...Mutual Understanding." Written by Jackie Copleton and copyrighted in 2015, Penguin Books. I did not actually read it, but listened while driving. The author was an English teacher who spent years working in Japan, absorbing culture while she was working.
Two Japanese citizens who were adults at the time of the devastating bombing of Nagasaki. They were at a distance when the bomb was dropped, so were not actually physically affected by the initial blast or fallout. But their daughter was at the point of impact, waiting for her mother to meet her. The grandson was at school, out side at playtime, and suffered severe burns after the explosion, when the horrendous blast consumed everything. They wanted to believe the grandson might have survived the bomb, but after years of fruitless searching, they moved to the US and gave up hope he might be alive.
Eventually the grandson finds the woman, at her home in Pennsylvania, after she has become a widow. But the idea that he did make it through the blast, and that the man at her door is truly her beloved, long-lost grandson is so difficult to believe. The story is told from the point of view of the aging grandmother, often looking back over her life. She remembers and shares a horrifying story, reminiscing about what they did to survive the unthinkable. A thought provoking tale, making that bomb that killed so many, while saving so many other lives by bringing the war to an abrupt end, into a character in the novel.
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