Available shortly in North American via Ahadada and Small Press Distribution, Masako's Story is now available from IMC Books (our Japanese distributor). Masako’s Story: Surviving the Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima...

On August 6, 1945, when the world’s first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, the Furuta family was living about one mile away from the hypocenter. Five-year-old Kikuko, her mother, Masako, and her two brothers barely escaped with their lives. However, their soldier father was not so fortunate. Masako never talked about her family’s experiences on that day and the days following the bombing. Then one day, Masako started to talk about what happened — breaking a silence of nearly fifty years . . .

Kikuko (Kay) Otake was five years old when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, August 6, 1945. In her book Masako's Story (forthcoming from Ahadada), she offers a survivor's perspective.

Professor Kikuko (Kay) Otake was born on February 22, 1940 in Osaka, Japan. She earned her B.A. from Tsuda College of Tokyo, Japan in 1962 in English Literature. In August of 1968, she came to the US and in September 1987 earned her M.A. in Education from California State University in Los Angeles.

Professor Otake is an award-winning poet who regularly publishes tanka and haiku.

Written by Kikuko (Furuta) Otake, now an assistant professor of Japanese in the United States, Masako’s story is a bilingual collection of prose-poetry, based on the true story of her family’s tragedy. The appendix presents the original Japanese poetry written to capture the story as her mother said it in Hiroshima dialect. Moreover, the English translation is written with an “Objectivist” lineation similar in its understated power to Charles Reznikoff’s “Testimony”:

After crossing the Aoi Bridge,
I walked diagonally across the grounds of the Gokoku Shrine
To take a short cut.
Oh. That ground was filled with hundreds of people with horrible burns
Scattered everywhere.
Many of them were dead.
But those that still lived,
Begged, “Mizu! Mizu o kudasai,” in faint whispers.
Soon my way was blocked by their outstretched arms.
One of them even grabbed my ankle, though feebly,
To stop me from running past him.
His burnt skin sloughed off his fingers,
As I pulled from his grip.

(pg. 23).

Kikuko Otake’s Masako’s Story is a powerful addition to the literature of the Atomic Bomb, and yet more evidence that we should all work together to stop the Nuclear madness.