Fifty years after surviving the atomic bombing of Nagasaki as a six-year-old, Sachiko Yasui began to share her story. This moving work of creative nonfiction offers Yasui’s account of life in wartime Japan, the “unspeakable seconds” of the bombing, her family’s struggle to survive, the deaths of her siblings from radiation sickness, her thyroid cancer, and her decades-long struggle to find words as ahibakusha, a survivor of the bombing.

Photographs and short essays on topics that include “Racism and War,” “Little Boy and Fat Man” (code names for the bombs dr...