Waiting on the shelf

I bought this purely because it filled a number in my collection. The beauty of this collection is you sometimes reach into it and find something extraordinary. This was written as an article for the New Yorker, they published it as a special edition. The author travelled to Japan to get first hand accounts and it is one of the finest pieces of journalism I've read and bear in mind it was published in 1946, so to have read it then must have been very hard to digest. It's a very uncomfortable and moving read 66 years on.