Second World War

The Second World War is a decisive past presence in the novel, encountered less as a continuous account of military events than through what it has done to places, families, and memory. Nagasaki’s destruction and reconstruction form the visible aftermath, while stories of hardship in Tokyo show how wartime experience travels between generations and returns in fragments years later.

Destruction and the Rebuilt City

Etsuko recalls living with her husband in an area east of central Nagasaki, near a river. She had been told that a small village once stood on its bank; after the bomb fell, only charred ruins remained. In the years that followed, rebuilding reached the area in fits and starts. Four concrete apartment blocks went up, each containing around forty apartments, but Etsuko’s block was the last, and construction stopped there. Between the buildings and the river stretched several acres of dried mud and ditches. Poor drainage left craters of stagnant water, and officials periodically took measurements or notes without making improvements.

The new apartments belonged to a changing postwar landscape: identical homes with tatami floors and Western-style kitchens and bathrooms, often rented to young couples through their husbands’ expanding firms. Their residents appeared broadly satisfied, but Etsuko remembers an unmistakable sense of impermanence, as though everyone were waiting to move somewhere better. The unfinished ground beside the blocks makes reconstruction feel both real and incomplete: buildings have returned, but the city’s recovery has not reached every space.

Wartime Hardship and Civilian Memory

The war’s effects are also conveyed through Sachiko’s account of her earlier life in Tokyo. She describes prolonged danger and displacement, with people living in tunnels and derelict buildings amid rubble. Mariko, her daughter, witnessed distressing scenes there. One morning, after Mariko ran into the streets and Sachiko followed, they encountered a young woman beside a canal holding a baby. Sachiko says the woman later died by suicide. The episode, which Mariko continued to remember, brings wartime suffering into the novel through a child’s lasting memory rather than a broad historical explanation.

Sachiko connects this past to the circumstances surrounding Mariko’s birth. She reflects that she may have been foolish to marry when war seemed imminent, while also acknowledging that she could not have known what war would actually be like. She had married into a respected family and had not expected conflict to transform her circumstances so profoundly. The war thus appears not only as destruction in the landscape but as a force that unsettles the assumptions on which family life had been built.

Aftermath and Social Change

Etsuko’s memories of the period after the fighting emphasize both relief and transition. American soldiers remained in Japan while the Korean War was under way, yet Nagasaki seemed calm in comparison with what had come before. The city’s renewed life could be viewed from above: after an outing to Inasa, Etsuko looks across the harbour and the rebuilt area and contrasts its vitality with the devastation caused by the bomb. To her, the visible recovery offers reason to look ahead, though the incomplete wasteland near her home complicates any simple picture of restoration.

The postwar break also appears in arguments over education and national identity. Ogata-San mourns the dismantling of the school system he had served and believes that it had once passed discipline, loyalty, and duty to the young. Jiro counters that the old system taught children to memorize claims of Japan’s divine and superior status. Their disagreement shows how the war’s legacy extends beyond physical destruction: the values and historical lessons taught before the defeat become subjects of dispute in a society being remade.

Memory Across Generations

The novel presents wartime experience through retrospective, incomplete accounts. Etsuko’s recollections return during a later visit from Niki, when Keiko’s death is also present between mother and daughter, though they rarely discuss it directly. Etsuko says that remembering Sachiko is part of the circumstances of that visit, and acknowledges that memory may be colored by the conditions in which it is recalled. The past therefore emerges not as a settled record but as something shaped by later grief, silence, and the act of telling.

Mariko’s lasting fixation on the woman and baby in Tokyo gives this transmission a different form: a child’s wartime encounter remains vivid within family life long afterward. In the present, Niki wonders whether her father should have looked after Keiko more. Etsuko’s recollections of wartime loss and the later family ruptures do not collapse into one event, but they place private responsibility alongside histories that cannot be repaired by reconstruction alone. The Second World War remains consequential because its effects persist in the places people inhabit, the stories they carry, and the explanations they struggle to give.