Indeed, she dismissed contemporary poets who write ‘shallow poems of puns and manners and sex’ (Black Eggs 22) for their poems’ exclusionary quality and failure to ignite the imagination. For Kurihara poetry has the ability to be transformative and should, therefore, reach a broad readership. She pointed to the fact that for her, ‘the techniques of poetry are my hope to express myself more deeply and more beautifully, so that I can be understood better and by more people’ (Black Eggs 22). The importance of accessible language, directness, simplicity and repetition in hibakusha poetry is the same requirement for the language of the public intellectual; jargon undermines public dissemination and discussion. American public intellectuals Chomsky, Todd Gitlin, Camille Paglia and Howard Zinn have commented on the divisive and subversive nature of jargon and the need for the demystification of language. As Chomsky stated in my interview with him:
I am very impatient with mystification, with pretentious language and a pretty closed circle of people who are the only ones who understand what is being said. One of the important aspects of being a public intellectual is that the public must know what you are saying; must be able to understand what you are saying…Clear concise communication is the most important thing. (In So Many Words, 134-5)
Kurihara’s poetry is most often political in its scope and content, but expressed simply and concisely for a large, general – and what she hoped would be – an international public. Her poem, ‘The Day of the Atomic Bomb’, published in 1946, is a suite of eighteen tanka, which begins by referencing what happened to Kurihara moments after the bomb was dropped and ends with confronting images of injured refugees and the bodies of the dead. Six tanka from this poem are reproduced below, in translation. The translator, Richard Minear, has preserved line count but only syllable count ‘where I could do so without harming poetic flow’ (27):
In the field out back, A bluish-white flash; Thinking to myself, “A flare,” I look out. Uneasy about the weird blue flash, I step outside – something is very wrong … Acting on instinct – air raid! – I race to our trench and hold my breath. Crawling out of the shelter, I find doors and shoji blown off and ceiling down.
These tanka illustrate the initial confusion and chaos that ensued after the dropping of the bomb. As there was no vocabulary for this experience, Kurihara conveys the way the ‘bluish-white flash’ of the atomic bomb was mistaken for ‘a flare’ and the ‘hazy sky’ for ‘an air raid’. It begins with a slow, personal rumination and builds to the moment where the narrator ‘race[s] to our trench’. The use of ‘weird’ and ‘uneasy’, along with the lines ‘something/is very wrong’, convey a sense of impending doom with the world on the brink of nuclear annihilation.
In a similar fashion, the next series of tanka focus on the physical chaos of doors and screens ‘blown off / and ceiling down’ and then compares the streets, filling with those fleeing the hypocentre, to ‘hell’:
… Frightening street of hell – each moment the number of refugees grows. The refugees all have burns; clothes are seared onto skin.
The use of the lines ‘seared / onto skin’ is a horrific illustration of the way the atomic bomb burned victims, leaving many survivors with inoperable keloids. It also represents Kurihara’s attempt to ‘sear’ these horrific images in the readers’ mind, with the purpose of trying to prevent another nuclear war. By stirring the public with her graphic descriptions of suffering, she lobbies for an end to nuclear war.
In her free verse poem, ‘For the Dead of August’, published years later, Kurihara, a dissident public intellectual, is critical of Japan’s war crimes and discusses its culpability in the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Writing in free verse allows her the freedom to explore lines and stanzas of varying length, while her decision to abandon tanka and its illustrious Japanese history is representative of the rupture created by atomic warfare. Kurihara’s poem focuses on new beginnings and the knowledge that life can never be the same. However, perhaps most importantly, she makes the point that the world can avoid repeating the mistake of nuclear warfare through disarmament. In the same way, Kurihara abandons repeating her experience of the atomic bomb: ‘No matter how much I speak of “my” details of that day/ it is impossible to speak of Hiroshima’. Even as she repeats her eyewitness testimony, language is described as ‘corroded, rusty [and] rasping’; it is all ‘overtalking’. This is juxtaposed with the foregrounding of the ineffability of the experience of the atomic bomb. In a poignant oxymoron, there are too many words and yet no words to describe the trauma. To overcome this paradox, Kurihara asks for a ‘forg[ing of] language’ where people all over the world can appeal to ‘those who manipulate nuclear power’ on behalf of the dead; it is the responsibility of the living to do this:
Let us forge our language for the dead of August. The publishing code of the occupation forces became a myth, Our language corroded and rusty with greedy appetites and overtalking. Let us polish our rasping language and thrust the anger of the dead before the ones who manipulate nuclear power.
In the sixth stanza, Kurihara as dissident public intellectual is most evident from this quatrain implicating Japan in its own devastation. In this poem, she presents Japan as both victim and victimiser:
Hiroshima did not begin the morning of August 6. It began with the first charge of the Japanese army in Liuyang Lake. We received the bomb as citizens of the army capital, Hiroshima.
Kurihara’s poetry lobbies for nuclear disarmament, an end to Japanese colonialism, discrimination, militarism, and Japan as ‘atomic victim’ (Haverson 70). Her use of stark imagery, simple language and repetition eschews jargon in an effort to attract a large public, first nationally and then – in translation – internationally. In an essay published in 1991, Kurihara stated:
The importance of Hiroshima has expanded from the early stage of revealing the misery of the A-bomb to allow discussion of issues surrounding the nuclear civilization that produced the bomb and widening the point of view concerning the destruction of humanity, the earth, and the environment. This view demands that Japan take responsibility for the militarism that led to the invasion of Asian neighbors, war with the United States, and ultimately the A-bomb.’ (White Flash / Black Rain 63).
Indeed, Kurihara’s activism as a dissident public intellectual extends beyond Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Her poetry and prose continue to lobby for the safety and preservation of humanity and the world, through the eradication of nuclear weapons.
