d and to be able to accept new ideas is crucial when you look at people from a different type of background and way of thinking. To read this novel you must also have a pretty solid stomach because there are many detailed entries about wounds and the way that the skin starts to melt right off the living body. The whole story is told from the eyes and thoughts of the main character Mr. Shizuma is different than any first hand account that I have ever read and a reader must be willing to get into that character in order to get the message, feelings, and pictures that Mr. Shizuma is trying to put forth. The novel is written extremely clear but one of the problems is that it gets slow every once in a while if Mr. Shizuma gets something into his mind so he decides to get it done. The pond that his friend is growing carp in is traveled to what seems to be about a thousand times. What is good about the many travels to these same places is that each time the scene changes slightly with someone becoming sick or the carp growing. What a person needs to read this book is careful thought because of the slight changes and also a map seems to grow inside your head of the different places that he goes to. These places are described in so much detail that it does not take very much imagination to see what is going on and what he is seeing.The title has a lot to do with the book because the title is how the whole thing started, with Mr. Shizuma's daughter coming home with black spots on her skin where the black rain had hit her. It could not be washed off and it burnt through clothing. The ending to the novel was satisfactory because the end of the war was a good place to end the novel. The only problem that I can see with this type of ending is that the reader wants to know what has happened to the community after a few years but what the writer is trying to say is very clear and enforced with people crying because they lost the war. The crying was no...
