As a Japanese child I knew about the atom bomb, even went to Hiroshima on a school trip, but I never thought of it as part of the narrative: it somehow stood outside of history as an appalling and incomprehensible catastrophe.

Richard Overy’s Rain of Ruin: Tokyo, Hiroshima and the Surrender of Japan has put the atom bombs back into history for me, but in their rightful place. If the book has one aim, it is to warn us against the neatly packaged “atom bombs => Japanese surrender” thesis. By bringing together various factors and contexts, such as the ambitions of the US air force, and new material concerning the Japanese leadership, Overy’s narrative offers a convincing account of the last months of the war that allows for the messiness with which events, even terrible events like the dropping of atom bombs, ­happen in history; and how they can, still, fail to achieve their objective.

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