When Amaterasu Takahashi opens the door of her Philadelphia home to a badly scarred man claiming to be her grandson, she doesn’t believe him. Her grandson and her daughter, Yuko, perished nearly forty years ago during the bombing of Nagasaki. But the man carries with him a collection of sealed private letters that open a Pandora’s Box of family secrets Ama had sworn to leave behind when she fled Japan. She is forced to confront her memories of the years before the war: of the daughter she tried too hard to protect and the love affair that would drive them apart, and even further back, to the long, sake-pouring nights at a hostess bar where Ama first learned that a soft heart was a dangerous thing. Will Ama allow herself to believe in a miracle?
Author Interview
What
sparked your interest in a story set in Nagasaki? Of the two cities
targeted by the atomic bombs, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, why did you
choose Nagasaki?
I’m
going to have to take you back to 1993. I was 21 years old. I’d
graduated from university with a degree in English and had no idea
about what I wanted to do in terms of a career. As I trawled job
advertisements at my parents’ home, a friend who was working at a
school in Japan wrote out of the blue: “Come here. You’d love it.
You can teach.”
In
that weird synchronicity of life, an advert appeared in a newspaper
looking for graduates to apply to GEOS, at that time one of the
world’s biggest English language schools. I got the job and was
allocated, at random, the city where I’d be teaching: Nagasaki.
Fate, I guess, or luck, led me there. I loved my own small piece of
Nagasaki: the curious ramshackle home I rented with the hole in the
floor in lieu of a flushing toilet, the tatami mats and paper sliding
doors in the bedroom, the tailless cats that loitered on my doorstep,
the lack of street names that left me lost on my first night, the
temples and shrines and foreigner cemeteries, the food, and the sheer
adventure of being dropped into a world so alien I had my own “alien
registration” card.
I
knew I wanted to set my first book in Nagasaki but I was wary about
tackling the atomic bomb. It was too big a topic, the devastation
real and not imagined, the aftermath still felt by generations of
families. However, every time I wrote about the city, the plot—or
rather the characters—took me back to the Second World War. And so
reluctantly, and cautiously, I began to feel my way towards a story
about an elderly woman called Amaterasu Takahashi who had lost her
daughter and grandson when Bockscar dropped Fat Man over Nagasaki—and
who had lived with that loss for forty years.
During
my two years living in Nagasaki, I attended the 50th
anniversary of the atomic bomb at Nagasaki Peace Park, alongside
30,000 more people who gathered together in the stifling heat to
remember the dead. I watched a small boy eat ice cream by a fountain
built to commemorate the fatally injured who had cried out for water.
I stored the memory of that boy away and later he turned into Hideo
Watanabe, the seven-year-old child seemingly killed on August 9,
1945.
Decades
pass in the book, and a man going by the same name arrives on the
doorstep of Amaterasu’s home in the US to declare he is the
grandson she thought dead. The adult Hideo has a type of retrograde
amnesia and I wanted his condition to reflect a certain historical
amnesia that we have in the West with regards to the atomic bombs.
Nagasaki was the second city hit. When we talk about nuclear war
Hiroshima is more often cited. That’s quite a thing, to have second
billing but to have shared the same horror.
Beyond
inspiring my first novel, Nagasaki has had a huge impact on my life.
It gave me my first job as a teacher, later my profession as a
journalist—and wonderful memories.
On
my first night in the city, a sushi restaurant owner, who also
happened to be a former boxer, declared: “For as long as you live
in Nagasaki I will protect you.” I feel the book is my way of
repaying my debt to all the kind people who looked after me when I
lived there. They protected me when I was young and a long way from
home.
Read the rest of the interview after the break.
