“Hibakusha” tells a story of a meeting of three people: an American scientist completely devoted to physics and its discoveries, a Hindu god Shiva, and the eponymous hibakusha – a Japanese man who survived two atomic bomb attacks.
Shiva is a destroyer god, who with philosophical zest observes the mortals, their wars and paradoxical desires to build a new type of weapon that would become “the guarantor of peace”.
Robert J. Oppenheimer, also called the father of the atomic bomb, is he coordinator of Sudden Explosion. As a co-creator of the destructive weapon he carries out a vivisection on himself, trying to understand how it came to science being used for the purpose of killing. Tsutomu Yamaguchi is the hibakusha – the one who survived, the real witness of the atomic bomb explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Living in a country where death is valued more than life, he tries to understand what is the meaning of surviving the nuclear cataclysm twice.
Is Oppenheimer the incarnation of Shiva? Or is he a victim of the atomic bomb like Tsutomu Yamaguchi? Where, if anywhere, does the author’s responsibility for his work end? And who is doing the killing – people or gods?