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Trauma and Ethics of Responsibility: Levinas and Hayashi Kyoko's A-bomb

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Clio: A Journal of Literature, History and the Philosophy of history
48.3 (2021). pp 273-298

Trauma and Ethics of Responsibility: Levinas and Hayashi Kyoko’s A-bomb Literature
Vandana Saxena

In the gloom where neither outdoor light nor store lighting reached the shelf, each doll
stood in a queer posture. They were made of red clay, baked unglazed so as to make the
most of the clay color. Measuring five or six centimeters in length, each had a different
expression and design. What they had in common was that the neck of every doll was
forcefully twisted heavenward. And they were wailing, each with a different expression.

When I took some in my hand, I noticed the artist’s fingerprints on the stick-like torso,
which measured about 5 millimeters in diameter. One doll had a flowing fingerprint from
its forehead to the pointed nose of its inverted triangular face, which was upturned to
heaven, creating a warped expression as if it were about to break into tears. Like a snail,
two eyes of another doll protruded from its head, with two additional red eyes placed just
below. The torso of another doll stretched from the legs to the neck, then, at the tip, a face
opened up like a plate. On the plate were two eyeballs, lips, and two ears, taken from the
face and arranged like fruit.1

The absolute experience is not disclosure but revelation: a coinciding of the expressed
with him who expresses…the manifestation of a face over and beyond form… The face is
a living presence; it is expression. The life of expression consists in undoing the form in
which the existent, exposed as a theme, is thereby dissimulated. The face speaks. The
manifestation of the face is already discourse. He who manifests himself comes […] to
his own assistance. He at each instant undoes the form he presents.2

In Hayashi Kyoko's story, “Masks of Whatchamacallit,” (hereafter called ‘Masks’) the encounter
with the dolls on the dark shelf of a gift shop in Nagasaki breaks through the equanimity of the
narrator’s self. Their monstrously human form, so out of place among the ‘showy local toys,’
confronts the onlooker. The narrator finds herself face-to-face where her gaze is not just
transformed but reversed by its object. The dolls gaze back, their expression demanding a
response: “As I stood gazing at them, the dolls almost seemed to crowd together and press
toward me, making me avert my eyes.”3 Held in thrall by their peculiar gaze, the narrator keeps
returning to the shop to buy a different doll every time she visits Nagasaki.
The face-to-face encounter with the dolls has little significance to the main plot of Hayashi’s
story which centers on the meeting between the narrator and her friend Takako, nearly two
decades after the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. The two girls were fifteen when the exposure to
atomic radiation altered their lives and that of many others in Nagasaki. The plot of “Masks”

1
Kyoko Hayashi, "Masks of Whatchamacallit: A Nagasaki Tale (Nanjamonja no men)," The Asia-Pacific Journal:
Japan Focus 3:12 (2005): 1-21, 2-3. Hereafter cited as Hayashi, “Masks.”
2
Emmanuel Levinas. Time and the Other, trans. Richard Cohen. (Pittsburgh: Duquesene University Press, 1987
[1979]). 65-66. Hereafter cited as Levinas, “Time.”
3
Hayashi, “Masks,” 3

1
Clio: A Journal of Literature, History and the Philosophy of history
48.3 (2021). pp 273-298

focuses on their intermittent encounters for nearly four decades after the bombing until one of
them dies in 1974. The episode in the Nagasaki gift shop is an aside, or an entretemp that French
philosopher Emmanuel Levinas describes in his essay “Reality and its Shadow,”4 an interstitial
episode that interrupts the story to give a glimpse of the monstrous dimension of suffering that
lies beyond the structures of the narrative. It startles the subject, the narrator, who cannot
comprehend the suffering of the dolls yet she can empathize with the pain and vulnerability
embodied by them. The girls appropriate the dolls as their burial figurines, thereby assimilating
the pain of the dolls into their own status as hibakusha, the atomic bomb survivors. As their
burial figurines, the dolls become a metaphorical representation of the suffering during the
bombing and their lives afterward. Yet the pain of the dolls, their distorted bodies and facial
expressions is immemorial and eternal. The narrator buys one with a mouth “torn from ear to ear,
opened across its face. White spots covered its body, and the inside of its wide-open lips was
colored with vermillion red paint.” Her friend, Takako, christens it “A scream”- a cry of a person
in pain for “[r]emaining this way. It’s painful to be exposed to the world.”5 The scream is
interpellative and interlocutionary, demanding a response from the onlooker, yet in its suspended
enduring form, it exceeds the onlooker’s attempts of appropriation. As an artistic expression of
an unknown handicap artist, the dolls carry the trace of his fingerprints. But the suffering that the
dolls embody surpasses the artist’s identity as well. It is simply there, exceeding all the efforts of
assimilation. The dolls exist prior to and beyond their appropriation; they outdo the efforts of
giving meaning. In other words, like the statue or image which reflects Levinas’
conceptualization of art in “Reality and its Shadow,” which is disconnected and disengaged from
the totalizing dimensions of selfhood and representative language, their alterity is an entretemp
or “between times,” an interruption in the flow of temporality which can be accessed only
through “something inhuman and monstrous.”6 (Levinas, 1987, 11).
Hayashi Kyoko's A-bomb fiction opens space for such entretemps – the monstrous dimensions of
time that reaches beyond the universal domain of history and the particularistic one of memory,
ascending into the realms of what Levinas calls infinity. Hayashi who passed away in 2017 at the
age of 86, was 15 years old when Nagasaki was bombed. She suffered from radiation sickness
throughout her life. Her fiction – mostly short stories and novellas - capture the memories of the
bombing as a lived experience where the past permeates the present in multiple and overlapping
ways. Centered on the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, these are memories of trauma, unspeakable
and non-representable – the extreme memories that bypass the structures of language and
comprehension.7 Despite their location within the experiential past and individual suffering
which makes them highly personal, the traumatic memories narrativize a dissolution of selfhood
- of the ‘I’ that is the locus of identity. They call for a primordial response to empathize and
respond to suffering.
Trauma inhabits the interstitial spaces in narratives of history and memory.8 In other words,
trauma is the other of history and memory. It infringes on the totalized dimensions of the time in

4
Emmanuel Levinas, "Reality and its Shadow." In Collected Philosophical Papers (Springer: Dordrecht, 1987) 1-14.
Hereafter cited as Levinas, “Reality and its Shadow.”
5
Hayashi, “Masks”, 3
6
Levinas, “Reality and its Shadow,” 11
7
Cathy Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). 7. Hereafter
cited as Caruth, Trauma
8
Caruth, Trauma, 16

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48.3 (2021). pp 273-298

the accounts of history and memory, making the incursions of infinite Otherness in these
totalities possible.9 Literary aesthetics, this paper contends, dramatize such interruptions in the
flow of time through silences and gaps, and thereby, link the space of literature to the experience
of trauma and also to the ethics of responsibility. This paper studies Hayashi’s short stories –
“Two Grave Markers,”10 “The Empty Can”11 and “Masks of Whatchamacallit” with reference to
Emmanuel Levinas' meditations on memory, ethics, and literature. Through close reading and
textual analysis, the paper explores the way personal trauma impinges upon and links the past
and the present. Literature, thus, emerges as a zone of alterity; in its attempts to represent the
traumatic memories and experiences of the A-bomb survivors, literary discourse becomes a
medium that intertwines art with the notions of ethics, responsibility, and justice.
The Story of the Hibakusha
The hibakusha of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are an integral yet a problematic presence in the
collective memory and history of Japan. As the bearers of the traumatic memories, the figure of a
hibakusha embodies otherness – a survivor whose trauma is etched not only in the mind and the
body of the victim but also in the collective memory of the society around them. Just like the
victims who are unable to put away or evade the traumatic memories, in the collective psyche,
the presence of the hibakusha is a persistent reminder of the traumatic history. They stand as a
reminder not just of the bombing of the two Japanese cities but also the grim defeat of the
country in the War. For Caruth, the memory and the experiences of the survivor of trauma are
unspeakable: “the traumatized…carry an impossible history within them, or become themselves
the symptom of history that they cannot entirely possess.”12 The survival of the hibakusha roots
the country to its painful history that has shadowed the narratives of recovery and progress in the
post-war era.
According to Akiko Naono, the category of the hibakusha came into being in 1957 with a law
concerning the Medical Care of the Hibakusha of the Atomic Bombings instituted to provide
medical compensation of the A-bomb victims.13 The category was shaped by the discourse of
science and medicine14 and socio-legal discourse.15 The process of categorization helped the
survivors to develop a collective identity and provided grounds for collective action. In 1968
another law that provided further medical and social welfare benefits insisted on a certification to
prove one’s presence in the city between August 6-20, 1945, in other words, a document that

9
As Caruth refers to trauma as an unclaimed experience which “is not locatable in the simple violent or original
event in an individual's past, but rather in the way that its very unassimilated nature—the way it was precisely not
known in the first instance—returns to haunt the survivor.” Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma and
Possibility of History (Baltimore, London: John Hopkins University Press, 1996). 3-4
10
Kyoko Hayashi. "Two Grave Markers." In The Atomic Bomb Voices from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ed. Kyoko Iriye
Selden, Mark Selden. New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2989 [1986]. 24-54. Hereafter cited as Hayashi, “Two Grave-markers”
11
Kyoko Hayashi, “The Empty Can.” In The Crazy Iris and Other Stories of the Atomic Aftermath, ed. Kenzaburo Oe.
New York: Grove Press, 1985. 127-143
12
Caruth, Trauma, 5
13
Akiko Naono, “The Origins of ‘Hibakusha’ as a Scientific and Political Classification of the Survivor,” Japanese
Studies, 39.3 (2019): 333-352, 334
14
Maya Todeschini, “Illegitimate Sufferers: A-Bomb Victims, Medical Science, and the Government” Daedalus,
128.2 (1999): 67-100.
15
Lisa Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). Hereafter cited as Yoneyama,
Hiroshima

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Clio: A Journal of Literature, History and the Philosophy of history
48.3 (2021). pp 273-298

“legally authorizes the individuals' atomic bomb experiences.”16 These rules underlined the
complicated position of hibakusha in the society. The suffering of hibukusha, examined and
certified by an official authority for its authenticity, subjected their trauma to the regimes of truth
that sought to contain and comprehend the experience.
Thus, caught between the twin poles of past and future – the horrifying memories and the desire
to move on along with the rest of the nation – stories of the hibakusha of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki underline the attempts of containment of trauma narratives and the impossibility of
such efforts. Soon after the bombing, in September 1945, the Allied authorities occupying Japan
issued a Press Code to restrict the reference to the bomb in reporting and publication.17 Zubek
points out the alienation brought about by this forced silence: “Hibakusha were forbidden from
sharing their stories, from connecting with others – their voices could not be heard in public.
They had to privately, and silently, endure the atomic ordeal.”18 Censored by the authorities, the
suffering caused by the A-bomb became a taboo topic.
At the same time, on a larger scale, the plans to commemorate the bombing were shaped by the
political and social exigencies of the time. The design for Hiroshima Peace Memorial to
commemorate the victims of the bomb was selected in 1949 under the Allied occupation.19 As
the Allied occupation came to an end in 1952, the process of gradual integration of hibakusha
memories and experiences within the discourses of peace and commemoration was already
underway wherein the bombing of the two Japanese cities was reframed into a symbolic
narrative of forgiveness and harmony in the global memory.20
Ran Zwigenberg’s study of Hiroshima as the “City of Bright Peace” traces the cultures of
commemoration where the bombing that killed thousands came to be remembered as a
significant event in the discourse of peace and future harmony. According to Zwigenberg, this
discursive transformation of atomic bomb led by the global and local politics was cemented by
the tacit involvement of the victims. For instance, Zwigenberg discusses the 1956 “Atoms for
Peace” exhibit at the peace memorial museum at Hiroshima as the point of Japan’s entry into the
nuclear age.21 The exhibit reframed the bombing of the city in terms of an event that led to peace
and transformation of Japan. The euphoria generated by the exhibit led to the formation of
Hidankyō, a hibakusha organization which embraced nuclear energy with great enthusiasm.22
Such endorsement by the survivors legitimated the research in the field of nuclear energy in
Japan’s quest for progress and modernity. The exhibit presents an interesting instance where the
otherness of the victim, the experiences of hibakusha, were harnessed to justify the narrative of
national progress. Similarly, the much-discussed case of the Hiroshima Maidens is another
instance wherein the trauma of hibakusha was appropriated by the discourse of peace,
international co-operation and scientific advancement. In 1955, a group of 25 Japanese women
who had been in school when the bomb hit the city leaving them disfigured, were chosen to go to

16
Yoneyama, Hiroshima, 94
17
Izadora Eni Zubek, ‘Atomic Silence: Contrasting Narratives of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,’Masters Diss. Instituto de
Relações Internacionais, PUC-Rio, 2016. 15. Zubek, “Atomic Silence.”
18
Zubek, “Atomic Silence”, 15
19
Yoneyama, Hiroshima, 1.
20
Ran Zwigenberg, Hiroshima: The origins of global memory culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2014); Yoneyama, Hiroshima
21
Zwigenberg, Hiroshima, 111-127
22
Zwigenberg, Hiroshima, 127

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48.3 (2021). pp 273-298

the USA to undergo reconstructive surgeries. Their stories, widely publicized, were
accommodated within the moral anti-war lessons on peace and forgiveness. The journey of the
Hiroshima maidens, endorsed by the US authorities, was celebrated as an example of American
science and charity which rose up to occasion to erase the suffering caused by the bomb. In the
teleology of scientific progress and advancement, the bomb came to be viewed as an error, “an
example of ‘humanity’s mistake’”’ – a conceptualization that swept away the peculiarity of the
disaster and the responsibility of the perpetrator.23 Such inclusion of victim’s memories and
experiences within the discourse of peace – at times problematic, and at times, much desired
(since it integrated the survivors into the visions of the future) – has become a long enduring
feature of hibakusha testimonies. The 2015 issue of International Review of the Red Cross
dedicated to the human cost of nuclear weapons features the stories of three hibakusha who share
their experiences “with the hope that our readers will understand the horrors of nuclear weapons
use.” The review provides space to voice the memories of suffering – of the victims and their
families – all framed within the “call for assurances that nuclear weapons will never be used
again.”
However, otherness by its very nature resists and slips beyond appropriation. The hibakusha
themselves were not passive political tools. On the other side of the grand narratives of peace
and cooperation, the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki disaster have sought to share and talk
about their experiences in the context of social welfare, anti-war protests and scientific
advancement. In his account to the International Review of Red Cross, Dr. Masai Tomonaga, a
survivor of Nagasaki atomic bomb, and now a doctor treating radiation illness among the
hibakusha, relates the story of a woman survivor who lost her chance of marriage and suitable
employment due the keloid scars on her face:
She had a very lonely life, but when she was about 50 years old, she decided to talk about
her experience of the atomic bombing. She became a very famous protester against the
atomic bomb. She was even invited to visit the Pope in Rome. That was an extremely
happy point in her life. But it took more than forty years for her to feel comfortable
talking about her experience.24
Other survivors also mention the great reluctance that they had to overcome before they could
share their memories; one uses the word ‘munashisa’ to describe the sense of hollowness that
they felt as they were confronted by the inability of the language to reconstruct the experiences.25
Zwigenberg cites the views of Takenishi Hirosoko, an A-bomb writer, on the gap between the
experience and the “words that the bomb makes her speak.”26 To some extent, the survivors of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki face the same dilemma that the survivors of traumatic events like the

23
Zwigenberg, Hiroshima, 127. The survivors often endorsed such conceptualization of the atomic bomb. For
instance, Yoshiro Yamakawi, a hibakusha of Nagasaki narrating his story in the International Review of the Red
Cross in 2015 insists that “[o]nce I learned about how this bomb was developed and how it was used, I did not
have any sense of hate towards ordinary Americans because I knew that most Americans did not know about the
atomic bomb at that time. ... I do not hate Americans as a whole.” Yoshiro Yamawaki, “After the Atomic Bomb:
Hibakusha tell their stories,” interview by Vincent Bernard and Hitomi Homma, International Review of the Red
Cross 97, no. 899 (2015): 507-525. 524
24
Masao Tomonaga, “After the Atomic Bomb: Hibakusha tell their stories,” interview by Vincent Bernard and
Hitomi Homma, International Review of the Red Cross 97, no. 899 (2015): 507-525. 513
25
Yoneyama, Hiroshima, 90
26
Zwingenberg, Hiroshima, 67

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48.3 (2021). pp 273-298

Holocaust frequently return to – of representing the unrepresentable.27 Many have been forced
into silence in the face of discrimination in marriage and employment prospects. According to
one of the survivors, after the war, hibakusha became a “minority, like the burakumin (the old
untouchable class), we did not belong.”28 Emotional displays of grief and resentment were
discouraged and channelized into movements like anti-nuclear peace movements which gave
meaning to the narrations and a purpose to the sharing of memories.29 Then there is the concern
that the future generation would forget or the horrors would be downplayed by history.30 Some,
like Hayashi, insist that this obligation to share is an ethical demand placed on the survivors by
history and by the future. Referring to the sixth anniversary of Fukushima Daiichi nuclear
disaster, Hayashi insists on solidarity among the victims of atomic disasters:
So, once again I wanted to offer an occasion in which audience and participants could
gain knowledge, experience art, and reflect on the meanings of Fukushima. I wanted to
create a new experience, a particular time and space, whose memory would make people
feel closer to Fukushima. To young people who do not have the same memories that we
do, we cannot ask them not to forget. But we can create a new experience: we can stand
together and want to remember. We can then resist our forgetfulness.31
Thus, the hibakusha of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been on the forefront of global memory
cultures – as the first victims of atomic weaponry. Along with their trauma and suffering, they
have also borne the anti-war message, not only in Japan, but on the world stage, literally on the
scars of their bodies. While most of the survivors, indeed the entire society and nation that
underwent the trauma, would like to put the past to rest and move into the future, the survivors –
in their presence and activism – have embodied the reminder – “Never again.”
What does the society – on a global scale - owe to the survivors whose suffering can hardly be
erased by monetary compensations or even medical aid? What is the ethical responsibility of
those who have not undergone the suffering and therefore, cannot understand the true nature of
victim’s trauma? While the peace and anti-nuclear lessons have appropriated and presented the
suffering of the hibakusha as a cautionary tale (albeit with their participation), such discourses
have also domesticated the unspeakable and the unrepresentable nature of the bomb and its
effects – neglecting the trauma which brands and isolates the survivors of the bomb. The
otherness of the hibakusha is marked by a profound tension between the hope of ultimate

27
Elie Wiesel, in his 1989 essay “Art and the Holocaust: Trivializing Memory,” insists “just as no one could imagine
Auschwitz before Auschwitz, no one can now retell Auschwitz after Auschwitz. . . . Only those who lived it in their
flesh and in their minds can possibly transform their experience into knowledge.” In other words, Holocaust is a
unique event with no historical or real referential. It is incomprehensible to those who have not experienced it
since language and other mediums of expression fall short. The survivors of the bombing evince a similar
sentiment. E. Wiesel, ‘Art and Holocaust: Trivializing Memory’, New York Times, June 1989.
http://www.nytimes.com/1989/06/11/movies/art-and-the-holocaust-trivializing-
memory.html?pagewanted1⁄4all. (Accessed on May 11, 2018)
28
Zwingenberg, Hiroshima, 15
29
Zwigenberg, Hiroshima, 77-78; Yoneyama, Hiroshima, 202
30
This study is especially relevant given the dwindling number of survivors. In 2005, they were 240,000. By 2018,
the number had shrunk to 154,859. ‘30 A-bomb survivors apply for radiation illness benefits,’ The Japan Times,
March 15, 2006.https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2006/03/15/national/30-a-bomb-survivors-apply-for-
radiation-illness-benefits/#.XKH09tIzbIV (Accessed on Feb 23, 2019)
31
Kyoko Hayashi. “To Rui, Once Again.” Asia-Pacific Journal – Japan Focus, 15.7 (2017): 1-24. 20

6
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48.3 (2021). pp 273-298

recuperation and integration back into the society, and an awareness of the impossibility of such
desire. Without denying the importance of peace and the anti-war message, this study
concentrates on the memory and experience of the survivor that exist beyond such meaning-
making narratives. It focuses on understanding the suffering without the moralizing contexts in
order to explore the possibilities of an empathic response that does not domesticate or subjugate
the trauma of the survivors to the grand narratives. The story of the hibakusha of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki exists beyond the symbolic meaning making activities. In the sphere of literature,
fictional pieces by writers like Hayashi Kyoko and many others confront the transcendent and
politically charged grand narratives by capturing the deeply lived experiences of the hibakusha.
In these narratives, the bombing, and suffering it entailed, remain a site of multiple problematic
emotions like shame, guilt, and alienation as well as the discourses of victimization and
responsibility. The trend of thought is evident in hibakusha literature where the earlier tropes of
redemption and sacrifice have given way to the genres likes atomic literature and nuclear
sublime which attempts to capture the experience of otherness and lived dimension of trauma.32
This study is an attempt to engage with the hibakusha literature beyond overarching meanings
and morals that seek to contain the stories. It does so through Emmanuel Levinas’ philosophical
exploration of persistent otherness that gives rise to ethics and responsibility. Otherness lies at
the heart of hibakusha literature, in the figure of hibakusha herself, as discussed above and also,
in the traumatic memories that form the core of their narrative. These memories resist
comprehension and closure provided by the linear narratives of suffering and forgiveness, or the
history of scientific progress. The relationship between trauma, memories and literature is more
complicated. In Otherwise than Being, Levinas separates memory from the ‘immemorial past.’
To a large extent, this dichotomy is founded on the presupposition that lies at the heart of his
philosophical thought: the transcendence of being into being’s other, or “otherwise than being.”
Memory belongs to the domain of the ego that lies in the order of the being; it plunges into the
past to understand and organize it in a comprehensible narrative of history: “memory after the
event, assumes the passivity of the past and masters it. Memory as an inversion of historical time
is the essence of interiority.”33 Therefore, memory represents an impossible quest for the lapsed
time. Levinas’ approach to literature is more complex. Several scholars have outlined the
Platonic bias in Levinas’ idea of incompatibility between art and ethics.34 On the other hand,
thinkers like Henry McDonald have outlined the alterity of art and literature that makes them
central to Levinas’ philosophical thought.35

32
Stephanie Houston Grey. “Writing Redemption: Trauma and the authentication of the moral order in Hibakusha
literature.” Text and Performance Quarterly, 22.1 (2010): 1-23; Gregory Mason, “Witness and Appropriation in
Hibakusha Stories,” Peace Review, 17.4(2006): 411- 417; Alyson Miller and Cassandra Atherton. "‘Monster in the
sky’: Hibakusha poetry and the nuclear sublime." TEXT: journal of writing and writing programs 41(2017): 1-12.
33
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and infinity: An essay on exteriority. trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus
Nijhoff, 1979) 56. Hereafter cited as Levinas, Totality
34
Chris Thompson, “The Look of Ethics: Emmanuel Levinas, Leo Bronstein, and the Interhuman Intrigue.” In Textual
Ethos Studies of Locating Ethics, ed. Ann Fahraeus and Ann Katrin Jonsson (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), 315-332;
Edith Wyschogrod, "The Art in Ethics: Aesthetics, Objectivity, and Alterity in the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas’,
In Ethics as First Philosophy: the Significance of Emmanuel Levinas for Philosophy, Literature, and Religion, ed.
Adriaan Peperzak (London: Routledge, 1995), 138–9.
35
Henry McDonald, "Aesthetics as first ethics: Levinas and the alterity of literary discourse." Diacritics 38. 4 (2008):
15-41. Hereafter cited as McDonald, “Aesthetics”

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This paper explores the literary discourse as a crucial element of Levinas’ philosophy of ethics
and responsibility through an exploration of memory, trauma, and the spaces of narration. The
three stories under consideration highlight the incomprehensible aspect of the traumatic
memories that unhinge the historical narratives and call for an ethical responsibility towards the
past. “Two Grave Markers,” published in a 1986 anthology of voices from Hiroshima and
Nagasaki tells the story of a fourteen-year-old girl, Wakako, and her struggle for survival –
physical as well as psychological – after the bombing of Nagasaki. Wakako and her friend, Yoko
were working in an ammunition factory when the bomb exploded. Though they manage to find
shelter in the surrounding mountains, Yoko succumbs to her injuries. As maggots swarm around
dying Yoko, Wakako abandons her friend in order to survive. The two short months that follow
are plagued with guilt and responsibility as the society around her tries to create narratives of
heroism and sacrifice to give a meaning to the events. “The Empty Can” narrates the story of five
women and their lives after the bomb. They reunite in their school to see it one more time before
it is pulled down. In its dilapidated and neglected state, the school stands as a metaphor for the
fading memories of the women who experienced the bombing as schoolgirls. They revisit the
school not just spatially but also temporally as they remember their school days. The most
devastating is the memory of the day of the explosion and its aftermath. The third story “Masks
of Whatchamacallit: A Nagasaki Tale” published in 2005, once again tells the story of two
friends who survive the bombing only to suffer through the lifelong aftermaths of the bomb -
bodily as well as socially and culturally, as they face the taboos that surround the atomic bomb
survivors. These three stories – one depicting the events of the day of the bombing and the days
that followed, and the latter two stories exploring the long terms effects of bombing - mediate
between the individual memories and trauma of the survivors and the collective memory of the
society as it attempts to make sense of the events. The paper contends that it is precisely the
failure to make sense or to comprehend and overcome the trauma which makes ethical demands
against the resolution and relegation of the traumatic memories into history. In giving space to
the memories and persistent suffering of the survivors, literature, as Hayashi’s stories show,
creates space for the past – for otherness to survive within the society and its orientation towards
future, development and progress.
The Trace of the Event
The central human act in Levinas’ philosophy of ethics is the encounter with the other, the first
unreflective face-to-face with another living presence. Living presence, for Levinas, implies a
genuine otherness, exposed and expressed by the face of the other, by simply being there as an
undeniable reality. The other in his/her absolute alterity evades self’s ideas and thoughts that
seek to grasp, comprehend and thereby make the other a part of ‘my’ world. But the irreducible
alterity of the other indicates his/her refusal to be bound as a finite entity: thus, “the face resists
possession, resists my powers.”36 The encounter with such otherness shakes the solidity of the
self as the individual being is confronted by that which is beyond being, the non-being whose
otherness transcends the totality of the known world.
In the essay “The Trace of the Other,” Levinas turns to the idea of a trace as a mark of such an
encounter.37 In common parlance, a trace is a mark left by an entity or an event. It is the mark of

36
Levinas, Totality, 197
37
Emmanuel Levinas, "The trace of the other." Trans. A Lingis. In Deconstruction in context (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1986), 345-359. Hereafter cited as Levinas, ‘The trace’

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otherness that persists even after the other or the encounter with the other is over, after it has
faded into the structures of interpretation and comprehension, and the otherness has been
appropriated by the self like the memories of the hibakusha which became a part of the
discourses of peace and harmony. But as mentioned earlier, in fiction like Hayashi’s one gets a
glimpse of trauma that resists or reaches beyond this appropriation – the trace of the suffering
itself. Hence, the trace is a fragile reflection, a mark of loss or irrecoverability. It is marked by an
excess of signification – like Lacan’s object petit a – which cannot be captured, recovered or
represented. For Levinas, the trace is linked with the temporality of the encounter: in every sign
or word that is written or uttered, lies the trace of the moment of utterance, of the “passage of the
person who left the sign.”38 The trace is the imprint of both - the other who spoke and the
moment of speaking – lost irrevocably yet existing in the “inflexions of forgotten voices.”39 The
moment of understanding or interpretation of the trace is far removed from the experience of the
event. Therefore, the eyewitness accounts or testimonies carry only the trace of the event or the
lost entity because language or word, the means to make the past known, always fall short of the
experience:
Immemorial, unrepresentable, invisible, the past that bypasses the present, the pluperfect
past, falls into a past that is a gratuitous lapse. It cannot be recuperated by reminiscence
not because of its remoteness, but because of its incommensurability with the present.
The present is the essence that begins and ends, beginning and end assembled in a
thematizable conjunction; it is the finite in correlation with a freedom.40
The trace confounds history as well as memory by the irretrievability of the past. The
irrecoverable past which is beyond representation because “the move from event to experience,
from ‘what happened’ to a recollection of what happened, involves a withdrawal—a forgetting—
that compels language. It is on the loss of the event that we are compelled to say what we saw.
But it is that loss that dooms language, as Levinas’ ‘said,’ to failure.”41 Edward Casey insists that
“the trace is not a presence but is rather the simulacrum of a presence that dislocates, displaces,
and refers beyond itself.”42
The titles of the Hayashi’s stories refer to such traces of absence. The two grave markers, in the
story by the same title, are the traces of two young girls who lost their lives during and after the
atomic bombing. Though the grave markers stand as the point of closure, a full stop to the life
and story of Yoko and Wakako, they fail to capture the lived experience of bombing and the
suffering due to the radiation; neither do they capture the terrible death of one friend and the
guilt of the other. The grave markers are brittle signs of the complicated friendship between
Wakako and Yoko – solid but vulnerable to personal flaws and also, the march of time which
leads to the demise of the two girls and their relationship during the bombing of Nagasaki. Even
before the stories are relegated to the two grave markers, Wakako, as she lies on her death bed
just over a month after the bombing, is aware of the gradual fading away of the event and its

38
Levinas, ‘The trace,’ 357
39
Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus
Nijhoff, 1981). 26. Hereafter cited as Levinas, Otherwise than Being.
40
Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 11
41
Michael Bernard-Donals, Forgetful memory: Representation and remembrance in the wake of the Holocaust.
(New York: SUNY Press, 2008). 21
42
Edward Casey, “Levinas on Memory and the Trace,” In The Collegium Phaenomenologicum, edited by J.C. Sallis,
G. Moneta, & J. Taminiaux. (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988), , 241-255. 252

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experience from the collective memory. She hears her grandmother, Obatchan, telling the story
of a nun who wouldn't let a young girl come near to save her even as she burnt: “That story is a
fake, Wakako mumbled to herself. Obatchan’s story was an embellished fabrication, not the
truth.”43 She wonders if the girl student who escaped fabricated the story as she remembered the
image of the burning nun: “It must be that she wanted to believe in her own good will.”44 But the
new story appeals to people and Wakako believes that “as the days pass, the lie will penetrate the
girl’s body and she herself will begin to believe it.”45 Wakako waits impatiently for the day she
would be able to free herself similarly by absolving herself from the guilt of Yoko’s death. Like
the grave markers, the memories that would mark the lost event and people in the future would
be riddled with such psychological strategies of survival. At the end of the story, as Wakako’s
mother looks at the graves of the two girls, she believes that the two girls are speaking together:
“She thought she was hearing the laughter of Wakako and Yoko.”46 Tsune’s nostalgia evades the
event, the bombing and what happened afterwards, to recapture the unsullied past; it yields to the
circuit of the return to the same or the familiar world where the horrendous experiences of the
two girls and their friendship are given a neat and explicable end. The event becomes
irrecoverably veiled by the signs and symbols that enable the people of Nagasaki to find solace
in stories of heroism, sacrifice, and bravery.
In “The Empty Can,” like Yoko and Wakako’s grave markers, Kinuko’s empty can carries the
trace of her dead parents. Its emptiness is the mark of her loss which Kinuko carries everywhere
she goes. The narrator, at the end of the story, is unable to recall Kinuko but recalls the can and
wonders if Kinoku still keeps it with her. The title of the third story, “Masks of
Whatchamacallit,” is more complicated as it marks a double absence. The word
‘Whatchamacallit,’ a metasyntactic term to refer to “a person or thing whose name one cannot
recall, does not know, or does not wish to specify.” It is the name the narrator gives to the dolls
that she and her friend, Takako bought together in Nagasaki. It also refers to the two friends, the
hibakushas in the story whose presence as A-bomb survivors, the manifestation of the A-bomb
in their bodily disease and their lived experiences, the society would like to forget. Apart from
the medical effects including extreme illness and injuries, post-war hibakusha testimonies are
riddled with the strains of societal discrimination and fears. They are the ‘whatchamacallit’ of
the title - their experiences compressed into the symbolization of the event whose experience the
community would like to forget or relegate into the past. They are the unpleasant traces of the
past trauma that persists despite the efforts made by the collectivity to overcome the memory.
The dialogic nature of the word, ‘whatchamacallit,’ in the story – with its reference to dolls, to
the hibakushas, to the attitude of the society and the stigma borne by the survivors – situates the
personal narratives of the two friends in a socio-cultural context. The course of the narrative
reveals the absence of single cohesive meaning. The account of the two hibakushas is the story
of the mask of normalcy that they wear to disguise their vulnerability and suffering, and also the
ethical demand their suffering makes on the society. The trace addresses the remnant of the past.

43
Hayashi, ‘Two Grave-markers,’ 34
44
Hayashi, ‘Two Grave-markers,’ 34
45
Hayashi, ‘Two Grave-markers,’ 34
46
Hayashi, ‘Two Grave-markers,’ 54

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“It can lend itself to the conceptualizing activity of the consciousness but the trace is also the
disturbance of that activity.”47
Thus, the trace splits and interrupts the accounts of memory, marking these accounts with gaps
that indicate forgetfulness, which is often voluntary. It challenges the notion of memory as a
power to recall and record the past. Mneme, the capacity of an individual to retain the past
experience, is troubled by anamnesis, the involuntary flashes of the past that burst forth and
rupture the cohesive linear narratives; the involuntary recollections or the traces signify the
surplus of memory and interrupt traditions of commemoration and historiography. In hibakusha
literature, particularly Hayashi’s stories, these recollections are not just psychological, they also
bodily, taking the forms of illness and injury that carry the trace of the bombing. Deterioration
of Wakako’s physical health (“Two Grave Markers”) is accompanied by her slow descent into
insanity. Despite her efforts to save herself, the maggots that “swarmed” on Yoko’s dying body,
now fester in her thoughts and memories. The purulent sores on her body as well her insanity
become the forms of remembering the trauma, the true experience of the events that transpired
during the days after the bombing which she never tells anybody. In “The Empty Can,” as the
friends discuss their lives and relationships, each wonders about the centrality of the bombing in
their lives. “ ‘Are we making too much of the bomb,’ said Oki in a whisper.”48 Yet it is Oki who
is troubled by her assignment at Nagasaki prefecture that would take her away from the N-bomb
hospital. Their lives are tied to the atomic bomb and its after effects, despite the efforts to move
on. Later in the story, after Kinuko and the narrator pay respect to their teacher who died
instantaneously during the bombing, Kinuko decides that “it’s best to forget about people who
are dead.”49 But the bodily recollection assaults her immediately – “Just then Kinkuko gave a
sharp cry of pain and rubbed the palm of her hand. There was neither blood nor any sign of a
wound on the palm.”50 Nearly three decades after the event, Oki and Kinuko visit the hospital to
remove the shards of glass embedded in their skin.
Similarly, “Masks” is an account of Takako’s gradual deterioration and her valiant attempts to
fight the aftereffects of the radiation. The story reverses the conventional bildungsroman as it
traces the distortion of the process of growth and coming-of-age for the two girls. Instead of
entry into womanhood and its secrets as the narrator had envisaged, menstruation is painful and
never-ending. Marital relations are fraught with social taboos; pregnancy is fearsome as the
husbands, families, society, even the hibakusha themselves fear giving birth to children who
might carry the genetic defects. While the narrator chooses to give birth to her child, she watches
on resentfully when husband checks the limbs of the child before declaring that the baby
resembled him. “If the body had had defects caused by the bomb, my husband would never have
asked if it looked like him,” she thinks resentfully.51 Her friend, Takako, on the other hand,
chooses to terminate her pregnancy though she craves for a child. Her words echo her husband
and her society's attitude to a hibakusha as she tells the doctor to abort the child: “Because I’m a
hibakusha, I worry about deformity.”52 The other effects of radiation catch up with Takako,

47
Cynthia D. Coe, Levinas and the Trauma of Responsibility: The Ethical Significance of Time. (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2018). xi
48
Hayashi, “The Empty Can”, 103
49
Hayashi, “The Empty Can”, 105
50
Hayashi, “The Empty Can”, 105
51
Hayashi, “Masks,” 16
52
Hayashi, “Masks,” 15

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including fever, lethargy, hair loss and cancer. “I am a superior guinea pig,” she tells the
narrator, making light of her suffering.53 The aftermath of the bombing, the trace of the traumatic
event that marks their lives, splits the subjectivity confronting it with its own fragmentation. For
the girls, the impossibility of natural growth – indicated by menstruation, motherhood, old age,
and subsequent death– accompanies the psychical breakdown where each attempt to move into
the future is hindered by the past. Traces of the past, thus, disturb the linear nature of
remembrance. Since the meaning of the trace lies elsewhere in the past, the self that bears the
trace is forever marked and ruptured by the past. McDonald insists that this calls forth a
diasporic consciousness no longer rooted or located in the fixed consciousness or an ‘I.’54 It
gives rise to memory which is “nomadic”: “It is an irreducible relation to the earth: a sojourn
devoid of place.”55 The evasion to representation, comprehension and thereby to narration,
echoes infinite otherness.
Diachrony, Trauma, and Responsibility
In the three stories, the narratives of the victims repeatedly resist and undercut attempts to give
meaning to the suffering and explain it away. In “The Empty Can,” Nishida, one of the girls who
joined the school after the bombing, remembers her school years by the competitions like the
annual speech contest, while the others remember the devastation on the fateful day. Though
Nishida has assimilated the bombing in her memories of the past, the repeated interruption of her
accounts by those of the survivors reveals the limitation of her understanding and experience of
history. Levinas’ concept of diachrony intertwines this experience of otherness within the
frameworks of time, history and language. In Otherwise than being, he talks about the presence
of the other interrupting one’s understanding of time and the events of the past. The self,
Nishida’s in the above case, understands time – the past and the future - from the point of view
that is rooted within its own subjectivity where the bombing, though a common tragedy, is
remembered differently among those who learnt about it and those who experienced the impact
first hand. Subjective perception of the past seeks to empower the self by understanding the
events of the past (not only within one’s own experience but across the range of history) from the
location of the self. Nishida, therefore, is aware of the bomb and its impact but with the
subjectivity of the one who did not experience the impact first hand. She expresses guilt that she
did not suffer the exposure. “Emotionally, I want to have been exposed like you,” she tells the
others.56 But her sympathetic desire for one-ness with the victims is short lived. The irony
heightens as the girls discuss Oki’s problem with the job at Nagasaki prefecture that would take
her away from the N-bomb hospital. The narrator insists that “as a fellow a bomb victim, I could
understand Oki’s uncertainty.”57 Nishida, on the other hand, views Oki’s dilemma in a rather
simplistic manner as her inability to follow through her plans: “ ‘It may sound brutal to say so,’
Nishida said, ‘but once your plans are set, you have to go ahead with them - that’s life, isn’t it?
Even if you are sick.’”58 Thus, Nishida’s encounter with the other, her friends who are struggling
with the radiation effects, presents her with a past that is collectively remembered; yet the

53
Hayashi, “The Masks,” 5
54
McDonald, “Aesthetics,” 26
55
McDonald, “Aesthetics” 136
56
Hayashi, “The Empty Can,” 100
57
Hayashi, “The Empty Can,” 101
58
Hayashi, “The Empty Can,” 101

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memories and experiences are not one’s own59 – the self, confronted with such memories, cannot
comprehend or remember because the limitations of its own subjectivity. In terms of their
memory, though Nishida and her friends talk and remember the same past, their awareness and
experience of the time is different. The barrier between those who suffered the bombing and
those who did not is invisible yet strong.
Such interruption in one’s understanding of time or diachrony “is a structure that no thematizing
or interested movement of consciousness – memory or hope – can either resolve or recuperate”
since understanding is rooted in the experience once cannot comprehend.60 Levinas uses the
phrase “monstration of essence” to discuss diachrony as it deforms the coherence of one’s self,
and its knowledge and understanding, by interrupting the present with something which cannot
be made present or experienced.61 Thus, diachrony is tied up with a disturbance in the order of
the self. In terms of language, it is the presence of the other – whose thoughts and words come
from the location that is not available for comprehension, appropriation or even understanding to
the self. Diachrony, resulting from such encounter with the other, upsets the reign of the self, and
the intelligibility of history facilitated by its subjectivity. This disturbance, for Levinas, is at the
core of the empathic response to the other. It is experienced not just by those listening or
encountering the hibakusha, but by the survivor him/herself who experiences persistent otherness
within the psyche as s/he still trying to come to terms with trauma. The loss of agency, of control
on the part of the victim/survivor of trauma, includes her ability to narrate her experience and
trust that others will listen.62 Wakako cannot tell anyone, even her mother, about the events on
the mountain (“Two Grave Markers”). When Yoko’s mother Yoshi visits them and tells Wakako
that she was going to N-city to search for Yoko, Wakako tells her that she had seen Yoko alive
and running to the mountains. Around her, she hears the stories of heroism, which her
experiences contradict – stories that she believes are fabricated. Yet these are the stories that the
people like. The narrative and language of “Two Grave Markers” mirrors Wakako’s hesitation
and trauma as it tells about the events of the day in a broken non-linear manner. But the event,
the bombing and her subsequent desertion of Yoko, festers in Wakako’s mind as demonic
presence, driving her to insanity. The failure to narrate does not imply that trauma cannot be
remembered but rather that traumatic events disturb the psyche’s ability to remember normally.
Levinas emphasizes the acceptance of vulnerability arising from such diachronic interruptions
caused with the encounter with the other. Herein lies his conception of ethical responsibility. One
needs to open and make oneself vulnerable to the experience of the other resisting the impulse to

59
Alison Landberg refers to the memories ‘not natural, not the product of lived experience […] but are derived
from the engagement with a mediated representation’ (Landsberg 20-21). Work of fiction along with other forms
like cinema create prosthetic memories for the collectivity that did not live through the historical event. According
to Landsberg, as people of diverse backgrounds ‘see through another’s eyes’ (148), they get an affective as well as
intellectual insights into events that they did not live through but are now made available to their understanding.
While prosthetic memories are important in disseminating the accounts of the past over time and space, they are
also implicated in the ideological reproductions like the narratives of peace and harmony assimilating the event of
bombing, as discussed earlier in the essay. Prosthetic memories are also problematic in the second instance where
despite the acts of recall that transfer memories, the lived experience of the past remains beyond language or
narrative.
60
Levinas, Time, 137
61
Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 30
62
Susan J Brison, Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). 49-
51

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appropriate, explain and give meaning to the traumatic experience and hence the protect the
self’s understanding of the past. In Levinas and Trauma of Responsbility, Coe traces the
language of trauma used by Levinas to describe “the unanticipated nature of responsibility, the
way in which encountering the other makes a claim against which the self cannot protect
herself.”63
Levinas also anticipates the resistance of the ego to this invasion of the other. In “Masks,”
Takako husband is the voice of reason that stands confident in its self-assurance. When he agrees
to marry Takako, his attitude, at least on the surface, seems that of liberal enlightenment. On
hearing about Takako’s exposure to atomic bomb radiation, he avers that “It doesn't matter at all,
to me at least. The war-damaged more or less all of us who lived through it. You and I are fifty-
fifty in this sense.”64 Beneath the liberal broad-mindedness lies the tendency to appropriate the
trauma of the hibakusha into the larger narrative of Japan’s victimization. Either as a master
narrative of Japan’s collective suffering or a means to forestall the discussion about the war
responsibility, “the particular identity and victimhood of hibakusha, or A-bomb survivors, were
symbolically appropriated for and attributed to the Japanese populace as a whole.”65 Takako's
husband not only appropriates the victimhood but displays indifference when Takako develops
breast cancer due to her exposure to the bomb: “One should manage one’s own health. Even
between husband and wife, it is each person’s responsibility. Not only that, in the first place I
never wish to see a wound on another living person.”66 Such convenient distancing is further
evident as he argues rationally when Takako expresses her wish to give birth, telling her that
firstly she is a hibakusha and secondly, she was the one who had explained to him how radiation
could affect the genes. “Any deformity that can be prevented should be rationally checked ahead
of time,” he announces. “Would you say it’s our responsibility to leave superior people for future
generations?”67 Later after the abortion, when they discover that it was a healthy baby, he swiftly
distances himself once again insisting that he was so involved in Takako’s A-bomb disease that
he found himself looking at the child with the “mentality of a victim”:
I was made to see clearly the fragility of reason. I feel miserable. I have had enough of
former soldiers begging on the train, and I have had enough of your a-bomb disease.”
With this he left the room.68
The episode offers an interesting insight into the gender dynamics that have come to underwrite
the hibakusha identity where the discourse of victimhood is appropriated by the male character,
even as he denies the bodily trauma. Hayashi’s women characters, as seen in all the three stories,
seem to accept excessive guilt.69

63
Coe, Levinas and Trauma, 13
64
Levinas, “The Masks,” 10
65
David Stahl, ‘The Way of the survivor,’ In Representing the other in modern Japanese literature: A critical
approach ed. Rachael Hutchinson and Mark Williams. (London: Routledge, 2006), 211-229. 211
66
Hayashi, “The Masks,” 12
67
Hayashi, “The Masks,” 14
68
Hayashi, “The Masks,” 15
69
The dichotomy of gender when it comes to the role and status of Japan during the War is complex and
problematic. Yoneyama links it directly to post-war politics where women were constituted political subjects at the
expense of national defeat – “In the prevailing popular memory, ‘Japanese Women,’ unlike most men, are
probably remembered as "victims" who were liberated at the expense of the national defeat” (Yoneyama,
Hiroshima, 188). While incidents like the case of Hiroshima Maidens constituted the feminized identity for the

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Denial, sympathy, and identification strengthen the barriers of ego and become a means to evade
the responsibility of a primordial empathic response to the suffering without resorting to rational
argumentation or thought. Assuming ethical responsibility calls for opening oneself to the trauma
of the other, of experiencing the vulnerability that the rupturing of selfhood entails. Ultimately it
evinces the capacity to speak with care and think of justice.
Ethical responsibility and A-bomb literature
This section explores literary space as a zone of alterity or otherness that unsettles and evokes
responsibility in all its traumatic manifestations. The emancipatory potential of literature lies in
its revelation of the fissures and dilemmas that run through the acts of witnessing and narration.
On the one hand, the survivors of trauma insist on the incommunicability of what it meant to live
through the extreme experience like the Holocaust or the atomic bombing, an insistence that
challenges the feasibility of writing for a larger audience. But this incommunicability is
precisely what atomic bomb or Holocaust literature is meant to communicate.
Several critics have decried Hayashi’s single-minded preoccupation with a theme which has
become a politically suspect in modern Japan because it encourages the predilection for
assuming the posture of an aggrieved victim, and also, due to Hayashi’s persistent refusal to
trade that theme for other literary or historical issues. John Whittier Treat cites novelist
Nakagami Kenji’s long-standing frustration, not just with Hayashi but with the theme of the
bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nakagami accuses Hayashi of being an “atomic fascist”
insisting that nuclear issue had, in fact, become something of a “fetish” in literary circles.70
Elie Wiesel, a well-known and perhaps the most influential of Holocaust survivors, grapples with
a similar dilemma in One generation after. According to Elie Wiesel, bearing witness to the
Holocaust presents the drama of a messenger unable to deliver his message:
Certainly there can be no other theme for him: all situations, all conflicts, all obsessions
will, by comparison, seem pallid and futile. And yet, how is one to approach this universe
of darkness without turning into a peddler of night and agony? [...] Still, the story had to
be told. In spite of all risks, all possible misunderstandings.71
There is a similar sense of mission with which Hayashi writes A-bomb stories. The stories focus
on independent characters who move in different orbits but the past ties them together. Each
faces the event rooted in their egological self-index – in their memories and relationships, in their
socio-political milieu and its attitudes, even their bodies, and their medical histories. The format
of a short story where the writers “see by the light of the flash […] the only thing one can be sure
of – the present moment,”72 dramatizes the instant in which otherness makes a foray into the

hibakusha victim, highlighting their passive status as the victims of the atomic bomb (Yoneyama, Hiroshima, 208).
It also served the purpose of diverting attention from Japan’s aggression in Asia, especially the sexual violence and
the system of ‘comfort women’ that is remembered vividly in countries like Korea, China, Malaysia and Singapore.
James J. Orr, The Victim as Hero (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001). 174-175
70
John Whittier Treat, "Hayashi Kyoko and the Gender of Ground Zero," In The Woman's Hand: Gender and Theory
in Japanese Women's Writing, ed. Paul Gordon Schalow, and Janet A. Walker. (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1996). 262-92. 265
71
Elie Wiesel, One Generation After. (New York: Random House LLC., 1970). 11
72
Nadine Gordimer. “How a short story differs from a novel.” In The Art of the Short Story ed. eds. Sana Gioia and
R. S. Gwynn. (New York: Longman, 2005). 345-346. 346

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knowable; that which is beyond comprehension or predictability infiltrates the conscious

structures of selfhood and society. Away from the linearity of history, literature dramatizes such
entretemps, the moment “between times” where the encounter with otherness reveals both the
possibilities of human contact and intimacy but also of unassimilable difference between the self
and the other.
The diachronous past invades and upsets the concreteness of the present at multiple levels. In
Hayashi A-bomb stories, the bodies of the characters carry traces of past into the present; the
present relationships are shaped by the experiences during and after the bombing. Hayashi
interweaves news, medical and scientific data, her personal experiences and those of the other
hibakhusha into a single moment in which the past extends indefinitely towards an unpredictable
future. Rather than disorienting the reader, the narratives, riddled with frequent temporal shifts,
trace the continuity of devastation and confusion of the bombing into the present. One of
Hayashi's concerns is the malleable nature of human memory. Her writing grapples with the
distortion effected by time, for instance, the inability of the narrator to remember Kinuko in “The
Empty Can” though she remembers the can. Bhowmik points out the way the stories
problematize the modern idea of history as a neutral and linear medium marked by frames of
reference in terms of past, present and future;
historical conventions of temporality assert the fundamental and powerful idea that the
neutral medium of experience, which extends to infinity and opens to an individual mind
the vast power of generalizations, is a product of consensus. This historical consciousness
that allows for the formation of generalizations and universal laws makes its way into
narratives in the figure of the omniscient narrator who tells the past and intimates the
future for the reader.73
For the survivors, the historical consciousness carries the traces of the rupture caused by the
bombing. Hayashi’s secure childhood in Shanghai was displaced by the bomb that fell in
Nagasaki. She is aware that her experience is only one among countless others. As she tells and
retells her memories of escaping the ammunition factory, her memories mingle with those of the
others. In ‘Shanghai to hachigatsu kokonoka’ Hayashi insists that instead of relieving the burden
of the past, writing about it has made her realize that there were many August Ninths: “My
August Ninth was escaping from the demolished factory and going towards Mount Konpria on a
single narrow path. It was just the August Ninth that I saw while fleeing via that single route. It
was August Ninth, and it wasn’t August Ninth” (cited by Bhowmick).74 In her writings, Hayashi
focuses her attention on the other August Ninths.
As mentioned earlier, such receptivity to the other is conditioned by the fracturing of self-
identity, the experience of diachrony within the self. LaCapra echoes a similar notion as he talks
of empathic unsettlement which calls for experiencing the pain of the other, while
simultaneously acknowledging her otherness.75 (2001, 135). Literature offers a glimpse of
alterity that unsettles the self:

73
Davinder Bhowmik, "Temporal Discontinuity in the Atomic Bomb Fiction of Hayashi Kyôko," In Ôe and Beyond:
Fiction in Contemporary Japan ed. Philip Gabriel and Stephen Snyder (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1999).
58-88. 62. Hereafter Bhowmik, “Temporal Discontinuity”
74
Bhowmik, “Temporal Discontinuity,” 72
75
Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001). 135

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Literature is the unique adventure of transcendence beyond all the horizons of the world,
which even the boldest departures do not let us flee. Only art would let us “take off” - but
for the fact that in the conquest of exteriority, we must remain forever excluded: for if it
did offer shelter to the poet, exteriority would have lost its very strangeness76
In “Masks,” Takako tells the narrator about how the red bubble on her pupil, another strange
manifestation of the exposure to atomic radiations, distorts her vision: “Viewed through her red
eyeball, she told me, the faces of healthy, beautiful women appeared to be those of red
demons.”77 The narrator wonders if Takako “might have been telling the truth when she said
people looked like red demons.” She feels Takako’s gaze rest on her and wonders what she saw
“through her three pupils.” This encounter with the gaze of the other evokes a sense of dis-ease
that unsettles selfhood. As the narrator of the “Masks” discovers, being the object of the
indeterminate gaze of the other forecloses the recovery of a settled state of identity. More
importantly, like the red gaze that imbues the familiar with strangeness, literature presents a view
of the world, including the subject’s selfhood, from the other side. It unsettles the cohesive and
confident egological self and calls for responsibility that is unconditional and instinctive.
A text - if it attempts to be complete and absolute representation of the reality of the event -
would always fail to capture the experiential reality. However, the multiple, non-linear,
fragmented narratives that constantly evoke and re-evoke each other become a palimpsest for
further retellings that create a space for a constant ‘saying' which can never be completed or
totalized. Such differential sharing of the traumatic past illuminates what Michael Rothberg calls
the “multidirectional” orientation of memories where one narrative evokes other narratives of
trauma. Multidirectional memory is “subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and
borrowing”78; it “draw[s] attention to the dynamic transfers that take place between diverse
places and times during the act of remembrance.”79 Hence memory, in a multidirectional
orientation, is excised from personal ego and becomes a part of a network that is open to constant
referencing and cross-referencing. None of the accounts are complete but each account is
invitation to extend the network further. Thus, if history roots the event in the specific instance of
time, fixed by temporal and spatial points, literature with its multidirectional orientation
dislocates such rootedness. Linearity disappears as the event rises above the historical time into a
floating moment: the atomic bombing of Nagasaki lies wherever the narratives lie – in the past,
the present or the future of the characters. Levinas makes a similar distinction between “the
Said” and “the Saying.” “The Said,” like history, includes the totality of language or narrative in
all its thematic functions. On the other hand, “Saying” which is ongoing, is signified only in the
act of narrative that remains open and dialogic. Takako’s red eyed vision, the gossip that
surrounds her, the liberal discourse of her husband that mirrors that accusations of Hayashi’s
most vocal critics as well as the attitude of the society, the interweaving of various hibakusha
accounts, the frequent rupture of the linear time frame and narratorial voice – all these together
constitute “Saying(s),” that fail to capture the entirety of the event, yet manage to capture the
traces of the event in multiple memories and narratives.

76
Emmanuel Levinas, "The Poet’s Vision." Proper Names (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). 127-39. 134.
77
Hayashi, “Masks,” 4
78
Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford:
Stanford UP, 2009). 3. Hereafter cited as Rothberg, Multidirectional
79
Rothberg, Multidirectional, 11

17
 Clio: A Journal of Literature, History and the Philosophy of history
48.3 (2021). pp 273-298

Literature, or art, thus embodies the fissures in the hegemonic structures of history, memory,
identity and other totalizing socio-political or psychological frameworks. In engaging with a
fictional text, the reader essentially enters a contract with alterity. McDonald throws light on the
parallel between literature and the zone of “between times” or entretemps in Levinas’
philosophical discourse. The alterity of literature is located in the “interstices” of memory and
language, in the “between times” of modes of temporality, and in the diasporic spatiality of the
self in exile. It is not a zone of empowerment but of impowerment,80 to use McDonald’s term,
where the self, in all its passivity, is held in thrall of the other who evokes the sense of ethics and
responsibility. One responds to the call of the other, either with denial in the guise of reason and
bordering on indifference like Takako’s husband, or with the acceptance that the narrator of
“Masks” displays when she sees Takako solicit men in an attempt to survive by trying to “imbibe
some of their energy and make sure of my life”81 It is similar to the acceptance that Tsune, the
mother, shows in ‘Two Grave Markers’ as she defends her dying daughter despite suspecting her
of abandoning Yoko: “Even if the rumor was true, who could blame her?” 82
Trauma fiction like Hayashi's A-bomb literature emerges as a space where traces of traumatic
memories frequently interrupt and unhinge personal narratives. Death finally catches up with
Takako, a year after the encounter described in the introduction, nearly four decades after the
bombing of Nagasaki. The narrator burns the doll they brought together, as Takako’s burial
figurine. Does the burial figurine capture the Takako’s life? The narrator tells us of twenty
similar dolls she keeps hoping that they would be her burial figurines. Yet the pain and suffering
that narrator as well as Takako went through would exceed these dolls. Similarly, as a work of
art, a literary text enables the representation of the traumatic past, and at the same time, reveals
the limited nature of such representation. These texts can be studied further in terms of narrative
strategies and devices that enable them to bear the trauma and its experiential dimension even as
they preserve the radical alterity of the witness/teller. Literary texts like Hayashi’s A-bomb
stories embody infinite ‘Saying’ that breaks the amnesia of the social body by speaking of the
unspeakable events of history. Poised between the two poles of silence and testimony, literature
tells of the past even as it reveals its inability to tell it in its entirety.

8080
McDonald, “Aesthetics,” 27
81
Hayashi, “Masks,” 20
82
Hayashi, “Two Grave-markers,” 52

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