Kenzaburo Oe on 70th Anniv. of US Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

[Monte Davis]

Is it only fiction that can "work things over on an artistic/cultural
level"..? Because John Hersey's 'Hiroshima,' filling an issue of the New
Yorker barely a year after the event, was a striking public event --
newsstands sold out, readings on radio and live around the country, etc.

http://www.newyorker.com/books/double-take/john-herseys-hiroshima-now-online

It was certainly important to me in 1960, and instrumental in steering me
towards being a receptive reader for GR. Born in 1949, my parents having
met and married as Marines in the Pacific during the war, I'd grown up
immersed in US triumphalism (not specifically theirs, which was quite
muted) and Cold War nerves. As a very precocious reader by 1960, I was
already immersed in science fiction (lots of nuclear apocalypses), WWII
accounts such as Dornberger's V-2, and filling my school notebooks with
drawings of jets and rocket ships. I'd just read Martin Caidin's then-new
The Night Hamburg Died about the 1943 firestorm, with fascinated horror but
no real moral reflection I can recall, and found Hiroshima on the same
library shelf. I can remember very clearly, only part way through it,
thinking: 'No, this is too much, nothing can justify this. Don't care who
started it, don't care if bombing Tokyo the old-fashioned way had killed
more in ways just as terrible, don't care how many more Japanese and
Americans might have died in some alternate history, this is just too
wrong.'

Part of that was the "keep cool but care" clarity of Hersey's writing, and
part was surely that the A-bomb connected with my own anxieties from
duck-and-cover drills and bomb-shelter signs in my schools: we were about
to move from a Boston suburb into ground-zero Manhattan, and my uncle would
soon build a basement shelter. I wish I could say I was instantly cured of
boys'-toys fascination with military technology and its awful spectacles,
but I can say that after reading Hiroshima I could never again indulge it
without questions and qualms -- which would grow through the 1960s into
systematic skepticism about Their accounts of current affairs as well as
about history.

On Fri, Aug 7, 2015 at 7:46 AM, John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:

> Always feels to me that the US never really worked over the bombings of
> Hiroshima and Nagasaki on an artistic/cultural level the way German postwar
> artists addressed their own nation's actions. Not unusual of course,
> Japan's own actions in Manchuria are rarely addressed in fiction and
> Australia is obsessed with romanticizing WWI and II. But am I missing a
> great US work about the Hiroshima bombing that's equivalent to any of the
> German greats?
> On 7 Aug 2015 8:43 pm, "Mark Kohut" <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Very moving interview. His life is a parable. I second the recommendation.
>>
>> Sent from my iPad
>>
>> > On Aug 7, 2015, at 2:57 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <
>> lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>> >
>> >
>> > Great interview, thanks!
>> >
>> > Oe's books - start with "A Personal Matter"! - I can recommend.
>> >
>> >
>> >> On 07.08.2015 03:33, Dave Monroe wrote:
>> >>
>> http://www.democracynow.org/2015/8/6/japanese_nobel_laureate_kenzaburo_oe_on
>> >> -
>> >> Pynchon-l /http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>> >>
>> >>
>> >
>> > -
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