ON NAGASAKI

In 1986, I had the extraordinary opportunity to serve as an interpreter for Taniguchi Sumiteru, a fifty-seven-year-old survivor of the Nagasaki atomic bombing, who was on a speaking tour in Washington, D.C. In 1945, sixteen-year-old Taniguchi was delivering mail on his bicycle when the atomic bomb detonated just over a mile away, releasing unrivaled explosive force, unbearable heat, and fatally toxic radiation. In a split second, Taniguchi was hurled into the air and slapped face down against the pavement. Down one arm and from neck to buttocks where his back would be, his skin and flesh were burned off, leaving only scorched muscle and tissue.

When I met Taniguchi forty-one years later, I was spellbound by his story of survival. I longed to better understand the mass destruction of his city and what it took for Taniguchi to live day by day in the face of extreme pain and a personal history split in half by an atomic explosion. Many questions crowded my thoughts: How many hibakusha ("bomb-affected people") still lived in Nagasaki? What were their injuries – both physical and psychological – and what did survival look like in the days, months, and years that followed the attack? Why do most Americans know little or nothing about the survivors' experiences at the time of the bomb and in the years since 1945? And how could it be that even I – who had been educated in top public high schools and universities across the country and who had lived in Japan – had no specific knowledge about survivors of the atomic bombs?

These questions haunted me for years. In my initial search for information, I was shocked to find that no book has offered personal accounts of the long-term impact of the atomic bomb on those who survived. I also found that the United States government made concerted efforts to censor and distort information about what happened beneath the atomic clouds, which has severely limited the American public's ability to understand the true effects of the bombs.

Nagasaki is the culmination of seven years of work, traveling to Nagasaki to talk with survivors and atomic bomb specialists, conducting research here in the U.S., translating my interviews as well as survivor essays and medical records, and writing their stories. It is my hope that readers will come to know these five survivors not only as victims of a nuclear war, but also as engaging, funny, unique individuals whose survival can help us understand where we are as a people, and how we choose to proceed in the twenty-first century.