In 1948, a former OSS agent named Walter Lord-who had interrogated (or, from a certain point of view, “interviewed”) many of Japan’s surviving naval officers -was struggling to turn a series of non-job-related interviews into his first book: A N ight to Remember. For people underneath an A-bomb to have become shadows on the wall, and charcoals, before they could fall to the ground, no one wanted to believe it. That is why, for over sixty years, I kept what I saw to myself… until the day others spoke about it, were called liars, because the atom bombs could not have happened that way. Even as fiction, no one would believe it.
You could not make these landscapes up and have people believe it.
