“So am I. But it’s amazing that we found Naoki and Aiko. It’s amazing that anyone survived, and we’re here together.”
On 15 August, Carolina and I are in the Nippon Budokon, a giant arena in Tokyo, to listen to the annual National Memorial Service for the War Dead. In the past, the service was in other cities, but it will be in Tokyo from now on. At noon, everyone goes silent. A single minute of silence all over the country, to commemorate the end of the war.
I want this minute to last. I want to hold everyone who’s still alive, everyone who is yet to be born, safe. Now and forever.
Carolina presses against me, and we interlace our fingers.
POSTSCRIPT
While the figures will always remain imprecise, perhaps as many as 100,000 people were killed instantly in the Hiroshima bombing on August 6, 1945, and another 60,000 died of injuries sustained in the bombings over the next weeks and months. Estimates vary, but perhaps around 60,000 people were killed instantly in the bombing at Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, with another 20,000 dying of injuries soon after. The number of people who later died of cancer caused by radiation exposure is also hard to calculate, but it could well be double the total of people killed by the explosions. The March 9, 1945, firebombing of Tokyo, however, was the deadliest air raid of World War II, and of any war in human history. Again, the figures are debated. It killed around 120,000 people, injured perhaps as many as 1,000,000, and left more than 1,000,000 homeless.
NOTES ON RESEARCH
Information on the people living in the Italian embassy in Tokyo from 1940 until they were taken to the internment camps in 1943 is scarce. I therefore felt free to make up Simona and her family. While much of what happens in the embassy comes from documents I read, the personalities of the ambassador and his wife are my own creations and neither is to be identified with the true Ambassador Indelli and his wife.
A few characters in this story are historical, including the Jesuit priests at the mission in Hiroshima. The rectory was the only institutional building of the city that was not reduced to rubble in the bombing, and the water really did still run in those pipes. Somehow the people in the rectory survived their injuries, and only Fathers Kleinsorge and Cieslik suffered from radiation sickness. That’s why I chose to place Simona/Simo-chan and Carolina/Karo-chan in that rectory.
The prisoner-of-war camp at Ofuna is also real, and it was indeed a secret, so no records were kept.
Various issues of time arose in writing this. Time in Tokyo is thirteen hours ahead of time in New York, and the international date line falls in the Pacific Ocean. Because of this difference, the date on which an event took place is reported differently in scholarly works, based on which time perspective is used. In this book, the date, day of the week, and time is local to the characters. For example, in the first chapter, the dates and days are given according to time in Italy. After that, they are given according to time in Japan. So according to the Japanese, Pearl Harbor was bombed on December 8. But according to Hawaii, which is east of the international date line, the date was December 7. Further, events were sometimes announced to the public on dates different from when they occurred. For example, Italy surrendered (in the Armistice of Cassibile) on September 3, 1943, but this news was not known to people in Japan until several days later. Always, the dates in this book reflect the realities as the characters would have perceived them.
Materials on World War II are abundant, and I read nonfiction widely (including the outstanding memoir of Dacia Maraini, Bagheria), starting my research in 2007, when I first visited Japan and got the idea for this story, continuing through 2012, when I sat down to begin writing it, and on through 2019, when I finally finished it. So many books influenced me, some of which are listed in the bibliography, but the one that was my companion throughout was A Diary of Darkness: The Wartime Diary of Kiyosawa Kiyoshi. I also relied heavily on Leaves from an Autumn of Emergencies. But really, everything I read informed this story in one way or another.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to Barry Furrow (still and always), Faith Applegate, Erin Brangiel, Sam Charney, Libby Crissey, Tashi Dawa, Chaz Donnelly, Ivy Drexel, Henry Hewitt, Lily Martin, Masataka Murakami, Michael Noon, Colleen O’Brien, Libby Parker-Simkin, Bobby Ralph, Abigail Raz, Joanna Riever, Alison Ryland, Edwin Stajkovic, Kayla Strine, Yukiko Sugimoto, Rachel Sutton-Spence, and Elizabeth Wiseman for comments on earlier versions. Thank you to Thad Guyer for discussing matters of the heart and plot with me. Thank you to Brenda Bowen for discussing so many things about writing in general and about writing this story in particular, and always being my confidante and friend. Thank you to Linda and Hajime Hayakawa and their whole extended family for help with Japanese language usage as well as comments on the story. Thank you to Samuel Yamashita, Henry E. Sheffield Professor of History at Pomona College, for checking historical details, and for his suggestions on cultural matters and daily wartime life. Thank you to Jamie Kuramaji, for checking culture and tradition authenticity in a close-to-final draft. Thank you to Dana Carey for reading and commenting on every draft and never showing a hint of being tired of this story. And, most of all, thank you to Wendy Lamb for being my partner all along. Her deep respect for and understanding of the child’s sensibility sat on my shoulders through every scene. Any straying beyond is due to my own stubbornness.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DONNA JO NAPOLI has published more than eighty books for young readers, including picture books, early readers, and young adult and middle-grade novels. Her work has been translated into nineteen languages and has won many awards at the state and national level. She is a professor of linguistics and social justice at Swarthmore College, and she brings her research skills and her profound interest in language to bear on her novels, particularly the historical ones. She lives in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, with her husband.
donnajonapoli.com
swarthmore.edu/donna-jo-napoli
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