Hiroshima in the Morning by Rahna Reiko Rizzuto

Hiroshima in the Morning

A friend was reading this book and said she wished someone else would read it so she could talk about it. She said a little bit about it and I thought it sounded good so I ordered it.

My friend had said that many of the reviews of Hiroshima in the Morning were all about how the author went to Japan and ended up leaving her husband and children. I was interested to hear that happen "live," when another friend said something like that when I mentioned I was reading this book. She said something along the lines of it being a book about a woman who goes by herself to Japan and discovers she likes it so much she leaves her husband and children.

I don't think that's quite an adequate summary of what the book is about. The author does go to Japan by herself, leaving her husband and two young children at home in New York City. She goes to do research for a novel she plans to write that includes the things that happened to Japanese-Americans who came back to Hiroshima right after the bomb. She was inspired by the life of her Aunt Molly. Molly was an American citizen who, like other Japanese American people, was interned during the war. Then she goes to Japan right after the bombing and sees all the devastation that caused. Then eventually she went back to the US to live the rest of her life. The author wrote, "Aunt Molly may, at that point, have been one of the few people still alive who had lived the unique Japanese American triptych of the internment, the American occupation of Japan and the atomic bomb aftermath."

At the beginning of the book the author explains that she applied for a grant she found in a journal, after being urgently encouraged to do so by her husband. To her surprise, she wins the grant and finds herself planning to leave for 6 months in Japan. She and her husband married when she was just 17, and by this point had two little boys. She writes about how she had never actually lived by herself before, and when she was first in Hiroshima on her own, she started thinking about her girlhood in Hawaii and says, "Solitude has led me back to the last time in my life when choice was not collective."

I thought that was an interesting sentence. I can relate to the feeling of freedom when I am on my own and can decide what I'll do based only on what I want, rather than wondering and trying to guess what my husband would want. When I'm with my husband I don't actually notice the "collective decision" process, but when I'm not, I do notice the difference.

As she is doing her research in Japan, the author is also working through the loss of her mother. She starts to feel her mother's presence beside her, in a way. But as time goes on, she loses that feeling of her mother's process. It seems to be a part of her process of learning to be on her own.

At first she can hardly stand the homesickness of not being with her husband and children. She and her husband are both heartbroken and even wonder why she ever decided to leave. When 9/11 happens, it deepens those feelings. At one point the boys both get the flu and the husband has to deal with two children throwing up all over, cleaning them and the house up all on his own.

After a while he begins to resent the fact that he's carrying the entire burden alone, and doesn't even read or listen to her talk about what she's accomplishing. When he and the boys come to visit her in Japan, it's pretty much a fiasco. A few times she needs to meet with people for whom she's waited a long time to get an appointment, and he doesn't see why her work should take precedence at any time while they are there visiting.

She draws a comparison of the before and after of her relationship with her husband, 9/11 and Hiroshima and the bomb:

So there is that moment, then; the last breath of before: when life is about to change, utterly and forever, into something we have no way to conceive of. When the trajectory is already being drawn and there is no way to stop it.

Have we been living in that moment all along?

This talk of the "before moment" sticks in my mind. It goes along with my constant feeling that we never know what will happen in the next moment or hour or day of our lives. This feeling started when my brother called to tell me he had been diagnosed with ALS, and then 6 months later he was gone. One moment he was there, then he wasn't. We never know what's around the next curve; all we do know is that Christ will be there with us.

I didn't see in the book exactly when the author and her husband actually divorced, but I assume they did. In the book she ends when she goes back home after the six months. The afterword is 10 years later and she just says that her "marriage unravels." She calls the book a memoir, and that's what it is, a memoir of her 6 months in Japan.

I found the author to be a sympathetic person. Reading her thoughts and memories as she is living away from her husband and children, I feel convinced that she loves them. I don't feel like I can condemn her for deciding to leave them, and that isn't the central subject of her memoir, although coming to the point where you can see that her marriage is unravelling is a part of the story, for sure.

It was interesting to read about her finding her way in Japan, not easy in Hiroshima where many people do not speak English. It was also very interesting to read the accounts from the people who lived through the bomb. At first when she tried to get the witnesses' stories, they seemed to kind of recite a story, but after 9/11 they opened up more and told honest, more open stories of what they had seen and how they had felt. Incredible what they went through.