This coming August will mark the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, and at this point in time the ramifications of the act itself remain fairly circumscribed. People still argue as to whether it brought an end to the Pacific War and thus made wholesale slaughter of civilians during wartime an acceptable concept. At least 140,000 human beings died as a result of the bombing, some instantly, others after prolonged agony. There is, of course, something to be said about condemning the very idea of the bomb and its use against living things, given that many countries possess nuclear weapons and could conceivably use them under certain circumstances, but Hiroshima is part of history, something that cannot be undone. The impulse to lay blame or justify the bomb’s use cannot change what has already happened. It remains in memory as an epic tragedy.

But epic tragedies are stories, and stories are the most edifying tools we’ve got. That most people in the West were first made aware of the scope of the bombing with the publication of John Hersey’s book-long report in the New Yorker in 1946 counts as a significant part of the overall Hiroshima story. Hersey’s article did not explicitly contemplate the morality of the bomb or its role in ending the war, but conveyed its physical and psychological effects on six survivors. Readers had to decide for themselves the attendant morality based on what they knew about how the U.S. and Japan fought the Pacific War, and that knowledge may not have been extensive. The stories Hersey told after interviewing firsthand witnesses were harrowing and direct. He did not delve into the matter beyond what happened to the individuals he talked to and what they saw, but he made a huge difference by showing what the bomb did that made it unique as a weapon, and many readers were not only shocked by what he revealed but also disgusted by it, regardless of what it may or may not have accomplished with regard to Japan’s surrender.

M.G. Sheftall’s Hiroshima: The Last Witnesses doesn’t necessarily expand on Hersey’s report, and despite its subtitle, the book isn’t strictly an oral history, though much of the narrative portion is based on interviews with surviving hibakusha (persons exposed to the bomb). If anything, it’s an attempt to come to terms as thoroughly as possible with what actually happened on that day by extending the stories told by Sheftall’s interlocutors in both temporal directions and then adding relevant cultural and historical context. Sheftall, a longtime professor at Shizuoka University, keeps it all local. Except for the opening chapters, which describe in detail the execution of the bombing from the U.S. military’s standpoint, the nearly 500-page book is focused on the city of HIroshima, its residents, and, to a certain extent, Japan as a nation. In that regard, it’s almost a shame that the Nobel Peace Prize given last fall to the hibakusha organization Hidankyo wasn’t announced before the publication of the book, which mentions the group, and not just because the publisher could have used the PR to its advantage. The prize and its international press coverage provides meaning that gives the reader a wider understanding of the bombing’s, and thus the book’s, implications. 

Another distinction of the book is that it feels personal, which isn’t to say it’s about Sheftall himself, but rather that he elaborates on his interviews by explaining their provenance and setting, and then describes his own feelings as they relate to the stories and the attendant research. The narrative has a broader dramatic dimension because Sheftall, an American, has lived in Japan for almost 40 years and conveys the story as an outsider who has nevertheless invested a great deal of emotional capital in its social trappings.

Structurally, the book is a hodgepodge. Though there is an overall linearity, the author takes numerous detours to explain background issues, including theoretical quantum physics and the effects of radiation on human bodies and objects; the Japanese military bureaucracy during the war and its impact on the municipal life of Hiroshima; gender dynamics in mid-20th century Japan as a means of explaining outcomes for different female victims of the bomb; the spiritual-religious dynamic of Japan as it was related to authoritarian control of the citizenry and postwar attitudes surrounding remembrance of the bombing. The stories as told by the witnesses take up the same timeframe, and thus the horrors tend to be repeated—the blasted landscape, the countless corpses, the walking dead, the mass cremations, the search for loved ones. 

The most interesting parts of the book are those nearer to the end that confirm my assumption that postwar Japanese authorities have tried to control the discussion surrounding the bomb so as not to encourage public resentment against either the American military, which dropped it, or the wartime imperial Japanese government, which was also responsible for the death and destruction of the bomb because it continued to prosecute a war it could never win. The meaning of Hiroshima as contrived by the people currently in power in Japan is that those who died in the bombing were “sacrificed” in the name of world peace, and Sheftall endeavors to get to the heart of this matter. Moreover, he explains it without reducing the witnesses’ and other hibakushas’ feelings about it to platitudes. These are not easy concerns to address, and he honors the difficulties the survivors struggled with to come to terms with the national or, for that matter, international conversation about the bomb and the war in general. Perhaps the most affecting incident in the book, outside of explicit scenes of the immediate aftermath of the explosion, is a lecture that one witness gives about the bombing to students of a school in the Tokyo neighborhood where she lives. This witness had so far avoided talking about her experience and now, later in life, she decides to pass on that experience to a new generation, and the reaction, at least from one student (who, for whatever it’s worth, is described as being from an under-privileged household), is rage at the perfidy of the wartime Japanese government. It’s the kind of response you should probably expect, but for some reason it takes the witness, and the reader, by surprise, implying that Japanese people born after the war have not been sufficiently taught what happened. 

From my understanding, Sheftall is now working on a companion volume about the bombing of Nagasaki, which should be interesting not only for what it may say about the bombing itself, but for what it treats as related issues, though he is pretty complete in this book, including the role of the Catholic Church in Japan, which I imagine would be one of the distinguishing features of a book that takes place in Nakasaki, since that was where the Church gained a foothold in the country. I won’t venture to say that Hiroshima is the last word on the bombing—Kenzaburo Oe’s Hiroshima Notes is pretty essential—but it provides more than enough food for thought to anyone with even a passing interest in one of the most momentous events in human history.