Flash-Bang

Children of the A-Bomb. Compiled by Dr. Arata Osada. Translated by Jean. Dan and Ruth Sieben-Morgan. (Peter Owen, 25s.)

THIS book comprises sixty-seven short essays in which sixty-seven Japanese schoolchildren re- count what happened to -them in Hiroshima. I Would have said that any child who had survived such an, experience in any sort of mental shape at all and had got away from it sufficiently to think about it would certainly have fallen into some kind of posturing. But it isn't so. They write with a grave concernfor classroom syntax and the order of events.

That evening I finally fell asleep at the hill, The town was burning steadily and in the sky the moon was like a red lantern.

The next morning I went back to the place where our house had been. I stood for a long time thinking that maybe Mother would be worrying about what happened to me and conic here. I did not see Mother.

The dying and the dead were at Funairi.

thought maybe Mother might be among them and I went around looking carefully at their

faces one by one, 'but Mother wasn't there.

That is from the account of Tokuo Nakajima, who was six years old. The essayists handle not only experiences, but emotions, too, with the same fine indifference to effect. Shizuo Sumi,

badly burned and temporarily speechless, was laid in the vegetable patch while his distracted mother ran about the garden and the flattened neighbourhood went up in flames. 'I resented it all furiously,' he recalls. And this is not a deliberate or even a fortuitous playing-down. It is simply that they are factual about everything. I had always understood that the 'love' of children for their parents was an example of the pathetic fallacy, like the 'gaiety' of lambs; what children feel for their parents, I sternly reminded my more sentimental self, Is not love but selfish affection. However: It's already six years since Mother died. When I think that for all those years I haven't been able to talk to Mother, I feel so sad that I can hardly bear it.

And: Even though I murmur 'Dad' and 'Mother' in my heart', Dad and Mother don't murmur anything back to me.

I would say that that was love, complete. Surprisingly few of them say anything like this:

When I think that except for that dreadful A-Bomb we could all be happy living together, I hate the American Army.

More seem inclined to blame their own people:

And saying, 'For the sake of Peace, for the sake of Peace,' we made war. Where is the peace in that, I would like to know?

Most of them are not interested in who was to blame, but exceedingly anxious lest it happen again. Ruriko Araoka, who' was four years old, finishes her account thus: 1 can't forget my cute little brother who died calling 'Mummy, Mummy,' and my dear grand- mother. That's why I pray there will never be another of those dreadful Flash-bangs.* I am always thinking of that Flash-bang.

And Hisato Itoh, who was ten, addresses his adult readers with the patient mildness -of a psychiatrist: Finally, I would propose the following con-

clusion: not to use the atom bomb second time for the purpose of war, and to please end the fighting in Korea quickly.t The general standard 'of behaviour in Hiroshima seems to have been high. 1 have not quoted any of the most poignant passages from the book because they demand to be quoted in full and 1 haven't the space. (Though in this connection 1 must just mention the account of Kiyoko Tanaka where, on page 113, you will find an incident fit for some twentieth-0..1min. New Testament.) If you are interested in either children or the Bomb, you will find the book very valuable, and it is unique. It is full of the sort of particularity which a fiction writer might not think of or might dismiss as too loaded:

It got dark. I went to sleep in the arms of one of the soldiers. Then it was morning. One of the soldiers said, go and find your grandma for you,' and he put his gun on his shoulder and went off somewhere. The next soldier said the same thing and he didn't come back either. It got to be afternoon,

• That seems to have been a pattern. Adults. unable, to bear the anguish of the children. offered help which they found they couldn't give. Unable to bear their own helplessness, they then betrayed the children. It's not a bad microcosm of our present situation.

ROBERT 1301.

* Hiroshima's nick name for the Bomb. t Written at the time of the -Korean War.