Editor’s note: This is the first of a three-part series on “Hadashi no Gen” (Barefoot Gen), Keiji Nakazawa’s manga series themed on the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, which began running in a comic magazine in June 1973.

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Keiji Nakazawa, who lost his father, sister and brother in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, had no intention of writing a manga about what he experienced until his mother died two decades later.

When her body was cremated, only ash and white fragments just 3 to 4 centimeters remained.

“The atomic bomb now even robbed me of the marrow of her bones,” Nakazawa (1939-2012) thought, feeling a flash of red-hot anger that the exposure to radiation made her bones brittle. 

He began portraying the atomic bombing and its consequences in manga and went on to earn fame for his autobiographical “Hadashi no Gen” (Barefoot Gen) series.

Born to a stubborn father and a cheerful mother, Nakazawa was an elementary school first-grader when the atomic bomb was dropped at 8:15 a.m. on Aug. 6, 1945.

He was standing near the school gate when what looked like a giant ball of flame darted into his field of vision. He lost consciousness.

When he finally crawled from under a toppled concrete wall, he noticed that the mother of his classmate, with whom he had just spoken, was blown far away.

Her body was burned charcoal black, with her white eyes wide open as if glaring at him.

“What on earth has happened?” the boy wondered. He frantically headed straight home.

A person whose body was burned all over was drinking water from a fire-fighting water tank.

He also came across a person whose eyeballs had popped out and another whose intestines were protruding outside the body.

A female neighbor had numerous glass fragments embedded into her body. When she moved, the shards made a crunching sound as they came into contact with each other inside her body.

Nakazawa’s two-story wooden home was destroyed, just like many others around it.

His mother, Kimiyo, was desperately trying to remove a pillar under which the head of his younger brother was trapped. But he was burnt alive, while crying out for help from his mother.

His elder sister, who usually went to school with Nakazawa, was crushed under the house. She was still at home that day because she was not ready to leave for school yet. 

His father was engulfed in flames inside the house.

A 6-year-old boy with a sunny disposition, Nakazawa witnessed firsthand the horrors that could be unleashed on humans by an atomic bomb blast.  

Kimiyo was in the final weeks of her pregnancy and gave birth to a girl on that day, apparently out of shock.

She lost her infant four months later, whether from malnutrition or from atomic bomb radiation.

Whenever Nakazawa recalled that day, the smell of rotting corpses, charred ruins and festering burns returned to haunt him.

Just reading the kanji characters that stand for an atomic bomb made him worry that he might develop symptoms resulting from the effects of radiation.

He continued to turn his back on the atomic bombing, trying to forget what he experienced and hiding the fact that he was exposed to atomic bomb radiation.

Nakazawa came to Tokyo at the age of 22, aspiring to become a manga artist like Osamu Tezuka (1928-1989) of “Astro Boy” fame, often called “the god of manga.”

Nakazawa’s debut work featured an industrial spy. He believed that cartoons must be entertaining.

His conviction, or everything in his life, changed when he returned to Hiroshima in 1966 after receiving a telegram about the death of Kimiyo.

As he saw the tiny bone particles at the crematorium, Nakazawa thought about his mother, who raised her three remaining children despite her life ruined by the atomic bombing.

On the train ride back to Tokyo, he made up his mind to tackle the atomic bombing head-on as a cartoonist.

“On her behalf, I will avenge the deaths of my father, elder sister, younger brother and a sister who died just four months after her birth,” Nakazawa wrote about his determination at the age of 27 in his autobiography “Hadashi no Gen Watashi no Isho” (Barefoot Gen, My Will).

“I will thoroughly bring to account those responsible for the war and the atomic bombing, whether they are the Japanese government authorities or the U.S. government authorities,” he thought. “Through manga, I will fight them to the last stand.”

His wife, Misayo, remembers that Nakazawa did not utter a word that day.

“He remained silent throughout the train ride. He kept absolutely quiet even after he returned home,” said Misayo, now 80. “I thought he had something on his mind and left him alone.”

Just a week later, Nakazawa suddenly showed his wife several panels from his first manga themed on the atomic bombing.

“Kuroi Ame ni Utarete” (Struck by Black Rain), a short piece, centered around a young man about to die of atomic bomb disease attempting to kill a vicious American to seek revenge.