Virago Press

Working with Shadows: How I Came to Write about Hiroshima

by Shaena Lambert

Radiance is about an 18-year old Hiroshima victim who comes to New York in 1952 to have reconstructive surgery on her face – and the relationship she has with the Long Island housewife who hosts her during her stay.

As with most writing, I didn’t approach this subject straight on. Instead, I engaged in an extended dance around the subject matter – a dance that took me to Hiroshima and back, and taught me a strange lesson about the a-bomb’s effect on imagination and creativity.

The first seed may have dropped into my mind when I was given the job of unpacking ‘Hiroshima Artifacts’ during a large Vancouver peace festival in the mid-eighties. A peculiar venue had been chosen: Robson Square, which at that time had a sunken area for exhibitions and a food court all around it. Not the best place to display artifacts from the bombing of Hiroshima, but I dutifully worked to unpack the materials.

Each one came in a wooden crate, which I pried open. Inside were mounds of pale straw, and inside that, bubble wrapped, were ‘the artifacts.’ I remember a piece of concrete printed with the shadows of leaves, a child’s blackened tricycle, a pocket watch streaked with burn marks, its minute hand fused to the clock face.

As I touched these objects, my fingers began to tingle and I felt hot. I knew I should feel compassion, but my actual emotions were much more complicated. My skin began to itch – as though this stuff, brought all this way, might leak its radioactive taint into the carpeted gallery, the food court above. And into me – my bones, my skin.

That experience was probably the first seed of Radiance, but it was a seed I didn’t return to for years. Then one day, quite by chance, I was at the Toronto Public Library, and I found Robert J Lifton’s book, Death in Life on the shelf and began to leaf through it. This is a book of interviews with Hiroshima survivors and people who have lived closely with them. One interview described the fear of contamination that overcame a neighbour living near one of the victims. Shi no Hai -- those were the words used to describe the darkness carried by those exposed to radiation. Ashes of death.

What I remember now is the hush of the library, with its waterfall and 70’s sculpture of descending sheets of timber. In my mind I saw two women – one a Hiroshima survivor, the other somebody else, somebody quite conventional, who finds herself terrified, yet fascinated, by what the other carries. Ashes of death. Atomic seeds.

I began to explore North American attitudes towards the bomb in the 1950s. It was so new, that was the thing – casting a huge shadow of fear and fascination. Atomic chewing gum was on the market. Detergents ‘radiated’ a new clean. People actually brought deck chairs to Yucca Flat to watch the explosions and feel the wind and burn on their own skin. Atomic particles from the above-ground tests were dancing all over the globe, affecting children’s teeth, causing cancer, and there was some understanding of this harm, but not much.

Seven months pregnant, I traveled to Hiroshima with my husband, Bob, and Peter my six-year-old son. I was eager to get as much written as I could before the baby was born. While Peter played outside the Hiroshima peace museum (ringing the big peace bell), I took a breath and entered the building that houses the atomic exhibition.

Here, again, were the artifacts I remembered touching. But in this place, at ground zero, there were so many more: gruesome remnants of destruction packed two whole floors. I walked among the displays, noting a little girl’s burnt sundress, clumps of hair fallen from a radiation victim’s head. But when I reached the drawings by children, swollen corpses in the river, wasted ghosts walking up a road, skin hanging from their hands, I found that I could no longer record anything.

I came back into the sunlight and joined my husband and son. We stood at the children’s monument, looking down at the million paper cranes, so colourful, filling a dry fountain.

“How did it go?” Bob asked.

“Fine, “ I said. “It was fine.”

But in truth I felt gutted. And when I returned to Canada I took my careful, assiduous notes – books and books of them – put them away in my closet, and didn’t touch them again for four years. The magnitude of the bomb – the sheer, terrible, gruesomeness of it -- had shut me up.

Later I discovered that other fiction writers – especially those who were actually exposed to the a-bomb, have shared this experience. Yoko Ota, a novelist, writes that though she could write journalism about the bombing – telling and re-telling the flash and heat and suffering -- her capacity after the bomb to fictionalize events was completely stymied. It was as though the bomb had shone into every crack, erasing imaginative complexity. And while what I experienced at the museum was of a much lesser degree, seeing, firsthand, the remnants of so much carnage had had a similar effect on me.

If one cultural tragedy stopped the story, oddly enough a second tragedy got it going again. It was only in the weeks after the planes struck the world trade centre on September 11th, that I felt an urge to return to this book. I’m not sure why this happened, though I know it happened to other writers as well. After September 11th, many manuscripts were shelved and new books begun, or old books returned to with sudden urgency, as priorities shifted. For me, the terrain I had rejected as too frightening, too terrible, became terrain I again felt compelled to explore. While the McCarthyism of the 50s now seemed relevant, too -- culturally akin, in some ways, to our own age.

And in the end, my trip to the museum did play an oblique role in what I wrote. Questions I must have been unconsciously pondering, about light and shadow, imagination and the burning away of imagination, started to become strands in what I was writing. While the characters who bring Keiko to New York for surgery – mostly well-meaning sorts -- try, with increasing insistence, to get the girl to relate her ‘a-bomb story,’ in a campaign to build opposition to hydrogen bomb, Keiko fights, with equal determination, for her right to silence. Wary and determined, deceitful, yet oddly true to herself, Keiko finds herself rejecting the One Big Story of the atomic bombing in favour of the memories and stories that exist solely in her mind. It is this struggle – shadowy world of myth and story versus the horrific light of the bomb – that ended up becoming much of the underpinning on which I hung the book.

Many myths are parables for human creation. In Cupid and Psyche, for instance, Psyche is visited at night by a beautiful lover, and she is told she must never light a candle in order to see his face, or he will instantly desert her. She does flash a candle at him – fearing that he’s a monster – and he does indeed take flight. Then she has to search for him over many miles and for years.

Writing fiction can be like that. Sometimes you have to let the story take shape in the dark, trusting that it’s not a monster (while perhaps secretly believing that it is), never attacking it with too much rational thought or criticism. Even when writing about the searing brightness of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima—maybe especially in this case—a too-bright light could kill the story. For me, certainly, approaching Radiance sideways, with my eyes half closed, was the only way I could say what I needed to say.