On page 1-2:
"The American knelt beside her mother-in-law during prayers at St. Mary's cathedral
in Urakami District.....
The world ended without warning....no sound, no shift in the earth...
all the souls they had sheltered were transmuted instantly into light."
On first reading this can only be a quandary. It's resolved near the end of the book.
On page 299 Drum is looking for an assistant to replace Polly Coggins who "ran off with
Tadahito or Mura or whoever he was."
If you research Urakami you may realize it was in Nagasaki that the second atom bomb
incinerated Urakami's Cathedral and 10,000 Christians.
I had to fight with my Editor for this one. It was originally the first chapter in an early manuscript version, and she demoted it to a prologue, wanted to cut it altogether. I still feel the entire narrative and the point of the novel hangs on this opening scene.
ReplyDeleteI see your point; I've seen various mention of things best explained as
Deleteanother narrative.