Hiroshima Notes

Ōe began writing the essays for the journal Sekai in 1963, shortly after publishing his novel A Personal Matter. The pieces were collected in book form in 1965 by Iwanami Shoten. An English translation by David L. Swain and Toshi Yonezawa was published in 1981^[1] and reissued by Grove Press in 1996.^[2]

In 1970, Ōe published a sister volume, Okinawa Notes (沖縄ノート), also with Iwanami Shoten. This work examines Okinawa under U.S. occupation, its role as a military base during the Korean and Vietnam Wars, and uses the Okinawan experience to question what it means to be Japanese and the state of democracy in mainland Japan.^[3]

Scholar John Whittier Treat argues that Ōe frames Hiroshima as an “extreme situation” that reveals the contours of human freedom and responsibility. He notes that Ōe’s approach is deeply influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre, particularly the concepts of the Other, bad faith, and authenticity. Ōe positions the hibakusha as an existentialist Other, a mirror through which he examines his own identity as a non-victim, a Japanese, and a writer. This relationship is ambivalent: Ōe both admires the survivors’ courage and feels estranged from their experience. ^[1]

Treat suggests that Ōe’s attempt to extract “dignity” and “humanism” from the atrocity risks sentimentalizing the survivors and diluting the radical absurdity of nuclear destruction. Other critics, such as Kurihara Sadako, have accused Ōe of idealizing hibakusha activists and thereby obscuring the broader, more mundane suffering of ordinary survivors. Similarly, Robert Jay Lifton and Sidra Dekoven Ezrahi have questioned whether nonfiction can adequately convey traumatic experience. Treat notes that Hiroshima Notes ultimately “reads not as a simple ode to heroic, if tragic, martyrs, but rather as a commentary on the impossibility of such sentimental ideals after a nuclear atrocity”.^[1]

In a 2023 retrospective essay, Umehara Toshiya reaffirms the book’s contemporary relevance, noting that Ōe’s warnings about nuclear complacency remain urgent in an era of renewed atomic threats. Umehara emphasizes Ōe’s focus on the “sanctity of life” and the individual’s right to die with dignity, a theme underscored by Ōe’s non-judgmental depiction of survivor suicides as acts of reclaimed autonomy.^[2]