Dreams, x-rays, atomic radiation, and "invisible men" are phenomena that are visual in nature but unseen. Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) reveals these hidden interiors of cultural life, the "avisual" as it has emerged in the writings of Jorge Luis Borges and Jacques Derrida, Tanizaki Jun'ichir and Sigmund Freud, and H. G. Wells and Ralph Ellison, and in the early cinema and the postwar Japanese films of Kobayashi Masaki, Teshigahara Hiroshi,...