Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, author of the 2000 American Book Award recipient "Why She Left Us," came to speak at Longwood University at 8 p.m. on Wed., Nov. 10.
At this eleventh stop in her tour, she discussed her book "Hiroshima in the Morning," recently published in September 2010, and its basis: an eight-month stay in Hiroshima, Japan interviewing atomic bomb survivors. A Brooklyn, N.Y. resident, Rizzuto is a faculty member in Vermont's Goddard College's MFA in Creative Writing program.
Professor Craig Challender opened in Wygal's Molnar Hall, followed by Susan Stinson introducing Rizzuto as her friend and mentor. Stinson also cited reviews of Rizzuto's presented work.
As the keynote speaker, Rizzuto said the book started with research from her first novel that she was not yet ready to use. In part, the book was described as about "what we remember [and] how we remember."
Immediately thereafter, she walked the audience through a passage about her great aunt Molly and descriptions of Hiroshima before, after, and through its bombing. According to Rizzuto, Molly, a peace worker, saw both American internment and Hiroshima's decimation. In Hiroshima, Molly felt conflicted by both American contradictions and her instant identification as an American.
Rizzuto then explained her initial failure to find usable stories and details for "Hiroshima in the Morning." The next passage gave the audience images of the Hiroshima peace garden and peace museum, and then anger at the atom bomb's horrors.
Next, she spoke about the Hibakusha, the atom bomb victims, and their stories' change after September 11th to forms that rendered literary details.
During the question-and-answer session following the reading, Rizzuto elaborated on certain subjects, including her interviews, Hiroshima youths' bitterness towards the Afghanistan conflict, and the same young people's apathy to the bombings. Rizzuto also discussed survivors' condemnation of war and the emotional toll from September 11.
At the reception following the presentation, Rizzuto sat down, answered questions, took pictures with enthusiastic audience members, and signed books.
Rizzuto acknowledged that "Hiroshima in the Morning" had both pain and anger: "When we're angry, it's because we're afraid and we're in need . so I think the two of them happen together."
On the topic of a moral of the story, Rizzuto commented, "I don't start with [the] idea that I need to make sure 'I said this thing and people come away with this idea." Instead, Rizzuto built on material given to her, "structured" into a theme and based on personal experience made understandable to others: one that became shared.
Recognizing possible connections between "Hiroshima in the Morning's" mothers, personal experiences and bombing aftermath, Rizzuto said, "I think that with the Hiroshima stories I was looking at places where people struggle and places where people are creating their identities." Faced with conflicting and personal ideas of motherhood, Rizzuto said, "when I saw people creating their own stories and their own identities, I was also creating a new story for myself with a new identity." Rizzuto thought each of the themes "were happening at the same time." Likewise, when resistance faded, she found survivors mourned heavily for mothers who were "essential" to many of their stories.
Analyzing interviewing difficulties on two levels, Rizzuto said, "Well, in a practical way, it was finding the people first because I didn't speak the language, finding the people who would help me and then finding the people who would talk honestly and then trying to puncture their rehearsed story." To do this, unexpected questions acted to stir memories. On an emotional level, she talked about staying with people "re-experiencing their emotions." Rizzuto said, "You can't sit there from far away and ask very factual questions while people are crying. You have to really be there with them and that's straining."
On her style's development, she commented, "It's kind of the voice I hear in my head. When I write I can't have music on, I can't have noise [because] I hear everything in my head. There's a music to the lines." Rizzuto felt lucky because "I was writing a novel and I was writing my own personal story then I [could] use my own voice. I don't to have to have a journalistic kind of factual voice. I just listen to myself, talk to myself, and that's how it comes out."
She described herself as not really having "any influences" and continued "I have some writers that I love and one of the writers that I love is Michael Ondachi. I didn't actually study writing, I studied astrophysics. I started writing by myself. listening to myself.reading books that I loved."
Rizzuto said of her great aunt Molly, "Well she's my great aunt and we had that kind of connection . at one point she wrote to me and said, 'grab everything that you can that's fresh and put it away' and that's one of the things that I thought about a lot when I was writing my diary."
In life, both Rizzuto and her great aunt wondered how Japanese they were. Despite Rizzuto being half-Japanese and Molly "ethnically fully Japanese," they found in Japan that they were "fully American." Rizzuto added that "she [Molly] passed away two years before I finished my final manuscript, but her children . have all read the book and they really appreciate the fact that she lived this life and that this is kind of what came out of it."
Rizzuto said visiting Longwood "was wonderful. I really enjoyed it. The campus is beautiful. I had a walk around with the chair today and got to see all the buildings and meet some of the students. I sat in on a class today and got to talk to some people in depth about the book. And they were very engaged and very well-prepared and thinking interesting thoughts in interesting ways about the work they're experiencing and their own work. It was really a treat to be here.