Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima

10 Creative Response: 1) "A-Bomb Literature"

CREATIVE RESPONSE: 1) "A-BOMB LITERATURE" Artistic re-creation of an overwhelming historical experience has much to do with the question o'f mastery. Artists can apply to that experience their particular aesthetic traditions and individual talents to evolve new ways of "seeing" it and giving it form. In Hiroshima or elsewhere the relationship between the quality or popularity of artistic works and the degree of collective mastery is imprecise and difficult to evaluate. But an important relationship does exist. For these works are special distillations of group psychic response, and in their accomplishments and failures can both reflect that response and profoundlyinfluence it. I therefore tried to learn what I could about artistic reactions of every kind to the A-bomb, particularly in Hiroshima itself, and to a lesser extent in other parts of Japan and the rest of the world. Since the most significant efforts—in quality, number, and general influence—have been made in literature and film, all of this chapter deals with the former, and most of the next chapter with the latter. Stage, radio, and television drama, as well as painting and music, are treated more briefly. In no case shall I attempt to be all-inclusive. Rather, I shall focus upon what I consider to be the most important general themes, paying special attention to the artist's individual psychic struggles and their relation- D E A T H I N L I F E ship to his creative work, particularly in the case of those artists (mostly writers) with whom I was able to explore such issues directly. We shall note important differences between hibakusha and nonhibakusha artists, but also strikingly consistent patterns having to do with the nature of the A-bomb experience and the formidable barriers it poses to all recreation . 39S I) Problematic Genre Turning first to writing, the dilemma which immediately presents itself is whether or not there is such a thing as "A-bomb literature"—a term that has been used to include just about everything written which mentions the atomic bomb. Like "A-bomb disease/' it illuminates important problems by its very ambiguity, as well as by the contention it inspires. We have, in earlier chapters, quoted from one kind of A-bomb literature, the personal diary or memoir—most frequently from Yoko Ota's Town of Corpses and Dr. Michihiko Hachiya's Hiroshima Diary. Memoirs, of course, never merely record events, but re-create them through the author's personal formulation of them, however hidden this formulation may be. In Miss Ota's case, we have observed the blending of exquisite psychological sensibilities with an angry anti-militarism; and in Dr. Hachiya's, a combination of medical commitment and nonjudgmental detachment (not to mention the further distillation of his Hiroshima Diary, and in a sense reformulation of it, by Warner Wells, the articulate and morally responsive American physician who rendered the book into English). Such memoirs derive, at least in part, from two longstanding Japanese literary conventions: the use of the personal diary; and the related "Inovel ," a form of first-person narrative which all but obliterates the boundaries between autobiography and fiction. We are therefore hardly surprised that many A-bomb memoirs, including Miss Ota's, have been labeled novels. But the distinction between memoir and fictional transformation isof considerable importance. Indeed, the difficulty in taking the imaginative leap from the one to the other was a preoccupation of just about every writer I spoke to who was concerned with A-bomb literature. A Hiroshima literary critic conversant with these matters told me that there have been three sequential stages of writing about the A-bomb: first, that of "reportage" (or what we have called the "personal memoir"), beginning at the time of the bomb and extending until about the mid1950s ; then, that of a "novel" so autobiographical that it differs only slightly from reportage (and perhaps is best termed the "memoirnovel "), lasting roughly until 1955; and a subsequent "stage of confusion " in which writers have attempted, with relatively little success, to D E A T H I N L I F E convert the A-bomb experience into a genuinely fictional idiom. The critic's conviction was that writers "have already exhausted the resources of the immediate experience," and that they must now deal with it as "something of a more symbolic nature" by portraying "ordinary people and ordinary circumstances while having...