Dark Night of the Soul: Catholic Articulations of Atomic Trauma in Seirai Yuichi's "Ground Zero, Nagasaki"
Conference Year
January 2019
Abstract
This paper discusses how the Catholic faith of the hibakusha (atomic bomb victims) and their families shapes their understanding of the bombing of Nagasaki in Seirai Yuichi’s short fiction work Ground Zero, Nagasaki. Specifically, Seirai Yuichi’s text counters the “connected divide” described by Yuko Shibata in Producing Hiroshima and Nagasaki in that it centers the atomic experience on the individuals and away from the canonical atomic bomb collection of testimonies by John Hershey in Hiroshima and corroborated by Nagai Takashi’s popular work The Bells of Nagasaki. By re-centering the atomic narrative back on the individual articulations of faith as affected by age, gender, and first- versus second-generation trauma, Seirai offers a harrowing look into the lives of those who live with the memory of the atomic bombing.
Primary Faculty Mentor Name
Kyle Keoni Ikeda
Status
Undergraduate
Student College
College of Arts and Sciences
Program/Major
Asian Studies
Primary Research Category
Arts & Humanities
Dark Night of the Soul: Catholic Articulations of Atomic Trauma in Seirai Yuichi's "Ground Zero, Nagasaki"
This paper discusses how the Catholic faith of the hibakusha (atomic bomb victims) and their families shapes their understanding of the bombing of Nagasaki in Seirai Yuichi’s short fiction work Ground Zero, Nagasaki. Specifically, Seirai Yuichi’s text counters the “connected divide” described by Yuko Shibata in Producing Hiroshima and Nagasaki in that it centers the atomic experience on the individuals and away from the canonical atomic bomb collection of testimonies by John Hershey in Hiroshima and corroborated by Nagai Takashi’s popular work The Bells of Nagasaki. By re-centering the atomic narrative back on the individual articulations of faith as affected by age, gender, and first- versus second-generation trauma, Seirai offers a harrowing look into the lives of those who live with the memory of the atomic bombing.