Fleeing from her house through the fires on the day of the bombing, she had saved nothing but a rucksack of emergency clothing, a blanket, an umbrella, and a suitcase of things she had stored in her air-raid shelter she had much earlier evacuated a few kimonos to Kabe in fear of a bombing. Gradually, the worst of the symptoms abated, but she remained feeble the slightest exertion wore her out. A month after the bombing, she came down with radiation sickness she lost most of her hair and lay in bed for weeks with a high fever in the house of her sister-in-law in the suburb of Kabe, worrying all the time about how to support her children.
Her son and two daughters-ten, eight, and five years old-were buried in rubble when the blast of the bomb flung her house down. She lost her mother, a brother, and a sister to the atomic bomb. Her husband, a tailor, had been taken into the Army and had been killed at Singapore on the day of that city’s capture, February 15, 1942. In August, 1946, a year after the bombing of Hiroshima, Hatsuyo Nakamura was weak and destitute.
