“Charcoal Girl – Meeting the Ghost of the A-Bomb in 1954 Hiroshima” is an unusual visual book in two parts. The first part is a graphic novel the author wrote at age seven in Hiroshima where her father was the first US diplomat after America destroyed the city with the world’s first atomic bomb. The second part, written in 2014, tells the “story behind the story.”
For the past 30 years, Farida Fotouhi has been the president of Reality2, a leading branding and advertising agency based in Brentwood. Recently she came across the graphic novel she wrote when she was seven.
“As a seven-year-old, I didn’t have any idea that it was a metaphor for war and the atomic bomb my country had dropped,” Farida said. “When I discovered it hiding in an old scrapbook, I was blown away and decided to create a book about it.”
As the only American in her Japanese school and neighborhood, creating graphic novels was one way young Farida processed her experiences and unanswerable questions.
The coffee-table-style book combines Fotouhi’s vivid 1954 graphic novel “Charcoal Girl” (translated into English) with her engaging 2014 reflections on the Fotouhi family’s extraordinary life in 1950s Hiroshima, illustrated with photographs.
“The underlying theme of the book is the hope for world peace,” Farida said. “It’s about how the human heart can build bridges between former enemies, a message that’s still important today.”
One of the essays in the 2014 portion of the book, “The Question,” won first prize in the Brentwood Library’s creative writing contest earlier this year. The book is available at charcoalgirl.com and on Amazon.
