No matter who you are, or which side of the bombing of Hiroshima you are coming from, the Ash Garden by Dennis Bock clearly brings out the struggles, emotions, and pain that follows everyone involved. The struggles of the main characters in this novel are both besieged in their own unique way. Emiko, a Japanese girl who was physically wounded by the bomb itself in Hiroshima, deals with the struggles of physical deformities as well as the emotional unstableness due to the death of her family caused by the bomb. Anton Böll, a scientist who was with the United States military during World War II everyday has to battle the memories, horrors and terrifying scenes that he had seen in Hiroshima with his research after the bomb dropped. The Ash Garden, by Dennis Bock is a moving portrait of two lives, damaged and changed by the war, it is a haunting mediation on the uses of memory and its power to both condemn and redeem. Emiko is the first struggling character to be introduced. The story begins with Emiko playing in a river the morning of Aug. 6, 1945 near the Bantai Bridge in Hiroshima Japan. She is a simple girl, no cares in the world; then it hits. The life altering, history changing, American made nuclear bomb hit Hiroshima. Emiko and Mitsuo, her younger brother lost their parents immediately. While Mitsuo was thrown into a deadly coma, Emiko could do nothing with her burnt corpse, other than lie in her grey morbid hospital bed begging for her brother's return to health. Emiko's grandfather was the only authoritative figure that remained. He would come and stay with the two children till the nurse sent him home. "For months after waking up in the Red Cross Hospital, I was forced to lie on my stomach in order to let the wounds on my back breathe and heal. My left eye had sealed over with scar tissue and pus since I was shipped here form the Oshiba Aid Station, where we had been taken after being found near the river by a group of soldiers." [Bock, 28]. Emiko had begun to lose hope in her brother's recovery, and the doctor's huddling over Mitsuo only said, "he was a lost case and soon would die. They wondered aloud what kept him alive. Every morning they seemed surprised that he had survived the night. There was no hope for him." [Bock, 28] Emiko's physical appearance was completely disfigured by the bomb; she would have to live forever, even after plastic surgery and reconstructive surgery, with scars baring the prior disfigurement of her body. Her little bundle of hope, Mitsuo, an innocent boy, and both her blameless parents were stolen from her in an instant; Emiko had nothing left but her own will. Though her childhood was very distraught little things helped Emiko pull herself back on track and place her as a prominent women in the western society; the society which first destroyed her.The disfigured Emiko was chosen out of hundreds of indignant Japanese girls to get the opportunity to travel to the United States for reconstruct...
