Japan's Only Known Survivor Of Both Atomic Blasts Has Died

Japan's Only Known Survivor Of Both Atomic Blasts Has Died - The Two-Way - Breaking News, Analysis Blog : NPR


I received this notice today via NPR (public radio in the United States)-it made me think again of Kenzaburo Oe's non-fiction work Hiroshima Notes in which he spoke of the  of people who survived both atomic bomb blasts and their fates. One of the people mentioned by Oe was Tsutomo Yamaguchi.   He passed away yesterday at the age of 93 after a long fight with stomach cancer.     The people of Hiroshima were among the very first Japanese to speak out against the role of the Japanese military in WWII.    Oe said in Hiroshima Notes that the most important thing to come out of the bomb blasts was the wisdom the suffering did bring to many of the survivors.     Oe's collection of short stories by and about survivors of the atomic bomb blasts, Crazy Iris and Other Stories of the Atomic Aftermath is a world class treasure.   I devoted five reviews to the stories in this book.  When I did Google searches on the authors of the stories, some of them went on to become famous and respected authors.   However, three of the authors had no Google records (other than mentioning their story was reprinted in Oe's collection).   At first I thought this means I am writing these relatively long blog posts on something no one cares about and I admit I was concerned the posts might turn new readers (my blog had just started when I wrote the six posts devoted to this collection and Hiroshima Notes) away from my blog.    I had by then begun to follow my blog with Google Web Master tools (as most all blogspot bloggers do).    I noticed people from all over the world were doing Google searches on the very obscure to most writers to whom I had dedicated posts and coming to my blog to read the articles on them.    A number of them read the articles in Japanese.   Somehow I have now come to see my posts on the writers from the collection as a small memorial to them.    Before I wrote my posts you could find information on five of the eight writers in the collection via a Google search. Now you can find information on all of them.


Mel u





 

Four Stories of The Atomic Aftermath

Noted added September 16, 2014.

To the many readers of this and related posts from U C L A, please let my 100,000 monthly readers know of your feelings on this story and the others in the collection.  I am assuming this book is being read in a class at U C L A and I am very glad to see that.  These stories are world class treasures. 

I have already posted on four stories from Crazy Iris and Other Stories of the Atomic Aftermath (edited and introduced by Kenzaburo Oe, 1985)-     Here are the final four stories in the collection.

"Human Ashes" (22 pages)  by Katsuzo Oda.   Katsuzo was exposed to the atomic blast at Hiroshima while working as a student recruit in a factory.   His story was first published in a journal published by the Japanese Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications in 1966.   He was never a professional writer.   "Human Ashes"  appears to be his only work in print in English.   Wikipedia has no article on him and all google searches lead back to this story.   "Human Ashes" tells of Katsuzo immediate reaction to the bomb.   He wanders through scenes of horrible destruction.   Katsuzo had just felt the first sexual urges that came with young age and he cannot help but notice many of the female victims have lost much of their clothes.   He begins to wander through the city.   Everywhere he sees the dead and the soon to be dead.   In one very sad moment of terror a black rain begins to fall.   The people of Hiroshima at once assume the Americans are dropping gasoline on them and are terrified as then expect to be set on fire. The rain is radioactive.  The Japanese had received constant reports on the horrible cruelty of the Americans.   We see the Bushido code begin to erode when a young officer (maybe 19 and only an officer in a youth corp) orders the young boy factory workers he was in charge of to line up at his instructions.   He is so shocked when his charges (mostly 13 to 15 years old) run from him.   Just yesterday they obeyed everything he said.   The primary heroes of the boys were kamikaze pilots.   Oe says Odo is the only writer included in the collection who did not go on after the war to become a professional writer.    "Human Ashes"  was written 21 years after the day of the bomb.   Oda was born in 1931, the year Japan invaded Manchuria.   I could not find any images of him nor could I find out if  he is still alive.   "Human Ashes" is a simple completely honest attempt by a thirty five year old man to describe how August 6, 1945 in Hiroshima felt to him.


"Fire Flies" by Yoko Ota (27 pages first published in 1953)  Yoko Ota was already a well known author prior to experiencing the atomic bomb blast at Hiroshima.  Her writings focus closely on individual victims of the blast.   It is the first story in the collection that expresses extreme bitterness about the use of the bomb and in which its use is treated as an immoral decision, in the remarks of a doctor treating victims and by the narrator of the story.   I am not sure exactly when the U S Army began to stop censoring the publication of information that could be construed  as anti-American but I think it was around 1953 or so.   (It should be noted that the Japanese public were never informed in any way concerning the terrible actions of their own soldiers.)   The narrator goes to visit a friend she has not seen since August 6, 1945.   As she enters the modest house she notices a young girl disappear into a room.   It turns out she wants to put on her best clothes to meet the visitors.   She comes back into the room.

It was not a girl but a monstrosity.   Her deformed face and hands stood out even more grotesquely because she had put on her best clothes..her face was expressionless.  I broke down weeping  slumped on the wooden board, shuddering but unable to stop my tears.  I wished I could stand up, reach out to the monstrous body of the young woman and embrace it.   However, Japanese people, and I especially, are not accustomed to expressing emotion in this way.

The narrator begins to speak with the young girl.   We find when she goes out people sometimes think she is part of an exhibit.   She says people thing of her as a zoo animal allowed out and will sometimes slip twenty yen in her hand.   Her eyes have a permanent glow.   She cannot eat without spilling food as her mouth and lips were reshaped by the blast. 


"The House of Mirth" by Mitsuhara Inoue (1960, 25 pages) deals with the fate of female orphans, now grown to marriageable age, who lived in a rural orphanage near Nagasaki.   The girls have been there since 1945, most came at ages from infants to ten years.   A few of the girls have married and attempted to have children.   Many have miscarried and none has had a child live past four.   A suitor (in an arrangement made by relatives) is coming to meet  one of the girls.   Everyone wants to keep as a secret from the suitor the fact that the woman in question was at Nagasaki when the bomb went exploded.    Some villagers see the inability of the women to have healthy children as curse brought on my their adoption of Catholicism in place of their old religions.   The became Catholics because the catholic priests helped the orphaned bomb victims.   In this well told story we see the bond between the orphaned women and the shunned status of bomb victims  Discrimination against bomb victims was evidently worse in rural areas around Nagasaki than elsewhere.   Bomb survivors were almost like a class of untouchables.  (In a footnote Inoue describes for us the existence of an untouchable type cast of people in the rural areas.).    I could find almost no information on Inoue.  I could find no images.   Oe tells us he was active in the communist party after the war.   He was born in 1926.

"The Rite" by Hiroko Takenishi (31 pages) was first published in 1963.   Takenishi was born in Hiroshima but was not there on the day of the atomic bomb explosion.   She and a friend are their for the erection ceremony for a monument to Tamiki Hara.   I have already posted on "Summer Flowers, his story in the collection.  Takenishi established a reputation as a critic of modern literature with a profound knowledge of classical literature.   "The Rite" appears to be her only work in print in English.   This story is the most self consciously artistic of the stories in the collection.   It centers around rites of death and rites of mourning interleaved with accounts of the day the bomb dropped.    It is perhaps the most beautifully written of the stories.   I could find no images of her or really no information at all on her via google.

The stories in The Crazy Iris and other Stories of the Atomic Aftermath all are deeply moving.   When I began my blog July 7, 2009 I never thought I would do a series of posts like the ones I have attempted on the stories in this collection.   At first I thought no one will read them.   I have done google searchs on each of the writers.   A few are quite famous but some have little or no information on them  on the web and no pages dedicated to them.   Somehow it made me feel good when I began to see that people from all over the world were coming to my posts on these figures.   In several cases there is nothing else on the web (at least in English) on the writers in this collection.   I thank those who have read my posts on this topic and really hope others will read these stories and Mr Oe's deeply felt introduction to the collection.   It is also a way to read eight stories chosen by a master writer.

"The Colorless Paintings" by Ineko Sata

"The Colorless Paintings" by Ineko Sata is the fourth selection from The Crazy Iris and Other Stories of the Atomic Aftermath (edited and introduced by Kenzaburo Oe) that I have so far read.   It is only thirteen pages long and was first published in a Japanese literary magazine in 1961.  

Ms Sata was born and raised in Nagasaki but was not there when the atomic bomb blast occurred August 9, 1945.    As "The Colorless Paintings" opens the narrator and her friend Y are at the opening day of an exhibit of painting at the very prestigious Tokyo National Museum.   They are looking for painting done by their friend K which are part of the exhibit.   K was a member of the communist party of Japan as was the narrator.   He also had advanced tuberculosis.   They find the paintings.  

The pictures seem like softly moaning heretics..The pictures even remind us of burnt bones...  These posthumous paintings of his completely deny all color.  K, while painting them, repeatedly rejected color..the paintings are powerful precisely because they are colorless, because we see them as an honest expression of the violent drama that took place within him, purity withdrawing into itself.

K's paintings were done after he was diagnosed as having radiation sickness from his presence on August 9, 1945.   K and the narrator were long time associates in the communist party of Japan but she never knew he was exposed to the atomic bomb.   He never spoke of it nor had her friend Y who was also exposed.   K lived the rest of his life in silent anxiety over what the effects of the blast on him might be one day.   Exposure to the bomb was known by the early 1950s to produce high rates of cancer and leukemia in those exposed to it.  They left the exhibit to go to an annually held memorial event for the victims of the bomb.   The event takes place at The Nagasaki Peace Park

Y spoke for the first time about the day when the atomic bomb was dropped.   And because she had done so, K also spoke about it, he too for the first time.   When describing the tragic scene, K seemed to be walking back and forth in the midst of the ruins.   "Everyday I was walking among corpses.   And even after I heard about how K and his friends had wandered around in the radiated area,  I somehow thought of them as being outside the radiation.

The narrator tells us that K died of liver cancer.

The name of the disease is liver cancer.   But what is the name of the thing that deprived this man of all color? What could it be called?   It seems that the ideas suggested by these painting preclude anything that is common place.   They appear to belong to another realm.   They rather seem to be produced by the will to defy, but that defiance had to be painted, even though the colors escaped the artist, and that's why they display an unnamable grief...Y sways and takes a step forward.   It seems as though her body automatically sways and takes a step..Y must have sensed deep in her heart what the paintings were saying.

Ineko Sata  was born in Nagasaki (1904 to 1998)  into a very poor family.   In her late teenage years she worked in a cafe frequented by young literary types.   From these associations she began to write and publish short stories focusing on the problems of  women from poor families.   She began also a life time involvement with the communist party of Japan.   She was briefly expelled from the party when she became an early denouncer of Stalinism.   She married one writer, divorced him and married another.  She was an early advocate of women's right in Japan.   She wrote several highly regarded and prize winning novels but "The Colorless Paintings" appear to be her only works in print in English.   Her longer works have never been translated.    Sata has a great affinity for the beautiful.   "The Colorless Paintings" has kind of a lonely feel to it.

In researching background information on the bombings, I came upon an article Mr Tsutomu Yamaguchi.   He is one of 165 people who were exposed to both atomic bomb blasts.   He wrote a book about his experiences but it is available only in Japanese.   In 2006 the United Nations invited him to take part in a documentary about double A Bomb Victims.   As of this writing he still lives, fighting cancer caused by the blasts. 

"The Empty Can" by Kyoto Hayashi

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Please share your thoughts on
This story with us

Other Stories of the Atomic Age edited and introduced by

Kenzaburo Oe. I have already posted on two stories from this
collection, “The Crazy Iris” by Masuji Ibuse and “Summer Flowers” by
Tamiki Flowers. After reading “Summer Flowers”, about the first few
days after the atomic bomb drop on Hiroshima, I said to myself this is
the saddest story I have ever read. Now I think “The Empty Can”, a
gentle and beautiful tale of memory by a woman who was in Nagasaki when the second atom bomb exploded may well be a sadder tale.

Hayashi was a young woman in her late teens that had been moblized by the government along with a number of her classmates in an exclusive girl’s school in Nagasaki to work in a munitions factory. She and her classmates were at work August 9, 1945 when the bomb exploded.   They all survived.   Thirty years later she and four of her classmates meet for a reunion at the old school.   "The Empty Can" tells us what happen to the women in the thirty years since the bomb exploded.    The reunion conjures up memories of the day the A Bomb exploded.




The school the girls attended had been turned into a munitions factory. At first the women recall how the blast broke all the window panes and bent the frames. After the war the building went back to being a school

but in the remaining two years of Kyoko’s schooling there were no window panes in the school. The replaced windows are the first thing they talk about. (The women have not seen each other for many years.)


As they enter the school auditorium old memories come to the fore. On October 1, 1945 the school held a memorial service for the students who died in the blast.


They had both survived but many others had died on the floor under the watchful eye of teachers and friends.   Out of a student body of nearly 1300 300 had died  between that day and October 1, 1945. Some had been recruited to work in the munitions factory, some had died in their own homes a few days later.   As the names of each student was read, there was a stirring among the students who survived….The parents of the students who had survived...The parents of the students who had died sat along the three walls.  The parents were in tears before the service began.  The tears turned to sobs and the sobs drifted toward the center of the room.


During the memorial service Oki’s name had been read as one of the dead. She had in fact survived.   She had been terribly hurt in he blast and her parents came to get her and no one heard from her after that so it was assumed she was dead.   She has never been well since that day and is now scheduled thirty years later to have fragments of glass that were embedded in her back that day removed.    There is a huge waiting list for public hospitals at the time to treat bomb survivors.    All of the women live on in fear of radiation sickness which can occur many years after exposure.    Of the three women in "The Empty Can" three have  never married and seemingly have never had a relationship.   (Atomic bomb survivors were very unwanted as spouses as it was felt they could not produce healthy children.)


There are several heart breaking stories relayed by the women as they recall old friends.

They all suddenly recall Kimuko and the empty can she always had with her.



“Remember Kimuko’s empty can? …she put her father and mother’s bones in an empty can and brought it her every day…I remember the girl who came to school every day with the bones of her parents in her school bag.   The girl kept the bones in  lidless can that had been searedred by the flames.   To keep the bones from falling out, she had covered the top with newspaper, and she tied it with red string.  When the girl arrived at her seat she took the empty can, picking it up carefully with both hands, and placed it on the right side of her desk.   At first none of us had known what was in the empty can. And the girl did not show any sign of wanting to tell us, either.   No one questioned her about it.   The love  that could be  seen in the girl's fingertips when she handled the can made us feel all the more reluctant to ask.  One day their new calligraphy teacher, recently discharged from the military and returned to his prewar job, asked her what was in the can she always put on her desk.


“The girl hung her head and held the can on the knees of her work pants. The she began to cry. The teacher
asked her why. “It is my parents. Then she began to cry. The teacher took the can from the girl's hands, and placed it in the center of the desk on the platform.  May your parents rest in peace. Let us have a moment of
silent prayer in their memory”, he said and closed his eyes. After a long silence, the teacher handed the can back to the girl and said, "After this leave it at home.   Your parents will be there waiting for you when.   It is better that way."


“The Empty Can” is only seventeen pages long.   It has more power to move than many works 30 times longer.   We feel we know the people in the story and in some small way can feel how the bomb stole the lives of the living as well as the dead.    "The Empty Can (first published in 1978) is not a bitter work.   It is sadder and wiser for that.

Mel u

"Summer Flower" by Tamiki Hara

"Summer Flower" by Tamiki Hara is the second story included in The Crazy Iris and Other Stories of the Atomic Aftermath (edited and introduced by Kenzaburo Oe).

I have already talked a bit about why I was so happy to acquire The Crazy Iris and Other Stories of the Atomic  Aftermath in my post on the lead story, "The Crazy Iris". 

Tamiki Hora was in Hiroshima on the day the atomic bomb was exploded at Hiroshima August 6, 1945.

He survived because he was far enough away from ground zero in the bathroom of a very well constructed house built by his father.  "Summer Flowers" is an account of that day and the days right after the blast.

A lot of us have probably seen movies about apocalyptic seeming events.   Many book bloggers have enjoyed books about life after and during times in which all seems destroyed.   "Summer Flowers" is an eye witness account.  

The  story is set in Hiroshima in August  of 1945.   August 3 was the one year anniversary of the death of the narrator's wife.   He wanted to put some incense sticks on her grave but somehow he feared the whole city would soon be destroyed soon in bombing raids.  

After burning the incense sticks that I had brought I made a bow, I drank out of the well beside the grave..It was on third day after my visit to the grave that the bomb was dropped...My life was saved because I was in the bathroom.

When the bomb explodes he is knocked to the ground by the blast (we do not know how far away he narrator was from ground zero).   At first he loses his sight due to the fall.   His sister finds him and tells him his eyes are bleeding.   He and his family begin to see their first survivors.

Someone rushed in with a bewildered gesture.   His face was smeared in blood. .. K of the factory office appeared on the veranda of the drawing room.   Seeing me, he cried in a sad voice. "I'm hurt! Help me" and dropped down in a heap where he stood.   Blood was oozing from his forehead, and his eyes were glistening with tears.

Here is the first corpse he sees

Even as I looked something infectious seemed to emanate from her lifeless face.    It was the first such face I had seen.   But  I was to see many, many more that were more grotesque.

At first people did not realize what had happened that day.   People felt they they had just had bad luck in a normal bombing raid.   Slowly they began to realize a weapon of a new order of magnitude had been used that day by the Americans.

Everyone had at first thought that just his own house had been hit by a bomb.   But then they went outside and saw it was the same everywhere, they were dumbfounded.   They were also greatly puzzled by the fact that, although the houses and other buildings had all been damaged or destroyed, there didn't seem to be any holes where the bombs had fallen...It was all like some kind of magical trick, my sister said, trembling with terror.

The narrator begins to walk the necropolis where he was born, where his beloved wife is buried.  He observes a common effect of the blast.   Those closer to the blast than him but  enough far away not to die instantly have swollen heads and deformed faces    People with this mark of death upon them have only a few days to suffer.   He comes upon a dispensary set up near a temple to help victims.   The screaming are everywhere but the doctors have no idea how to really help them.   The legs and arms of the victims begin to swell up.

A few yards away from us, two schoolgirls lay groaning for water under a cherry tree, faces burned black...a woman whose face was smoked dried joined them...she stretched out her legs listlessly, oblivious to the dying girls.

The narrator's older brother got a wagon and was rounding up the extended family to leave town.   On the way to pick up a sister they come on the dead body of the brother's son.  

Here is a beautiful passage (I know it may seem jarring to some to find beauty in these descriptions but it is there) describing the narrator's reactions as they leave Hiroshima

Amid the vast silvery expanse of nothingness that lay under the glaring sun, there were the roads, the river, the bridges, and the stark naked, swollen bodies.   The limbs of the corpses, which seem to have become rigid after struggling in their last agony, had a kind of haunting rhythm.  In the scattered electric wires and countless wrecks there was embodied a spasmodic design in nothingness.   The burnt and toppled streetcar and the horse with its huge belly on the ground gave one an impression of a world described by a Dali surrealist painting.

People continue to die long after the blast from its effects.   There is a heart breaking rendition  of the efforts of the narrator to help his good friend find his wife or her body.  

"Summer Flower" is as sad a story as I have ever read.    The beauty of the fashion in which the story is told somehow seems almost wrong.   Tamiki Hara is described  by Oe as the most  outstanding of the writers who survived the bomb blast.      Tamiki felt compelled to wrte about his experience  of the bomb blast as a kind of memorial to his wife.   There was censorship for several years of any writing by Japanese about the war (managed by the occupying forces and their Japanese employees) and his first writings were published in deviance of law.   He studied English literature in college and had a life time fondness for the great 19th century Russians.   "Summer Flowers" was first published in 1947.    In 1951, in protest and horror at the start of the Korean War, he threw himself into the path of a train.     Sadly it appears that "Summer Flowers"  and one other story by Hara are the only part of his work in print in English. Crazy Iris and Other Stories of the Atomic Aftermath is worth obtaining just for these two stories.

Mel u

"Crazy Iris" by Masuji Ibuse

"Crazy Iris" by Masuji Ibuse is  the lead story in The Crazy Iris and Other Stories of the Atomic Age which was edited and introduced by Kenzaburo Oe.  (1985, Grove Press)    All of the short stories in the book were selected by Oe and deal with the effects of the Hiroshima Atomic Bomb experience on August 6, 2009 on those who lived through it.   Several of the authors whose stories are included in the collection were in Hiroshima or near it that day.   Oe also provides an  introduction to the book in which he tells us a little about each writer and their personal background and life history.   I was so excited when I found this book in a mall book store last week.   It really is a perfect book for someone like me who wants to learn about Japanese literature.   The book contains stories by eight different authors considered very talented by Mr Oe.   In most cases he knows them.

The author of "Crazy Iris" Masuji Ibuse was born in Hiroshimi and, like Oe studied French literature and also had a deep interest in the work of Tolstoy.    He was born 1898 and died 1993.   During WWII he served in Singapore in the Japanese Army.   His primary duty as writer for the Singapore newspaper The Straights Times.   He wrote articles in which he  depicted the occupation of the city by the Japanese as very preferable for the people to British rule via a diary he published.   As time went on he stopped publishing his diary as he saw no point to doing it under military supervision.   He also gave lectures on Japanese culture at a Singapore University.    He was an unwilling inductee into the Japanese army and he showed his distaste for military life in his  writings  after the war.   He did not directly experience the blast as he was in Singapore on August 6, 1845.   He never was in combat.

There is a codified language of flowers made use of in Japanese literature and art (and even in tattoos).

Different flowers mean different things.   These meanings would be part of the assumed cultural background of the original readers of "Crazy Iris".    It is common cultural knowledge among Japanese readers and the authors of  the works in this collection would all assume their readers understood it.    This knowledge is not, at least in my case, something I learned as a child in early schooling, so I did a bit of research to discover the possible symbolic meaning of the Iris in Japanese literature.   In the symbolic language of flowers, hanakotoba, the iris stands for strength, vitality, boldness and power.   In rural Japan, where "Crazy Iris" is set, it was considered protection from typhoons and storms and was often planted on roof tops.   It is also considered a symbol of royal warriors.   Like Oe, Masuji Ibuse evokes echos from Western mythology and history in his use of floral images, super imposing two traditions into one or in some cases using the western traditiion as a haunted mirror image of the Japanese.    In ancient Greece Iris was, among other things the goddess of the rainbow and the messenger of the gods.   In ancient Egypt and much of India the iris symbolized resurrection.   In post war Japan the old faiths were destroyed.    In these circumstances in many cultures people seek out roots and myths that predate those that  let them down.    I think the same thing happened to Oe and Ibuse and other Japanese writers.   If we look deep enough into their stories we will see roots in ancient cults and animism.   It is no accident that Yeats and Blake are Oe's English poets.

"Crazy Iris" begin on the morning of August 6, 1945, the day of the first atomic bomb blast.   It is set in a rural town about 100 miles from Hiroshima.    The people of the town had been advised the day before to evacuate as a heavy fire bomb raid from the Americans was expected soon.    The Americans even dropped leaflets telling people to move.   As the story begins our narrator is at a store owned by a friend of his.   Everything but food is very cheap.   The shop keeper tells him might as well sell everything before his store is burned by the bombs.   The people of the town had all been told to take the train to Hiroshima where it was felt they would be safer.   The people are frustrated to hear that all trains going to Hiroshima have been stopped.   At first they do not know what has happened to cause this.   Our narrator goes to visit a dental clinic owned by an old friend of his.

Just a few days before, his only son, who had volunteered as a junior pilot, was killed and the news seemed to have taken the life out of him.   I felt if the air raid siren were to sound this very moment, he would not take shelter but continue to stand there leaning on the table.

Here is how he first heard of the bomb blast:

In fact I did not hear of the destruction of Hiroshima until thirty or forty hours after the event.   We in our village first learned what had happened indirectly from one of the victims who had fled to a neighboring village.  He reported some strange weapon had been exploded  and that from one moment to the next Hiroshima had ceased to exist.

Survivors of the blast began to spread out to neighboring towns.    Many of the people who lived and worked in Hiroshima were from the smaller towns near it and he wanted to return home to look for help and face death among those they knew.

Kobayashi had no idea where he was going...He was aware of  a peculiar pain throughout his body.   Something told him he was going to die.   Whatever happened he must make his way back to his home village and his family!  He managed to get a ride on a truck to Fukuyama and from there he took an army truck hom.  He returned covered with blood.   He immediately visited Dr. Tawa, the village doctor, but the latter had no idea how to treat him.

The residents of Fukuyama do not really understand yet what has happened.   The biggest topic of conversation is "where will it happen next".   Soon they hear of  the surrender.   Our narrator begins to develop stomach problems he will never get rid of right after hears the news.   Many others flood the doctor's office with complaints that seem to have no cause the doctor can find.   Many will have them the rest of their lives.

Life goes on.   Ten months after the surrender our narrator goes to visit Hiroshima to see it for himself.

I remember how impressed I was to find that of all the trees in Hiroshima, the palms alone, though charred and twisted, had withstood the tremendous temperature of a year before and were now putting forth buds.

We see some interesting events unfold that can tell us a lot about life in the immediate post war period.   It was very interesting, for example, to see how Japanese policemen are now treated by the people.   They once were regarded as agents of the Imperial God of Japan and  were greatly feared.   Our narrator was from Tokyo had had moved out when the war started.   (We never learn much about him.  We do not know if he had a family or a role in the war efforts.   I guess he is in his 60s.  We never learn his occupation or economic status.)  

A week after the blast he decides it is time to go back to Tokyo.   He stays with an old friend who lives next to a pond.   One morning he gets up early and sees a body floating in the pond.   The iris are all clustered at one end of the pond.      They all call the police.   Then they notice one of the iris is in bloom.

"Did you know there is an iris in bloom", the old man's voice voice came up.  "It's amazing!   Think of an iris blooming at this time of year!"

We learn the body in the pond was that of just another person driven mad by the blast.   

"I gather she was a half-crazy girl.   Her parents had sent her to work in Hiroshima to work in a factory and she was there the day the atomic bomb exploded"

What is more interesting to our narrator and his friend is what has happened to the iris in the pond

At the mouth of the gulley grew the angular leaves from whose recess emerged the twisted stem with its belated purple flowers.  The petals looked  hard and crinkly..."Do you think they were frightened into bloom?..I have never heard of an Iris flowering this late.   It must have gone crazy! ..When I told Mr Kiuchi this incident he turned to me and said "The iris blooming is crazy and it belongs to a crazy age"

The crazy iris evokes a world in which warrior traditions are destroyed and old folk beliefs about the protective power of flowers are turned into a  graveyard joke.   The atomic bomb somehow seems an inverted iris.   A messenger from long ago and far ahead that will have to be reread into the language of flowers.

There are a lot of interesting details in this twenty page short story.   We get a real feel for how it must have felt to be 100 miles from the blast in a small town in rural Japan.   "Crazy Iris" was first published in 1951.  Masuji Ibuse lived a very long time and became a revered figure in Japanese literary circles.   His best known work was a novel about the effects of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Black Rain.   I will read it soon I hope.     There are other thematic veins that could be mined in this story.   For example, there are clear symbolic meanings in the reference to palm trees as the only surviving trees  These references are very interesting in that they suggest that Ibuse is evoking ancient themes from traditions other than his own.   Maybe the story is in part, as are the stories of Oe I have read, about the recreation of life supporting faiths and myths after the accepted ones are made hollow.   These matters all tie directly into Reading Life questions.

U C L A students are reading, as of September 2014, this post in large numbers.  I hope they will share theirs reaction to this and related stories with us