Nagasaki is a Japanese city, and the largest city in the Nagasaki prefecture. It was a port city that was an important place for international trading in the sixteenth through the nineteenth century. During the war, Nagasaki was a powerful city that held the main Imperial Japanese Navy Base. It had military power, and during the Second World War, became the second ever place attacked with nuclear weaponry after the Japanese allegedly “ignored” the warning given to them by the United States that called for “complete and utter destruction”. The death toll for the bombing of Nagasaki is an estimated 60,000 to 80,000 people killed, including allied prisoners of war. The decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki has been widely criticized in part because it was seen as a wholly unnecessary action that only functioned to display the fruits of the Manhattan Project, since the war was winding down and almost at a close by the time the decision to drop the bombs was made.

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Geneva is a city in the country of Switzerland that is considered on par in terms of influence with other ‘global cities’ such as London, England. In 1815, Mary Shelly made an expedition throughout much of the European continent, and one of the major destination spots that she visited was Geneva, which can be seen in her later novel Frankenstein, where she makes much of the novel place. Geneva is interesting not only because of this but also because of its general reputation for being an extremely peaceful place. Not to mention the existence of the Geneva Convention, though those were drafted much, much later than the publication of Frankenstein, in the aftermath of the Second World War. It’s somewhere that you would not expect atrocity to be presenting itself, in other words. Much of the tragedy in the novel happens in the borders of Geneva, which is a bit of irony that you would only pick up on had you known the cultural climate of the area.

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