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April 23 - April 29, 2025
the crucial meaning of the atomic bombings lies in the future, not the past. The future of our civilization hinges on what we decide to do now, based on what we know of the past.
By the time the sound of the explosion reached her son Nenkai two kilometers away, all the substance of Mrs. Aoyama, including blood-derived iron and calcium-enriched glass, would be ascending toward the stratosphere to become part of the strange radioactive thunderstorms that were to chase after Nenkai and the other survivors.
Its light blazed through the missing letters like paint sprayed through a stencil. It struck Arai’s face with the equivalent force of four or five full days under the August sun, stenciling the tender script of a child who was lost, permanently on her skin.15
Only the top of the monster seemed active, growing higher and wider. When this cloud falls to the earth, Yamaguchi told himself, every living thing will die.
Teeth were more resilient than bones, and at one intersection, where more than sixty individuals must have been standing fully exposed beneath the flash, the only evidence of their existence was a sidewalk strewn with teeth.
Something appeared to have erupted through the empty eye sockets. Brain matter had boiled, expanded, and oozed as the house burned. It seemed to Keiji that his father’s skull was weeping.
Death came to them within one two-hundredth of a second, and two-tenths of a second after that, all the soft tissues in their bodies became incandescent gas and soot. Vaporizing brain matter and blood tried to escape through the eyeless sockets of a woman’s skull as jets of black steam, but the sudden rise of pressure was so great that the skull exploded from the inside.
In the end, the same man who slept on the ground where his wife had been vaporized in Hiroshima, desiring only that her spirit would not feel abandoned, never lived more than half of a city block from the stone pinnacle where Setsuko’s parents had buried her bones.
How many cruel swords must have pierced the Holy mother’s heart all this time, Kayano wondered.
In years to come, Nakazawa would wonder if there existed a point during the feeding of poison from child to mother and from mother to infant, at which one more dose of radiation was reduced to mere redundancy. He supposed he might just as well ask how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.
In the playground, flower stalks had erupted between ribs and through the eyeless sockets of skulls—dozens and scores and hundreds of skulls. The majority of them were little; and Shoda guessed that all of the larger bones must have belonged to the teachers.
“You can say I didn’t know anything before Hiroshima about what that bomb would do. But what about three days later? I knew, then. I knew what would happen to the next city—which turned out to be Nagasaki. And yet I blessed the bomb. I blessed the crew. I blessed the instantaneous slaughter of seventy-three thousand people. God have mercy on me.”
His mother pried open the cover and found the food inside converted to black carbon, like her son’s flesh. Yet, like every fossil, the carbonized meal told a story. “Oh, Shigeru,” his mother cried out to history. “You died before you could even eat your lunch.”
Hypocenters could be covered up with gardens and memorial sculptures, but visitors to the rebuilt cities would never understand or even be aware that there existed a spiritual wreckage.
The history of civilization is written in humanity’s perversion of nature.
In 1945, the two hypocenters were merely the latest examples. Uranium-235 was, in all essentials, the still-active remnant of the supernovae that gave the solar system life. Thinking creatures sought it out, coaxed it to beget plutonium, named the newly born element after a Roman god of death, and taught a dead star how to scream out against humanity—twice.
If the gift is handled properly, Nagai tried to explain, each man is given the key to the universe—“a key that may one day throw open the doors to the planets, and the stars beyond.” And yet, somehow this same key had been fashioned in such a manner that it could also unlock the gates of hell.
“Indeed we did. We all let the words, ‘Who takes a knife will die by a knife,’ go through one ear and out the other. We took the greatest knowledge that science could provide and, lacking wisdom, we human beings busily made warships, torpedoes, and now atomic bombs. God did not twist and pervert nature’s gifts. We did.”
“If my life ended on August 6 and August 9, then whatever might come afterward, I should perhaps consider to be my second life?”
If there is another war, atomic bombs may explode everywhere and there will be no beautiful songs of distant Earth [from other planets]—no poems, no paintings, no music, no literature, no research. Only death.”
“After all, haven’t scientists and Buddhists, physicians and Christians been saying very much the same thing all along to those who had ears to listen? It’s just that, sometimes, we use different language. Different words.”And with such grace did Akizuki begin to live the rest of his life with one simple, Nyokodo-esque commandment: “Be kind.”
