Masuji Ibuse Biography and List of Works

Japanese novelist noted for his psychologically sharp but sympathetic short stories of ordinary people. Ibuse gained world fame with KUROI AME (1965, Black Rain), which drew its material from the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The novel emerged as a significant work of art distinct from the many sentimental or political accounts of the bombing. In the depiction of ultimate act of violence, Ibuse used contrasts between horror and humour, destruction and beauty, the state and the individual, to transform the horrors into a morally challenging picture of devastation.

  "If a rainbow appears over those hills now, a miracle will happen," he prophesied to himself. "Let a rainbow appear... and Yasuko will be cured."
   So he told himself, with his eyes on the nearby hills, though he knew all the while it could never come true.
(from Black Rain)

Ibuse was born into an old family of independent farmers. Ibuse spent his childhood in the country, in the village of Kamo in eastern Hiroshima. In 1917 he started studies at Waseda University in Tokyo and adopted new ideas from surrealism to Marxism that swept through Japan. Although he specialized in French literature, Ibuse became interested in Russian writers, chiefly in Tolstoy and Chekhov.

Ibuse's first stories, published in the early 1920s, suggest Western influences. Ibuse's first book, YU HEI (1923), did not gain much success. In the late 1920s however Kobayashi Hideo, perhaps Japan's most influential modern critic, praised Ibuse's talent, and his works started to gain attention.

The short story 'Koi' (Carp) marked Ibuse's turning to the more traditional techniques of his homeland. He used the subjective Japanese "I-novel" mode, in which narrator and author are one. His interest shifted to the rustic countryside of southern Japan, which inspired his story 'Tangeshitei' (1931), depicting two colourful characters, a master and servant, in a remote mountain valley. Ibuse's subtle contrasts in dialogue, wry humour, and sparse characterization became the distinguishing traits of his style. Among Ibuse's pre-war works were the historic novella SAZANAMI GANKI (1930-38) about the final defeat of the Heike clan in the 12th century. TAJINKO MURA (1939) portrayed the life of a village.

When Japan entered the WW II, Ibuse served in propaganda units and witnessed the end of the war and annihilation of Hiroshima in Kamo. Ibuse did not write much during this period, but his unwilling induction into military service probably inspired his biting satire of army drills in the story 'Yohai taicho' (1950, Lieutenant Lookeast).

After the war Ibuse started a literary collaboration with Osamu Dazai, whose suicide in 1948 deepened Ibuse's views concerning the fragility of life. Ibuse's works from the 1940s include JON MANJIRO HYORYUKI (1940, John Manjiro), which traces the chequered life of a castaway, HONJITSU KYUSHIN (1949, No Consultations Today) and Lieutenant Lookeast, both depicting with bittersweet humour the human frailties and foibles that arise from the small incidents of daily life. In the allegorical short story 'The Charcoal Bus' Ibuse tells about a journey in a bus, five years after the war. The bus has been painted but it still has to run on charcoal. Quarrelling passengers push it four miles to start the engine. Finally, at a crossroads, the narrator decides to take another bus, so does some other people. The rest say that they continue pushing.

"We crossed a bridge over a dried-up river; beyond the rice fields I could see the slopes of a barren-looking mountain. As we passed a Shinto shrine by the side of the road, the conductor removed his cap and wiped the perspiration from his forehead. As he did so, he bowed his head slightly, and I wondered whether this was intended as a mark of respect for the shrine. Such reverence had been unfashionable for some time after the war but was now gradually coming back into favour. The conductor's gesture seemed deliberately ambiguous."
(from 'The Charcoal Bus' in Literature of Asia, 1999)

When Black Rain appeared, it was generally thought that Ibuse, the elder statesman in the Japanese literature, was on the verge of retirement. Before his death in Tokyo on December 1993, Ibuse produced still several works, including the autobiographical HANSEIKI (1970). Debate over Black Rain has continued after its publication. Among others the Nobel laureate Oe Kenzaburo has seen Ibuse's fiction as an attempt to humanize the inhuman. However, Black Rain has become perhaps the world's best-known Japanese novel.

Kuroi ame, 1965 (Black Rain) - Ibuse Masuji began serializing Black Rain in the magazine Shincho in January 1965. The novel is based on historical records of the devastation caused by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Ibuse employs dual settings and time frames, alternating his narrative between Kobatake, a rural hamlet some distance from Hiroshima, at a time several years after the end of the war, and Hiroshima itself in the days immediately after the bombing. The protagonist, Shizuma Shigematsu, tries to find a husband for his niece, Yasuko. Shigematsu, his wife Shigeko, and Yasuko reassure prospective husbands by recopying journals, that Yasuko was not affected by the radiation, although she was under the black rain that followed the destruction. Yasuko gives up all hopes of marrying and falls ill with radiation sickness. - Ibuse avoided portraying the disaster in its totality, but rather set the beauty of the southern landscape and the everyday life of the people against the brutality of the atomic holocaust.

For further reading: "Black Rain," Death in Life by Robert Jay Lifton (1967); Approaches to the Modern Japanese Novel, ed. by K. Tsuruta and T. Swann (1976); Pools of Water, Pillars of Fire by John Treat (1988); A Critical Study of the Literary Style of Ibuse Masuji by Anthony Liman (1992); Writing Ground Zero by John Treat (1995); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 2) - Other works about the devastation of Hiroshima: Hiroshima by John Hersey (1946); Hiroshima, Mon Amour by Marguerite Duras (1959, screenplay, film directed by Alain Resnais)

YU HEI, (1923)