Fiction
June 2020
Drawings of Hiroshima
by Marcelo Simonetti
“The sky was covered with grey clouds. The drizzle was lighter than normal, almost pious. The Japanese were advancing through the streets with short, fast steps. Satoru was ahead of them. He pedaled at a good pace. From his bicycle seat, the city revealed itself to his eyes as a sequence of frames. It was strange to be there, in his grandfather's city, and to ride through it as he had probably never done before: on two wheels. Even so, the possibility that the route he was taking would intersect with the routes that his grandfather had taken when he was a child, provoked an intimate emotion in him. Those landscapes were over eighty years old, including an atomic bomb, but it was the land where Ryu Nakata had learned to walk, to speak, to read”. The death of his grandfather, awakens in the young Yasuhiro Nakata the desire to know the family history, especially after finding a letter in which he discovers another side of the old man whose last words were: 'Hiroshima, Hiroshima', warning of the existence of a secret. As a result, Yasuhiro embarks on a journey that will take him from Valparaiso to Hiroshima, where his grandfather emigrated ten years before the atomic disaster. This is the beginning of Drawings of Hiroshima— a charming story that allows readers to follow the protagonist on a journey in which he not only reconnects with his Japanese origins, but also questions his present, his interpersonal relationships and his interest in writing, deepening the unconscious desire to understand the role that he plays in a story that is not his own but yet challenges him directly. With this new release, Marcelo Simonetti addresses issues such as migration and identity, connecting the historic Chilean port of Valparaiso with the memory of the tragedy occured in the Japanese city.
