Ash Garden [Hardcover]

2001 Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award Shortlist:: The unprecedented impact, ideology, and geographic scope of the Second World War continue to attract new novelists who hammer the history out a little thinner each time, highlighting lesser-known massacres or sifting through minor characters to discover a representative but undiscovered guide. Dennis Bock's poignant book The Ash Garden personalizes the epic bombing of Hiroshima through Anton Böll, a German émigré physicist, and Emiko, a Japanese victim of the bomb. Bombmaker and bombed, they balance this incisive, symmetrical novel and its sustained inquiry into remorse and forgiveness.

One of 25 Hiroshima Maidens relocated from post-war Japan to America for corrective plastic surgery, Emiko remains in the U.S. as a student, then as a filmmaker. The novel is at its best with her, from the heavy losses that surround her recovery in Japan to the awkwardness of immigrating to the nation that is both her tormentor and her savior. Meanwhile, Anton, her opposite number, doesn't just return home from war, he returns having irrevocably changed war. Stubbornly proud of his work and estranged from his isolated, ailing wife, Anton offers no home to remorse, and his conflicted legacy takes a lifetime to heal. Heal it does, though, just as Anton and Emiko meet and begin to discuss their roles in the bombing. The climax may be too much for readers impatient with a Dickensian full-cast ending: like those of John Irving, Bock's symmetries are delightful to discover at the halfway point but disappointingly conspicuous by the novel's close. --Darryl Whetter

No matter how far they travel from Hiroshima, the protagonists of Canadian author Bock's roomy, thoughtful novel are marked by the effects of the atomic bomb. For Emiko Amai, the imprint lingers on her face, in the form of burn scars from the heat of the bomb's detonation in 1945, when she was six. For Anton B”ll, a refugee German scientist who helped build the bomb, the scars are emotional, though he tried to transform his feelings into images in a series of secret films shot among Hiroshima's ruined buildings. For Sophie, Anton's wife herself a half-Jewish refugee from Austria there is the pain of exile, a debilitating illness and the heavy shadow of her husband's guilt. Though Anton claims that the bomb was dropped "to save lives," he remains acutely aware of the human cost, both to its victims and himself: "I know the world requires a certain payment from us... for the freedoms we enjoy. We have all paid." When Emiko confronts Anton in 1995 at a lecture in New York, he surprises himself by agreeing to participate in a documentary she's filming. He invites Emiko to the quiet house he shares with Sophie in Ontario, and as Sophie declines toward death, Anton tells Emiko all the ways he has influenced her life since Hiroshima. In his attempt to obliquely represent the overwhelming horrors of Hiroshima's destruction, Bock (Olympia) has created a group of characters with closely guarded emotional lives. When they reveal themselves, it's in flashes as brilliant as the splitting of the atom. (Sept. 11)Forecast: Though his novel cannot touch a nonfiction classic like John Hersey's Hiroshima, and may be overlooked in the crowded ranks of WWII-inspired fiction, Bock acquits himself well. A first printing of 60,000 copies and a six-city author tour attest to Knopf's faith in this sophomore effort.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

More than 50 years after the bombing of Hiroshima, that event still resonates as one of the defining moments of the 20th century. This novel explores the consequences of the bomb on the lives of three people who were directly touched by it. Anton Boll, one of the scientists involved with the Manhattan project; his wife, Sophie, the daughter of an Austrian-Jewish violin maker; and Emiko Amai, a documentary filmmaker and one of the bomb's victims. All three are key players in the events leading up to and surrounding the dropping of the bomb. Boll escapes from wartime Europe to contribute a critical piece of information in the bomb's development. Sophie is sent from home aboard the SS St. Louis and ends up in an internment camp outside Quebec City. Emiko, who loses her family and half her face in the bombing, is chosen to come to the States for reconstructive surgery in an act of postwar contrition. From its achingly sad opening to its haunting conclusion, this riveting novel explores the moral ambiguities of war while illuminating a shameful moment in our collective history. Highly recommended.Barbara Love, Kingston Frontenac P.L., Kingston, Ont.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

Set 50 years after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, this poetic, affecting novel explores the legacy of that devastation through the intersecting lives of three people. Emiko, a young Hiroshima native who lost part of her face on August 6, 1945, is now a documentary filmmaker working on a feature about the bomb. Her work brings her to a small Ontario city where Anton, a German physicist who worked in Los Alamos, lives with his wife, Sophie, an Austrian refugee from World War II. Like James Thackara's recent novel about Oppenheimer, America's Children (BKL Mr 1 01), this title includes plenty of rich historical detail but keeps its focus on the human stories, especially how creators of the bomb wrestled with the reality of their life work, and, as in Bock's previous novel, Olympia (1999), how losing family during wartime forever imprints the soul. Written in richly described flashbacks that slowly reveal the characters' almost surreal connections, this deceptively understated novel asks crucial questions about how to live and reconcile history in an atomic age. Gillian Engberg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

“A crystalline meditation on the defining event of the twentieth century and its aftermath . . . Inventive and consistently challenging” –Mark Rozzo, Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Mysterious and compelling. . . . An elegant, unnerving novel that illuminates the personal consequences of war.” –Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“Exquisite. . . . Bock’s achievement here is in creating characters with believably ambiguous edges, vulnerable people whose understanding of themselves and others is incomplete.” -Janice P. Nimura, The Washington Post Book World

“Bock has shined an illuminating searchlight on the terra incognita where the personal and the political intersect.” –Dan Cryer, Newsday

“A splendid, powerful book, written with authority and admirable control.” –St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Assured and compassionate.” –Pico Iyer, Harper’s

“[T]his brilliant novel traces the lingering effects of the Hiroshima bombing . . . showing how war binds victor and victim as surely as scar tissue closes a wound.” –Rick Waddington, Minneapolis Star-Tribune

“Reconciliation, responsibility, blame and regret shift and fall in different patterns throughout this moving and thoughtful novel.” –Barbara Fisher, The Boston Globe

“Dennis Bock began The Ash Garden long before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, but it’s impossible now not to read his haunting debut novel outside the glare of that tragedy. . . . Bock sets a match to ethical issues that are reaching the flash point today.” –Ron Charles, The Christian Science Monitor

“One can go further with this book, and say that Bock has learned just about everything that can be gained from Michael Ondaatje and Jane Urquhart in the use of compelling images. . . . Very, very accomplished.” –T. F. Rigelhof, The Globe & Mail

“This is a gorgeous, poetic novel, with scenes that stun the senses. . . . Bock makes us see and live these lives in all their uneasy compromise.” –Susan Larson, New Orleans Times-Picayune

“For all its worldliness, The Ash Garden feels intimate and interior. . . . [Bock’s] are the battlefields of conscience, the war away from the war.” –Annabel Lyon, National Post --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

A scientist stealing across the Pyrenees into Spain, then smuggled into America... A young woman quarantined on a ship wandering the Atlantic, her family left behind in Austria... A girl playing on a riverbank as a solitary airplane appears on the horizon... Lives already in motion, unsettled by war, and about to change beyond reckoning -- their pasts blurred and their destinies at once bound for the desert of Los Alamos, the woman unexpectedly en route to a refugee camp, the girl at Ground Zero and that plane the Enola Gay.In August 1945, in a blinding flash, Hiroshima sees the dawning of the modern age.

With these three characters, Dennis Bock transforms a familiar story -- the atom bomb as a means to end worldwide slaughter -- into something witnessed, as if for the first time, in all its beautiful and terrible power.Destroyer of Worlds.With Anton and Sophie and Emiko, with the complete arc of their histories and hopes, convictions and requests, The Ash Garden is intricate yet far-reaching, from market streets in Japan to German universities, from New York tenements to, ultimately, a peaceful village in Ontario. Revealed here, as their fates triangulate, are the true costs and implications of a nightmare that has persisted for over half a century.In its reserves of passion and wisdom, in its grasp of pain and memory, in its balance of ambition and humanity, this first novel is an astonishing triumph.

“A crystalline meditation on the defining event of the twentieth century and its aftermath . . . Inventive and consistently challenging” –Mark Rozzo, Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Mysterious and compelling. . . . An elegant, unnerving novel that illuminates the personal consequences of war.” –Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“Exquisite. . . . Bock’s achievement here is in creating characters with believably ambiguous edges, vulnerable people whose understanding of themselves and others is incomplete.” -Janice P. Nimura, The Washington Post Book World

“Bock has shined an illuminating searchlight on the terra incognita where the personal and the political intersect.” –Dan Cryer, Newsday

“A splendid, powerful book, written with authority and admirable control.” –St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Assured and compassionate.” –Pico Iyer, Harper’s

“[T]his brilliant novel traces the lingering effects of the Hiroshima bombing . . . showing how war binds victor and victim as surely as scar tissue closes a wound.” –Rick Waddington, Minneapolis Star-Tribune

“Reconciliation, responsibility, blame and regret shift and fall in different patterns throughout this moving and thoughtful novel.” –Barbara Fisher, The Boston Globe

“Dennis Bock began The Ash Garden long before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, but it’s impossible now not to read his haunting debut novel outside the glare of that tragedy. . . . Bock sets a match to ethical issues that are reaching the flash point today.” –Ron Charles, The Christian Science Monitor

“One can go further with this book, and say that Bock has learned just about everything that can be gained from Michael Ondaatje and Jane Urquhart in the use of compelling images. . . . Very, very accomplished.” –T. F. Rigelhof, The Globe & Mail

“This is a gorgeous, poetic novel, with scenes that stun the senses. . . . Bock makes us see and live these lives in all their uneasy compromise.” –Susan Larson, New Orleans Times-Picayune

“For all its worldliness, The Ash Garden feels intimate and interior. . . . [Bock’s] are the battlefields of conscience, the war away from the war.” –Annabel Lyon, National Post --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

DENNIS BOCK’s first book of stories, Olympia, wonthe 1998 Canadian Authors’ Association Jubilee Award, the first annual DanutaGleed Award for best first collection of stories by a Canadian author and theBetty Trask Award in Britain. Dennis Bock lives with his family in Guelph,Ontario.

1

We had very little in the days when the war was still far away, in the remote place I imagined all wars lived when I was a girl. When it finally came to our city in August 1945 it consumed what little we had left, and years later, when there was nothing left at all, I was forced to journey to America to begin my surgeries. Of course, when I was a child it had seemed to me that what we'd had in those early days was sufficient. All but the barest necessities had been taken from us, but we didn't know any better. I often thought of the war as some great famished beast that ate away at the heart of my people. But my family was no different from any other family in the Asaminami district, the area of the city we lived in, and my brother and I never missed what we'd never had. I do not know if our parents and grandfather felt the same way.

In what might seem a rare gift in the legacy of my family's suffering, my mother and father were lucky enough to die at the same instant, which, for me, is a slight but not insignificant consolation. Neither had to endure the other's death, or the death of my little brother, who followed them not long after. I was left with only my grandfather to take care of me, a scarred and disfigured girl of six with only half a face; and my grandfather had only me to take care of him. Ten years later, when Grandfather fell ill with tuberculosis and finally joined the rest of my departed family, I was in the process of getting a version of my face back, at Mount Sinai Hospital, in New York City. Before I left for America he had made me promise I would not, no matter the circumstance, return to him before the surgeons had completed their work and I was again his beautiful granddaughter. I kept that last promise, and as a consequence he died alone. But slowly my face--or at least a version of it--was restored to me, just as he had always said it would be.

As I have said, my brother and I did not feel the sacrifice as my parents or grandfather might have. We knew nothing different from what we were living through then. It had been like that all our lives, it seemed. The drone of high-flying airplanes, the piercing song the sirens played when a fire- or bombing-drill was staged, the general absence of men in civilian dress, blackout paper covering every window, nothing to eat but rice and bean-paste soup and cabbage. These things did not occur to me as anything special. We knew nothing but war. Planes trolled the skies above our heads. Sirens woke us most mornings. The trenches we'd constructed to contain the spread of fire split neighborhoods into sections. That men must wear uniforms seemed so normal that a young man seen wearing slacks and jacket and fedora looked wildly eccentric to my eyes. Similarly, my father stood out conspicuously. He had not been allowed to join the army. He had been forced to stay home.

The fear I heard in my mother's voice, too, was unexceptional, as were the attempts she made to mask it with reassuring pronouncements and stern, even confident instructions. Outside the home she obeyed my father, as tradition dictated. But inside, where it counted most, I learned, it was the other way around. When action was to be taken, or caution to be exercised, it was my mother who decided which action or cautionary measure. It was she who protected me and my brother, and cared for our grandfather when his breathing became weak or his rheumatism became unbearable, and it was she who tended to my father when he came home disoriented late at night (I didn't know what drunkenness was then), which he did more frequently as the war drew on.

One night I heard my father admit to my mother that he had brought shame to his family and to himself by failing to gain entry to the war. After hearing a loud noise, I'd risen from the mattress I shared with Mitsuo and watched my father cry into my mother's arms, as I stood there at the top of the stairs, hidden in shadow. He insisted that he had been condemned to live out his days branded a coward and a pacifist, a word which was new to me. Pitiful tears streamed down his face. My mother cradled his head and smoothed his cheeks as he pinched the bridge of his nose with his fingers, as if trying to staunch the flow of tears. I wondered if I would be capable of this same tenderness my mother showed. I had never seen my father in this state. But I saw from how she held him in her arms that it was not unknown to her, and that this was something the grown-up world had suddenly, just then, thrust upon me.

My mother listened patiently. She let my father finish talking-crying, then got him in a chair and washed his face with a kitchen cloth. He was mumbling, looking down at his hands. I was afraid for him, and of him. He said the word children under his breath, and my little brother's name, but as far as I could tell he did not speak of me.

My father did not go to work the following morning. He stayed in his bed while we assembled downstairs and ate our gruel and rice-bran dumplings. After breakfast, my mother sent Grandfather to the bank, despite his sore legs, to tell the people there that Father was ill. I accompanied him through the streets to deliver our message.

Though we had all been affected by the war, and the network of trenches and water-filled ditches constructed in the event of an enemy firestorm now marked the city into grids, none of the buildings we passed had been destroyed. As we walked, my grandfather told me that even the enemy respected the beauty of some of our most ancient cities. Not even barbarians would consider destroying our lovely town. Trying to put me at ease, he told me that people of Japanese ancestry were living among the enemy, in distant America, where they had worked to convince their government to spare us. Naturally this knowledge did calm my anxiety, but I was agitated for another reason. What I had seen the previous night was with me still. I wondered if my grandfather knew about my father, and the real reason he was unable to represent us in the world that day.

The streets were already busy that morning. I watched the Miyajima streetcar make its slow crawl up from the harbor, where it always began its run, carrying the older men to their places of work, or housewives to their shopping. Work gangs from outlying communities assembled on street corners, waiting for their morning assignment. There was always more to be done in preparing our city for what might come, and not a morning went by when these work gangs did not collect on street corners in every district, focusing their attention on the tasks ahead. That day there were many soldiers in the streets and on the tram, and their presence further eased my nervousness. We knew they were our protectors, and I secretly understood my father's shame at not being permitted to be one of them on account of his leg, the consequence of a childhood affliction. It would have been a great honor for us. The fathers of many of the children in our neighborhood were away at the war, and at school these children were awarded a special status that I envied. The teachers told us that we were all able to contribute equally, whether at home or away at the war, but the daughters of soldiers were emboldened by the absence of their fathers.

On our route to my father's place of employment to deliver our deceitful message, an odd sensation crept over me. He might indeed be ill, I considered, but he suffered from a different sort of illness from the one we meant to suggest. I was not supposed to know this, of course. My mother was not aware I had heard what had passed between them the night before. But telling a lie--and to the bank! This seemed dangerous and exciting, and opened up for me a new world of unknown possibilities.

We turned left, then right onto the business street, where my father's bank was located. Many of these buildings had been here longer than my grandfather, which seemed an impossibly long time to me. Sometimes I liked to walk along this street--and others, in different neighborhoods--and imagine Grandfather here, as he might have appeared at my young age of six. He had spent the whole of his youth in Hiroshima and, in my mind, it was not difficult for me to create a picture of him as a boy. I used my little brother's small frame as a stand-in when I thought back to what it must have been like, in another century. My imagination simply drew his clear, youthful face and body over my grandfather's old, wrinkled one. I painted his portrait in my head, and a streetscape of what Hiroshima had looked like back then, without soldiers carrying rifles on every corner and blackout paper pasted over every pane of glass. I painted men who wore their dark robes like lords, and wealthy landowners and women costumed in traditional flame-colored kimonos, which had been replaced during the war years by the durable monpe pantaloons all women had taken to wearing.

When we entered the bank, my grandfather asked for Mr. Hatano, the manager. We waited silently at one end of a large room for him to meet with us. Finally his office door opened and he emerged. He crossed the hardwood floor, a stack of papers clutched under his right arm, and bowed respectfully to my grandfather. His shoes creaked. He smelled of soap and hair grease.

"I have been sent by my daughter," my grandfather began, after returning an equally deep bow, "Mrs. Yokuo Amai, to tell you that my son-in-law, Haruki Amai, a diligent employee of this institution, is ill today and is unable to honor his responsibilities. I am to tell you that he will be well tomorrow and that he is deeply regretful he cannot take his post today."

This was my grandfather's particular way of speaking, but it was a manner appreciated by those of his generation, a part of which the man he was addressing seemed to be.

We walked home hand in hand, slowly because of Grandfather's bad legs. I did not ask if he knew he'd been entrusted with a lie. It occurred to me that I might be the only one, besides my mother, to know the true cause of my father's malaise. My child's... --This text refers to the Paperback edition.