SOURCE: "Japanese Atomic Bomb Literature," in World Literature Today, Vol. 62, No. 3, Summer, 1988, pp. 420-24.

In the following essay, Konaka surveys several works exemplary of a Japanese literary genre known as "atomic-bomb literature."

In On Photography, Susan Sontag tells of seeing, at the age of twelve, the victims of the Jewish concentration camp at Birkenau, and of how it changed her. For my part, I cannot forget seeing as a youth for the first time in the illustrated weekly Asahigurafu photographs depicting the suffering caused by the atomic bomb. In that year, 1952, the U.S. Occupation of Japan ended, and information about victims of the nuclear explosions became generally available. Also, just this year the film Genbaku no ko (Children of the Atomic Bomb), directed by Shindo Kanendo and based on a collection of essays by young people from Hiroshima, was released. The hellish conflagration depicted on the screen...