On Monday, August 6, 1945, an American bomber dropped a nuclear bomb on the Japanese city, Hiroshima. Thousands of people died, some of which ran burning alive to the river that runs through the city, jumped in to try to save themselves, and died there. Their relatives went there and scattered flowers on the river in their honour. That's where the title, The Flowers of Hiroshima, comes from.
The novel takes place 14 years after the end of the war. An American comes to Hiroshima, and rents a room from the narrator of the novel, a Japanese woman who lives in the house with her husband, and her kids. Her sister lives there also. She doesn't want to tell this American anything about the bombing and the impact that has had on their lives, but it slowly comes out.
It is an interesting novel, sometimes quite beautiful, but this horrible event is always lurking in the background. It touches, or taints everything in this family's life. It shows very well how the brutality of war can have consequences far beyond the war itself. That of course isn't something that only applies to this event. All nations that take part in wars deal with the consequences of those wars long after peace treaties have been signed. But it is difficult to find an single event with one bomb that took place in a war that matches the bombing of Hiroshima. And that is always there in the background.
I thought it was an interesting novel in most aspects. There was one thing though that I did wonder about and that is the fact that the writer is a Swedish American, and not Japanese. If she had decided to make the narrator the American of the novel who is looking at the Japanese and trying to understand what happened there I think it would have been different, but she makes the Japanese woman the narrator. It didn't really bother me as such, but still, because of this, there were a few times when I thought to myself how would a Japanese writer have described this.
Edita Morris did have some connection to Japan. For example, her son, Ivan Morris, visited Hiroshima very soon after the bomb was dropped, and the novel is to some extend based on his experiences of being there. Edita, and her husband later founded a rest house in Hiroshima for victims of the bomb. So she clearly had connection to Hiroshima, and the events that took place there, but I did occasionally wonder if she got the cultural aspect correctly, or if something had got lost in translation.
Despite this, I enjoyed the novel very much. It moved me at times. And to be honest, I can't point to anything she got wrong, after all I'm not from Japan either. I think it is definitely worth the read, and the bombing of Hiroshima is really worth remembering. It is a stark reminder of just how brutal wars can be. But what the novel also shows is the humanity of individuals, how different we are, but at the same time so similar.