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By Makoto Oda
Translated by D. H. Whittaker. 216 pages. Kodansha International. $18.95.
Hiroshima
Three Witnesses
Edited and translated by Richard H. Minear
Illustrated. 393 pages. Princeton University Press. $40 cloth; $15 paper.
For the last 45 years, Aug. 6 has been branded in memory as the day the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. For the first time in the long history of conflict between tribes and nations, the lingering effects of a military weapon challenged the very idea of a large-scale war in any civilized future.
How could the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki be depicted in art and language to convey the horror and to serve as a warning? That problem has confronted artists and writers ever since the first atomic bomb fell and its radioactive cloud became a tocsin for mankind. No Picasso appeared to create a ”Guernica” for Hiroshima; no one did for Nagasaki what Henry Moore did for London in the ”Shelter Drawings,” which showed British families sleeping in the Underground during the Blitz.
In a newly translated novel – ”The Bomb,” by Makoto Oda – and in a collection of prose and poetry – ”Hiroshima: Three Witnesses,” edited by Richard H. Minear – Japanese writers grapple with their own experiences. They present unforgettable scenes of disaster but attach little blame to the United States in apolitical memoirs that recognize war’s consequences.
As reportage, ”Hiroshima: Three Witnesses” proves that what happened on Aug. 6, 1945, and in the days that followed needs no embroidering. As fiction, ”The Bomb” suffers from overambition. It mixes in too many characters and elements, including the plight of American Indians and of Japanese-Americans interned during the war. A far more successful novel about Hiroshima is Masuji Ibuse’s ”Hard Rain,” which also was the basis for a fine film, in part because it narrowed its focus to members of a single family and their friends.
Mr. Oda’s novel might well have worked had he confined his story to Japan. Perhaps unwittingly, he has tried to write three or four novels in ”The Bomb,” neglecting the main event: the bombing of Hiroshima and its effects. More than half of the novel takes place in the United States. He begins in a small Southwestern town, where an Indian tribe is evicted from its sacred tribal land for a top-secret Government project. This enables him to offer familiar criticism of the exploitation of the American Indians. Then he introduces a Korean woman whose family moved before the war to Japan, where they encountered discrimination. The author also editorializes about the treatment of Americans of Japanese descent in wartime. He jumps around from American internment camps to the war in the Pacific to a cancer ward in Japan to a surrealistic dream of a visit to the White House. In the process, Hiroshima gets lost.
”Hiroshima: Three Witnesses” is a valuable work because of its first-person recollections. Almost from the first day, the contributors said they had decided that they must bear witness to the event, for themselves and for later generations. The three witnesses are a fabulist, Hara Tamiki; a novelist, Ota Yoko, and a poet, Toge Sankichi.
In ”Summer Flowers,” Hara Tamiki gives an account of his family’s ordinary activities on the day the bomb dropped. He describes the flash of light, the shock that threw him to the ground, the fires that raged, the wounded with their ashen faces, the torrent of radioactive rain. Everyone had a personal story to tell: ”There was the story of the man who, in searching for his wife, lifted up the corpses of several hundred women in order to examine their faces; not a single one still had a wristwatch on.”
In ”City of Corpses,” Ota Yoko describes Aug. 6 and the months that followed. What is particularly interesting is that part of her story, written for Japanese consumption during the Occupation, was censored by a United States Army intelligence officer. In part of one censored section of her book – now published here in full – the author wrote:
”When the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, the war was already over. The Fascist and Nazi armies had been utterly defeated, and Japan stood alone against the entire world. A war in which, objectively speaking, the outcome has been settled is no longer a war. In that sense, the war was already over. Had the militarists not held out desperately and pointlessly, the war actually would have been over. The atomic bomb, at Hiroshima or anywhere else, is unthinkable except as the ugly after-echo of a war that had already ended.”
The ”Poems of the Atomic Bomb” by Toge Sankichi, the third witness, are eloquent. In the final stanza of ”Flames,” he writes:
Hiroshima’s
night of fire
casts its glow
over sleeping humanity;
before long
history will set an ambush
for all who would play god.
Most American readers first became aware of what the bomb meant to its victims when The New Yorker devoted its entire issue of Aug. 31, 1946, to John Hersey’s ”Hiroshima.” That celebrated report followed the lives of six people who lived through the explosion. Mr. Hersey’s latest edition of ”Hiroshima,” published in 1985 after a return visit to update his original report, informed readers about what had happened to the six people he interviewed. It remains the clearest study of Hiroshima. In one chilling observation, Mr. Hersey noted that a 1984 poll showed that a majority of Hiroshima survivors believed that nuclear weapons would be used again.
Saturday, Late Edition – Final
A book review on Wednesday about ”The Bomb,” by Makoto Oda, misidentified another novel about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. It is Masuji Ibuse’s ”Black Rain,” not ”Hard Rain.”