Saying the Unsayable: Hiroshima: Summer Flowers by Hara Tamiki
Translated from French
There are events in the history of mankind that seem to mark the limit of what language can express. The abyss opens, and words, derisory, appear to recoil before the horror. Hiroshima is one such abyss. Yet, faced with the unsayable, some have felt the imperative duty to bear witness, not to explain, but to not let silence complete the work of destruction. At the forefront of these watchmen stands Hara Tamiki (1905-1951), survivor, whose stories collected under the title Hiroshima: Summer Flowers constitute one of the founding acts of what critics would call “atomic bomb literature” (genbaku bungaku)1“Atomic bomb literature” refers to works born from the trauma of 1945. Carried by survivors like Hara Tamiki and Ôta Yôko, this genre was long “judged minor, local, documentary” by literary circles. Its strength lies precisely in its attempt to interrogate “the limits of language, its uncertainties, its lacks” in the face of horror and at the same time to strive to compensate for them, as Catherine Pinguet emphasizes.
Rejected forms:
Literature of the atom.
Gembaku bungaku.. A trilogy “of a world that never stops burning”2Forest, Philippe, “Quelques fleurs pour Hara Tamiki” (“A Few Flowers for Hara Tamiki”), art. cit., the work—composed of Prelude to Destruction (Kaimetsu no jokyoku), Summer Flowers (Natsu no hana) and Ruins (Haikyo kara)—recounts, in three stages, the before, the during, and the after.
A Writing of Deflagration
Hara’s style is not that of controlled writing, but a “descent into the fragile psyche of a desperate man” confronted with terribly undone, almost unrecognizable landscapes, where it seems impossible for him to find traces of his life as it was just moments before. His dislocated writing, which offers no landmarks, has as its setting a city itself annihilated, “disappeared without leaving traces—except for a sort of flat layer of rubble, ashes, twisted, burst, gnawed things” to borrow the words of Robert Guillain, the first Frenchman on the scene. It is on this canvas of desolation that Hara projects sometimes “shreds of interrupted existences”, sometimes fragments of memory filling the voids of a torn reality.
This stylistic deconstruction reaches its paroxysm when, in the poetic insertions, Hara adopts a particular form of Japanese—the katakana usually reserved for foreign words, as if the usual language had become inept:
“Sparkling debris
/ stretch into a vast landscape
Clear ashes
Who are these burned bodies with raw flesh?
Strange rhythm of dead men’s bodies
Did all this exist?
Could all this have existed?
An instant and a flayed world remains”Hara, Tamiki, Hiroshima : fleurs d’été : récits (Hiroshima: Summer Flowers: Stories), trans. from Japanese by Brigitte Allioux, Karine Chesneau and Rose-Marie Makino-Fayolle, Arles: Actes Sud, coll. “Babel”, 2007.
While Hara, inside the furnace, was suffering through this Dantesque spectacle, stunned intellectuals, at the other end of the world, were trying to think through the event. On August 8, 1945, Albert Camus wrote in Combat: “mechanical civilization has just reached its final degree of savagery. We will have to choose, in a more or less near future, between collective suicide or the intelligent use of scientific conquests. Meanwhile, it is permissible to think that there is some indecency in celebrating thus a discovery which first puts itself at the service of the most formidable rage of destruction that man has shown”3Camus’s editorial was published on the front page of the newspaper Combat only two days after the bombing and before that of Nagasaki. It offers the exact counterpoint to the reaction of much of the press, such as Le Monde which headlined the same day about “A scientific revolution”. By going against the enthusiasms of the time, Camus establishes himself as one of the quickest and most lucid intelligences at the moment of the advent of the nuclear age.. Hara does not philosophize, he shows; and what he shows is precisely this “rage of destruction” planted like a blade in the very flesh of men.
A Few Flowers on the Vastest of Tombs
The central story, Summer Flowers, opens with an intimate mourning: “I went out into town and bought flowers, for I had decided to go to my wife’s grave”. For Hara, the end of the world had already begun a year earlier. He had lost his wife, Sadae—the person dearest to his heart—and, with her, the purest delights of this life. The catastrophe of August 6, 1945, is therefore not a rupture sprung from nothingness, but the monstrous amplification of a personal drama, which mingles with the collective one of the atomic bomb victims and paradoxically ends up becoming a reason for being, an urgency to speak. “’I must leave all this in writing,’ I said to myself”, giving himself the courage to live a few more years. His writing is no longer merely a lament amid the ruins; it transforms into a memorial to Hiroshima, a few flowers laid for eternity on the vastest of tombs; an act of resistance too against the silences, whether imposed by the censorship of American occupation forces4After the 1945 surrender, American occupation authorities established a Press Code that for several years prohibited the dissemination of overly raw information and testimonies about the effects of the bombings, thus delaying the publication of many works, including those of Hara. “To suffer in silence, then”, summarizes psychologist Nayla Chidiac in her work L’Écriture qui guérit (Writing That Heals), which devotes an entire chapter to Hara., or born from discrimination against the “atomized” (hibakusha), whose stigmata engendered fear and rejection.
Silence of the Dead, Silence of God
But this mission that kept him alive ended up crushing him. In 1951, he signed a farewell note, haunted by the specter of a new Hiroshima with the outbreak of the Korean War: “It is time now for me to disappear into the invisible, into the eternity beyond”. Shortly after, he threw himself under a train. His ultimate gesture, as Nobel Prize winner Ôé Kenzaburô would write, was a final cry of protest “against the blind stupidity of the human race”.
When the voices of witnesses fall silent, memory takes refuge in the objects that the crime left behind. Decades later, it is this material memory that priest Michel Quoist confronts during his visit to the atomic bomb museum. He is struck by the vision of “clocks, pendulums, alarm clocks”, their hands forever frozen at 8:15: “Time is suspended”. This striking image is perhaps the most accurate metaphor for Hara’s effort to crystallize the fatal instant. It is this same image that would inspire Quoist to write a lapidary poem in perfect resonance with Hiroshima: Summer Flowers:
“Interrupted, erased people
/ dust
/ shadow
/ night
/ nothingness
Silence of the dead
Silence of GodWhy do you keep silent, the dead? I want to hear your voice!
Cry out!
Howl!
Tell us it is unjust!
Tell us we are mad! […]
IT IS NIGHT OVER HIROSHIMA”Quoist, Michel, À cœur ouvert (With an Open Heart), Paris: Les Éditions ouvrières, 1981.
To Go Further
Around Hiroshima: Summer Flowers
Quotations
“On the shore, on the embankment above the shore, everywhere the same men and the same women, whose shadows were reflected in the water. But what men, what women…! It was almost impossible to recognize a man from a woman, so swollen and wrinkled were the faces. Eyes narrowed like threads, lips, veritable inflamed wounds, bodies suffering everywhere, naked, all breathing with an insect’s breath, lying on the ground, dying. As we advanced, as we passed before them, these people of inexplicable appearance begged in a small sweet voice: ’Water, please, water…’”
Hara, Tamiki, Hiroshima : fleurs d’été : récits (Hiroshima: Summer Flowers: Stories), trans. from Japanese by Brigitte Allioux, Karine Chesneau and Rose-Marie Makino-Fayolle, Arles: Actes Sud, coll. “Babel”, 2007.
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Bibliography
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- Quoist, Michel, À cœur ouvert (With an Open Heart), Paris: Les Éditions ouvrières, 1981.
