On August 9th, 1945, fourteen-year-old schoolgirl Kyoko Hayashi was sent to work at the Mitsubishi Munitions Factory and miraculously survived the blast only to endure radiation sickness and its painful after-effects for the next 73 years. Hayashi started writing in 1962 and became a leading literary voice for the Hibakusha, those who survived the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. She published dozens of books, articles, stories, and poems, and won multiple literary awards.

Her moving autobiographical short work, From Trinity To Trinity, about her 1999 pilgrimage to Trinity Site in New Mexico, where the atomic bomb that would define her life was first tested, was published in 2000 and translated into English by Eiko Otake of the performance artist duo Eiko & Koma (Station Hill Press, 2010). In 2009, Eiko reached out to the NY-based actress Ako (Shogun, God Said This, Snow Falling on Cedars, and the founder of the Amaterasu Za theater company in NYC) suggested she perform it as a one-person play. It has been performed only twice, in workshops at New York Theater Workshop in 2009 and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2010. They say that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, but how you remember the past and whose eyes you are seeing it through are just as important.

In this, the 80th anniversary year of the 1945 atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which coincides with the anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camps throughout Germany that same year, we are reminded of humanity’s boundless capacity for cruelty and destruction. Those who survived these catastrophes came away with perspectives that some expressed in art and others in literature or advocacy. Their voices were powerful, and they deserve to be heard and even amplified again and again in this time when the news, sadly, seems to be filled once again with stories of violence, indifference, and nationalism.