Nearly 60 years after the United States dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the closing days of World War II, the aftermath lingers in the visions of artists like Takashi Murakami and Seitaro Kuroda, whose works are being showcased in Manhattan galleries throughout this month.

As a neo-pop artist who rose to fame in the 1990s, Murakami used his fascination with "otaku," a computer-nerd subculture marked by obsession with "manga" (comics) and "anime" (animation), to curate his show, "Little Boy: The Arts of Japan's Exploding Subculture," at the Japan Society until Sunday.

Murakami's reference to Little Boy, the code name for the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, was intentional.