Hiroshima Notes

by Kenzaburō Ōe

Book Overview

Hiroshima Notes is a powerful statement on the Hiroshima bombing and its terrible legacy by the 1994 Nobel laureate for literature. Oe's account of the lives of the many victims of Hiroshima and the valiant efforts of those who cared for them, both immediately after the atomic blast and in the years that follow, reveals the horrific extent of the devastation. It is a heartrending portrait of a ravaged city -- the "human face" in the midst of nuclear...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802134645
• ISBN13: 9780802134646
• Release Date: June 1996
• Publisher: Grove Press
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.5" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Not "Very Good" condition as ordered

Once again I have received the book that I ordered as "Very Good", without a dust jacket!!! I would not have ordered it if it had said "no dust jacket." So frustrating. ISBN: 0714530077 ISBN13: 9780714530079

not about taking sides

The other long reviews do a decent job summarizing. But what's missed is Oe's moral stance--he isn't interested in "victimhood Olympics", whether the bombs were worse or as bad as Auschwitz; he's not even really interested in why they were dropped or if the decision made political and military sense from an American perspective, or even if the bombs might have shortened the war. He simply doesn't care about that sort of calculation and he's arguing that neither should you. Nobody despises Japanese militarism and colonialism more than Oe, so he's no apologist for the Japanese military or political leaders. Which is of course his point. His moralism is like Ghandi's: seemingly simple, but really only uncompromising. The book is about how ordinary people dealt with the consequences of the bombing. They are who matters to him and they will always be precisely who doesn't matter to political or military disucssions or to the victimhood Olympics. This book only looks simplistic or one-sided if you try to read it from those perspectives, which are Oe's target. I suppose the book is also an implicit essay on how hard it is to get people past their rationalizations. I mean, this book is as direct as it gets, but most readers, Japanese and otherwise, still refuse to see the point.

An Honorable Authenticity of Survival

The book "Hiroshima Notes" is a collection of essays, journalistic in conception and in style, written by Oe Kenzaburo in the mid-1960s after his first visit to Hiroshima to report on an international conference there. Each essay might stand alone as a piece of impressionistic reflection; together they are somewhat repetitive and sprawling. Many of the concerns and most of the events are 'water under the bridge' by now, whatever the resolution has been, but the intensity of Oe-san's involvement with the mentality of Hiroshima and the Hiroshima survivors still has the power to compel an English reader to think and feel. Don't look for Oe's characteristically bizarre, visceral prose style in these essays. At least in translation, they are written simply and declaratively, with extended passages of quotation from writings and interviews of the Hiroshima survivors themselves. Still, Oe's perceptions are complex and multi-faceted, not always consistent, and not always palatable to an "outside person" - a "gai jin" - particularly to an American who may be ready to defend the use of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. One of the two previous reviewers here on the River expresses that patriotic dudgeon quite vehemently. Oe - let's be honest! - regards the bombing as a crime against humanity comparable to the German genocide camps. [Please don't lambaste me in comments; I'm merely reporting, not advocating.] In the preface to the first republication of Hiroshima Notes as a book, Oe wrote: "The realities of Hiroshima can be forgotten only by those who dare to be deaf, dumb, and blind to them." Read that sentence several times! It's not as straightforward as it seems. Why "dare"? Allowing for the difficulty of translation, still I think this sentence captures Oe's ambiguity about the remembrance of what he considers the cruelest punishment ever inflicted on any people in history. On the one hand, no one beyond Hiroshima should be so foolish as to forget exactly how horrible the atomic attack was. But on the other hand, Oe repeatedly expresses great admiration for the citizens of Hiroshima who have chosen to "forget" enough to seek full lives, to eschew victimhood, to avoid being viewed as mere evidence in the global anti-war movements. Be prepared to accept such ambiguity if you read Hiroshima Notes; Oe is able to express admiration and approval both for those Hiroshimans who choose to live on and those who choose to die by suicide. Among the sites Oe visited in 1965 was the "A-bomb hospital", where he observed an aged survivor, quite near death after a 20-year battle with radiation sickness, who described himself as one of the "people who go on struggling toward a miserable death." This Mr. Miyamoto is one of those whom Oe considers "authentic" people. Oe says: "As I understand it, Mr. Miyamoto left this phrase with the strongest sense of humanism, for he did not lose courage even while struggling for nothing more tha to give meaning to the tim

Lessons from suffering

Hiroshima Notes is a collection of seven essays written between August 1963 and January 1965 on the occasion of several visits by Mr. Oe to Hiroshima. The year 1963 was a watershed for Kenzaburo Oe. In 1963, his son was born with a lesion of the skull through which brain tissue protruded. Unable to decide if he should allow the child to die or agree to an operation which would leave his son permanently brain-damaged, Mr. Oe went on a reporting assignment to Hiroshima that resulted in "a decisive turnabout" of his life which, he says, "eschewing all religious connotations, I would still call a conversion".The central figure of the essays is Dr. Fumio Shigeta, a medical doctor who was in Hiroshima on the day the A-bomb was dropped. He happened to arrive in the city to take up a new post just a week before the day of the bombing. It is through Dr. Shigeta that Oe learns how the bomb victims become social outcasts, have difficulties finding marital partners, get divorced because they cannot have children, hide in shame in the back-rooms of their houses for years, and commit suicide or go insane upon learning that they are diagnosed as having "an A-bomb disease". In the midst of this pain and suffering, Dr. Shigeta patiently applies his medical skills to help the victims. He ignores the stigma placed on the victims by Japanese society, and for him there is no taboo on issues like the genetic effects of the radiation.Dr. Shigeta is the "authentic man" for Oe, a person who is "humanist in the truest sense ¡V neither too wildly desperate nor too vainly hopeful". A man of modesty, patience and perseverance, Dr. Shigeta appears to be the real-life counterpart of the fictional Docteur Rieux of Albert Camus's novel The Plague: "When Hiroshima was attacked by radiation - the plague of the modern age - the city was not specifically closed off. Since that day . . . Dr. Shigeta took upon himself the misery of Hiroshima, and has continued to do so for twenty years."More than anything he saw in Hiroshima, it must have been the example of Dr. Shigeta that made Oe realize that there was just one answer to his own personal question whether his son should be operated to live brain-damaged thereafter or be left to die. If Dr. Shigeta could bear the suffering of thousands of strangers and dedicate his life to relieving their pain, then he could bear the suffering of raising a brain-damaged son. I believe it was this realization that made Oe wake up and face his own suffering: "I think it was in Hiroshima that I got my first concrete insight into human authenticity." While the Hiroshima Notes are the central document of Oe's humanism, they also provide a uniquely Japanese view of the Hiroshima bombing. Oe examines the feelings of shame and humiliation in the victims, and the attempts of the people of Hiroshima to forget what he calls the "holocaust of the A-bomb". His tone is very restrained and unemotional, devoid of moralizing and anger. Any sensationalism is missing