Hostname: page-component-7479d7b7d-wxhwt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-11T08:26:02.602Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Hiroshima and the Place of the Narrator

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2011

John Whittier Treat
Get access

Extract

In ōta yōko's (1903?–63) novel Han-ningen (Half-Human, 1954) the heroine, named Oda Atsuko, is like author Ōta herself a famous A-bomb writer suffering from severe depression. She enters the hospital in an attempt to cure an addiction to tranquilizers whose intemperate use derives from very real, but to the medical profession opaque, neuroses ultimately due to the trauma of Hiroshima. No treatment proves totally effective. Medicine can only hope to counter illness, not history, and Oda's deepest torments remain chronic. She continues to be plagued by a frustration linked in the novel's fifth chapter with the choices she has faced in the seven years since the end of the Second World War: suicide, flight, or the writing of a “good work of literature.” Throughout the novel Oda dismisses suicide as not in her nature; Ota, in her essay “Ikinokori no shinri” (The psychology of survival, 1952), concludes that no Japanese writer can abandon Japan, and her heroine here concurs. Of Oda's three alternatives all that is left is the writing of a good work, but that too seems elusive. What constitutes “good” is unclear. Just how she might recognize such a work (ii sakuhin to wa nanimono ka) is a literary problem inextricably bound with Oda's physical and psychological problems, and all have arisen from her presence at Hiroshima's destruction on August 6, 1945.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 48 , Issue 1 , February 1989 , pp. 29 - 49
Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 1989

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

List of References

Booth, Wayne. 1983. A Rhetoric of Fiction. 2d ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Akiko, Esashi. 1971. Kusazue: Ōta Yōko hyōden [Spoiled grass: A critical biography of Ōta Yōko]. Tokyo: Nami Shobō.Google Scholar
Shinzō, Hamai. 1965. “Hajime ni” [Foreword]. In Genbaku taikenki [Atomic-bomb testimonies], ed. Kankōkai, Hiroshimashi Genbaku Taikenki, pp. 3–4. Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha.Google Scholar
Tamiki, Hara. [1948] 1965. “Sensō ni tsuite” [On war]. In Hara Tamiki zenshū [Collected works of Hara Tamiki] 2:589–90. Tokyo: Haga Shoten.Google Scholar
Sadako, Kurihara. 1970. Dokyumento Hiroshima 24 nen: Genzai no kyūsai [Document Hiroshima 24 years: The salvation of the present]. Tokyo: Shakai Shinpō.Google Scholar
Sadako, Kurihara. [1978] 1983. “Genbaku bungaku ronsōshi (shō): Ōta Yōko o jiku ni” [Excerpts from the history of the atomic-bomb literature debates: Ōta Yōko]. In NGB 15:269–300.Google Scholar
Kazuo, Kuroko. 1983. Genbaku to kotoba [The atomic bomb and language]. Tokyo: San'ichi Shobō.Google Scholar
Lifton, Robert Jay. 1967. Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima. New York: Simon and Schuster.Google Scholar
Hiroyoshi, Nagaoka. 1973. Genbaku bungakushi [A history of atomic-bomb literature]. Nagoya: Fūbaisha.Google Scholar
Hiroyoshi, Nagaoka. 1982. “Kaisetsu” [Commentary]. In OYS 2:345–55.Google Scholar
Hiroshi, Noma. [1953] 1983. “Genbaku ni tsuite” [On the atomic bomb]. In NGB 15:145–48.Google Scholar
Yōko, Ōta. [1939] 1982. Ryūri no kishi [Drifting Shores]. In OYS 4:5–255.Google Scholar
Yōko, Ōta. [1945] 1982. “Kaitei no yō na hikari—genshi bakudan no kushu ni atte [A light as if from the depths—the atomic bomb air attack].” In OYS 2:275–80.Google Scholar
Yōko, Ōta. [1948]. 1982. Shikabane no macbi [City of corpses]. In OYS 1:6–156.Google Scholar
Yōko, Ōta. [1950] 1982. “Shikabane no macbi jo” [Preface to City of Corpses]. In OYS 2:300–305.Google Scholar
Yōko, Ōta. [1951] 1982. Ningen ranru [Human rags]. In OYS 2:7–273.Google Scholar
Yōko, Ōta. [1952a] 1982. “Ikinokori no shinri” [The psychology of survival]. In OYS 2:314–20.Google Scholar
Yōko, Ōta. [1952b] 1982. “Sakka no taido” [The stance of the writer]. In OYS 2:307–11.Google Scholar
Yōko, Ōta. [1953] 1985. “Fireflies” [Hotaru]. Trans. Kōichi, Nakagawa. In The Crazy Iris and Other Stories of the Atomic Aftermath, ed. with introduction by Ken-zaburō, Ōe, pp. 85–111. New York: Grove Press, Inc.Google Scholar
Yōko, Ōta. [1954] 1982. Han-ningen [Half-Human]. In OYS 1:261–334.Google Scholar
Yōko, Ōta. [1956] 1982. “Bungaku no osoroshisa” [The terror of literature]. In OYS 2:321–23.Google Scholar
Yōko, Ōta. 1961. Hachijūyonsai [Eighty-four years old]. Tokyo: Kōdansha.Google Scholar
Ineko, Sata. 1982. “Kaisetsu.” In OYS 1:335–46.Google Scholar
Akiko, Sawada. 1985. “Shikabane no machi” [City of corpses]. Kokubungaku kaishaku to kanshō 50, no. 9:60–65.Google Scholar
Steiner, George. 1966. Language and Silence. New York: Atheneum.Google Scholar
Kōichirō, Tanabe. [1954] 1983. “Genbaku no bungaku [The literature of the atomic bomb].” In NGB 15:167–79.Google Scholar
Kazuhiko, Uranishi. 1982. “Kaisetsu.” In OYS 4:341–51.Google Scholar