Rain of Ruin: Tokyo, Hiroshima and the Surrender of Japan by Richard Overy
This year marks the 80th anniversary of the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The cities’ unprecedented destruction was the culmination of President Truman’s promise of a “rain of ruin” that would fall on Japan. As the eminent military historian Richard Overy points out in his chaff-clearing book about the last days of the war in the Pacific, bombing came late to Japan because until mid 1944 no US aeroplane had the capacity to reach it. With the introduction of the B-29 “Superfortress” that changed.
By that time the idea of strategic bombing had been abandoned and Japan’s cities were the target of all-out destruction in a concerted firebombing campaign in which battering civilian morale was as much an objective as military infrastructure: the raids on Tokyo left 16 square miles of the city destroyed. Among the topics Overy discusses with exemplary clarity are the moves already afoot within Japan to bring the war to an end and whether the decision to drop the atomic bombs was really meant as a signal to the Soviet Union. The link between the bombs and surrender was not, he says, clear-cut.
By Michael Prodger
Allen Lane, 224pp, £25. Buy the book
Alive: An Alternative Anatomy by Gabriel Weston
Gabriel Weston took an unlikely path into surgery, from majoring in literature to completing a medical degree offered to arts students (the course’s founders being of the mind that some non-medics might well have a doctor’s sensibility). Alive, essentially a “medical biography”, comes from this dual heritage: divided into chapters devoted to one organ at a time (brain, skin, womb, lungs), it aims to give a surgeon’s-eye view of the body’s constituent parts and expand them through personal anecdote and poetic simile.
The result is a refreshingly accessible medical text that broadens our knowledge of our bodies, providing minute detail of villi, osteoids and corpus spongiosus as well as topical contexts (fascinating advances in gut health; our centuries-old penchant for disregarding the clitoris). Its narration, however, at times tends toward the florid, simplistic or sensational. Yet increasingly toe-curling metaphors – of a transplanted uterus: “This is the house that Jack built, lay your own little eggs in it” – are a price worth paying for the privilege of stepping into a surgeon’s scrubs, and Alive comes heartily recommended to anyone wishing to better acquaint themselves with their own fluids.
By Sydney Diack
Jonathan Cape, 304pp, £20. Buy the book
I Don’t Like Your Tie: 100 Takes on the Joke That Made the Beatles by Mark Moss-Jones and Kevin Core
On 6 June 1962, the Beatles arrived at EMI Studios on Oxford Street to record their first single. It was also a kind of audition for George Martin, the producer and head of the Parlophone record label. After the session, Martin told the band he was unimpressed by what he’d heard, and asked if there was anything they didn’t like, to which George Harrison replied: “I don’t like your tie.” The most important man in the British music industry laughed, Lennon and McCartney joined in with their own jokes and the rest is history.
I Don’t Like Your Tie is that scene reimagined over and over again. The commitment to the joke is exhaustive and delightfully perverse. The tie story is rewritten as the work of Agatha Christie and Lee Child, as the reminiscences of Nigel Havers, as a press release announcing the sale of a replica of the tie, as a Chaucer poem. In one universe the tie becomes the subject of a divisive referendum (“accepting the will of the Beatles”); in others, the Beatles are woodland animals or resistance fighters in Nazi-occupied Britain. This book is a hall of very silly mirrors.
By Will Dunn
Independently published, 200pp, £8
The Naked Eye by Yoko Tawada
A young Vietnamese student is invited to present her paper (written in Russian) at an International Youth Conference in East Berlin. Neither reader nor protagonist is prepared for the kaleidoscopic narrative of National Book Award-winning author Yoko Tawada.
Through kidnappings, confused international train journeys and countless misunderstandings the narrator, whose real name is never disclosed, relates her story spanning multiple years in a surreal, meditative manner with no attachment to her fate or that of others. That is until she discovers the iconic French film star Catherine Deneuve, who quickly becomes the object of her fixations. The story weaves communist ideology, politics, history and sexuality in each of the 13 chapters framed by Deneuve’s films – Tristana, The Hunger, Indochine – and so it is best to expect the unexpected.
On the surface, The Naked Eye is a fever-dream page-turner. Yet expertly entwined in the narrative are the everyday perils of an undocumented individual and the loss of one’s identity. From one perspective it is an inconceivable and mildly comical story; from another it is a tale of detachment and escape from the horrors of the modern world.
By Zuzanna Lachendro
Granta, 240pp, £14.99. Buy the book
[See also: Why we’re stuck in Ancient Rome]
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This article appears in the 26 Feb 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Britain in Trump’s World