Surviving Nagasaki: history, memory, and nuclear devastation.

• Author: Gregory, Anthony
• Position: 'Nagasaki: Life after Nuclear War' - Book review

Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War, by Susan Southard, Viking, 416 pages, $28.95

WHEN THE U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki at the end of the Second World War, Yoshida Katsuji was horrifically injured. "Like everyone else in Nagasaki that day," Susan Southard writes, his "immediate survival and degree of injury from burns and radiation depended entirely on his exact location," the direction he faced, his clothing, and which buildings and natural structures stood between him and the blast. Half a mile away from the explosion, Yoshida saw the skin from his arm "peeled off and was hanging down from his fingertips." "Blood was pouring out of my flesh," he recalls.

Do-oh Mineko's story is even more gruesome. The "whole left side of her body was badly burned, a bone was sticking out of her right arm at the elbow, hundreds of glass splinters had penetrated most of her body, and blood was streaming down her neck," Southard reports. There was a "wide and deep horizontal gash stretching from one ear to the other, filled with shards of glass and wood. " By candle-light and without anesthesia, a doctor removed hundreds of glass shards and splinters from her body and head as she screamed all night, praying to die.

The immediate aftermath of days and weeks did not bring an end to the pain and suffering. A decade after the war, Southard notes, survivors still suffered "blood, cardiovascular, liver, and endocrinological disorders, low blood cell counts, severe anemia, thyroid disorders, internal organ damage, cataracts, and premature aging." They were routinely rejected as suitors for marriage. They faced an extreme and often unobtainable burden of proof to secure access to the health examinations provided to survivors under the 1957 Atomic Bomb Victims Medical Care Law. Yoshida's children endured the shameful predicament of telling their friends what had happened to their father's face.

Even the nearly instantaneous destruction of hundreds of thousands of lives can become somewhat lost in a war where 60 million people, mostly civilians, died. In Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War, Southard, who holds a degree in creative nonfiction, focuses on five survivors, tracking their post-bomb lives and consulting hundreds of other primary and secondary sources.

In addition to Yoshida and Do-oh, Southard describes the fates of Nagano Etsuko, Taniguchi Sumiteru, and Wada Koichi, "among the select few who keep the public memory of the atomic bomb alive." These...