Japan -- Hiroshima Notes by Kenzaburo Oe and translated by David L. Swain and Toshi Yonezawa

Kenzaburo Oe. Hiroshima Notes. David L. Swain, Toshi Yonezawa, trs. New York. Boyars. 1995. 192 pages. $22.95. ISBN 0-7145-3007-7.

The reissue by Marion Boyars Publishers of the English translation of Kenzaburo Oe's Hiroshima Notes, originally published in Japanese in 1965 and first translated into English in 1981, will now enable a much wider Western audience to glean the thoughts of the 1994 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature (see WLT 66:1 pp. 74-75, and 69:1, pp. 5-16) on the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945, an event whose fiftieth anniversary in 1995 sparked vociferous debates anew. These "notes," the product of Oe's visits to Hiroshima between August 1963 and May 1965 in the role initially of journalist to cover the activities of the various peace movements, reveal a man of unabashed humanism, beseeching understanding of the sufferings of...