It’s hard not to think about war these days, with Ukraine and Gaza.

It’s been said that only the dead can stop thinking about war; only the dead have seen the end of it. But for survivors of military conflicts, war can be everlasting: a body scarred for life; a mind filled with memories that can shape a postwar existence.

Tattered Kimonos in Japan examines the impact of one of history’s most consequential conflicts —World War II — on Japan’s war generation: the men and women who survived that struggle; who remembered what it was like and grappled with the consequences of those recollections; and who managed to carry those memories into the twenty-first century, where they crafted lives out of long-ago misfortune.

Tattered Kimonos in Japan tells their stories, and in so doing presents what one reviewer called “a singular and vital anti-war statement.” Tattered Kimonos in Japan considers what character traits enabled wartime survivors to thrive, and how Japan, a defeated empire, atoned for its wartime aggression.