Burnt Shadows: A Novel
4/5
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About this ebook
Kamila Shamsie's Burnt Shadows is a story for our time by "a writer of immense ambition and strength. . . . This is an absorbing novel that commands in the reader a powerful emotional and intellectual response" -Salman Rushdie.
Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award
An Orange Prize Finalist
Nagasaki, August 9, 1945. Hiroko Tanaka watches her lover from the veranda as he leaves. Sunlight streams across Urakami Valley, and then the world goes white.
In the devastating aftermath of the atomic bomb, Hiroko leaves Japan in search of new beginnings. From Delhi, amid India's cry for independence from British colonial rule, to New York City in the immediate wake of 9/11, to the novel's astonishing climax in Afghanistan, a violent history casts its shadow the entire world over. Sweeping in its scope and mesmerizing in its evocation of time and place, this is a tale of love and war, of three generations, and three world-changing historic events.
Kamila Shamsie
Kamila Shamsie was born and grew up in Karachi, Pakistan. She is the author of seven previous novels including Burnt Shadows, shortlisted for the Orange Prize, and A God in Every Stone, shortlisted for the Women's Bailey's Prize and the Walter Scott Prize. Her novel Home Fire won the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2018. It was also longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2017, shortlisted for the Costa Best Novel Award, and won the London Hellenic Prize. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages. Kamila Shamsie is a Fellow and Vice President of the Royal Society of Literature and was named a Granta Best of Young British Novelist in 2013. She is professor of creative writing at the University of Manchester. She lives in London. @kamilashamsie
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Reviews for Burnt Shadows
316 ratings46 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5An extraordinary work which covers real scenes of loss and tension for those who are always considered outsiders and never fit in a society ..... i thoroughly loved reading it .... every single line takes you to a world where everything is unknown to people although they trying enough to become familiar with their surroundings..
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I loved the images that flowed through this narrative. The twists and turns that the characters experience are moving and heart-breaking.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Although this was a very well-written book with finely-observed characters, and excellent geopolitical insight, in the end I decided I didn't like it, and didn't enjoy it. The main character's life is a tale of repeated loss, and although that's ok and real life for many, ultimately there was no redemption or even much hope. So I wondered why the author was writing it. It's not for the enjoyment of the reader (at least not this one), and I was left wondering whether she was deeply unhappy in herself and wanted to share it, or just despairing. There is also quite a lot of anti-English or anti-US which is fair comment in the context of the novel, but I wondered if there was a bigger agenda too.
It's a shame really, because the writing was excellent and the characters and emotions were well observed.
Plot: 3/5
Writing: 5/5
Characterisation: 4/5
World: 4/5 - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A quietly devastating exploration of the human costs of war. Ranging from Nagasaki in 1945 via pre-partition Delhi and Karachi through to New York and Afganistan in 2002, the story interweaves tales of conflict and moral choices and ambivalences with an intensely moving family story. Beautifully written and thought provoking - Shamsie is a talented story teller with plenty to say about the modern world.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Wonderful and engrossing story centring on Hiroki - a Japanese woman who survives the atomic bomb in Nagasaki. Everything flows from the bomb- tragic, heart warming and wonderful writing.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Diasporic writers originating from South Asia and the Indian subcontinent are sweeping the world. Kamila Shamsie, a Pakistani author educated in America and living in London, follows in the footsteps of Khaled Hosseini and others, as she writes about Afghanistan and Pakistan to a European and American audience. Her most recent novel, Burnt Shadows, has already become an international phenomenon.Shamsie is a great storyteller and an ambitious writer. Her novel manages to cover the atomic bomb in Nagasaki in 1945, the independence and partition of India in 1947, the rise of the mujahideen in Pakistan and Afghanistan in the 1980s, and finally the 9/11 attacks in New York and the beginning of the war in Afghanistan. The one character who is present during all these historical turning points is Hiroko, a Japanese woman who escapes Nagasaki and comes to India to witness the last moments of British colonial rule.The first half of the novel is a riveting read, despite the occasional lapses to strange sentimentalism and descriptions that you would expect to find in harlequin romances (seriously, making love on a blanket in a secluded grove?!). The second half of the novel was disappointing. The plot strays all over the place, trying to follow each character, but focusing on no-one in particular.By the end, the entire story has become so unrealistic that you almost hope that it would just end. There are a few exciting moments of suspense, but the ending is incredibly frustrating.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I'm reading this book again, for the third time. It's not perfect, but something about it keeps bringing me back (and, I'm going to be using excerpts in a writing workshop I'm teaching next month, so I have to review it.) It's powerful and compelling and occasionally brilliant.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Hiroko is in Nagasaki when a bomb hits during WWII. Her finacee is killed, and she leaves Japan a couple of years later to go to India, where his sister lives. Hiroko moves in with Elizabeth and her husband James, and falls in love with one of their employees. Fast-forward 35 years and Hiroko and her husband have a teenage son, Raza, who manages to get involved in something a little over his head.The fast forwarding of time didn't bother me (there was an additional 10 year forward after the 35 year one), but for me, the book started off really slowly. I got more interested in Hiroko falling in love in India. But, there were still dry spots where I did lose interest again. Parts of Raza's story were interesting for me, but other parts weren't. This book varied for me, with me tuning out some parts that didn't catch my interest and other parts that did draw me in. Overall, I'd consider this one merely o.k.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Unputdownable, largely because of the writing – which is poetic, descriptive, imaginative, refreshing. And before you know it, you are captivated by the story and its characters too. When someone first told me it was about a person’s life through the Nagasaki bombing to the 9/11 attacks, my initial thought was “Wow, the author must have struggled to stretch a story that far.” But that is not how I felt when I began to read the book. The story flows naturally, without bearing you down with too much history. The writing is still what made it a compelling read for me. Will soon be binge-reading all of Shamsie’s books!
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This is an anti-war novel, and a really good one. It’s intelligent, gripping and heartfelt. It’s too gentle to be called an epic, but it has an epic’s scope.
The novel covers sixty years and three generations, in the lives of two interlocked multi-cultural families. It begins with the bomb in Nagasaki and ends with the tension and paranoia of the post-9/11 world. It’s about culture shock, assimilation, and losing one’s homeland. The characters are all great; I wanted to follow them around forever. The cities also live: Delhi, Karachi, New York.
My main quibble is that it ends at a point of crisis that left me blinking. I guess the author’s message is that nothing can be resolved in a world perpetually at war. - Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Interesting at first, but a bit overwritten. As the story went on I felt it became less interesting, and a bit confused as it jumped through generations, locations, events and history. Too much of a point being made and the characters became less important and therefore less interesting. Overall, not as satisfying as I had hoped it would be. Perhaps the author needed to concentrate more on fewer characters and maybe political events and movements to focus interest and provide depth. Interesting ending, though.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I have just re-read this book so that I can discuss it at my book club. I read it some time ago and loved it then but much to my surprise I got even more from it the second time. The detail of events and the wonderful portrayal of the various characters was re-awakened again and I enjoyed it again. This is the only book of Shamsie's that I have read so I look forward to getting to know the others, can't wait. As has been said by others though, I found the ending upsetting, such a shame.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5There's a mark on the wall from me throwing this book across the room when I read the last paragraph. Loved, loved the book! HATED, HATED, HATED the ending. Sweeping narrative, complex characterizations, and a finely detailed portrait of man's inhumanity to man and yet the author failed to come up with a more satisfying ending. I don't mean that the ending wasn't a likely result of everything that preceded it, it's just that I was looking for something, oh I don't know, maybe....happier?In this epic novel of love, loss and heartache, Shamsie has painted an achingly sad picture of war and its devastating effect on the lives that get in its way. From Nagasaki, to India, to 9/11, to Afghanistan Shamsie covers the years from 1945 until 2002. Hiroko Tanaka watches as her world crumbles with the explosion of the atomic bomb that would finally end WWII. She bravely picks up the pieces and moves on to India, Delhi in particular where she watches Partition unfold. And then, years later, she arrives in New York City right after 9/11 and watches as her son ends up in Afghanistan. Shamsie does an excellent job demonstrating how Hiroko was able to face the many challenges that presented themselves."She rubbed her thumb along the interlacings of the green cane chair. And this world , too, was ending. A year or two, no more...and then the British would go. It seemed the most extraordinary privilege---to have forewarning of a swerve in history, to prepare for how your life would curve around that bend. She had no idea what she planned to do beyond Delhi. Beyond next week. And why plan anyway? She had left such hubris behind. For the moment it was enough to be here, in the Burton garden, appreciative of a blanket of silence threaded with vibrant bird calls, knowing there was nothing here she couldn't leave without regret." (Page 60)Filled with symbolism, evocative and mesmerizing in its haunting beauty and written in poetic prose, I would highly recommend this novel but you might want to finish reading it outside where you can throw it across the yard`without doing much harm.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The beginning with the love story in Japan (and the writing style a bit) reminded me of David Mitchell's 'The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet' and sure enough, Mitchell is mentioned in the acknowledgements. Interesting. One section also reminded me of 'A Passage to India', though I have never read it, and a few pages later it is actually mentioned in this one. It also reminded me of The Kite Runner. As I knew there were so many tragedies as a centerpiece, I thought maybe Shamsie was trying to benefit by including them. But often the book took place right after or before those events, which I'm not sure is a good or bad thing. Many places and cultures were included here. I loved the first 33 pages in Japan, but then the bomb falls. I would have liked if more of the book took place there. If it wasn't for the places and times mentioned in the chapter headings, I wouldn't have guessed anything that happened as the story went on. So maybe I would have liked to have less of a hint. But overall, I really like Shamsie's writing style (there are many memorable images here) and I'd love to read more.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This beautifully written book of life, love and, most of all, tragedy, tells the stories of two families intertwined by fate and choice, from the bombing of Nagasaki to post-9/11 New York. Sometimes heart-wrenching, other times delving into emotions you'd rather not explore yet want to know, the author's delicate and graceful writing style really brings out the emotive power of events both large and small. Her words are like colors on a canvas describing scenes and feelings, making it so easy to lose yourself in the story. The book explores the complexities and subtleties of life, relationships, and history -- taking viewpoints of well-known recent and current events probably not normally taken, which also gives the storyline a believability that makes it so intriguing to read. I wanted the story to continue, to know how all the remaining characters fared, and the paths they would take. But not all is told either, and that makes the story even more powerful. Originally written on Feb 02, 2010 at 12:42PM
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Not too many years ago, there was a child who cried at social injustice without understanding what she was crying at; then, there was an idealistic law student determined to become a human rights lawyer, unswervingly filling her head with international cases and conventions/statute/regulations and muddling through them all to find a way towards that ever-mocked 'world peace'. And yes, she is me...At some point I realised two things: one, it was unlikely I would ever make it in the ironically cut-throat world that is becoming an established human rights lawyer and; two, short of a windfall, I couldn't support myself through the hundreds of pro bono cases that would preceed the actually-getting-paid part (those who have their human rights violated obviously not usually being particularly wealthy...). So I still became a lawyer but I swerved off towards commercial (and I love it, so that isn't a sad ending!). One thing I will always remember from university, though, was a presentation but a British-American lawyer who represented British/American nationals who were being held in Guantanamo Bay and was one of the only legal personnel allowed in. His talk was fascinating in detail but the thing that struck me the most was the same way as that which struck me with Burnt Shadows. When an atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, a huge number of people were killed. How do those that make the decisionson things like that rationalise it? What are the effects on those individuals that get caught up in political strife and war? The amount of people that were killed by that atomic bomb was huge (approximately 60-80,000) but compare it to the amount that were killed during World War II and, shockingly, it starts to look small. What I loved about Burnt Shadows, and what I loved about that British-American lawyer years ago, was the author's ability to look past the bigger picture and at the individuals whose lives are shaped by global events. Looking past the deaths of tens of thousands and focusing on "just" a couple is hard to do well, I think. It's too easy to miss the finer points of emotion in the grasping of massive tragedy - if my city was devastated in this way, would I stop to think about the effect on tens of thousands? Eventually yes, but right away? I think I'd be more likely to be caught up in my own grief about my own family/friends. It's selfish but it's real. Likewise Guantanamo Bay - looking past 9/11 and at the individual alleged terrorists is exceptionally difficult but Burnt Shadows looks at that issue, as did my revered lawyer. Can we look past the world-changing events and listen to an individual accused's story without skewing it with our own perceptions? I wouldn't dare ruin the book but this is indeed an epic story sweeping up these issues and presenting them through the plight of two families: the Burtons and the Ashraf-Tanakas. To communicate these harrowing themes, Shamsie uses prose that is so elegant it could be poetry. The story flows beautifully and the imagery for each country evokes a sense of time and atmosphere that I was constantly in awe of - I don't think I've ever read a book that so deftly switches between countries and era. The reader travels through Japan, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and New York over the space of about 60-something years and each time the story "jumps", it re-establishes itself so quickly that you feel as though you've been with the characters the whole time. In some books, when we skip a period of say 30 years, it feels as though one story just cuts to another - I think it works so much better here because the characters are strong and their relationships so realistic that you pick up with them as you would a good friend you haven't seen in years but still love dearly.My personal favourite character is Hiroko - she survives the dropping of the second atomic bomb, partition in India and post-terrorist New York in the way I think most of us would like to imagine we would: yes, she has physical and emotional scars but she's resolute about survival; she experiences real emotions like rage and devastation but gradually picks herself back up and looks after those she loves. She's also a fantastic individualist and her integration into Pakistani culture is very moving in places. This is by no means an easy read but I respect Shamsie immensely for tackling the subject matter in such a humbling way. I went through everything with those characters and have spent the last couple of days mulling it over and remembering and appreciating something new each time I do. I could honestly go ramble on forever! I'd set up a book club just to force people to read this.Everyone I've spoken to even once in the last year, expect a copy for Christmas....Overall: I struggle to find the words to recommend this enough: it's heart-breaking; it's funny; it's political and historical; it's about love but most of all it's about the impact of those huge world-changing events on the "little person" and how you can survive so much more than you think if you just have the right attitude and something/one to hold on to. Read it, dwell on it and cry over it - you'll feel better when you have...
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5So many historic markers-- Nagasaki, Post-colonial India, the birth of Pakistan, Americans in Afganistan, 9/11-- that are really interesting, but subjects that could each fill a novel. I liked the characters in Burnt Shadows, but they seemed secondary-- shadows to the events that consume them. I understand that this is a theme the author embraces, but I could understand more about a period of time if the focus had been sustained longer.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Kamila Shamsie's novel "Burnt Shadows" uses a cinemascope vision to portray a Japanese woman's struggle to understand her life in a spinning world where historic forces seem to lead her and her family into an inevitable showdown with fate. Hiroko carries the memories and scars imprinted into her skin from the atomic blast in Nagasaki in 1945 from Japan to India to post-partition Pakistan. Her son Raza carries the memories into a politically charged New York where the events of September 11, 2001 still loom in our headlines. Shamsie deftly leads the reader through the haunted landscapes of the last sixty years and by distilling chilling historical events through the vision of one family her words shed light into the shadows of time. An important work that I highly recommend.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This book certainly had good moments and overall I enjoyed it very much. However, it was uneven. The first section of the book, the part based in Japan, was superb. The second and bigger part based in India was less good but still enjoyable. The third section in New York was fine. The better part of the book focused on the life long challenges an immigrant faces in their new homeland, particularly if their physical appearance is notably different. Wothwhile reading
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I've always enjoyed Kamila's fast pace of narration and vivid, apt descriptions of my hometown, Karachi, but I don't always feel that I can relate her characters to Karachiites. 'Burnt Shadows' has some memorable characters though, particularly Hiroko Tanaka, and some of the questions it asks, such as how usually good, kind people can support war and collateral damage, will always remain very relevant.Aside, I remeber Kamila's sister telling me a few years back (before 'Broken Verses' had been published) that Kamila was doing researching phlox for her next book. Phlox are only mentioned twice in 'Burnt Shadows', and that too as only part of a list of subcontinent flowers. I can only imagine then how much research must have gone into a book that covers the bombing of Nagasaki, Partition of the Subcontinent, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, 9/11 and Guantanamo. Ambitious yes, but to Kamila's credit she does justice to her story.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I think it's important to note that the main characters in Kamila Shamsie’s brilliant novel, Burnt Shadows, are Japanese, German and Pakistani Muslims. This is a book that deals with the political tensions between different nations, nationalities and ethnic groups, and within that context Shamsie succeeds in putting a human face on the US's three bitterest enemies of the past sixty years. It is an epic novel that spans all of those years - covering three generations and as many continents. And, a typical hazard of epic fiction, just when I found myself getting attached to one group of people and becoming invested in their storyline, the author moves on. She is particularly skilled at creating memorable and sympathetic characters. I especially loved Hiroko, the Japanese woman who loses her German fiance in the bombing of Nagasaki, and thereafter moves to India to live with his sister (who has nearly disavowed her German identity) and her British husband. Hiroko is the personification of "ground zero," as she moves from her decimated home city after the bombing, to Delhi just before the acrimonious partition between India and Pakistan and, as a widow, to New York City in the years leading up to September 11. She is a most unusual and spirited creation and I was saddened when the author eventually moved her to the margins.All the other characters, while not quite as impressive as Hiroko, are unique and believable. Even to the very end, when some very destructive choices are made, I was hard-pressed to lay blame. Shamsie demonstrates that we are all products of the times we live in and, since WWII, propaganda and fear-mongering have played a huge role in shaping society. Shamsie’s writing is concise and very readable. I found the pages flying by and what seemed to be, at the outset, a rather daunting read, went by very quickly. Burnt Shadows demonstrates how circumstances, both personal and global, are often the result of a chain of events that, once set into motion, are all but impossible to stop. And by winning our empathy for her characters, she proves that, underneath it all, we are all much more alike than different.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5An ambitious and sweeping novel that tackles some serious contemporary issues. In the main it succeeds, but as the final chapters moved away from the central charcater, Hiroko, I found my engagement diminished and a touch of confusion emerged. This book reminded me a little of 'Bel Canto' with its diversity of nationalities and a central character who is Japanese.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Stunning. Kamila Shamsie has crammed a novel of great scope, beauty and significance into less than four hundred pages.I'm surprised that several reviewers have suggested that the start was the least impressive part, whilst I liked the whole book it was the opening section, set in Nagasaki on the day the atom bomb was dropped, that I found most breathtaking. She manages to create something beautiful out of a horrific event. I particularly liked the idea of hiding notebooks whose cosmopolitan content would not have been approved of by the Japanese authorities by attaching them to a tree:"He remains certain that no one will ever think to enter the deserted garden to search for treachery amidst the leaves. The people who would willingly sift through every particle of dust in a house for signs of anti-state activity can always be deceived by a simple act of imagination."
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Not for a long time have I read a book that plumbs the depth of human frailty, resilience, humility, generosity, kindness, loneliness, true friendship that knows no color, culture or language boundaries and love.This is a story about 2 families and the effect the bombing of Nagasaki, the separation of India and Pakistan, the Afghan Soviet war, and 9/11 have on them through the decades.Starting innocently enough with Hiroko Tanaka, a translator and linguist in Japan having gotten engaged to Konrad Weiss, a German teacher, these 2 individuals see their lives brilliantly ahead of them despite the ominous growlings of WWII. The Nagasaki bomb drops and all is changed.Gently but not so that the horrors of the aftermath of the bomb are glossed over, Hiroko describes staccato scenes of the destruction while recovering from her own injuries (horrible scarring on her back where patches of her kimono have been seared into her skin)in hospital. She is now hibakusha - a term that carries with it all the stigma associated with being a survivor of the A-bomb in Japan.Moving to India, she learns Urdu, builds a bond with her dead fiance's sister, and begins a journey filled with great joy and love, but which is also challenged with pain, betrayal and loss. Her journey takes her to Turkey, Pakistan and America, throughout which she is forced to call upon the very resilience that allowed her to survive and live after that dreadful day in Nagasaki.Hiroko and her family present the sides to the story most often unheard. How do ordinary people who just want to live in peace and who have aspirational dreams find the strength to stay true to their values and continue to see the good in others, even those governments warn against?This is a book about outsiders looking in, trying to find their place in a community, and of trying to belong. This is a book about the the human spirit and optimism. This is a book about living for what is right and not hiding because its an easier way to live. This is a book about despair for ruling governments. This is a book about hope for the world because there are people who make a difference.This review does absolutely no justice whatsoever to the depth of this book, and for that I apologize. But it is a book I would encourage you to read because it will leave a mark on you.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This story follows Hiroko through her life. The story starts in Japan during WWII and ends in 2002. We follow Hiroko as she loves, loses, and ages. While the events in history play second to the story there are many things that Hiroko deals with: the bombing in Nagasaki, the split of India and Pakistan, 9/11. The characters are well rounded, and as the story jumps from one to the other we really get a sense of who these people are and what emotions they are dealing with. I became connected to just about all of the characters. The story is well written, the descriptions were a bit much in some places, but the pictures that Shamsie is able to paint with words are breathtaking. Her use of reacurring themes makes the story really go full circle. Her ability to take monumental events in history and make them the basis of Hiroko's life, without making the story simply about the history is a feat. A good read. There were parts that read a little slow, but there weren't many and the story is compelling enough to pull you through them.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hiroko Tanaka, a young woman living in Nagasaki in World War II, has fallen in love with a German. They know their lives are constantly in danger, but somehow their love has blossomed regardless. On the same day that Konrad proposes, the Americans drop a bomb on Nagasaki. Hiroko’s life changes irrevocably, right down to her skin, on which the birds from her mother’s kimono have been etched in scars. A few years later, Hiroko finds herself at the home of Konrad’s sister in India, where new love awaits. Sweeping onwards through to Pakistan and later the United States, this multi-generational work encompasses the depths of the horror of war and the endurance of the human spirit in the face of unspeakable horror and tragedy.I’m not sure it’s possible to like this book, although I know I’ve said I do already. It is almost relentless in the danger and the pain it causes for its main characters, particularly Hiroko. In the beginning, it feels too long and it moves very slowly. While I appreciate the messages the book is trying to convey, it takes a great deal of concentration to get through and it might have benefited from a more concise plot. The writing is gorgeous, but doesn’t help matters, although it does feel as though we could live in the settings of the book. Each location feels different, as they should given where they are in the world. Hiroko moves from Nagasaki to India to Pakistan to New York City, all of which are beautifully drawn with Shamsie’s words.It’s the message that this book has left me with, however, which is certainly both anti-war and almost anti-nation. By taking a large time period, Shamsie can show that as human beings, we haven’t learned from our mistakes, and that war is truly horrible in a way that people who haven’t lived through it don’t properly understand. She also shows us what a lack of education about can do through Hiroko’s son, Raza. Hiroko tries to shield him from the atrocities of the atomic bomb by speaking little about her own experience, but that only means he doesn’t understand what he’s getting into when violence does encroach upon his life and only learns later the meaning and devastation of violence and loss. The mistakes are repeated later with another character, still ignorant of what war truly means. With these characters, it seems to me that the author is trying to express that people are people, by giving voices and faces to those who do cross country boundaries and who may otherwise be considered suspicious. Nationalism only impairs our ability to relate to others as we stereotype them into something Different. It’s unquestionable, in the end, that this book has given me a lot to think about.As such, I don’t know if I’d call Burnt Shadows an enjoyable book, but it is very deep. I felt that I was left with a lot on my mind and I had learned something about Pakistan in particular in the process (which I did enjoy, I like learning). So I’m undecided as to whether or not I can recommend it, and instead will leave you with just this review to decide for yourselves.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5In a brilliant flash of light Hiroko Tanaka's world changed. That light was the atomic bomb dropped August 9th, 1945 in Nagasaki Japan, and it took away everything that Hiroko held dear- her fiance, her father, her home. At the same time, the bomb left it's mark- 3 black cranes burned into her back from the after shock of the bomb as she was wearing her beautiful silk kimono. The bomb also left it's mark deep within her soul...How does one make one's life worthy? In a world where wars are fought, and prejudices exist, Burnt Shadows follows the lives of a family that began in Japan, travels to India during the Partition of India and Pakistan, and finally to New York and Afghanistan after 9/11. It is a sweeping novel that spans a life time of disappointments, love, loss and sacrifice. Kamila Shamsie's prose is lyrical, and you feel part of the story as you travel Hiroko's life with her as a silent companion.The conclusion is a quiet reminder of the world we live in now...
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5An ambitious and complex novel that moves from World War II Japan, to India at the time of Partition, to Pakistan and then to post 9/11 New York. The transitions are managed primarily through one character, Hiroko but other superbly drawn characters enter and leave as the novels develops and moves to its haunting, and unexpected but somehow appropriate conclusion. Shamsie uses her characters with mastery and at different levels. At the personal level, they have their strengths and weaknesses, their own life stories and their relationships. At the next level, their situations provide insightful commentary on cultural dislocation and relocation and finally, and ultimately, they are illustrative of the raw human issues associated with each of the major world events around which the story line is focussed. It was an ambitious approach but Shamsie has made it work.This is a big book in every sense, a long journey over time, continents and cultures. It evokes a range of feelings that sit in a satisfying juxtaposition - lightness and darkness, stability and instability, happiness and sadness, hope and despair. The language is beautiful, the historical context is accurately portrayed and the characters are balanced and believable. This is an engaging and rewarding read – highly recommended.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Spanning seven decades, six countries, and four families, Burnt Shadows depicts a brilliant narrative that originates in Nagasaki in 1945. The poignant catastrophic apocalypse culminates in post 9/11 New York City.Hiroko Tanaka, a proficient translator and schoolteacher is teaching Japanese to Konrad Weiss, her German fiancé. Leaving, he turns, and waves good-bye. Within a heartbeat and an atomic bomb, their world no longer exists. The crane pattern embedded in her back from her kimono is Hiroko’s only memento. Eventually, Hiroko travels to Delhi to meet Konrad’s half-sister Elizabeth, and her pompous British husband, James Burton. Not her initial intent, nor James’ desire, Elizabeth insists Hiroko stay until she may find a suitable place to utilize her linguistic skills. There, she meets Satjad Ashraf, James Burton’s local Muslim employee. Burton manifests his superficial attestation of his munificence in their daily chess games. Sadly, Satjad believes that his employment will result in procuring a position as a lawyer. An unexpected rapport develops between Hiroko and Satjad, and she asks him to teach her the Urdu language. Much to the dismay of Elizabeth, ignoring the social proprieties of class, their relationship deepens. As she discovers more about Konrad from Hiroko, Elizabeth also develops a close friendship with her.With daily news reports of the Partition of India, the Burtons arrange their leave with the intention of inviting Hiroko (without Satjad), to join them. Despite protestations from his family, Satjad plans to leave with Hiroko. Aware of the dangers of a Muslim remaining in India, they travel to Pakistan. When he finally realizes he will not be able to return to India, his Dilli, this move creates a life-long sorrow for Satjad.Sporadic relationships among these families endure, and the plot scenarios shift from country to country: Pakistan, Afghanistan, the United States, and Canada. Increasingly ominous events suggest disaster in the Middle East. Hiroko moves to New York City to live with Elizabeth. However, no safe place exists after 9/11. Trust and faith in fellow man no longer propel actions. Confusion and fear dominate decisions. These unforeseen variances affect relationships.The conclusion, though shocking, was preordained. Kamila Shamsie has created a provocative and memorable novel overflowing with richly endowed characters who struggle to live and to love amidst the compelling history this book encompasses.When I finished this book, I re-read the prologue and the poetry and realized I had come full circle.Extradordinary book; one of the best I have read this year.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5When Hiroko Tanaka was 21, she was living in Nagasaki and engaged to be married to Konrad Weiss. Things were difficult for them, though, because it was 1945 and people were leery of Konrad because he was German. When the atomic bomb is dropped on Nagasaki, Hiroko’s life is changed forever – she lost the love of her life and she is emotionally and physically scarred for life.Hoping to forget the past and start all over, Hiroko immigrated to India a few years later. She stayed with Konrad’s half-sister and her family and meets and falls in love with Sajjad Ali Ashraf. Against impossible odds, Hiroko and Sajjad got married and made a life for themselves, through good times and bad.It is really hard to write a synopsis of Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie without giving too much of the story away. The book starts out slow, and although the pace really doesn’t pick up much, I found myself drawn to the book after a few chapters. Hiroko is such a strong female character and I really admired her ability to re-invent herself and her life when she needed to. She never told her son about her experiences in World War II because she wanted to protect him, but then he ended up getting caught up in some militant activity and she said, "I wish now I’d told Raza. Told everyone. Written it down and put a copy in every school, every library, every public meeting place. But you see, then I’d read the history books. Truman, Churchill, Stalin, the Emperor. My stories seemed so small, so tiny a fragment in the big picture."Passages like that really made me reflect on the past and the importance of remembering and learning from mistakes. It also reminded me that every person’s story is important.I also learned a lot from Burnt Shadows. I’m kind of embarrassed to say I knew next to nothing about Pakistan and how it was formed and why there’s so much unrest in the area.Burnt Shadows is really the story of two families whose lives are intertwined through the years and in five different countries and I thoroughly enjoyed reading about their triumphs and tragedies. My thoughts are inadequate to describe how much is in this book and the beauty of its words.
Book preview
Burnt Shadows - Kamila Shamsie
For Aisha Rahman and Deepak Sathe
Table of Contents
Title Page
PROLOGUE
The Yet Unknowing World - NAGASAKI, 9 AUGUST 1945
Veiled Birds - DELHI, 1947
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
Part-Angel Warriors - PAKISTAN, 1982–3
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
The Speed Necessary to Replace Loss - NEW YORK, AFGHANISTAN, 2001–2
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
ALSO BY KAMILA SHAMSIE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
FURTHER READING
Copyright Page
PROLOGUE
Once he is in the cell they unshackle him and instruct him to strip. He takes off the grey winter coat with brisk efficiency and then—as they watch, arms folded—his movements slow, fear turning his fingers clumsy on belt buckle, shirt buttons.
They wait until he is completely naked before they gather up his clothes and leave. When he is dressed again, he suspects, he will be wearing an orange jumpsuit.
The cold gleam of the steel bench makes his body shrivel. As long as it’s possible, he’ll stand.
How did it come to this, he wonders.
… a time
to recollect
every shadow, everything the earth was losing,
a time to think of everything the earth
and I had lost, of all
that I would lose,
of all that I was losing.
—AGHA SHAHID ALI,
A Nostalgist’s Map of America
In past wars only homes burnt, but this time
Don’t be surprised if even loneliness ignites.
In past wars only bodies burnt, but this time
Don’t be surprised if even shadows ignite.
—SAHIR LUDHIANVI, Parchaiyaan
The Yet Unknowing World
NAGASAKI, 9 AUGUST 1945
Later, the one who survives will remember that day as grey, but on the morning of 9 August itself both the man from Berlin, Konrad Weiss, and the schoolteacher, Hiroko Tanaka, step out of their houses and notice the perfect blueness of the sky, into which white smoke blooms from the chimneys of the munitions factories.
Konrad cannot see the chimneys themselves from his home in Minamiyamate, but for months now his thoughts have frequently wandered to the factory where Hiroko Tanaka spends her days measuring the thickness of steel with micrometers, images of classrooms swooping into her thoughts the way memories of flight might enter the minds of broken-winged birds. That morning, though, as Konrad slides open the doors that form the front and back of his small wooden caretaker’s house and looks in the direction of the smoke he makes no attempt to imagine the scene unfolding wearily on the factory floor. Hiroko has a day off—a holiday, her supervisor called it, though everyone in the factory knows there is no steel left to measure. And still so many people in Nagasaki continue to think Japan will win the war. Konrad imagines conscripts sent out at night to net the clouds and release them in the morning through factory chimneys to create the illusion of industry.
He steps on to the back porch of the house. Green and brown leaves are scattered across the grass of the large property, as though the area is a battlefield in which the soldiers of warring armies have lain down, caring for nothing in death but proximity. He looks up the slope towards Azalea Manor; in the weeks since the Kagawas departed, taking their household staff with them, everything has started to look run-down. One of the window shutters is partly ajar; when the wind picks up it takes to banging against the sill. He should secure the shutter, he knows, but it comforts him to have some sound of activity issuing from the house.
Azalea Manor. In ’ 38 when he stepped for the first time through its sliding doors into a grand room of marble floor and Venetian fireplace it was the photographs along the wall that had captured his attention rather than the mad mixture of Japanese and European architectural styles: all taken in the grounds of Azalea Manor while some party was in progress, Europeans and Japanese mixing uncomplicatedly. He had believed the promise of the photographs and felt unaccustomedly grateful to his English brother-in-law James Burton who had told him weeks earlier that he was no longer welcome at the Burton home in Delhi with the words, There’s a property in Nagasaki. Belonged to George—an eccentric bachelor uncle of mine who died there a few months ago. Some Jap keeps sending me telegrams asking what’s to be done with it. Why don’t you live there for a while? As long as you like.
Konrad knew nothing about Nagasaki—except, to its credit, that it was not Europe and it was not where James and Ilse lived—and when he sailed into the harbour of the purple-roofed city laid out like an amphitheatre he felt he was entering a world of enchantment. Seven years later much of the enchantment remains—the glassy loveliness of frost flowers in winter, seas of blue azaleas in summer, the graceful elegance of the Euro-Japanese buildings along the seafront—but war fractures every view. Or closes off the view completely. Those who go walking in the hills have been warned against looking down towards the shipyard where the battleship Musashi is being built under such strict secrecy that heavy curtains have been constructed to block its view from all passers-by.
Functional, Hiroko Tanaka thinks, as she stands on the porch of her house in Urakami and surveys the terraced slopes, the still morning alive with the whirring of cicadas. If there were an adjective to best describe how war has changed Nagasaki, she decides, that would be it. Everything distilled or distorted into its most functional form. She walked past the vegetable patches on the slopes a few days ago and saw the earth itself furrowing in mystification: why potatoes where once there were azaleas? What prompted this falling-off of love? How to explain to the earth that it was more functional as a vegetable patch than a flower garden, just as factories were more functional than schools and boys were more functional as weapons than as humans.
An old man walks past with skin so brittle Hiroko thinks of a paper lantern with the figure of a man drawn on to it. She wonders how she looks to him, or to anyone. To Konrad. Just a gaunt figure in the drabbest of clothes like everyone else, she guesses, recalling with a smile Konrad’s admission that when he first saw her—dressed then, as now, in white shirt and grey monpe—he had wanted to paint her. Not paint a portrait of her, he added quickly. But the striking contrast she formed with the lush green of the Kagawas’ well-tended garden across which she had walked towards him ten months ago made him wish for buckets of thick, vibrant paint to pour on to her, waterfalls of colour cascading from her shoulders (rivers of blue down her shirt, pools of orange at her feet, emerald and ruby rivulets intersecting along her arms).
I wish you had,
she said, taking his hand. I would have seen the craziness beneath the veneer much sooner.
He slipped his hand out of hers with a glance that mixed apology and rebuke. The military police could come upon them at any moment.
The man with the brittle skin turns to look back at her, touching his own face as if trying to locate the young man beneath the wrinkles. He has seen this neighbourhood girl—the traitor’s daughter—several times in the last few months and each time it seems that the hunger they are all inhabiting conspires to make her more beautiful: the roundness of her childhood face has melted away completely to reveal the exquisiteness of sharply angled cheekbones, a mole resting just atop one of them. But somehow she escapes all traces of harshness, particularly when, as now, her mouth curves up on one side, and a tiny crease appears just millimetres from the edge of the smile, as though marking a boundary which becomes visible only if you try to slip past it. The old man shakes his head, aware of the foolishness he is exhibiting in staring at the young woman who is entirely unaware of him, but grateful, too, for something in the world which can still prompt foolishness in him.
The metallic cries of the cicadas are upstaged by the sound of the air siren, as familiar now as the call of insects. The New Bomb! the old man thinks, and turns to hurry away to the nearest air-raid shelter, all foolishness forgotten. Hiroko, by contrast, makes a sharp sound of impatience. Already, the day is hot. In the crowded air-raid shelters of Urakami it will be unbearable—particularly under the padded air-raid hoods which she views with scepticism but has to wear if she wants to avoid lectures from the Chairman of the Neighbourhood Association about setting a poor example to the children. It is a false alarm—it is almost always a false alarm. The other cities of Japan may have suffered heavily in aerial raids, but not Nagasaki. A few weeks ago she repeated to Konrad the received wisdom that Nagasaki would be spared all serious damage because it was the most Christian of Japan’s cities, and Konrad pointed out that there were more Christians in Dresden than in Nagasaki. She has started to take the air-raid sirens a little more seriously ever since. But really, it will be so hot in the shelter. Why shouldn’t she just stay at home? It is almost certainly a false alarm.
Why risk it, Konrad thinks. He retrieves his air-raid hood from inside the house and starts to walk swiftly towards the shelter which the Kagawas had built in the back garden. Halfway across the garden he stops and looks at the wall which divides the property from the vacated lot next door. He hasn’t checked on his birds, on the other side of the wall, since the last rain shower. Tossing the air-raid hood on the grass, he strides to the boundary wall and hoists himself over it, slinging his body low to reduce the chances of being seen by passers-by or the military police.
If anyone were to see him they would think he looked ridiculous—a gangling European tumbling over a wall, all arms and legs and hooded eyes, with hair and close-cropped beard of a colour so unexpected in Nagasaki that Hiroko Tanaka had thought, the first time she saw him, that the hair of Europeans rusted rather than greyed as they aged. Later she discovered that he was only twenty-nine—eight years older than she was.
The dry grass crackles beneath his feet—he feels as though he is snapping the backs of tiny creatures—as he walks across to the giant camphor tree to which the birds are fastened, rotating slowly in the faint breeze. It is Hiroko who first referred to his purple notebooks as birds—the day they met; the only time she has been inside his house. She lifted a notebook off his desk, splayed, and glided it around his room. The animation of her touch made him acutely conscious of the lifelessness of his words: sentences thrown down on paper year after year simply so he could pretend there was some purpose to his being here, some excuse for cowering in a world from which he felt so separate that nothing in it could ever implicate him.
But ever since Germany’s surrender shifted his status in Nagasaki from that of ally into some more ambiguous state which requires the military police to watch him closely the lifeless words have become potent enough to send him to prison. It says all there is to say about the paranoia of Imperial Japan: notebooks of research and observation about the cosmopolitan world that had briefly existed within a square mile of where he now lives are evidence of treason. Yoshi Watanabe made that clear to him when Germany’s surrender started to seem imminent. You write about a Nagasaki filled with foreigners. You write about it longingly. That’s one step away from cheering on an American occupation. And so, the night Germany surrendered, Konrad constructed a mobile of strong wire and hung each of his eight purple-leather notebooks from it. He climbed over the wall to the vacant property that adjoined his own, and attached the mobile to a tree. The wind twirled the purple-winged birds in the moonlight.
He remains certain that no one will think to enter the deserted garden to search for treachery amidst the leaves. The people who would willingly sift through every particle of dust in a house for signs of anti-state activity can always be deceived by a simple act of imagination.
Ducking beneath a low swooping branch, he reaches out a hand and finds the leather books dry and unmarked, though slightly faded. He looks gratefully up at the protective canopy of leaves before noticing the white streak on one of the leather covers: a real bird’s comment on these purple impostors. His face breaks into one of those smiles which sometimes fool people into thinking him handsome. As he steps away from the tree his attention shifts to the slightly deranged tone that has crept into the mournful call of the air-raid siren. Not much point dropping a bomb here, Konrad thinks, making his way without haste back to Azalea Manor’s air-raid shelter. The former Foreign Settlement where he lives is characterised now by absence, and always by waste. In Urakami ten families could live in this space! Hiroko said the first time they met, gesturing at Azalea Manor. And she followed it with: The rich! Ridiculous! before turning to ask him what he intended to pay her for the translation work he was requesting.
Weeks later, he accused her, laughingly, of driving up her price by playing on his guilt. Well, of course, she said, with characteristic frankness; scruples and starvation don’t go well together. Then she spread her arms wide and scrunched her eyes shut as though concentrating hard on conjuring up another world: When the war’s over, I’ll be kind. Opening her eyes, she added quietly, Like my mother. He couldn’t help thinking her mother would never have approved of starting up a romance with a German, or even walking alone with him through the hills of Nagasaki. It discomforted him to know his happiness was linked to the death of her mother, but then she took his hand and he doubted that anyone, even a revered mother, could have told Hiroko Tanaka what to do. Why should rules of conduct be the only things untouched by war, she once asked him? Everything from the past is passed.
Kicking the air-raid hood on the ground before him he enters the capacious shelter built into the slope of Azalea Manor’s garden. The air musty and tinged with bitterness. Here, the deck of cards with which he and Yoshi Watanabe and Keiko Kagawa kept each other distracted, particularly useful during the early days of the air-raid sirens when there was more terror than boredom associated with the warnings; here, the oak chair from which Kagawa-san surveyed the behaviour of his neighbours and family and staff during those rare occasions when the air-raid sirens found him still at home; here, the hopscotch squares which Konrad had drawn in the dust for the younger Kagawa children; here, the hidden bottle of sake which the cook thought no one else knew about; here, the other hidden bottle of sake which the teenage Kagawas came in search of late at night when the shelter was empty. They knew Konrad could see them from his caretaker’s house, but while their parents might still be uneasy after seven years about quite how to negotiate their relationship with the landlord who folded his lanky frame into the tiny house at the bottom of the garden the younger Kagawas knew him as an ally and would have happily welcomed him into their drinking parties if he had shown any inclination to join them.
Now all the Kagawas cross over to the other side of the road if they see him walking towards them. One round of questioning by the military police about the suspect loyalties of their landlord was all it had taken to move them out of Azalea Manor.
Konrad sits on Kagawa-san’s oak chair, bouncing his air-raid hood on his knee. He is so immersed in what was that it takes him a moment to realise that the figure which appears in the entrance to the shelter, hood in hand, exists in present tense. It is Yoshi Watanabe.
As if asking for permission to enter a private party, Yoshi says, in English, May I come in? I’ll understand if you say no.
Konrad doesn’t respond, but as Yoshi mutters a word of apology and starts to walk away, Konrad calls out, Don’t be an idiot, Joshua. How’d you think I’d feel if a bomb landed on you?
Yoshi steps inside, looping his spectacles over his ears and blinking rapidly.
I’m not sure.
Picking up the deck of cards, he kneels on the ground, shuffling the cards and then dealing ten each to himself and the empty space across from him.
Yoshi Watanabe is the Jap
whose telegrams James Burton had referred to when packing Konrad off to Nagasaki. His grandfather, Peter Fuller of Shropshire, had been George Burton’s closest friend and neighbour. When Konrad arrived in Nagasaki it was Yoshi who was waiting at the harbour to welcome him, Yoshi who showed him around Azalea Manor, Yoshi who found him a Japanese tutor, Yoshi who produced the Kagawas as though they were a bouquet of flowers hiding within his sleeve within hours of hearing Konrad say he’d be far more comfortable living in the cosiness of the caretaker’s house, Yoshi who regaled him with stories of Nagasaki’s turn-of-the-century cosmopolitan world, unique in Japan—its English-language newspapers, its International Club, its liaisons and intermarriages between European men and Japanese women. And when Konrad said he needed someone to translate Japanese letters for the book he was planning to write about the cosmopolitan world, it was Yoshi who had introduced him to his nephew’s German teacher, Hiroko Tanaka.
It was one of those friendships which quickly came to seem inevitable, and unbreakable. And then in a conversation of less than a minute, it ended.
They come increasingly to check on me, Konrad. My mother’s family name was Fuller. You know what that means. I can’t give them any other reason to think I have divided loyalties. Until the war ends, I’m staying away from all the Westerners in Nagasaki. But only until the war ends. After, after, Konrad, things will be as before.
If you had been in Germany, Joshua, you’d say to your Jewish friends: I’m sorry I can’t hide you in my attic, but come aver for dinner when the Nazi government falls.
Why are you here?
Yoshi looks up from the fan of cards in his hand.
I was at home when the sirens started. This is the nearest shelter.
At Konrad’s raised eyebrow he adds, I know. I’ve been going to the school house’s shelter these last few weeks. But with this New Bomb … I didn’t want to risk the extra minutes out in the open.
So there are risks in the world greater than being associated with a German? That’s comforting. What New Bomb?
Yoshi puts down his cards.
You haven’t heard? About Hiroshima? Three days ago?
Three days? No one’s spoken to me in three days.
In the shelter at Urakami, Hiroko is packed in so tightly between her neighbours she cannot even raise a hand to wipe the sweat damping her hairline. It hasn’t been so crowded in here since the early days of the air-raid sirens. What could have provoked the Chairman of the Neighbourhood Association into such a frenzy about rounding up everyone in his path and ordering them to the shelter? She exhales through her mouth and turns her head slightly towards the Chairman’s wife, who responds by turning quickly away from Hiroko. It is impossible to know if this is guilt or disdain.
The Chairman’s wife had been a close friend of Hiroko’s mother—she recalls the two of them giggling together over the newest edition of Sutairu, in the days before war brought an end to the magazine: no place in wartime Japan for a publication that advised women on the etiquette of wearing underwear with Western dresses. As she was dying, Hiroko’s mother had called the Chairman’s wife to her bedside with a single request: protect my husband against himself. There was even less place in wartime Japan for an iconoclastic artist than for magazines about modern girls. For a long time, the Chairman’s wife had carried out her promise, persuading her husband to regard Matsui Tanaka’s outbursts against the military and the Emperor as a symbol of a husband’s mourning that was so profound it had unhinged him. But in the spring, Matsui Tanaka had been walking past a neighbourhood house and saw the cherry blossom festooning it to commemorate the sacrifice of the fifteen-year-old boy who had died in a kamikaze attack. Without saying a word to Hiroko who was walking silently beside him Matsui Tanaka darted forward, pulling out a book of matches from the pocket of his trousers, and set fire to the cherry blossom.
Seconds later he lay bloodied on the ground, the dead boy’s father struggling against the neighbourhood men who had finally decided to restrain him, and Hiroko, bending down over her father, found herself pulled up by the Chairman’s wife.
Report him yourself,
said the woman who had been like an aunt to her. That advice is the only protection I can give you now.
She hadn’t listened, of course—the privations of wartime may have loosened up her scruples, but not her loyalty—and the next day three things happened: the military police came to take her father to prison, where he stayed for over two weeks; the principal of the school where she taught German told her she was dismissed, there was no room in his school for the child of a traitor and no need for the students to learn a foreign language anyway (the principal’s body curling into itself as he spoke, as though he thought that if he occupied less space there wouldn’t be so much of him to despise); and when she returned home, the Chairman was waiting to tell her she had been conscripted to work at one of the munitions factories.
She wants now to signal to the Chairman’s wife that she knows the woman did her best, for so long; but in part she wants to signal this in order to shame her.
Someone new enters the shelter, and everyone else is squeezed back even further, though, there is nothing but polite murmurs of apology to signal the indignity of being so closely pressed up to the armpits and groins of strangers. Hiroko finds herself moving back into a gap which has opened up from necessity rather than any physical possibility, and finds herself beside two boys. Thirteen, maybe fourteen years old. She knows them, these Nagasaki boys. Not these ones exactly, but she knows that look of them. She guesses the taller one with the arrogant tilt of the head is in the habit of wooing girls or catching the attention of young teachers with tales of the thoughts he knows he’ll have on his one-way flight into the bridge of a US carrier (soon, very soon, the youngest of the pilots are not much older than him), all the while implying that the female towards whom he’s leaning will be central to those final, heroic thoughts.
You’re lying,
the shorter boy whispers.
The taller one shakes his head.
Those who were close, it stripped to the bone so they were just skeletons. The ones further away, it peeled off their skin, like grapes. And now that they have this New Bomb the Americans won’t stop until we’re all skeletons or grapes.
Stop it,
Hiroko says, in her teacher’s voice. Stop telling these lies.
They’re not …
the boy starts to say, but her raised eyebrow silences him.
One of her former students—Joseph—really had piloted his Ohka into a US carrier. He told her once that on the final flight he would take with him two pictures—one of his parents standing beneath a cherry tree, and one of Myrna Loy. A picture of Myrna Loy, she said, as you destroy a US warship? But he couldn’t see any irony in that. He was the neighbourhood boy whose death had propelled her father into burning the cherry blossom—perhaps he did it for her. The only way he knew of saying he understood her grief and fury, held inarticulate inside. She doesn’t know which she is more surprised by—the possibility that this could be true, or the fact that it hasn’t occurred to her earlier. Since her mother’s death she has taken to interpreting the silence from her father as an absence of anything worth communicating rather than an inability to form a new configuration with his daughter now his beloved wife is no longer around to serve as the voice to his thoughts.
Skeleton or grape?
the tall boy whispers. She can smell the fetidness of stale breath.
Outside are air and trees and mountains. It’s worth any risk.
She shoulders her way forward, and all those who were polite in allowing more people in are outraged by her attempts to leave.
What are you doing … there’s no room … keep back, keep back …
An elbow collides with her ribs.
My father,
she calls out. I must find my father.
Some of the women in the shelter start to make room for her to exit, lifting their children up in their arms.
A voice says, Her father is Matsui Tanaka, the traitor,
and there’s a ripple of unpleasantness around the shelter, more people making space for her but in a way that suggests they don’t want her here.
She doesn’t care. She is out now, gulping in the fresh air which almost seems cool by comparison.
She walks quickly to get away from the shelter, and then slows, aware of the emptiness around her. Under a pale-leafed tree she holds her arms up to be patterned with drifting spots of sun and shadow as the branches sway in a breeze that isn’t perceptible at ground-level. She glimpses her hands as she holds them up—blistered from the combination of factory work and bamboo-spear drills. This was not how she imagined twenty-one. Instead, she imagined Tokyo—Hiroko Tanaka in the big city, wearing dresses, leaving lipstick marks on wine glasses in jazz clubs, her hair cut just below the ear—single-handedly resurrecting the lifestyle of the modern girl
of the twenties whose spirit had lived on in Sutairu through the thirties.
But that was childish dreaming. Or borrowed dreaming, really. She saw the way her mother sighed and laughed over stories of the modern girls and she imagined their world as the only mode of escape from a dutiful life. Though the older she got the more she was certain her mother—so devoted to husband and daughter and home—never really desired the escape, only enjoyed the idea that it existed in the world. That was where she and her daughter so sharply differed. For Hiroko, to know was to want. But that world glimpsed in magazines was known far less than the world she could reach out and grasp by the roots of its rust-coloured hair.
Now the childhood dreams are past. Now there is Konrad. As soon as the war ends, there will be her and Konrad. As soon as the war ends, there will be food and silk. She’ll never wear grey again, never re-use tea leaves again, never lift a bamboo spear, or enter a factory or bomb shelter. As soon as the war ends there will be a ship to take her and Konrad far away into a world without duty. When will the war end? It cannot happen quickly enough.
He walks away from Azalea Manor, almost running.
He can hear Yoshi calling him to come back and wait for the all-clear, but all he can think is that if another New Bomb is to fall it will fall on Urakami: on the factories, on the people packed close together. The shelters won’t keep it out, not the thing Yoshi described. And if it is to fall on Hiroko, let it fall on him, too.
He picks up his pace, runs through memories of her: the gate through which she walked in search of him as soon as Yoshi’s nephew delivered the letter he had written, asking if she’d be interested in translating letters and diaries into German for a negotiable fee; the schoolyard where they used to meet every week for the first few months, the exchange of translations and money slipping further and further to the margins of their encounters; the road leading to the street-car, where she’d responded to his gloomy complaints about rationing by singing Yes, We Have No Bananas
and he discovered she spoke English as fluently as German; the Chinese quarter, where he made her laugh out loud for the first time, confessing the names he’d given to all the vegetables he didn’t recognise: windswept cabbage, knots of earth, fossilised flower, lanky potato; Megane-Bashi, or Spectacles Bridge, where they had been standing, looking into the water, when a small silver fish leapt out of Konrad’s reflected chest and dived into her reflection and she said, Oh,
and stepped back, almost losing her balance, so he had to put his arm around her waist to steady her. And here—he slows; the all-clear sounds; the threat has passed—the banks of the Oura, where he told her that his first winter in Nagasaki he had walked past the frozen river and seen splashes of colour beneath the surface.
I went closer to look. And what do you think I saw? A woman’s name. Hana. It had been written in red ink by someone—either a skilled artist or an obsessed lover—who knew how to paint on the water in the instant before the ice froze the characters into place.
Instead of a shaking her head at him and offering up some entirely practical explanation for a name sealed in ice, as he had expected, she frowned.
Your first winter here was ’38. Why didn’t we meet sooner? What a waste.
It was the first indication he had that she—bizarrely, wonderfully—went at least part-way to reciprocating his feelings.
He sets off again, panic replaced by purposefulness. Ever since Germany’s surrender he has told her it isn’t safe for her—a traitor’s daughter—to spend too much time with him. So they have been meeting only twice a week, for an hour at a time, always out in public, sometimes trailed by the military police—on those occasions they speak loudly, in Japanese, about the glorious history of Japan about which she pretends to instruct him. He has stopped his weekly practice of lending her books in German and English from his library, though it has formerly been one of his great pleasures to see the different expressions of delight with which she greets Yeats, Waugh, Mann; no matter the length or denseness she is done with the book—has sometimes read it twice—by the time the next week comes around. But now books
have joined the list of suspended intimacies between them. Each time they meet she complains that there’s too much rationing in the world as it is, but he is unyielding. After the war, he always says. After the war. Now he sees how much of Yoshi’s thinking has infected him.
Crossing into the valley, he looks up towards Urakami Cathedral with its stone figures that stand against the sky—on overcast days their greyness suggests each cloud is an incipient statue waiting for a sculptor to pull it down and hew it into solidity. And he, too, has been hewn into solidity—gone now those days of insubstantiality, not knowing what he’s doing in Japan, a fugitive from a once-beloved country he long ago gave up on trying to fight for or against. He knows entirely why he’s here, why here is the only place he can be.
Away from the river now, away from the Cathedral, he veers towards the slope she has described to him—with the denuded silver-barked tree painted black so that the moonlight doesn’t make a steel tower of it and draw enemy fire (and on the topmost branches someone has painted stars). There, the purple rooftops of her neighbourhood which remind her of his notebooks, so every day when she comes home from the factory she sees his birds, every night she falls asleep beneath their outstretched wings.
Konrad-san?
She stands on the verandah of her house, looking at him with concern. What could have brought him to Urakami, for all her neighbours to see?
He smiles and makes a gesture of mock-despair. Months ago he asked her to call him Konrad
and she said, It’s a nice name, but on its own it sounds naked.
Then she gave him her wickedest smile. One day, maybe that won’t be a problem.
Is your father here?
Out walking in the hills. Come.
She opens the sliding door and he fumbles to take off his shoes before joining her inside. She is walking up the stairs before he’s in and he barely allows himself time to look around the small reception room, the focal point of which is an ink-and-brush painting of a Nagasaki seascape—her father’s work, he guesses correctly, feeling strangely unsettled at the thought of her father. Hiroko once said she learnt how to question the world’s rules from his example rather than his instruction, and Konrad can’t help but suspect Matsui Tanaka’s disengaged parenting will stop at the precise moment his daughter introduces him to the German she … what? … loves?
Upstairs, he enters a room in which a futon is rolled up, but hasn’t yet been put away. He tries not to stare at her bedding.
Hiroko steps out on to the balcony and leans on the railing. This house is far up the slope and though it is hemmed in on three sides by other homes the balcony looks out on to nothing but trees and hills. And nothing but trees and hills look on to it.
You never told me you live a single dive away from an ocean of liquid leaves,
he says.
She touches his sleeve.
Are you all right? You look strange. And you’re here. Why?
As ever their conversation moves between German, English and Japanese. It feels to them like a secret language which no one else they know can fully decipher.
I have to ask you something. I don’t want to wait until the war ends to hear the answer.
In saying it he realises his purpose in coming here. Will you marry me?
Her response is swift. She pulls herself to her full height, hands on her hips.
How dare you?
He steps back. How has he been so completely wrong?
How dare you suggest there’s a question attached to it? Last week when we talked about travelling around the world together after the war—in what capacity did you think I was agreeing to go with you, if not as your wife?
The end of the sentence is muffled in his shirt as he