Hibakusha

Script: Thilde Barboni
Artwork: Olivier Cinna

Description:

Ludwig has never been a soldier. A childhood injury left him lame in one leg, which has allowed him to largely sit out the war on the sidelines, as a translator. Fleeing his passionless marriage, he accepts an assignment in Japan, allowing him to return to the land of his youth. But the year is 1945. It is not a good time to be Japanese, or German… much less stationed in Hiroshima. Ludwig is tempted by love and, in furtively tampering with his translations of classified documents, by the chance to do something heroic. But none of that will save him...

My Thoughts:

Hibakusha is the Japanese term for survivors of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima or Nagasaki in 1945. To read about the personal experience of Hibakusha, try Barefoot Gen, a graphic novel series by Keiji Nakazawa. There is also a very good multigenre novel titled Sachiko by Caron Stilson.

This is a fictional love story of a German translator and a Japanese woman in Hiroshima in 1945. What makes this intriguing is that the author starts with the haunting images of people's shadows incinerated in stone.

When I was a child, my mother and I lived in Japan so she could teach English at a Japanese high school. My maternal grandmother had family in Hiroshima so on our school holidays we would catch the shinkansen, bullet train, from Osaka to Hiroshima to stave off our homesickness by visiting relatives. At seven, I visited the peace memorial in Hiroshima and the image of the stone with the shadow of the person that was sitting on that stone continued to haunt me. Like the shoes in the Holocaust museum in DC, the shadow on the stone has stayed with me all these years. I can understand, then Barboni's desire to create a story around the shadow in the stone.

In her own haunted imagination she wonders if the stone can remember. She wants to know if the soul of the person memorialized in the stone can be immortalized in the rock. That is what is most fascinating about this story. 

A digital copy provided by Net Galley and the publisher for an honest review.