I Have Been to Hiroshima Mon Amour

Chiori Miyagawa’s I Have Been to Hiroshima Mon Amour revolves around two love stories: one, played out in memories, involves a Japanese man, who returns to Hiroshima after fighting in WWII, and a Japanese woman who dies instantly at the moment of detonation of the atomic bomb on August 6, 1945. The other, involving the same man and a French actress, occurs in 1959 in “restored” Hiroshima. The Japanese woman — or her ghost — haunts the second love story.

Ms. Miyagawa’s play, a singular tragedy of atomic war told through personal loss, is a poetic response to the 1959 French film Hiroshima Mon Amour, and asks, “Who is entitled to memory?”