Introduction
Masuji Ibuse’s Black Rain is considered a contemporary classic in Japanese literature. Drawing inspiration from real-life accounts of Hiroshima bombing survivors, Ibeki attempts a flashback into that period of history through the main protagonist Shigematsu Shizuma, a survivor and a victim of radiation sickness. Shizuma lives in a small fishing village with his wife Shigenko and their adopted niece Yasuko who they consider their own daughter.
Main body
At the time of the bombing, Yasuko was rumored to be working at a Hiroshima middle school and by that extension, exposing herself to radiation caused by a black cloud that had swept over the unfortunate city. The title “Black Rain” refers to this radioactive cloud which would bring upon Yasuko the permanent stigma of being a radiation victim and turn her life into a daily struggle against marginalization by Japanese society.
Under these conditions, Shizuma feels miserable because of his inability to find a suitable husband for his beloved niece. In a loving desire to redeem her life from such a barren existence, he chances upon her personal journal where she used to write diary-like description of the events surrounding Hiroshima. Taking it upon himself to complete Yasuko’s recollections of the dark days, Shizuma must rewrite the journal to bring to the reader an unmistakable account of the injuries, the horrors and the victimization that was to become the destiny of his niece and those thousands of Hiroshima survivors. The tone of narration is matter-of-the-fact, brutal and devoid of any desire to elicit sympathy from the reader.
In exploring the substance behind the numerous Hiroshima accounts that have passed down into literary archives, Ibeki uses masterful skill in portraying the dilemmas facing various characters who must have endured the hardships of those tumultuous days with great courage, grit and determination. Without resorting to anti-American or anti-war rhetoric, the author carefully wields the story as a saga of human “desire” to survive amidst the most unfavorable conditions in the world.
This makes the novel similar to the unbiased portrayal of misery depicted in the American book The Grapes of Wrath and thus, has to be seen as a homage to the true spirit of the Japanese nation. The biggest strength of Ibuse lies in his merciful depiction of contemporary characters as a canvass on which one can project their own feelings of helplessness and sense of betrayal. For example, despite the life-changing rumor of Yasuko being a radiation victim, it is built in the form of the book that the courageous woman was living her own life fending off such lies and surviving the aspersions of society. This sense of normalcy was depicted by Shizuma as follows,
“Everything was completely normal – corpuscle count, parasites, urine, sedimentation, stethoscopy, hearing and so on” (qtd. p.15).
Ibesu must have paid a lot of attention to specific details of the misery afflicting Hiroshima survivors as he portrays Yasuko’s journal entries using an Anne-Frankish diary account into the fresh scenes of the Hiroshima bombing disaster and its painful aftermath– faces muddled in anxiety and horror, Shizuma’s permanent legacy of lethargy, pain, pimples and heaviness of limbs, the crowd of middle school students who drowned themselves in the river singing Japanese warrior songs even as their teacher led them on to their untimely death, the apparent look of disgust Hiroshima survivors have toward their military; Ibesu has successfully combined history and fiction into a poignant reminder of the fact that we as humans, have been endowed by our Creator with an undefeatable will to overcome the odds and regain our lives. Without resorting to melodrama or literary pun devices, the Black Rain is a novel which will touch your raw nerve in more ways than one.
Impossibly brilliant and a must read!
References
Ibuse, M. (translated by Bester, J.). (1981). Black Rain: A Novel. Kodansha International.