He would spend three months in the village, picking through mud in the search for bodies. One day, the women called him over to the place where the bodies were laid out for washing. Among them was his own ten-year-old granddaughter, Nao. Abe had lifted her out himself. She had been so covered with mud that he had not recognised her. Nao’s nine-year-old younger sister, Mai, was found a week later, and their father a week after that. ‘The older girl was just the way she had always been,’ Abe told me. ‘She was perfect. It was just as if she was asleep. But a week later – well, seven days in those
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