IT IS ON THE THIRD FLOOR of Hiroshima’s Funairi Mutsumi Nursing Home that I first hear the name of Akiko Osato, spoken by her 85-year-old mother, Shima Sonoda. A frail, dignified woman with close-cropped black hair, she closes her eyes to remember that distant summer morning in 1945.

Shima, a widow, had asked her three elder children to mind the stationery shop in the front of their wood-frame house while she and Akiko, her four-year-old daughter, readied a wartime breakfast of soybeans, radish leaves, and rice porridge. Shima did so with a sense of relief. A few minutes earlier the air-raid sirens had sounded the all clear, and she and the children had climbed out of their makeshift bomb shelter, a