Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2018. x, 162 pp. US$62.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-6777-5.
Like any city, Hiroshima and Nagasaki carry countless meanings, but, for most people, these names surely figure most prominently for the bombings of August 6 and 9, 1945, and their aftermath. It is these figurations that Yuko Shibata examines in her compelling new study, which considers how documentary and dramatic films, memoirs, and reportage, and other cultural production have shaped our perceptions of the bombings; the survivors’ experiences; the wider war, defeat, occupation, and more. The first chapter—the heart of the book—leads us through a penetrating postcolonial critique of the celebrated avant-garde film Hiroshima Mon Amour, directed by Alain Resnais and released in 1959, and of its screenplay, written by Marguerite Duras. The remaining three chapters develop out of the first to treat sets of what can be considered intertexts of Resnais’ and Duras’ work. A brief introduction and afterword frame the four chapters.
Shibata’s introduction opens the book emphatically, making the case for a transnational and interdisciplinary method suited to the central object of her study. She critiques “the geographical organization of knowledge,” under which cinema studies and comparative-literature scholarship on Hiroshima Mon Amour has ignored its Japanese intertexts, while the field of Japanese studies in North America has in turn ignored Duras’ and Resnais’ work. Shibata explains, “How to bridge this disciplinary divide is a question I have long pondered, and this book is the result” (4).
The first chapter leaves no doubt about the efficacy of this method. Merging comparative literature and area studies, Shibata brings France’s and Japan’s colonial histories and their “collaboration” in Southeast Asia to bear upon Hiroshima Mon Amour (which records a conversation, interrupted by flashbacks, between a French actress making a film in the Japanese city and a Japanese architect, in which she recalls an earlier affair with a Nazi soldier during France’s occupation). Shibata argues that “given this historical background, allegorically speaking, the French woman and the Japanese man in Hiroshima Mon Amour have already met and collaborated in French Indochina before Hiroshima, just as she and the German man did in Nevers” (23). The reading that emerges from this insight references Duras’ reported work at the Colonial Office in Paris promoting French empire under the Vichy government in the late 1930s noting that, while her screenplay addresses collaboration with the German occupation, Duras remains silent on this collaboration in Indochina: “This silence is where her colonial unconsciousness manifests itself” (26). This unconsciousness produces the “alienation of Japan” in Duras’ screenplay and the “othering of the Japanese man,” who becomes “a chimera of colonialism,” allegorizing “a mainstream postwar Japan that has experienced both imperial history and colonial subordination under the US” (26–30). There is much more to the chapter, including analyses of the gender politics and linguistic politics that underpin the story. Shibata’s agile argumentation organizes it all to devastating effect.
Chapter 2 examines Japanese films on the bombings, including documentaries from which Resnais borrowed footage for the montage that opens his own film and dramatizations, from the 1950s and later. Kamei Fumio’s 1956 documentary Ikite ite yokatta (Still It’s Good to Live) draws the most attention; Shibata describes how Kamei removed several “disquieting” episodes from his film, opting instead for a “conventional humanism” that erases the hibakusha’s heterogeneity (50). This leads into chapter 3’s discussion of the visibility and invisibility of hibakusha, which centres on Kikkawa Kiyoshi, an atomic-bomb survivor who revealed his extensive keloid scars to “tourists, journalists, scientists, film directors, and students who came to Hiroshima” (65) soon after the bombings, becoming known as “Hiroshima Number One.” This leads into a discussion of the visibility and invisibility of hibakusha, employing Didier Anzieu’s concept of “the skin-ego” (75). Chapter 4 moves to an analysis of two written works, that again demonstrates the advantage of her discipline-crossing method. The first is John Hersey’s work of reportage, Hiroshima, first published in 1946 in the New Yorker magazine to immediate acclaim. The second is Nagai Takashi’s 1949 memoir of the bombing, The Bells of Nagasaki, which Shibata considers together with the enormously popular song of the same title, recorded by Fujiyama Ichirō immediately after the book’s release, and a movie inspired by the song and released the following year. The afterword introduces one more film, the 2001 avant-garde documentary H story, for a cursory discussion of how it responds to Resnais, then briefly addresses “the difference between Hiroshima/Nagasaki and Fukushima,” a topic that, once raised, demands fuller development.
Shibata maintains a tight focus on her research object and advances her argument at a fast clip. A research fellow at Meiji Gakuin University in Tokyo, she previously worked as a staff writer for the Asahi Shimbun and possesses a reporter’s skill at conveying complex ideas clearly and efficiently, as well as facility with a variety of theoretical tools. With its sophisticated engagement of Japanese and “Euro-American” literary and cinematic texts and its original and effective approach, Producing Hiroshima and Nagasaki is certain to fulfill the hope Shibata expresses in her introduction, that her intervention “assists with the further inclusion of Asian studies scholarship in other humanities fields” (16).
Michael P. Cronin
College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, USA