I cried because of the last chapter, and I cried after reading your aunt's story....
I'm so sorry for all their suffering, especially that in trying to help she's become haunted over her small, kind action.
The same here... I hope someday humanity finally learns from its past and stops violences between men.
Thank you all for your kindness and kind words. Keiko is an amazing woman with a strength of spirit that is unmatched. She lost one family to gain another in her husband and six children and many grandchildren. She rarely allows herself to linger in the past, but on those rare occasions when she does, she chooses to remember her loved ones fondly and not beat herself up over what can't be changed. Whenever I read a manga where the idea of a "perfect Japanese woman" is described or mentioned, I instantly think of Keiko. She is who I want to be "when I grow up". If I can be half the woman she is, I'll be in pretty good shape. I'm 47 and still working on it. LOL Thank you all, again.
My heart always aches when I read Showa era pieces. My aunt survived the bombing of Hiroshima, though the rest of her family did not. I get a lump in my throat just typing that here. The characters of the first and last story may be fictional, but the events and situations of the people of Japan living through that time are not. My aunt's older half sister was sold to a geisha house in the late 1930s and when the bomb hit Hiroshima that same half sister managed to find my aunt through the destruction and chaos. Their reunion was short lived as her sister passed away from radiation poisoning the very same night. My aunt's sister had been feeling ill since she was found and in her fevered sleep, begged for water. My aunt had no idea that the cool, clean water that flowed past the place where they rested was inundated with radiation. So, she gave some to her sister. To this day she doesn't know if it was the fallout from the bomb or the fallout in the water that killed her sister, and it haunts her. My aunt was just 16 in 1945.