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Hiroshima in the Morning
2010 FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD
In June 2001, Rahna Reiko Rizzuto went to Hiroshima in search of a deeper understanding of her war-torn heritage. She planned to spend six months there, interviewing the few remaining survivors of the atomic bomb. A mother of two young boys, she was encouraged to go by her husband, who quickly became disenchanted by her absence.
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.
In June 2001, Rahna Reiko Rizzuto went to Hiroshima in search of a deeper understanding of her war-torn heritage. She planned to spend six months there, interviewing the few remaining survivors of the atomic bomb. A mother of two young boys, she was encouraged to go by her husband, who quickly became disenchanted by her absence.
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.
336 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 2010
22 people are currently reading
836 people want to read
About the author
Rahna Reiko Rizzuto
4 books90 followersRahna Reiko Rizzuto's third book, Shadow Child, will be published by Grand Central in May 2018. Her memoir, Hiroshima in the Morning, was selected as a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Asian American Literary Award, and named the winner of the Grub Street National Book Prize. She is also the author of the novel, Why She Left Us, which won an American Book Award in 2000. Reiko is a recipient of the U.S./Japan Creative Artist Fellowship, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including the L.A. Times and Salon, and she has been a guest on The Today Show, 20/20, The View, among others. She was Associate Editor of The NuyorAsian Anthology: Asian American Writings About New York City, and teaches in the MFA program for creative writing at Goddard College. She is the founder of the Pele's Fire Writing Retreat on the Big Island of Hawaii.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 62 reviews
March 27, 2012
In this book, the author parallels the (her) tragedy of being held to/not wanting to be held to the responsibilities of marriage and parenthood to the bombing of Hiroshima and throws in 9/11 as the crux of this decision.
To be more clear: the backdrop is interviewing survivors of Hiroshima- the book is about a woman who goes there to write a book about them but ends up writing about herself interviewing these people while slowly detaching from her family.
How do you judge a book? This book is well-written, indulgent, and narcissistic. It's better quality is its use of transitions, putting memories into memories while discussing everything from a memory and alternating through them.
The book's saving grace is the chapter "On the Hill." This is the only part in the book that delves into the history of the event. This chapter reveals creepy details about the medical research and the "help" victims were receiving. The author also mentions having clearer evidence to support her claims as to what happened which would've been interesting but... that's not what this book is about.
If you're looking for a book that takes care in observing the tragedy of Hiroshima and reading the survivor's stories- read something else: short synapses of people's stories are sprinkled about giving the impressions of being tokens of proof.
Altogether the base reason for the book falters, the main character/author is uninteresting and relies heavily on subject matter to give this book some sort of care.
To be more clear: the backdrop is interviewing survivors of Hiroshima- the book is about a woman who goes there to write a book about them but ends up writing about herself interviewing these people while slowly detaching from her family.
How do you judge a book? This book is well-written, indulgent, and narcissistic. It's better quality is its use of transitions, putting memories into memories while discussing everything from a memory and alternating through them.
The book's saving grace is the chapter "On the Hill." This is the only part in the book that delves into the history of the event. This chapter reveals creepy details about the medical research and the "help" victims were receiving. The author also mentions having clearer evidence to support her claims as to what happened which would've been interesting but... that's not what this book is about.
If you're looking for a book that takes care in observing the tragedy of Hiroshima and reading the survivor's stories- read something else: short synapses of people's stories are sprinkled about giving the impressions of being tokens of proof.
Altogether the base reason for the book falters, the main character/author is uninteresting and relies heavily on subject matter to give this book some sort of care.
May 10, 2020
This is a book that people seem to love and hate, but who else but me shares this demographic. Went to Asia alone, left the husband with kids, Lived in Japan alone, have been to Hiroshima and Yokohama, Mom has Alzheimers, ended up divorced.
So every work resonated with me, and this woman isn't alone. I was different though in that I wanted my kids and loved them dearly and felt that as long as someone was home with them it didn't matter if it was the mom or the dad. The kids were in high school when I was gone for 3 months to China, and they were in college when we divorced.
But I had traveled to Japan alot and I remember how hard it was for my husband to take them when they were 5 and 7 to Japan to meet me. But I was with them on the way home and I was the one sitting next to my daughter when she threw up, so I think we were even. But he was alone with them and had never done it before, so I gues sit was harder for him.
The walk through the Peace museum is exactly as I remember it. It starts out clinical, with maps, and very matter of fact, the history of the war, then bit by bit it gets worse. It started with a slow burn designed to lure you in with your logical brain. To understand the reasonableness of war and what has to be done. and when you move to the other side, it is all there in its horror - a wave of emotion that you can't reason away. and it feels personal with little trinkets from school girls, and burned skin, and the shadow. You can never forget it.
Her dad printed out her emails, my mom printed out my blog.
How did she not know to get her son food at 7-Eleven. I was screaming at her. And it made me think of the peanut butter sandwiches I loved, a little sweet with whipped peanut butter and crimped edges with no crusts. And the pancakes, I have been dying for the package of 2 pancakes, with a little butter and maple syrup that you can microwave just for 10 seconds until it melts, and I can still taste it in my mouth. Wonderful.
The ban in her family where no one could know that her mother had Alzheimers? Why is that generation like that, why not have people that would help you and understand? It seems so odd to me, I tell people so that they know.
I had never heard that the Japanese really filled balloons with poisonous gas to p=float them across the Pacific. they launchd 9000 and some actually made it to America, causing brush fires. I had learned about it at the Edo museum when I was there.
The phone calls from her husband. She was not listening, just waiting for them to end. Same for me, they just went on and on, everything I did wrong. She didn't want to lose the last third of her fellowship, to be forced to remake the choice minute to minute, between her work and family. When they were there, she had to make the choice daily, I guess that is why people leave.
She is also afraid of losing her life(mind). Every time she forgets a word, she thinks, this is how it begins. When you know it could be short, where should the time be spent, who should you give it to?
So every work resonated with me, and this woman isn't alone. I was different though in that I wanted my kids and loved them dearly and felt that as long as someone was home with them it didn't matter if it was the mom or the dad. The kids were in high school when I was gone for 3 months to China, and they were in college when we divorced.
But I had traveled to Japan alot and I remember how hard it was for my husband to take them when they were 5 and 7 to Japan to meet me. But I was with them on the way home and I was the one sitting next to my daughter when she threw up, so I think we were even. But he was alone with them and had never done it before, so I gues sit was harder for him.
The walk through the Peace museum is exactly as I remember it. It starts out clinical, with maps, and very matter of fact, the history of the war, then bit by bit it gets worse. It started with a slow burn designed to lure you in with your logical brain. To understand the reasonableness of war and what has to be done. and when you move to the other side, it is all there in its horror - a wave of emotion that you can't reason away. and it feels personal with little trinkets from school girls, and burned skin, and the shadow. You can never forget it.
Her dad printed out her emails, my mom printed out my blog.
How did she not know to get her son food at 7-Eleven. I was screaming at her. And it made me think of the peanut butter sandwiches I loved, a little sweet with whipped peanut butter and crimped edges with no crusts. And the pancakes, I have been dying for the package of 2 pancakes, with a little butter and maple syrup that you can microwave just for 10 seconds until it melts, and I can still taste it in my mouth. Wonderful.
The ban in her family where no one could know that her mother had Alzheimers? Why is that generation like that, why not have people that would help you and understand? It seems so odd to me, I tell people so that they know.
I had never heard that the Japanese really filled balloons with poisonous gas to p=float them across the Pacific. they launchd 9000 and some actually made it to America, causing brush fires. I had learned about it at the Edo museum when I was there.
The phone calls from her husband. She was not listening, just waiting for them to end. Same for me, they just went on and on, everything I did wrong. She didn't want to lose the last third of her fellowship, to be forced to remake the choice minute to minute, between her work and family. When they were there, she had to make the choice daily, I guess that is why people leave.
She is also afraid of losing her life(mind). Every time she forgets a word, she thinks, this is how it begins. When you know it could be short, where should the time be spent, who should you give it to?
March 4, 2011
I just finished reading a beautifully written book that I received as part of a blog book review tour from Feminist Press. Did you know that some younger women do not like to be called feminists? What is up with that? But I digress.
Hiroshima in the Morning – a video from the author. Hiroshima in the Morning (click on the title for the video which is really well-done – I spent way too much time trying to get the Youtube video box to embed. I quit – just click on it.)
Rahna Reiko Rizzuto is the author and she is truly a writer. She is able to share her world in such beautiful language that I even dog-eared some pages so I would not lose the parts that I just had to re-read.
Here is an excerpt:
I can tell you the story but it won’t be true.
It won’t be the facts as they happened exactly, each day, each footstep, each breath. Time elides, events shift; sometimes we shift them on purpose and forget that we did. Memory is just how we choose to remember.
We choose. It begins in our house, on the top floors of a 19th century brownstone. I’m sitting at our long dining room table across from my husband Brian, my two, brightly-pajamaed sons asleep – finally – after slipping downstairs for water, and then just one more kiss between the banisters. The year is 2001, the place New York City, and in the quiet of the last, warming days of May, I am making a list.
I am a list maker, a super-organizer who measures her success in life by how many of the items she’s checked off. This is who I’ve always been, and it’s never occurred to me to question it. It occurs to me only that I have a goodbye party to throw for myself, which will involve a 25-pound pork butt, Hawaiian rock salt, and ten yards of purple plumeria-patterned fabric that I’ve ordered on the internet but has yet to arrive. If I think about plates, about feeding fifty of my dearest friends who will come to wish me well, I will not have to think of this trip of mine – my first trip away, my first trip alone, my six-month long “trip” to the other side of the world. Brian watches me busy myself. And then the question: “Why are you going to Japan?”
…In Brooklyn, in 2001, I was making a list. I knew I was leaving, but if I had known how thoroughly my life would shatter over the next six months, into gains just as astonishing as the losses; if I knew I was saying goodbye to the person I was that night, that decade, that lifetime; if I understood I was about to become someone new, too new, someone I was proud of, who I loved, but who was too different to fit here, in this particular, invisible narrative that I was sitting in but couldn’t feel, would I still have gotten on the airplane?
This is the question people will ask me. The question that curls, now, in the dark of the night. How do any of us decide to leave the people we love?
She shares her fears and doubts in a open honest account of her relationships that is rarely found even in our over-sharing world today. But I do have to confess that when I first read Ayelet Waldman‘s book blurb*, I took note – that is to say I was on high alert. Ms. Waldman has proven to be controversial (but never dull) and her own take on Motherhood has raised more than a few eyebrows…feminist or otherwise. I feared at first that this would be an anti-mothering screed that would make me uncomfortable. It is and it isn’t, it does and it doesn’t.
Ostensibly, it is the author’s journey to Japan to interview the surviving victims of Hiroshima and how her experience getting them to share is altered by 9/11 in that the people she is interviewing are suddenly more emotionally accessible after America also suffered a tragedy. The stories of the people who were in Hiroshima are heartbreaking and painful and raw. The stories are faithfully re-told and this part of the book I found moving and jarring and true.
While it isn’t a screed (a : a lengthy discourse b : an informal piece of writing (as a personal letter) c : a ranting piece of writing) – no wait, it kind of is one. It is a memoir of a woman who is searching for herself and her history and her relationships – past and present – and who is trying to see where she actually begins and ends…if that is at all possible.
While the writing is lovely, I got a little impatient with the author, a privileged person not unlike the heroine of Eat, Pray, Love. Oh, shut up. Julia Roberts is lovely and I am sure it was a nice movie (I read the book) but show me a real person (yes, you – the ones who bought the book or a ticket to the movie) who gets a major cash book advance, leaves her stultifying marriage and then pulls herself together by managing to finally (!) gain weight in Italy, meditate and hang out with some yogic cowboy in India and find love (I had something else here but this is a family blog) in an island paradise. But again, I digress.
The author, Rizzuto, has lots of time for self-reflection but isn’t very good at it. She comes across as the adolescent she refers to in her subway memory (only with a good vocabulary and a poetic way of writing about the world) and she is a pretty petulant one at that. I guess my biggest problem with the book is that after 9/11 and with her children and husband in New York City…the author didn’t go home. Okay? Really? How do you not go to your family? So there is some restriction that if she were out of the country for more than seven days it meant she would lose her grant. So…go home. The flight does not take seven days. That is why her husband was pissed – okay, that’s why I would have been pissed – Sorry for projecting.
I am not immune to wondering “Are you anything else when you are a mother or is that your defining role/characteristic/fate?” I get it. I don’t get making your child wait for the bathroom (he was three years old) until you eat the rest of your noodles because this would be the chance for you to come back to them emotionally . Huh? Total and complete disconnect for me. Take the kid to the G-D bathroom when he has to go.
Here is a nice review of her first book, Why She Left Us which I will read at some point but not just yet. I sense, ahem, a theme.
I liked the book enough to send it to my mother-in-law as a gift but I did have the furrowed brow thing going for parts of the book.
*”This searing and redemptive memoir is an explosive account of motherhood reconstructed. Pulling from the wreckage of two wars, as well as the loss of her own mother to Alzheimer’s, Rahna Reiko Rizzuto recasts her identity as a mother and a daughter, and finds a truer connection to her family.” — Ayelet Waldman
I updated this post today because it has been getting quite a bit of traffic and I wanted to make it easier to find. Also I figured out the you tube plug-in.
Hiroshima in the Morning – a video from the author. Hiroshima in the Morning (click on the title for the video which is really well-done – I spent way too much time trying to get the Youtube video box to embed. I quit – just click on it.)
Rahna Reiko Rizzuto is the author and she is truly a writer. She is able to share her world in such beautiful language that I even dog-eared some pages so I would not lose the parts that I just had to re-read.
Here is an excerpt:
I can tell you the story but it won’t be true.
It won’t be the facts as they happened exactly, each day, each footstep, each breath. Time elides, events shift; sometimes we shift them on purpose and forget that we did. Memory is just how we choose to remember.
We choose. It begins in our house, on the top floors of a 19th century brownstone. I’m sitting at our long dining room table across from my husband Brian, my two, brightly-pajamaed sons asleep – finally – after slipping downstairs for water, and then just one more kiss between the banisters. The year is 2001, the place New York City, and in the quiet of the last, warming days of May, I am making a list.
I am a list maker, a super-organizer who measures her success in life by how many of the items she’s checked off. This is who I’ve always been, and it’s never occurred to me to question it. It occurs to me only that I have a goodbye party to throw for myself, which will involve a 25-pound pork butt, Hawaiian rock salt, and ten yards of purple plumeria-patterned fabric that I’ve ordered on the internet but has yet to arrive. If I think about plates, about feeding fifty of my dearest friends who will come to wish me well, I will not have to think of this trip of mine – my first trip away, my first trip alone, my six-month long “trip” to the other side of the world. Brian watches me busy myself. And then the question: “Why are you going to Japan?”
…In Brooklyn, in 2001, I was making a list. I knew I was leaving, but if I had known how thoroughly my life would shatter over the next six months, into gains just as astonishing as the losses; if I knew I was saying goodbye to the person I was that night, that decade, that lifetime; if I understood I was about to become someone new, too new, someone I was proud of, who I loved, but who was too different to fit here, in this particular, invisible narrative that I was sitting in but couldn’t feel, would I still have gotten on the airplane?
This is the question people will ask me. The question that curls, now, in the dark of the night. How do any of us decide to leave the people we love?
She shares her fears and doubts in a open honest account of her relationships that is rarely found even in our over-sharing world today. But I do have to confess that when I first read Ayelet Waldman‘s book blurb*, I took note – that is to say I was on high alert. Ms. Waldman has proven to be controversial (but never dull) and her own take on Motherhood has raised more than a few eyebrows…feminist or otherwise. I feared at first that this would be an anti-mothering screed that would make me uncomfortable. It is and it isn’t, it does and it doesn’t.
Ostensibly, it is the author’s journey to Japan to interview the surviving victims of Hiroshima and how her experience getting them to share is altered by 9/11 in that the people she is interviewing are suddenly more emotionally accessible after America also suffered a tragedy. The stories of the people who were in Hiroshima are heartbreaking and painful and raw. The stories are faithfully re-told and this part of the book I found moving and jarring and true.
While it isn’t a screed (a : a lengthy discourse b : an informal piece of writing (as a personal letter) c : a ranting piece of writing) – no wait, it kind of is one. It is a memoir of a woman who is searching for herself and her history and her relationships – past and present – and who is trying to see where she actually begins and ends…if that is at all possible.
While the writing is lovely, I got a little impatient with the author, a privileged person not unlike the heroine of Eat, Pray, Love. Oh, shut up. Julia Roberts is lovely and I am sure it was a nice movie (I read the book) but show me a real person (yes, you – the ones who bought the book or a ticket to the movie) who gets a major cash book advance, leaves her stultifying marriage and then pulls herself together by managing to finally (!) gain weight in Italy, meditate and hang out with some yogic cowboy in India and find love (I had something else here but this is a family blog) in an island paradise. But again, I digress.
The author, Rizzuto, has lots of time for self-reflection but isn’t very good at it. She comes across as the adolescent she refers to in her subway memory (only with a good vocabulary and a poetic way of writing about the world) and she is a pretty petulant one at that. I guess my biggest problem with the book is that after 9/11 and with her children and husband in New York City…the author didn’t go home. Okay? Really? How do you not go to your family? So there is some restriction that if she were out of the country for more than seven days it meant she would lose her grant. So…go home. The flight does not take seven days. That is why her husband was pissed – okay, that’s why I would have been pissed – Sorry for projecting.
I am not immune to wondering “Are you anything else when you are a mother or is that your defining role/characteristic/fate?” I get it. I don’t get making your child wait for the bathroom (he was three years old) until you eat the rest of your noodles because this would be the chance for you to come back to them emotionally . Huh? Total and complete disconnect for me. Take the kid to the G-D bathroom when he has to go.
Here is a nice review of her first book, Why She Left Us which I will read at some point but not just yet. I sense, ahem, a theme.
I liked the book enough to send it to my mother-in-law as a gift but I did have the furrowed brow thing going for parts of the book.
*”This searing and redemptive memoir is an explosive account of motherhood reconstructed. Pulling from the wreckage of two wars, as well as the loss of her own mother to Alzheimer’s, Rahna Reiko Rizzuto recasts her identity as a mother and a daughter, and finds a truer connection to her family.” — Ayelet Waldman
I updated this post today because it has been getting quite a bit of traffic and I wanted to make it easier to find. Also I figured out the you tube plug-in.
June 29, 2011
I wanted to like this book. I read about the book online and was so intrigued by the author's struggle with her own identity vs. being a mother. Should a woman's duty as a mother supersede her own desires for a career? How can you balance both? The premise of the book as well as learning more about the horror of Hiroshima really did make me want to cuddle up with this book and soak it up.
I despised this book. It was almost as if she was a philosophy major in college and talked in the abstract at all times. It was hard to follow (I wanted to follow!). The writing was very much like poetry with lots of commas and half thoughts. If she wanted to make a book of poetry, that would have worked much more effectively. This book was tedious, self-indulgent reading. I really just wanted her to shut up about 200 pages in. It was like being stuck in a corner when a philosophy major is on a rant, and you really want to leave but are stuck listening.
The ending isn't satisfying. It just ends. It doesn't talk about her life changes once she gets back home (apparently they divorced, husband got remarried, she's not the primary guardian of the children).
I despised this book. It was almost as if she was a philosophy major in college and talked in the abstract at all times. It was hard to follow (I wanted to follow!). The writing was very much like poetry with lots of commas and half thoughts. If she wanted to make a book of poetry, that would have worked much more effectively. This book was tedious, self-indulgent reading. I really just wanted her to shut up about 200 pages in. It was like being stuck in a corner when a philosophy major is on a rant, and you really want to leave but are stuck listening.
The ending isn't satisfying. It just ends. It doesn't talk about her life changes once she gets back home (apparently they divorced, husband got remarried, she's not the primary guardian of the children).
July 18, 2011
From the description, I expected this book to be more about Hiroshima survivors and how the events of 9-11 brought their own tragedy into sharper focus. Really, this book is all about the author Reiko and her experiences in Japan, interviewing these survivors while her husband and two small boys are left in New York missing her and (understandably, in my view) resenting that she doesn't miss them.
The words of the survivors are edited down to brief paragraphs that are the most moving parts of the book. But I just couldn't get involved in Reiko's personal journey and got really tired of hearing about it. Some have said there's a gender bias here, but honestly I wouldn't have enjoyed the story if it were reversed to a father leaving his wife and kids behind and realizing that he wanted a life unencumbered by them.
One of those annoying memoirs where someone got paid to go do research for a book but then could only put together something completely self-absorbed at the end of it.
The words of the survivors are edited down to brief paragraphs that are the most moving parts of the book. But I just couldn't get involved in Reiko's personal journey and got really tired of hearing about it. Some have said there's a gender bias here, but honestly I wouldn't have enjoyed the story if it were reversed to a father leaving his wife and kids behind and realizing that he wanted a life unencumbered by them.
One of those annoying memoirs where someone got paid to go do research for a book but then could only put together something completely self-absorbed at the end of it.
April 26, 2011
While this book had some good information, I did not enjoy reading it. I found it self-indulgent and self-involved to a degree that I do not understand. Also, I thought it was a bit overdramatic except for the testimony from survivors, which was the only part of the book I thought worthwhile. We all have personal crises but, frankly, most are not worthy of publication. Nearly everyone was separated from loved ones on 9/11, even if only by a few feet or a few miles. My son was on a business trip to London and could not get home to California. The response I felt and heard from others was a strong desire to physically hold our loved ones. Reading of this author's own crisis was like watching someone pick at a sore. I was very disappointed and, at times, disgusted. I was expecting a book about the personal effects of experiencing the horrific bombing. I guess I just don't get this author, much as I did not get Elizabeth Gilbert in her Eat, Pray, Love.
May 5, 2011
This book had so much potential to be a truly fantastic commentary on so many issues, the atomic bomb in Hiroshima, the survivor's stories, being a mother and wife when it is not what you envisioned for yourself... However, the writing was particularly abstract and did not have a good flow. I often felt I was wandering with the author's thoughts, wanting more of an idea she mentioned in passing and never fully developed. In addition, the America bashing was not appreciated. This author lives in New York and is able to live the life of her choice in a city that offers a great deal to her and she has the audacity to continually criticize her own country for an act that occurred before she was ever born and never once bothers to discuss the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the loss of her own people as a part of this same war.
August 30, 2012
I found this to be a compelling memoir of the author's time in Japan on a research grant, a time during which she came to terms with her identity as a writer, wife, and mother. She chooses to be a writer foremost in the end and gets divorced after the grant is over.
This is a thoughtful memoir that explores issues related to how we choose to be our authentic selves. This book puts emphasis on gender issues specially within marriage. There is a raw truthtelling element here. Many women experience a similar kind of identity search when given opportunities on research grants like this. Rizzuto doesn't pretend to offer answers. She exposes the rawness of her lived experience that turned into a discernment process.
This is a thoughtful memoir that explores issues related to how we choose to be our authentic selves. This book puts emphasis on gender issues specially within marriage. There is a raw truthtelling element here. Many women experience a similar kind of identity search when given opportunities on research grants like this. Rizzuto doesn't pretend to offer answers. She exposes the rawness of her lived experience that turned into a discernment process.
March 26, 2015
This book is beautifully written, and it is raw. The author takes you on her own personal journey through time, space, perspective, as she discovers her history, our history, in the shadow of history being made. A good book for reflection on society, history, writing, travel, culture, and interpersonal relationships, which is where all of these larger movements take place; they start with us.
July 7, 2010
Really liked this one. Also, sidenote, really recalled Japan to me. And since going to the Peace Museum in Hiroshima was a life altering experience for me, I really appreciated that aspect of the book.
October 5, 2011
Not as bad as Eat, Pray, Love, but pretty close. Too bad the real story of the Hirsoshima surviors got lost in this lady's identity crisis.
September 14, 2021
In a word, beseeching is how I would term ambiance of the book.
The writer leaves for a fellowship in Japan. She is really running away from small children & husband, she articulates a sense of relief; when she gets to Japan, she wrestles with those internal feelings as she begins to gather materials for the book. Its clear theres conflict between her relief, and guilt as she’s torn.
I nearly put it down because the writer focused so much on herself rather than the last remaining survivors. But as the reader delves further & further into the book, the book begins to shape itself. Its towards the last few pages that I read what I was looking for, does Japan blame the USA for the bomb?
In the end, Japan has very few survivors left to tell the story of Hiroshima and the aftermath. Currently, Japan is gentrifying the area, the country. Perhaps not only to remove the stain of poor politics but also to offer up a new hope for the new generations who have never experienced loss on an impossible to describe scale. This book, Its a tough read.
The writer leaves for a fellowship in Japan. She is really running away from small children & husband, she articulates a sense of relief; when she gets to Japan, she wrestles with those internal feelings as she begins to gather materials for the book. Its clear theres conflict between her relief, and guilt as she’s torn.
I nearly put it down because the writer focused so much on herself rather than the last remaining survivors. But as the reader delves further & further into the book, the book begins to shape itself. Its towards the last few pages that I read what I was looking for, does Japan blame the USA for the bomb?
In the end, Japan has very few survivors left to tell the story of Hiroshima and the aftermath. Currently, Japan is gentrifying the area, the country. Perhaps not only to remove the stain of poor politics but also to offer up a new hope for the new generations who have never experienced loss on an impossible to describe scale. This book, Its a tough read.
February 26, 2023
Rahna Reiko Rizzuto’s HIROSHIMA IN THE MORNING is a moving, lyric memoir that covers everything from the WWII atomic bombing of Japan to 9/11, war and peace, change and resilience, marriage and separation, motherhood and selfhood. It is Rizzuto’s accounting of her six-month fellowship in Japan in 2001—away from her life in NYC with her husband and her 3- and 5-year-old sons. In it, she goes from a woman who has never lived on her own before to one who can move, speak, and live fluently in another country. It is trying to fit back into her previous role in her family that feels foreign. She notes—and this resonates for me—that “memory is not history… memory is narrative” (p. 199). Even history isn’t history, but a series of narratives, told from myriad points of view, trying to understand what happens, what it is to be a human person in the world, to be alive. “Not just the carcass but the spark,” writes the poet Gregory Orr. Heartbreaking, to me unimaginable, raw, honest, and gorgeous gorgeous gorgeous.
September 16, 2024
It really pains me to give a book a bad review, or rather admit I didn’t like it. I see what she’s trying to do, make parallels of Hiroshima, 9/11 and her marriage, and while they sort worked in a literary sense, I felt the two tragedies of war weren’t respected enough. Ultimately, I just found the memoirist to be unlikable. She spends a lot of pages discussing how she never wanted to be a mother, and resenting her husband for not being her cheerleader as she moves to Japan for six months to write a book. Hard to blame her husband who’s raising two young kids in New York City, in the aftermath of a terrorist attack, while she traipses around Japan like a tourist, lining up the occasional interview. There is a lot of interesting discussion about what it means to be a woman, a mother, a writer, but I found it to be at the expense of her family, the cornerstone of Japanese culture. She doesn’t seem to recognize the irony. It’s an OK read but not one I would want to read again. Just not for everyone, and that’s OK.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 18, 2024
This is a book about a multiracial US-American woman discovering her own identity. If you come here expecting a history lesson about Hiroshima of course you are in the wrong place. Don't rate an apple poorly against the standards of an orange. While i did pick up this book with the ignorant initial intention to study facts about Hiroshima, towards the end i realised i continued reading for different reasons. I want to thank the author for sharing her vulnerabilities with the world by writing this beautiful book. Feminism has changed in the past decade+ since her book was first written. We've really come a long way, though we're not at the finish line yet of course. I'm not Japanese but I'm raised in a different culture from my birth parents and always struggle with wondering what my identity means to me. Thank you again to the author for your insights and it helps me on my journey in learning what it means to be me.
August 13, 2014
Much is written about Rahna Reiko Rizzuto’s book "Hiroshima in the Morning" detailing its thrust and theme, but even more regarding praise, ridicule, and legitimate criticism of both book and author. What follows here is more of a review of the reviews, a criticism of the criticism, than a review of the book; however, there will be some of the latter.
A common criticism has much more to do with the author than the book, namely that she is a bad mother, a bad wife for “abandoning” her children. Now all I have to go on is what I read in the book, where it seems to me she clarified the situation in the very beginning at the second page of the Prologue. She notes that her husband Brian asked her “Why are you going to Japan?” She goes on at the very next page to say, “He was the one who urged me to apply” for the grant to spend six months in Japan. Furthermore, on the next page she recalls, “Brian had plenty of help with the children. And, he himself pointed this out, he had always promised to be their primary caretaker, so he owed me a chunk of time.”
It appears Rahna took him at his word, that he could handle the situation for the six months and that he would support her. It also appears, as we read on, that when reality set in, and did so very soon, the promises were without meaning.
No, for those who claim this mother abandoned her children, there is a serious disconnect with reality on their part. Rahna went to Japan to fulfill her commitment upon receiving a grant/fellowship, which Brian had urged her to seek. She had put her children in the caring hands of her husband, the children’s father.
Yes, the usual deal is that it is the husband/father who takes off days, weeks, months at a time to do research, follow up on company business, etc. In those cases, there is no issue at all. The wife/mother is expected to fulfill the dutiful role. In this case, however, in the eyes of some Rahna is perceived as selfish and borderline evil.
Some have protested that the author provides absolutely no information of the nature or source of the grant/fellowship. Well all one has to do is read the author’s “Acknowledgments” at page 334 where she says very clearly, “My deep gratitude to…the National Endowment for the Arts for the fellowship that became a life-changing opportunity.” In addition, a bit later she notes her gratitude to “Christopher Blasdel” who at p. 52 is quoted and listed as “grant administrator.”
Then, there are those comments to the effect that “If you are looking for a book about the historical and human impacts of the bombing…” then this is not the book that is to come. No, it is true that this is not a historical treatise, but there is much history within the pages. There is certainly MUCH that relates the human impact of the bombing. Note the 27 pages of direct testimony concerning the horrific impact the bomb had on individuals, families, and acquaintances; not to mention the pages and pages of the author’s take off from those testimonies.
Beyond doubt, the worse comment leveled against this fine author and brave woman is that fired off at Amazon.com by a so-called “counselor” on October 25, 2011. This “counselor” concludes: “Make no mistake, she is a bad human being. It is pretty clear she is a bad wife, a bad mother, a bad daughter and a bad judge of history (and) a horrific woman…” No “counselor” worthy of the title has any right to diagnose (judge) a person on such a short body of “evidence” (one book of 336 pages).
Finally, there are those who have charged that Rizzuto has offered no insights regarding her declared topics. I would beg to differ and would offer here just one example out of many why I believe Rahna Reiko Rizzuto is one extremely insightful human being:
“How we tell our stories makes all the difference. They are where we store our tears, where the eventual healing lies. If ‘we’ are talking, then we are safe in our group perspective; we do not have to own our experience alone, nor do we have to feel it. What September 11 gave to the hibakusha,and what they gave in turn to me,is a way to re-enter memory. As scary, and painful, as it is to claim our pronouns, ‘we’ cannot inhabit our own lives until ‘I’ begins to speak.”(p. 239)
It seems that many “readers” did not “hear” the stories told either by the hibakushas, or by the author.
Rizzuto goes on to add near the end of her gripping juxtaposition of Hibakusha stories, her own stories, and her mother’s story that:
“If I have learned anything in Japan, about memory, about identity, it is that our narrative is what we are looking for. A way to explain ourselves to ourselves. A way to go forward. When we look back at those moments when life changed forever, we are looking for protection against life changing again -- as it does, as it is doing at this moment. It is not the witness, the writer, who creates the character, but the character who creates the witness. The function of memory is not to record history, but to tell stories. It is never fact we want. It is understanding, fiddling with the books.”(p. 325)
The fact that "Hiroshima in the Morning" was named a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist, an Asian American Literary Award Finalist, a Dayton Literary Peace Prize Nominee, and the winner of the Grub Street National Book Award in Nonfiction suggests the biting commentaries posted, denigrating both author and book, have little-to- no credibility.
A common criticism has much more to do with the author than the book, namely that she is a bad mother, a bad wife for “abandoning” her children. Now all I have to go on is what I read in the book, where it seems to me she clarified the situation in the very beginning at the second page of the Prologue. She notes that her husband Brian asked her “Why are you going to Japan?” She goes on at the very next page to say, “He was the one who urged me to apply” for the grant to spend six months in Japan. Furthermore, on the next page she recalls, “Brian had plenty of help with the children. And, he himself pointed this out, he had always promised to be their primary caretaker, so he owed me a chunk of time.”
It appears Rahna took him at his word, that he could handle the situation for the six months and that he would support her. It also appears, as we read on, that when reality set in, and did so very soon, the promises were without meaning.
No, for those who claim this mother abandoned her children, there is a serious disconnect with reality on their part. Rahna went to Japan to fulfill her commitment upon receiving a grant/fellowship, which Brian had urged her to seek. She had put her children in the caring hands of her husband, the children’s father.
Yes, the usual deal is that it is the husband/father who takes off days, weeks, months at a time to do research, follow up on company business, etc. In those cases, there is no issue at all. The wife/mother is expected to fulfill the dutiful role. In this case, however, in the eyes of some Rahna is perceived as selfish and borderline evil.
Some have protested that the author provides absolutely no information of the nature or source of the grant/fellowship. Well all one has to do is read the author’s “Acknowledgments” at page 334 where she says very clearly, “My deep gratitude to…the National Endowment for the Arts for the fellowship that became a life-changing opportunity.” In addition, a bit later she notes her gratitude to “Christopher Blasdel” who at p. 52 is quoted and listed as “grant administrator.”
Then, there are those comments to the effect that “If you are looking for a book about the historical and human impacts of the bombing…” then this is not the book that is to come. No, it is true that this is not a historical treatise, but there is much history within the pages. There is certainly MUCH that relates the human impact of the bombing. Note the 27 pages of direct testimony concerning the horrific impact the bomb had on individuals, families, and acquaintances; not to mention the pages and pages of the author’s take off from those testimonies.
Beyond doubt, the worse comment leveled against this fine author and brave woman is that fired off at Amazon.com by a so-called “counselor” on October 25, 2011. This “counselor” concludes: “Make no mistake, she is a bad human being. It is pretty clear she is a bad wife, a bad mother, a bad daughter and a bad judge of history (and) a horrific woman…” No “counselor” worthy of the title has any right to diagnose (judge) a person on such a short body of “evidence” (one book of 336 pages).
Finally, there are those who have charged that Rizzuto has offered no insights regarding her declared topics. I would beg to differ and would offer here just one example out of many why I believe Rahna Reiko Rizzuto is one extremely insightful human being:
“How we tell our stories makes all the difference. They are where we store our tears, where the eventual healing lies. If ‘we’ are talking, then we are safe in our group perspective; we do not have to own our experience alone, nor do we have to feel it. What September 11 gave to the hibakusha,and what they gave in turn to me,is a way to re-enter memory. As scary, and painful, as it is to claim our pronouns, ‘we’ cannot inhabit our own lives until ‘I’ begins to speak.”(p. 239)
It seems that many “readers” did not “hear” the stories told either by the hibakushas, or by the author.
Rizzuto goes on to add near the end of her gripping juxtaposition of Hibakusha stories, her own stories, and her mother’s story that:
“If I have learned anything in Japan, about memory, about identity, it is that our narrative is what we are looking for. A way to explain ourselves to ourselves. A way to go forward. When we look back at those moments when life changed forever, we are looking for protection against life changing again -- as it does, as it is doing at this moment. It is not the witness, the writer, who creates the character, but the character who creates the witness. The function of memory is not to record history, but to tell stories. It is never fact we want. It is understanding, fiddling with the books.”(p. 325)
The fact that "Hiroshima in the Morning" was named a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist, an Asian American Literary Award Finalist, a Dayton Literary Peace Prize Nominee, and the winner of the Grub Street National Book Award in Nonfiction suggests the biting commentaries posted, denigrating both author and book, have little-to- no credibility.
June 17, 2019
Not sure what to think of this one. I liked her style but I found her perplexing. Her desire to know and be close to her mother while leaving her own family was strange to me. Also, to me sad she would jeopardize her family for a book. I am glad to have learned about Hiroshima and the aftermath. Ghastly but good to know.
November 29, 2024
I found this through Pearl, by Sherri L. Smith and Christine Norrie. It's an engrossing memoir of time spent in a foreign environment, strain on a marriage, and choices the USA made in the early 2000s.
January 16, 2018
Loved it. Thought provoking, real, woven into truth and perspective and history denied...
October 24, 2025
It wasn't what I was expecting, but not a terrible read.
January 13, 2011
This book is all over the place, by design. I read the whole thing and I still cannot tell you whether or not this “works.” Guess that must mean that it does, at least on some level. It worked enough to unsettle me, anyway, and to keep me reading, and to make me want to read Rizzuto's novel.
Rizutto went to Japan in 2001 to research her second novel, which was going to be about an atomic bomb survivor in Hiroshima. Everything fell apart--there is no novel--and what there is instead is this story of how it happened. Nonfiction work that preserves the hibakusha's words. Memoir of being a gaijin in Japan. Story of being the daughter of a woman who lived through the mass incarceration of the Nikkei community during World War II. Memoir of a marriage falling apart, questions of what it means to be a mother, story of a New Yorker a continent and an ocean away from New York on and after September 11, 2001. Of being in Hiroshima in the aftermath of 9/11, when and where--of course--everyone was talking about it happening again. I don't remember talking about this? Did we? I remember the other side of the "happening again" narrative, which is also in the book--Rizzuto's uncle emailing her the results of a survey in which some absurd number of Americans said they'd like to see the internment happen again. I've never been able to find reference to this survey, but it must have existed: my mother called me furious and afraid for family friend and quoted its numbers, and now Rizzuto writes about it too. A fitting thought, I guess, after a book that's also a tale about how memory is not history.
Apparently I have taken the scattered-by-design ness of this book as license to write a review that is just scattered
Anyway. A book with a lot in it, clearly. Too scattered to be one of my favorite books, but intriguing enough that I will certainly read Rizzuto's novel, which is apparently about the Internment.
Rizutto went to Japan in 2001 to research her second novel, which was going to be about an atomic bomb survivor in Hiroshima. Everything fell apart--there is no novel--and what there is instead is this story of how it happened. Nonfiction work that preserves the hibakusha's words. Memoir of being a gaijin in Japan. Story of being the daughter of a woman who lived through the mass incarceration of the Nikkei community during World War II. Memoir of a marriage falling apart, questions of what it means to be a mother, story of a New Yorker a continent and an ocean away from New York on and after September 11, 2001. Of being in Hiroshima in the aftermath of 9/11, when and where--of course--everyone was talking about it happening again. I don't remember talking about this? Did we? I remember the other side of the "happening again" narrative, which is also in the book--Rizzuto's uncle emailing her the results of a survey in which some absurd number of Americans said they'd like to see the internment happen again. I've never been able to find reference to this survey, but it must have existed: my mother called me furious and afraid for family friend and quoted its numbers, and now Rizzuto writes about it too. A fitting thought, I guess, after a book that's also a tale about how memory is not history.
Apparently I have taken the scattered-by-design ness of this book as license to write a review that is just scattered
Anyway. A book with a lot in it, clearly. Too scattered to be one of my favorite books, but intriguing enough that I will certainly read Rizzuto's novel, which is apparently about the Internment.
March 10, 2011
This book is very honest and utterly fascinating. It explores the role of a woman as a daughter, mother and a wife, versus her need for fulfillment in her career and passion and whether those roles can co-exist. It explores the human condition in times of war, specifically Japanese "hibakusha" or victims of the Hiroshima bombing. Reiko leaves her 3 and 5 year old sons with her husband to pursue a writing fellowship in Hiroshima in the summer of 2001. Shortly after her arrival, 911 happens while husband and sons are still in Brooklyn. As she is exploring the aftermath of Hiroshima, her marriage begins to crumble and her husband wants her to come home, despite having agreed to the arrangement. There were times I didn't like Reiko, thought she was cold, selfish, and at other times, I hated her husband for putting her in such a position and not being more understanding. I realized that this is what makes this book so compelling, the honesty of her expression, the impossible situation here that so many modern women must be faced with. If a man leaves his family for six months for his job, nobody blinks about it. But for a woman to leave her children in the same scenario, she is considered heartless, and her husband a saint. Reiko's husband became bitter and unyielding, and at the same time she longed for her children, she realized the hopelessness of her marriage. I now want to read her first novel, as she is a truly accomplished writer.
April 20, 2011
Hiroshima in the Morning interweaves the memories and history of the bombing of Hiroshima, along with Reiko’s personal journey to rediscovery. Her journey starts in New York as a mother of two leaving her family for the first time alone. She will be gone for six months to research and interview Hiroshima victims in Japan. What comes out of her time there is not only a chronicle of the bombing and the effect on the victims, but also questions how memory plays a huge role in self-definition.
At first, adjusting to life on her own is not what she expected. As the days progress she questions her memories, being a mother, her marriage and how she is evolving into the person she truly wants to be. The outcome creates an unexpected result.
There has been a lot of emphasis on this book about motherhood and what ”motherhood” means. That is part of the book, but it touches on so much more. Interviews with the Hiroshima victims, her relationships with the Japanese people and their stories are woven into the book seamlessly with her own story. Shifting from a memory of her own mother to the memory a hibakusha has of their mother. I throughly enjoyed this book. It gave voice to an important part of history and delved into life experiences that do not often get discussed. If you are a historical fiction buff, who likes a touch of personal, this is a must read.
At first, adjusting to life on her own is not what she expected. As the days progress she questions her memories, being a mother, her marriage and how she is evolving into the person she truly wants to be. The outcome creates an unexpected result.
There has been a lot of emphasis on this book about motherhood and what ”motherhood” means. That is part of the book, but it touches on so much more. Interviews with the Hiroshima victims, her relationships with the Japanese people and their stories are woven into the book seamlessly with her own story. Shifting from a memory of her own mother to the memory a hibakusha has of their mother. I throughly enjoyed this book. It gave voice to an important part of history and delved into life experiences that do not often get discussed. If you are a historical fiction buff, who likes a touch of personal, this is a must read.
November 10, 2013
I took a long time reading this because I ended up reading a couple of other books in between -- one because I was obliged to review it and another just because I was enjoying it. This one took awhile to grow on me, but in the end, I really did appreciate what the author was doing and that she had the courage not to wrap everything up in a neat package in the end. Rizzuto goes to Japan to do research for a novel (which I think never got written, although I haven't checked) about victims of the bomb in Hiroshima. In particular, her novel was to be about a Japanese American who was caught in the horror. She interviews many people in Hiroshima but people don't start opening up until after 9/11 (she is in Japan at that time), presumably because they now believe that she as a New Yorker has some understanding of this kind of mass, human-induced suffering.
Meanwhile, her husband is becoming more and more impatient with the independent woman she has become and the second strand of the story is what will become of her marriage. She thinks she has gone to Japan to discover the part of her past (she is half Japanese) related to Hiroshima, but in the end the discovery has more to do with who she is as a wife and mother.
But I don't want to simplify this because it's a very complex book, and very lyrically written. If the topic interests you, give it a try.
Meanwhile, her husband is becoming more and more impatient with the independent woman she has become and the second strand of the story is what will become of her marriage. She thinks she has gone to Japan to discover the part of her past (she is half Japanese) related to Hiroshima, but in the end the discovery has more to do with who she is as a wife and mother.
But I don't want to simplify this because it's a very complex book, and very lyrically written. If the topic interests you, give it a try.
March 23, 2011
This almost seemed like two different books. One was the author's journey to Japan to learn more about the A-Bomb survivors as well as the Japanese-American internees who returned to Japan. In many ways they were rejected by two nations. Added to this was the overlap of 9/11 while she was in the midst of her conversations. This aspect of the book would easily be 4 stars. It's a part of U.S. history that doesn't get nearly the attention it should and the questions of war, peace, memory, and identity were addressed with sensitivity, eloquence, and depth.
The second book was the crumbling of the writer's marriage during this time. It was a harsh contrast and I don't think it worked that well. At times I felt she was baring too much of soul and I felt uncomfortable reading about her kids.
There has been some current controversy over the book and the writer in that she's portrayed as a mother who abandoned her kids. That's a very simplistic and not wholly accurate statement and shouldn't take away from the brilliance and importance of the survivor's stories.
The second book was the crumbling of the writer's marriage during this time. It was a harsh contrast and I don't think it worked that well. At times I felt she was baring too much of soul and I felt uncomfortable reading about her kids.
There has been some current controversy over the book and the writer in that she's portrayed as a mother who abandoned her kids. That's a very simplistic and not wholly accurate statement and shouldn't take away from the brilliance and importance of the survivor's stories.
May 20, 2011
In June 2001 Rizzuto traveled to Hiroshima in search of a deeper understanding of her war-torn heritage. She planned to spend six months there, interviewing the few remaining survivors of the atomic bomb. A mother of two young boys, she was encouraged to go by her husband, who quickly became disenchanted by her absence, and understandably so as it seems that Rizzuto barely misses her two very young children and husband. There are parallel narratives that 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;and this narrative is laced with survivor stories of the 1945 bombing in Hiroshima.
Rizzuto is very honest with her feelings (or lack there of), and I was hoping this would make her more relatable for me, but it did not.
In the end her "work" in Hiroshima and personal journey led her to find she was not meant for full time parenting after all. I recognize the double standard in this; if there were a man writing this books, heads would not be turned a bit; let alone gasps.
Rizzuto is very honest with her feelings (or lack there of), and I was hoping this would make her more relatable for me, but it did not.
In the end her "work" in Hiroshima and personal journey led her to find she was not meant for full time parenting after all. I recognize the double standard in this; if there were a man writing this books, heads would not be turned a bit; let alone gasps.
June 21, 2011
This book is a graceful, lyric, original exploration of memory, identity, and self-discovery. I picked it up after seeing an interview with the author on "The View," in which they focussed very heavily on the elements of ambivalent motherhood, which is what piqued my interest. But the book is much, much more than that. Make no mistake -- this is the author's memoir, and the stories of Hiroshima (and 9/11 to a lesser extent) serve a supporting role here. Readers with very narrow expectations of the book (ie. those looking for a book about the atomic bombing) may be disappointed (though the accounts of survivors of the bombing are as searing, painful, and difficult as one would expect), but those who approach the book with an open mind will be richly rewarded.
It is interesting and revealing to see the backlash against the author and the choices she made around motherhood and marriage; the criticisms levelled against her are quite gendered, and complaints that she is too 'self-involved' have missed the point entirely.
Definitely makes my all-time top 10 list.
It is interesting and revealing to see the backlash against the author and the choices she made around motherhood and marriage; the criticisms levelled against her are quite gendered, and complaints that she is too 'self-involved' have missed the point entirely.
Definitely makes my all-time top 10 list.
April 3, 2011
A memoir about memory, war & peace, family and identity. The author, a 37 y.o. Japanese-American writer visits Japan to interview atomic bomb survivors as research for a novel. During the 7-month visit, she struggles with the loss of her mother to dementia and her identity as a wife and mother, while also describing the impacts of the bomb, peace activists, and cultural complexities of her interactions in Japan pre- and post-9/11. Well-written, but probably best read in spurts to be less jarred by its fragmentation.
The book is very introspective and journal-like. I recently read The Finkler Question, which while not a memoir, naval-gazed in a completely different way - Jewish/Japanese, male/female, funny/sad.
I noted that it was published by The Feminist Press and then was saddened to note that some readers on Amazon were more interested in commenting on her choices as a woman than on the book.
The book is very introspective and journal-like. I recently read The Finkler Question, which while not a memoir, naval-gazed in a completely different way - Jewish/Japanese, male/female, funny/sad.
I noted that it was published by The Feminist Press and then was saddened to note that some readers on Amazon were more interested in commenting on her choices as a woman than on the book.
Read
December 9, 2012Being a true story, I'm not going to rate it.
However, I will say a few words. Reiko-san's journey was fascinating and interesting to read about. The stories told from the survivors of Hiroshima were heartbreaking and yet I couldn't stop reading them.
As for Reiko-san's own story.... I found her inward thoughts on her mother to be touching and revealing. However, her selfishness astounded me. To want so much and appreciate so much of her own mother, yet to leave her own children and husband for six months? I don't get how she could have done it.
However, her inward journey was interesting and I hope she's content, though I do believe in going, she lost more than she gained. There is nothing quite so valuable and precious as our families. And while she did regain her love for her children, the loss of her husband and the life that they as a family had is tragic. Her sons will never be the same.
However, I will say a few words. Reiko-san's journey was fascinating and interesting to read about. The stories told from the survivors of Hiroshima were heartbreaking and yet I couldn't stop reading them.
As for Reiko-san's own story.... I found her inward thoughts on her mother to be touching and revealing. However, her selfishness astounded me. To want so much and appreciate so much of her own mother, yet to leave her own children and husband for six months? I don't get how she could have done it.
However, her inward journey was interesting and I hope she's content, though I do believe in going, she lost more than she gained. There is nothing quite so valuable and precious as our families. And while she did regain her love for her children, the loss of her husband and the life that they as a family had is tragic. Her sons will never be the same.
March 13, 2011
I did not like this book, partly because I thought it was self-consciously arty but also because I could not stop judging the author for leaving her children. I don't think that is a fair way to evaluate a book, but I could not get past it. Gloria Steinem would be very disappointed in me (although I don't think a father should voluntarily leave a three-year-old and a five-year-old for six months either).
I was disappointed because I thought the book would be more about Hiroshima than about the author's maternal and marital woes. In fact, by the end of the book I thought it was a bit self-absorbed to try to juxtapose the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people against one woman's failure to answer her cell phone in a timely manner. (And see, that last sentence isn't entirely fair, either. But this book made me irritable.)
I was disappointed because I thought the book would be more about Hiroshima than about the author's maternal and marital woes. In fact, by the end of the book I thought it was a bit self-absorbed to try to juxtapose the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people against one woman's failure to answer her cell phone in a timely manner. (And see, that last sentence isn't entirely fair, either. But this book made me irritable.)
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