Black Rain (Japan's Modern Writers)

Every once in a while I find a book that surprises me.I had bought Ibuse's Black Rain upon recommendation from the remarkable Kenzaburo Oe. I expected something like a documentary novel about Hiroshima, maybe like John Hersey's book about that subject.What I found is a unique work of art on top of the documentary. We have here a complete tale of life in war before the bomb and in peace after the bomb. Not to forget the transition phase of uncertainty and disorientation.The narration is set a few years after August 6, 1945. A family of survivors lives a simple life of daily routines and remembrances. The man in the house had written a diary on the day of the bomb and the following days. He copies the original text and adds further memories. He asks his wife to add a text on food during the war. The act of writing is as much a subject as the act of living in the presence and remembering the life of the past. The writing is done for the sake of a local library which had asked for it.The real focus of human interest is not the mass killing. We can't be moved, really, by hundreds of thousands. We need individuals. We have the small family of 3. We have Yasuko, the main man's niece, who lives with uncle and aunt, and has lived there during the bombing. She is young and attractive and suspect. Does she have radiation disease? Can she bear a son? Can one marry her? The uncle's heart is near breaking point. Nobody knows the truth. Rumors have the girl at totally wrong places, but knowledge of the right places would not guarantee health.The novel delves into amazing detail. It is a cook book for famine times. It gives recipes for aquaculture under monopoly administration. It tells us how a man with radiation sickness can spend his time productively without overexertion.The diary describes the phenomena of the bomb's effects (the clouds, the light, the fires, the injuries, the corpses, the decomposition etc) with attention to much detail, but with total ignorance about the kind of weapon that has been used. Hindsight does not blur this. This uncertainty is a main driver of the tale.We learn about conflicts between bureaucracy, military and civilians. We watch the total collapse of organization after the bomb, but we see no descent into barbarity by the survivors. Decency and civility are maintained. Well, apart from some minor transgressions like theft of provisions. And yet: it takes a century, thinks the narrator, to repair the moral damage done to the population in an area badly ravaged by war.(This simple truth seems easily forgotten by contemporary invaders of foreign countries.)What to do with corpses of people who die of their injuries and diseases after the bomb? Death certificates? Burials? Our narrator gets conscripted as temporary scripture reader at funerals. He learns to appreciate the Buddhist texts that have been given to him by a monk for the purpose. He memorizes the Sermon on Mortality.A superb early scene: on the morning of the bomb, help units are dispatched into town; the headman sees them off with patriotic bombast about spirit of war and keeping their bamboo spears as symbols; on the way, they make a lunch break at a farm house; during the break they hear a speech on the radio, We do not learn what the speech is, but the men drop their spears when they continue their march.How can a book with this subject avoid melodrama, monotony, sentimentality, and all the other pitfalls of the subject? That's what the translator asks in his introduction.Good question. Ibuse did it. The tone and sense of humor is the greatest surprise in this book. A miracle of counter-intuitive writing.

A worthwhile read about a seminal moment in human history.Moving and at times very depressing a simple perspective on a complex problem.

This book is excellent because it zooms in on and transforms what is unquestionably a horrific tragedy of war into clear, everyday, straightforward, even mundane (but never boring) depictions of what average, ordinary human beings lived through in the days, weeks, and years following the dropping of the bombs. Most of the book is narration in the form of a journal written by an older japanese man (Shigematsu) who (along with his wife and neice) lived through the dropping of the bomb in Hiroshima. Along the way other persons' diaries or recollections are interspersed to form a chronological picture of the days before and after the bomb. The accounts are in themselves written in ordinary speech, and have the feel of conversation, as though you'd been invited for dinner over to these people's houses, and they talked to you of some of their experiences...telling what they saw, what they heard, what they felt. The genius of the book is weaving the accounts into a cohesive whole, and making no judgment or commentary on the events other than the opinions expressed in the accounts. These are everyday accounts in everyday speech, and perhaps for that very reason, make the tragedy the more real -- Shigematsu and the others notice some details more than others, just the way that you the reader in your own life notice some things and not others. These details ring incredibly true...you (as the reader) are transported to the scene. You become both inured to seeing disfigurement and death because it is everywhere, but moved at seeing it because it is your own friend or loved one who has been instantly burned, or who, years after the blast, only then starts to lose their hair, and their teeth, and to develop terrible sores. Excellent, excellent book.

This is a quietly terrifying book, one of the best anti-war novels ever written. it's oddly similar to Dante's Inferno, in part of course because the reality of HIroshima the day of and days following are similar to Dante's disturbing vision of hell but also because the narrator walks quietly through the horror and gathers both his own, his family's, and other people's stories. The contrast between the description of beauty and horror give the book much of its power. Much of the beauty is in the glimpses of the agrarian and community life, in the love of family, and some of it is in simple, stunning imagery. Even the explosion itself is gone back to, over and over, in an attempt to get the words right.It's a sobering book, and a necessary one for any student of World War II or of world history. The difference between the country--the land, the community and its traditions--and the state is a distinction that will stay with me.

The author appears to have compiled a large collection of eyewitness accounts, and knit these into an interconnected story, as one survivor transcribes a copy of his journal. The human stories, terribly sad, are intermixed with beautiful descriptions of the natural world.

This is the most beautiful and most sad thing I've ever read. I literally had no idea.Thankfully, the author does not preach about the evils of what happened. Rather, Black Rain simply describes what it was like for a few of the survivors of Hiroshima. It includes the events of that black day in 1945, but also talks about what happened to the people next; how their lives were effected by the radiation sickness and even worse. The stigma of being at Hiroshima ruined their future. You would think they had suffered enough without the addition of such harmful gossip from their fellow countrymen.It's very hard to see where the lines between fiction and non-fiction are in this book, but to me, that's what makes it so great.The kindle version has an interactive table of contents, and one can easily navigate between the chapters using the 5-way controller.

We are fortunate that the early half of the Twentieth Century gave us small glimpses of Hell... We have no excuses... We know the horror.Black Rain is supposed to be a work of fiction but I find that hard to believe - there are too many things that scream out that this is a first-hand experience, that the things we read about were actually seen: blobs of melted lead on sticky tarmac; corpses lying charred on the road; victims walking through dense smoke, ruined shadowy shapes, stumbling over charred bodies, dazed, horribly injured, flesh peeled away and flapping. Scenes one could not imagine were it not for that nightmare reality; bodies washed up on the riverbank, a babe tries to suckle at the breast of a partly-burnt corpse... These are images that have entered our communal imagination... images of the end.Back in the very late 60s and very early 70s I read two books that left indelible scars on my vision of the world; John Hersey's "Hiroshima", with its haunting visions of the nightmare, and Robert Jay Lifton's "Death in Life". One dealing with the event itself and the other with the way the hibakusha (the "bomb-blast people") survived - their experience, their feelings of shame, of guilt at having survived, their apathy and their fear of radiation sickness."Black Rain" joins that pair as a work of great power, horror and beauty. It interweaves the ordinary lives of farming people with that extraordinary event, the bombing of Hiroshima. Its characters talk to us directly through their diaries, face-to-face in what could easily be a haunting conversation after a meal - a conversation in which you have been stunned into silence, listening, jaw dropping. I have talked with survivors of Auschwitz, of the Warsaw Uprising, of slave labour... I recognise that immediacy of the eyes staring off into the past, seeing the events for real, painting a picture in your head that will never go away.In the introduction we are told that the novel draws on actual records and interviews, that the lead character, Shigematsu Shizuma and his diary actually exist but, both in that introduction and, coincidentally, in Lifton (where there is an appendix) the novel is analysed as a work of fiction. I suppose my failure to believe that it is a construct is homage to the book's power.Scenes from "Inferno" imagined by Dante (who often fell back on his own memories to describe horror and the nightmare) reoccur here..."...Whenever there was a strong gust of wind, the smoke would thin out and the street would appear, with dim human forms moving here and there on it. At one moment, we would be able to see far into the distance; at the next, we would be enveloped in smoke... Whenever the smoke completely enveloped us, it was too dangerous to go ahead. To blunder into red-hot cinders lying on the ground would mean getting badly burned... Once, Yasuko stumbled... When the smoke cleared again, we found that the obstacle was a corpse clasping a dead baby in its arms..."There is a beauty here that is difficult to tie down. It's about ordinary people trying to survive. Survivors suffer, endure, fall ill, even die. Survivors wander purposely yet strangely without purpose; they're simply surviving.The Japanese have an aesthetic sense that can appear amazingly contradictory when looking at their violent history; beauty, simple in its natural elegance, goes hand-in-hand with brutal death and a rigid social structure. This is reflected in the novel; beauty and death and social order.That's what really stands out as I think back; a calmness among all the horror. Once again, it reminds me of Dante, of the dead stood by the banks of the Acheron (of the transports as they reach Auschwitz, hands reaching out through the windows and the wire) eagerly awaiting the ferryman, eager to cross over...There are those who condemn the dropping of the bomb... Japan was, after all, a defeated power was she not? Not so. The book reveals the determination, even within the vacuum of Hiroshima, with that gloopy roiling mushroom cloud expanding overhead, that surrender did not enter the mind. It is always about survival, of the individual as part of the nation...However much we may condemn what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki we should also be thankful, surely.... if not for them would we ever have survived the brinkmanship of the second half of the Twentieth Century?

This is an excellent book; I first read it some years ago in paperback, having mislaid my copy & not wanting to buy another lest the first should resurface, I was delighted to finally be able to buy it on my Kindle. I find the book every bit as good as I remembered. tI deals with the terrible situation of those who survived the Hiroshima A-bomb, but does it in a most rational, matter-of-fact way, expressing this in straightforward journalistic reportage, without wild exclamations of horror or disapprovel. I think this works much better than a more sensationalised version would - what happened was quite horrific enough in itself, & to my mind has more impact as described in this book than it would in one laden with sensationalism I unreservedly recommend this book in either format.

very fast delivery and perect conditionsWould do business with this seller againThe books look quite interesting. totally worth it

Agh it’s just such a sad book, the imagery presented by the way words is intense and allowed me to travel back in time! Absolutely loved the book! A great read!

Good experience