The most iconic image of Hiroshima is a photograph of a human shadow burned into a stone step when the bomb went off - a stark and haunting metaphor for all that was erased in that brutal, historic moment. But when Rahna Reiko Rizzuto - novelist, wife, mother, daughter of a family for whom "to heal was to forget" after their imprisonment in the Japanese American internment camps -- went to Japan for six months in 2001 to research her second book, the safe distance of metaphor was not what she was after. She was looking for memories, the narratives we tell ourselves to shape and reshape our lives, so much more volatile - and in their recovery, risky -- than shadows fused to stone.
By pulling from the wreckage of time the stories of those who survived the bombing of Hiroshima and its aftermath, in piecing together a collage of answers to questions of identity, belonging, and survival, Rizzuto found her own answers and her own story of herself shifting, and her future forever changed. In writing as beautifully gestural and balanced as Japanese brush painting, with a clarity of perception and humility that is rare in a book so intimate, Hiroshima in the Morning is a brave, compassionate, and heart-wrenching memoir of one woman's quest to redeem the past while learning to live fully in the present.
-Kate Moses, author of Cakewalk, A Memoir, Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath; Because I Said So: 33 Mothers Write About Children, Sex, Men, Aging, Faith, Race & Themselves; Mothers Who Think: Tales of Real-life Parenthood
Rahna Reiko Rizzuto is the author of the American Book Award-winning novel, Why She Left Us. Her memoir about living at the original ground zero during the September 11th terrorist attacks, Hiroshima in the Morning, will be published in September 2010. She is a recipient of the U.S./Japan Creative Artist Fellowship, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Associate Editor of The NuyorAsian Anthology: Asian American Writings About New York City. Her essays and short stories have appeared in anthologies, journals and newspapers including the Los Angeles Times, Salon Magazine, the Crab Creek Review, Mothers Who Think, Because I Said So, and Topography of War, among others. She is a faculty member in the MFA in Creative Writing program at Goddard College. She can be found at: www.rahnareikorizzuto.com.
By pulling from the wreckage of time the stories of those who survived the bombing of Hiroshima and its aftermath, in piecing together a collage of answers to questions of identity, belonging, and survival, Rizzuto found her own answers and her own story of herself shifting, and her future forever changed. In writing as beautifully gestural and balanced as Japanese brush painting, with a clarity of perception and humility that is rare in a book so intimate, Hiroshima in the Morning is a brave, compassionate, and heart-wrenching memoir of one woman's quest to redeem the past while learning to live fully in the present.
-Kate Moses, author of Cakewalk, A Memoir, Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath; Because I Said So: 33 Mothers Write About Children, Sex, Men, Aging, Faith, Race & Themselves; Mothers Who Think: Tales of Real-life Parenthood
Rahna Reiko Rizzuto is the author of the American Book Award-winning novel, Why She Left Us. Her memoir about living at the original ground zero during the September 11th terrorist attacks, Hiroshima in the Morning, will be published in September 2010. She is a recipient of the U.S./Japan Creative Artist Fellowship, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Associate Editor of The NuyorAsian Anthology: Asian American Writings About New York City. Her essays and short stories have appeared in anthologies, journals and newspapers including the Los Angeles Times, Salon Magazine, the Crab Creek Review, Mothers Who Think, Because I Said So, and Topography of War, among others. She is a faculty member in the MFA in Creative Writing program at Goddard College. She can be found at: www.rahnareikorizzuto.com.
