This bilingual issue has a threefold purpose: to expose, map, and encounter the primary moment of the catastrophe from a Japanese perspective—made available here to most Anglophone readers for the first time. The concomitant and secondary effort is aimed at examining some of the patterns of evasion and repetition that characterize the suppressed moment of cultural and historical adaptation and reaction to the catastrophe, with the final hope of opening up the debates surrounding the critical responses to the atomic bombings, understood as one of the central traumatic “limit events” of our epoch, to an alternative set of cultural, critical, and literary perspectives.