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April 30, 1946.

Rummaging through the burnt wreckage of a house, Akiko looked sharply, desperately for any scrap of food. Despite frantic digging, she found nothing. Nothing except fragments of an old issue of Story magazine from March 1940, according to the date on the cover. Why it hadn’t been turned to kindling long ago she had no idea. Perhaps it had been because of the cover, depicting a beautiful young woman dressed elegantly in the latest fashion of that time. Once, such clothes had been plenty, and Akiko would have liked to have worn something like that herself. But such things were idle fantasy these days.

With a dejected sigh, she got up and looked around. Once, this had been a fairly small yet prosperous village some 15 km north of the city of Kōchi, the capital of Kōchi Prefecture on the island of Shikoku. Now, like so much of the prefecture, like so much of the island, it was a deserted and partially burnt out shell, left to the elements.

Wandering through the empty streets, the nine-year-old girl once again thought back to her old ward of Setagaya in Tokyo, where she had been born five years before the war with America started, the second daughter of an officer in the Imperial Army and a housewife. When the war situation had worsened (she could not help but recall how Japan’s victories, as reported by the NHK and other media, had been steadily occurring closer and closer to the Home Islands) and the first air raids by the B-29s had started, she and her family had been evacuated from Tokyo, being relocated to Shikoku and Kōchi in 1944.

At first it hadn’t been so bad, and it had felt like more of an adventure than something dangerous. The first indication that things weren’t so good, though, had been when her mother had forbidden her from going to the beach and swimming in the ocean. She had heard that there were American submarines prowling about, and mines, and other hideous dangers. This had dismayed her greatly, for she had always loved swimming, and had even idly fantasized about taking part in the Olympics some day and winning the gold medal, like Hideko Maehata in the Berlin Olympics.

Barking interrupted her reminiscing, and she turned and ran toward the direction where it came. Coming to the end of the street, she was just able to see a mangy stray dog turn tail and run like the wind down a dry gulley.

Her mouth watered even as her stomach grumbled. It was no wonder the dog had turned tail and run; these days Man was the most dangerous predator of dogs. As the food shortages had steadily worsened, people had increasingly turned to other sources of nutrition. Dogs, cats, horses, zoo animals… everything was fair game. It was like the hunger towns of old, when entire villages would starve if the harvest failed. Akiko had even seen grown men fight to the death over a single rat.

She looked around warily. In these times one couldn’t trust strangers. It was every man and woman for himself or herself. One’s family was all that mattered.

Family… Father. Mother. Sister. The girl squatted on the dirt as the memories overwhelmed her.

*

For her, July 3, 1945 had been the beginning of purgatory. That was the day when the American Air Force struck Kōchi, burning half the city to the ground. Thankfully, none of her family had been killed or injured, but many others had been, and their house had been destroyed. The remaining hospitals had overflowed with the dead, the injured and the dying, and she heard there had been little to no medicine available, as everything had been allocated for the Army.

They had been forced to relocate to a ramshackle house on the outskirts of the city. Things had only worsened from there. Food became ever scarcer, disease became ever more rampant. The grumblings, muted and small in number at first, became ever louder and more numerous. The Americans freely roamed the skies and struck at will. Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been each obliterated by a single bomb – the pikadon bomb. The defence fighters of the Kōkū Sōgun – the Air General Army - were nowhere to be seen.

Then came the August 15th Incident, when treasonous elements in the government and military had attempted to overthrow the Emperor and deliver Japan to the Americans. Only the heroic and decisive actions of General Anami had saved the Emperor and averted disaster, at least according to the NHK, and why would they lie?

So Japan had continued to fight on. And the bombings had continued, food had become ever scarcer, the children had become ever hungrier. Fear and paranoia had reached new heights; whenever a B-29 appeared in the sky the entire city would fall into a screaming panic, with people trampling over each other in an effort to get to imaginary safety. And school had changed, as well. Much of it had already been heavily tinted toward patriotism and obedience toward the Emperor, at the expense of regular school subjects, but now it proceeded to consume almost the entire curriculum. From the start of the school day to the end, the children would be drilled almost non-stop on the virtues of total obedience, self-sacrifice and hatred for the American, British and Russian devils. And woe unto anyone who failed to show the required amount of dedication… Akiko shuddered as she thought back to that day in late August, when one of her classmates had broken down in class and wailed about his hunger, about his sick sister, about his brother who had gone MIA in the Philippines, about how he feared the B-san and how he just wanted the war to stop. Her teacher had flown into a terrible berserk rage, beaten the boy black and blue and dragged him screaming to the principal’s office. The rest of the class had denounced him, of course, either out of patriotism, or of fear of being singled out next. Or both.

*

Shaking herself away from the memories, Akiko got up and walked out of the ruins of the village. On both sides of the path she walked were looted and despoiled grain fields, stripped bare by masses of hunger-maddened refugees despite fierce resistance by the farmers. There was no sight of the refugees, now. Nor was there any sight of the farmers.

Life for Akiko and her family had become much harder after the bombing. Their only source of income had been her father’s monthly army major’s salary, which he had arranged to be paid to them, as he had been stationed in China. Yet by that stage money had had little meaning as everything was strictly rationed, and virtually no food could be purchased legally. By autumn they had been forced to use the money to buy food from the black market, an already-risky proposition that had become ever riskier after the August Incident. Black marketeers and their customers were severely punished, and the police had placed checkpoints in the countryside to catch anyone trying to buy or sell food illegally.

Eventually, the prices in the black market had risen to such heights that only a fraction of the food needed could be bought. It was then that Akiko’s teenaged elder sister Kazuyo had taken up measures of her own. Akiko did not know the details; all she knew was that every few days, Kazuyo would come back late in the evening from who knows where, carrying rice and other needed food. And each time she returned, she looked like she had lost another small piece of her soul. Akiko didn’t know what her sister had been doing in those evenings, and she hadn’t mustered the courage to ask. She had sensed that their mother had known what was going on, judging by the distraught expression on the older woman’s face whenever Kazuyo would finally come home, but she likewise had never dared ask her daughter.

Winter had been harsh and many had perished, yet somehow her family had survived. One factor had probably been the drafting of her mother, her sister and Akiko herself to “National Service Units,” masses of civilians tasked by the local authorities to scavenge every source of nutrition, from picking moss to scraping rock tripe from cliff faces, as had been done during the time of the shoguns. It had been hard work, but at least it had meant a steady, if meagre, source of food for the three of them and Akiko’s two younger siblings, her 6-year-old brother Takao and 3-year-old sister Takayo. It was at this point that the family had been relocated to a village several miles away from the city in order to be closer to the work at hand. In any case, the work interfering with schoolwork was no longer an issue, either, as the schools had been closed since November “for an indefinite period, until the restoration of regular order,” as the proclamation had read. This had also coincided with the cessation of all remaining rail traffic and power generation, which had plunged society almost overnight back over a hundred years. What little, diminishing petrol was left had been reserved entirely for the military.

Walking down the road, Akiko saw a shape dangling from a tree a few hundred meters in front of her. Getting closer, she realized it was the desiccated, bird-eaten body of a man. Around its neck was a placard with one word: THIEF. Maggots crawled all over what remained of the man’s clothing and flesh, his mouth permanently open in a silent scream.

A loud roar came suddenly and unexpectedly from behind and above. By instinct, Akiko threw herself to the ground. Looking up, she saw two of the new American jet fighters fly over and away from her at a very low altitude. Getting up, she dusted herself off as she watched the rapidly diminishing fighters, still flying at low altitude. And why not? She could no longer remember the last time she had even seen Japanese anti-aircraft fire, let alone Japanese fighter planes. She wasn’t even sure if the Imperial Army even existed anymore. It was very hard to get any information from the wider world, as there had been no news broadcasts since February, and the last newspapers had been published back in November.

All at once there were explosions on the road about a kilometre ahead of her. She then heard rather than saw the jet fighters fly away to the west, toward Kyushu.

With a quick jog (going as fast as her famished body would allow), she soon arrived at the scene of destruction. Trees were blown to smithereens. Bicycles and fragments of bicycles were everywhere. As well as bodies and fragments of bodies. All of them with army uniforms.

The sound of moaning caught her attention. Running toward its source, she came upon the mangled remains of a soldier. Both of his legs had been blown off beneath the knees, and half his face was just… gone. Yet, the man was still moaning.

Akiko watched with her eyes wide open and her entire body trembling, covering her mouth with her hand, as the man noticed her with his remaining eye and stretched both his arms at her. Whatever he had tried to say only came out as a pitiful gurgle, saliva and blood flowing from the corner of his mouth. Then his arms dropped and the man became still and silent, his eye still open.

She stood still for a moment, before collecting herself and proceeding to rifle through the soldier’s pockets. Then she proceeded to do the same with all the other bodies that she could find. It was not the first time that she had done such a thing. True enough, she soon had half a dozen small boxes of canned kanpan bread, which the army issued as field rations to the troops. She opened one of the boxes and bit into the kanpan. It was dry and hard, yet at that moment it tasted and felt like a sumptuous meal to her. Having finished the bread, she resisted the temptation to gobble up the rest and instead put the rest inside the purple scarf wrapped around her waist that she used as a makeshift purse. The bread would be for her siblings, especially her younger ones.

Only then did she see something on the ground that made her forget about the bread. It was white and grainy. Not believing her eyes, she bent down for a closer look. Rice. And pieces of sackcloth. And there was more of the stuff around. The soldiers had been transporting rice on their bikes!

“There has to be a whole sack around here, they can’t all have blown open,” she muttered to herself. She searched around the detritus for the next few minutes, finding not one but two such bags, both of them with “1 kg” printed on them.

She lifted them up. They would have been heavy for any girl her age, more so for one who was chronically malnourished, but at that moment she didn’t care about the weight, nor for the fact that she’d have to walk quite a way before she’d reach the abandoned dwelling at the edge of the forest that served as the home for her and her three siblings.

*

Their mother had been in Kōchi when the Americans had dropped their pikadon bomb on the city on April 6th. She had gone there to seek news about their father, of whom no word had been received since early August. Despite repeated visits, she had failed to get any information whatsoever about his fate. Censorship had prevented any news from the Chinese front, yet her mother had received snippets of information from sympathetic army officers, out of earshot of the kempeitai. These had not been good; according to them, Manchukuo had been overrun by the Russians, and most of the mainland had been lost to the Chinese. The only Japanese military formation in China known to be still intact was the Tenth Area Army in Taiwan under the command of General Andō, the Governor-General of Taiwan. This detail had been no good for them, though, since Taiwan was not where their father had been stationed. They had no way of knowing whether he was dead, alive or taken prisoner.

The four of them had heard the engine of the B-29, then seen the pika – the flash – on the horizon in the direction of the city, followed by the don – the sound of the bomb going off in the distance. Akiko and Kazuyo had wanted to immediately go and look for their mother, yet they had held back, remembering the rumors following the previous pikadon attacks. About how the people in and around the cities attacked, even those otherwise uninjured, had been struck down by a mysterious illness to which there was no cure.

So they had watched and waited the whole day, and the night after that, but their mother hadn’t returned. The thin streams of refugees passing through the village had told tales of unmitigated destruction, of all-consuming firestorms and people resembling the living dead walking the streets. Akiko remembered wondering what had been the point of the Americans dropping another of their bombs on Kōchi, seeing as they had already burned down half the city eight months previous. Maybe they had been simply running out of cities to burn.

It was on the third day after the bomb that Akiko and her siblings had been evicted from their dwelling and the village itself, along with all the other non-locals. Resources were scarce, and the villagers had no inclination to look after strangers anymore. By this time any and all semblance of government, law and order had been rapidly disintegrating. It was as if the destruction of the city had finally unleashed all the pent-up stress and emotions in the region. Mass rioting and panic had spread like wildfire. What police and military units had remained had quickly disintegrated. Those officers who had tried to keep their units together and in order had found themselves outnumbered and outgunned by their mutinous men. As for the police, they had once been greatly feared for their cruelty and brutality, especially in the rural areas. Now, with the onset of general chaos, people’s hunger, anger, desperation and fear of death had finally overcome their fear of the law. Akiko still remembered vividly how a group of twenty of so children of various ages had swarmed a police officer. The constable had furiously struck first one, then another child with his billy club before collapsing, the tendons of his feet having been sliced from behind by a third child. The rest of the children had then piled onto him, stabbing, hitting, bashing him with rocks, punching, kicking, scratching and biting him. His screams had gotten ever louder and shriller before suddenly ceasing…

The village from where she and her family had been evicted had itself been attacked and overrun by a huge mass of people only a week later. They had heard sporadic gunfire in the distance. When Kazuyo and Akiko had dared to venture forth to look a few days later (leaving their younger siblings to wait in the abandoned house they had found, with strict orders to stay hidden and avoid any and all strangers), they had found a scene of utter devastation: looted and burned down houses, ruined fields and bodies strewn all over the place. Some had gunshot wounds, but most had either been stabbed, slashed or beaten to death. When Kazuyo had seen the state of the female corpses, she had urgently told Akiko to immediately look away, but Akiko had had just enough time to see that the women had been in various stages of undress, with some of them being stark naked…

Since that dreadful day, life had been constant struggle. With the disappearance of their mother, Kazuyo had taken on the role of the family parent. At first, only she had ventured forth to scavenge and look for food, since at 16 she was the most able-bodied in the family, while Akiko would stay behind and look after her brother and younger sister.

Eventually, however, pretty much all the available food in the immediate area had been exhausted, necessitating Kazuyo to go even further away in search for food. Soon, Akiko had had to do the same thing in order to increase their chances of everyone getting enough food to at least make it through the day. Now Takao had had to take up the role of looking after his little sister. At the rate things were going, they would all have to pack up what little they had and migrate elsewhere…

*

She grunted as she walked with her load to the edge of the blasted road. The kanpan cans clanged together as she began to climb the low but steep incline. She was now very eager to get as far away from the bicycles and bodies as possible. If she had heard the explosions, others would have as well. It was only a stroke of luck that she had managed to be the first person at the scene. In a few minutes the road would be swarming with scavengers. Who would surely be bigger and stronger than her. And she had seen enough to know that she could only rely on stealth and speed…

“Oi! Youjo-chan, wait up!” a jovial male voice rang out just as she came to the summit of the incline. She turned around instantly, wide-eyed.

Down below were three men looking at her. Two of them were dressed in fragments of Imperial Army uniforms. All three looked filthy and malnourished, their beards unshaved. All of them carried a bladed object in their hands: the smiling man who had addressed her held a bayonet, another held a knife, while the third carried a pair of scissors.

Somehow seeing the tattered uniforms distressed her and once again reminded her of her father. This was odd in a sense, since she already had few memories of him on account of him having been away so much while she had been growing up. Yet, one of her few clear memories of him was how handsome and dashing he had looked in his uniform. A complete contrast to the shambling creatures standing in front of her, like starving wolves.

The men’s eyes widened when they saw the rice bags she carried. The one who had called her took a step forward.

“Is that rice you’re carrying? Yes, yes it is,” he said as he took another step.

“Don’t come any closer! What do you want?” Akiko called out, taking a step back.

The man kept smiling and held out his hands in a placating manner. “No worries little girl, we don’t wanna harm you. We just want the same as you. Come on, times are hard, where would we be if we didn’t help each other? Share and share alike, that’s all we’re asking.” He took another step forward.

While the man in the centre was talking and smiling, the other two began to fan out and stroll, almost casually, toward the summit. This did not escape Akiko’s notice, as her eyes darted back and forth. All the time the man in the centre kept chatting affably. Yet, she could now see that the man’s smile did not extend to his eyes. Those cold and shifting eyes, and the reptilian calculations being made behind them. And though he was very slow, at no point did. He. Stop. Moving. Toward. Her.

She swung her foot back and kicked as hard at the gravel as she could, toward the man’s face. His hands instantly flew up to shield his eyes as he moved back, dropping the bayonet as he did so. Yet doing so caused him to lose his balance and he tumbled down the incline, gravel trailing after him.

Akiko turned and ran. She heard angry yells and cries behind her.

“Get her! Get the fuckin’ bitch!”

“Get the rice!”

She ran as fast as she could, but she could hear the men climbing after her. Weakened as they were, they would cross the summit in a manner of seconds. She had always been a fast runner, probably on account of her having always been tall for her age, so much so that her classmates back in Tokyo had called her “Long-legged Kojima.” But she was malnourished too, and weighed down with the rice. And long as her legs were, the men’s legs were longer. She only had seconds to decide. She needed the rice, her family needed it, especially Takayo-chan. Takayo-chan who these days coughed constantly. Takayo-chan who always received the most food at mealtime, often over the objections of a hungry Takao. But if the men overtook her – which they would – she would lose the rice… and more.

The rumors were rife, and though Akiko had never seen any actual evidence, she knew that people had… disappeared, never to be seen again. But was that so strange? After all, in an age where the strong took what they wanted from the weak, who was to say that the strong wouldn’t also satisfy themselves with the flesh of the weak?

And they also might do other… things to her. Unspeakable things. Things like what had been done to the dead women in the village, the women in various stages of undress…

She threw down one of the rice bags, never stopping with her running. Her burden eased immediately and she ran and ran despite her lungs feeling like they were about to burst, not looking back, even when the sound of pursuit ended instantly when the running steps came to a stop at where she had dumped the bag.

Then she heard other sounds. Sounds of argument, shouting… fighting. Only then did she turn around.

One of the men was lying on the ground, an object sticking out of his neck. The other two were locked in savage combat, their prior hierarchy and camaraderie instantly forgotten at the prospect of easy loot. She could see the punches and kicks, the slashes and stabbings, hear the furious and pained screams.

She then turned and resumed her running, not wanting to be around when the eventual victor emerged. Others would also be here very soon, and they might be stronger than the men she had just encountered. They might have guns. Best not to be anywhere near here when that happened.

She had had to sacrifice one rice bag, but she still had the other, in addition to the bread. The struggle for her and her siblings would continue tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that. But at least she was alive now, and would be alive tomorrow. In these harsh times, that alone was something to be thankful for.

So long as she was alive, there was hope.
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