is a novel by

Japan Japan is an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean off the northeast coast of the Asia, Asian mainland, it is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan and extends from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea ...

ese author

Masuji Ibuse was a Japanese author. His novel ''Black Rain (novel), Black Rain,'' about the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, bombing of Hiroshima, was awarded the Noma Prize and the Order of Culture, Order of Cultural Merit. Early life and educat ...

. Ibuse began serializing ''Black Rain'' in the magazine ''Shincho'' in January 1965. The novel is based on historical records of the devastation caused by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

Plot

Black Rain is told through the diary entries of Shizuma Shigematsu and other characters during August 6–15, 1945,

Hiroshima is the capital of Hiroshima Prefecture in Japan. , the city had an estimated population of 1,199,391. The gross domestic product (GDP) in Greater Hiroshima, Hiroshima Urban Employment Area, was US$61.3 billion as of 2010. Kazumi Matsui has b ...

, and at the time of narration, Shigematsu and his wife Shigeko are the guardians of their niece Yasuko. They feel obligated to find a suitable husband for her, and by the start of the novel, three earlier attempts to arrange a match had already failed because of rumors that she had radiation sickness from exposure to " Black Rain," radioactive precipitation that had fallen when the immense

firestorm A firestorm is a conflagration which attains such intensity that it creates and sustains its own wind system. It is most commonly a natural phenomenon, created during some of the largest bushfires and wildfires. Although the term has been used ...

caused by the nuclear explosion seeded the clouds over Hiroshima, causing the radioactive material to fall back down as rain. Fear and disgust of radiation sickness and those who have it are two of the main themes throughout the story. Though Shigematsu's journal entries attempt to disprove his niece's sickness by demonstrating that she was not in Hiroshima during the blast, in the end it turns out that Yasuko had gone there immediately afterward to find her parents and was indeed sickened by the "Black Rain".

Adaptations

Director Shohei Imamura directed a

film adaptation A film adaptation transfers the details or story of an existing source text, such as a novel, into a feature film. This transfer can involve adapting most details of the source text closely, including characters or plot points, or the original sou ...

of the Japanese novel in 1989.

References

1965 Japanese novels Novels about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki Novels first published in serial form Works originally published in Shinchō Japanese novels adapted into films {{nuclear-issue-book-stub

Plot

Adaptations

See also

References