Just magnificent. A piece of art by one of the greatest artist of the asian continent.

Finally, we can have the last of the three parts of the Manga Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. As always, spectacular drawing and the best version of the Donald F. Glut script ever made!

Just when we were enjoying the marvelous comic book of A NEW HOPE, the manga version, Toshiki Kudo strikes back with this spectacular version of the sequel of the trilogy created by George Lucas. The price is a little elevated, but the drawing is excellent. A must-buy book!

This book shows what atrocities of war can do to people, how they can affect innocent lives. Hiroshima No Pika(Hiroshima's Flash) is mostly focused on a child, Mii, and, as we all know, the bombing of Hiroshima in WWII.

The detailed descriptions of people dying all around make this book perhaps not one suited for young audiences. The semi-abstract and disturbing pictures further add to this effect.

Many of the reviews dis this book, claiming that it is "one-sided", and does not tell about some of the horrid things the Japanese did in WWII. Hiroshima No Pika is not about those things---it's purpose is to provide us with a glimpse of what happened that day, the fear, the confusion, and the lingering effects of the radiation. If you want to know about other crimes, I suggest you read another book, there are plenty out there.

"Hiroshima No Pika" is a beautiful book about an ugly topic. The delicate watercolors adorning the pages of this thin volume are heavy with horror, and they give a real, first-person, child's perspective on the unprecedented nightmare that was the bombing of Hiroshima.

I don't like the way that so many reviewers attempt to diminish the power of this book, by placing it in certain contexts which implicitly subtract from its immediacy. Why not at least partly read it as it was intended -- as a testimonial of the confusing, unexpected, heartbreaking experiences of a seven year old girl trying to deal with an atom bomb destroying her hometown, her home, and much of her family? Your heart will break for little Mii, wandering among the ruins, and half-sleeping in a frightened daze for several days on a nearby beach.

Just to make sure that you are prepared for anything, you might want to know that most of the illustrations depict survivors with all their clothes burned off. Most of the book has nude images, so... know your audience! If you plan to share this with particularly immature boys, for example, you might want to be aware of this little fact in advance. The horror of the whole setting is so powerful that many readers will hardly even notice this, but I thought it bore mentioning.

Young readers today overwhelmingly tend to have little or no sense of the range of nuclear weapons, in terms of destructive power. I would like to encourage librarians, parents, or teachers who purchase this excellent book, to explain to their frightened little audiences that this is an account of a particular, specific, historic atomic blast. The power of such weapons today has an exponential range. For example, a small "dirty bomb" could literally constitute a couple of sticks of regular dynamite, combined with a few grams of radioactive strontium 90. At the other end of the spectrum, today's gigantic multi-megaton weapons, particularly those with multiple warheads, could deliver close to ten thousand times as much destructive force as the Hiroshima bomb, in a single nanosecond. If you would like to prepare yourself to better answer such questions on the part of young readers, I would like to encourage you in the strongest imaginable terms to purchase a copy of "The New Nuclear Danger," by the pediatrician and human rights activist Dr. Helen Caldicott. "The New Nuclear Danger" has a really terrific bibliography at the end, including both websites and books.

The majority of people reading this review are likely to be from the USA, so I'd just like to quickly inject here a couple of relevant comments. World War II is an increasingly distant, misty memory for Americans on the whole. This is particularly so, I think, for people who are "middle class" in a way that has meaning, because for them the Vietnam War era is so much more attractive to ponder. Vietnam clearly engaged America as a divided "society," as opposed to engaging us as a united "nation." People enjoy the memories of the feeling of rebelling against the authority of our government -- hey, the 60s were an exhilarating time to be alive in the USA. Thinking about World War II, instead of Vietnam, can help us to see that, ultimately, the act of coming to terms with the wars we might wage should not be all about their divisive effect upon our own society, so much as it should be about the absolutely hideous, nightmarish, lethal horrors we can unleash upon the members of the societies we are attacking. "Hiroshima No Pika" makes this point both starkly and accessibly, and for this reason, among many others, it should be included in as many public and private collections as possible.

The firestorm of debate over "Hiroshima No Pika" ("The Flash of Hiroshima") is quite interesting. From time to time on the news I have heard stories about the debate in Japan over how World War II is taught in Japanese schools, with regards to the atrocities committed. Certainly, Japan is not alone in having to deal with brutal aspects of its past, but let us just talk about Toshi Maruki's book "Hiroshima No Pika" for a moment, specifically in terms of the other reviews being offered on these pages.

First, this story is not about the victimization of all Japanese because of the bombing of Hiroshima. It is about what happened to the people of Hiroshima. In her "About This Book" comments in the back, Maruki tells us that this fictional story is based on the story of a survivor who tried to escape the Flash carrying her wounded husband upon her back and leading her child by the hand. But that woman also tells of how when she moved to Hokkaido the people there were not sympathetic or kind about her experiences, telling her she was trying to draw upon their pity. It seems to me that this book is clearly intended primarily for a Japanese audience and is in fact provides the sort of confrontation with the past for which other reviewers have called.

Second, with regards to Toshi Maruki in particular, her paintings have included the genocide during the Japanese occupation of Nanking. Obviously she cannot be dismissed as someone who has forgotten the atrocities committed by her nation during the war, whatever general charges you want to make against the Japanese as a people. I am not surprised that the American publishers of this book did not want to do one of Maruki's paintings of Nanking. The debate over Japan coming to terms with its past is worth having, but not over this particular book.

Third, yes this book has an emotional impact. Having your city destroyed in a single flash of light and being thrown into a nightmare of the dead and dying is going to be emotional, especially for an audience that knows all about radiation poisoning. I am part of the generation that had to learn "Duck and Cover" in school, who assumed that one day there would be a World War III and that it was going to be nuclear. Although "The Day After" turned the nuclear nightmare into actual images, the idea of a nuclear holocaust was ingrained in our fiction from "Dr. Strangelove" to "On the Beach" to "Star Trek." The people of Hiroshima are entitled to have their story told and Maruki's paintings do so on their behalf. I do not see anything monumentally wrong with that...

"Hiroshima No Pika" gives young readers a emotional sense of what it was like that day when the Flash came. I think it is inevitable that at some point students would ask why the bomb was dropped. At that point they can be made aware of the reasons. They can learn how Truman decided it would save American lives and end the war, which it certainly did. But it terms of paying back for atrocities committed by the Japanese in China, the Philippines and everywhere during World War II, the line I always heard was that we would not apologize for Hiroshima because the Japanese never apologized for Pearl Harbor. So to suggest the dropping of the atomic bomb was justified by these earlier atrocities seems to me to be obvious revisionist history.

Very well written. Tons of info, very interesting concepts

Sure to please american expectations as to what the contemporary Japanese are like. But its just propaganda written to order for a foreign market and its diseased media. A vulgar soapbox sermon. Elitist and condescending. In fact the commemoration of the BOMBING of Pearl Harbor was a very festive occasion. Deal with it.

Hiroshima Notes is a collection of seven essays written between August 1963 and January 1965 on the occasion of several visits by Mr. Oe to Hiroshima. The year 1963 was a watershed for Kenzaburo Oe. In 1963, his son was born with a lesion of the skull through which brain tissue protruded. Unable to decide if he should allow the child to die or agree to an operation which would leave his son permanently brain-damaged, Mr. Oe went on a reporting assignment to Hiroshima that resulted in "a decisive turnabout" of his life which, he says, "eschewing all religious connotations, I would still call a conversion".

The central figure of the essays is Dr. Fumio Shigeta, a medical doctor who was in Hiroshima on the day the A-bomb was dropped. He happened to arrive in the city to take up a new post just a week before the day of the bombing. It is through Dr. Shigeta that Oe learns how the bomb victims become social outcasts, have difficulties finding marital partners, get divorced because they cannot have children, hide in shame in the back-rooms of their houses for years, and commit suicide or go insane upon learning that they are diagnosed as having "an A-bomb disease". In the midst of this pain and suffering, Dr. Shigeta patiently applies his medical skills to help the victims. He ignores the stigma placed on the victims by Japanese society, and for him there is no taboo on issues like the genetic effects of the radiation.

Dr. Shigeta is the "authentic man" for Oe, a person who is "humanist in the truest sense ¡V neither too wildly desperate nor too vainly hopeful". A man of modesty, patience and perseverance, Dr. Shigeta appears to be the real-life counterpart of the fictional Docteur Rieux of Albert Camus's novel The Plague: "When Hiroshima was attacked by radiation - the plague of the modern age - the city was not specifically closed off. Since that day . . . Dr. Shigeta took upon himself the misery of Hiroshima, and has continued to do so for twenty years."

More than anything he saw in Hiroshima, it must have been the example of Dr. Shigeta that made Oe realize that there was just one answer to his own personal question whether his son should be operated to live brain-damaged thereafter or be left to die. If Dr. Shigeta could bear the suffering of thousands of strangers and dedicate his life to relieving their pain, then he could bear the suffering of raising a brain-damaged son. I believe it was this realization that made Oe wake up and face his own suffering: "I think it was in Hiroshima that I got my first concrete insight into human authenticity."

While the Hiroshima Notes are the central document of Oe's humanism, they also provide a uniquely Japanese view of the Hiroshima bombing. Oe examines the feelings of shame and humiliation in the victims, and the attempts of the people of Hiroshima to forget what he calls the "holocaust of the A-bomb". His tone is very restrained and unemotional, devoid of moralizing and anger. Any sensationalism is missing from Oe's writing. He does not accuse or explain, he simply reflects. At times, though, he gets tangled in his reflections. The most embarrassing example is his argument that the A-bomb would never have been dropped on Leopoldville in the Congo because the American decision makers wanted to drop the bomb only on a people with the "human strength to cope with the hell that would follow." This racist, muddled thesis is an absolute exception, however. A small stain on Oe's essays which shows that even a Nobel Prize winner with a conscience will get caught up in prejudices from time to time.

I recommend these essays to anyone who has read Kenzaburo Oe's "A Personal Matter" (the fictional account of the decision the author had to make with regard to his son), and to anyone who ever had to answer the question "why should I rather follow one course of action instead of another when both options involve me suffering?"