Pushed by the crowd, I lost hold of my younger sister's hand. All that remained was the pair of *geta* sandals she had been wearing.

#nana56b


Opening line

Whenever we held hands, my grandmother would always grab my wrist instead of my palm.

“Grandma, not my hand—this one.”
She pushed my outstretched hand away and grabbed my wrist again.

“It’s better this way,” she said, but she never told me why.

Every summer vacation, I was sent to stay at my grandmother’s house, where she lived alone in a small town along the river.

We never went to see the fireworks at the summer festival. “I can’t stand crowds,” she’d say, and close the storm shutters early.

But she often took me to the quiet riverbank nearby to watch the fireflies.

Even then, my grandmother would grip my wrist tightly.

On that one summer morning each year, my grandmother would sit seiza-style in front of the Buddhist altar for a long time.

The incense smoke rose straight up, and her small back—just for that moment—seemed as big as a mountain.

One summer during my second year of junior high, I had to visit the Peace Memorial Museum for a school assignment.

“Grandma, why don’t you come with me…?” I asked,

but Grandma answered without looking at me.

“I’m fine. I don’t need to go—it’s right here inside me.”


I didn’t truly understand the meaning of those words until a typhoon-stricken night during my senior year of high school.

Amid the power outage, gazing at the candle flame, my grandmother began to speak quietly.

That day, the sky suddenly flashed, and a moment later, a sound—if you could even call it that—came.

Before she knew it, my grandmother found herself lying on top of what had been the town just moments before.

“It wasn’t about being hot or in pain—it wasn’t anything like that.”

“It was as if the whole world had been turned upside down.”

My grandmother called out the name of her younger sister, Sayo—who was four years her junior—and pulled her dusty hand out from among the rubble.

The two of them held hands and walked toward the river.

She said they could hear the voices of people, their throats parched, crying out for water from all around.

“We held hands so we wouldn’t get swept away, and walked along the bank.”

“But even so, a lot of people were pushing us from behind.”