Having read about the atomic bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima in my high school American History classes, I admit that I was emotionally numb to those tragic events. I just merely learned them as historical facts, chronological events that I needed to memorize for my next test on the war with Japan during World War II. In my defense, the whole Out of Sight, Out of Mind principle was a huge factor in my treatment of such defining moments in Japan’s history. Then.. I read Pika-don.

The exposition of Pika-don was short but extremely instrumental in developing my identification with Tsutomu Yamaguchi. It had such a Letters from Iwo Jima feel to it, giving me and other readers an insider’s look to how the enemy of America felt during the war. Movies like Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line convince you to love the main characters and to hate the enemy, the enemy of America, that risks their lives. However, Pika-don put everything that I felt in those movies into perspective, and I felt the same amount of care for the enemy against which Steven Spielberg and Terrence Malick pitted me. During the exposition of Pika-don, I gained a sense of how Tsutomu was willing to sacrifice everything for his family--even the family itself. Artistic with the result of what Tsutomu would have done to save his family, the last page of Pika-don’s exposition shows him with his family, though shrouded in darkness, in a very peaceful state. They have committed suicide, but, given the nature of their faces and the position of their bodies, the image of Tsutomu and his family expresses zero regret and only love and devotion. The answer to “what [Tsutomu] will do to save them” (26) is revealed without words. The creators introduced the sleeping pills in the part where Tsutomu writes the letters to his wife, and they knew that Tsutomu’s reason for mentioning the pills to his wife was so shocking and so memorable that only a image of them was necessary to complete the reader’s understanding of page 26. Fo sho.. Bravo.

August 5, 1945. Given very special attention and scary. However, the date’s foreshadowing of the bombing failed to prepare me for the second panel on page 41, whose surprise came with full force. The bombing of Hiroshima was closely as abrupt as it must have been for the Japanese. The following images worked well to bring some light to the tragedy that Tsutomu faced and to the pain and suffering that he witnessed and endured. The isolated text “I’m alive” on page 49, on which Tsutomu stared at the mushroom cloud in fear and wonder, to me, was ironic because I was convinced by the mushroom cloud to ask, “Alive for what?” The despair that my question beholds was only supported and strengthened by the following pages, especially by pages 55 and 56. The image of the bleeding and burned child was terrifying. It was easy to pass over most of the images on those pages, the details of which were vague enough to allow me to keep reading. However, the crying child, so detailed, was hypnotizing. I was terrified of her.

Tsutomu’s trek from Hiroshima was helpful in forgetting the story’s next inevitability. However, the fact that Tsutomu was from Nagasaki raced into my mind, and I automatically understood that Tsutomu’s story hadn't ended. When he finally finds Hisako, I was unable to feel happy for them, fearing the relentless possibility of Tsutomu losing his family.

That point of the book helps to distinguish how the book skillfully and efficiently creates its underlying tension. From the beginning, readers already know the inevitable and terrible events that will take place. American History classes foreshadow the events in Pika-don, and even from the beginning, I feel only despair for the main character. The previously mentioned point of the book where Tsutomu reunites with Hisako works in the same fashion. I already know that Nagasaki will be bombed, so I am still extremely tense as they happily embrace. Such an interesting tool... Using known historical fact to create tension for the reader.

As I said, Pika-don put everything into perspective, including my knowledge of the atomic bomb as a historical fact. Reading Pika-don, I realized that the Japanese must have been very confused during the bombings. Because I was fed the atomic bomb as a historical fact, it was long before I realized that the Japanese had zero idea on what had hit them. Page 111 illustrates the Japanese’s confusion. With everything occurring around them too quickly, the Japanese on that day could only consider explanations that had been already established in their time. They could only refer to the atomic bomb as pika-don, a beautiful choice for the title of this graphic nonfiction novel, because they lacked a name for the phenomenon. With its title and content, Pika-don is a powerful reminder of the sense of fear and confusion that the Japanese experienced.

I love the uplifting ending to Pika-don. The idea of rebirth helps to ease my experience with the book, during which I constantly wonder how I would face actual images of the bombings’ results if I found those in Pika-don to be gruesome and terrifying. Pika-don is a realistic and eye-opening reveal of something that I have stored snugly into my brain.