Editorial Review
Los Angeles Times
By Susan Salter Reynolds
Sept. 30, 2007
Masako’s Story
Surviving the Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima
Kikuko Otake
Ahadada books: 96pp., $15 paper
KIKUKO OTAKE was 5 years old on Aug. 6, 1945. Her family lived in Uchikoshi, just 1.1 miles north of the hypocenter.
Her mother and two brothers were wounded but survived. Her father, stationed with the Japanese Army in Hiroshima, was killed.
For decades, her mother, Masako, refused to talk about that day. The family fled to Otake’s grandmother’s house in a nearby suburb, a journey that took many days and which Masako remembers in agonizing detail.
Masako told her daughter that because she had three children and a wounded arm she was unable to gather them altogether and jump into the river. “And that’s the only reason/Why you are still alive today.”
Otake came to the United States in 1968 to marry an American. “By a strange twist of fate,” she writes, “I ended up becoming a naturalized citizen of the country that had unleashed the atomic bomb on my family and the world.”
Otake began working on this book after visiting her 78-year-old mother in Japan in 1991. She felt she did not know enough about the bomb, its effect on her family and the world.
The notes she took while talking with her mother are transcribed here in the shape of poems: “I once saw a painting of hell. / But I swear this sight was more nightmarish than that.” This little memoir in verse has a beautiful sweetness, reverence and sorrow that gives its readers freedom to imagine the enormity, the horror of Hiroshima.