Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms

By Fumiyo Kouno
Last Gasp, 108 pp.
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In The Idea of History, author R. G. Collingwood argues that nineteenth-century historians viewed their task in a different spirit than their predecessors. While previous generations of scholars treated history as a simple chain of events, the Romantics wanted to recreate the past through their writings. The Romantic historian, Collingwood explained, “entered sympathetically into the actions which he described; unlike the scientist who studied nature, he did not stand over the facts as mere objects for cognition; on the contrary, he threw himself into them and felt them imaginatively as experiences of his own.”

I found myself revisiting The Idea of History as I read Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms, a project that might well have resonated with Collingwood’s pioneering nineteenth-century historians. Fumiyo Kouno’s slim volume contains two interrelated stories examining the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing. Neither has an obvious dramatic arc; both are slice-of-life stories that afford readers a unique opportunity to imagine the fears, hopes, and sorrows of the hibakusha. In her introduction to Town of Evening Calm, Kouno explains her approach to the subject in terms that are strikingly similar to Collingwood’s:

Although I was born and raised in Hiroshima, I am neither a hibakusha survivor of the atomic bomb, nor am I a second generation hibakusha. I don’t have any relatives who can talk about their experience. For me, the atomic bomb is a tragedy that occurred in the tragic past. At the same time, it was a circumstance that existed in the background of ‘other people’s households.’ I always thought all I needed to know about the bomb was that it was a terrifying thing that happened once upon a time, and a subject best avoided. After living in Tokyo for a while, however, I came to realize that people outside of Hiroshima and Nagasaki didn’t really know all that much about the ravages of the atomic bomb. Unlike me, they weren’t avoiding the subject—they never had the opportunity to learn about it even if they wanted to… I hadn’t experienced the war or the bomb first-hand, but I could still draw on the words of a different time and place to reflect on peace and express my thoughts.

The first story, “Town of Evening Calm,” focuses on Minami, a young seamstress living in Hiroshima ten years after the atomic blast. Superficially, the city seems to be healing: its downtown is bustling with activity, as is the dressmaker’s shop where Minami works. Yet subtle signs of the devastation remain, from the ramshackle houses of the residential district to the scarcity of everday goods. (In a particularly effective scene, we see Minami walk home barefoot so as to preserve her only pair of shoes.) Minami herself bears psychic wounds from the day, as is evident in her brusque dismissal of Uchikoshi, a co-worker who clumsily courts her with baseball shoptalk and promises of marriage. Minami refuses to leave her ailing mother’s side, as their family has been effectively reduced from five to two. (Minami’s father and sister perished in the blast, while her brother elected to live in Tokyo with relatives rather than return to Hiroshima.) Underneath her bravado, we see a fearful, guilt-ridden young woman who wonders when she will succumb to the long-term effects of the radiation, and who cannot escape her horrifying memories of August 6, 1945.

The second story, “Country of Cherry Blossoms,” takes place nearly twenty years later in Tokyo. We first meet Nanami, a baseball-addled tomboy, as an eleven-year-old girl. Through a few telling details–Nanami’s dirty baseball uniform, Nanami’s interactions with classmates–we see that Nanami suffers accutely from her mother’s absence. (Her mother, a hibakusha, succumbed to cancer.) Lacking a female role model, she latches onto Toko, a classmate who epitomizes girly grace. Kouno depicts a few ordinary moments from this odd pair’s childhood: a playground discussion of a homework assignment, a baseball game, a trip to the hospital where Nagio–Nanami’s younger brother–is hospitalized with severe asthma.

We then jump forward seventeen years. Nanami and Toko are estranged; Nagio, now healthy, is training to be a doctor; and Asahi, their elderly father, has been behaving oddly. Fearful that Asahi may be losing his faculties, Nanami tails him through the streets of Tokyo, where she bumps into Toko. Their initial conversation is awkward and forced; seeing Toko dredges up some of Nanami’s most painful childhood memories. Toko, undeterred by Nanami’s rudeness, furnishes Nanami with a disguise, and the two set off for Hiroshima, where Nanami’s father seems intent on completing a mysterious errand. Running parallel to the story of Nanami and Toko’s reunion is the story of how Nanami’s parents met. As we watch their courtship unfold, we realize that Asahi is the link between the first and second stories; he is Minami’s “lost” brother, the one who was living with relatives when the Americans bombed Hiroshima, and the one who chose to remain in Tokyo rather than return to the devastated Hiroshima.

Kouno’s refusal to impose an obvious dramatic structure on either story, her deft manipulation of time, and her emphasis on small, everyday moments, inoculate Town of Evening Calm against sentimentality and mawkishness. The artwork is clean and simple, with enough background detail to bring the streets of Hiroshima to vivid life. Kouno’s character designs have a slightly rough, clumsy quality to them; the adults’ large heads and large feet seem to belong to bigger bodies. Yet these awkward proportions don’t detract from the beauty of the work; if anything, the illustrations make Kouno’s characters seem more vulnerable, more imperfect, more fragile—in short, more human and more believable. And that honest vulnerability, in turn, makes it possible for readers from all walks of life to enter sympathetically into Kouno’s haunting yet life-affirming story.