Hiro, Mon Amour

This book is Michel Comte’s love letter to Japan, seen through the prism of his relationship to his wife Ayako Yoshida and the history of her family. Hiro—Hiroshima—is Yoshida’s hometown and here Comte begins his journey, not today but precisely on 6 August 1945, the day when an atom bomb desecrated the city, heralding Japan’s surrender and the end of World War II. When the bomb was released at 8:15 that morning, Ayako’s grandfather Shigetaka was working in the basement of a building not far from the Genbaku Dome, which today remains as part of the peace memorial in Hiroshima. Although just 200 meters from the blast center, he survived against all odds. This sense of the miraculous colors Comte’s vision in Hiro, Mon Amour, his visual diary of Japan across space and time. The book combines Comte’s recent photos made throughout the country with stills from his and Yoshida’s 2013 film The Girl From Nagasaki, their retelling of Madame Butterfly in Nagasaki, the other city to suffer an atomic bomb in August 1945, forever changing Japan’s physical and cultural landscape.