#hiroshima library

[brandonshimoda]

The Hiroshima Library, an itinerant reading room/collection of books on atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is always seeking/accepting donations of books, magazines, pamphlets, movies (VHS, DVD), audio recordings (cassettes, CDs, vinyl records), etc. to add to its collection. 

We are also seeking the following books (below). 

The Hiroshima Library is reopening at the Seay Music Library at Colorado College, in Colorado Springs, Spring 2026.

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Akiko Mikamo, 8:15: A True Story of Survival and Forgiveness from Hiroshima

Atsuhiro Ozaki, The Song of Hiroshima

Cathy Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory

Chong Ki-Sheok, Black Flower in the Sky: Poems of a Korean Bridegroom in Hiroshima. Translated by Naoshi Koriyama and Elizabeth Ogata.

Eiichiro Ochiai, Hiroshima to Fukushima: Biohazards of Radiation

Flash of Light, Wall of Fire: Japanese Photographs Documenting the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Fujio Hironobu, Truth of Nagasaki

Gavan McCormack, Twice Victims: Koreans at Hiroshima

Greg Mitchell, Atomic Cover-up: Two U.S. Soldiers, Hiroshima & Nagasaki, and The Greatest Movie Never Made

Harry J. Wray and Seishiro Sugihara, Bridging the Atomic Divide: Debating Japan-US Attitudes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Hiromi Tsuchida, Hiroshima Monument II

The Hiroshima Murals: The Art of Iri Maruki and Toshi Maruki, edited by John Dower and John Junkerman

Hiroyuki Agawa, The Devil’s Heritage, translated by John Maki

Hisako Matsubara, Cranes at Dusk

John Auxier, Ichiban: Radiation Dosimetry for the Survivors of the Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

John O'Brian, Camera Atomica

John Whitter Treat, Pools of Water, Pillars of Fire: The Literature of Ibuse Masuji

Kikuji Kawada, Chizu (”The Map”)

Kunito Okamura, May the Seven Rivers of Hiroshima Reach the Galaxy

Mandy Conti & David Petersen, Survivors: The A-Bombed Trees of Hiroshima

Medical Effects of the Atomic Bomb in Japan, edited by Ashley Oughterson

Melinda Clarke, Waymakers for Peace: Hiroshima and Nagasaki Survivors Speak

Michael Light, 100 Suns

Mick Broderick, Hibakusha Cinema: Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Nuclear Image in Japanese Film

Mitsukuni Yoshida, Hiroshima and beyond: A heritage of technology

Miyako Ishiuchi, Hiroshima

Monica Brau, The Atomic Bomb Suppressed: American Censorship in Occupied Japan

Nagasaki Speaks: A Record of the Atomic Bombing

Naomi Hirahara, Hiroshima Boy

Paul Ham, Hiroshima Nagasaki: The Real Story of the Atomic Bombings and Their Aftermath

Ran Zwigenberg, Hiroshima: The Origins of Global Memory Culture

Raúl Zurita, The Country of Planks. Tr. from the Spanish by Daniel Borzutzky

Reiko Tachibana, Narrative as Counter-Memory: A Half-Century of Postwar Writing in Germany and Japan

Sachi Komura Rummel, Hiroshima: Memories of a Survivor

Sadako Kurihara, Black Eggs: Poems

Sadako Okuda, A Dimly Burning Wick: Memoir from the Ruins of Hiroshima

Sankichi Tōge, Poems of the Atomic Bomb 

Sheila Fugard, Harp Song for Hiroshima

Su-nam Pak, The Other Hiroshima: Korean A-bomb Victims Tell Their Story

Takashi Nagai, ed. We of Nagasaki: The Story of Survivors in an Atomic Wasteland. Trans. Ichiro Shirato and Herbert B. L. Silverman

Takehiko Fukunaga, Shi no shima

Terry Watada, Hiroshima Bomb Money

The Unfinished Atomic Bomb: Shadows and Reflections, edited by David Lowe, Cassandra Atherton, and Alyson Miller

Tomin Harada, Hiroshima Surgeon

Toshiharu and Rita Kano, Passport to Hiroshima: The Unthinkable, Inspiring Journey of a Japanese American Family

Virginia Moffa Khuri, Hiroshima: Remembering 1945 & 1958

Widows of Hiroshima: The Life Stories of Nineteen Peasant Wives, edited by Mikio Kanda, translated by Taeko Midorikawa

William J. Schull, Song Among the Ruins

Yoshiteru Kosakai, ed. A-Bomb: a City Tells Its Story

Yuki Miyamoto, Beyond the Mushroom Cloud

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The Hiroshima Library is seeking copies of these books, and other books, in any condition (from poor to new). If you are interested in donating please contact Brandon Shimoda at [email protected].

Photo: The Hiroshima Library in the Hirasaki National Resource Center at the Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles.

[brandonshimoda]

The Hiroshima Library is an itinerant, sometimes spontaneous reading room/collection of books on the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and their ongoing afterlives, as well as the environments and situations in which the collection either publicly or privately exists. The collection is (currently) 200+ books, including hibakusha testimonies, history and journalism, art and photography, poetry, novels, graphic novels and comic books, art and literary criticism, theory, politics, science, and also contributions by the communities in which it appears. (Donations are always welcome.) It also includes books on collective memory, Fukushima, the 1985 MOVE bombing in Philadelphia, Gaza, as well as an archive of essays and documents. 

The library is inspired, in part, by the Rest House in the Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima; the ice cream vendor in the Hypocenter Park in Nagasaki; the reading areas in the MRT stations in Kaohsiung, Taiwan; abandoned gas stations and strip malls throughout the United States and Japan; as well as mundane, workaday spaces adjacent to catastrophic life, which occupy a frequency between communal mourning and melancholy, private refreshment, and idle and free associative learning, and into which an individual (passerby, tourist, wanderer, child), motivated by an aimless yet open curiosity, might enter and, for a moment, disappear.

The collection was first conceived in 1988 when I (Brandon Shimoda) received, as a gift from my parents, a copy of Keiji Nakazawa’s manga, I Saw It: The Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima: A Survivor’s True Story (English translation, 1982). That same year I visited, for the first time, the city of Hiroshima. I was ten.

The Rest House in the Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima, for example—located across the Motoyasu River from the atomic bomb hypocenter (detonation point), and surrounded by memorials and monuments to the dead—is an information center/gift shop filled with brochures, benches, and beverage machines, where people can use the restroom, have a drink, and, in the midst of the ruins, let their minds go blank. It was originally a kimono shop, but was turned over, during the war, to the war effort, where it became the site of the murder, by the bomb, of thirty-six people.

The Hiroshima Library was first installed on a dining table in an abandoned house in Marfa, Texas (2015). It was installed at BRUNA press + archive, in Bellingham, Washington, from August through October 2019; in the Japanese American National Museum, in Los Angeles, from November 2019 through August 2021, as part of Under a Mushroom Cloud: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Atomic Bomb; and at Counterpath Press, in Denver, CO, from October 2021 into September 2022. 

The library is currently installed at the Albert Seay Library of Music and Art (Packard Hall) at Colorado College. 

The collection includes donations of books from the generous people at: Beacon Press, Coffee House Press, Dramatic Publishing, Drawn & Quarterly, Fantagraphics Books, Fortress Press, Haymarket Books, University of Massachusetts Press, McFarland, NYU Press, OR Books, SUNY Press

Read Sommer Browning’s article on the Hiroshima Library at Southwest Contemporary.

Photo below courtesy of the Japanese American National Museum.

Visit the PDF Branch of the Library here.

For more information, the library’s catalog, to make a donation, and/or to suggest a location/space for the library, please contact [email protected].

Photo below taken by Kristina Lee Podesva and Alan McConchie at BRUNA.

Thank you to the following people for their involvement/support: Julie Carr, Dot Devota, Yanara Friedland, Clement Hanami, Karen Ishizuka, Tim Johnson, Chloe Jung, Machete, Kirsten Emiko McAllister, Alan McConchie, Eiko Otake, Kristina Lee Podesva, Tim Roberts, Ryan Seward, Karen McAlister Shimoda, Yumi Shimoda, Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman, Shodekeh Talifero