Lovely man. I wanted him to be my adviser, but he was on leave my second year of grad school, and I changed direction greatly.

When I visited Japan as a tourist in 1979, I asked him in advance to write me a generic letter of recommendation. It was full-page, handwritten. It opened every door that needed opening. He was also nice enough to exaggerated the importance of my thesis when talking about it with my parents. ;)

He told me once that as a teenager he pursued both math and piano. When he had to pick one, he obviously picked math.

His wife becoming a significant politician surprised me. I just recall her bringing sushi she'd presumably made to a math department party at Harvard. She seemed perfectly nice, but didn't talk much. I don't know how good her English was or wasn't at the time.

Here is an accessible description of Hironaka's resolution of singularities (pdf):

https://homepage.univie.ac.at/herwig.hauser/Publications/hau...

Grothendieck said of his resolution of singularitis in characteristic 0 that it was the deepest result of the XX Century.