If I had continued the listing, seven of the next eight books are by Haruki Murakami.
The only one of these that I have read is Memoirs of a Geisha and I was pretty unsatisfied by it. The rest all seem legit enough – they are set in Japan or somewhere like it. Before the Coffee Gets Cold starts in Korea but at a quick glance spends most of the book on the other side of the straits.
Next: the Philippines, but since next Sunday is the last day of the month when I will do my usual book round-up, that will be in two weeks’ time.
The messenger Father Kleinsorge had sent—the theological student who had been living at the mission house—had arrived at the Novitiate, in the hills about three miles out, at half past four. The sixteen priests there had been doing rescue work in the outskirts; they had worried about their colleagues in the city but had not known how or where to look for them. Now they hastily made two litters out of poles and boards, and the student led half a dozen of them back into the devastated area. They worked their way along the Ota above the city; twice the heat of the fire forced them into the river. At Misasa Bridge, they encountered a long line of soldiers making a bizarre forced march away from the Chugoku Regional Army Headquarters in the center of the town. All were grotesquely burned, and they supported themselves with staves or leaned on one another. Sick, burned horses, hanging their heads, stood on the bridge. When the rescue party reached the park, it was after dark, and progress was made extremely difficult by the tangle of fallen trees of all sizes that had been knocked down by the whirlwind that afternoon. At last—not long after Mrs. Murata asked her question—they reached their friends, and gave them wine and strong tea.
This is a searing and vivid piece of journalism, in which the stories of six victims of the Hiroshima bomb are told in detail. Five are Japanese, and the sixth is a German Jesuit priest. One of the Japanese is a Methodist minister, two are doctors and two are women, one a widow, one a young factory worker. You immediately notice of course that these are chosen to appeal to an American readership – for instance, two Christians out of six is probably somewhat higher than the general ratio within the population of Hiroshima, then or now.
And yet it’s excusable; the point of the writing is to make the reader think about what nuclear war would mean for people like them (i.e. New Yorker readers), and it works very well – the instant agony of the explosion, followed by the horrible deaths of many of the survivors over the following days in a city whose infrastructure has been pulverised and poisoned. There were of course other terrible bomb raids in the Second World War and before and after, but I don’t think it is wrong to look at Hiroshima in particular. It was the first atomic bombing, and it was worse hit than Nagasaki both proportionally and absolutely. It matters.
Hersey concentrates on the six core characters of his narrative, but it’s not difficult to find other details of tragedy from that day. For instance, Hiroshima’s mayor, a Christian who had resisted Japanese military excesses against their own civilian population in the 1930s, was eating breakfast outdoors that sunny morning with his son and granddaughter, and they were instantly fried by the blast; his wife, who was inside the residence, survived for a month before dying, and their daughter who came to Hiroshima to nurse her also later died of secondary radiation. And there are two hundred thousand more stories like that from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, most of which will never be told.
There’s no explicit judgement here about nuclear weapons, or indeed about war as a whole. But there doesn’t need to be. Anyone making policy decisions (or even just aspirations) about war needs to be aware of the consequences, and here those consequences are described by some of the people directly affected. You can’t really do more than that.
Hersey’s Hiroshima was published as a single edition of The New Yorker in 1946, and I had read a hardback copy as a teenager. I suspect that the version I read did not have the update in the current edition which follows the protagonists in the four decades after 1946, but the edition you can get from Amazon now does have those stories; or you can read the original on the New Yorker website.
On one of my visits to the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, maybe in 1997, there was a large exhibit about the reconstruction for display of the Enola Gay, with no reflection of what it had been used for, and I was frankly nauseated. Hiroshima is mentioned in its current resting place at the Udvar-Hazy Centre near Dulles Airport, but only briefly.
Second page of third chapter (which is in English in the original – I checked):
Someone commented on social media that this isn’t my usual reading fare, and it’s true. Back in November I was at Brussels Comic Con, and also needed a new phone case; and I spotted a stall selling manga-style artwork including this rather striking young warrior woman. So I bought it.
I thought it must be just something that the stall-holder had invented, but young F was certain that it was a canonical manga, and after a bit of crowdsourcing with his friends, confirmed that it is Rukia Kuchiki from the BLEACH by Tite Kubo. So I invested in the first volume, Strawberry and the Soul Reaper, to become better informed.
It’s a fairly basic story of Ichigo Kurosaki, a kid with red hair (unusual in Japan, to say the least), who finds himself drawn into the grand supernatural battle between the good guy Soul Reapers and the evil spirits called Hollows. Rukia Kuchiki, the character on my phone case, is one of the immortal Soul Reapers (based on the traditional Japanese shinigami, only cuter), but ends up giving her powers to Ichigo and having to become a normal(ish) schoolgirl.
I wasn’t blown away by it, though I can see why the core audience (which I’m not in) would like it. I would have liked to see more sensitive exploration of Ichigo’s abusive family situation, and I was sorry that the promising character of Orihime was introduced and then apparently got dropped. (Though I believe she comes back in later volumes.) Those who like this sort of thing will find it the sort of thing that they like. You can get it here.
Even though it’s about a teenage boy with magical powers, I did find a scene where Rukika and Orihime are talking to each other about Orihime’s injured leg. Ichigo is in the vicinity but not in the conversation. (Read right to left.)
The end of story about the phone case is that less than three months after buying it, I found that I needed to upgrade to a new iPhone in order to be able to run my Apple Watch. So if you’d like the Rukika phone case, it’s surplus to my needs right now.
This was my top unread book by a non-white writer, and also my top unread comic in English; next on those piles are Babel, by R.F. Kuang, and Land of the Blind, by Scott Gray.
Second paragraph of third chapter (English version, haven’t been able to locate the Japanese original):
Yoshiko had just turned seventy-five. She had never had sex and hadn’t kissed anyone either. She had never even once had intercourse with her older husband, who had died five years earlier. Both of their daughters had been conceived by artificial insemination, and she was still a virgin when she became a mother. Both daughters were now married, and she was thoroughly enjoying living alone in the house her husband had left to her.
One of the books submitted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, sadly not eligible as it is not a novel but a baker’s dozen of unconnected short stories, vignettes of life in a series of different worlds which are not quite like ours. The creative use of human body parts, including discreet but socially sanctioned cookery, is a recurrent theme. These are all very weird and disturbing but also memorable, and recommended if you think you can take a bit of body horror. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book by a non-white writer. Next on that list is Fevered Star, by Rebecca Roanhorse.
