Aiko

On a bright summer morning, two schoolgirls walk toward a bridge with secrets between them: one girl carrying a hidden pencil, the other a sentence she has not yet found the courage to say.

When Aiko bends to fix a loose sandal strap, the smallest ordinary movement divides one life from another.

Told through mothers, fathers, teachers, strangers, children, and the survivor who spends decades trying to understand why she lived, Aiko is an intimate literary novel about ordinary life interrupted by impossible light. It is a story of memory, silence, guilt, testimony, and the duty to remember victims as people before history turns them into numbers.