Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes was written in 1977 by Canadian author Ellen Coer. At the time of the book’s publication, Coerr was already an established children’s author, having written “Twenty Five Dragons” and “The Legend of the Golden Cat”, among others. Coerr had had a lifelong fascination with Japan and visited the country multiple times, but perhaps the most notable was her visit to Hiroshima in 1953, 8 years after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was during that trip when Coerr heard the story of Sadako, a Japanese girl who had been struck with leukemia due to radiation poisoning after the atomic bombing, and Coerr was inspired to tell her story after hearing of the bravery and will to live the young girl possessed.
Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes was made into a movie adaptation in the year 1991, and is narrated by Liv Ulman. It received a rating of 7.8 stars on movie review site IMDB. Another movie loosely based on Sadako’s story, but mainly centered around Coerr, the woman who wrote Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes, which is to star Evan Rachel Wood, and has received backlash from the Asian American community due to the white lead.
