POSTSCRIPT FROM HIROSHIMA

Nearly twenty-one years have passed since the pika seared the body and life of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Rafael Steinberg presents the Hiroshima of today, where ""cameras click away like busy Geiger counters"" in the Park of Peace, where families come to play and photograph themselves before the cenotaph that bears the names of all known victims of the atomic bomb...a list that grows in the memorial ceremony held each year on the anniversary of the holocaust, as hibak'shas fall victim to atom bomb diseases, most notoriously leukemia. It is a city invigorated by immigrants and the industry of the Toyo Kogyo auto plant, the noisiest and most enthusiastic baseball city in Japan with its own losing team, the Carps. It is a city of broad streets, the broadest quietly attesting to the point of the explosion of the atom bomb, a newly built city over which broods the remains of the industrial exhibition hall, the Atom Dome, which gives survivors ""license to remember"" and raises doubts as to the advisability of retaining it in others. The author reveals a present which has only partially absorbed the trauma of the past, only partially mastered fear of the future. Reading his book is a punishment, but one responsible Americans may feel they should incur.