Before Hiroshima: The Confession of Murayama Kazuo and Other Stories

by Joshua Barkan

As death approaches, an old Japanese man finds it necessary to cleanse his soul, to confront the mistakes of his youth, and to confess about a time he might have been able to save the thousands who died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The title novella is complemented by Five Stories.

148 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

Reviews

[Crystal]

I bought this book ten years ago because of a review in the Boston Globe - the author was living in Brookline then. I opened the book, and was unable to get beyond the first page for ten years. The author had supposedly lived in Japan for a year, but somehow had failed to notice that there is no such place as Tokyo-ken or Kyoto-ken. So much for the author's powers of observation. But I finally decided to read it, and despite a few other geographically suspicious details (a character has a home on a hill in Minami-ku in Kyoto, which to my knowledge is one of the flattest sections of the city) it was pretty good. Certainly the soldier characters in the title story behave realistically based on what I have read about wartime Japan, and the other stories' characters are believable as well. The settings of the stories vary enough that you don't get short story fatigue from this collection.

[Carrie Szoke]

This book contains one long short story and about a half dozen short short stories. They were all very different in terms of storyline and setting, which was nice. They were all interesting. I found the endings a bit too anticlimatic. As far as recommending a collection of short stories, I much prefer Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri.