By Alidė Kohlhaas

Writer Dennis Bock chose the bombing of Hiroshima as the underlying theme of his fascinating novel, "The Ash Garden". He singles out three seemingly unrelated characters to give cohesion to his story, as their lives become intertwined, woven, so to speak, into the tapestry of the awesome brilliance of the "second sunrise" over Hiroshima on that fateful August morning: the Japanese call it &"the day the sun rose twice."

On August 6, 1945, when Col. Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the Enola Gay, gave orders for the release of the first ever atomic bomb to be dropped on a civilian target, few humans – including its scientist-creators – could even faintly imagine what havoc it would cause, what human suffering. The bomb's creation was a marvel of scientific achievement, whose consequences were barely comprehended at the time. Only weeks later, after the surrender of the Japanese, when scientists and medical personnel examined and studied the surviving victims of this bombing and that at Nagasaki, did the world begin to realize that this weapon could spell the doom for all living things on our globe.

The irony in all this is that the victims and their descendants have become pariahs in Japan. Despite a declaration by the Japanese government that the two bombs have produced no genetic defects, the descendants of the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki face continued discrimination when it comes to being married. The Japanese public still fears that effects from the bombs have altered genes.

Bock uses a Prologue to set the scene for us. We witness the child Emiko playing with her younger brother, Mitsuo, in the mud of a riverbank not far from their home in Hiroshima. It is early morning and the two children see a plane high above them from which falls a strange object that looks "like a bloated body with dark skin." This scene of the two children playing early in the morning in the mud – a forbidden pleasure – prior, during and after the falling of the bomb . . .

Click to read Bock interview

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