The Hiroshima Library is an itinerant reading room/collection of books on the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and their ongoing afterlives. It is curated by Brandon Shimoda. The collection is (currently) 200+ books, including hibakusha testimonies, art and photography, poetry, fiction, comic books, children’s books, plays, art/literary/film criticism, theory, politics, science, religion; books on nuclear war, radiation, museum studies, memory studies, trauma studies; as well as films, records, and 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 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.

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

Thank you to the following people for their involvement and support: Sommer Browning, 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.