"The bomb on the 6th of August, 1945, deprived me of my parents, my friends, my reason ... No, it deprived me of my entire life. From that day, I became entirely a living corpse. The only thing I wanted was to destroy everything with that axe ... Yes, everything... Even my own life."
These words, uttered by the ax murderer "M" during an interview with Kaoru Ogura, lie among hundreds of pages of raw details of postwar Hiroshima recently unearthed when Keiko, Ogura's widow, discovered the frail carbon copies of letters written by her husband nearly 60 years ago.
"A woman's engagement was broken off," reads another passage, "because it was feared she would give birth to deformed children."