Author · 1905–1951
原民喜Hara Tamiki · はら たみき
Hara Tamiki (1905–1951) was a poet and fiction writer born in Hiroshima. He studied English literature at Keiō University in Tokyo and began publishing poetry and short prose before the war. His wife died before the end of the war, and he returned to his family home in Hiroshima, where he survived the atomic bombing. 夏の花, based closely on that experience, became his best-known work and is regarded as a central text of Japanese atomic-bomb literature. He continued to write about the bombing and its aftermath in prose and poetry. In 1951 he took his own life in Tokyo.
Stories by Hara Tamiki
夏の花 — Flowers of High Summer
夏の花 is a first-person account of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, written by a survivor who was inside his family home when the bomb fell. It opens quietly, with the narrator buying flowers for his late wife's grave. It…