The Textual

1) "What is written consigns the person who must write to a statement over which he has no authority, a statement that is itself without consistency, that states nothing, that is not the repose, the dignity of silence." Maurice Blanchot, "The Essential Solitude"

2) For several years, Shigematsu Shiguroma, of the village of Kobatake, had been aware of his niece Yasuko as a weight on his mind. What was worse, he had a presentiment that the weight was going to remain with him, unspeakably oppressive, for still more years to come. In Yasuko, he seemd to have taken on a double, or even a triple, liability. That no suitable marriage was in sight for her was a circumstance simple enough in itself. The real trouble was the rumor." Masuji Ibuse, Black Rain

3) "When I was first asked to translate Masuji Ibuse's Kuroi Ame, I had considerable doubts. I knew that the work had been acclaimed in Japan, but suspected the critics of prejudice in its favor on account of its subject. Could the author have avoided stridence, melodrama, monotony, and all the other pitfalls?" John Bester, "Translator's Preface"

Textual representation of human experience often shies away from depicting the horrific, motivated not so much by squeamishness, but by the difficulty of capturing the enormity of such events. One strategy adopted by many artists involves a conscious choice to reduce the scale, diminishing the events until they reach manageable proportions. In Masuji Ibuse's Black Rain, for example, the bombing of Hiroshima is referred to in terms of its ongoing presence as an oral myth, a dark shadow from the past. A young Japanese girl experiences great difficulty in finding a husband because she had worked in Hiroshima near the end of the war, and potential suitors fear the effects of radiation sickness. As with visual representation, the textual is marked by a degree of uncertainty, tracing specific events through mimetic effects, while acknowledging the impossibility of reproducing the original.