During the months after the bombing, the author was obsessed with recording what he saw and heard in the days spent searching for his wife and small son. Walking through the scorched rubble, Ogura was stunned by the extent of the destruction. At one point he tried to move aside a corpse lying in his path; he took it by the legs and thought for a minute that his hands had slipped, but then found that the skin had peeled off and slid, wrinkled, down around the ankles.
He describes the fate of his wife's niece Eiko, trapped beneath the family home when it begins to bum: her mother tried to free her but was forced away, despite Eiko's cries, by smoke and flying embers. Later, when the wreckage was shoveled away, all that was left was the girl's bleached white bones.
Eventually Ogura finds his wife and son alive, but he quickly learns the gravity of his wife's radiation sickness, to which he soon loses her. In these letters, written to her in the year following her death, Ogura turns an unflinching eye on the horrors he saw and on his own private grief.
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