The Bells of Nagasaki

by Nagai, Takashi; Nagai, Takashi; Johnston, William; Parry, Richard Lloyd

• ISBN13: 9781529952599
• ISBN10: 152995259X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2026-03-02
• Publisher: Vintage Classics
• More Book Details
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Summary

‘A book that everyone should read’ — The Times

A harrowing, heart-rending first-hand account of the bombing of Nagasaki — and the acts of human kindness left in its wake.

On 9 August 1945, the Japanese city of Nagasaki was struck by an atomic bomb. Forty thousand people were killed instantly. Doctor Takashi Nagai was not one of them.

Dragging himself, broken and bloodied, from the ruins of what had been the city’s university hospital, Nagai gathered together a small, tattered group of survivors — doctors, nurses and students, each carrying their own grief and fear. Together, they worked relentlessly at the impossible task of tending to the wounded and comforting the dying amid unimaginable devastation.

As they struggled to heal their shattered city, a mysterious and terrifying sickness began to spread among them, silently claiming lives. Writing from his sickbed, Nagai recorded what he witnessed in the days and weeks following the bombing.

This powerful eyewitness account of one of the most catastrophic events in human history stands as both a chilling historical document and a profound testament to humanity’s capacity for compassion, courage and solidarity in the face of destruction.

With an introduction by Richard Lloyd Parry.

Author Biography

Takashi Nagai was a Japanese Catholic physician specializing in radiology, an author, and a survivor of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. His subsequent life of prayer and service earned him the affectionate title ‘The saint of Nagasaki’. He died in 1951 from leukaemia.
William Johnston was born in 1925 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He joined the Jesuit Order in 1943 and after completing his studies at the University of Dublin, travelled to Japan in 1951. There, he taught English literature while earning a PhD in Theology, and later wrote a number of books on religion and mysticism. He died in 2010 at the age of 85.
Richard Lloyd Parry is Asia Editor of The Times. He was born in 1969 and was educated at Oxford. He has been visiting Asia for eighteen years and since 1995 has lived in Tokyo as a foreign correspondent, first for the Independent and now for The Times. He has reported from twenty-one countries and several wars, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Indonesia, East Timor, North Korea, Papua New Guinea, Vietnam, Kosovo and Macedonia. His work has also appeared in the London Review of Books and the New York Times Magazine. He is the author of In The Time of Madness, an eyewitness account of the violence that interrupted in Indonesia in the 1990s, and People Who Eat Darkness: The Fate of Lucie Blackman.