慶應文 2011 A

Of the personal memoirs of Hiroshima that I know―which are those that have been translated from the Japanese―all but (1)one have this in common, that they are gatherings of images rather than continuous narratives. And one can see why this might be the form those memories would take. These books are by men and women who were there, under that burst of apocalyptic light and heat, and who witnessed the utter strangeness of the event and its aftermath. They looked on a scene more radically unfamiliar and more desolate than any battlefield: the dead more hideous, the surface of the earth more utterly devastated. Nothing was recognizable, neither persons nor places: children did not recognize their parents, people returning to their neighborhoods couldn't find where their own houses had stood, or even their streets. As for the order in time that continuity in a story implies, where was it? What could be expected or predicted in this annihilated place? How could there be a tomorrow?

Even the one continuous narrative, Dr. Michihiko Hachiya's Hiroshima Diary, has this quality of radical strangeness; it is a diary, a day-to-day report of a life, yet it has no sense of dailiness about it, none of the familiarities and repetitions by which ordinary life goes on. Dr. Hachiya's days pass without coherence, in a town that no longer exists, in a time that is out of time. The strangeness is in the first entry, dated August 6,1945―the day of the bomb. It is morning; Dr. Hachiya is sprawled on his living room floor, dressed only in his underwear, exhausted by a night of air-raid-warden duty.

Suddenly, a strong flash of light startled me―and then another. So well does one recall little things that I remember vividly how a stone lantern in the garden became brilliantly lit.... Garden shadows disappeared. The view where a moment before all had been so bright and sunny was now dark and hazy. Through swirling dust I could barely discern a wooden column that had supported one corner of my house. It was leaning crazily and the roof sagged, dangerously.

Moving instinctively, I tried to escape, but rubble and fallen timbers barred the way. By picking my way cautiously I managed to reach the roka [a sort of gallery around the house] and stepped into my garden. A profound weakness overcame me, so I stopped to regain my strength. To my surprise I discovered that I was completely naked. How odd! Where were my vest and pants?

What had happened?

All over the right side of my body I was cut and bleeding. A large splinter was protruding from a mangled wound in my thigh, and something warm trickled into my mouth. My cheek was torn, I discovered as I felt it gingerly, with the lower lip laid wide open. Embedded in my neck was a sizeable fragment of glass which I matter-of-factly dislodged, and with the detachment of one stunned and shocked I studied it and my blood-stained hand.

(2)The note through the entry is of stunned astonishment; a man of science finds himself in a new world of events without causes.

The dead and dying that he sees around him are part of that terrible strangeness. Confronted by these damaged people, the doctor cannot comprehend the causes of their injuries; and later, when radiation-sickness cases begin to appear, he can neither diagnose nor treat their illness: 'there was not one with symptoms typical of anything we knew.' He doesn't even have a medical language for what he sees; he speaks more like a survivor of some primal catastrophe, like Noah after the flood, than like a doctor.

Helplessness is a condition of victim literature, perhaps the definitive condition. (3)So long as you can do something, oppose your enemy somehow, you are not entirely a victim. But here, there was nothing to be done, and the doctors felt that as much as anyone. 'There is nothing I can do,' a fellow doctor tells Dr. Hachiya; 'nothing anybody can do.' But there is something they can do; they can testify, as scientists, to what has happened. 'We had no microscope, no laboratory reagents, and no laboratory, but ( ア ) history and clinical findings we could record might one day be important. Nowhere before in the history of the world had a people been subjected to the devastating effects of an atomic bomb.' And so the helpless man opposes, by bearing witness.