed the bundle into his pocket.
After a long voyage by sea, followed by a ride on the Tokyo tram network, which had only just been restored to service, Koichi finally made it back to his old hometown. But what he found there did not remotely resemble the familiar streets he’d walked as a boy even though he’d gotten off at the correct station and knew he’d taken the correct turn at the next corner. What should have been his neighborhood looked more like a burned-out junkyard. As he made his way down the charcoal-covered road, he began to fear the worst, until his anxiety was so certain that he found himself running the whole rest of the way home.
What awaited him there was not the dearly beloved house he’d been born in but only the charred husk thereof. Though the iron door on the warped metal gateposts insisted this was indeed his family home, the only thing its fence now circumscribed was a heap of rubble. Only when he looked more closely could he see the faint contours of the old foundation beneath the debris.
As he stood there in a state of shock and disbelief, a voice called out, “Wait a minute… Is that you, Koichi-san?”
He turned to see that an older woman with unkempt hair had emerged from a crudely constructed shanty nearby and was now gaping at him incredulously as though he were a ghost. For a moment, Koichi didn’t recognize her—but after a moment, he realized she could only be Sumiko Ota, the lady who lived next door.
“Miss Ota!” he exclaimed.
“I thought you were sent off on a suicide mission…” said Sumiko. Apparently, word of Koichi getting assigned to a kamikaze unit had gotten around the neighborhood. When he didn’t respond to this, she pressed him. “Were you not?”
Only when Koichi winced at this did Sumiko finally understand.
“No… You’re kidding…” she said. “And now you have the nerve to come crawling back here without a lick of shame? You’re a disgrace.”
Koichi could only stand there and take this verbal abuse on the chin. His evident abandonment of his duties had stoked the still-burning embers of indignation within Sumiko—an emotion he knew he was not directly to blame for but which he now had to accept as a shameful representative of the Japanese forces that had let her down. To be cursed for having returned alive from a losing battle was about the harshest reception a soldier could endure.
“It’s because of spineless cowards like you that we’re in this mess right now,” she went on. “If you’d just done your jobs properly, my children would still be alive!”
Koichi winced again. Did all of the neighbor kids, whom he remembered fondly for their playful mischief, lose their lives in the firebombing that had ravaged this entire area? Koichi swallowed hard and, averting his gaze, asked Sumiko the one question whose answer he dreaded most: “Do you know what happened to my parents?”
Sumiko’s spiteful glare gave way to a coldhearted smirk.
“They’re dead,” she said. “Everyone is. If only you could have seen it; this whole neighborhood was drowning in flames. Your family met the same horrible fate as mine.”
It was the answer he’d anticipated, but that did nothing to soften the blow. Koichi fell to the ground, leaning his back against the gatepost as Sumiko walked off. Sitting there amid the evening hubbub in this neighborhood that had only just reclaimed some semblance of normal human life, he could think of only one thing to do. He pulled out the letter his mother had written him and read it over for the hundredth time.
Please, whatever you do, just come home safe.
For so long, he’d been using that one sentence to justify his cowardice to himself. But now even these words rang hollow. There was no solace left to be found in his mother’s plea.
“Well, here I am, Mom…” Koichi mumbled. “I made it back home.”
But naturally, there came no reply.
Koichi could do nothing to lift himself out of this pit of depression. With each passing day, the world around him seemed bleaker and bluer than the last. He could barely manage to get his hands on some scrap wood and cobble together a rudimentary shelter on the plot where his childhood home once stood. It was hardly even worthy of being called a shack—but for now, it was home.
As he lay awake one night in his hovel, he had the sudden realization that he was starving. He hadn’t eaten anything in three whole days now, come to think of it. Part of him felt content to just lie here and rot away like this, in truth, but his hunger pangs were enforcing the physiological mandate to seek nourishment. To survive. To go on living.
“Do I even want to live anymore…?” he muttered.
About a kilometer’s walk away from his dwelling, there was a black market that had opened by necessity in the aftermath of the air raids where one could barter and trade for anything they might need. And in a corner of said market sat Koichi, slurping away at the bowl of potage he’d just procured. It was clearly made from the leftover scraps of American occupation forces, featuring dubious crumbs of bread and slivers of meat, leafy greens that had once been part of a salad, and a few meager grains of rice. Yet despite its unappetizing appearance, the potage was surprisingly rich with flavor—either that or he was so hungry at this point that anything would have tasted like the nectar of the gods. Koichi felt strange to be so gratefully devouring this meal despite the deep sorrow that had taken root in his heart; it was as if his mind and body were entirely at odds on the matter of whether he deserved to live.
Just then, he heard a voice from across the crowd cry out, “Stop! Thief!” an all-too-common refrain at the black market, where it was shouted countless times per day. But this time, Koichi noticed that the commotion seemed to be moving straight in his direction—judging by the angry shouts growing louder and closer—until finally, he saw what seemed to be the culprit: a young woman carrying a large bundle in her arms being chased by several burly-looking men as she cut her way through the crowd.
Instinctively, Koichi shot up to his feet to block the woman’s path. This was no moral crusade for him, nor did he bear her any ill will. He simply felt compelled to help resolve the situation. The woman’s eyes went wide as she stopped dead in her tracks and considered her options for a moment, before—much to Koichi’s bewilderment—she shoved the bundle she was carrying right into his arms.
“Please help!” she cried, then slipped past him and sprinted off down the street. Her pursuers followed shortly thereafter, and once they were gone, the onlookers quickly lost interest and the black market regained its usual clamor as though nothing had happened.
But now Koichi had a new problem. What was he supposed to do with this heavy bundle the woman had foisted upon him? Perplexed, he pulled back the old rags that were covering it to see what it was—only to reveal the face of a curious infant staring back at him.
“Wait, huh?” he mumbled in disbelief.
As Koichi stood there, confused and unsure what to do, he looked up to see the woman’s pursuers had returned and were now trudging back to their posts. Judging from their expressions, it seemed they hadn’t managed to catch their quarry.
“How the hell is that woman so damn fast?” grumbled one of them.
“I don’t know, but that’s the second time this month,” said another.
Koichi walked up to the men and held out the baby in his arms.
“Um, excuse me…” Koichi said to the one who appeared to be their leader.
“Yeah?” said the man. “What do you want?”
“Well, I just don’t know what I’m supposed to do with this now…”
“Not my problem, kid!” the man said, then continued with his retinue back to wherever they’d originally come from.
Now the sun was beginning to set. Koichi stood there for a good long time under the golden twilight, utterly at a loss as to what to do. He tried to tell himself over and over that he had no obligation to take this baby home with him just because it had been thrust into his arms. At one point, he even set it down on the wooden crate where he’d been sitting and began to walk home—but he didn’t get far before turning around to see the infant staring innocently back at him, helplessly reaching out its hands.
“Great…” Koichi mumbled. “Just what I needed.”
As he walked back toward his home with the baby in his arms, wondering how in the hell he was going to take care of a child all by himself, a voice called out to him from a side street just past the edge of the black market.