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About the Book

On an early midsummer morning, from a clear, pure blue sky, a single bomb was dropped.

In an instant, the town was transformed into a sea of fire, and lost everything.

After the War, as the leading Peace Memorial City, Hiroshima has arranged for some bomb survivors to become storytellers, and their tragic experiences have been delivered to people around the world. However, many other survivors like my grandmother, who is now over 90 years old, have mostly not talked about their own experience of the bombing or the struggles that they had to face after the war with their families.

It seems she used to have many more scars apart from the large scar on her left leg. But now, they seem to have become indistinguishable from her wrinkles. As long as one doesn’t see her left leg, perhaps no one would even know that she is a hibakusha, a survivor of that bombing.

And despite being told many times over that the inheritance of A-bomb-related illnesses cannot be medically proven, we descendants of the hibakusha still feel trapped by an obscure unease. All of those are the memories of Hiroshima, and so are the histories of our families and my grandmother, all of which must be recorded to tell all nations about the horrors of nuclear weapons.

Suppressing the pain and anguish that comes with recollecting those memories, my grandmother talked about those memories for me and for future generations. With all my love and respect for her, I will bequeath this book to the generations who are yet to come. Lest we forget the wounds borne and the pain in the hearts that hibakusha have endured.

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