The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki remembered in seven books

Times

3 days ago

N o weapons are more extreme than nuclear bombs, and they encourage writers to go to extremes of their own, in description, polemic and invective. Eighty years on, much of the most effective writing on Hiroshima and Nagasaki approaches the subject with an outward detachment, and at an oblique angle, not ignoring horror, but conveying it indirectly, as a shadow or chill cast over a calm present day. The story of the United States' development of the bomb and the decision to drop it on Japan in August 1945 — first on Hiroshima on August 6 and then Nagasaki on August 9 — has generated a library of its own. The books on this list, all of them translated into English, describe something else: death and survival as they were experienced in Japan.
John Hersey's short masterpiece, originally published as a long article in The New Yorker, remains one of the finest works of non-fiction reportage on any subject. In calm prose, he tells the story of the first atomic bombing and the year that followed through the interwoven accounts of six survivors, including a war widow, a young female clerk and a German missionary.
Tamiki Hara scribbled parts of his novella in a notebook as he staggered through the ruins of Hiroshima in the hours after the bombing. In its unselfconscious attention to detail, it is as close to eyewitness documentary as a work of literature can come. It begins with the narrator laying flowers on the grave of his young wife, recently dead from tuberculosis. In the third paragraph, he is saved from death by being in the lavatory at the moment the bomb explodes. But Hara's death was delayed, not avoided: four years later, in despair at reports that the United States was contemplating the use of atomic bombs in the Korean War, he killed himself by lying in front of an oncoming train.
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Takashi Nagai, a brilliant Roman Catholic doctor, was a few hundred yards from the atomic bomb that exploded over Nagasaki on August 9, 1945; six years later, he died of leukaemia at the age of 43. His bestselling book, which made him internationally famous even as he lay dying, describes with intimate horror the bombing and its aftermath, and the heroic relief efforts carried out by Nagai and a team of injured and dying medical workers. It ends with an extraordinary, jolting and unforgettable religious meditation, deeply controversial ever since, that pictures Nagasaki as 'a victim, a pure lamb, to be slaughtered and burned on the altar of sacrifice to expiate the sins committed by humanity in the Second World War'.
The crew of the bomber Enola Gay in 1945
ALAMY
This great and neglected novel begins deceptively, as a story about that timeless subject of literature: a family's anxious efforts to find a husband for an unmarried young woman. Despite living far from Hiroshima, Yasuko's prospects are blighted by rumours that she was exposed to the sinister 'black rain' that fell and irradiated areas outside the city. In an effort to refute these, her uncle Shigematsu writes an account of the family's experience of the bombing five years earlier. His account, interleaved with accounts of peaceful village life, conveys the terrible events and the cruel prejudice that its victims faced for decades afterwards.
Inside illustrations from Barefoot Gen
© KEIJI NAKAZAWA. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. REPRINTED BY PERMISSION OF THE PUBLISHER LAST GASP
Originally published in a weekly magazine, rendered in the exaggerated style of popular manga, Keiji Nakazawa's comic book has little of the artfulness and refinement of the modern graphic novel. But the power, simplicity and anger of the storytelling, based on the author's experience, are indelible, especially in the early volumes of the long series. After seeing his family die in the bomb, young Gen escapes with his pregnant mother to scrabble for a living in the ashes of the city and the broken ruins of postwar Japanese society.
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The atomic bombing goes almost unmentioned in the Nobel prizewinner's first novel, but it lingers in its pages like a faint but ineradicable smell. Etsuko, a Japanese widow and mother living in Britain, recollects her life as a young woman in postwar Nagasaki where everyone is straining to look cheerily to the future. The psychological cost of all this emerges, with beautiful subtlety, in the narrator's relationship with a mysterious friend, Sachiko, who is not what she seems. The novel's central theme is the tremendous act of repression that survivors frequently exert to make the unbearable facts tolerable. The recent film is good, and makes the shadow of the bomb more pronounced, but the novel is even better.
Maximilian Kolbe in 1936
ALAMY
Naoko Abe, a Japanese journalist resident in Britain, takes as her subject the influence on Japanese lives of the Polish saint Maximilian Kolbe, who founded a friary in prewar Nagasaki and was later canonised after taking the place of a condemned prisoner in Auschwitz. Most compelling is the story of Tomei Ozaki, who became a friar after being orphaned by the bomb as a teenage boy. Abe's understated style serves her well in recounting the appalling details of the bombing's aftermath: the living people with their skin burnt off; the boiling, raging sky; a child helplessly scrabbling to pull his mother out of a burning house.
Richard Lloyd Parry has written a foreword to a new edition of The Bells of Nagasaki by Takashi Nagai (Vintage Classics £16.99)