Hayashi, Kyoko

Born in Nagasaki. The next year after birth, she moved to Shanghai with her parents and three sisters, where her father, who worked at the Mitsui trading company, was seconded. The relatively cloudless Shanghai childhood, which, however, was taking place against the backdrop of scenes of the atrocities of the Japanese army, ended in the spring of 1945 , when the Japanese began a hasty evacuation from China. Returning to Japan in March 1945, she entered the municipal women's school, where she settled in Nagasaki to study, unlike her mother and sisters, who were located in the outskirts of Isahai, 25 km from the city.

Among other schoolchildren, she was mobilized to work at a military factory. At the time of the atomic bombing, Nagasaki was in the city at the factory premises in the immediate vicinity of the epicenter of the explosion. In her own words, she remained alive only by a miracle, but her health was thoroughly undermined. For two months after the explosion was in serious condition as a result of exposure . After the war, she studied at the Nagasaki Medical University Women's School, but she did not finish her studies. In 1951 she moved to Tokyo .

She began to write in 1962 , joining the Bungei Shuto (文 芸 首都, Literary Capital) doujinshi , where Kenji Nakagami and Yuko Tsushima started with her. The first work was the story "Blue Road" (青 い 道, 1962 ). The full-fledged debut, however, took place much later, already in adulthood in June 1975, with the story “Place of Remembrance” (祭 り の 場) published in Gundzo magazine, in fact a documentary reflection of her catastrophic personal experience of the bombardment, which forever divided into “before and after ”the life of a 14-year-old schoolgirl who worked at a military factory and was at the time of the explosion at a distance of 1.4 km from the epicenter. An autobiographical description of August 9 and the next two months is interspersed with news, medical and other scientific evidence and childhood memories. Already in this early work, Hayashi used the later became the cornerstone of breaking the linear course of history, using the tension between different time layers and the resulting rhythm. With its original purpose as accurately as possible to document the experience of August 9, 1945, Hayashi, as the work progressed, more and more understood the utopianism of this plan, noting how memory changes under the influence of the present. Documentary evidence in the form of scientific reports, etc., was used by her to fill this thirty-year vacuum, which divides the past even today.

The story was awarded the Gundzo Magazine Prize for novice writers and the Akutatawa Prize , becoming the first atomic literature to receive such wide acclaim. Critics' opinions were mixed: noting Hayashi’s courage and enormous emotional strength due to the material itself, the literary significance of the work was called into question. Among the most fierce critics of the writer were Kojin Karatani and Kenji Nakagami , to the extent that the latter publicly accused her of “atomic fetishism” ^[2] , speculation on atomic experience, not confirmed by any artistic value.

After the Memorial Place, Hayashi continued to write autobiographically about the bombing of Nagasaki. In 1977 - 1978 Gundzo published a series of twelve stories, which was then released as a separate book entitled The Glass of Nagasaki (ギ ヤ マ ン ビ ー ド ロ, 1978 ). Eleven of them were devoted exclusively to atomic bombing and its consequences, and only one that stood apart in this series, “Yellow Sand” (黄砂), turned out to be written based on the memories of childhood spent in Shanghai. A significant difference between the Nagasaki Glass and the Place of Remembrance was Hayashi’s awareness of the limitations of his own experience, understanding of the endless versatility of August 9, fragments of which were experienced individually by each hibakusha. Therefore, the mosaic of "Nagasaki Glass" became for her on August 9 the Other, a united image of glass as a metaphor for the passage of time. "Glass of Nagasaki" was a landmark work in the formation of Hayashi — the artist.

The next step towards a more complicated and ambiguous narrative was taken in the first novel, “As if Nothing Happened” (無 き が 如 き, 1981 ). A distinctive feature of the work was to a greater extent an indirect appeal to the Nagasaki theme (without a description of the bombing itself, with an emphasis on its rebirth in the present), as well as polyphony: the narrative is bifurcated, that is, conducted on behalf of two heroines at the same time. Through the mouth of one of them, Hayashi voiced her creative manifesto, declaring her determination to remain the chronicler, the narrator of the atomic Nagasaki.

Against the background of the Nagasaki theme, life experience in China in the pre-war and war years occupies a clearly peripheral place. At the same time, however, it is fundamentally important for her both in the sense of her personal formation (in fact, this is the same military experience turned inside out), and for creating a counterpoint that sets the movement for all of her work. The Shanghai theme was developed in the works of the 1980s , first in a detailed description of childhood in the novella “Michel Lipstick” (ミ ッ シ ェ ル の 口紅, 1980 ), and then in travel notes “Shanghai” (上海, 1983 , Literary Award for Best Female Work ), written based on a five-day trip there almost forty years after leaving China in 1945 . In general, Hayashi's work, beginning in the 1980s , marked the transition to more complex forms and wider thematic diversity. While preserving the bombardment as the nucleus and starting point of any of her thoughts, through her prism she addressed the topics of family life and its destruction, thus rising to an artistic generalization to the level of understanding life and death in general. So the collection “For a Woman Is Not At Home in Three Worlds” (三界 の 家, 1984 ), the title story of which was awarded the Kawabata Prize , is devoted to the theme of the death of her father and the complex relationship between parents. In the collection of short stories “The Road” (道, 1985 ) that followed, Hayashi turns to thoughts about the fate of his son and his second-generation hibakusha in several works. In stories included in The Valley (谷 間, 1988 ) and The Blue Sky of Virginia (ヴ ァ ー ジ ニ ア の 青 い 空, 1988 ), the writer delves into reflection on her three-year stay in the United States in 1985 - 1988 . One of Hayashi’s most important mature works was the novel “Now Rest in Peace” (や す ら か に 今 は ね む り 給 え, 1990 , Tanizaki Prize , a requiem for his school teacher who died in Nagasaki.

• Two gravestones / Per. E. Redinoy // Modern Japanese short story 1945-1978. - M .: Fiction, 1980. - S. 493-516.
• "Dance of Death" and "Procession on a cloudy day" // Procession on a cloudy day. Collection. / Per. V. Grishina . - M .: Rainbow, 1985 .-- 216 p.
• Glass Nagasaki / Per. O. Grishina // Hiroshima. Novels, short stories, poems. - M .: Fiction, 1985. - S. 474-484.

1. Davinder L. Bhowmik. Temporal discontinuity in the atomic bomb fiction of Hayashi Kyoko // Oe and Beyond: Fiction in Contemporary Japan . - Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999 .-- P. 58-88.
2. Noriko Mizuta Lippit, Kyoko Iriye Selden. Hayashi Kyoko // The Atomic Bomb: Voices from Hiroshima and Nagasaki . - New York: ME Sharpe, 1989 .-- P. 248-249.
3. Noriko Mizuta Lippit, Kyoko Iriye Selden. Hayashi Kyoko // Japanese Women Writers: Twentieth Century Short Fiction . - New York: ME Sharpe, 1991 .-- P. 271-272.
4. 渡邊 澄 子. 林京子 の 仕事 // 大 東 文化 大学 紀要. 人文 科学. - 大 東 文化 大学, 2004. - No. 42 . - S. A89 — A100 .

• About the story “Place of Remembrance”, awarded the Akutagawa Prize (Japanese)