5. Hiroshima No Pika

Hiroshima No Pika by Toshi Maruki (Lothrop, Lee, & Shepard Books, 1980)

Genre

Historical, Picture Book

Honors

The Mildred L. Batchelder Award
The Jane Addams Peace Award
A Boston Globe/Horn Book Honor Award
An American Library Association Notable Book

Review  

Hiroshima No Pika focuses on one family's experience of the dropping of Little Boy on August 6th, 1945.  They are at breakfast when the bomb drops.  Mii's father is engulfed in flame.  Her mother lifts the father onto her back and runs to the river.  There they see many of the people from town (and several dead bodies -- both animal and human -- float by).  They sleep and wake 4 days later.  Mii holds her chopsticks this whole time.  After taking her father to the hospital, Mii's mother takes her to their home to survey the damage (that picture looks like a million flat, gray pebbles).  The last note about Mii is that even years later, her mother picks glass out of her scalp. 

Opinion

For English readers, the book will have significant weight -- the name of the girl through whom the events are focalized is Mii.  Hearing "me" over and over as you read the book places you into the events.  The expressionist-inspired artwork is equally beautiful and horrific.  It expresses the emotion of the event if not presenting an actual representation of what happened.  Perhaps most powerfully, we learn that this experience is a very close retelling of events recounted to the author.

Ideas

Coupling the book with other sources for a display or lesson on Hiroshima would be quite effective.  Photographs can show the actual horror of the event, this account -- based on one survivor's actual experience can help add personal insight.  It supplements numbers and figures with the human experience and the trauma is reflected in the artwork.