Nagano and her son opened the cabinet door and removed the lid from her older brother’s urn. His ikotsu (cremated remains) were white and pinkish, as she had expected. Those of her father, who had died three years after the bombing, were a mixture of black and white. When they opened Seiji’s and Kuniko’s ashes, Nagano shivered. “They were makkuro—totally black! They were white when we cremated them, but when we opened them, they were pitch-black.” The ashes of Nagano’s husband’s family who had died in the bombing were black, too. Her son felt sick. The monk told them that the ashes of twenty
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