The 1945 Kobe Bombing

The 1945 Kobe Bombing, as Nishio-san recounts it, is a catastrophe experienced from beneath the rubble: a seven-year-old child repeatedly digs toward the surface, only to be buried again as explosions continue. Her account moves between the instinct to seek life and the discovery of death, and finally turns survival into a burden sharpened by the loss of her family. In the book, the event reaches the reader through Nishio-san’s later telling, not as the narrator’s own firsthand memory.

Nishio-san’s Childhood Account

One morning in 1945, when Nishio-san was seven, bombs began falling on Kobe. She had heard bombing before, but only at a distance. This time, she believed the bombs were intended for her family, and the fear of that immediate danger shaped her response: lying on the tatami, she hoped death would come while she slept. An enormous explosion struck close by. She felt as if she had been torn into tiny pieces, then, surprised to find herself alive, tried to move and determine whether her limbs were still attached. The obstruction around her revealed what had happened: she had been buried alive.

Her first effort to escape was made with her hands. Digging, she hoped she was moving upward, although she could not tell which direction would lead out. In the dirt she encountered an arm. She could not know whether it remained attached to a body, but she was certain its owner was dead. The detail makes the danger intimate and immediate: before Nishio-san can see the destruction above ground, she meets its human consequence in the confined darkness around her.

Digging Toward the Sounds

Nishio-san stopped when she began to suspect that she might be digging the wrong way. She listened, heard cries, and turned toward them. The rule guiding her was simple: “That is where there is life.” The sound gave her a direction when sight and certainty were unavailable. Yet reaching the surface did not bring the safety she expected. Among the skeletons of houses, she saw shreds of human flesh and had barely enough time to recognize her father’s head before another great explosion buried her beneath debris again.

The reversal unsettles the instinct that had kept her moving. The noise had seemed to promise life, but the surface it led her toward held death. Nishio-san briefly considered remaining in the shelter of her earth tomb, where there seemed to be greater security and fewer horrors. Gradually, however, she began to suffocate. She dug toward the noise again, afraid of what she would find, and emerged only to be buried once more. The sequence repeats until escape itself becomes a cycle: each ascent is interrupted by another explosion, and each return underground renews the need to try again.

Survival and Family Loss

Nishio-san could not say how long the repeated blasts and attempts to emerge lasted. She describes digging again and again because the instinct to crawl upward was stronger than she was. By then, she knew her father was dead and her house destroyed, but did not know what had happened to her mother and brothers. The uncertainty persisted until the bombing stopped and people cleared away the debris. They found the missing in the wreckage, whole or in pieces; her mother and brothers were among the dead.

The account ends its chain of immediate discoveries with a comparison that reveals the extremity of Nishio-san’s experience: she was jealous of her sister, who had been hit by a train two years earlier, because the sister had escaped this nightmare. Survival does not resolve the losses or restore the family home. Nishio-san’s testimony instead makes endurance inseparable from knowledge of who did not survive, and from the terrible contrast between her own repeated emergence and her sister’s earlier death.

Retelling and Narrative Significance

The bombing is presented as a memory told by Nishio-san to the narrator. The narrator asks whether she is sure she wants to tell the story; Nishio-san agrees to speak, and the narrator listens as she describes both the physical ordeal and the deaths of her family. The frame matters: the event is not narrated as the child narrator’s personal recollection of the bombing, but as Nishio-san’s account of what happened to her when she was seven.

Elsewhere, the narrator says that memory begins with the white chocolate in February 1970, and distinguishes those later firsthand memories from the earlier period, which must be reconstructed from what other people have told her. Nishio-san’s bombing story belongs to that earlier history and therefore reaches the reader as another person’s testimony, received and retold. The narrator also observes that Nishio-san’s stories ended with body parts, a pattern starkly present here in the arm found underground and the bodies uncovered after the bombing. That recurring physical imagery preserves the story’s horror without turning survival into a neat resolution: the account closes on continued digging, the end of the bombing, and the identification of the dead.