A Japanese-American family, reeling from their ill treatment in the Japanese internment camps, gives up their American citizenship to move back to Hiroshima unaware of the devastation wreaked by the atomic bomb in this piercing look at the aftermath of World War II by Newbery Medalist Cynthia Kadohata.
World War II is finally over and twelve-year-old Hisa and her family are at last freed from the Japanese-American internment camp where they were forced to spend the last several years. They had had nothing to do with the bombing of Pearl Harbor, or the war at all, and still they d been forced to live behind a barbed wire fence like prisoners, simply because they were Japanese. Feeling betrayed and unwanted by America, Hisa s parents decide to give up their citizenship and sail across the Pacific to Japan, Hiroshima specifically. Perhaps there they would find that now missing feeling of home .
But post-war Hiroshima is not at all what they expect, certainly not the cherry blossom dream that Hisa had hoped for. Instead, they discover that the city has been devastated by an atomic bomb, and that the repercussions still smolder. Countless orphans beg door to door, hundreds of thousands of people are starving, and American Hisa now reels in shock at what her family, and the people of Hiroshima, face. Despite everything her family begins to do to help staunch the suffering they see around them, Hisa feels more in limbo, more unwanted, than ever before, for here she is American, and the Americans had dropped the bomb in the first place. In the ashes of a war-torn world, Hisa must forge her own identity, a bridge in her heart between the hyphen between her cultures, in order to find her true home as a Japanese-American."