To Rui, Once Again

Extract

This essay was the last major published work by Hayashi Kyoko, who died on February 19, 2017, at the age of 86. Born in Nagasaki on August 28, 1930, Hayashi spent most of her childhood in Shanghai, until she returned to Nagasaki with her mother and sisters, in the spring of 1945. On August 9, she was working as a student recruit at the Mitsubishi Munitions Factory. Her story “Ritual of Death” (Matsuri no ba, literally “The Place of the Festival”), a searing account of her experiences that day and during subsequent months and years, won her the Akutagawa Prize in 1975. Her next work, a short story collection, Cut Glass, Blown Glass (Gyaman biidoro 1978), was selected to receive the Geijutsu-senshō-mombudaijinshinjin-shō, a prestigious literary award by the Ministry of Education. Hayashi, however, refused this award on the grounds that, as a hibakusha, she could not accept an award from the Japanese government so long as it maintained the stubborn refusal to acknowledge the effect of internal exposure to radiation—a perspective that is made abundantly clear in the present work. Despite a relatively late debut, Hayashi was a prolific writer whose eight volume collected works was published in 2005.