By Meredith Warden
After the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6, 1945, and August 9, 1945, respectively, atomic bomb survivors, or hibakusha, almost immediately began writing down their experiences. While genbaku bungaku is an established genre in Japan that focuses on the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it is also “a literature of the nuclear age” in that its works speak to the specific experiences of Japanese hibakusha, to global hibakusha, and to what it means for all of humanity to live in an atomic age.[2] In this paper, I am looking at both prose and poetry within this genre, as well as other poetry in the anthology Atomic Ghost, which was created during and in the wake of global antinuclear protests.
While much has been written about atomic bomb literature, few have explicitly considered how this genre evokes a sense of uncanniness that unsettles linear temporalities around the atomic bomb and what it means to be a hibakusha. When one looks for it, this sense of nonlinear time and the “nuclear uncanny”—or “the material effects, psychic tension, and sensory confusion produced by nuclear weapons and radioactive material”—is everywhere within genbaku bungaku.[3]After all, these nonlinear framings of the atomic bombs make sense: the bombs unsettled familiar places and people, and, in doing so, often disrupted survivors’ perceptions of time. Much in the way other atrocities have muddled the chronology of witnesses, participants, and victims,[4] the experiences of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings thus provoked feelings of unease and the nuclear uncanny, or “psychic slippage,” that clouded the usually linear perception of time.[5] Indeed, some have even argued Hiroshima is “engaged by a ‘plastic structure of thought’…[and] ‘temporal plasticity,’ a time wholly without direction.”[6] By delving into the nuclear uncanniness and unease present in atomic bomb literature and poetry, this paper will explore how these unsettled temporalities reflect a unique chronology within atomic bomb literature that undermines more linear narratives of the atomic bomb. I will argue that genbaku bungaku and atomic bomb poetry frequently employ a concept of the nonlinear ‘nuclear uncanny’ to reflect a sense of unease before the atomic bombings, the unsettled and surreal moments during and directly after the bombings, and the present uncanniness of living after 1945 and in the atomic age. I will also situate this argument within contrasting dominant national narratives that frame the atomic bombs within linear timelines.
To understand nonlinear nuclear uncanniness within atomic bomb literature and poetry, we first need to consider how dominant national discourses often utilize linear, progress-centered narratives that either laud the bomb as a human feat of scientific achievement or portray the horrors of the bomb as only in the past and divorced from the present and future. In the U.S. the atomic bombings are commonly portrayed in a “triumphal” way that centers the supposed technological and scientific feat of developing and using the nuclear weapons.[7] In this viewpoint, the atomic bomb is the culmination of a linear increase in scientific innovation of weaponry, beginning in WWI but primarily focused on WWII’s increased “strategic bombing” of cities to win the ‘total war.’[8] Strategic bombing set a precedent that encouraged the linear narrative of scientific achievement during wartime, as “technological fanaticism” allowed both scientists and the government to view and frame the development of the atomic bomb as the culmination of scientific innovation related to air warfare.[9] Indeed, one Los Alamos scientist notes that “the machinery caught us in its trap,” and another indicates that many at LANL viewed the bomb as the linear continuation of strategic bombing: “From our point of view…the atomic bomb was not a discontinuity. We were just carrying on with more of the same…We had already destroyed sixty-six [cities], what’s two more?”[10] Various museums in the U.S. also uphold this dominant linear narrative of scientific achievement. The Smithsonian incident—in which the museum received backlash about including information on the “human consequences of the bomb” and instead decided to only include “the fuselage of the Enola Gay as the centerpiece of the exhibition”—shows how this museum chooses to uphold the heroic narrative that portrays the atomic bombs and related machinery as a pinnacle of linear scientific achievement.[11] Likewise, in emphasizing the scientific work done at Los Alamos National Laboratory and repeatedly noting that, today, “Los Alamos National Laboratory is one of the world’s largest multidisciplinary research institutions,” the Bradbury Science Museum centers the linear narrative of “scientific ingenuity of creating the first atomic bomb, the progress made in nuclear research, and the importance of securing and defending the nation.”[12] Thus, both contemporary narratives of the atomic bomb and historical memory narratives in the U.S. frequently frame the atomic bombs and the bombings themselves as the linear culmination of scientific innovation.
Although dominant narratives of the atomic bomb in Japan are quite different from the U.S.’s, common framings of Hiroshima still uphold a linear narrative that frames nuclear weapons as solely in the past and Hiroshima as a ‘bright, modern’ city. For example, the reconstruction of Hiroshima involved “the clearing away of physical reminders of the war and atomic destruction, and the redefining of memories through spatial and temporal containment.”[13] One instance of this ‘temporal containment’ is the preservation of the A-bomb Dome. Lisa Yoneyama asserts that this Dome is ‘artificially preserved’ in a state of ruin that situates the building in an “ahistorical and almost naturalized past”; that is, the Dome is contained within a static past, distanced from the present day.[14] When further contrasted with “its background scenery, a magnificently received urban space [that] assures people of today’s peaceful, prosperous, and clean world,” the Dome creates the sense that the atomic bombs and the horrors of August 6, 1945 are solely in the past, and that Hiroshima has successfully recovered from the atomic bombs in a linear movement from a “‘dark’ past” to a “bright and cheerful” present.[15] The A-bomb Dome thus exemplifies how one dominant Japanese narrative embraces a “temporal ideology” centering on an “obsession with the future, with moving forward” that reduces the “‘ghastliness of the atomic bomb’…to an object in need of being ‘recorded’” within a linear framework.[16] Thus, just as the U.S. has its own dominant linear narratives surrounding the atomic bombs, so too do dominant Japanese narratives of Hiroshima emphasize a linear chronology through situating sites like the A-bomb Dome in the past and juxtaposed against a ‘reborn’ city.
In contrast to both the linear narrative of the atomic bomb as the pinnacle of air warfare and scientific achievement and the linear narrative of Hiroshima as a ‘bright’ and modern city in which the threat of nuclear weapons is solely in the past, atomic bomb literature and poetry frequently embody ideas of the ‘nuclear uncanny’ that show how the nonlinear experiences of the atomic bomb and hibakusha experiences—and the experiences of others living in this atomic age—resonant in the past, present, and future. One example of genbaku bungaku that demonstrates the unease and felt nuclear uncanny before the U.S. dropped the atomic bomb is Hara Tamiki’s “Prelude to Annihilation.” The first sense the reader gets of this uneasiness is when Hara (writing in the third person with the designation “Shōzō”) describes visiting his wife’s grave in April—though “the peach trees were in full bloom and the willow leaves were glistening,” Shōzō felt that “something had slipped out of place; things were dreadfully out of joint” and wondered “will I still be alive when [the] new day dawns?”[17] Though these short lines are easy to overlook, they reflect the unease Hara felt in the months before the bomb—or, in another idea that perhaps speaks to the nonlinearity of memory and trauma surrounding hibakusha experiences, the sense of unease Hara remembers feeling months before the bomb. Another moment of beforehand unease comes when Shōzō dreams of being “violently thrown about in a storm and [feeling] himself falling,” and right after describes a bombing that day by saying that “no sooner had the radio reported one plane heading for Hamada…[then] it happened: a string of bombs came raining down on Kamiya-cho [part of Tokyo].”[18] The combination of the violent dream and the real-life bombing of Tokyo reflects both the foreshadowed violence of experiencing the atomic bomb and the current knowledge that other cities were being bombed. Indeed, this passage in particular speaks to “bukimi,” or the “ominous” and “uncanny” feelings many Hiroshima residents described experiencing in the time leading up to the bomb. Those experiencing bukimi had the “impression that their city had been in some way singled out for preservation or annihilation,” and these uneasy feelings of “uncanny frisson,” of simply not knowing what would happen, structured everyday life before the bomb.[19] Hiroshima residents—including Hara, as we see in “Prelude to Annihilation”—were haunted by the nonlinear nuclear uncanniness of bukimi, living within a “conditional space of catastrophe” in which it seemed their city could be preserved or destroyed at any moment in time.[20]
Similarly, Hara’s description of preparing for air bombing in “Prelude to Annihilation” also shows these bukimi-esque feelings of “anticipation” about potential bombings.[21] Hara hauntingly describes preparing for and fleeing from multiple possible bombings in the days before the actual attack:
When the preliminary alert sounded along the coast of Tosa, he would begin to get ready. When the air raid alarm sounded in Kōchi Prefecture and Elina Prefecture, it would be less than ten minutes before a preliminary alert sounded in Hiroshima Prefecture and Yamaguchi Prefecture…by the time the siren sounded for the preliminary alert, he would always be in the entryway with his shoes on.[22]
In describing numerous instances of Hara fleeing possible air attacks, this passage shows how “the horror of the event [the actual bombing] and the horror of the drill in preparation for it” are suspended in a nonlinear experience of routine.[23] Each time Hara flees, he does not actually know whether or not a bomb will drop, and this constant repetition and not knowing essentially collapses the multiple preparations for possible bombs and the actual bomb into one nearly indistinguishable terrible moment. Hara becomes “numb to the everyday threat”: asserting that “the terror had somehow become routine,” he demonstrates how the expectation of an attack and the everyday experience of fleeing from possible attacks creates both a sense of constant terror and a numbing to this terror, as it is simply “hideously prolonged expectation…[and] the advance symptom of a disaster still to come.”[24] In this mindset, Hara thus experiences the nonlinear nuclear uncanny, as “the real war [or bombing] and the rehearsal for war [or bombing] become psychologically indistinct”; that is, his sense of time shifts as multiple false alarms foreshadow yet also, in some ways, become indistinct from the soon-to-come actual bomb.[25]
While nuclear uncanniness before the bomb can be seen in expressions of bukimi, many pieces of genbaku bungaku and some atomic bomb poetry also express nuclear uncanniness during and directly after the atomic bombs’ explosions, specifically regarding comments about the surrealness of when the bomb hit, being ‘stuck in time,’ and everyday life made strange. As Hara relays in Summer Flowers, the moment the bomb hit was like “something out of the most horrible dream…as the situation around me, though still hazy, began to resolve itself, I soon felt as if I were standing on a stage that had been set for a tragedy. I had surely seen spectacles like this at the movies.”[26] These comments reflect the surreality of that singular moment when the bomb hit and the inability, at least at first, to process the realness of the situation. In describing his feeling that the explosion felt like a ‘dream’ or like a fictional tragic play or movie, Hara demonstrates the uncanniness of that moment in time and suggests that his perception of time, like one’s perception of time in a dream, was altered. Although written by an American non-hibakusha, “The Garden” also mirrors this sense of being stuck in time at the moment the bomb hit:
Imagine you happen to be standing/at the door when you look down, about/to grasp the knob, your fingers/curled toward it…Imagine it happens this quickly, before/you have time to think of anything else;/your kids, your own life, what this will mean…just beginning to twist [the door knob];/and when the window turns white/you are only about to touch it/preparing to open the door.[27]
In repeating the sensory action of being ‘about’ to turn the door knob when the flash occurs, “The Garden” evokes the surreal and uncanny feeling of being ‘stuck in time’ at the moment the bomb exploded—unable, in that split second, to consider what will occur, one’s life, or one’s family. Thus, similar to Hara’s descriptions of the bomb’s explosion as surreal and dreamlike, “The Garden” poem embodies a sense of warped time, of being stuck in a singular moment, that makes up part of the nuclear uncanny right when the atomic bombs exploded.
Moreover, both Hara and Ōta Yōko’s descriptions of familiar, everyday places and people made strange also reflect the nuclear uncanny directly after the bombs. Hara depicts the scene before him as “a new hell”:
everything human had been obliterated…the expressions on the faces of the corpses had been replaced by something..automaton-like…seeing the streetcars, overturned and burned apparently in an instant, and the horses with enormous swollen bellies, one might have thought one was in the world of surrealistic paintings.[28]
Here, Hara demonstrates how the physical place of Hiroshima, once so familiar to him, has suddenly been made so strange and uncanny that he compares the view to surrealistic paintings. In City of Corpses, Ōta also describes a familiar scene made strange, noting, “Each time I had gone to my friend Saeki Ayako’s house, I had been struck by the architectural beauty of the large temple [nearby]…But now it had burned down, and only the frame was left ash-colored and utterly caved in.”[29] Along with the rest of the passage, which continues to describe once-familiar scenes rendered almost unrecognizable, this statement demonstrates how Ōta’s view of bombed Hiroshima refracts her previous, familiar memories of pre-bombed Hiroshima, and thus alters her experience of time as she tries to make sense of the strange and uncanny scene before her. Hara and Ōta’s uncanny moments are indicative of what Avery F. Gordon calls “haunting,” or “those singular yet repetitive instances when home becomes unfamiliar, when your bearings on the world lose direction, when the over-and-done-with comes alive, when what’s been in your blind spot comes into view.”[30] These passages from Summer Flowers and City of Corpses suggest that Hara and Ōta felt this ‘haunting’ in these “encounter[s] in a disenchanted world between familiarity and strangeness,” as the surrealness and strangeness of the once-familiar scenes before them gave them intense feelings of uncanniness and altered “the experience of being in time.”[31]
Lastly, genbaku bungaku and atomic bomb poetry also express feelings of the nuclear uncanny in the atomic age—most notably, in expressions related to literal and metaphorical shadows and death—once more time has passed after the bombing. Tōge Sankichi’s two poems “Blind and “Eyes,” for example, vividly describe the shadows of people badly burned after the bombing: they are “log-like bodies, burned black, that tumble into the river/glimmering afterimages of life”; they are “Shapes I do not recognize…/in a lost world, a lost time/inside a dark storehouse,/a light neither night nor day falls through the twisted bars/of a window;/piled one atop the other—shapes that were once faces.”[32] We can see hints of ‘shadows’ as Tōge describes humans whom he can no longer recognize as such: the bodies are ‘afterimages of life’ and through the storehouse ‘a light neither night nor day’ falls. These shadows are both literal (the bodies are burned beyond recognition and, as such, almost look like human shadows) and metaphorical (after experiencing the bomb, these human beings are ‘shadows’ of who they once were). Tōge also connects this shadow motif with a stated feeling of being in ‘in a lost world, a lost time,’ indicating how the linearity of time became muddled as he struggled to make sense of people who have become ‘shadows.’ Thus, these poems reflect the nuclear uncanniness and unsettled linearity of seeing both real and metaphorical shadows of human beings in those who experienced the atomic bomb.
We can see more metaphorical shadows in “The Empty Can” and “Shades: The Post-Doomsday World.” For example, in “The Empty Can,” the auditorium of Hayashi’s old Nagasaki school is filled with place-based and temporal shadows. As they enter the room, Hayashi and her friends who had gone to school right after the bombing immediately remembered their atomic bomb-related memories of this space. Hayashi recalls a memorial for those in the school who had died from the atomic bomb: “as the name of each student was read, there was a stirring among the students who had survived…The parents were in tears before the memorial service began. The tears turned to sobs, and the sobs drifted steadily toward the center of the room where the students were sitting.”[33] In vividly describing this ceremony, Hayashi shows that the shadow of this event, and, by extension, the atomic bomb, cannot be divorced in her mind from the physical space of the present auditorium. The space is imbued with feelings of physical and temporal uncanniness as the past and present collapse within the auditorium—indeed, as Hayashi recalls the memorial, one can almost imagine the faint shadows of those at the ceremony, haunting the now-empty space. Similarly, Kurihara Sadako’s poem “Shades: The Post-Doomsday World” movingly demonstrates the haunted emotions of living in the atomic age: “The world sinks toward evening;/In the ashen sky/shades drift, drift in the wind,/Dawn, dawn;/It will not come again”; All creatures, “not to be born again,” instead “become mere shades/trembling like ribbons.” These lines reflect the complicated feelings of mourning, apathy, and past and future loss in the atomic age, as the shadows of those killed by nuclear weapons, and shadows of all those alive now, exist a world with an “ashen sky” in which “dawn, it will not come again.”[34] Thus, like “The Empty Can,” “Shades: The Post Doomsday World” demonstrates the uncanny and unsettled feelings of existing in a world in which literal and metaphorical shadows haunt memories and present existence in the atomic age.
Finally, the nuclear uncanniness of death clearly permeates atomic bomb poetry, for how does one write about surviving the bombs when “no one was meant to”?[35] For example, in describing himself and others by a Hiroshima riverbank as “living grave markers,” Tōge shows how he and those around him are ‘living on borrowed time’ (that is, they were not meant to survive) and are existing in an uncanny temporal space of living while dying from the atom bomb.[36] “The ‘Hibakusha’s’ Letter,” written in the first-person narrative of a hypothetical hibakusha woman, also shows how the knowledge that one could have died when the atomic bomb dropped disrupts the linearity of lives after 1945. Though one character in the poem states that “we can’t drag each corpse behind us/Like a shadow. The eye blinks, a world’s gone,” the fictional narrator is still haunted by surviving the bomb, stating that “my death flashed without, not within/I can’t come back.”[37] This line demonstrates how surviving the atomic bombs can haunt one even in the present—the narrator feels that she ‘can’t come back’ from that day, from feeling trapped in that moment of time. The poem “The radio talk…” also evokes the uncanniness of living in the atomic age, as the apocalyptic stanza “the radio talk this morning/was of obliterating the world” is juxtaposed with the second stanza reflecting quotidian, everyday life and the omen of death: “I notice fruit flies rise/from the rind/of the recommended/melon.”[38] Thus, while some atomic bomb poetry reflects hibakusha’s grappling with death and the uncanniness of continuing to live after 1945, other poetry considers what it means for all of us to live our everyday lives in the atomic age.
In contrast to the linear chronology prominent in both American and Japanese national narratives—which, respectively, emphasize scientific achievement in air warfare and a ‘bright’ present divorced from the bomb—genbaku bungaku and atomic bomb poetry show that, for many hibakusha and even those just living in the atomic age, “trauma is not simply absorbed into the flow of history; it recurs, it troubles the very notion of chronology” and linear time.[39] By emphasizing the ‘nuclear uncanny’ in moments of unease before the bombs, during and directly after the bombs, and in present time, this literature and poetry speak not only to personal experiences of hibakusha and others in the atomic age, but also suggest the importance of situating efforts for nuclear abolition within a context of the nuclear uncanny and an understanding that “time ever since [the bombings has been] ‘out of joint.’”[40] If we do not understand how personal uncanny, nonlinear experiences of the bomb reflect how atomic weapons unsettle linear notions of time, we will not be able to envision a present and future without nuclear weapons.
[1] Joseph Masco, Nuclear Borderlands (Princeton University Press, 2013),29. www.fulcrum.org/concern/monographs/mp48sf404. Accessed 29 Aug. 2021.
[2] John Whitter Treat, Writing Ground Zero (The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 3.
[3] Masco, 29.
[4] A famous example is Kurt Vonnegut’s semi-autobiographical postwar fiction novel Slaughterhouse Five, in which Billy Pilgrim experiences being “unstuck in time” (Vonnegut, 29).
[5] Freud, qtd. in Masco, 30.
[6] Michael J. Shapiro, “Hiroshima Temporalities,” Thesis Eleven 129, no. 1 (Aug. 2015): 42-43. journals.ohiolink.edu/apexprod/f?p=1507:200::::200:P200_ARTICLEID:327769891. Accessed 29 Aug. 2021.
[7] John W. Dower, “Triumphal and Tragic Narratives of the War in Asia,” The Journal of American History 82, no. 3 (Dec. 1995): 1125.
[8] “Strategic Bombing and the Manhattan Project” Lecture, 23 Jun. 2021.
[9] Mark Selden, “The Logic of Mass Destruction,” in Hiroshima’s Shadow, ed. Kai Bird and Lawrence Lifschultz (The Pamphleteer’s Press, 1 May 1998): 58.
[10] Jon Else, The Day After Trinity, directed by Jon Else (1980; KTEH Public Television), documentary film; Philip Morrison, qtd. in Treat, 13.
[11] Dower, 1125.
[12] Bradbury Science Museum, “Welcome to the Bradbury Science Museum,” Triad National Security, n.d. /www.lanl.gov/museum/exhibitions/lobby/index.php. Accessed 29 Aug. 2021; Alison Fields, “Narratives of Peace and Progress: Atomic Museums in Japan and New Mexico.” American Studies 54, no. 1 (2015): 61. muse.jhu.edu/article/580427. Accessed 29 Aug. 2021.
[13] Lisa Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces (University of California Press, 1999), 66.
[14] Ibid., 70, 71.
[15] Ibid., 72, 65, 51.
[16] Ibid., 75.
[17] Tamiki Hara,“Prelude to Annihilation,” Summer Flowers, 1947, in Hiroshima: Three Witnesses, ed. and trans. Richard H. Minear (Princeton University Press, 1990), 89.
[18] Ibid., 92.
[19] Paul Saint-Amour, “Bombing and the Symptom,” Diacritics 30, no. 4 (Winter, 2000): 61. ezproxy.oberlin.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/bombing-symptom-traumatic-earliness-nuclear/docview/746427840/se-2?accountid=12933. Accessed 29 Aug. 2021.
[20] Ibid., 60.
[21] Paul Saint-Amour, “Air War Prophecy,” Comparative Literature Studies 42, no. 2 (2005): 131. www.jstor.org/stable/40247473. Accessed 29 Aug. 2021.
[22] Hara, “Prelude to Annihilation,” 106.
[23] Saint-Amour, “Air War Prophecy,” 131.
[24] Masco, 33; Hara, “Prelude to Annihilation,” 107; Saint-Amour, “Air War Prophecy,” 140.
[25] Saint-Amour, “Air War Prophecy,” 131.
[26] Tamiki Hara, Summer Flowers, 1947, in Minear, Hiroshima: Three Witnesses, 46.
[27] Dorianne Laux, “The Garden,” in Atomic Ghost, ed. John Bradley (Coffee House Press, 1995), 143-144.
[28] Hara, Summer Flowers, 57-58.
[29] Ōta Yōko, City of Corpses, 1950, in Minear, Hiroshima: Three Witnesses, 204.
[30] Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters (University of Minnesota Press, 2008), xvi. ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/oberlin/reader.action?docID=346045&ppg=223. Accessed 29 Aug. 2021.
[31] Ibid., 55, xvi.
[32] Sankichi Tōge, “Blind,” in Minear, Hiroshima: Three Witnesses, 314; Sankichi Tōge, “Eyes,” in Minear, Hiroshima: Three Witnesses, 317.
[33] Ibid., 131.
[34] Sadako Kurihara, “Shades: The Post Doomsday World,” in Black Eggs, Poems by Kurihara Sadako, ed. and trans. Richard H. Minear (University of Michigan Press, 1994), 309. www.jstor.org/stable/10.3998/mpub.18511. Accessed 29 Aug. 2021.
[35] Treat, 16.
[36] Sankichi Tōge, “Landscape with River,” in Minear, Hiroshima: Three Witnesses, 343.
[37] David Mura, “The ‘Hibakusha’s’ Letter,” in Bradley, 41.
[38] Lorine Niedecker, “‘The radio talk…’” in Bradley, 72.
[39] Kyo Maclear, Beclouded Visions (State University of New York Press, 1999), 26.
[40] Ibid., 4.
Works Cited
Bradbury Science Museum. “Welcome to the Bradbury Science Museum.” Triad National Security, n.d. /www.lanl.gov/museum/exhibitions/lobby/index.php. Accessed 29 Aug. 2021.
Dower, John W. “Triumphal and Tragic Narratives of the War in Asia.” The Journal of American History 82, no. 3 (Dec. 1995): 1124-1135.
Else, Jon, director. The Day After Trinity. 1980, KTEH Public Television. Documentary film.
Fields, Alison. “Narratives of Peace and Progress: Atomic Museums in Japan and New Mexico.” American Studies 54, no. 1 (2015): 53-66. muse.jhu.edu/article/580427. Accessed 29 Aug. 2021.
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Kurihara, Sadako. “Shades: The Post Doomsday World.” In Black Eggs, Poems by Kurihara Sadako, edited and translated by Richard H. Minear, 309. University of Michigan Press, 1994.
Laux, Dorianne. “The Garden.” In Atomic Ghost, ed. John Bradley, 143-144. Coffee House Press, 1995.
Maclear, Kyo. Beclouded Visions. State University of New York Press, 1999.
Masco, Joseph. Nuclear Borderlands. Princeton University Press, 2013. www.fulcrum.org/concern/monographs/mp48sf404. Accessed 29 Aug. 2021.
Mura, David. “The ‘Hibakusha’s’ Letter.” In Atomic Ghost, ed. John Bradley, 40-42. Coffee House Press, 1995.
Niedecker, Lorine. “‘The radio talk…’” In Atomic Ghost, ed. John Bradley, 72. Coffee House Press, 1995.
Saint-Amour, Paul. “Air War Prophecy.” Comparative Literature Studies 42, no. 2 (2005): 130-161. www.jstor.org/stable/40247473. Accessed 29 Aug. 2021.
Saint-Amour, Paul. “Bombing and the Symptom.” Diacritics 30, no. 4 (Winter, 2000): 59-82. ezproxy.oberlin.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/bombing-symptom-traumatic-earliness-nuclear/docview/746427840/se-2?accountid=12933. Accessed 29 Aug. 2021.
Selden, Mark. “The Logic of Mass Destruction.” In Hiroshima’s Shadow, ed. Kai Bird and Lawrence Lifschultz, 51-62. The Pamphleteer’s Press, 1 May 1998.
Shapiro, Michael J. “Hiroshima Temporalities.” Thesis Eleven 129, no. 1 (Aug. 2015): 40-56. journals.ohiolink.edu/apexprod/f?p=1507:200::::200:P200_ARTICLEID:327769891. Accessed 29 Aug. 2021.
“Strategic Bombing and the Manhattan Project” Lecture, 23 Jun. 2021.
Tōge, Sankichi. “Blind.” In Hiroshima: Three Witnesses, edited and translated by Richard H. Minear, 313-314. Princeton University Press, 1990.
Tōge, Sankichi. “Eyes.” In Hiroshima: Three Witnesses, edited and translated by Richard H. Minear, 317-318. Princeton University Press, 1990.
Tōge, Sankichi. “Landscape with River.” In Hiroshima: Three Witnesses, edited and translated by Richard H. Minear, 343. Princeton University Press, 1990.
Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughter-House Five. Dial Press Trade, Paperback Edition, 2009.
Whittier, John Treat. Writing Ground Zero. The University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Yōko, Ōta. City of Corpses, 1950. In Hiroshima: Three Witnesses, edited and translated by Richard H. Minear, 147-273. Princeton University Press, 1990.
Yoneyama, Lisa. Hiroshima Traces. University of California Press, 1999.
On Second Thought 