The public backlash to the proposal was quick and insistent.

Read in Japanese by a woman, the entries provide a series of testimonies of the atomic bomb: student factory workers dying, bodies covered with keroid; children sent off by train to safer locations while their parents died; a daughter who never returned from a hiking trip to eat the peach her mother saved for her.

The answer appears on the thirty-ninth page of the book.

Hurrying, sometimes leaping from boulder to boulder but never once glancing back or stopping to rest its heavy satchel, the grubling led them further down the gorge.