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The bomb has destroyed Hiroshima, Gen's hometown, and now he, his mother, and his newborn sister have to find a way to survive. They have no home, and they've lost three immediate family members in the blast. Society has completely fallen apart, and common courtesy is now gone. It's now survival of the fittest, and everyone thinks solely of himself.

Gen decides to rescue Ryuta, the boy from the previous volume who looks so much like his dead brother Shinji. He has to convince his mother to let him do this, as they don't have enough food for themselves as it is. But then Gen finds a job that pays extremely well. Unfortunately, it's to care for a man dying of radiation sickness, a man utterly abandoned by his family, though they live just mere steps from his filthy room. Gen shows the man kindness and compassion, and the reader is given a bit of hope that not all survivors are selfish and greedy. Time and again, Gen shares what little he has, even if it's only a little bit of love and kindness. He even finds a way to provide some food for a sick woman and her son when her son can no longer scam food from area farmers, yet he and his mother and Ryuta are never more than a few days from starvation themselves.

I can see how readers may be turned off by the extremes shown in this book, from the destruction of the city to the disgusting state of survivors suffering from radiation sickness. But this is semi-autobiographical. We can sit here 70 years removed from the events and think the art is extreme, yet this is what Nakazawa saw with his own eyes when he was merely six years old. Imagine seeing people with their skin melting off, survivors vomiting copious amounts of blood, hundreds and thousands of dead bodies piled up, smelling the odor of burning flesh as the authorities built funeral pyres. And all this after you knew your father, brother, and sister had been burnt to death in the rubble of their home.

This is why we should never allow the dropping of another nuclear bomb.