Fioretti di San Francesco (The Little Flowers of Saint Francis) is a florilegium - a collection of excerpts - divided into 53 short chapters, on the life of the fabled saint, which was composed at the end of the 14th century.

The anonymous Italian text, almost certainly by a Tuscan author, is a version of the Latin Actus beati Francisci et sociorum eius, of which the earliest extant manuscript is one of 1390 A.D. The text has been ascribed to Fra. Ugolino da Santa Maria, whose name occurs three times in the Actus.

The text has been the most popular account of his life and relates many colorful anecdotes, miracles and pious examples from the lives of Francis and his followers.

It is said that one day while Francis was traveling with some companions they happened upon a place in the road where birds filled the trees on either side. Francis told his companions to “wait for me while I go to preach to my sisters the birds”. The birds surrounded him, drawn by the power of his voice, and not one of them flew away. Francis spoke to them:

My sister birds, you owe much to God, and you must always and in everyplace give praise to Him; for He has given you freedom to wing through the sky and He has clothed you…you neither sow nor reap, and God feeds you and gives you rivers and fountains for your thirst, and mountains and valleys for shelter, and tall trees for your nests. And although you neither know how to spin or weave, God dresses you and your children, for the Creator loves you greatly and He blesses you abundantly. Therefore… always seek to praise God.

Fioretti tells that in the city of Gubbio, where Francis lived for some time, was a wolf “terrifying and ferocious, who devoured men as well as animals”. Francis had compassion upon the townsfolk, and went up into the hills to find the wolf. Soon, fear of the animal had caused all his companions to flee, though the saint pressed on. When he found the wolf, he made the sign of the cross and commanded the wolf to come to him and hurt no one. Miraculously the wolf closed his jaws and lay down at the feet of St. Francis.

“Brother Wolf, thou doest much harm in these parts and thou hast done great evil…” said Francis. “All these people accuse you and curse you…But brother wolf, I would make peace between you and the people.”

“As thou art willing to make this peace, I promise thee that thou shalt be fed every day by the inhabitants of this land so long as thou shalt live among them; thou shalt no longer suffer hunger, as it is hunger which has made thee do so much evil; but if I obtain all this for thee, thou must promise, on thy side, never again to attack any animal or any human being; dost thou make this promise?”

In agreement the wolf placed one of its forepaws in Francis’ outstretched hand, and the oath was made. Francis then commanded the wolf to return with him to Gubbio.

Meanwhile the townsfolk, having heard of the miracle, gathered in the city marketplace to await Francis and his companion, and were shocked to see the ferocious wolf behaving as though his pet. When Francis reached the marketplace he offered the assembled crowd an impromptu sermon with the tame wolf at his feet. He is quoted as saying: “How much we ought to dread the jaws of hell, if the jaws of so small an animal as a wolf can make a whole city tremble through fear?”

Gubbio was freed from the menace of the predator. Francis, ever the lover of animals, even made a pact on behalf of the town dogs, that they would not bother the wolf again.

These legends exemplify the Franciscan mode of charity and poverty as well as the saint’s love of the natural world. Part of his appreciation of the environment is expressed in his Canticle of the Sun, a poem written by the saint in Umbrian Italian shortly before his death in 1226, which expresses a love and appreciation of Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Mother Earth, Brother Fire, and all of God’s creations personified in their fundamental forms. In Canticle of the Creatures, he wrote: “All praise to you, Oh Lord, for all these brother and sister creatures.” His Canticle is believed to be among the first works of literature, if not the first, written in the Italian language.

It is an affirmation of Francis’ personal theology as he often referred to animals as brothers and sisters to Mankind, and rejected material accumulation and sensual comforts in favour of “Lady Poverty”.

Image: Saint Francis instructs the Wolf, Carl Weidemeyer-Worpswede, 1911

At the turn of the century, Parisian magazine subscribers were treated to colourful advertising posters which were included in the monthly issues. Each magazine contained four small 11 x 15 inch posters. For 60 months, subscribers also received a monthly original lithograph by one of 90 French or foreign artists, numbered and imprinted with the mark of Atelier Chaix, the magazine publisher.

Subscribers paid nothing for these prints, other than the price of the magazine. Today, though, if you want to purchase one of these posters, you are looking at a price of several hundred dollars apiece – more for the works of the more famous artists.

An important catalogue of 256 of these prints, Les Maîtres de l’Affiche, offers a representative selection of art of la Belle Epoque.

Published in Paris, this collection reflects the well-deserved pride of the French at having invented the artistic commercial poster. Jules Chéret, the artist-director of the printing house, was the father of this artistic genre. For his role in launching the golden age of the poster, he was awarded Légion d’Honneur.

He believed that advertising design at the time was vulgar and lacked redeeming artistic features. Chéret was the first to associate a woman with a product; for example, beverages such as Dubonnet, various pastilles and soaps, music halls such as les Folies Bergère.

His salon artists covered the buildings and walls of Paris with images of beautiful women, turning the city into a plein-air museum.

It was not only the French who collected these posters; it is estimated that 6,000 American subscribers also had a collection. Major museums such as the Metropolitan and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Louvre in Paris, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, also acquired these works for their permanent collections.

One of the best-known Maîtres de l’Affiche was Alphonse Mucha. His images were appropriated during the 1960s for theatre posters, and they often featured actress Sarah Bernhardt. Another well-known contributor was Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, whose art celebrated the Parisian cabaret and the bohemian life in Montmartre.

The complete set of 256 prints illustrated in Les Maîtres de l’Affiche or its English-language counterpart, Masters of the Poster, provide an enticing glimpse into the bohemian life of la Belle Epoque.

Dr. James Orbinski served as head of mission for Doctors Without Borders during the Rwandan Genocide. What he saw there transformed him.

Orbinski’s new book, An Imperfect Offering: Humanitarian Action in the Twenty-First Century, to be published April 22 by Doubleday Canada, traces the journey of a humanitarian doctor who has served in some of the world’s most dangerous conflict zones. Orbinski, 47, was international president of Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders/MSF) from 1998 to 2001, and he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on the organization’s behalf in 1999.

Over the past quarter-century, he has worked in places such as Somalia during the famine and civil war; in the refugee camps in Jalalabad, Afghanistan; and at the Kosovo Macedonia border during the NATO bombings in 1999. His book explores every facet of his work, from the deeply personal to the broadly political: How does a man persevere – and, furthermore, create meaning and invoke change – after witnessing the most violent, sadistic acts human beings can inflict on one another? What is the role of the humanitarian in the post–Cold War era, in which traditional rules of war have been swapped for anything-goes ethical nihilism? How could MSF confront politics and public apathy during crises so it had the space and resources to heal patients?

The notion of imperfection permeates many of Orbinski’s answers. “The book’s title is inspired by the poem and song Anthem, by Leonard Cohen, and there’s a beautiful line where he says, ‘Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything,’”says Orbinski. “When I read that poem, it struck me that that’s the essence of my experience over the last 20 years as a physician, as a putative humanitarian, as a person who has tried in various ways to influence the political processes that determine who gets what, when. It’s very much an imperfect process with equally imperfect outcomes, but it doesn’t obviate the absolute necessity of trying. You achieve something, and sometimes just enough to go on.”

It was the Rwandan Genocide that he has called both “my undoing” and “the most transformative moment in my life.” During the 100-day period from April to July 1994, one million men, women and children – including 85 per cent of all Tutsis in Rwanda – were murdered by Hutu extremists. By early April, only MSF, the Red Cross, the UN peacekeeping force headed by Roméo Dallaire, and two UN humanitarian members remained in Kigali. Orbinski split his time among the King Faycal Hospital, the UN compound, the Red Cross Hospital and a stadium filled with 12,000 people seeking refuge. When he arrived at the Faycal Hospital, 6,000 people occupied every recess of the building, from the stairwells to the closets. Orbinski and other MSF members worked 16- to 18-hour days while outside, killing squads continued to slaughter men, women and children. The MSF team treated waves of victims with machete wounds, gunshot wounds and shrapnel injuries. They cared for people who had chest injuries from being buried alive; women and girls who had been raped; and those maimed by grenades and land mines. They established an orphanage in Faycal Hospital for children whose parents had been killed. And still, more and more victims arrived.

In his book, Orbinski writes that he “felt beaten by the waves of suffering, of killing, of screams, of silent stares, of terror, and waves of not just political indifference but malfeasance.” He had acted and spoken, while an entire world stood by without helping. He remained while the violence eddied more constrictively around the hospitals – until he was one of the last doctors left in Kigali. He made a choice. His choice was to stay and save what lives he could, to relieve what suffering he could – it was that simple, and that hard. He did not leave until the genocide ended.

In a companion documentary, Triage, Orbinski returns to Africa to clear his mind and complete his book. Taking a journey to Rwanda, Congo and Somalia, he revisits the past, and engages with the present. Orbinski’s steady heartbeat propels the film forward, taking the viewer to a place beyond rage and despair, where bonds of solidarity are forged, and human spirits somehow remain unbroken.

“There are moments in a particular story [in An Imperfect Offering] where I knew that my fear overwhelmed everything else, and there are other moments where the implications of not acting or speaking overwhelmed my fear.” Later, he adds, “What I’ve experienced is that I can’t know the future. I can’t know if anything that I do will change what happens tomorrow. I can’t know with certainty, but what I do know is if I do nothing, nothing will change.”

Excerpted from University of Toronto Magazine

Excerpt from the book

Triage/White Pine Pictures

Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières

Hot on the heels of Lance Mackey’s amazing 2008 Iditarod win, back to back with a win on the grueling Yukon Quest, and the second Iditarod championship in a row for Mackey, here are two Alaskan murder mysteries for after-mushing brandy-quaffing by the fire.

Murder on the Iditarod Trail

The Iditarod, sometimes called The Last Great Race, brings thousands of competitors and their dog teams to Anchorage each year. The racers cover 1150 miles of some of Alaska’s roughest, most majestic terrain - jagged mountain ranges, iced-over areas of Norton Sound, frozen rivers, dense forests, desolate tundra and miles of windswept coastline. The temperatures frequently fall well below zero, with winds that can cause complete loss of visibility. Hazards of overflow, long hours of darkness and treacherous climbs and side hills are always present.

It is an arduous sport, but not a deadly one. Until now.

When a veteran musher smashes into a tree and is fatally impaled by a branch, Sergeant Alex Jensen is called in. In the midst of race proceedings, he begins a homicide investigation. The next day, another death. And then another, each one more brutal than the last.

Someone is systematically killing the top competitors. And as the mushers thread their way through the treacherous trails, Jensen races to find the murderer – before more blood stains the frozen Alaskan range.

Jessie Arnold has been training long and hard. This is her big year; for the first time she’s got a shot at winning. But as her position in the race improves, so do her chances of being the killer’s next target. Amid the tensions of the race and the threat of murder, Jessie and Alex Jensen are drawn together.

In a stunning finale, the race and the case come to a close simultaneously, and the savage truth emerges just as the winner crosses the finish line.

Murder on the Yukon Quest

Jessie and her dog team are well prepared for the tough Yukon Quest sled race, but her one regret is that her longtime friend and lover, Alex Jensen, isn’t there to see her off. Alex has been called home to Idaho for a family emergency and Jessie begins the big race without her biggest booster.

Well along the trail, Jessie is stunned to learn that a young novice racer she met at the start has been abducted and held for ransom. The girl’s distraught father has been warned that no one but Jessie Arnold is to be told - especially not the police. Feeling isolated and alone, Jessie must decide what to do in the face of terrible odds.

As other mushers push on toward the finish line, Jessie forges ahead in a race all her own.

Sue Henry is the author of six novels in her award-winning Alaska mystery series: Murder on the Iditarod Trail, Termination Dust, Sleeping Lady, Death Takes Passage, Deadfall, and Murder on the Yukon Quest. She has lived in Alaska for almost a quarter of a century, and brings history, Alaskan lore, and the majestic beauty of the vast landscape to her mysteries. Based in Anchorage, she teaches writing at the University of Alaska.

“Work with animals is a source of suffering to all of us. We treat them like babies who cannot speak. The more time passes, the more I’m sorry about it. We did not learn enough from the mission to justify the death of the dog.”
~~ Oleg Georgivitch Gazenko, 1998

There was really a dog named Laika, and she touched the stars 50 years ago. Laika was the abandoned Russian puppy who was destined to become Earth’s first space traveler.

On November 3, 1957, the Soviet Union made headlines and history when they launched Sputnik II into orbit around the earth. The satellite had a passenger: a brown and white mutt named Laika.

Nick Abadzis brings her story to life in a haunting and bittersweet graphic novel, Laika, published by First Second Books. In 200 pages, he manages to portray the Russian attitude toward space conquest at the time, the grueling schedule that the scientists were forced to follow, and the heartbreaking decisions that the trainers of the dogs in the program had to make.

Laika began her life as the unwanted offspring of a highborn lady’s dog. Given to a boy as an “attitude change,” she wais locked up and abused before being thrown away. A series of events led Kudryuvka (Laika’s original name) to Yelena Dubrovsky, the trainer with the Russian space program. Both Yelena and Dr. Gazenko began to understand the sacrifice that both the dogs and the people involved in the space program were asked to make during the Space Race between Russia and the US.

The graphic novel opens with scenes of the frozen Russian gulag and a man named Korolev. Eighteen years later, he is the Chief Designer of Sputnik. Buoyed by the success of the successful launch, Prime Minister Khrushchev demands that his space program launch a second orbital vehicle within a single month…this time, with a living creature on board.

Laika, one of many dogs at the Institute of Aviation Medicine, has been trained for flight travel. She bonds immediately with her caretaker Yelena Alexandrovna Dubrovsky and endears herself to the other scientists as well. No dog is better suited for space travel, and Laika is slated to make a trip from which she will never return.

Laika dies five hours after she is launched on Sputnik II. Unlike later missions, no provision was made to ensure her safe return.

The historical facts of Laika’s life and the characters that surround her were exhaustively researched. There’s Sergei Korolev, the head of the program, whom we meet as he is walking out of one of Stalin’s gulags, whence he had been banished in the great purges, and who becomes a driven monster, forever scarred by Siberia. There’s Yelena Dubrovksy, the space medicine program’s animal handler, who has a preternatural ability to connect with the space-dogs, but who is also a scientist and Party member who is clear-eyed in confronting their eventual fate.

For the most part Abadzis maintains a simplified cartoon style. At moments of great importance, however, he renders the figure of Laika more three-dimensional. As Laika sits in the red light of her capsule, mere moments before takeoff, she becomes highly realistic. Sometimes scenes are black and white, like stills from a movie. Other times they are two page spreads that drill home the wonder or the horror of a given moment. And in dreams, the lines that make up a panel grow soft and colourful.

Abadzis talks to Jeff Vandermeer at Amazon.com about making the graphic novel:

I’d known it was a good story since I was about six years old. It had always been at the back of my mind as a story to tell. In 2002, new information came to light about the Sputnik II mission and specifically Laika’s death. That was the spark. Why a graphic novel? Well, comics are my language. It’s the medium that I’m most familiar and comfortable…so it was first choice.

I had no idea there were so few Soviet engineers and scientists involved in the nascent space program — not to trivialize their incredible achievement but, in many senses, they just winged it, borne along in great part by Korolev’s force of will and political manoeuvering. Also it was interesting to find out how much the Soviet scientists cared for their cosmodogs. Events conspired to make Laika a sacrificial passenger on board Sputnik II, but they really did honour their canine cosmonauts. There’s even a statue of Laika in Moscow. Perhaps this book will go some small way to re-establishing her position in history: whatever the circumstances, and whether you agree with what they did or not, she was the first earthling in orbit around this planet.

I could have done with another hundred pages. But I’d taken a bit of time to write and thumbnail it and when that stage was finished, the publisher and I realized that the 50th anniversary of the Sputnik launches was fast approaching. When I first pitched the idea to Mark Siegel at First Second, neither of us realized that it was so close. It felt like we needed to be a part of that, so I drew it extremely fast–two hundred pages in a little over eight months. It’s an understatement to say that it was extremely hard work. What got left out was a longer explication of Laika’s origins; the scenes with Mikhail, her first owner were much longer…. Originally, I did have an idea of doing three books: Laika would be the first, Gagarin the second, and a full-on comic strip biography of Korolev would be the final part that would bind together events seen in the first two. Maybe one day.

I suppose it would have been easy to make it another overly saccharine dead-dog story but that wouldn’t have been true either to my taste or to the socio-political system and culture I was attempting to portray. Laika — the real Laika — was a cute dog, as photographs attest. I didn’t want to anthropomorphize her, at least not to the extent that she was spouting speech and thought balloons like Tintin’s Snowy. It’d be disingenuous to suggest that, in dealing with a true story that involves dogs and their owners (even if they happen to be scientists in a Soviet cosmodog program), there wouldn’t be a bit of emotion. There’s plenty (and I hope the reader feels it). But there’s also the harsh reality of the time, the place and the confluence of events that put Laika into space.

When Comrade Yelena visits Laika for one last time she can hear the dog saying her name with every bark, even when Yelena is too far away to hear them. She dreams that Laika is calling out to her for help.

No one can walk away from this book untouched.

Excerpt at First Second Books

Review at Readaboutcomics

Interview with Abadzis at Comics Reporter

Aaron George Bailey’s Laika website

BBC News: What Happened to Laika

Interviews at BBC News: The World

“There is a vast part of this city with mouths buried in it… Mouths capable of speaking to us. But we stop them up with concrete and build over them and whatever it is they wanted to say gets whispered down empty alleys and turns into wind…”

These are among the last words of Professor David Hollis before he throws himself off a ferry into the frigid waters of Lake Ontario. A renowned professor of forensic geology, David leaves in his wake both a historical mystery and an academic scandal. He postulated that on the site where a sports arena is about to be built lie the ruins of a Victorian boat containing an extraordinary treasure: a strongbox full of hundreds of never-seen photographs of early Toronto, a priceless record of a lost city. His colleagues, however, are convinced that he faked his research materials.

Determined to vindicate him, his widow, Marianne, sets up camp in a hotel overlooking the construction site, watching and waiting for the boat to be unearthed. The only person to share her vigil is John Lewis, fiancé to her daughter, Bridget. An orphan who had come to love David as his own father, John finds himself caught in a struggle between mother and daughter all the while keeping a dark secret from both women.

Interwoven into the contemporary story is another narrative set in 1850s: the tale of Jem Hallam, a young apothecary struggling to make a living in the harsh new city so he can bring his wife and daughters from England. Crushed by ruthless competitors, he develops an unlikely friendship with two other down-on-their-luck Torontonians: Samuel Ennis, a brilliant but dissolute Irishman, and Claudia Rowe, a destitute widow. Together they establish a photography business and set out to create images of a fledgling city where wooden sidewalks are put together with penny nails, where Indians spear salmon at the river mouth and the occasional bear ambles down King Street, where department stores display international wares and fine mansions sit cheek-by-jowl with shantytowns.

Consolation, by Torontonian Michael Redhill, is the winner of the 2007 Toronto Book Award, and nominee for the 2007 Man Booker Prize. It has been selected as the One Book for the community to read together during the month of February, as part of the inaugural Keep Toronto Reading program of the Toronto Public Library.

Consolation moves back and forth between David Hollis’s legacy and Jem Hallam’s struggle to survive, ultimately revealing a mysterious connection between the two narratives. Exquisitely crafted and masterfully written, Michael Redhill’s second novel reveals how history is often transformed into a species of fantasy, and how time alters the contours of even the things we hold most certain. As complex and layered as the city whose story it tells, Consolation evokes the mysteries of love and memory, and what suffering the absence of the beloved truly means.

The book tells about a city only too keen to bury all existing remnants of its past. “It’s just one more link to the place that we come from that was carelessly removed, and it’s unfortunate that no attempt at preservation was ever made.”

Redhill began writing Consolation in the late 1990s, motivated equally by the desire to alert his fellow citizens to the historical toll taken by Toronto’s “developmental frenzy” as he was to write a book rooted in his city’s soil and tell a story that connected two eras in Toronto’s relatively brief but criminally neglected civic history.

Of the reason for that neglect, an apparent civic amnesia blighting Toronto more dramatically than just about any other centre of its size and significance, Redhill muses, “In part because it’s a young city. We live in a place that’s just over 200 years old now and although it’s as old as it’s ever been to us who live there, in the context of world cities it’s not a very old city at all.

Redhill recalls being overwhelmed by a series of photographs he discovered in book by William Dendy called Lost Toronto. A 360-degree panorama consisting of thirteen shots of the city taken in 1856 from a hotel at the corner of Simcoe and York Streets, the pictures sparked in the author a kind of hypothetical reverie of the city that once was. In fictional form, the photos would also come to play a key role in Consolation.

Toronto Star Books

Toronto Public Library: One Book

The Toronto Panorama

Michael Redhill’s Blog

Michael Redhill: Poetry and Publications

Reading Cities

Toronto Book Awards

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Canadian literature has largely centred on rural and wild spaces. Cities are often viewed as a blight on the landscape, encroaching on its imagined pristineness.

Toronto writer, Anne Michaels has documented the intersection of Canada’s largest city, and time, memory and imagination in her poem, “There is no city that does not dream.” This poem is the centerpiece of her third book of poetry, Skin Divers.

I first came across this poem one day on the subway, possibly as we were crossing Shaw Street. It was hidden among the subway car’s advertising, and it was part of the “Poetry on the Way” series which made my commute bearable. I had no notepad with me at the time, and I was afraid that I might not come across it again, so I memorized it and wrote it down as soon as I got home.

In the poem, the city unfolds, not in its brick and mortar sprawl this time, but as real and imagined remembrances over millions of years.

In a city so familiar that we hardly notice it, we read rumours of lost lakes such as glacial Lake Iroquois whose shores define the Niagara Escarpment; ravines which conceal lost rivers, long paved over, such as Taddle Creek, which still runs under Philosopher’s Walk; and dinosaur bones unearthed with the building of the subway – all part of our city’s geologic garden.

Our present day experience of the spring air and the ferry ride in the rain intertwines with this unread page of love charting where we came from, drifting away from us on the wind.

The line, “The lost lake/crumbling in the hands of brickmakers/the floor of the ravine where light lies broken/with the memory of rivers” transports me into a past where I no longer hear the quotidian hum of the city, but walk through the wild and secret marshes from another time.

Persepolis is the story of author Marjane Satrapi’s childhood. It’s an experience few readers will be familiar with; although certain aspects of youth are universal, she grew up in Iran, the child of protesters with a grandfather who was once the son of the emperor.

Originally published to wide critical acclaim in France, where it elicited comparisons to Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Persepolis is a bittersweet memoir about growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. In powerful black-and-white comic strip images, Satrapi tells the story of her life in Tehran from ages six to fourteen, years that saw the overthrow of the Shah’s regime, the triumph of the Islamic Revolution, and the devastating effects of war with Iraq.

“Unfortunately, it happened in a country where people were very traditional, and other countries only saw the religious fanatics who made their response public.” In her graphic novel, Satrapi shows readers that these images do not make up the whole story about Iran.

An illustrator, Satrapi chose to tell her story in a graphic novel.

“Images are a way of writing. We learn about the world through images all the time. In the cinema we do it, but to make a film you need sponsors and money and 10,000 people to work with you. With a graphic novel, all you need is yourself and your editor.”

Persepolis paints a portrait of daily life in Iran: of the bewildering contradictions between home life and public life and of the enormous toll repressive regimes exact on the individual spirit. Satrapi’s child’s-eye-view of dethroned emperors, state-sanctioned whippings, and heroes of the revolution allows us to learn as she does the history of this fascinating country and of her own family.

The book starts right into a challenging subject, especially to Western readers: the veil that all women were told they must wear. The ten-year-old Satrapi complains of the rule not out of politics or social concerns, but because it’s too hot and other girls steal them to play with. The girl’s logic isn’t predictable, and the deviation from the expected can be amusing. She’s interested in her uncle’s stay in prison, where he was tortured, because she wants to brag about it to her friends. Events become stories instead of memories, even as she loses her dreams and her relatives to fundamentalists.

Her follow-up volume, Persepolis 2, won the Angoulême International Comics Festival Prize for Scenario in Angoulême, France, for its script and in Vitoria, Spain, for its commitment against totalitarianism.

Marjane Satrapi was born in 1969 in Rasht, Iran. She grew up in Tehran, where she studied at the Lycée Français before leaving for Vienna and then going to Strasbourg to study illustration. She currently lives in Paris, where her illustrations appear regularly in newspapers and magazines. She is also the author of several children’s books.

An animated film version of the book won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2007.

Brat’s Eye View

Salon.com commentary

Kuroi Ame (Black Rain), by Masuji Ibuse, was hailed in Japan as the first true work of art to be inspired by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The title refers to the radioactive rain and fallout from the explosion.

Ibuse began serializing Black Rain in the magazine Shincho in January 1965. On the publication of the work, Ibuse received the Order of Cultural Merit, Japan’s highest honor to a writer.

On that morning - the morning of August 6 - the Service Corps of the Second Middle School in Hiroshima had been listening to an exhortatory address on Temma Bridge, or some other bridge in the west of the city, when the atomic bomb fell.

In that instant the boys were burned from head to foot, but the teacher in charge had got the whole party to sing, pianissimo, a patriotic song: “Lay Me Beneath the Waves.”

When they had finished, he gave the command “Dismiss!” and himself led the way in jumping into the river, which happened to be running high with the tide at the time. The whole party followed suit.

Image: Robert Motherwell, Beside the Sea #24, 1962

Black Rain is based on contemporaneous diary and journal entries of the bombing. We follow the principal narrator Shigematsu, in the days after the destruction of his home, when the black rain begins to fall. Shigematsu begins re-writing his poignant journal of the events in the hope of finding a husband for his niece, Yasuko, who has been scarred by radiation sickness. Shigematsu, his wife Shigeko, and Yasuko reassure prospective husbands that Yasuko was not affected by the radiation, although she was under the black rain that followed the destruction. Shigematsu reads his wartime diary to understand his own life, and Yasuko gives up all hopes of marrying and falls ill with radiation sickness.

The talks on my niece Yasuko’s marriage, which were rapidly approaching an agreement, have quite suddenly been broken off by the Aonos - the young man’s family. Yasuko has begun to show symptoms of radiation sickness. Everything has fallen through. By now, it is neither possible nor necessary to go on pretending. Yasuko, it seems, has sent the young man a despairing letter saying she has started having symptoms. I wonder whether it was love for him that made her decide on this honest course? Or did she do it in despair, on the impulse of a moment?

Her sight has deteriorated rapidly, and she complains of a constant ringing in her ears. When she first told me about it, in the living room, there was a moment when the living room vanished and I saw a great, mushroom-shaped cloud rising into a blue sky. I saw it quite distinctly.

Black Rain is never melodramatic.Sometimes his characters criticize the wartime government but otherwise Ibuse expresses his views at an everyday level. Subtly, Ibuse tempers horror with gentle humour. Alongside the horrifying wastes of the ruined city, he sets the gentle Japanese countryside with its unchanging people and traditions. Against the threat of universal destruction, he sets the small, unimportant - and hence infinitely touching - human things which triumph in the end. The narration alters 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.

Shigematsu fastened this account away as an appendix to his “Journal of the Bombing.” Then, at Shigeko’s request, he set off for Kotaro’s place with rice dumplings for The Mass for Dead Insects. The lacquer box containing the dumplings was inside the metal wash-bowl in which Kotaro had brought the loach, and the whole was encased in a wrapping-cloth.

The Mass for Dead Insects was a rite performed on the day after the festival, when farmers would make rice dumplings as an offering to the souls of the deceased insects they had inadvertently trodden on as they worked in the fields. On the same day, custom also demanded that they should return any articles that they had on loan from their neighbours.

Image: Pamela Bannos, Perils of Time 1899/1999, 1999

The book’s microscopic view initially seems to avoid the larger political and moral questions that surely such an atrocity demands, but a more nuanced understanding soon dawns: these larger questions cannot be asked of any situation if one cannot comprehend simple human misery and pride.

Black Rain’s awful beauty is brilliant.