comment on tone

The tone of the story is generally graphic, describing everything from the diarrhea and unwashed undergarments of American soldiers fighting in the Pacific to the bodies of enemy soldiers the Japanese mutilated and emasculated to send warnings to the living. The victims of Japan’s institutionalized rape are allowed to tell their own stories, without skimping on details, but so are those on the ground in Hiroshima who saw skin melt away on people not yet dead and who had to beg forgiveness of those they had to leave behind in rubble. The tone is also foreboding, as the scenes of island battles between the Americans and Japanese hint at an even worse event had the Americans invaded Japan, had the Soviets gotten to Japan before it surrendered, and had any hostile power acquired nuclear weapons before America did.