Book Description

To the Western world, Ibuse Masuji is known primarily as the author of Black Rain, a document of the atomic holocaust and perhaps modern Japanese literature's most important contribution to the world of letters. In Japan, where is career has spanned six decades of revolutionary historical and social change, his popular novels, stories, essays and poems have won that nations' highest literary awards. John Whittier Treat's illuminating study of Ibuse is "an inquiry into the life and writings of a man brave enough to attempt a story that, in the view of more than one Hiroshima survivor, was "beyond words." Treat's analysis is the first comprehensive critical work on Ibuse outside of Japan. He provides a key to Ibuse's extraordinary writings, making his Japanese subject accessible to a Western audience. Moving beyond conventional distinctions between Ibuse's earlier and later works, Treat synthesizes a framework in which to read and understand Ibuse as a whole. He begins with a question: why and how did this author come to write Japan's most acclaimed novel of the Hiroshima bombing? His answer is organized chronologically and thematically, incorporating elements of both biography and literary criticism. He translates extensively from Ibuse's works and from interviews with the author. Pervasive themes, motifs, and images are developed and interrelated throughout the short stories, essays and early novels of the 1920s and 1930s, wartime journals, and the historical fiction based on the accounts of castaways in Edo period Japan. Ibuse's quintessential humor and irony culminate in the powerful realism of Black Rain and his postwar writing. Ibuse's voice emerges clearly. His message is human; his subject is man as a survivor. Treat's book reveals an author whose complex themes "explore what binds man to his world--not, as is so often the case with modern fiction, what separates him." To this end, says Treat, Ibuse's work is about the work of literature, about coming to terms "with the power of words to prescribe as well as describe how we see ourselves complete in a fractured world."