From the day his grandfather died, Renzo Nakata remembered two things. The butterfly that entered the bedroom a few seconds after he stopped breathing. And the last words that came out of his mouth, which were strictly speaking only one: “Hiroshima, Hiroshima”. No one was surprised that when death was imminent, the grandfather remembered the city where he was born and lived until his parents opted for a different life on the other side of the world. However, for Renzo those words contained something else, a kind of encrypted message that the grandfather had dropped as if revealing a pending account.
MARCELO SIMONETTI
2014: Best Literary Work for the best unpublished storybook
2005: Casa de América Award for Innovative Narrative
2003: Municipal Award of Santiago
1999: La Felguera Award
This is a novel that links Japan with Chile through the story of a grandfather and his grandson. It begins with the last words spoken by Ryu Nakata, a Japanese native of Hiroshima who, like many of his compatriots, crossed the Pacific Ocean with his family at the beginning of the last century to find a new home in Latin America.
«A novel about family inheritance and the ghosts that inhabit the other side of the planet. A tragedy anticipated by a group of children who, ten years before, in a Hiroshima school, drew, without knowing what it was about, the atomic mushroom that would wipe out everything. A moving story, written with precision: Marcelo Simonetti is back».