Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms (Japanese: 夕凪の街 桜の国, Hepburn: Yūnagi no Machi, Sakura no Kuni) is a one-volume manga written and illustrated by Fumiyo Kōno.

It has also been adapted as a 2006 radio drama, as 2007 novels by Kei Kunii and Yohei Makita, as a 2017 stage play and as a 2018 television special.

She lives with her mother, Fujimi, in a shanty-town near downtown, having lost her father and two sisters to the bomb; her younger brother, Asahi, was evacuated to Mito, Ibaraki, where he was adopted by his aunt.

Fujimi is a seamstress while Minami, who is "all thumbs" as her mother puts it, works as a clerk in an office, and together they are saving money for the trip to Mito to visit Asahi.

He later gives her a pair of sandals made by his mother and a handkerchief, but when he tries to kiss her, she has a flashback where she sees the victims of the bombing where they now stand and pushes him away.

At the start of fifth grade, Nanami Ishikawa, the daughter of Minami's brother Asahi (and thus second-generation atomic bomb victim), is a tomboy nicknamed "Goemon" by her classmates, to her disgust.

On the way, she meets her best friend and next-door neighbor, a feminine girl named Toko Tone, who loans her subway fare and accompanies her.

In Nagio's hospital room, they toss cherry blossom petals that Nanami collected into the air, to give him the experience of spring that he's missing.

That summer, her grandmother, Asahi's mother, Fujimi, dies, and that fall Nanami loses touch with Toko after her family moves closer to Nagio's hospital.

One day Nagio, who recently graduated from medical school, tells Nanami he ran into Toko as a nurse at the hospital where he is interning.

In a flashback, Asahi recalls the riverbank as a shantytown, then remembers meeting Kyoka Ota, a neighborhood girl his mother hired to help her after Minami died, when he returns to Hiroshima to start college.

According to Fumiyo Kōno's afterword, she was prompted to write Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms when her editor asked her for a Hiroshima story.

She was initially reluctant because, while she was born in Hiroshima neither she nor anyone in her family was a survivor of the atomic bomb, and growing up she found the subject upsetting and had tried to avoid it ever since.

[11] It has been published in English by Last Gasp,[12] in Korean by Munhak Segye Sa,[13] in Traditional Chinese by Sharp Point Press,[14] in French by Kana as Country of Cherry (French: Le Pays des Cerisiers),[15] in Portuguese by Editora JBC as Hiroshima - A City of Calm (Portuguese: Hiroshima - A Cidade da Calmaria),[16] in Spanish by Glènat España[17] and in Russian by Alt Graph.

[19] It won the 2006 Agency for Cultural Affairs Art Festival Award in the Radio Division,[20] and was shortlisted for the 2007 Prix Italia.

The story was praised by the award jury of the Japan Media Arts Festival for its brevity and its "depiction of 'the dark shadow of war'".

[2] Manga News described the apparently simplistic art as beautiful, which emphasizes the story's depth without ever going over-the-top or into excess morality.

[4] Otaku USA described the scenes of daily life as "welcoming" and the art "lovely", saying the "antiwar message is unspoken, and comes naturally from the desire not to see the characters die.

[42] According to a review in Asia Pacific Arts, during the sequence when the father returns to Hiroshima, the film shows "an interaction" of the past, present, and future, which is indicative of "the slipperiness of memory", a technique that "makes more visible and effective the ongoing resonance of the past in the present" but that "rejects the politics of the bombing" of the first part of the film.