Invisible Atomic Bombs: Spectrality and the Testimonial Potency of the Atomic Bomb in Hibakusha and Post-Hibakusha Narrative

Abstract

Invisible Atomic Bombs:Spectrality and the Testimonial Potency of the Atomic Bomb in Hibakusha and Post-Hibakusha Narrative Jason C. Toncic (bio) Tamiki Hara, born 15 November 1905, lived the majority of his life in dreamlike comfort. Then, on 6 August 1945, at 8:15 a.m., an eighteen-kiloton nuclear bomb, code name "Little Boy," exploded over the city of Hiroshima where he lived, immediately killing 80,000 people and later taking the lives of an additional 60,000 civilians. The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki began a new era. Yet where does the story truly begin? Does it start with J. Robert Oppenheimer's work on the atomic bomb, Albert Einstein's support of nuclear weaponry, President Truman's decision to use the bomb on Japan, the pilots of the Enola Gay who delivered the first payload—or does it rather begin with the aforementioned Hara, who wrote, "I owe my life to the fact that I was on the privy" (1990, 45)? Atomic bomb literature is essentially backward-facing. The hibakusha's narrative structure begins with the end (i.e., the bomb) and, instead, presupposes a beginning. The hibakusha—atomic bomb survivor—testimony predicates the survival of the hibakusha writer; atomic bomb literature, therefore, is literature of survival. However, many of the survivors embody a ghostly existence after the atomic bomb: they share in their writings that they no longer feel alive. In "Summer Flowers," Hara writes, "Right from the start, when I received the blow to my head and things went black, I knew I wasn't dead. … My cry sounded in my ear like someone else's voice" (1990, 46). The hibakusha story indelibly begins with the end—the end of lives but also of the narrative—and what emerges is an abnormal syuzhet (narrative chronology) in which the figurative end is predicated by the literal continuation of the narrator's life. Those killed in the atomic blast could dictate no stories, and those who survived were heavily laden with the task to represent the unsignifiable, although words ceased to capture reality. In "Summer Flowers" there are two levels of storytelling. When Hara writes that "it was like something in the most horrible dream," it stands [End Page 183] in contrast to his ruminations on his past: "That large maple had stood forever in the corner of the garden; when I was young, it had figured in my daydreams" (1990, 46–47). The "dream" forced into existence by the atomic bomb stands contrapuntally to the "dream" before the atomic bomb. Witnessed in this way, too, are hibakusha Katsuzō Oda's dreams in "Human Ashes." Oda first notes, "My one dream at that time was to shoulder a gun and go off to battle," but this dream is incompatible with the post-bomb world in which a lieutenant's "frenzied shouts resembled the outcries of a frightened animal" (1984, 64, 71). The restructured dream is a trope of the hibakusha work—it is not dreaming that is changed but rather reality, inverted by the atomic bomb, which perhaps necessitated the construction of the real world as a dream world. The challenge for the hibakusha work is that it must reference an imaginary signifier. It must summon up images of the bomb that are unknown to the reader. For example, in Takehiko Fukunaga's Island of Death, a hibakusha notes that "others are utterly incapable of understanding it" (Fukunaga 1971, 289). The atomic bombing conjures a contradiction—the story of the A-bomb is not transmittable through language, yet a large number of hibakusha works exist. The expression of the bombing through symbolic representation cannot be complete, for metaphor fails in the hibakusha work. Rather, the hibakusha narrative relies on metonymy. The I in the hibakusha testimony becomes the scopic "eye," relating events as a binocular to the reader. Through this metonymic inclusion, the reader becomes the writer's I and witnesses the story through that perspective. Hibakusha Megumi Sera notes that "at the time each of us believed that our house had received a direct hit" (quoted in Treat 1995, 49). The atomic bomb created a singularity that was relayed by a metonymic narrative. The dream...