Atomic bomb literature


Atomic bomb literature is a literary genre in Japanese literature which comprises writings about the Hiroshima and Nagasaki">Hiroshima (book)">Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Definition

The term "atomic bomb literature" came into wide use in the 1960s.
Writings affiliated with the genre can include diaries, testimonial or documentary accounts, and fictional works like poetry, dramas, prose writings or manga about the bombings and their aftermath.
There are broadly three generations of atomic bomb writers. The first, made up of actual survivors of the bombings, who wrote of their own experiences, includes Yōko Ōta, Tamiki Hara, Shinoe Shōda, and Sankichi Tōge. The second, who wrote about the bomb addressing both individual and broader social and political issues it raises, includes Yoshie Hotta, Momo Iida, Kenzaburō Ōe, Masuji Ibuse, Ineko Sata and the early Mitsuharu Inoue. The third, whose writing looks into the past and the future in a post-nuclear world, includes Kōbō Abe, Makoto Oda, and the latter Inoue.
Yōko Ōta's short story was published on 30 August 1945 in The ''Asahi Shimbun, making it the first published literary text on the atomic bomb. The following month, by directive of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, the censorship of topics like the atomic bomb in the media came into operation, with the effect that books dealing with this topic, like a poetry collection of Sadako Kurihara or Yōko Ōta's novel City of Corpses, initially appeared only in abridged form.
In 1983, Holp Shuppan published the 15-volume, which contained fictional and nonfictional writings by the most prominent exponents of the genre.
Essays on the Red Circle Authors website also included works by non-Japanese authors in the atomic bomb literature cycle, like John Hersey's Hiroshima, which was originally published in The New Yorker in 1946. Still, anthologies like Nihon no Genbaku Bungaku or The Crazy Iris and Other Stories of the Atomic Aftermath'' are confined solely to Japanese writers.

Selected works