They finally dug up something real from the vaults. A 230-page memoir written back in 1947 by Kiyoshi Tanimoto—a man who survived the absolute nightmare of the Hiroshima atomic bomb—was found sitting in some US archive after decades of being ignored. Now, this summer, the world is finally going to get his raw, firsthand account of what went down when the sky fell in 1945. No corporate filter, just the real, painful truth.

Random House is dropping the book in the US, and Penguin is releasing it worldwide on August 6, which is the actual anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing. The book is already selling out in major territories because people want to hear the real history from someone who was actually on the ground. Tanimoto's daughter, Koko Tanimoto Kondo, who is 81 now, wrote a heavy 9,000-word introduction for the book to make sure her father's legacy stays alive.

Let’s look at the history, because the numbers are wild. On August 6, 1945, the US dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima to end World War II. The blast wiped out the city, killing 120,000 people in just the first four days. People were severely burned and disfigured from the radiation. Just three days later, they dropped another plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, killing about 73,000 people, before Japan finally surrendered on August 15.

Tanimoto, who was a Methodist priest in Hiroshima, survived by a stroke of pure luck. On the day the bomb dropped, he was out of town transporting a heavy wardrobe. When he came back, he saw things so terrible he thought nobody could ever put them into words. But he knew he had to write it down so nobody would ever have to go through that hell again. He lived to be 77 years old, passing away in 1986.

His daughter Kondo’s part of the story shows the deep trauma that families carry. She was only an eight-month-old baby in her mother’s arms when the bomb dropped. It took her mother 40 years before she could even bring herself to tell her daughter how they survived. Back then, people didn't talk about it because the memories were too heavy to bear.

Kondo writes about how the blast completely flattened central Hiroshima. At ground level, the heat reached 4,000 degrees Celsius. That kind of heat doesn't care who you are—it burned right through wood, tile, concrete, and human flesh. Kondo says keeping these memories alive is our only hope for survival as human beings, and she’s not lying.

Now, they’re making a major movie out of Tanimoto's life called "Hi...". It’s being produced by Donald Rosenfeld, the former president of Merchant Ivory Productions. Takehiro Hira, who played a detective in that Netflix show Giri/Haji, is set to play Tanimoto. Pre-production starts this November, and they start shooting in February 2027. Kondo is keeping it real by making sure the filmmakers actually talk to survivors and their families so they don't mess up the history.