In August 6, he beseeches his compatriots to remember by opening with the most striking image: The flash that became the mental imprint of a nation’s collective trauma. Many of the hibakusha (A-bomb survivors) described a “blinding light” before the explosion. The flash illuminates the abject horrors Toge goes on to describe in searing detail. At the same time, it burnt a long shadow on readers across generations. When Hiroshima native Iri Maruki and his wife Toshi published a picture book for children of the post-atomic age in 1950, the couple gave it the title, Pikadon, a compound word made up of onomatopoeias of a brilliant flash of light (pika) and a thunderous bang (don). In Kamila Shamsie’s 2009 novel Burnt Shadows, the pikadon of the Nagasaki explosion burns the birds from the protagonist Hiroko’s silk kimono into her back.

“suddenly 30,000 in the streets disappeared

in the crushed depths of darkness

the shrieks of 50,000 died out”

Neither the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki nor the aftermath is depicted in Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s explosive saga about the father of the atomic weapon. Many critics have described this omission from a retelling of one of human history’s darkest chapters as a shocking erasure. But what the criticism fails to grasp is the omission is very much a deliberate choice. J Robert Oppenheimer and his team of scientists were so hamstrung by insularity that they never truly considered what their invention could end up unleashing. During the Trinity test (as depicted in the film), one scientist readies himself by pulling up a lounge chair, slathering sunscreen all over his face, and donning shades to shield his eyes, as if he were at a beach resort. Another sits in his car, as if he’s at a drive-in theatre. Therein lies the horror.

Unflinching belief in the American cause and equating it with the greater good had helped justify, in their own heads, the military necessity of dropping the A-bomb on Japan. Oppenheimer immerses us in the fractured psyche of one man and one man alone whose complicity and legacy got tangled up in his own ambivalence. That’s about the scope of Nolan’s film. For the epilogue and a comprehensive audit of the devastation, there are Japanese poems, short stories, novels, diaries, manga, anime and films — all waiting to be explored. Put together, they make up a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary, multigenerational body of creative responses.

“when the swirling yellow smoke thinned

buildings split, bridges collapsed

packed trains rested singed

and a shoreless accumulation of rubble and embers”

By the 1950s, writings about the atomic bombings had started to congeal into a genre, referred to as genbaku bungaku. Through these writings, those who survived tried to keep alive all the terrible facts: The unknown ordeals of radiation sickness, the gnawing ghost of survivor’s guilt, the bomb’s destabilising influence on the country’s social fabric, and the stigma surrounding the hibakusha community. Articulating their nightmare through words, therefore, was as much an act of strength as an exercise in remembering. For how does one express horrors beyond words? How does one make sense of a catastrophe that destroys all meaning? Writers like Sankichi Toge, Tamiki Hara, Yoko Ota, Sadako Kurihara and Takashi Nagai had witnessed the unspeakable horrors first-hand. Instead of merely recounting what had transpired, they used the deep rifts as outlets to reclaim meaning from a world that had been knocked off balance by an event without precedent.

“before long, a line of naked bodies walking in groups, crying

with skin hanging down like rags

hands on chests

stamping on crumbled brain matter

burnt clothing covering hips”

First-generation writers drew on eyewitness accounts to paint a full picture of a post-atomic world, thereby giving a voice to those who had been reduced to statistics. But it didn’t happen right away or easily. After the atomic bombings, Japan was occupied by the Americans who enforced a culture of censorship. News publications that criticised the bombings or democracy (as Americans practised it) risked suspension. Hara had finished writing Summer Flowers by the end of 1945 but couldn’t find a home for it till 1947. The piece eventually ended up in a little-known journal that had escaped the eyes of the censors. A majority of the creative writings didn’t see the light of day until the American occupation ended in 1952

One of the earliest literary records, in fact, emerged across the North Pacific. On assignment for The New Yorker, American war correspondent John Hersey had been commissioned to build an on-the-ground report of post-war Japan. Once he arrived in Hiroshima, he however shifted his focus to gathering testimonies of survivors on the day of the explosion. The resulting 31,000-word article occupied an entire issue of the magazine in a historic first. Titled Hiroshima, it told the story of a ravaged landscape and a haunted populace through the eyes of a widowed seamstress, a secretary, a Japanese reverend, a German Jesuit priest and two doctors. Hersey’s prose was spare but evocative. “(The survivors) still wonder why they lived when so many others died,” he wrote. “Each of them counts many small items of chance or volition – a step taken in time, a decision to go indoors, catching one streetcar instead of the next – that spared him. And now each knows that in the act of survival he lived a dozen lives and saw more death than he ever thought he would see. At the time, none of them knew anything.”

For Japanese writings on the subject, Hara’s short stories serve as an ideal gateway. Starting with Summer Flowers and ending with The Land of My Heart’s Desire, he recounted his personal experiences as a survivor, while grappling with the loss of his wife a year before the bomb and the lasting effects of nuclear trauma on his state of mind. Hara died by suicide in 1951 when the Korean War had renewed the threat of the A-bomb. Two years later, Toge died from radiation-related complications. Throughout his anthology Genbaku Shishu (Poems of the Atomic Bomb), Toge urged for peace and called for an end to nuclear warfare so we may never have a repeat of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The graphic images he evoked in his poems doubled as rallying cries for disarmament.

“corpses lie on the parade ground like stone images of Jizo, dispersed in all

directions

on the banks of the river, lying one on top of another, a group that had crawled to

a tethered raft”

As wounds became scars, the second generation of writers reflected on how Japan and its people had begun to adapt to fresh political and social contexts in a changing world. Masuji Ibuse’s historical novel Black Rain was a characteristic work that captured this transition. The title refers to the inky drops of radioactive fallout from the Hiroshima bombing to which the young woman of the story may or may not have been exposed. Nonetheless, the sheer possibility of being exposed derails her guardians’ attempts to find her a match. Fears of children inheriting genetic defects or illnesses meant women faced more stigma than men. The trauma of the bombing may have echoed throughout Japan. But it was the hibakusha who were affected most by its reverberations. Ibuse incorporated notes and diaries of survivors into a matter-of-fact account of the daily lives of a family who were both a victim of the A-bomb and the culture of discrimination the A-bomb aggravated in Japan.

24years after its publication, Black Rain was adapted into a feature by Imamura Shohei. The opening sequence of the 1989 film puts us right at the epicentre of the Hiroshima bombing, conjuring the carnage and chaos it had left, as Toge had done in August 6. We see commuters in a bus blown to smithereens, whole neighbourhoods engulfed in raging hellfire, shocked residents stepping over incinerated bodies, a mother holding a dead baby to her breast, a man recoiling in horror at the sight of a disfigured child crying for help, and the ominous canopy of the mushroom cloud shadow the scorched earth below.

“also gradually transformed into corpses beneath the sun’s scorching rays

in the light of the flames that pierced the evening sky”

the place where mother and younger brother were pinned under alive

also was engulfed in flames”

On-screen depictions of the bombings were seldom so shocking. The film studio Toho, for example, conceived of giant monsters known as kaiju as metaphors. Ishiro Honda’s Gojira (Godzilla in English) was the A-list star of an entire roster of hulking leviathans that embodied the lingering threat of nuclear warfare. But perhaps the most shocking depiction appeared in the 1983 animated film, Barefoot Gen. Nakazawa Keiji was all but six and on his way to school when the bomb was detonated on Hiroshima. On becoming a manga artist, Nakazawa drew from his own experiences as a young boy growing up in the city.

August 6 begins like any other day: Nakazawa’s stand-in Gen heads to school; his mother hangs clothes on the balcony; his siblings and father watch ants streaming in lines into their home; locals commute by the tram line. Out of nowhere, Gen spots an American B-29 in the sky and wonders why the air-raid siren isn’t being sounded. The clock strikes 8:15. In the brief moment he bends down to pick up a rock from the ground, the flash arrives, sucking out all the colour from each succeeding image. The camera zooms in on a little girl whose red balloon pops, clothes, hair and skin vaporise, eyes jut out of their sockets, and body withers to a purple husk. A postman, an elderly man, a mother with a baby on her back, and a stray dog — all suffer the same fate. Gen is knocked unconscious but survives. When he pulls himself out of the rubble, he finds where his home town once stood is now a grey wasteland. Corpses lie everywhere. Burnt and melting survivors walk by in a ghoulish daze. A horse on fire gallops in a panic. When Gen runs to look for his family, he realises his nightmare has only just begun. Nakazawa furnishes a cross-sectional survey of a post-war landscape, with a community coming together to rebuild and also those attempting to profit from the tragedy.

“when the morning sun shone on a group of high-school girls

who had fled and were lying

on the floor of the armoury, in excrement

their bellies swollen, one eye crushed, half their bodies raw flesh with skin ripped

off, hairless, impossible to tell who was who

all had stopped moving

in a stagnant, offensive smell

the only sound the wings of flies buzzing around metal basins”

Akiyuki Nosaka based his short story Grave of the Fireflies on his wartime experiences as a 14-year-old who lived through the Kobe bombings. Turned into a landmark animated feature by Takahata Isao for Studio Ghibli, the story follows two orphaned siblings trying to scrape by amidst food shortages in the last days of World War II. The trauma of war, the fear of nuclear apocalypse, and the figure of a child left without one or both parents reappear as motifs across so much of Japanese media, from Akira to Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind to Neon Genesis Evangelion, even if they were not explicitly about the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.

Often dubbed “the Father of Manga”, Osamu Tezuka created the popular series Mighty Atom, known outside of Japan as Astro Boy. Tezuka imagined an android with the heart of a child and the power of an atomic reactor. Astro Boy channels the creative power of an atom — the building block of all matter in the universe — as opposed to the destructive power it also held within. A nuclear-powered child saving the world thus became a mechanism to exorcise the ghosts of the past.

“can we forget that silence?

in that stillness

the powerful appeal

of the white eye sockets of the wives and children who did not return home

that tore apart our hearts”

Ideas of silence and stillness repeat as refrains in many stories, real or fictional. Hara, who had survived the Hiroshima bombing only because he was in the toilet, speaks of a “strange silence” while recounting the last memory of his destroyed home in Summer Flowers. Hersey’s Hiroshima catalogues a “macabre traffic” where “hundreds of crumpled bicycles, shells of street cars and automobiles, all halted in mid-motion” — as described to him by the German Jesuit priest who was 1400 yards from the epicentre. Miyoko Matsutani’s Two Little Girls Called Iida tells the story of two siblings who encounter a magical talking chair in a house where the calendar stays frozen on August 6. Stillness speaks to the survivors’ feeling of being stuck in time and trying to pull out of trauma’s dissociative stupor.

“Can it be forgotten?”

In the prologue of Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), a Frenchwoman (Emmanuelle Riva) tries to convince her Japanese lover (Eiji Okada) that she has looked at enough newsreels and photographs, been enough times to the museum, and seen everything there is to see in Hiroshima to understand the pain of its people as if it belonged to her too. He disagrees: “You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing.” She is an actress who has come to the Japanese city to make a film about peace. He is an architect. Their affair stirs up memories of a past affair with a German soldier in her home town of Nevers during Nazi occupation. The collective trauma of Hiroshima awakens in her the personal trauma of being sheared and humiliated during the liberation. Resnais and his screenwriter Marguerite Duras devised a cinematic language that expressed the shattered realities of trauma — from the sense of temporal dislocation to the fragmented nature of memories — and compensated for the inadequacy of words or images by themselves. The opening sequence shows a private moment haunted by public suffering. Naked bodies tangled in amorous embrace become covered in a rain of radioactive dust which dissolves into sweat. As the Frenchwoman recounts the places she has visited in an incantatory tone, Resnais cuts to images of the hospital, the museum, the streets, then to newsreels and re-enactments of the devastation. With a framework that intertwines the past and the present, two cities, and two affairs, the film investigates the nature of trauma and the relationship between reality and representation. But most of all, it is about the horror of forgetting. We may have seen nothing in Hiroshima or Nagasaki, but we can never forget the horror.

Prahlad Srihari is a film and pop culture writer. He lives in Bangalore.