☰The Bells of Nagasaki

Dr Nagai was a Catholic radiologist already dying of leukaemia caused by his medical work when the bomb fell on Urakami in 1945, killing his wife. He survived the immediate blast and spent the next six years treating victims, writing, and gradually dying himself in his two-tatami hut. The Bells of Nagasaki is his account of the days after the bombing — practical, unsentimental, deeply spiritual. The book was a phenomenon in postwar Japan and helped form the way the country remembered Nagasaki. The hut he wrote it in still stands in the Urakami valley.