Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes

Inspired by beginning A Song for Nagasaki for Reading for Believers, I picked up Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes, a true story retold by Eleanor Coerr, to read one night to the kids. My young listeners were too busy playing to pay attention to the first 30 pages of the story.  And since it is only about 50 pages long, that means they only listened for about a third of the book. But the second third is most moving. The kids couldn’t believe that Sadako actually died. (They were waiting (hoping?) for someone to die in Little House.) How could the author let the main character, a little girl die? Why does the Author of life let anyone young die?

The owners of our local donut shop recently lost their 9 year old daughter, who attended the neighboring Catholic school, to brain cancer. Our children had been praying for her every day at school. They also prayed for my friend, the mother of their friends in Illinois, every day, and she died of cancer recently, too.  Several years ago, we were able to be at the bedside of the kids' young aunt, who also succumbed to brain cancer.  Other friends and family members remain on our prayer list for the time being.


When I was the age of my oldest, the only people I knew who had died were a couple great-aunts and a friend's grandma.  So far these encounters with the deaths of young people haven’t scandalized my kids or given them nightmares about leukemia. No one has asked why our prayers haven’t been answered the way we want them to be answered - maybe because I’ve talked to them about this idea before, maybe because they just aren’t to that level of critical thinking. They’ve been the funerals of three great-grandparents, and even looked in and touched the body of my great-grandmother, the only one with an open casket, without qualms. But those funerals were peaceful events, celebrating long, well-lived lives.


The death of a young person is harder to comprehend. It was brave of the author to write about Sadako. She writes plainly, without sentimentality. The temptation is not to introduce to children the idea they could die any time (although I admit a perverse pleasure in telling my children the gruesome beginnings of some nursery rhymes). The book only hints at the devastation and despair that must have accompanied the deaths caused by the atom bomb – from the immensity of that tragedy the author spares her readers. Instead she directs their empathy toward a particular victim, Sadako, who becomes a face for all those who died.  It is much easier to comprehend, and mourn, an epic tragedy when we "know" one of the sufferers.


The book had several references to the family’s religious practices, but they were described in such a way that the kids didn’t discern anything in contradiction to Catholic practice, nor was the Shinto practice belittled. I appreciated being able to read without having to edit.


Below are photos of statues of Sadako from three different Peace Parks - in Seattle, two statues from the Children's Peace Park in Hiroshima, and the last from Santa Fe.