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

[Mark Kohut]

As Monte and the article said, HIROSHIMA hit the culture hard and went
long...The book still sold steadily
in a powerfully looking paperback when I entered bookselling in the later 60s.

IF The Bomb hung over us all....this book and the Cuban Missile Crisis
did most to hang it there...

On Fri, Aug 7, 2015 at 1:14 PM, jochen stremmel <jstremmel at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>>>> >>
>>>> >>
>>>> >
>>>> > -
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>>
>
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