A Bowl Full of Peace: A True Story

Each evening Sachiko’s fam­i­ly gath­ers around their table in Nagasaki, Japan. Before the Second World War, Grandmother’s bowl is the cen­ter­piece of every meal, filled with squid, eel, octo­pus, and udon noo­dles; as the war rages on, it con­tains only wheat balls in boiled water. Sachiko is just six years old when the atom­ic bomb drops. She sur­vives the bomb, which kills three of her brothers—one imme­di­ate­ly, and two lat­er from radi­a­tion expo­sure. Surviving fam­i­ly returns to Nagasaki two years lat­er to find their house in ash­es but Grandmother’s bowl unharmed—a sym­bol of sur­vival. Stelson (Sachiko: A Nagasaki Bomb Survivor’s Story, rev. 1/17) builds her debut pic­ture book around this one ele­ment of Sachiko’s sto­ry. Kusaka’s illus­tra­tions effec­tive­ly focus on Sachiko’s fam­i­ly and the ways they used the bowl to cre­ate an order­ly fam­i­ly life even in the midst of, and after, a dev­as­tat­ing war. The ceram­ic bowl is the focal point of many of the unclut­tered dig­i­tal paint­ings: placed in the cen­ter of a square table, sur­round­ed with for­mal­ly arranged chop­sticks and dish­es. This image is repeat­ed through the book, pro­vid­ing the read­er with breath­ing space amidst dark images of war. The bomb itself is pow­er­ful­ly shown as a ball of fire in a series of spreads, with red light glow­ing through heavy black clouds. The third-person narrative’s calm, direct tone and the hope­ful end­ing make this dif­fi­cult, sophis­ti­cat­ed mate­r­i­al man­age­able for old­er elementary-school and middle-school chil­dren. An author’s note includes addi­tion­al infor­ma­tion about Japan dur­ing the war, inter­na­tion­al efforts to abol­ish nuclear weapons, and a brief bibliography.