A few years before she passed away in 2019, Nicole Midori Woodford’s Japanese grandmother developed dementia after a stroke, and she came to live with the Singaporean director’s family just as Woodford was recovering from a particularly traumatic period in her life.
“She opened up to me about her life in Japan, and how she was late for work one day and missed the train to Hiroshima which meant that she narrowly escaped the atomic bomb that went off that morning,” says Woodford, recalling one of their conversations. “She later married my Eurasian British-Portuguese grandfather, and they moved to Singapore to start a new life. [I felt that] it was my grandmother’s way of reassuring
