And cautiously, she opened the shojis, and what she saw took her breath away. Not one single thing had changed in their house. Even the scroll in the tokonoma was still there, placed exactly where it had been when she was a child, and her grandmother taught her how to arrange the flowers for it. And there were flowers there now, but they were dry and long since wilted. They had obviously gone away, for safety, somewhere.
“Who lives here, Mommy?”
“Your grandparents, Toyo. They will be very happy to see you.”
“Who are they?”
“My mommy and daddy,” she explained, and he looked intrigued, surprised that she had them.
She walked slowly around the house with him. Her mother's clothes were there, all their furniture and cooking utensils. There were several photographs of her, and of Yuji, and she stood staring at them, wanting to reach out and touch them. And then they walked out into the garden. She stopped at the little shrine, and bowed to it, and it felt odd to be doing it again. She hadn't bowed in so long now.
“What are you doing, Mommy?”
“Bowing to our shrine, to honor your grandpar-ents.” He had seen old people in the camps bow, but he had been too young to remember.
“Where are your mommy and daddy?” he asked with interest.
“I think they went away,” she explained, and then slowly she walked next door to their neighbors' house. They were at home, and they looked very surprised to see her, and even more so to see Toyo. She bowed to them formally, and they told her that her parents had gone to the mountains for safety before the summer. They weren't sure where, but they thought to their old buraku near Ayabe.
It was the farming community where Hidemi was from originally, and it made perfect sense. They had probably been afraid that Kyoto would be bombed, to make an example of it, like Dresden. But she knew it would take them days to get to Ayabe. It was inaccessible normally, but with conditions such as they were, it would be nearly impossible. And then she decided to ask her neighbors if they had a car she could rent or borrow. They said they didn't, and suggested she take the train, which was a reasonable solution. And a little while later, she walked to the train station with Toyo. She took their suitcase, just in case, and she bought some fruit from a child selling apples on the way, and she and Toyo were happy to get them.
But then they told them there was no train till the next morning. She stopped with Toyo after that, and bought some food for them, and then they went back to her parents' house, and they moved into the second bedroom. It was the room where she had been born, and she remembered her father's story, about how she had been born there and not at the hospital because her mother was so stubborn. It made her smile, and she told Toyo that she had been born in that room, and that intrigued him. And that night, while he slept, she wandered from room to room, feeling the warmth of being near them.
There were soldiers patrolling the street outside, but they didn't bother them. And the next morning at seven, she and Toyo went to the train. And because of delays, and debris on the tracks that had to be removed, it took them fourteen hours to get to Ayabe. They didn't arrive until nine o'clock that night, and she had no idea where the house was. So she and Toyo curled up in the train station, under a small blanket she'd brought with them, but Toyo said he didn't like it.
“I don't either, sweetheart, but we can't find the house till tomorrow.” And at dawn, she woke up, and got some food for him again from a street vendor, and then paid a man with a car to take them to her grandparents' house out in the country. Her grandparents were long gone, but her mother had kept the house to go to in the summer.
And the man with the car took a thousand detours to get there. It took them well over an hour, and when they arrived, she could see why. The house, and a number like it, had been leveled.
“What happened?” she asked, looking horrified, and afraid that Toyo would be frightened. It looked as though the whole mountainside had caught fire, and it had. In August.
“A bomb,” he said sadly. “There were a lot of them. Just before Hiroshima.” There weren't even any neighbors to talk to about it, and he took her finally to a small Shinto shrine that she remembered going to once with her grandmother years before. And there was a priest there.
He looked at her like a ghost when she said who she was, and he shook his head. Yes, he knew her parents.
Did he know where they'd gone? He hesitated for a long time before he answered.
‘To heaven, with their ancestors,” he said, looking apologetic but holy. Both of her parents had apparently been killed in the bombing, along with several friends, some relatives, and all their neighbors. It had happened three months before. Three months before, they'd been alive, while she had been at Lake Tahoe, but there was no way she could have come then.