Ground Zero and Other Stories
(Bakushin)

ENGLISH / Paul Warham

GERMAN / Nora Bierich

TURKISH / Devrim Çetin Güven

Bungei Shunju (2006)

On the 9th of August 1945, during the Pacific War, the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. Using those people who have lived around the bombsite as leading characters, the short stories contained in this book portray their horrific experiences of the A-bomb attack and the days afterwards. Who am"I" and where have "I" come from? "I" is the narrator of the story, "Tori (Birds)." He doesn't know his parents. There are columns in his family register, which are supposed to be filled by the names of his parents, but they are both blank, so his birthday too is unknown and is set as August 9, the very day when A-bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. He was just a baby when he was found crying in the rubble near ground zero. "I" was picked up by a woman, his foster mother, who fled from the site as fast as she could with "I" in her arms. He grew up, got a job, got married, had children and grandchildren, and celebrated his sixtieth birthday. Even so, he still asks himself who he is over and over again. There were babies among those 74,000 who lost their lives because of the A-bomb attack, so he wonders if he might have been recorded as one of the deceased babies. "So when I think about the list of the deceased, I feel as if I were a phantom of someone who was included in the list at that time. This makes me feel that the whole 60 years of my life might have been just faint dreams and phantasms as well." In this story, "Tori (Birds)," this man in his sixties reflects upon his life and the remaining life that is much shorter than that he has already lived.

The author spends the least number of scenes on the devastation caused by the atomic bomb in 1945, but, since he is based in current Nagasaki, the land that has the memory of the A-bomb attack and is marked with a long history of Catholicism, he raises questions about the serious issue of the A-bomb attack once again.