Abstract

In August 2010, Ryosuke, having been hospitalized for leukemia, is coming home to spend his last days there. While his wife and daughter prepare, they find an old specimen box in the Buddhist altar. Pinned inside is a small blue butterfly, with part of its　forewing missing. It is a memento of Ryosuke's sad first love, which fell apart in August 1945.

Toward the end of World War II, Ryosuke, born and raised in Hiroshima, lives with his grandmother and stepmother. His father, an aerial reconnaissance officer, travels from one city to another for duty and rarely comes home. Ryosuke’s stepmother is a good hearted and outspoken woman, and Ryosuke was brought up to be a cheerful, normal 12-year-old boy. When his father is transferred to Taiwan on a new assignment, his pregnant mistress Kie, with nowhere to go, moves into the detached annex of their house. Curious Ryosuke secretly visits and befriends Kie over their common interest in insects. Young Ryosuke adores beautiful Kie, and they promise to meet outside to find a blue butterfly—that very day, the atomic bomb falls over Hiroshima.

Author’s Information

Yanagi Suo was born in Tokyo in 1964. She grew up in Otake City, Hiroshima Prefecture, from the age of five until third grade in primary school. After graduating from Waseda University, she worked as an editor before becoming a writer. Her father was born in Hiroshima, the son of an army soldier, and was exposed to the atomic bomb when he was in junior high school. Suo won the 2013 Shōsetsu Subaru New Writers Prize for her first novel Hachigatsu no aoi chō (The Butterfly and the Bomb); she modeled the story after her late father who passed away in 2010. She won the 2015 Hiroshima Book Award for this same work. Suo has published many works, especially historical novels, including Mi mo kogaretsutsu: Ogurayama no hyakunin isshu (a biographical novel on a Japanese poet of Heian period), which won the 2022 Yoshihide Nakayama Literary Prize.