“The injured were sprawled out over the railroad tracks, scorched and black. When I walked by, they moaned in agony. ‘Water… water…’

I heard a man in passing announce that giving water to the burn victims would kill them. I was torn. I knew that these people had hours, if not minutes, to live. These burn victims – they were no longer of this world.

‘Water… water…’

I decided to look for a water source. Luckily, I found a futon nearby engulfed in flames. I tore a piece of it off, dipped it in the rice paddy nearby, and wrang it over the burn victims’ mouths. There were about 40 of them. I went back and forth, from the rice paddy to the railroad tracks. They drank the muddy water eagerly. Among them was my dear friend Yamada. ‘Yama- da! Yamada!’ I exclaimed, giddy to see a familiar face. I placed my hand on his chest. His skin slid right off, exposing his flesh. I was mortified. ‘Water…’ he murmured. I wrang the water over his mouth. Five minutes later, he was dead.

...

Everywhere, as far as my eyes could reach, all the houses had collapsed, all the trees and electric poles had been broken down. About two kilometres away, around the spot which later proved to be the explosion centre, thick dark smoke whirled up from a sea of yellowish dust.

I remained stunned, completely stunned. The next moment I heard a faint groan, then disconnected words that seemed to come up from the bottom of the earth: "Yuko . . . dead . . . I’m dying . . . don't stay ..." It was my wife, but it was not anything like a voice uttered by a human being: it was a voice squeezed out from the last bit of life in death's grip. "What? Be strong now! . . . Where are you? Where are you?" As if in reply, a pile of tangled timbers moved with a creaking noise. Bleeding all over, my wife stood upright, with our two-month-old baby tightly in her arms.

All around us we heard shouting, groaning, cursing, voices calling father, voices calling mother, voices in search of brothers and sisters. All over the central part of town flames were shooting out as if the earth's crust had been ripped open. And these sorely burnt men and women all in stark nakedness! It was as if our corrupt world had come to an end, giving way to hell. My wife was most painfully wounded. On her whole body were stuck countless fragments of glass, large and small, that reflected pallid lights like a glittering spearhead of a demon. She could see nothing.

I took my wife on my back, and held the baby on my left arm. We walked three hundred metres, stepping barefooted on the debris and broken sheets of glass that went to pieces under our weight, and took refuge on a sand bank in a river where the tide had ebbed. Here we joined hundreds of suffering people, and the sound of the frantic search of parents for their children was heartrending enough to make one giddy.

....

But it wasn't that bad, right?