“In the distant past, we didn’t call it Hiroshima, but Ashihara. It was a wide delta covered in reeds.” Thus begins the description that writer Ōta Yōko gives of the landscape of her hometown before, at dawn on August 6, 1945, the first atomic bomb to descend upon the world changed it forever. In an instant, a flash of bluish-green light left behind hundreds of thousands dead, an even greater number wounded, buildings in ruins, and scorched earth. Just a few days later, Japan resolved its complete surrender: the war was over, but, as the author points out, life went on.

City of Corpses is the agonized cry of a victim driven by the urgent need to capture in writing the devastation, the horror, the despair, and the chaos she has witnessed. Armed with the most harrowing writing and the most intimate truth as her only weapons, Ōta Yōko threw herself headlong into the abyss, defying censorship, to bear witness to one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century; to tell the story of those who perished and to map the trauma, as well as the hope, of the survivors.