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Kenzaburo Oe, who won the 1994 Nobel Prize for Literature, visited Hiroshima and listened to survivors. His Hiroshima Notes (Marion Boyars, £14.95/$22.95, ISBN 0 7145 3007 7, translation from the Japanese original by David Swain and Toshi Yonezawa), first published in 1965, have been reissued for the anniversary. His essays appeal to the conscience of the Japanese to relieve the suffering of the survivors, whose stories he recounts. As a witness to the strength and endurance of people tried beyond our imagination by their terrible experiences, Oe, like Prima Levi before him, fulfils his intention to set the unthinkable before us, to change our way of seeing the world.