I have this idea of something I like to call the World City. It seems to me that all sufficiently large cities are more like each other than whatever countries in which they happen to be situated. Tokyo, New York, and London are the World City, but San Francisco, Manchester, and Osaka aren't. The World City is so huge and cosmopolitan that it transcends space and time. Babylon and Rome were probably the original World City, at least that we know about.

By analogy, the Saddest Book In The World is a single text of such destructive pathos that it crumbles covers, frontispieces, and contents tables. It is a work of nonfiction, it carries truths and moral judgments too huge for the mind to hold, and I have been reading it for my entire life.

The last chapter of the Saddest Book In the World that I read was written by Tadeusz Borowski, and it was called This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. It is a book about surviving as a Pole in Auschwitz. It is written with a terribly honesty and clarity. It is mordantly ironic. It describes the doing of the unthinkable in the name of survival, only to succeed and then be left to think about what you've done for the rest of your life. It is unflinchingly unsentimental, it passes judgment, and none are judged innocent. It is the Saddest Book In The World.

Westerners are used to contemplating and discussing the Holocaust. When I was in high school, my American Studies class spent part of a week watching unedited documentary footage of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen. We were given the opportunity to leave the classroom, and we were given several opportunities to cut the viewing short. Almost none of us left, and we decided by consensus to watch the whole thing. It seemed very important to me then that I bear witness, that I carry the knowledge of that terrible thing with me until I died.

But the Holocaust was not the only terrible thing to happen during World War II. Nor was the firebombing of Dresden, the terrifying hide and seek of the Battle Of The Bulge, or the rape of Nanking. No, the Faustian bargain America used to seal the end of the war was one of its most terrible acts, and is one that Americans have persistently held a blind spot towards, building elaborate justifications and rationalizations to paper over something horrifying and immoral.

I'm talking, of course, about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, two cities of negligible industrial importance, located far from the seat of Imperial Japanese power in the southwest of Japan. I've just finished reading the next chapter in my own particular volume of the Saddest Book In The World, and it is a collection of short stories by Kenzaburo Oe called The Crazy Iris, and Other Stories of the Atomic Aftermath.

I suspect sometimes that I have a masochistic streak when it comes to my choices of reading material, but I don't regret reading this book. I still believe in the moral power of bearing witness, and I feel that as an American and a child of the Cold War I have an especial obligation to bear witness to what happened to Japan. I don't think all the humility and moral courage in the world would make reading this book any easier, though.

What happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki was far more terrible than any American who hasn't specifically studied the matter would know. It wasn't so much the immediate casualties, although those ran into the high tens of thousands in each city: people burnt to ash where they stood, obliterated by flying glass, crushed by collapsing masonry, burnt by the sudden conflagrations which used to be their homes. It wasn't the people who died of burns or radiation poisoning over the next few weeks. It wasn't the people who died of leukemia, cancers, and a host of semi-inexplicable ailments over the next ten years. It wasn't even the thousands of women who were left incapable of bearing children, either due to sterility or miscarriages, or spent the rest of their lives obsessed with the worry that any children they have might be monsters.

The bombings were simply too huge for the Japanese to accept. A fault line cracked its way through Japanese society that has never healed properly. People need to find reasons for things, and it was impossible to believe that the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were connected enough to the war to merit the annihilation that was visited upon them. In one of those bitterly cruel ironies that are so close to the horrors of World War II, the survivors of the bombing were left with a taint that they couldn't shake off. They were connected to something too awful to contemplate, and were thus made pariahs.

Coupled with the intense guilt and anxiety the survivors naturally felt, this stigmatization caused the entire generation of survivors, in some sense, to be lost. This is the point the stories in this book make over and over again. How can you have a normal life when you see the back of your teacher's head charred off in a flash of light? How do you make sense of life when your entire family dies but you survive? What do you say when you find out you may never marry, because women from Nagasaki aren't proper wife material?

The stories themselves are restrained and circumspect almost to a fault. There's no finger-pointing or histrionics here, there are only quietly observed stories of death, survival, and loss. The stories are of variable quality (some of them, in fact, are barely stories at all) and sometimes the translations are clunky, but they get the point across. A group of women meets at their old elementary school and talks about operations to get embedded glass removed from their backs twenty years after the war; the color slowly leaches out of a man's paintings as he unconsciously tries to come to grips with what happened to his home and prepare for his death; a woman survivor of Nagasaki whose children have died soon after birth tries to comfort another woman survivor who can't stop bleeding after a miscarriage; a little girl carries an empty pail to school every day, containing the ashes of her mother and father.

Oe made a wise decision to close the book with "The Rite." It defeats any attempts to pull a sense of closure from the book; it is a night's reflections by a woman survivor of Nagasaki, as she tries to make sense of her own survival, the deaths of most of her friends, her inability to accept the love of a man she loved in return because of her own crippling guilt, her ultimate failure to make any kind of sense of what happened to her. She tries to find some Other towards which she can direct all of her anger, and realizes the Other she keeps finding is herself. She doesn't even consciously realize that she's been dispossessed, although she knows she has no home. As the story closes, all she wants is to make it through the night.

Because this book is honest, and because it was assembled to make a point, there is little hope or optimism to be found here. This is the Saddest Book in the World. It isn't fun to read. But it is worthwhile.

i have similar theory, that the atomic bombings fundamentally altered the cultural dna of japan, or at least significantly affected it for a damn long time. of course, i haven't actually been to japan, so this is just a theory. but the little i've seen from books and movies seems to bear this out. something about murakami's writing seems very post a-bomb, and i would love to see him tackle the subject.

you're not the only one with a masochistic reading streak. my book club has read, among other things, samantha power's book on genocide, anne applebaum's book on the soviet gulag, and also jose saramago's "blindness," which is no doubt another chapter in the saddest book in the world.