Japan -- Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb by John Whittier Treat

John Whittier Treat. Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb. Chicago. University of Chicago Press. 1995. xix + 487 pages, ill. $29.95. ISBN 0-226-811778.

In light of the strident controversies that have erupted this year, both in the United States and in Japan, over how to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the end of the Pacific War, the timely appearance of John Treat's Writing Ground Zero takes on greater cogency. A massive, scholarly study of the literature that ensued from the atrocity of the atomic bombs, it is a pathbreaking work that will now need to be reckoned with in any serious debate on the whole issue of how the war, and in particular the bombings, should be represented.

In the preface Treat clarifies his position in dealing with a topic that is not only remote from his own actual experience but also, due to a national identity as a citizen of the first and to...