In April 1945, thirteen-year-old Yoko Moriwaki began keeping a diary as a school assignment.

She records lessons and calligraphy practice, meals assembled from dwindling rations, warning sirens, illness, household chores and the exhausting labour imposed upon Japanese schoolchildren as the war approached its end. Her final entry was written on 5 August 1945.

The following morning, Yoko was working with other students near the centre of Hiroshima when the atomic bomb was dropped. She died from her injuries later that day. Preserved by her family and published decades later, the diary gives the historical catastrophe its ordinary scale: not the mushroom cloud viewed from above, but one child’s unfinished sequence of breakfasts, headaches, homework and plans for tomorrow.

First published in Japanese in 1996, Yoko’s diary has sometimes been compared with Anne Frank’s, although it documents a markedly different civilian experience of the same war. This first English translation is accompanied by Paul Ham’s historical introduction and reflections from Yoko’s family, including the inherited memory of Hiroshima among second-generation hibakusha.

First English-language edition, first printing. Edited by Paul Ham and translated by Debbie Edwards. ABC Books/HarperCollins Australia, 2013. Paperback. Very good condition, with minor shelf wear.