Hiroshima Notes is a moving statement from Japan's most celebrated living writer on the meaning of the Hiroshima bombing and its terrible legacy. Kenzaburo Oe's account of the lives of the many victims of Hiroshima - the young, the old, women and children - and the valiant efforts of the doctors who care for them, both immediately after the atomic blast and in the years to come, reveals the horrific extent of the devastation wrought. In Hiroshima Notes, Oe offers a sensitive portrayal of the people of the city - the 'human face' in the midst of atomic destruction. The lives Oe describes and his insights into the nature of human dignity are an indictment of the Nuclear Age as powerful as the ruins in the Hiroshima Peace Park.

Oe's dark musings on moral failure have come to symbolize an alienated generation in postwar Japan. This novel recounts the exploits of 15 teenage reformatory boys evacuated to a remote mountain village in wartime. When plague breaks out, the villagers flee, leaving the boys blockaded inside the empty village. The boys' brief, doomed attempt to build autonomous lives of self-respect, love, and tribal valor fails in the face of death and the adult nightmare of war.