SOURCE: Iwamoto, Yoshio. Review of Hiroshima Notes, by Kenzaburō Ōe. World Literature Today 70, no. 2 (spring 1996): 475.

In the following review, Iwamoto commends Ōe's compassionate reflections on the Hiroshima tragedy and its impact on his own life in Hiroshima Notes but argues that the author's polemic tone becomes overbearing at times.

The reissue by Marion Boyars Publishers of the English translation of Kenzaburō Ōe's Hiroshima Notes, originally published in Japanese in 1965 and first translated into English in 1981, will now enable a much wider Western audience to glean the thoughts of the 1994 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature (see WLT 66:1 pp. 74-75, and 69:1, pp. 5-16) on the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945, an event whose fiftieth anniversary in 1995 sparked vociferous debates anew. These “notes,” the product of Ōe's visits to Hiroshima between August 1963 and May 1965 in the role initially of journalist to cover the activities of the...