Radiance - 2007

London: Virago, 2007. Used. Later, when Daisy remembered that night, she could smell the scent of honeysuckle at the window and see the moon on the floorboards. But in her memories Keiko wasn?t bandaged: her face was broken down the middle, just like the moon. One half was pure and white, the other half mottled and porous. The unbroken side was as smooth as porcelain, terrifying in its brightness, but in every memory it was the pocked side that drew Daisy in. (From Radiance, p. 192)It?s 1952. Eighteen-year-old Hiroshima survivor Keiko Kitigawa arrives in New York City for surgery to cut away the scar marring her lovely face. Sponsored by The Hiroshima Project, Keiko is expected to be a media darling, ?The Hiroshima Maiden,? selected for her scarred beauty and for the talent she briefly revealed to Project doctors in Japan for putting words to the inexpressible horrors she has witnessed. But the Keiko who arrives in America does not perform as scripted, preferring to recall instead her grandfather?s dappled gardens and tales of trickster foxes. Frustrated by her recalcitrance, the Project presses Keiko?s suburban host mother, Daisy Lawrence, into duty, tasking her with drawing out the girl?s horrific story, the one they need for the media circuit. When Daisy reluctantly agrees, she must fight to enter Keiko?s sphere of intimacy, and is shocked by what she learns there.