A review by archer_sloane
Hiroshima Notes by Kenzaburō Ōe, David L. Swain, Toshi Yonezawa

dark emotional informative reflective slow-paced

4.5

This is, as far as I can tell, one of less than 5 books about how the bomb affected the Japanese people. Nearly every other book I've found tells the same story: The American scientists didn't want to build the bomb, but they were scared of the Nazis, so they did it anyway, and Japan was the unwilling recipient of that fear. What happened after? What's left in the crater? 

This book, and "A Personal Matter" are why Oe won his Nobel. Even now, you can't find another book on this topic in English, and I've been looking for years.