The reissue by Marion Boyars Publishers of the English translation of Kenzaburō Ōe's Hiroshima Notes, originally published in Japanese in 1965 and first translated into English in 1981, will now enable a much wider Western audience to glean the thoughts of the 1994 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature (see WLT 66:1 pp. 74-75, and 69:1, pp. 5-16) on the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945, an event whose fiftieth anniversary in 1995 sparked vociferous debates anew. These “notes,” the product of Ōe's visits to Hiroshima between August 1963 and May 1965 in the role initially of journalist to cover the activities of the various peace movements, reveal a man of unabashed humanism, beseeching understanding of the sufferings of the Hiroshima victims that may serve as a deterrent to a possible future nuclear holocaust which could well signal the annihilation of humankind as we know it. Rather than emphasize the awesome power of nuclear weapons, Ōe would put the spotlight on the human misery they perpetrate.

In the first essay, dated August 1963, Ōe reports on the political bickering of the various groups espousing an antinuclear stance—the Japan Communist Party, the Japan Socialist Party, the General Council of Trade Unions of Japan, et alia—that brings the efforts for a united Ninth World Conference against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs to a virtual standstill and that, by ignoring the voices of the surviving victims and their real situation, makes a mockery of their nightmarish physical and psychological ordeals past and present. In the rest of the essays he focuses for the most part on the victims themselves and their often moving testimonials. A self-proclaimed existentialist in the early part of his career, profoundly influenced by Sartre's philosophy, Ōe in his encounters with survivors finds new and deeper meanings to the vocabulary in the existentialist lexicon—words like sincerity and authenticity. He evinces compassionate understanding of those victims who commit suicide out of an irredeemable despair but reserves his highest encomium for those who endure and persevere despite all the horror, people “who do not kill themselves in spite of their misery.” He traces, for instance, the tireless work without fanfare of Dr. Fumio Shigeto, himself a victim of the atrocity, to care for his patients and to collect data that will contribute to research on radiation sickness. In Ōe's view, Dr. Shigeto is the archetype of the authentic man of Hiroshima, a man who reclaims humanity out of the ashes of dehumanization.

In the “1995 Introduction” to this English edition, Ōe acknowledges the partial validity of the criticism that “I used bits of Hiroshima's reality as springboards for flights of personal reflection.” His first visit to Hiroshima came on the heels of a personal tragedy: the birth of a child with a brain hernia whose fate rested in large measure on his decisions. He drew inspiration in confronting his own misfortune from the dignity and courage with which the survivors of Hiroshima coped. Hiroshima proved to be a transforming experience that was to color forever his view of what it means to be human.

The earnestness with which Ōe champions humanist values in Hiroshima Notes and in much of his other writings is truly admirable. Still, a trifle wearisome is the preachy tone in which the advocacy is often embedded.