I noticed that the people who were out and about today were all wearing similarly grave expressions as the soldiers at the mess hall. Everyone seemed on edge now that large-scale air raids were happening on the mainland, not to mention the fact that Okinawa had fallen. It was like a wave of fear had washed over the entire town, and people were beginning to wonder if maybe Japan might lose the war after all. I was sure it was the same all across the country.
I got turned around along the way, so it took me a bit longer to get to the Tajima household than expected, but I did manage to find it in the end. It was a very large estate, and when I called out from the entryway, a very refined old lady came out to greet me.
“Oh my,” she said. “And who might you be?”
“I’m here from Tsuru-ya Mess Hall,” I said.
“Ah, so you’re Tsuru-san’s new helper girl.”
“Yes, I am. Um… I was asked to bring you this,” I said, showing her the kimono.
“Ah, yes,” she said, nodding as though this was a regular occurrence. “Hoping to trade it for some rice, I assume?”
The woman walked back inside and returned a few moments later with a cloth sack full of rice. I had to say, it was much smaller than I was expecting—but I supposed that just went to show what a valuable commodity white rice was in this day and age, when even the finest kimono could only afford you a bag so small you could carry it with one hand. There was something deeply depressing to me about that, but it wasn’t my place to call it unfair, so I simply thanked the woman and left the Tajima estate behind.
As I made my way back toward the Tsuru-ya Mess Hall, my bag of rice in hand, I could hear the rhythmic clanging of metal from the local ironworks nearby.
Then, from somewhere far off in the distance, I heard another sound.
…RRRM…
Confused, I stopped in the middle of the road and strained my ears in an attempt to make out what it was. It was like a low, constant whirring sound that gradually grew higher in pitch—a sound that felt as though it was growing closer by the second.
…VRRRRRM…
Finally, I realized what this deeply unsettling noise was: a siren.
The other pedestrians around me began to murmur among themselves, gazing upward to see if they could spot anything in the skies overhead. Then, a moment later, another siren began to blare out—this one much closer, and ear-piercingly loud.
This was not a drill. This was an air-raid alarm.
I felt a jolt of fright course through me, and a cold sweat ran down my back.
What would I even do if I got caught in an actual air raid?
Obviously, I knew that the sirens were merely a precautionary measure, and there was no guarantee there’d be an air raid in your immediate vicinity just because they started ringing. But for whatever reason, maybe because of all the doomsaying at the mess hall this morning, I had a bad feeling about today. I could feel my heartbeat quicken. I wanted to believe our little neighborhood would be fine, but it was hard not to panic.
I needed to get home, and I needed to get there fast. I knew this—yet, for whatever reason, it felt like my shaky legs were bolted to the spot in fear. As if to heighten my anxieties, the discordant sound of sirens near and far overlapping with one another was harrowing enough to make all my little hairs stand on end.
Then, all of a sudden, the skies overhead grew dark in an instant. Reflexively, I cast my gaze upward to see a flock of small, jet-black silhouettes cutting a course across the bright blue summer sky, blotting out the sun.
“…There they are!” someone shouted. “Bombers!”
Everyone around me began crying out in terror.
“Run for your lives! Get to the air raid shelter!”
“Hurry! They’re coming!”
I watched in horror as a rain of bombs poured down from the sky. They looked no larger than sesame seeds at first, yet they grew larger by the second as the planes drew closer and closer. But I was in such a state of shock that I simply stood there motionless, as if the fear had sucked my soul right out of my body. All around me, people were shouting and running frantically to and fro. Several of them even bumped into me amid the pandemonium, nearly knocking me off balance.
“What are you doing?!” said an older lady, clapping me hard on the back. “Run!”
The shock finally snapped me back to my senses. Clutching the cloth bag tightly to my chest, I sprinted back down the road in the direction I’d come. Over my shoulder, I could hear the sound of bombs dropping from the sky—followed by a massive boom. I looked back over my shoulder and saw that the ironworks I’d passed by a moment ago were now engulfed in a sea of fire that was expanding by the second.
“They’re incendiary bombs…!”
“This whole place is going to be swallowed in flames!”
“Evacuate the air raid shelter! Now!”
I could hear firefighters shouting orders to the pedestrians around me.
As Tsuru had explained to me before, incendiary bombs were a fearsome type of weaponry that would be filled with gasoline or some other sort of fuel that would ignite. They exploded upon impact, resulting in massive fires that could span blocks or entire districts of a city—and if an air raid shelter happened to be caught within that expanse, they would no longer be safe to take refuge in. It seemed to me the sole purpose of such bombs was to indiscriminately take as many lives as possible. And this time, that might include mine.
From every side street and alleyway, I could see people rushing out of their homes with as many of their belongings as they could carry—some of them even using handcarts to try to escape with as much as they physically could. I had little choice but to let myself get swept up in the flood of people and vehicles that were now congesting the main drag.