#hiroshima notes

[seanvansickel]

Kenzaburō Ōe: Hiroshima Notes

Kenzaburō Ōe: Hiroshima Notes

Kenzaburō Ōe published these essays over a short span during and after the twentieth anniversary of the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima. This is not pleasant reading, and if you are not yet familiar with the specifics of that attack, if you don’t know what keloid scarring is or about the elevated leukemia rates persisting through generations, you will. And while the book starts off very slow…

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[thepanoply]

August 6th, 67 years later

The Japanese chose the principle of eternal peace as the basis of morality for our rebirth after the War.

-Kenzaburo Oe

Image from the Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Museum, taken from the ground after the blast

A note for anyone unfamiliar with Oe: He's a Japanese author, in fact one of two Japanese authors to receive a Nobel prize for literature (1994) for creating "an imagined world, where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today." As regards today's theme, Oe compiled two really excellent books of hibakusha (atomic bomb survivor) short fiction, Atomic Aftermath: Short Stories about Hiroshima and Nagasaki and The Crazy Iris and Other Stories of the Atomic Aftermath, and authored a highly reviewed book of essays detailing post-war/bomb devastation titled Hiroshima Notes. As one who will always find more warmth in Western lit, I'd like to say that Oe's writing is stylistically diverse and emotionally complex--wetter (as opposed to dry) than many of its Eastern counterparts. In fact, he referenced The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and the poetry of William Butler Yeats in his Nobel acceptance speech as spiritual and creative inspiration; he concluded the speech by saying he hoped to be of some use in a cure and reconciliation of mankind. (On that note, the speech is really worth reading in its entirety, so perhaps in your moment of silence?: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1994/oe-lecture.html/)