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A review by arirang
Hiroshima Notes by Kenzaburō Ōe, David L. Swain, Toshi Yonezawa
2.0
In 1963, Kenzaburō Ōe, then aged 28, was already developing a reputation as a novelist and a spokesperson for the younger generation.
June 1963 marked the birth of Ōe's son Hikari, born with a severe brain lesion, who was to be so important to much of the rest of Ōe subsequent writing.
Shortly after the birth, while debating whether to consent to an operation that might save Hikari's life but likely leave him mentally handicapped, Ōe accepted a commission to visit Hiroshima to report on a international peace conference to abolish nuclear weapons, a gathering that influenced by international trends, was expected to end in serious fragmentation of Japan's peace movement,
The result of that visit was this series of essays, ヒロシマ・ノート (phonetically Hiroshima nōto), which was originally published in 1965, between the 1964 novel A Personal Matter and perhaps his masterpiece The Silent Cry on 1967 (titles in the later English translations).
But the experience also had a profound impact on Ōe's own work and life:
Without that transforming summer experience, my literary work and my personal life would never have evolved as they did.
(author's introduction to 1995 edition)
(see also https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1994/oe/article/ for more background on the author and his works and this Goodreads thread https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/18103798)
The opening essays here tell of a Montyphytonesque split in the anti-nuclear movement, largely due to whether disarmament demands should be applied to all parties or somehow exempt the Communist bloc, and also whether Russia and China should be treated differently, leading to a farcical People's Front of Judea/ Judean People's Front "splitter" into the The Japan Council Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs and the The Japan Council Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs.
But Ōe instead found himself impressed by the dignity, and dismayed by the ongoing suffering, of those who actually experienced and survived the bomb (rather than those attempting to use their suffering purely for political purposes).
I have read all of Ōe's fiction in English translation, albeit many of the key works (including those discussed by the Nobel Committee https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1994/ceremony-speech/) are as yet untranslated.
But I was prompted to visit this book by Andres Neuman's novel Fractura, based around the Fukashima nuclear incident but whose protagonist, a (fictional) survivor of Hiroshima, reads this work in the 1960s, and can't identify with Ōe's view:
Watanabe had been born in the same year as Ōe, in a neighbouring region, just one prefecture away. They were both from towns close to Hiroshima, brought up under a militaristic nationalism, but had opposite approaches to dealing with the past.
His near neighbour wrote about the lessons the world could learn from the nuclear tragedy. About respect for the victims. The dignity of the survivors. Or promoted these ideas with the best of intentions.
The problem was that Yoshie himself felt very far from embodying those supposed lessons. He had no sense of being ennobled by everything he’d experienced or lost. All he retained, with brutal clarity, was the fear, the harm, the anger, the shame.
Ōe's own take on the Fukashima disaster can be found in his last (to date) novel whose English title would be In Late Style (from Edward Said's essay collection) but which unfortunately has yet to be translated (see https://web.archive.org/web/20120319085317/https://blogs.wsj.com/japanrealtime/2012/03/19/oe-in-paris-a-laureate-reflects-on-march-11/ and https://www.lemonde.fr/livres/article/2012/03/15/kenzaburo-oe-sommes-nous-un-peuple-aussi-facile-a-berner_1669357_3260.html)
It has to be said this book doesn't read that well to a more international audience, either in terms of the detail (things that would have been current issue in 1960s Japan are rather hard to follow in 2020s UK) or it the attitude. The rather infamous line in one of his essays even though the scope of misery caused in Hiroshima far exceeds that of Auschwitz is really quite a shocker (why even quantify a comparison?) albeit technically he is reporting (albeit approvingly) someone else's views.
In his 1995 foreword Ōe acknowledged:
At the time of writing these essays in this book I was sadly lacking in the attitude and ability needed to recast Hiroshima in an Asian perspective.
something he attempted to rectify in his 1994 Nobel Prize lecture (https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1994/oe/lecture/)
Also as fan of the author's novel, this was disappointing on a purely literary level, albeit that may well be a function of the translation. This book is aimed in English at a different audience and with a different literary intent, that his novels, and the translation decisions by David L. Swain and Toshi Yonezawa (not the translators of his novels) rather reflect that. As the former explains in a foreword:
The editorial goal was to make the author's own text as accessible as possible to the English-language reader ... the author's intricate style at times lends itself to both complex and simple English translations and editors opted for the more straightforward rendering.
As a (frustrated by lack of translations) Ōe completist, this was a worthwhile read for background and insight into his writing (and I plan to tackle his autobiographical writing next). But I would struggle to recommend this to anyone who is a fan of the novels but hasn't yet read them all (read the fiction first) or as the best non-fiction treatment of the people of Hiroshima.
2.5 stars
June 1963 marked the birth of Ōe's son Hikari, born with a severe brain lesion, who was to be so important to much of the rest of Ōe subsequent writing.
Shortly after the birth, while debating whether to consent to an operation that might save Hikari's life but likely leave him mentally handicapped, Ōe accepted a commission to visit Hiroshima to report on a international peace conference to abolish nuclear weapons, a gathering that influenced by international trends, was expected to end in serious fragmentation of Japan's peace movement,
The result of that visit was this series of essays, ヒロシマ・ノート (phonetically Hiroshima nōto), which was originally published in 1965, between the 1964 novel A Personal Matter and perhaps his masterpiece The Silent Cry on 1967 (titles in the later English translations).
But the experience also had a profound impact on Ōe's own work and life:
Without that transforming summer experience, my literary work and my personal life would never have evolved as they did.
(author's introduction to 1995 edition)
(see also https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1994/oe/article/ for more background on the author and his works and this Goodreads thread https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/18103798)
The opening essays here tell of a Montyphytonesque split in the anti-nuclear movement, largely due to whether disarmament demands should be applied to all parties or somehow exempt the Communist bloc, and also whether Russia and China should be treated differently, leading to a farcical People's Front of Judea/ Judean People's Front "splitter" into the The Japan Council Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs and the The Japan Council Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs.
But Ōe instead found himself impressed by the dignity, and dismayed by the ongoing suffering, of those who actually experienced and survived the bomb (rather than those attempting to use their suffering purely for political purposes).
I have read all of Ōe's fiction in English translation, albeit many of the key works (including those discussed by the Nobel Committee https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1994/ceremony-speech/) are as yet untranslated.
But I was prompted to visit this book by Andres Neuman's novel Fractura, based around the Fukashima nuclear incident but whose protagonist, a (fictional) survivor of Hiroshima, reads this work in the 1960s, and can't identify with Ōe's view:
Watanabe had been born in the same year as Ōe, in a neighbouring region, just one prefecture away. They were both from towns close to Hiroshima, brought up under a militaristic nationalism, but had opposite approaches to dealing with the past.
His near neighbour wrote about the lessons the world could learn from the nuclear tragedy. About respect for the victims. The dignity of the survivors. Or promoted these ideas with the best of intentions.
The problem was that Yoshie himself felt very far from embodying those supposed lessons. He had no sense of being ennobled by everything he’d experienced or lost. All he retained, with brutal clarity, was the fear, the harm, the anger, the shame.
Ōe's own take on the Fukashima disaster can be found in his last (to date) novel whose English title would be In Late Style (from Edward Said's essay collection) but which unfortunately has yet to be translated (see https://web.archive.org/web/20120319085317/https://blogs.wsj.com/japanrealtime/2012/03/19/oe-in-paris-a-laureate-reflects-on-march-11/ and https://www.lemonde.fr/livres/article/2012/03/15/kenzaburo-oe-sommes-nous-un-peuple-aussi-facile-a-berner_1669357_3260.html)
It has to be said this book doesn't read that well to a more international audience, either in terms of the detail (things that would have been current issue in 1960s Japan are rather hard to follow in 2020s UK) or it the attitude. The rather infamous line in one of his essays even though the scope of misery caused in Hiroshima far exceeds that of Auschwitz is really quite a shocker (why even quantify a comparison?) albeit technically he is reporting (albeit approvingly) someone else's views.
In his 1995 foreword Ōe acknowledged:
At the time of writing these essays in this book I was sadly lacking in the attitude and ability needed to recast Hiroshima in an Asian perspective.
something he attempted to rectify in his 1994 Nobel Prize lecture (https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1994/oe/lecture/)
The contemporary state of Japan and its people in their post-modern phase cannot but be ambivalent. Right in the middle of the history of Japan's modernisation came the Second World War, a war which was brought about by the very aberration of the modernisation itself. The defeat in this War fifty years ago occasioned an opportunity for Japan and the Japanese as the very agent of the War to attempt a rebirth out of the great misery and sufferings that were depicted by the ‘Post-war School’ of Japanese writers. The moral props for Japanese aspiring to such a rebirth were the idea of democracy and their determination never to wage a war again. Paradoxically, the people and state of Japan living on such moral props were not innocent but had been stained by their own past history of invading other Asian countries. Those moral props mattered also to the deceased victims of the nuclear weapons that were used for the first time in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and for the survivors and their off-spring affected by radioactivity (including tens of thousands of those whose mother tongue is Korean).
Also as fan of the author's novel, this was disappointing on a purely literary level, albeit that may well be a function of the translation. This book is aimed in English at a different audience and with a different literary intent, that his novels, and the translation decisions by David L. Swain and Toshi Yonezawa (not the translators of his novels) rather reflect that. As the former explains in a foreword:
The editorial goal was to make the author's own text as accessible as possible to the English-language reader ... the author's intricate style at times lends itself to both complex and simple English translations and editors opted for the more straightforward rendering.
As a (frustrated by lack of translations) Ōe completist, this was a worthwhile read for background and insight into his writing (and I plan to tackle his autobiographical writing next). But I would struggle to recommend this to anyone who is a fan of the novels but hasn't yet read them all (read the fiction first) or as the best non-fiction treatment of the people of Hiroshima.
2.5 stars