In this debut novel about a ‘Hiroshima Maiden’ coming to America in 1952, the author fashions a world with a technique as trim and taut as the cinched waists of her characters’ dressmaker suits. Scarred by the atomic blast seven years before, 18-year-old Keiko comes to New York City to receive facial surgery in tacit exchange for participation in the Hiroshima Project, a grandstanding concerned-citizens campaign against atomic testing.
From the start her host mother, Daisy Lawrence, feels slightly rebuked by Keiko’s aloofness, even though the girl is greeted with bountiful hospitality, a veritable panoply of wobbling aspic salads and finned automobiles. Why is she so prim and detached in the face of all this goodwill? The mystery, wound tightly within Keiko, unfurls against a backdrop of an America bristling with McCarthyism and the uncertainties of the Atomic Age.
With her polite blankness, Keiko provokes. Back in suburban Riverside Meadows, she becomes a magnet for the guilt and pain of those around her. Playing mother, the achingly childless Daisy is pressed by the Project to draw out the girl’s story so that it can be used on a public platform of anti-bomb appearances, but she also feels morally compelled to hear it. Instead of readily describing what happened that August morning when The Mighty One dropped, Keiko elicits the experiences of those around her – the neighbour who was interned in a Japanese prison camp during the war, a self-promoting doctor who will remove the fearsome scar on her otherwise-perfect face, and Daisy’s precarious radio-writer husband with a guilty left-wing past. In the end, does Keiko really owe anyone an answer after enduring the apocalyptic scorching at Hiroshima?
Throughout the story, Lambert set-dresses with 1950s detail – stovepipe skirts hobble the hips, faces fur with pancake powder, kitchens twinkle with chrome toasters. To fine effect, she pricks at this world and the colour blue spills forth, never allowing us to forget the sky, from which came what the survivor children later called pika-don (‘the big-flash boom’): a sky-blue Chevrolet ferries Keiko home from the airport; a blue blanket lies serenely folded at the foot of her bed; an azure swimming pool swells in the sun; skin-thin carrot peelings fall into the deep-blue of a Pyrex bowl.
Blame and forgiveness blister in these characters, much like the bubbled scar on Keiko’s face. Daisy, a consoler and forgiver, moves toward her own self-knowledge and radiance, learning from Keiko in ways she hadn’t quite planned. The sky – and what can crash down from it – becomes a character itself, illuminating the vulnerability and humanity of those standing below.
