Set closer to the end of the Second World War then Akira Kurosawa's 1991 film, Yoji Yamada's Nagasaki: Memories of My Son takes place in a Japan now at peace but still struggling to rebuild shattered lives (along with physically devastated cities), and facing hard economic times. Living in a house in the hilly outskirts of the city, Nobuko Fukuhara (Sayuri Yoshinaga) works as a midwife and is able to come by hard-to-get items courtesy of a friendly black marketer (Kenichi Kato). But she remains badly hurt psychologically by having lost close family members, particularly her younger son Koji (Kazunari Ninomiya) -- who effectively vanished into thin air, having been one of the thousands incinerated by the blast of the atom bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki.