Repairing a Form of Life

This article examines Ibuse Masuji’s (1898–1993) Black Rain (Kuroi ame, 1966) as a narratological attempt at remembering the atomic catastrophe that destroyed conditions for the ordinary function of language. The dropping of an atomic bomb obliterates “forms of life”—complex combinations of biological, environmental, and cultural circumstances that Wittgenstein considered as constituting the conditions for language’s normal working. This creates a threshold across which language ceases to function the way it normally has, and words stop meaning what they used to, posing a distinct challenge to the remembrance of the calamity. Based on this observation, this article offers a novel interpretation of Black Rain as a writerly practice akin to ritual for repairing a post-atomic form of life. The article analyzes the novel’s distinct narrative form that is multilayered and intertwined—multilayered, because of its featuring of numerous kinds of texts and the circumstances of their production and reception, and intertwined, because of its liberal crossing of the distances between those narrative layers. This form dismantles any monological meaning making, leaving many passages in the work in contextual ambiguity. This study interprets this narrative form as, on the one hand, reflecting the disturbance of the ordinary function of language in the atomic ruins and, on the other, embodying the author’s efforts for repairing conditions for that function in an altered, post-atomic world. This reading offers an alternative to the existing semantic framework that understands atomic-bomb literature as an “ironic” attempt at representing the irrepresentable. It also puts Black Rain in the context of Ibuse’s earliest postwar stories written in 1946, where he grappled with the difficulty of historicization due to a schism in a form of life, which in their case had been caused by the traumatic end of the war.