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Gerald Vizenor

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Simone Pellerin

Behind History Another History: Hiroshima Bugi

Bernadette Rigal-Cellard

Résumé

Fasciné par l’Orient, le Japon notamment où, selon son autobiographie Interior Landscapes, il passa parmi les meilleures années de sa vie, Vizenor offre dans Hiroshima Bugi, une méditation débridée sur les effets de la bombe atomique. Complexe, mystérieux et dynamique, ce roman ne se dévoile qu’à celui qui sait repérer derrière les visages lisses les coeurs des tricksters transfrontières afin de deviner le fil de sa morale. Adepte de la maïeutique bouffonne, Vizenor traque l’histoire de notre époque, exhibe sa misère morale, sa décadence mortifère et nous fait entrevoir d’autres mythes fondateurs de véritables civilisations humanistes, qui pourront peut-être encore nous sauver.

Texte intégral

1Published in 2003 Hiroshima Bugi is yet another tale Gerald Vizenor has thought up to continue educating his readers. Fascinated by the Orient, Japan in particular where he has said that he spent some of the best years of his life, Vizenor offers us here an idiosyncratic meditation on the long time effects of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. Even if his trademark trickster directs most of the telling, the subject matter has clearly expanded beyond the mere trickster narrative and the mere intra-Native-American topoi. While remaining faithful to his cultural Chippewa tradition, Vizenor has always refused to be constrained in too narrow a territory and proforma grievances and for our own benefit has jumped once more over the fence. Hiroshima Bugi can be seen as a sequel to Griever, an American Monkey King in China but its assessment of the fundamental issues is grimmer: it is not merely like Griever about cocks, tricksters and colonists, though it is also about that, but it is mostly about death, about spreading death, glorifying death and benefiting from the death of anonymous and innocent beings. Behind the history of several hoboes at a crossroad in the city of Hiroshima, one can access the grand History of our times. By “grand History” I mean two specific points underpinning the relations between East and West: one, the role during the war build-up and during the war itself of the Emperor of Japan as father, god, and blind commander-in-chief of the nation and two, the customization of the nuclear explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the promise of eternal peace for the future of mankind. Vizenor debunks the make-believe parades of the Peace Memorial Museum to decipher the actual script. I will look at his narrative strategies, at the ploys he entrusts his trickster hero with to try and outweigh the deadly warp History has been given by morbid samourai, so that in the end the life force is rescued by beauty and poetry.

1 Narrative strategies

2The book fits the definition of all post-isms. I once called Vizenor’s writing “post-maodernist”, here it can be studied as pertaining to post-colonialism, post-modernism, post-novelism, post-warism and better still post-ante-atomism. It is indeed about the new conditions brought about by the atom, and, as if to reflect this, the text itself has literally been atomized. As this is however Vizenor’s favorite mode of writing, his long time reader is not particularly at a loss here. As usual, the text as fruitful bricolage combines collages of quotations, poetical élans, and a very humorous sprinkling of Japanese terms and Japanese-sounding vizenorianisms.

3More than just a meditation on destruction, Hiroshima Bugi exhibits its author’s fondness for Japanese culture, though it is most difficult to filter the message and decode what should be classified as admiration, or on the contrary as pure sarcasm. Yet again this is typically Vizenor’s technique: he adds up bits and pieces and leaves the reader free to interpret the combination, for the sequence of thoughts on paper can lead to one thing as well as to its exact opposite. Meaning might appear as whimsically optional were it not for various clues dotted along the way, clues that are hard to perceive if one has not already grazed Gerald Vizenor’s glyphic grass.

4In Hiroshima Bugi, most of the quotations are taken from books and essays explaining this singular nation, but the major homage is to be found in the structure itself of the book. The artist likes to pick up literary models that he re-invents à la Vizenor. In so doing, he buttresses his own creations thanks to a commonly respected canonical work, and at the same time, he nags at it by more often than not subverting its contents: this was particularly efficient with his first novel, Bearheart, that followed the paths of The Pilgrim’s Progress, plus that of The Canterbury Tales or even The Satyricon, and also with Griever that borrowed from the old Chinese book on the quest of Buddha’s scrolls, The Journey to the West.

  • 1 www.japan-guide.com/e/e2090.html
    Kabuki is a traditional Japanese form of theater with its origins i
    (...)

5Here I must say I have not been able to track another pilgrimage narrative behind the structure. It seems rather meant to operate somewhat like Dead Voices in which each chapter reads like one of the playing cards of the famous Anishinaabe deck with which Naanabozho, the Trickster, played against the Evil Gambler. Since the introductory page calls it “a kabuki novel”, the chapters in Hiroshima Bugi must function like the scenes of a kabuki play.1 Yet, though I did watch a kabuki play and read a lot about this theater form, I have problems seeing how the pattern of Hiroshima Bugi sticks to that of the kabuki. I somehow guess that the similarities could be seen in the manner Vizenor has his characters appear or disappear, since “The kabuki stage (kabuki no butai) is a rotating stage. . . equipped with several gadgets like trapdoors through which the actors can appear and disappear.” (see note 1 on this page)

6The influence may also be found in the fact that the text embeds haiku poems (p. 29 notably) and weird dialogues meant to stress the problems of translation (many characters are indeed “lost in translation!” to use the title of Sofia Coppola’s 2004 film) and operate as comic relief in an otherwise tragic tonality. The exchange on cats (a cat is a neko) moves from humor and parody of traditional Japanese icons (tojo, chrysanthemums) to the core message of the book, the dominance of the emperor:

“Do you cats live here?
Yes, very shy.
Please show me.
There, behind the bench.
What are their names?
Kisu, Tojo, and Chrysanthemum.
Marvelous Names.
Tojo is my hero.
Truly, empire cats?
Yes, this is our palace.
The imperial moat.
The emperor is my family.”
Ronin then comments: “Kusu, she told me, was so named because he sucked on her neck.” (146-47)

7The other master structure of Hiroshima Bugi is explicit in the first chapter entitled “Ronin of Rashomon Gate”. It is more familiar to me since I share with Gerald Vizenor a fascination for Rashomon. It is first the title of a short story (1914) by Ryûnosuke Akutagawa and then the title of a film by Kurosawa in 1950. The film and its incredible plot derives its gloomy atmosphere at the gate from the story “Rashomon” but its plot is in fact inspired by two other short stories published in the collection Rashomon. One is “The chastity of Otomi” and the other one “In the bushes” (or “The Grove” in Hiroshima Bugi p. 11). With Henry James’s and Faulkner’s novels, the film is one of the best examples of the unreliable shifting centers of focalization, a device that teaches us why we must distrust all narrators. In Kurosawa’s film, the narrators are sheltering from a heavy rain under a ruined gate and from there they proceed in turn to testify on the strange scene they have observed and that none of them interprets in the same way. Vizenor takes up the motif to focus our attention on the ritualized exhibits of the bomb museum. Beautifully elegiac, the first chapter combines elements from Rashomon with the Anishinabe trickster figure Ronin. The first voice confesses: “The Atomic Bomb Dome is my Rashomon. Come closer to the stone, over here, out of the rain. . . The gates of ruins. . . Memory is our gate.” (1-2)

8In a form of doubling of Akutagawa’s narrative strategy, the next chapter is spoken by another voice, that of the Manidoo envoy. Yet, Vizenor does not keep up Rashomon’s narrative technique since the contrapuntal voice will always be that of the Manidoo envoy, who is the ambassador (could we see in the term “ambassador” a reference to the novel The Ambassadors of James the theorist of the center of consciousness?), the messenger sent by the spirit gods of the Anishinaabe, the manidoo, to rescue their mixed blood offspring, Ronin. Furthermore, this voice does not contradict what Ronin said (which is what Rashomon is about), but will repeat it in a slightly modified version and give precisions on what the protagonist is or does. This technique both comforts our understanding of Ronin’s version and lets loose Vizenor’s natural penchant or fondness for repetitions; for here also he succumbs to what Gérard Genette calls “l’ivresse de l’itératif” (Genette, 40) that could be translated by “the delirious intoxication of repetition”.

9The reader is thus not led astray by kaleidoscopic narratives that would offer contradictory interpretations of the same original event (which is what Rashomon achieves). At first sight, one might consider that the multiple quotations Vizenor borrows from a variety of sources without an obvious string to tie them up together function like multiple centers of focalization, but at second sight, this is not the case: the quotations reinforce the message of the author and are not meant to lead us astray. As for the oralized tales, those of the two voices, they spring from Vizenor’s dearest master narrative, the Chippewa oral tradition inhabited by the writer’s specific concerns to which I now turn.

2 Tricksters versus Samourai

10The title “Hiroshima Bugi” condenses the clash between the two worlds Vizenor writes about. Bugi is the Japanese form of Boogie and refers to the mixed blood origin of the protagonist Ronin Browne: his mother was a Japanese boogie-woogie dancer. The dance was imported from the west as part of the exchanges started a century earlier by Commodore Perry. The comical effect of such a bicultural title is contradicted by the fact that the book is more a danse macabre, a ghoulish dance, than a playful boogie-woogie. To some extent, though, one may even say that, by cleverly encapsulating the household commodity the name Hiroshima has become, this title in its own way perversely perpetuates the bias, since it becomes the catch phrase meant to attract the potential reader. Would every thing then turn into a farce? Would this be the message of the trickster forever reversing meanings, thus preventing the reader from any possible certainty? For, of course, the hero of the tale is a bi-cultural avatar of Naanabozho, here called Nanazu.

11Ronin’s father was an Anishinaabe from Minnesota (from White Earth Reservation, that is to say Vizenor’s reservation, 19) who worked as an interpreter for General MacArthur when he arrived in Japan to command the forces of occupation (a character Vizenor could have met since he was himself part of these forces in the fifties). Ronin unites the two sides of the ocean called Pacific, a misnomer at that. Also at the orphanage he bore the name Mifune (19), which is the name of the most famous Japanese actor who played in all (to my knowledge) of Kurosawa’s films, notably in Rashomon. Fiction, literature, film, history are all summoned up in this witty morphing.

12As for the name “Hiroshima”, like the name “Pearl Harbor”, it is the tragic chronotope literally fusing in one spot and one instant the two nations, binding them together in an apocalyptic and fatal melting pot. The difference lies in the type of victims, military personnel for one, military people and regular citizens, notably children for the second: Vizenor quotes a passage from a history book: “atomic bombs were not dropped on battlefields but on thriving urban centers” (136). The difference also lies in the causes behind the attacks: the hubris of the Emperor for one; in the second case the desire to put an end to war and to impress the rest of the world with the mighty weapon.

13The subtitle of Vizenor’s book is “Atomu 57”, which means that a new era was created by the blast in 1945, and that the story was written 7 years later. However, unlike in other revolutionary beginnings (like the French revolution that started a new count, An 1, An 2. . .) this birth did not signal the long awaited New Age but its very demise.

14There are several references in Native American stories to the first nuclear blast in New Mexico, notably in a (I think still unpublished) novel by Paula Gunn Allen. She strangely enough presents the blast as the reenactment of the Pueblo origin myth that has the earth open up in fire to produce a new cycle, and First Man and First Woman emerge at last from the underworlds. One can even interpret the prologue of House Made of Dawn in this light. Running counter to these possibly positive interpretations of the nuclear blasts, one finds Stallion Gate by Martin Cruz Smith (a Native writer of detective stories), which narrates what happened at the test site in New Mexico and focuses on the predicament of one Native American worker there). Hiroshima Bugi alludes to the Nevada Test site where the new versions of the bomb were exploded after the war: Nightbreaker, the father of Ronin, the Manidoo Envoy tells us, is supposed to have gone to work at this site after serving in Japan. And the voice concludes: “The Nevada Test Site was their Rashomon.” (20)

15Yet Vizenor does not like to dwell on the past since it cannot be changed; he consequently levels his attacks at what may possibly be altered for the better, that is the present situation. What he can’t stand, and what the book is mostly about, is the “simulation of peace” that has been celebrated since and that he stages under the black rain at the gate.

  • 2 Nothing much to do with the other film Black Rain that came out the same year, except that it is al (...)

16The black rain is no longer that of Kurosawa’s Rashomon but it is the rain of the falling-out radiations, the rain that spelled horrible death, either immediate or slow and devouring still sixty years later. Black Rain is also the title of an unbearable (for me) film that came out in 1989 about the after effects of the bomb on young people (Kuroi ame, by Shohei Imamura, after the novel of Masuji Ibuse,2 that I suppose Gerald Vizenor also saw).

17Like in the sand of Kobo Abe’s The Lady in the Dunes, out of the monsters’ melting pot, some creatures managed to survive, a new race, not exactly what Crèvecoeur called the new man, the American, but mixed bloods such as Ronin Browne. This character voices the agenda of all the writings of Vizenor. As a trickster he is alive thanks to chance (an earthquake that opened his glass jail free) and his plight resembles that of the buried Native Americans whose bones were disinterred and displayed in the museums of anthropology across North America: we remember Vizenor wrote extensively against this sacrilege that finally led to INGRA, the Repatriation Act (that obliges institutions and museums to return to the tribes the bones and various objects of their ancestors). The bones of the victims of the bombs share the fate of the Native American victims. Even though he jumped over the reservation fence, Vizenor has not forgotten his own people, witness this passage when Ronin tells how he is one with the dead:

My nightmare lasted sixty years. I was surrounded by white bones and burned, puffed bodies. . . I was dead, a heap of ancient white bones, and could only reach out for bits of passing flesh to cover my bones, to create a new memory. I caught a white pigeon with burned feathers. . . . Then my bones were mounted in a museum, with my broken, burned watch beside me, probably as punishment for my resistance and tease of time. (3)

18This last detail once more combines two sets of cultural references: first a well-known fact in Hiroshima literature, that of the watch that froze on the second of the blast and that has always stuck in my own recreation of that hell, and then the anti-chronological time hint typical of Native American literature. Ronin’s trickster signature is always referred to as for instance when he tries to use mirrors as a cover (87): tricksters are always seen with mirrors and this is vividly staged in Dead Voices. As with many other elements of Hiroshima Bugi, the mirror is a bridge between the cultures of the Anishinaabe and of the Japanese for we learn that mirrors are for the Japanese, Kagami, a symbolic object that contains the spirit of creation stories: “The ceremonial mirror revealed the shadows of spirits.” (116)

19Further, Ronin’s narration encapsulates the gist of the two disasters recorded in the book:

My body had deserted me, and my remains were displayed in a diaporama of victimry to promote peace. I raged over the passive notions of peace, and then, in the last scene of the nightmare, the museum was destroyed in an earthquake. My bones were liberated by chance and my shadow was cast in a ghost parade, a nuclear kabuki theatre. I awakened in the ruins, and every morning since then there has been a ghost parade that starts abruptly at eight fifteen ante meridiem. (3) (8:15 a.m. was the time of the blast).

20In chapter two, Ronin explains his name and speaks about death, alluding to the samourai who are then going to be ever present in the text. They would rather die rapidly than endure the endless pain of nuclear burns:

Death is my vision in the faint morning light. The master said, We are separated from a sense of presence because of our fear of death. Consider the instance of nuclear wounds every morning and the fear of death vanishes. The samourai warrior is never shamed by the fear of death. (15)

21I opened this presentation by giving the various post-isms the book, as a work of art, belonged to. Now I can even add two more: if Vizenor’s interest rests with post-Indianism, Hiroshima Bugi shows how Japanese society has sunk into post-nihonism, that is to say that it has forsaken its tradition to adopt the global consumer-ism we are deep into ourselves, and that as all forms of consumption it necessarily feeds on dead things.

22We then recall another conflict in a somehow similar context, also pitting the East against the West, the Vietnam war. At the beginning of it, the vampirish sister-in-law of the South Vietnamese President Diem, Madame Nhu, rejoiced at the sight of the Buddhist monks who immolated themselves on the streets to protest against the American-backed regime, and called those living torches nice “barbecues”. The bonzes indeed played such a part for even if they did horrify the television audience in the West, in the U.S.A. in particular, they also perversely fascinated people. Through their being consumed by the flames in front of the television cameras they made themselves “consumerable” by viewers. By doing so, they definitely did not accelerate the ending of the war, something that would have been possible at the time if viewers had truly been simply horrified. But this is not what happened. In fact, the bonzes can be held responsible for this failure for they had staged their sacrifice specifically for the television crews that they had called for the occasion. Like the Japanese of the pre-Hiroshima period they had only partly understood how some people functioned. The victims of Hiroshima have also turned into brochettes served as fodder for the monstrous cattle we have become. Vizenor has staged in this book how this against-nature cocktail amuse-gueule may turn all of us into mad cows. The only way out, he says, is to listen to our heads and hearts and act out our anger and irony.

23This is the path taken by Ronin, the warrior for true peace and life: his inbred gift implies creating, not destroying like the samourai, and the creation operates through words, as Vizenor has already explained. Here the Manidoo envoy tells us that the author’s persona, Ronin, “creates words, names. . .‘Survivance’, for instance, is not merely a variation of ‘survival’. . . He means a vision, and vital condition to endure, to outwit evil and dominance, and to deny victimry.” (36; this is taken up in other pages, notably 69) When we read further down: “Dominance. . . honors victimry” (36) we understand that the Japanese victims have been killed twice: in the war and ever after, since they have been turned into artifacts to justify a specific policy. Vizenor faults the Emperor and his government for having shunned the victims of this massive holocaust (68), which was all the more ignominious as those people had earlier bowed in respectful awe before the radio every time they heard their living god speak.

24Later the Manidoo envoy repeats the definitions and expands them to claim that “Ronin is a warrior, a shaman of other worlds, but he is not obsessed with the savage, literary glitter of death. He is a visionary, an aesthetic warrior of eternal survivance, a hafu samourai, but never a fanatical romancer of nationalism or the emperor.” (71) In the economy of the text this pits him against Yukio Mishima, one of the archvillains of Hiroshima Bugi, and I will close my presentation on this conflict.

3 The passé papier mâché Samurai versus the bicultural word warrior

25For some strange but fathomable reason, Vizenor viciously nags at Mishima. The attack starts page 59 with a kabuki scene staging one of the mongrels that keep bounding up and down Vizenor’s books, here attacking luridly a princess and licking his crotch on stage. The mongrel is named Mishima, and we know Vizenor loves giving the names of people he dislikes to dogs or any animal for this matter (we remember a president Jackson mongrel, a cock named Matteo Ricci, etc.). Later in the book mongrels even turn into monks.

26Before giving Mishima’s biography, the Manidoo Envoy alludes to the ritual suicide of Mishima through a quotation from one of his books, Confessions of a Mask (70). In another page the actual seppuku is depicted in slow motion, gore motion, across the pages. This leads me to question these passages for we know that when we depict horror as a means to criticize it, we penetrate in an obscure process: by graphically portraying horror, we do more than simply condemn it, we somehow revel in it at the same time (this is why the burning bonzes turned into barbecues). Though I never shared Mishima’s fascination for death (but he is far from the only one as I will explain later), I am a great admirer of his extraordinary prose and consider him one of the most powerful novelists of the 20th century. Vizenor himself admires the writer he was, but hates the character he came to be. Even though I understand his position, I cannot help finding it rather demeaning to see Mishima reduced in Hiroshima Bugi to a mere knot of smoking tripes bursting out under the blade of the sword, or as a dog licking its crotch!

27I can even understand Mishima’s final act, the last recoil in a Catch- 22 situation that I now wish to explain. Vizenor shows how the Emperor sabotaged his own people with his obsession with national grandeur, yet Hirohito was himself but the heir, or the product of a long warrior tradition that allowed his country to resist the colonial expansion of the Western powers throughout the modern period (we know that only the Dutch were allowed to maintain a trading post at Nagasaki because they had no colonial ambitions over Japan). Had Japan not fought efficiently against invasion, its cultural integrity would not have been spared. Starting in the 16th century, the colonial powers only succeeded where such strong defense did not exist. Japan’s culture of death, if one wants to call it thus, was put, to a great extent, in the service of the culture of life.

28Another point seems to me to be of interest here. It is in his disgusted concern for the last of the samourai’s ritual suicide, that of Mishima, that one perceives if need be, Vizenor’s originality among his generation of Native American writers. Commenting on the many violent deaths encountered in Native novels, Paula Gunn Allen once explained that more than mere metaphors of the plight of the colonized Natives, these deaths belonged to the harsh warrior culture of most tribes. By this she meant that one should not constantly bemoan these deaths, but on the contrary see them as ritualistic sacrifices in an age-long tradition. And we may recall at this point how Black Hawk proudly explained in his autobiography how he could only become a teenager once he had at least killed one man, and a full-fledged adult once he had killed several.

29My remarks are informed by my surprise when I realized a few years ago that Paula Gunn Allen’s words must be true: I was then driving Scott Momaday and his wife around my own reservation and was amazed to hear Momaday talk almost constantly about the battles between the French and the English or our other European enemies because he loved battles. He had made a point of visiting as many champs de bataille as possible and he gave me a very accurate list of those battles that most of us don’t even remember for they took place centuries ago. I am used to the reversed gaze à la Vizenor on European culture, but this was not a reversed gaze at all. The ritual suicide of Mishima who deplored the bastardization of his culture (while admiring the West to the point of making sure his novels were properly translated into English) probably would not strike the descendants of warrior Native American cultures as abnormal, even if suicide was not a common practice among them. That it does strike Vizenor as being the epitome of the culture of death testifies to his singularity, that I most admire.

30To contrast with the death culture of Mishima and of his samourai brothers, Ronin engages in comical subversion. He pours corrosive chemicals on the pillar of peace, the column on which metal letters perpetuate the victimry of Hiroshima in the museum. (83) The reproach Vizenor formulates is also that in the museum nothing much is said about Japanese militarism and the occupation of China and of much of Eastern Asia, as if the Japanese had only been the victims of the Americans (134) and not cruel offenders themselves.

31The farce reminds us of Griever liberating the chickens in the Chinese market, they prove that “Trickster stories are liberty” (4). Vizenor is, I suppose, conscious that such an act of resistance will not change the course of history, yet the metaphor is an active one: words matter. He has developed this theme in many works, particularly in Wordarrows, a term he borrowed from the 13th myth in Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain (46). Another act of defiance was to change the name of the Atomic Dome Museum to “Hiroshima mon amour” (134) because he loved the clear-sighted line of Duras “tu n’as rien vu à Hiroshima”, for indeed, Vizenor agrees, the tragedy cannot be understood, fathomed, seen.

32Hiroshima Bugi ends in a more peaceful tone with the homage to Lafcadio Hearn, again someone I have appreciated a lot since I discovered his books by chance on a Californian library shelf. I knew since Interior Landscapes (128-129) that Hearn had been the gate to the liberation of the trickster Vizenor. As the supreme homage Vizenor wrote in his autobiography: “Hearn was born Irish and Greek. . . He became Japanese, and he could have become Anishinaabe; we were brothers with the trees and stones.” (IL 129)

33The last chapters of Hiroshima Bugi signal the peace Vizenor has made with the culture he loves, through the go-between Hearn was for many Westerners. He takes up what he wrote in Interior Landscapes: the last words of the last chapter in Ronin’s voice poetically invite us to follow him and Hearn: “I am a crane, and you readers who want to know more about me must search in the clouds. Lafcadio Hearn is a crane on my wing. Many authors fly this way.” (203)

34Vizenor once more fuses his two cultural origins, since he has already told us that his Anishinaabe family belonged to the crane totem. Once his irony spent on the fake peace museum, he can revert to being the poetical trickster, the brother of trees and stones into which Lafcadio Hearn has already turned: “Lafcadio was already halfway into the stone, and the feather gave us both wings.” (202)

35We have flown eons away from the Atomic Bomb Museum. Nevertheless, it may appear strange to close the élan of the book on Hearn for he is considered by a lot of Japanese as one of those orientalist myth makers who spread in the West the vision of an aesthetized Japan, untouched by passing time. Vizenor, the constant gardener vigilantly uprooting fabricated stereotypes and myths such as the ones he perceives in the deadly passéism of Mishima, is here caught himself fondly riding the majestic waves painted by Lafcadio Hearn, who was in the words of Ronin “drawn to the traditional sentiments of this story of poverty, temptations, pleasure, return, magical flight, and the mystery of the great sea.” (191)

4 Some Concluding Remarks

36Before going for the first time to the United States, I was in contact with a French man who was living in Washington, DC. He warned me against all possible illusions on the country. Though he said many good things about it, he also declared: however nice and lovely people may be, most of them are profoundly materialistic, in spite of their professed religious faith, and in their eyes, everything is to be recycled for profit. As an example of this he told me he had just been to Hiroshima and had there visited the museum. He had been horrified by the exhibit that revived his own memory of the period. But, beyond this, he was struck by what could have passed for a casual, friendly mention in the guests book: the day before an American tourist had written: “Much enjoyable.”

37This detail, a paramount one, has been with me for over thirty years and surfaced with full clarity when I read Vizenor’s book. I will definitely not say Hiroshima Bugi is an enjoyable book, though this might please its father. It is everything but “enjoyable” in the usual sense of the word, even if many pages are superbly poetical.

38It is not a page-turner, suspense is minimal. We are confronted with the rehashing of atrocities in slow motion, like on C.N.N., but when on C.N.N. they are turned into a commodity for terror-hungry consumers turned voyeurs, here they are issued as a warning. Now they are imprinted on our mental hard disk. In spite of many humorous episodes, we actually never feel like laughing for the tragedy the book resurrects cannot be considered as a tragedy of the past that could finally be erased through the natural oblivion passing time charitably brings us. Thanks to the book, the tragedy keeps reverberating in our time as its victims are being ceaselessly used for hypocritical commemorations that in turn cover up similar monstrosities. The book therefore becomes a call-to-arms, not to make war but to make a true peace with ourselves and our neighbors. It nonetheless remains a profoundly difficult entreprise even if the writer seems convinced that this is feasible through the proper use of words and ironies. He himself finally retreats into the world of poetry, as the key to the mystical communication between the tricksters of Japan and of the Anishinaabe woodlands to which he invites his readers. This twist brings us back to Rashomon gate that has warned us against all narrators. Whom are we supposed to trust?

Bibliographie

Works Cited

Akutagawa, Ryûnosuke. Rashômon et autres contes. 1914, 1922. Traduction d’Arimasa Mori. Paris: N.R.F., Gallimard-Unesco, 1963.

Genette, Gérard. Figures III. Paris: Seuil, 1974.

Rigal-Cellard, Bernadette. “Vizenor/Griever, un singe qui se rit de la dialectique entre l’ici et l’ailleurs.” Annales du CRAA. Talence: MSHA, 1991. 16: 123-138.

RIgal-cellard, Bernadette. “Vizenor’s Griever, a Little Red Post-Maodernist Book of Cocks, Tricksters and Colonists.” New Voices In Native American Literature Criticism. Ed. A. Krupat. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993. 317-343.

Rigal-Cellard, Bernadette. “Doubling in Gerald Vizenor’s Bearheart: The Pilgrimage Strategy or Bunyan revisited.” Studies in Native American Literatures, 9: 1 (Spring 1997). 93-114.

Smith, Martin Cruz. Stallion Gate. New York: Random House, Ballantine Books, 1986.

Vizenor, Gerald. Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990. (First edition: 1978, as Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart. Truck Press.)

Wordarrows. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1978.

Griever: An American Monkey King in China. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Interior Landscapes. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990.

Dead Voices. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992.

Hiroshima Bugi. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003.

Notes

1 www.japan-guide.com/e/e2090.html
Kabuki is a traditional Japanese form of theater with its origins in the Edo period. Kabuki, in contrast to the older surviving Japanese art forms such as No, was the popular culture of the townspeople and not of the higher social classes.
Kabuki plays are about historical events, moral conflicts in love relationships and the like. The actors use an old fashioned language which is difficult to understand even for some Japanese people. They speak in a monotonous voice and are accompanied by traditional Japanese instruments.
The kabuki stage (kabuki no butai) is a rotating stage and is further equipped with several gadgets like trapdoors through which the actors can appear and disappear. Another specialty of the kabuki stage is a footbridge (hanamichi) that leads through the audience.

2 Nothing much to do with the other film Black Rain that came out the same year, except that it is also set in Japan.

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