LITMIR.BIZ

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handed down from way back-that a man that's ate a man's flesh has a ring of light come out from behind his neck. A golden green light. A ring a pale, pale light comes out. Anyway, they say it looks like somethin' called 'luminous moss'" (p. 127). Hachizo's remarks point forward and backward: forward to the play's end, where, in a crucifixion scene, the spectators all appear with halos of light, and backward to the introductory essay, where the narrator tells of going to find and of seeing the luminous moss. Since those who are themselves "human flesh eaters" can't see the light, by the end of the work nearly everyone (it's a closet drama, so the reader can't see the light either) becomes, as Takeda might put it, a producer. Takeda clearly calls for a moral happening.

      As a composite Christ-Everyman figure (cf. Ooka's dying officer), the captain further points up the universality of human involvement in flesh eating. The Christ analogy is made clear in ac 2 of the drama, which the production notes say is to have the atmosphere of a Passion Play. The captain's face is to be "like that of Christ" (as well as that of the junior high school principal). The spectators at the end of the play "look like the ring of spectators surrounding Christ as he was being taken to Golgotha for execution." As Everyman (as well as Christ), he is tried and convicted for the crimes of which all are guilty. His role is further suggested by the difference in his appearance between acts 1 and 2. In act 1 he is to appear as "the most sinister-looking man the reader can imagine"; in act 2, the "vicious look" is replaced by one of Christ-like calm, and he is identified with the angel-like junior high school principal and guide (" as he went on ahead of me, he made his lean body waver somewhat as if he were floating" [p. 97]). Perhaps the result is meant to be akin to what Renaissance writers portrayed so vividly: man's paradoxical ability to ascend to angelic heights or descend to bestial depths.¹¹

      The theme of Takeda's work is judgment, as the court-room drama suggests, and Everyman is on trial. If Fires on the Plain stresses the journey to discovery, in Luminous Moss the journey has already been made, man's deepest secrets discovered, and the heart itself, accordingly, become the courtroom. The "producer" is invited to weigh the evidence of his own heart. The unspoken warning is "Judge not that ye be not judged." Takeda, at any rate, is blunt enough in his indictment of societies of men who condone war but pretend shock at cannibalism: "As a proud manifestation of the power of civilization, weapons of war and their mass production are openly displayed in the newsreels. Cooking utensils for human flesh, on the contrary, are no longer seen in the flatware sections of department stores or in the special exhibit rooms of museums. Of these two types of criminal tools, one has successfully won popular support and is being improved from moment to moment, whereas the other is about to be erased from memory as a secret weapon whose recollection sends a shudder of horror through the human heart" (pp. 114-15). The hypocrisy is pointed up with irony during the trial in the prosecutor's statement (greeted with applause) that "never must any comparison be permitted in the same breath between those loyal war dead who fought the hardest and starved to death for the sake of our country and this detestable, egocentric defendant!" (p. 136). Given the court's blindness, we thus find the captain, like Meursault in Camus's The Stranger, on trial for the wrong reasons. By act 2, the captain has thus become a scapegoat-Christ, bearing the sins of the world, not least of which is its refusal to acknowledge its motives.¹²

      The central idea is bolstered by numerous small ironies. For example, Takeda capitalizes on Japanese prejudice against the Ainu by subtle comparisons. Before the incursion of the Japanese, he writes, "the aboriginal Ainu not only had fish but plenty of meat to devour to their hearts' content" (p. 95). Near the end of act I stage directions call for sacred music from a song of the Ainu bear festival. It is, Takeda explains, "a warm and devout piece of music expressing joy over being blessed with meat as well as a wish that the god return safely to his home" (p. 133). Since the music is heard from the time Nishikawa conceives the idea of murdering the Captain, the "primitive" Ainu appear in anything but an inferior light. More subtle is the narrator's remark when he leaves the Makkaushi Cave. He looks back and sees the "faint traces of the black footprints" left by his shoes in the moss which later becomes a symbol of man's killer-cannibal potential. "So it's all over the place," he says. "We've been stepping on National Treasures!" (p. 100).

      But since the moss is indeed "all over the place," man needs a scapegoat victim upon whom he can project his cannibal potential. Ironically, he will not only project and condemn it, but will yet fail to really see what he has done. For this reason the ambiguous last words of the captain, "Please look at me. Please, look at me closely" (p. 145), are both accusation and invitation. The reader is meant, of course, to see himself, and thus recognize one of those "fantastic creatures" of whom the junior high principal spoke. The truth may be a jolt. In the play, since neither judge, prosecutor, nor spectators can see the luminous light, all are by implication "flesh-eaters." The captain's plea thus contains horror, for if none can see, then indeed "a terrible thing is happening!" All are guilty, but ignorant of their guilt. But his words may also be an invitation to hope. If the luminous halo is a symbol of sin, it is by tradition, whether Buddhist or Christian, a mark of the saint. The two are not incompatible. The Christ-like captain is "bearing up" after all. Perhaps through the insistent "look at me" Takeda suggests that if there is to be salvation for modern man, it must begin with recognition. "Luminous moss" is then appropriately a symbol of illumination. The quest for identity begins with soul-searching.

      3

      AFTER THE BOMB

      It took Masuji Ibuse (1898-) over twenty years before he could properly defuse his own bomb, the one set ticking inside him by the great explosion at his birthplace in August 1945. But over two decades were necessary before he could articulate with his characteristic control, before he could set forth, with appropriate objectivity and aesthetic distance, the story he needed to tell. It is well he waited, for Ibuse is above all a stylist, relying to a greater degree than many of his contemporaries upon subtle contrasts, quiet touches of humor, and delicate shifts of nuance to carry his meaning. Of course more than aesthetic distance was involved. Ibuse's own identity was very much at stake. For one does not have to be melodramatic to assert that at least two generations of Japanese are not the same since the Hiroshima bomb. And Ibuse, with the added sensitivity that many Japanese feel for their place of birth, needed time to ponder, to sift through the details of the event, to evaluate, and to reevaluate again and again, what the world, Japan, and he himself had become and were becoming.

      Black Rain evolves from a central gripping contrast.¹ Ibuse sets a single event, the atomic explosion at Hiroshima, against the ongoing, quotidian necessities of existence; a death-dealing, molecule-reordering destruction and recreation via discontinuity confronts a life-preserving, life-maintaining process of continuity. To what extent will the one bend, change, and reshape the other? How will the other absorb, counter, and amend the first? The novel grows from such unstated questions. In the lives of the characters, centering on the small family unit of Shigematsu, his wife, and his niece Yasuko, Ibuse portrays a way of life, capturing not only the full impact of the tragic event, but the resilience of the human spirit in response.

      Something of Ibuse's achievement emerges when one compares the style of Black Rain with that of John Hersey's popular Hiroshima.² Hersey, Pulitzer prize-winning novelist and journalist, also had a story to tell; it is terse and dramatic. Six survivors of the blast struggle to comprehend what has happened to them. The reader follows, somewhat breathlessly, their alternating fates:

      "For we are consumed by Thine anger and by Thy wrath are we troubled. Thou hast set our iniquities before Thee, our secret sins in the light of Thy countenance. For all our days are passed away in Thy wrath: we spend our years as a tale that is told..."

      Mr. Tanaka died as Mr. Tanimoto read the psalm.

      On August 11th, word came to the Ninoshima Military Hospital that a large number of military casualties from the Chugoku Regional Army Headquarters were to arrive on the island that day, and it was deemed necessary to evacuate all civilian patients. Miss Sasaki, still running an alarmingly high fever, was put on a large ship.... Pus oozed out of her wound, and soon the whole pillow was covered with it. She was taken ashore at Hatsukaichi, a town several miles to the southwest of Hiroshima, and put in the Goddess of Mercy Primary School, which had been turned into a hospital. She lay there for several days before a specialist on fractures came from Kobe.

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