80 Years Later, Hiroshima Survivor's Memoir Drops

A long-lost firsthand account of Hiroshima's destruction is emerging from obscurity—and heading to both bookstores and the big screen. A 230-page memoir by survivor and Methodist pastor Kiyoshi Tanimoto, written nearly eight decades ago and forgotten in a US archive, will be published for the first time on August 6, the anniversary of the 1945 atomic bombing, the Guardian reports. It tells of how Tanimoto, having ventured a few miles from town on that fateful day, felt "a strong blast of wind" before discovering horrors, including skin "stripped off or hanging loose" from faces, per Publishers Weekly. An estimated 120,000 people died within four days.

Tanimoto's Hiroshima, 8:15 traces his search for his wife and infant daughter, his work identifying and burying the dead, as well as his own radiation sickness. Random House will release the memoir in the US with Penguin handling worldwide publication. The book has also sparked a feature film now in pre-production, produced by former Merchant Ivory president Donald Rosenfeld and set to shoot in 2027. Japanese actor Takehiro Hira (Giri/Haji) will portray Tanimoto, who died in 1986. The book includes a 9,000-word foreword by his daughter, Koko Tanimoto Kondo, now 81, who describes how silence shrouded the attack for decades—a silence this publication, and film, aim to break amid renewed global nuclear tensions.