Letters from the End of the World: History | Asian American Bookview

Letters from the End of the World
by Toyofumi Ogura
Kodansha International, Tokyo, New York, 1997, 192pp, $25
A firsthand account of the bombing of Hiroshima
EXCERPT

hat was a huge lightning bolt!" I thought. Then I lost consciousness. This was in front of the Fukuya department store."
Fumiyo,
That was what you said, the words coming out in broken phrases, when I finally found you alive on the night of August 7. On the morning of the sixth, when you were standing at Hatchobori in front of Fukuya's, I happened to be near Mukainada, walking toward the city of Hiroshima.
It was a find morning, windless and sultry, typical for the area around Hiroshima, as you know. The midsummer morning sunlight filled the sky to the point of overflowing. The brilliance of the light glinting off the mist in the blue sky was almost painful. The air-raid alert had been lifted about thirty minutes or an hour before and I was walking absentmindedly along the dusty paved road. I came to the east side of Shin'ozu Bridge. I stopped there for a minute, and just as I looked toward the sea and noticed the way the waves were sparkling, I saw, or rather felt, an enormous bluish white flash of light, as when a photographer lights a dish of magnesium. Off to the right, the sky split open over the city of Hiroshima. I instinctively flung myself facedown onto the ground.

I lay there without moving. Then I raised my head and looked up over the city. To the west, in the sky that had been blue a minute before, I saw a mass of white clouds--or was it smoke? Whichever it was, it had taken shape in an instant. Then a halo of sparkling lights, a little bit like the ring that forms around the moon as a sign of rain, appeared near the cloud mass and expanded like a rainbow. The outer edge of the white cloud mass rolled down and curled inward toward the center while the entire shape ballooned out to the sides.

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