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 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.) ( )

In the Spring of 2001, author Rahna Reiko Rizzuto packed up her bags and moved to Japan on a six month research grant, leaving behind her husband Brian and her two young sons. At the time, her intent was to gather interviews and information for a new novel revolving around the 1945 US bombing of Hiroshima. What she did not know, is that her journey was to open doors to much deeper issues: her marriage, her role as mother, her memories of her own family…and ultimately her own vision of herself.

Early on, Rizzuto faced difficulties with the Japanese language and culture. It was hard to get interviews set up and when she did talk to the survivors of Hiroshima (the hibakusha) the stories felt rote and practiced. Something was missing. And then September 11, 2001 arrived, and everything changed.

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. - from Hiroshima in the Morning, page 239 -

Hiroshima in the Morning is a stunning, deeply felt, and brave memoir. Rizzuto was drawn to Hiroshima from a very personal place – her aunt Molly lived in Hiroshima shortly after the bomb dropped, working for a government organization whose public goal was to assist the survivors, but whose actual role was to research the effects of the atomic bomb; and members of Rizzuto’s family had been interned in the United States as part of the knee-jerk reaction to imprison U.S. citizens who were of Japanese descent. Rizzuto thought that what she was seeking was a question of how war impacts individuals; about how Japanese-Americans had no home after the bomb – they were not welcome in the United States, and those who returned to Japan quickly discovered they were not considered Japanese either.

What makes Hiroshima in the Morning special is not the questions which Rizzuto first set out to answer, but the very personal growth and discovery that becomes the central theme of the book. Woven through the narrative are Rizzuto’s memories of her mother – a woman who was without question a wonderful mother, and who now was losing her memories to dementia. As Rizzuto struggles with her own role as mother, she begins to see her mother in a different way. The journey for Rizzuto becomes that of uncovering her own identity, separate from her role as mother.

How, in a life that always seemed defined by all she didn’t do, could my mother have also been a woman? And what kind? How can it be only now, at age thirty-seven, that I am learning that a mother is also a woman? A female adult, with her own name? – from Hiroshima in the Morning, page 190 -

By the time I had turned the last page of this elegant memoir, I had grown to respect the author…especially because of her brutal self-honesty and her courage to reveal things about herself which many people would not. Here was a mother who had left behind her three and five year old sons in order to pursue her dreams, who must have recognized she would be judged by others for that choice. Yet, Rizzuto bravely puts forth her experience, showing us that perhaps there are multiple definitions of what it means to be a mother…that identity is more than a role which we play, but instead is something that evolves and changes and is made up of many aspects: our heritage, our common experience, the choices we make, our view of the world.

Rizzuto’s prose is breathtaking, poetic, and insightful. I loved this book on so many levels, but especially for its wisdom. What Rizzuto does in Hiroshima in the Morning is to place the individual within the context of the community, to show that we are all connected through our stories and experiences, and that self-discovery is to be found in our relationships with others as well as through our unique view of the world.

Hiroshima in the Morning is a book which I highly recommend. Women, especially, will be drawn to Rizzuto’s story. This is a story which transcends the average memoir, a story which is both personal and universal. ( )

In the early morning hours of August 6, 1945, a B-29 bomber named Enola Gay dropped a 9,700-pound uranium bomb over the city of Hiroshima. The yield of the explosion was later estimated at 15 kilotons (the equivalent of 15,000 tons of TNT). Within minutes 9 out of 10 people half a mile or less from ground zero were dead. The numerous small fires that erupted simultaneously all around the city soon merged into one large firestorm, eventually engulfing 4.4 square miles of the city, killing anyone who had not escaped in the first minutes after the attack. Several days after the blast, the death rate began to climb from radiation sickness. Radiation sickness deaths did not taper off until seven to eight weeks after the attack.

No one will ever know for certain how many were killed by the bomb. Some 70,000 people probably died as a result of initial blast, heat, and radiation effects. By the end of 1945, because of the lingering effects of radioactive fallout and other after effects, the Hiroshima death toll was probably over 100,000. The five-year death total may have reached or even exceeded 200,000, from cancer and other long-term effects.

In 2001, the author, a 37-year-old Japanese-American writer, left her husband and children behind in New York and went to Hiroshima to interview the hibakusha, or survivors of the atomic bomb detonation. This memoir intersperses excerpts from her interviews with a chronicle of her trip, its effect on her marriage, and her simultaneous struggles adjusting to her mother’s increasing dementia.

Initially, Rizzuto felt as if she were getting “canned” responses in interviews, intellectually detached and devoid of emotion. After September 11, however, she found that her interviewees were opening up to her more, as the sharing of a tragedy created a link that was missing before.

The hibakusha universally deplored the bellicose response of the United States, believing that, as Rizzuto summarized it:

"...war seemed to be an act that could only be possible if we could fool ourselves into believing that other people's children were not as precious, or human, as our own.”

Meanwhile, however, Rizzuto’s husband, who had seen a plane hit the World Trade Center, fully subscribed to the jingoism that overtook the country. It helped drive them apart. Because back in Hiroshima, the author was hearing testimony about family members who were “vaporized, carbonized, melted, crushed, poisoned, maimed, and burned.” Or this report, from a former surgical intern:

"I went back to the hospital after the war ended, on the seventeenth of August. The ceiling had collapsed, the walls were broken down, the window glass was smashed into pieces. … On the ground, just in front of the hospital building, a huge pile of dead bodies were being cremated.

That was eleven days after the bombing. There were still patients everywhere…Since it was summer, they did not need futons. But the maggots – I was amazed by the great number of maggots and flies. On bodies, on food, on whatever you had. You could see the maggots moving inside people’s wounds …

The doctors took charge…but there was no medicine, no medical supplies. People were asking for help – some were shouting, but in most cases, there were only low groans.

It was unbearable.”

Evaluation: I have to admit I was less interested in the author’s fights with her husband and repeated expressions of sorrow about her mother’s deterioration than with her interactions with survivors in Japan. In telling her personal story, she could be somewhat repetitive. I also thought the experiences of the survivors of both the internment camps in the U.S. and in Hiroshima itself deserved more space than her personal memoir did. Nevertheless, it’s worth reading. ( )