Hibakusha: The Shadow That Didn't Burn

At dawn on August 6, 1945, a sixteen-year-old boy named Kenji Takahashi eats breakfast with his mother and younger sister in a wooden house on the outskirts of Hiroshima. An instant later, a white sun-strange and absolute-consumes his world. The city, the voices, the laughter... everything turns to dust and fire.
Kenji survives, but the life he knew is buried under the ruins. Turned into a hibakusha, he drags for decades the visible and invisible scars of that day: the physical pain, the irreparable losses, the silence imposed by a society that he sometimes preferred to forget.
Decades later, already old, Kenji decides to write his story. Not to ask for compassion or seek revenge, but to leave a testimony that survives his voice. In the first person, he reconstructs with rawness and tenderness the Hiroshima of his childhood, the moment of the explosion, the days of fire and death, and the long years of physical and emotional reconstruction that followed.
Between fragmented memories and scenes that are engraved in the memory like the shadow burned on a wall, Kenji delivers a story that is, at the same time, an intimate confession and a cry against oblivion. His oath is clear: to repeat this story until his last breath so that the bomb never falls again.
The Shadow That Didn't Burn is a novel that hurts and heals at the same time; a hymn to memory, a plea for peace and a human portrait of those who have seen the end of the world up close.