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

[Mark Kohut]

Correction to my parochialism:

Unless you were Japanese, in which
case the bombs' unbelievable destruction did most to hang the fear of
The Bomb over one.

On Fri, Aug 7, 2015 at 1:22 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>>>>> >>
>>>>> >>
>>>>> >
>>>>> > -
>>>>> > Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>>>>> -
>>>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>>>
>>>
>>
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