Plum Wine

I just finished reading Plum Wine by Angela Davis-Gardner. It is set in Japan in the 1960s and is the story of a young American woman from North Carolina who is spending the year teaching there. Barbara Jefferson is described as not interested in politics and she finds herself trying to explain the war in Vietnam to her students and learning about the bombing of Hiroshima from people who were present and greatly affected. There is a kind of mystery; Barbara inherits a chest filled with plum wine and journal entries from a colleague and she begins a relationship with a man who helps her translate the documents. Why did she inherit the chest and what are the motivations of the man helping her?

However, the core of the novel is the experience of war, its long-term effects and the difficulty of people to understand the experiences of others. Davis-Gardner does not explicitly compare Hiroshima with Vietnam, but one character talks about how napalm affects its victims and the comparison of the burns from napalm and the burns from the Hiroshima bomb are simply there for the reader to make the connection.

One of the things that amazed me the most when I visited the Peace Musem in Hiroshima was the inclusion of pavement that had shadows burned onto them by the heat of the bomb--reading about the temperature and other facts of the bomb did not have the same impact on me as this simple visual image. For Barbara, reading the translations of her friend's documents and talking with the Hiroshima survivors helps her understand the direct effects of war. Or, more specifically, she learns the stories of the survivors but realizes that she can never really understand their experiences.