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

[jochen stremmel]

Many thanks for that Hersey piece. TRP was 9 years old when it came out –
wouldn't have read it then but perhaps noticed that the issue had no
cartoons.


2015-08-07 16:17 GMT+02:00 Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>:

> 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
>>> >>
>>> >>
>>> >
>>> > -
>>> > Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>>> -
>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>>>
>>
>
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