Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War
By: Susan Southard / Narrated By: Traci Kato-Kiriyama
Length: 12 hrs and 16 mins
75 years later, and I’m devastated, and I’m a tad confused (I do admit it…!)
This review, Nagasaki by Susan Southard, will be featured in our weekly Sunday newsletter, coming out Aug. 9, the 75th anniversary of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki, Japan. It’s a devastating listen, very graphic, and it totally gives faces, voices, to the hapless victims on the ground. We’ve pretty much forgotten about this portion of our world history, and if we do remember it, it’s Hiroshima that gets the attention with Nagasaki being a “Huh?”.
First of all, lemme just say that I was brought up with the knowledge that there was much suffering and death during WWII, and by college, it was added: The US has been the only country vile enough to use such horrific weaponry, and on citizens/non-combatants. So, my younger years were of: Booo, hiss, bad US, BAD!
Then I turned into a bit of a history buff, and I reeeeally saw what was going on with Japan at the time, in China, the Philippines, the Pacific, how they treated POWs, how they themselves treated non-combatants; heck! how they treated their own citizens. Therefore, I’m totally going to go against what another and far more illustrious than I reviewer said in that this book was: A damning indictment. Nooooo; there was a reason the bomb was used.
You’ll find this audiobook to be firmly on the side of: There were other measures that could’ve been taken, the wooooooording in ultimatums was unclear, and that’s why Japan kept saying they would NOT, under ANY reason, surrender. Southard makes the case that the bombs were unnecessary, and she hints that the US was pretty much going to drop the danged thing no matter what (And what I’ve read/listened to about Truman, she has a point). But I’ve gotta tell ya, Japan sure made the case for the US pretty atrociously cut and dried. That nowhere was it said that an atomic bomb(s) would be used, that it took investigators a few days to get to Hiroshima, does NOT mean that Japan was anywhere neeeeear capitulation. I’ve just listened to 140 Days to Hiroshima (Didn’t make the cut for reviews this year, and was verrrrrry Pro-Bomb), and previously I’ve listened twice to The Rising Sun, a more nuanced 41+ hours of listening, and it’s PAINfully clear that the Japan of yesteryear, the BRUTally rightist Nationalist mentality, was going to take as many Americans down with them as they could. Plus, they’d be having their citizens fight to the death… or commit suicide/seppuku which is nice, really nice…
So that’s where I am on the issue, but this audiobook also makes it horribly clear just how atrocious nuclear war is. It follows the lives of five young people, each affected gruesomely by the blast, how they survived, how they suffered their grievous injuries, maiming which took yeeeears to kinda sorta just barely heal, how they battled illnesses and radiation sickness through the years that followed, and how they each came to become activists against the use and proliferation of nuclear weapons.
Ya gotta wonder how complicit citizenry is in their government’s decisions. Are we, as citizens under George W. Bush, complicit in invading a country that had no WMD? I dunno I dunno. Nagasaki shows that noooooo, please DON’T subject citizens, especially children, to the same kind of martial horror our soldiers endure. This is a very brutal listen, and you’ll hear about incinerated children, flesh melting from the bombs of those still breathing and crawling.
It’s a horror show, and I rather started crying when one young man, FINALLY out of the hospital, walks through a park, silently choking back tears as the young (NOT) disfigured mothers gasp and turn away in revulsion at the sight of his “healed” melted face, as their children openly gawk at him. He was just a kid when it happened, and just a young man when ostracized by the remnants of his maiming.
Fortunately, the book is also about an AWEsome resilience of spirit as each of the young people, and I’m a trifle saddened that I don’t have a print copy, so I can’t give you names, learn to cope, even as they tuck sorrow and guilt close within their hearts, and become voices for our present and future generations. There’s one young woman who, war be damned: All she wants in her life is good fashion! who says she survived it all to Live. She is sooooo determined, soooooo spunky, and yeh yeh yeh maybe the smoking didn’t help all the cancer, but as an elderly woman could she still enjoy a beer, enjoy Life, or what?!?
Traci Kato-Kiriyama narrates this really quite well; I’m only surprised cuz she’s a new narrator to me. She carries off each individual from their lives as young people prior to the bomb, their struggles after, and then she voices their more mature and determined tones as they’re older, spreading the Anti-Nuclear message. Well done, Ms. Kato-Kiriyama—you made me wince, and you made me cry… so… >sniffle<
Make sure you listen to the short interview with author Susan Southard at the end as it’s enlightening, and it’s more the message of hope for a better world. I got on a bit of a soap box at the beginning of my review, but that only cuz if there’s a FRAUGHT era in world history, with damning occurrences, questionable actions, WWII was IT.
All I mean is: If you want the human cost of atomic war? Give Nagasaki (And Hiroshima Diary) a listen. Feel for the victims, cry for them because it was horrific.
It’s just that, it didn’t have to happen, and Japan is an Ally now. I kept thinking of Mrs. Rossi’s Dream as I listened to this audiobook. We are at our best when we come together, suffering, doubtful, vulnerable. And then, if we can see our own humanity in each other’s eyes?
We become friends…
As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.