Black Rain, by Masuji Ibuse, does more than convey the horror of what it meant to be at Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. It makes the event a tragedy with the entire Japanese civilian population as its hero—but a tragedy without heroic postures, because the only possible ambition, confronted with the monstrous fact of the Bomb, is survival.

This is a 'documentary' novel, in the sense that it incorporates genuine factual material about the explosion and that some of its characters are drawn from life—including the middle-class businessman, Shigematsu Shizuma, whose journal of the holocaust provides the bulk of the narrative. But this is more than an immensely skilful reconstruction job. The documentation has an essential function in the finely imagined plot—to rebut the charge, years later, that Shizuma's niece has radiation sickness and so cannot marry. Great ingenuity is used (on the whole successfully) to keep...