Shin's Tricycle

A father, Nobuo Tetsutani, remembers the morning his little boy Shinichi is playing on a tricycle when the atomic bomb hits Hiroshima. Hours later he crawls through broken timber and concrete and finds Shin still gripping the handlebars, burned and pinned beneath the collapsed house. He pulls him free, searches for water and help, and stays close as the child’s breathing grows shallow. That night Shin dies, and Nobuo cannot leave him to strangers, so he buries his son in the garden together with the tricycle he loved. Decades later the family opens the grave so Shin and his sisters can be reburied properly, and the digging turns up tricycle parts and small remains. In the soil they also find two tiny hands clasped together, Shin and a neighborhood girl, Kimiko, who died beside him. Nobuo donates the tricycle to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum so the object can tell the story in silence.