Hiroshima in the Morning
Rahna Reiko Rizzuto
Language: English
Pages: 336
ISBN: 1558616675
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
It is her first solo life adventure, immediately exhilarating for her, but her research starts off badly. Interviews with the hibakusha feel rehearsed, and the survivors reveal little beyond published accounts. Then the attacks on September 11 change everything. The survivors' carefully constructed memories are shattered, causing them to relive their agonizing experiences and to open up to Rizzuto in astonishing ways.
Separated from family and country while the world seems to fall apart, Rizzuto's marriage begins to crumble as she wrestles with her ambivalence about being a wife and mother. Woven into the story of her own awakening are the stories of Hiroshima in the survivors' own words. The parallel narratives explore the role of memory in our lives and show how memory is not history but a story we tell ourselves to explain who we are.
Rahna Reiko Rizzuto's highly acclaimed first novel, Why She Left Us, won an American Book Award in 2000. She is a faculty member in the MFA in creative writing program at Goddard College, and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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quiet moment to plan our future. I conjure an image of my children playing in the surf on the beaches in Hawaii. “Ian sounded a little sad last night when I talked to him. Or not very talkative.” “He’s fine. He’s five. Phones are strange for kids. It’s like you’re a ghost.” “Mmmm.” I don’t like the sound of that but I know what he means. I am constantly having to say to my youngest, “Honey, are you still there? Mommy can’t hear you when you nod you know. You have to make a noise.” I switch
become comfort women is totally false. It’s nothing but ridiculous. That’s why we don’t take it seriously. And one other thing is, we Japanese believe that we don’t really have to speak up to let the world know the truth. We know that the truth will come out in the end no matter what. So, we just let people say whatever they want to say. It’s degrading to confront those Korean people. “We all think that way.” —the Colonel THE COLONEL HERE IS THE ANGER I’ve been looking for. He is full of
reunion has all the markings of a disaster, but cutting his time short would be even worse. Your dates are fine, I tell him. Your dates are great. November 16 to January 14. “We were living in Canada. We got no news, except that the atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima, and then we got a telegram from my grandfather saying, ‘Come home, just the four of you.’ Meaning, just leave everything and come. “I was fourteen. I had never been to Japan, and I didn’t know the Hiroshima dialect then. I
Yoshida is digging pits and piling bodies, and there’s a bonfire of burning flesh just outside the building day and night. The stories are flooding in from every direction, and I am catching what I can, absorbing what I can, trusting the tape recorder to catch the overflow: there is a clerk directing patients like traffic—he wears a headband and carries a sword, but was he a clerk at the hospital or somewhere else—and why the sword? A family heirloom saved from a falling building? Protection
