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The Ash Garden Paperback – January 7, 2003

by Dennis Bock (Author)

3.7 29 ratings

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Emiko Amai is six years old in August 1945 when the Hiroshima bomb burns away half of her face. To Anton, a young German physicist involved in the Manhattan Project, that same bomb represents the pinnacle of scientific elegance. And for his Austrian wife Sophie, a Jewish refugee, it marks the start of an irreparable fissure in their new marriage.

Fifty years later, seemingly far removed from the day that defined their lives, Emiko visits Anton and Sophie, and in Dennis Bock’s powerfully imagined narrative, their histories converge.

Print length

304 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Vintage
Publication date

January 7, 2003
Dimensions

5.13 x 0.65 x 7.99 inches
ISBN-10

0375727493
ISBN-13

978-0375727498
See all details

Editorial Reviews

Review

“A crystalline meditation on the defining event of the twentieth century and its aftermath . . . Inventive and consistently challenging” –Mark Rozzo, Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Mysterious and compelling. . . . An elegant, unnerving novel that illuminates the personal consequences of war.” –Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“Exquisite. . . . Bock’s achievement here is in creating characters with believably ambiguous edges, vulnerable people whose understanding of themselves and others is incomplete.” -Janice P. Nimura, The Washington Post Book World

“Bock has shined an illuminating searchlight on the terra incognita where the personal and the political intersect.” –Dan Cryer, Newsday

“A splendid, powerful book, written with authority and admirable control.” –St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Assured and compassionate.” –Pico Iyer, Harper’s

“[T]his brilliant novel traces the lingering effects of the Hiroshima bombing . . . showing how war binds victor and victim as surely as scar tissue closes a wound.” –Rick Waddington, Minneapolis Star-Tribune

“Reconciliation, responsibility, blame and regret shift and fall in different patterns throughout this moving and thoughtful novel.” –Barbara Fisher, The Boston Globe

“Dennis Bock began The Ash Garden long before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, but it’s impossible now not to read his haunting debut novel outside the glare of that tragedy. . . . Bock sets a match to ethical issues that are reaching the flash point today.” –Ron Charles, The Christian Science Monitor

“One can go further with this book, and say that Bock has learned just about everything that can be gained from Michael Ondaatje and Jane Urquhart in the use of compelling images. . . . Very, very accomplished.” –T. F. Rigelhof, The Globe & Mail

“This is a gorgeous, poetic novel, with scenes that stun the senses. . . . Bock makes us see and live these lives in all their uneasy compromise.” –Susan Larson, New Orleans Times-Picayune

“For all its worldliness, The Ash Garden feels intimate and interior. . . . [Bock’s] are the battlefields of conscience, the war away from the war.” –Annabel Lyon, National Post

From the Inside Flap

Emiko Amai is six years old in August 1945 when the Hiroshima bomb burns away half of her face. To Anton, a young German physicist involved in the Manhattan Project, that same bomb represents the pinnacle of scientific elegance. And for his Austrian wife Sophie, a Jewish refugee, it marks the start of an irreparable fissure in their new marriage.

Fifty years later, seemingly far removed from the day that defined their lives, Emiko visits Anton and Sophie, and in Dennis Bock's powerfully imagined narrative, their histories converge.

From the Back Cover

Emiko Amai is six years old in August 1945 when the Hiroshima bomb burns away half of her face. To Anton, a young German physicist involved in the Manhattan Project, that same bomb represents the pinnacle of scientific elegance. And for his Austrian wife Sophie, a Jewish refugee, it marks the start of an irreparable fissure in their new marriage.
Fifty years later, seemingly far removed from the day that defined their lives, Emiko visits Anton and Sophie, and in Dennis Bock's powerfully imagined narrative, their histories converge.

About the Author

Dennis Bock’s story collection, Olympia, was awarded prizes in Canada and England. He lives in Toronto.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1

We had very little in the days when the war was still far away, in the remote place I imagined all wars lived when I was a girl. When it finally came to our city in August 1945 it consumed what little we had left, and years later, when there was nothing left at all, I was forced to journey to America to begin my surgeries. Of course, when I was a child it had seemed to me that what we'd had in those early days was sufficient. All but the barest necessities had been taken from us, but we didn't know any better. I often thought of the war as some great famished beast that ate away at the heart of my people. But my family was no different from any other family in the Asaminami district, the area of the city we lived in, and my brother and I never missed what we'd never had. I do not know if our parents and grandfather felt the same way.

In what might seem a rare gift in the legacy of my family's suffering, my mother and father were lucky enough to die at the same instant, which, for me, is a slight but not insignificant consolation. Neither had to endure the other's death, or the death of my little brother, who followed them not long after. I was left with only my grandfather to take care of me, a scarred and disfigured girl of six with only half a face; and my grandfather had only me to take care of him. Ten years later, when Grandfather fell ill with tuberculosis and finally joined the rest of my departed family, I was in the process of getting a version of my face back, at Mount Sinai Hospital, in New York City. Before I left for America he had made me promise I would not, no matter the circumstance, return to him before the surgeons had completed their work and I was again his beautiful granddaughter. I kept that last promise, and as a consequence he died alone. But slowly my face--or at least a version of it--was restored to me, just as he had always said it would be.

As I have said, my brother and I did not feel the sacrifice as my parents or grandfather might have. We knew nothing different from what we were living through then. It had been like that all our lives, it seemed. The drone of high-flying airplanes, the piercing song the sirens played when a fire- or bombing-drill was staged, the general absence of men in civilian dress, blackout paper covering every window, nothing to eat but rice and bean-paste soup and cabbage. These things did not occur to me as anything special. We knew nothing but war. Planes trolled the skies above our heads. Sirens woke us most mornings. The trenches we'd constructed to contain the spread of fire split neighborhoods into sections. That men must wear uniforms seemed so normal that a young man seen wearing slacks and jacket and fedora looked wildly eccentric to my eyes. Similarly, my father stood out conspicuously. He had not been allowed to join the army. He had been forced to stay home.

The fear I heard in my mother's voice, too, was unexceptional, as were the attempts she made to mask it with reassuring pronouncements and stern, even confident instructions. Outside the home she obeyed my father, as tradition dictated. But inside, where it counted most, I learned, it was the other way around. When action was to be taken, or caution to be exercised, it was my mother who decided which action or cautionary measure. It was she who protected me and my brother, and cared for our grandfather when his breathing became weak or his rheumatism became unbearable, and it was she who tended to my father when he came home disoriented late at night (I didn't know what drunkenness was then), which he did more frequently as the war drew on.

One night I heard my father admit to my mother that he had brought shame to his family and to himself by failing to gain entry to the war. After hearing a loud noise, I'd risen from the mattress I shared with Mitsuo and watched my father cry into my mother's arms, as I stood there at the top of the stairs, hidden in shadow. He insisted that he had been condemned to live out his days branded a coward and a pacifist, a word which was new to me. Pitiful tears streamed down his face. My mother cradled his head and smoothed his cheeks as he pinched the bridge of his nose with his fingers, as if trying to staunch the flow of tears. I wondered if I would be capable of this same tenderness my mother showed. I had never seen my father in this state. But I saw from how she held him in her arms that it was not unknown to her, and that this was something the grown-up world had suddenly, just then, thrust upon me.

My mother listened patiently. She let my father finish talking-crying, then got him in a chair and washed his face with a kitchen cloth. He was mumbling, looking down at his hands. I was afraid for him, and of him. He said the word children under his breath, and my little brother's name, but as far as I could tell he did not speak of me.

My father did not go to work the following morning. He stayed in his bed while we assembled downstairs and ate our gruel and rice-bran dumplings. After breakfast, my mother sent Grandfather to the bank, despite his sore legs, to tell the people there that Father was ill. I accompanied him through the streets to deliver our message.

Though we had all been affected by the war, and the network of trenches and water-filled ditches constructed in the event of an enemy firestorm now marked the city into grids, none of the buildings we passed had been destroyed. As we walked, my grandfather told me that even the enemy respected the beauty of some of our most ancient cities. Not even barbarians would consider destroying our lovely town. Trying to put me at ease, he told me that people of Japanese ancestry were living among the enemy, in distant America, where they had worked to convince their government to spare us. Naturally this knowledge did calm my anxiety, but I was agitated for another reason. What I had seen the previous night was with me still. I wondered if my grandfather knew about my father, and the real reason he was unable to represent us in the world that day.

The streets were already busy that morning. I watched the Miyajima streetcar make its slow crawl up from the harbor, where it always began its run, carrying the older men to their places of work, or housewives to their shopping. Work gangs from outlying communities assembled on street corners, waiting for their morning assignment. There was always more to be done in preparing our city for what might come, and not a morning went by when these work gangs did not collect on street corners in every district, focusing their attention on the tasks ahead. That day there were many soldiers in the streets and on the tram, and their presence further eased my nervousness. We knew they were our protectors, and I secretly understood my father's shame at not being permitted to be one of them on account of his leg, the consequence of a childhood affliction. It would have been a great honor for us. The fathers of many of the children in our neighborhood were away at the war, and at school these children were awarded a special status that I envied. The teachers told us that we were all able to contribute equally, whether at home or away at the war, but the daughters of soldiers were emboldened by the absence of their fathers.

On our route to my father's place of employment to deliver our deceitful message, an odd sensation crept over me. He might indeed be ill, I considered, but he suffered from a different sort of illness from the one we meant to suggest. I was not supposed to know this, of course. My mother was not aware I had heard what had passed between them the night before. But telling a lie--and to the bank! This seemed dangerous and exciting, and opened up for me a new world of unknown possibilities.

We turned left, then right onto the business street, where my father's bank was located. Many of these buildings had been here longer than my grandfather, which seemed an impossibly long time to me. Sometimes I liked to walk along this street--and others, in different neighborhoods--and imagine Grandfather here, as he might have appeared at my young age of six. He had spent the whole of his youth in Hiroshima and, in my mind, it was not difficult for me to create a picture of him as a boy. I used my little brother's small frame as a stand-in when I thought back to what it must have been like, in another century. My imagination simply drew his clear, youthful face and body over my grandfather's old, wrinkled one. I painted his portrait in my head, and a streetscape of what Hiroshima had looked like back then, without soldiers carrying rifles on every corner and blackout paper pasted over every pane of glass. I painted men who wore their dark robes like lords, and wealthy landowners and women costumed in traditional flame-colored kimonos, which had been replaced during the war years by the durable monpe pantaloons all women had taken to wearing.

When we entered the bank, my grandfather asked for Mr. Hatano, the manager. We waited silently at one end of a large room for him to meet with us. Finally his office door opened and he emerged. He crossed the hardwood floor, a stack of papers clutched under his right arm, and bowed respectfully to my grandfather. His shoes creaked. He smelled of soap and hair grease.

"I have been sent by my daughter," my grandfather began, after returning an equally deep bow, "Mrs. Yokuo Amai, to tell you that my son-in-law, Haruki Amai, a diligent employee of this institution, is ill today and is unable to honor his responsibilities. I am to tell you that he will be well tomorrow and that he is deeply regretful he cannot take his post today."

This was my grandfather's particular way of speaking, but it was a manner appreciated by those of his generation, a part of which the man he was addressing seemed to be.

We walked home hand in hand, slowly because of Grandfather's bad legs. I did not ask if he knew he'd been entrusted with a lie. It occurred to me that I might be the only one, besides my mother, to know the true cause of my father's malaise. My child's mind wrestled with this, and finally I decided that my mother must have good reason to do what she had done, though I still had no idea what that could be. Her decision was based on an adult interpretation of the world that was beyond my experience.

She was sitting by my father's bed, talking quietly, when we returned. I heard her voice through the wall and waited patiently for her to come downstairs before I asked her permission to take Mitsuo to the river, a five-minute walk from the house, where we liked to play under the Bantai Bridge.

2

For months, after waking up in the Red Cross Hospital, I was forced to lie on my stomach in order to let the wounds on my back breathe and heal. My left eye had sealed over with scar tissue and pus since I was shipped here from the Oshiba Aid Station, where we had been taken after being found near the river by a group of soldiers. Mitsuo's cot sat to the left of mine. When the doctors conferred over him I was able to see only their legs and shoes, because I could not lift my head. But my ears were among the few things that had not been damaged. I listened to their voices, and soon began to hate how they spoke when they discussed my brother. They said he was a lost case and soon would die. They wondered aloud what kept him alive. Every morning they seemed surprised that he had survived the night. There was no hope for him, they said.

Nor did I like how they discussed my own condition, gathering around my bed like old men talking politics at a newsstand, bending my arms, poking at my burns. We seemed to them interesting experiments, as you might find the extended and exceptional life of a gnat or beetle interesting. They would stop briefly between our beds, add or subtract some observations from each of our charts and move on again to the next bandaged patient.

The ward was thirty-eight footsteps in length. I knew this because I had counted the paces of a nurse as she moved from end to end, tending to her helpless patients. It was a narrow room, wide enough only to accommodate the length of a cot on either side, with a space running up the center along which new patients could be rolled in or the dead removed on a squeaking gurney. The walls of unpainted plaster, a dull white-gray, had been fashioned roughly. In certain sections I was able to make out the horsehair and straw mixed into the plaster, material that rose to the surface of the wall at the head of my bed like roots pushing up through a sidewalk. Four lamps hung from the wooden ceiling on long black wires. Sometimes the lamps moved slightly when a breeze entered the ward through the windows, which were opened most mornings in order to release the fetid night stink that grew under our bedsheets while we slept. There was one picture in the center of the ward, on the far wall, preserved under a sheet of glass which one of the nurses dusted each morning. This was a portrait of Emperor Hirohito, at whom I could not look directly. This was not due to my awkward position in the bed but because he was more god than man to us then and such unabashed glaring would have shown grave disrespect.

Many nights I could not sleep for the pain that occupied my body like a razing army, and for the news my grandfather had brought soon after he found us here, almost three weeks after the bomb. He told me that our parents had been killed. He told me he had found Mother lying in the street, and Father still in bed. There can be no mistake, he said. You must be strong. After he left that day I tried to destroy the image of their deaths that I held in my head. I did all I could to forget the feeling that came over me the instant the mud around us had turned to stone. But I could not dispel the burning heat in my lungs, and the pain I felt on my skin as it split when the flash of light burned across our path and seared our grandfather's resemblance into Mitsuo's flesh...

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage (January 7, 2003)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0375727493
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0375727498
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 7.8 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.13 x 0.65 x 7.99 inches

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Larry L. Looney

A MOVING VIEW FROM DIFFERENT ANGLES...

Reviewed in the United States on October 9, 2002

Many books - fiction as well as non-fiction - have been written around the events of August 6, 1945. When the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, the world changed forever - and such an occurrence will be chronicled in many ways, for it touched and altered the lives of everyone on the planet. John Hersey's remarkable HIROSHIMA comes to mind, along with many other that have appeared since. Dennis Bock's novel THE ASH GARDEN is an astonishing, deeply moving look at the lives of three people - a German scientist who immigrated to America in order to work on the Manhattan Project; a young Austrian girl, sent away from the horrors to come by her parents, never to see them again; and a Japanese girl, just seven years old at the time, playing with her little brother on a riverbank, watching as a single plane approaches her city.
Bock's literary gifts are stunning. His descriptive abilities are deep and varied - I found myself reading passages over again when I realized that he had, obliquely rather than obviously, made a scene appear in my mind as clearly as if I were seeing it with my eyes. He applies this amazing talent to his characterizations as well - there are aspects of each character that are addressed directly, but many facets of their personalities and psyches are revealed more subtly, by conversations, thoughts and actions. I found the characters portrayed here - and this is, for me, the heart of all great writing - completely fleshed-out and whole. Each one has their strengths and weaknesses, with good and bad intentions vying within for dominance - and each one comes to know themselves as they come to know the ones with whom their lives are intertwined. Preconceptions exist and are seen to crumble - it's a fascinating process, and one that occurs within all of us as we live our lives and interact with others. To see it so subtly and completely reproduced on the printed page is a marvel.
Besides chronicling the events connected with the bombing of Hiroshima, and their consequences in the lives of these characters, the book deals very adeptly and thoroughly with the voyage of discovery that each one of them makes. Anton Böll, the émigré scientist, leaves his native Germany because he sees that the German atomic program is headed down a dead end - he knows that his talents and abilities will be put to much more fruitful use in America. He knows the horrible power that the weapon on which he is working will unleash - and he truly sees it as a necessary thing: a way to end the war. He also hopes, along with several of his fellows, that, once the power of this weapon is seen, there will never again be temptation to actually use it. He hopes against hope that the US government will choose to use it on a military target - but he also knows that they will most likely pick a civilian one. As the years pass after the war, he attends the annual rallies commemorating the event - not so much to ease his conscience as to make sure that the world knows the terrible power that the bomb carries.
Böll meets Sophie in a camp for refugees in Canada - he is immediately taken with her beauty and her spirit, and he marries her, getting her out of the camp. They move to New York City and begin their lives together - and then he is transferred to New Mexico to work on the Manhattan Project. Their hopes for their marriage carry him through this separation, and through the time after the war, when he is sent to Japan as a scientific observer of the bomb's results. Sophie has a more difficult time with this separation, and she deals with it - and with the pain of knowing she will never see her family in Europe again - by clinging to a new-found determination that she will live her life for herself, regardless of what those around her choose, or are compelled, to do.
It is while Anton is in Japan that he is moved beyond his own belief by the destruction he sees - destruction in the physical sense, to be sure, but mainly in the human sense. He sees the burned survivors - the adults as well as the children - and he comes to know an elderly doctor, and spends much of his spare time working with the old man in the hospitals, caring for those fighting to survive. Anton wrestles constantly - both consciously and subconsciously - with what he sees, trying to reconcile it with what he has believed about his work. It is a struggle that will remain with him.
Emiko and her little brother survive the blast, although they are badly burned. Just before the bomb detonated, she had painted a picture on the back of his white shirt, with mud, of the face of their grandfather. The flash and heat of the bomb burned this image into his back - and many other such `tattoos' are recounted on other victims, the patterns of the clothing they were wearing marking them for life. Emiko's brother eventually dies, but she survives, and is chosen to be one of a select few girls to be taken to American to undergo newly developed surgical techniques to restore her badly burned and scarred face. She becomes a documentary filmmaker as an adult, and through her work and self-education about the events leading up to the destruction of her city, she comes to know about Anton Böll and his role in those events. She manages to meet him at a commemoration event in New York City, and arranges to interview him.
When the lives of these three people begin to intertwine, it is a classic case of `the whole being greater than the sum of the parts' - there are dynamics that rise up and come into play that none of the three could have imagined. All three of them have believed that they have come to know fully the events of their lives - it is only after these versions meet and cross that they each realize that they still have things to learn and consider. Bock's research into the history of the bomb, his appreciation of the human personality and spirit, his respect of history, and the hopes he holds for humanity - both collectively and as individuals - are bound together here by his immense skills as a writer. THE ASH GARDEN is a book that everyone should read who wants to understand the power man has unleashed, along with its implications - and it does so without damning the bombs or the men who brought it to fruition, in an intelligent and moving way. This book is a modern masterpiece.

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Third Age Traveler

So Much in The Title's Paradox

Reviewed in the United States on April 30, 2013

Fifty years after Emiko Amai loses half her face and almost all of her family when the first atom bomb is dropped on Hiroshima, she is a documentary filmmaker seeking information on the bombing. In Dennis Bock's compelling novel, The Ash Garden, Emiko seeks out Anton Boll, a German physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project to develop the bomb and then went to Japan to study the aftermath of its use. She also meets Boll's Austrian wife, Sophie, who came to North America as a Jewish refugee and who lost her entire family during the Holocaust. These three characters' intertwining histories and their individual perspectives produce a powerful look at how human beings may react to the seminal moments of their lives--particularly when those moments happen in a time of war.

Anton Boll is first and foremost a scientist. He leaves his native Germany not for political or moral reasons. Rather his single mindedness and dedication to his science lead him to break with the scientists with whom he works and with whom he disagrees. He seeks his own avenue, and he leaves Germany as well as his mother whose fate, presumably influenced by his defection, he reflects on just once in this novel. He is, in fact, the last scientist to flee Germany before the borders close, and that is as late as 1940. Science is more than his vocation; it is his lifeblood.

Sophie is Jewish, and after escaping Austria, she eventually finds herself in a refugee camp in Canada, behind wires and with guards to keep the refugees in. She is a teenager determined to get out of that camp. Anton, a young and handsome visitor to the camp, sees her, falls in love and rescues her by marrying her. She does love him, and they are blissfully happy.

The war forces their togetherness to be short lived as he is soon called away to Los Alamos to continue his work on the development of the atom bomb. There he remains. The bomb is successful; the war ends, and Anton visits Hiroshima to study the destruction. He is stunned beyond comprehension.

When he finally reunites with Sophie who has waited patiently in Brooklyn, he finds he cannot communicate his reactions to Hiroshima nor can he fully understand his own reactions to what he experiences and the devastation he sees in Hiroshima.

He finds Sophie is also changed, and things cannot be as they once were. She does not reveal the sources of her change either. Much as they want to, they cannot go back to "before the war."

Over the ensuing years, Sophie's and Anton's attempt to cope with their physical and psychological alterations and to find some way to exist happily together is a constant struggle because, in their own ways, they love each other. Their very different backgrounds, their inability to fully communicate, and their physical problems are minefields they tread carefully.

Emiko's entrance in their lives appears unexpected, but this novel is full of the unexpected, so be prepared to gasp. She, of course, wants Anton to admit that the bomb was wrong and that he is repentant for his work. That is not the way he feels, and as their relationship unfolds, we see sides of him heretofore hidden as well as sides of her of which she was not even aware.

This is a book well worth reading. It is well written,and it will give you pause to think.

.

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DramaticDigitalDiva

Emotionally Written.

Reviewed in Canada on July 23, 2019

Verified Purchase

Tender. Real

johanna

German scientist developing a conscience after the H bomb on Hiroshima.

Reviewed in Canada on July 29, 2019

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The book was written well, in a similar style that I have come to know from Ian McEwan's novels: literary fiction, cerebral, much internal reasoning from the highly educated main character, slowly developing the storylines—not for everybody. The plot is intricate and mingled the stories of three different characters. It was to me, quite jarring to switch POV frequently, and I prefer to stay with one character. Luckily, the story, in the end, brings the three players together in a rather amazing, and maybe not altogether plausible, end.

七海光一

意気込みは買うが、不発である

Reviewed in Japan on December 23, 2005

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最初から最後まで、リズムが同じで、ややもたれる文体である。テーマが重いので、内容にも重みを持たせようとした風だが、登場人物の心理を表す比喩が込み入っているわりには心に響かない。精神なく語るという感じである。それから、著者は日本をよく理解していないという感じを受ける。エミコが病院で療養中、祖父が彼女にキスをするというシーンがあるが、あの世代の日本人で、孫にキスをするというのは、余程西洋化された家庭でなくては難しいだろう。それを示唆する背景が十分に描かれているとは言いがたい。さらに、タナベ・ヤサカという牧師が登場するが、ヤサカ牧師（Reverend Yasaka)と記述されている。すると、名前がタナベということになるが、それはおかしい。さらに、エミコが手術の為にアメリカに言ったというのはわかるが、何ゆえ彼女はアメリカに留まることになったのか。それがよくわからないし、そこにあったであろう心理的葛藤が十分描かれているとは思えない。アントンとソフィーの間の微妙な心理も、効果的に描かれてはいない。格別悪いかというとそうではないが、隔靴掻痒の感がはなはだしい。英語はまずまず平易だが、持って回った心理描写にちょっと閉口する。

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lovesunshine

Ugh.

Reviewed in Canada on March 27, 2015

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Was always in a bad mood when I tried reading it.

助三

書評だけ読むと面白そう、なんですが。

Reviewed in Japan on April 26, 2003

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原爆を製造したマンハッタンプロジェクトに参画した老科学者とその妻、広島での被爆痕整形のため渡米した少女がそのまま米国に残り不思議な糸にひかれていま「再び」あいまみえる・・・・興味をそそられるプロットにひかれて買いましたが、中身はちょっと期待外れ。
訳者もあとがきで書いていますが、中心人物３人の人物描写がどうもぴんとこないもので物語にはいりづらい。戦後、各々が「ヒロシマ」を有形無形でひきづりながら現在に至るのですがおもわせぶりな描写が長々続くものの心に迫るものはなし。
書評にもあるように最後に「秘密」は明かされますが、そこに至るまでの途中の経過が経過なので申し訳ないが「フーン」という程度。

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