1 Introduction¹

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, moved the Doomsday Clock’s hand to ninety seconds to midnight, marking the direst setting since the symbol’s inception in 1947. This Clock began ticking at the beginning of the Cold War to raise awareness of the threat of nuclear weapons to all humanity. The risk of a possible nuclear war or an attack on/accident at a nuclear power plant is higher than ever before, which is why the nuclear issue is unfortunately very relevant again. If only the risks against entities, such as a nation, are being debated and not against the many individuals who are threatened, the weight of each personal life loses significance, and war or the use of nuclear weapons become easier to discuss. Therefore, it is crucial to focus on the memories of the people who experienced the atomic bomb and analyse the types of suffering portrayed in the literature about the personal lives of individuals. The aim of the texts of the genbaku bungaku 原爆文学 (atomic bomb literature) is to keep memories alive and to warn against forgetting – also in terms of preventing similar future catastrophes.

Since the first atomic bomb was used militarily on Hiroshima and the second on Nagasaki in 1945 by the USA, Japanese literature has dealt with this topic. However, the first publications of literary texts based on atomic bomb experiences appeared only after 1949 due to censorship by the USA,² with the exception of Hara Tamiki’s 原民喜 short story “Natsu no hana” 夏の花 (Summer flower; 1947) and Ōta Yōko’s 大田洋子 Shikabane no machi 屍の街 (City of Corpses; 1948), which were published despite the censorship.³ After the censorship ended, atomic bomb survivors (hibakusha 被爆者) as well as people who did not directly experience the bombings began to write about them. In 1966, Ibuse Masuji’s 井伏鱒二 Kuroi ame 黒い雨 (Black Rain) won the Noma literary award. This novel became the prototype for a whole series of later texts dealing with hibakusha – and particularly with young female characters who are unable to marry due to the possibility of developing radiation sickness and the resulting social stigma. From the post-war period until the late 1980s, when the intensification of the Cold War led to nuclear arms races and tests, literary texts and other cultural representations emerged around the world to either draw attention to possible repercussions or legitimise the use of nuclear weapons. After the end of the Cold War in 1989, tensions and with them the nuclear threat temporarily subsided and the movement to reduce nuclear weapons advanced, with the total number of such weapons falling from 70,000 in the 1980s to 12,512 today (FAS 2023). Since the 1990s, when the threat of nuclear war became somewhat lower than before, publications on the subject began to decline.

In Japan, there is a phenomenon of increasing publications of war-themed cultural expressions in the summer, particularly in special commemoration years of August 1945. To mark the sixtieth year of the atomic bombings, for instance, Kashimada Maki’s 鹿島田真希 novel Rokusendo no ai 6000度の愛 (Love at Six Thousand Degrees; 2005), based on the film Hiroshima Mon Amour (Resnais 1959) and winner of the Mishima Yukio Literary Award, and Kōno Fumiyo’s こうの史代 manga Yūnagi no machi, sakurano kuni 夕凪の街 桜の国 (Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms; 2004) were released. Kōno’s manga became a bestseller and was awarded the taishō 大賞 (grand award) in the manga category at the eighth Japan Media Arts Festival in 2004 by the Japanese Cultural Authority, and the shinsei-shō 新生賞 (newcomer award) of the Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize in 2005 (Kawaguchi 2011: 107). The short story “Tori” 鳥 (Birds) discussed in this article was first published in July 2006 in the literary magazine Bungakukai 文学界 and was the last of six short stories in a series published in the literary magazine Bungeishunjū 文藝春秋 beginning in February 2005 and then compiled into an anthology entitled Bakushin 爆心 (Ground Zero, Nagasaki), which was released in November 2006. Seirai Yūichi 青来有一 was awarded the eighteenth Itō Sei Literary Prize 伊藤整文 学賞 and the forty-third Tanizaki Junichirō Prize 谷崎潤一郎文学賞 in 2007 with this anthology. The Japanese Literature Publishing Project (JLPP), which was launched in 2002 by the Japanese Cultural Affairs Office to promote Japanese literature worldwide through translation, selected, among others, this series of short stories. The German translation was published in 2014, the English in 2015, whereas the Turkish one followed in 2017.

Cultural artefacts have an impact on the construction of collective memories, often fueled by mass media. However, individual memories that are not told openly are forgotten. Representations of the aftermath of the atomic bombings have changed over time, and the average age of hibakusha exceeded that of eighty-five years old for the first time in a 2023 survey (MHLW 2023). In light of this, this article focuses on personal memories presented in a short story published sixty years after the atomic bombings. Seirai’s story examines the everyday lives of atomic bomb survivors and second-generation survivors in recent years. It imagines and rethinks the long-term psychological effects of nuclear weapons on people who did not experience them directly but live where they happened.

2 Genbaku bungaku and bakushinchi bungaku

Although the term genbaku bungaku is widely used to denote a genre of contemporary Japanese literature written on the subject of atomic bombings, there is no clear definition. The concept of genre is conventionally a category used to classify literary techniques, tone, or content such as prose, poetry, or satire. However, atomic bomb literature is defined by its theme and historicity. It covers a wider range of all types of literary texts, but also includes literary representations of testimonies, manga, films, theatre plays, paintings, etc. Kawaguchi Takayuki 川口隆行 (b. 1971), a literary researcher at Hiroshima University and head of the Genbaku bungaku kenkyūkai 原爆文学研究会 (Society for Genbaku Literature), describes genbaku bungaku as follows: “The genre of atomic bomb literature should be deemed not as a fixed genre, but as a realm of memory and survival, in which many voices come together in complex ways in a multi-layered socio-cultural relationship” (Kawaguchi 2014: 188).

The first publication of a book on atomic bomb literature was Genbaku bungaku shi 原爆文学史 (History of Atomic Bomb Literature), published by literary researcher Nagaoka Hiroyoshi 長岡弘芳 (1932–1989) in 1973. Kawaguchi focused on the fact that Ibuse Masuji’s Kuroi ame and Hara Tamiki’s “Natsu no hana” were first registered in the early 1970s as works to be covered in high school textbooks, which constitutes a public medium with a wide reach (Kawaguchi 2011: 15). He analyses that it is no coincidence that Nagaoka, in his research at the time, used the term genbaku bungaku and established the way of discussing it from a retrospective perspective, simultaneously founding the genre of atomic bomb literature (ibid.: 16).

In connection with the anti-nuclear movement that began in Europe in 1982, the Kakusensō no kiki o uttaeru bungakusha no seimei 核戦争の危機を訴える文学者の声明 (Statements by Literary Figures on the Threat of Nuclear War) was published in Japan and a signature campaign was launched under the leadership of Ōe Kenzaburo 大江健三郎 (1935–2023) and Oda Makoto 小田実 (1932–2007). Kuroko Kazuo 黒古一夫 (b. 1945), a researcher of modern and contemporary Japanese literature, joined this movement and subsequently wrote numerous studies on genbaku bungaku. In his monograph Genbaku bungaku ron 原爆文学論 (On Atomic Bomb Literature; 1993), Kuroko roughly outlines the history of atomic bomb literature. In his view, early genbaku bungaku was written by atomic bomb eyewitnesses from the period following the atomic bombings to the early 1950s, with the primary purpose of recording the unprecedented experience of the events (Kuroko 1993: 14). It was a rather difficult time for these hibakusha authors, marked by social discrimination due to a lack of understanding of atomic bomb disease, time pressure due to the risk that hibakusha could die at any time, and a sense of crisis, flooded with the possibility of becoming involved in another disastrous conflict with the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 (ibid.: 15–16). A feature of the next period, from the mid-1950s to the 1970s, Kuroko notes, is that many authors who had not experienced the events themselves began publishing novels with the atomic bomb as a theme (ibid.: 16). He points out that there is a tendency in works from this period to critically objectify post-war Japanese society by focusing on the event of the atomic bombings (ibid.: 17). Then, in the 1970s, works began to appear written by people who were little boys and girls at the time of the events and were based on their own experiences. Therein, they reconstruct the atomic bomb experience and concurrently express the suffering of the survivors (ibid.).

After analysing works of genbaku bungaku from the 1980s to early 1990s, Kuroko identifies three thematic trends that had not been previously observed. One is noticeable in Hayashi Kyōko’s 林京子 works that question human dignity in the decades she spent as a hibakusha (Kuroko 1993: 18). According to Kuroko’s analysis, various works after the publication of Ōe Kenzaburo’s Hiroshima Notes ヒロシマ・ノート (1965) also represent this first tendency. They all express the fact that in Japan, despite being the only country to have experienced atomic bombings, there is generally no deep understanding of the damage caused by nuclear weapons and therefore no common vision of a world without nuclear weapons exists (Kuroko 1993: 19). It can be said that this first trend has led to the nuclear weapons issue being gradually understood as a universal issue.

Kuroko cites Oda Makoto’s Hiroshima⁴ (1981) as a representative work of the second trend, which inherited the first trend and developed it further. In this novel, Oda showed that the victims of the atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not only Japanese, but also forcibly deported Koreans and Chinese, and that the victims were always tada no hito タダの人 (just ordinary people); thus, this text presents nuclear weapons as an anti-humanistic global issue. Another notable characteristic of this second trend is that the atomic bomb is considered from a comprehensive perspective. It thus begins with the manufacturing process itself, with the starting point being the uranium mining. Nuclear power generation is also included as a method of producing the raw material for nuclear weapons, and the potential for radiological contamination is expressed at every stage. In this way, the subject matter of genbaku bungaku was expanded to include the entire nuclear issue. This kind of literature is termed kaku bungaku 核文学 (nuclear literature) (Kuroko 1993: 19–20).

Finally, the third trend, Kuroko points out, which is mainly found in foreign literature, contains the portrayal of a fictitious World War III as a nuclear war based on the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, thereby depicting the post-apocalyptic world that would follow (Kuroko 1993: 20).

Looking at this overview, we can conclude that the atomic bombings were first expressed realistically. Over time, the topic has been reconsidered as a universal theme and also started containing fantastical elements. After the triple disaster in Fukushima in 2011, public attention turned to the danger of nuclear power plants, with many literary texts on this topic were subsequently published. In this context, the tendency arose to view the new category of genpatsu bungaku 原発文学 (nuclear power plant literature) in the same context as genbaku bungaku. Works written more than fifty years after the events can be described as a subgenre of posuto genbaku bungaku ポスト原爆文学 (post-atomic bomb literature). Those works distanced themselves from the immediate experiences of the bombings, describing on the contrary the consequences for the later lives of people in the area where the atomic bombs were dropped. Jinno Toshifumi 陣野俊史 (b. 1961), a literary critic and French literary scholar, analysed Seirai’s Bakushin and affirms the latter’s statement in an interview that it was post-atomic bomb literature and ground zero literature (bakushinchi bungaku 爆心地文学) (Jinno 2010: 322; 2011: 198, 202; Kusuda 2019: 174–175). According to Seirai’s explanation, ground zero literature focuses on a generation who did not directly witness the event of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, but, living on the very same ground zero, occasionally feel memories of the atomic bombing from that place (Jinno 2011: 203). Although the subgenre of ground zero literature is not (yet) established, it is worth mentioning it as Jinno and the genbaku bungaku researcher Kusuda Tsuyoshi 楠田剛士 (b. 1981) have used the term regarding Bakushin.

3 Seirai Yūichi – the Person and His Works

Seirai Yūichi 青来有一 is the author pseudonym of Nakamura Akitoshi 中村 明俊. He was born on December 13, 1958, in Nagasaki and grew up in Urakami 浦上 district, which is close to the hypocenter of the atomic bomb explosion. He completed a teaching degree at Nagasaki University 長崎大学 and joined the Nagasaki Municipality 長崎市役所 in 1983. In an autobiographical essay published in 2015 containing the short fictional story “Kanashimi to mu no aida” 悲しみと無のあいだ (Between Sorrow and Nothingness), Seirai reports that his father died in 2009 at the age of eighty. His father was adopted by a relative when he was five years old (Seirai 2015a: #Pos. 630). In 1945, he was sixteen years old and doing military service at a Mitsubishi shipyard in Aku-no-ura 飽の浦, which was about 3.4 kilometres from the hypocenter (ibid.: #Pos. 691). When the atomic bomb fell, his father was in a barbershop with a friend; they skipped work and therefore remained uninjured (ibid.: #Pos. 727). Seirai’s grandfather, his father’s adoptive father, had served at the Mitsubishi shipyard in Hiroshima, survived the first atomic bomb, immediately returned to Nagasaki with the special rescue train, worked at the Mitsubishi shipyard on August 9 and survived the second atomic bomb (ibid.: #Pos. 761). He was therefore a so-called nijū hibakusha 二重被爆者 (double hibakusha). Seirai’s mother was fifteen years old when the atomic bomb was dropped. Seirai sums up her recollection of the events in an interview as follows:

She worked in the prefectural administration and went to the town of Manzaimachi 万才町, which is about 2.5 kilometres from the hypocenter. There she suddenly saw a yellow flash and fled into a building so that she was not injured, although later her hair fell out and her gums were bleeding (Christian Today 2017).

As both of his parents are hibakusha, Seirai belongs to the second generation of survivors of the atomic bombings.

Since his childhood, he liked reading books and was also interested in Christianity (Nagasaki University 2003). He often went to the Nyokodō 如己堂 library, where Nagai Takashi 永井隆 (1908–1951) spent his final years (ibid.).⁵ During his time as an employee in the city administration, Seirai wrote short stories. His first short story, “Jeronimo no jūjika” ジェロニモの十字架 (Jeronimo’s Cross), appeared in the June 1995 issue of the literary magazine Bungakukai. For this short story he received the 80th Bungakukai shinjinshō 文學界新人賞 (Newcomer award of literary circle). The first-person narrator of this short story is called Seirai Yūichi 青来ユーイチ, a name identical with the writer’s pseudonym, but with the difference that the first name is not written in kanji 漢字 (i.e., 有一) but in katakana カタカナ (i.e., ユーイチ). Yūichi, the first-person narrator, has had his vocal cords removed due to cancer and can no longer speak, which is why he is trying to become more aware of his inner voice and express it, while also making an effort to and capture other people’s unspoken feelings or memories. This attitude seems to be an indication of Seirai’s understanding of himself as an author who wants to perform precisely this function, which could be a reason he gave the protagonist this name.

Seirai won the 124th Akutagawa Prize 芥川賞 in 2001 with the short story “Seisui” 聖水 (Holy Water), which first appeared in Bungakukai’s December 2000 issue. “Seisui” gave Seirai his breakthrough as an author; however, he continued to work in public service until his retirement in 2019. He became head of the Nagasaki City Peace Promotion Division 長崎市平和推進室長 in 2005 and took over the position of director of the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum 長崎原爆資料館長 in 2010, which he held until 2019. After his retirement, he accepted the position of visiting professor at RECNA (Research Center for Nuclear Weapons Abolition, Nagasaki University 長崎大学核兵器廃絶研究センター) where he remains active. In his many short stories and some novels, Seirai has addressed memories that are tied to certain places, the Christian faith in Nagasaki, memories of the war and especially of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki, but also current wars such as the one in Afghanistan (Seirai 2015b), as well as the increased threat of nuclear war under Donald Trump’s presidency (Seirai 2019).

4 Analysis: The Short Story “Tori”

As mentioned above, “Tori” is the last in a series of six short stories first published in Bungakukai’s and then in the anthology Bakushin, in which the six short stories are arranged in a circular manner. Kusuda considers Bakushin to be Seirai’s representative work, as it has been re-issued in several anthologies and translated into various other media formats, including a radio play and a film adaptation (Kusuda 2019: 172).

The first-person narrator is sixty years old; the setting is Kazagashira 風頭⁶ in the city of Nagasaki, sixty years after the atomic bomb was dropped. As the protagonist and narrator begins to come to terms with his lack of identity, he starts writing his memoirs. He was born shortly before the day of the atomic bombing and on that day a woman adopted and brought him into the house where he still lives. While writing his memoirs, he and his wife realise that something is wrong at home. Eventually, they discover a bird trapped in a fishing line hanging under the gutter of their house, and despite all attempts to save it, it dies. By seeing the death of his birth mother and ancestors mirrored in the death of this bird, and by burying its corpse in the garden, the protagonist feels that he has established a connection with his (lost) biological family.

To analyse this short story, a combination of different methods is used. Initially, a narratological content analysis and close reading (Nünning and Nünning 2010: 294; Greguš and Kamerer 2020: 213) were conducted, which enable a text-immanent interpretation. On a philological level, close reading enables not only an intensive examination of the contents of a literary text, but also, in this case, of the Japanese language used. For example, the use of kanji, katakana, or furigana 振り仮名 may offer valuable hints regarding the ways this text can be interpreted.

However, since the main theme of genbaku bungaku is about an actual event that changed the history of humanity, meaning that the texts have some reference to reality, the approach adopted here is also a context-oriented one (Nünning and Nünning 2010: 20). To fulfil the analysis’ goal of taking a closer look at the way the topic of second generation hibakusha’s memories and the impact on their daily lives is treated, my analysis will focus on the long-term psychological effects of nuclear weapons that are at the center of Seirai’s text. This article proceeds as follows: first, a character analysis focusing on the first-person narrator and his identity is carried out; second, it will be examined how the topic of memories is portrayed; third, the central motifs (such as white colour or light) are discussed, which appear conspicuously frequently in the text; fourth, home and family are thematised; and, fifth, the role of the bird is analysed.

5 The Identity of the First-person Narrator

“Tori” is composed of the story of the first-person narrator, an amateur writer, and the process in which he writes his memoirs. The opening sentence of Seirai’s story is identical with the opening sentence of the main character’s memoirs, revealing his birth/origin. The plot begins with the narrator starting to write his memoirs on a Saturday evening in mid-March 2006, and it ends on a Sunday, foreshadowing that the narrator will complete his memoirs in the afternoon of the same day. The final sentence is again the last part of his memoirs. Since the opening and closing passages frame this text, it can be said that the story that it tells is enclosed in a large bracket. These first and last passages highlight the gaps in the narrator’s family register and imply that the enigma of the protagonist’s identity cannot be clarified.

The narrator’s memoirs are divided into five parts in total and are written in jōtai 常体 (direct/plain style, da-dearu だ・である style), whereas the actual plot is described in the formal form keitai 敬体 (desu-masu です・ます style). The spoken language is rendered in the Nagasaki dialect, creating a local atmosphere. These subtle differences characterise the Japanese writing style, while it is difficult to recognise them when reading only the translation.

The protagonist, who is mentioned only twice by his first name Ryō 良 (Seirai 2010: 289, 294), has been working in a printing company for forty-two years and is about to retire. In September of the previous year, he is asked by Takiguchi 瀧口, a hibakusha who worked as a primary school teacher and is already retired, if he could write down his experiences as a hibakusha, given that Takiguchi collects the memories of hibakusha in his circle of acquaintances and plans to publish a series of booklets at his own expense in which their experiences are documented. When the narrator first rejects Takiguchi’s suggestion, he asks the protagonist the most important question about his identity:

“Who are you really, I wonder?” he asked. “Where do you really come from?” He had an inquisitive look in his eyes. But I’d never felt any need to hide my past. I’d spoken freely of the circumstances of my birth any number of times over the years – and not just to him. “You know the facts. I never knew my parents’ names. In that sense, I don’t know who I am.” “Even so, there must be something you could write.” “No, nothing. I’ve hardly even thought about it. I’ve had a peaceful⁷ life.” “Well, there you go. That’s your experience of the bomb” (Seirai 2015a: 160).⁸

In this scene, the protagonist begins to come to terms with who he is as he realises that he will never be able to deal with his original identity unless he starts actively thinking about it. After Takiguchi asked him to write down his memories, he loses consciousness several times, which also makes him realise that he is getting old, and thus in March he finally decides to write down his memories. Takiguchi plays an important role in Seirai’s story as a particular character. He only appears briefly, but his role is to give the protagonist the opportunity to actively deal with his memory and identity, as he is depicted as a hibakusha who collects other hibakusha’s memories in order to immortalise them. In the scene quoted above, Takiguchi makes the narrator realise that the gap in his identity stems from his (missing) memory as a hibakusha, referring to his lack of recollection of the day of the Nagasaki atomic bombing, an event he experienced as a newborn. The narrative opens as follows, with the first lines of the protagonist’s memoirs:

There are two blanks on my family register in the spaces where my parents’ names should go. My past disappeared in the shadow of the atomic cloud. I was rescued from the wreckage immediately after the bomb fell. The woman who picked me up and became my foster mother always said she remembered almost nothing of that day. I was a child crying amid the rubble. […] All I know is that I appeared suddenly out of that white flash of light at 11:02 A.M. on August 9, 1945. This is the day recorded in my family register under “Date of Birth” (Seirai 2015a: 153).

The narrator’s uncertainty regarding his identity described here runs through the entire plot. Later, it begins to revolve around an initially unidentifiable object (= the bird) that enters the narrator and his wife’s house and makes noises that worry the elderly couple, as they assume it is a thief.

At the very beginning of the narrator’s identity formation process there is a crucial element: instead of his actual date of birth, he was given the day of the atomic bombing, based only on his adoptive mother’s the memory who found him in the rubble that day. Marking an important part of one’s identity, birthdays are usually auspicious events and are celebrated every year; here, however, it is a bitter reminder for the main character as it is inextricably linked to the day the second atomic bomb was dropped, which has a symbolic meaning for all humanity. The dates August 6 and 9, 1945, are days of mass extinction, which killed a total of about 200,000 people, and are not normally associated with birth. This combination of death and birth in Seirai’s text can be understood as ironic, expressing that in an overall catastrophic situation something positive can also occur. Simultaneously, however, it can also be interpreted as an expression of the Buddhist view of the life cycle, which has no beginning and end point.

It is the void of both the protagonist’s identity as part of the group of hibakusha and his personal, individual identity that constantly unsettles him and casts a shadow over his entire life. As described in the quote above, his foster mother also cannot remember exactly what that day was like, or she simply suppressed the memory of it and did not tell anyone about it. Now that his foster mother has long since passed away, the precise circumstances under which he was found by her remain forever unknown.

Urakami is emphasised by the fact that the stepsister says that, for the first-person narrator, it is his fateful place as he was found there. Although he was still a baby and therefore cannot remember the events himself, he seems to have linked his memory to Urakami because his foster mother told him her memories and these were formed in him as a narrative. The passage continues:

Something about the story strikes a chord in me. It may be just make- believe, but a tear comes to my eye when I think of it. The egret was my guardian spirit, and I should always make sure to keep it from harm, she told me. I was lucky to be raised by a woman with this sort of belief. Sometimes I think I might have been more inclined to pick away at the problem of my identity if it hadn’t been for that story. I might have become obsessed with it to the point of missing out on the little moments of happiness life has to offer (Seirai 2015a: 165).

Through this imaginative explanation from his foster mother, the protagonist is able to avoid the question of his own identity since he felt protected and secure by his guardian spirit. Nevertheless, this only temporarily suppresses the question, which leaves a big void in his mind. Deeply hidden insecurities that form this emptiness in the narrator’s mind sometimes emerge as if in a flashback, such as illustrated by his dream about the record player or many hallucinations, which will be discussed later.

The protagonist’s biological family is unknown, but he has a home where his adoptive mother took him in, and his identity as an adopted child is certain. However, he writes in his memoirs that he often feels rootless:

I suppose it’s possible that the problem of my identity has been gnawing away at me for years without my ever being fully conscious of it. Presumably, at least a certain number of newborn babies were among the 73,884 people who died when the bomb was dropped. I might have been among them. The idea makes me feel ephemeral – like someone’s ghost. The last sixty years begin to seem like a shallow dream (Seirai 2015a: 163).

In this passage it is clear that he feels that he has lived a fake life and that he imagines that he could have just as easily died on the day of the atomic bombing. This suggests that the “guilt over survival priority” pointed out by psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton (2012: 35) affects even those who did not consciously experience the atomic bomb. The protagonist does not necessarily feel guilty that he survived, but he feels like a victim who was robbed of his original identity by the atomic bombing and had to live his life uprooted.

The real hibakusha, who consciously experienced the atomic bomb and witnessed the mass extinction, felt guilty for having survived. In contrast, the protagonist, who experienced the atomic bomb unconsciously as a newborn, sees himself as embodied with the dead. This highlights the difference in the psychological impact on survivors, depending on whether they experienced the atomic bomb consciously or unconsciously. Seirai’s protagonist thinks that he may also have been one of the victims, and it is a miracle that he was able to survive and live as a son in a new family. Another interpretation might be that his old self died on the day of the bomb and he was given a new, second life, so that the bomb represents a major turning point. In this sense, he has two identities: one before the bombing that will remain unknown to him forever, and another, new one after the atomic bomb was dropped, with a family to which he has no blood ties. He cannot reconcile the two – or, rather, it remains an enigma to him how the two relate to each other.

After losing consciousness twice in a row, the protagonist realises that he has already reached the twilight of his life and feels an inner urge to come to terms with the gap in his identity. He describes his inner thoughts, i.e., that he always felt like a stranger in his adoptive family, which is another reason he wanted to write his memoirs:

But another factor must be the unspoken feud that existed between my foster father and me. For him, it probably dated back to the very first time we met. He can hardly have been pleased to come home from the war to find a strange child feeding at his wife’s breast. His feelings sent out ripples that are still widening inside me even now, twelve years after he died. Now that he’s gone, I decided I needed to try to sort out my feelings about him – to untangle the knot – by putting it down in writing (Seirai 2015a: 163).

Before discussing this scene, it must be pointed out that there are some differences between the original Japanese and the English translation. In the explanation of the first sight of the foster father and the baby in the Japanese original, “breastfeeding” is not mentioned and comes only later on the same page (Seirai 2010: 287). The last sentence of the quote, translated directly, reads: “In order to have a peaceful memory of the deceased as a dead person, I feel that I must try to organise my tangled emotions and put my mind in order by slowly remembering them in writing. I thought it would be a good idea to clear up the things that were bothering me.”⁹ There are then two sentences in the Japanese original which are omitted in the English translation. In this quoted part, the protagonist’s motivation for deciding to write his memoirs is revealed. From the passage in the Japanese original, it can be concluded that the main character wants to remember the deceased as a dead person, as something of the past, because his memory is too vivid and painful. Both his lost identity and the memories of the dead can be understood as “unclaimed experiences” (Caruth 1996) – the causes of trauma that always remain an enigma for those affected.

6 Metamorphoses: Animal Comparisons and the Protagonist’s Record Dream

This section focuses on the metamorphosis of the protagonist’s wife, described through comparisons with animals, and a dream the protagonist had.

The main character and his wife both celebrated their sixtieth birthday one year prior to the events of the narrative. This birthday is a special occasion in Japan because it marks the so-called kanreki 還暦 – the completion of a sixty-year cycle¹⁰ – and symbolically represents a return to one’s birth. To celebrate, the jubilarian wears a red vest, alluding to the wish for good fortune, as red clothing is traditionally worn by newborns.

The main character’s wife is not mentioned by her name, but only by the role she fulfils in the marriage – that of his wife. Initially, she is described as acting and looking like a little girl, that is, as she ages, she reverts to a child-like state. There are not many scenes in which the woman is described, but the reader is informed that she was once a naive person, very simple and innocent, and over the course of her life as the main character’s wife, she became a stubborn and sceptical person. The first description of her in which she is compared to an animal reads as follows:

Her cheeks are drawn, her mouth pursed and pointed like a chicken’s beak. Her eyes, though, still shine as brightly as ever. Who is this woman I’m living with, I sometimes ask myself. It’s strange. But when I think of what she went through when we were first married, it’s painful to remember how much she put up with (Seirai 2015a: 156).

When one reads the English translation, the appearance of the shining eyes seems positive. However, the word “still” does not appear in the original; in the latter the eyes are portrayed just as eerily glowing.¹¹ Although she is an emaciated elderly woman with a mouth like a pointed beak, only her eyes express strong emotions and imply a sense of eeriness. This type of description is repeated later in the text in sentences such as “my wife’s eyes were wide open now, like a fish’s” (Seirai 2015a: 165) or “[s]he sat up under the blankets like a mermaid and looked at me with piercingly clear eyes” (ibid.: 166). Here, again, the translation presents her a little more positively than the original, where we read “iyō ni sunda me 異様に澄んだ眼” (Seirai 2010: 291), meaning oddly clear eyes. It can thus be concluded that his wife turns into an unknown, strange creature in the eyes of the protagonist. While the main character questions himself about his identity, he now wonders about her identity as well. It can also be recognised from the last part of the quoted sentences that the main character feels responsible for the negative transformation of his wife.

Another characterisation of the protagonist’s wife which uses the stylistic means of comparing her to an animal is found in the following passage:

Her gaunt face blanched. She looked like an old bird. With a pang, I realized that what I had said went right to the heart of her anxiety. I tried to brush it off. “Just my imagination,” I said. But I could tell that what I’d said had set off ripples in her mind (Seirai 2015a: 174).

Again, the English translation does not convey the same nuances as the Japanese original – in the latter, her face slowly changes into that of a lean bird.¹² The meaning of the titular bird motif will be discussed in more detail later in this article. Suffices at this point to say that here it symbolises the protagonist’s biological mother. It is a curious parallel that the two women are compared to a bird. This uncanny transformation expresses how much the couple is afraid of the unknown visitor at their home – as well as the fact that they are growing old.

The main character experiences a strong sense of age anxiety. He has realised that his life cannot last much longer, and feels the pressure of time, which forces him to wonder who he is. As he reflects on his life and worries about an uncertain future, he dreams the following:

I drifted into a dream. An old 78 record is spinning. Someone is singing in a voice that’s neither male nor female but a combination of two well-known singers from my youth. It seems to be about all the people who were lost in the last war. When I look more closely, I realize that the label on the record is blank¹³, with nothing to indicate the title of the song or the name of the singer (Seirai 2015a: 176).

Differences between the English and Japanese versions are again noticeable. The persons described as “someone” and “two well-known singers from my youth” in the quoted translation are specifically named in the original: Ishihara Yūjiro 石原裕次郎 (1934–1987) and Misora Hibari 美空ひばり (1937–1989). In contrast to the anonymised representations of the characters, concrete contemporary elements¹⁴ are used to create an authentic atmosphere. The legendary singer and actor Ishihara Yūjirō achieved his greatest popularity in the 1950s to 1970s, and Misora Hibari was active as a singer from the immediate post-war period until the 1970s – their songs are still popular today (Seirai 2010: 308). These elements create a nostalgic atmosphere of the Shōwa period (1926–1989) and evoke collective memories of the time. It must be pointed out that the next sentence is a fairly free translation,¹⁵ as the two singers did not die during World War II – with the war not being mentioned in the original.

This dream scene overlaps with the protagonist’s blank family register, as portrayed in the next sentence (“the label on the record is blank”), utilising the record as a metaphor for the lack of the protagonist’s identity and own memories. A record is a phonogram that stores and plays back a certain number of consecutive tones. Similarly, human memory is also a storage space that can be used to memorise something and remember it whenever needed. The dream scene continues:

After a while, the song changes to a sad little tune that sounds like an old children’s song or lullaby. I am an infant again, safety wrapped in a blanket¹⁶ of white feathers. But the needle starts to scratch and skip, and the sweet melody disappears. The skipping of the needle becomes a voice, and the voice calls out: “What’s there? Who is it? Who are you?” Then there’s a thump of static, and everything goes white (Seirai 2015a: 176–177).

Unlike the English translation, the Japanese original repeats twice the question “Who are you?”, written unconventionally in katakana, conveying the extraordinariness of the situation. This question pushes the protagonist to reconsider his own identity, but it can also be read as the voice of his heart, which appears because the existential wound in his heart aches, a sign of a traumatic experience – as Cathy Caruth explains: “sorrowful voice, that cries out, a voice that paradoxically released through the wound” (Caruth 1996: 2; emphasis added). The protagonist in Seirai’s text, while writing his memoirs, hears the question “Who are you?” repeatedly in various forms throughout the story, a total of twenty-four times by my count.

As the line “Maybe my mind was starting to skip like an old record” (Seirai 2015a: 174) indicates, both the record and the record player become unreliable when played repeatedly, which metaphorically shows that human memory can no longer be reproduced accurately, and that sometimes one has to consider whose voice is involved in a memory. As the melody changes, the protagonist also transforms into an infant, protected by his metaphorical mother, the bird. The scratching in the melody represents the blank space of memory, i.e., a painful unwilling released traumatic memory, and the white colour that emerges from the last loud scratch marks his death. The dream expresses the psychological state of the character, so one can conclude that he is afraid of thoughts of death, but also expresses his deepest dilemma: on the one hand, he feels warm and secure under the protection of the white bird; on the other hand, he suffers from rootlessness and loneliness. The endlessly spinning record and the white light, symbolising both birth and death, could again refer to a Buddhist view of life in which an endless cycle of life and death¹⁷ is assumed. The depiction of the protagonist’s wife gradually transforming into another being and the depiction of the main character metamorphosing into a record in his dream convey the idea that all things are constantly changing and are not static, and that memories are also subject to change.

7 The Motifs of White Colour and Light

White colour and light are motifs that are used repeatedly in “Tori” and reveal a symbolic meaning. The short story begins with the observation that there is a white column in the first-person narrator’s family register, emphasised as a void – and, at the end, the last passage of the text is quoted from his memoirs: “The places on my family register where my parents’ names should go are empty. Nothing is recorded there. My past¹⁸ as a newborn baby when the atom [sic] bomb fell lies buried in that empty white space” (Seirai 2015a: 182). The same terms for this white colour are used at the beginning of the text as well, thus forming the bracket for the entire story. In this sense, the white colour symbolises the infinite routine of beginning and end, birth and death, innocence, purity, and truth. Once again, this reflects a Buddhist view of life. The first-person narrator’s birth, or, rather, the beginning of his life, is the moment in which he is found by his foster mother in Urakami, described as follows: “All I know is that I appeared suddenly out of that white flash of light at 11:02 A.M. on August 9, 1945” (ibid.: 153). The white light here creates a connection with both the beginning of life and the atomic bomb, as the beam of light from the explosion is imprinted in the collective memory.

The leitmotif bird, a heron, is also depicted with white colour, a symbol of innocence, holiness, and goodness. The moment of death of this white bird is described as the loss of light: “The light went out of its eyes” (Seirai 2015a: 181). Shortly before this, there is a scene in which the first-person narrator carefully and laboriously cuts off the fishing line in which the bird has entangled in and tries to save it: “As each strand snapped, I felt in my heart like a needle skipping on a record. The bird, wreathed in white, filled my vision. I seemed to hear a voice coming from it. ‘Who is it? Who are you?’” (ibid.: 179). The part translated here as “wreathed in white” reads as “soko ni mō nani mo mienai de shiroi hikari ni tsutsumareteiru tori” (そこにもうなにも見えないで白い光に包まれている鳥; Seirai 2010: 313) in the Japanese original, and literally translates into “the bird, which can no longer see anything and is surrounded by white light.” The white light that envelops the bird symbolises that its death is slowly approaching. The thin, invisible fishing lines in which the bird is entangled can metaphorically represent an invisible mesh of repressed memories. The description of the bird’s painful liberation therefore implies an act of processing the memories, which is often also very painful. The question the dying bird seems to ask is also related to the protagonist’s suppressed identity. It is a difficult one for him, as he does not know his own past. Concurrently, however, it is also a difficult philosophical question given that identity is not only about seeking one’s own roots; it is also a question of how one lives and what constitutes one’s own life.

When the bird comes to their house, the couple senses something is wrong because they hear noises but do not know what happened. This is similar to a flashback into a (suppressed) traumatic memory which typically assumes an enigmatic form as well. When the couple hears the noises for the first time, the light is not mentioned but it plays an important role the second and third time, ultimately leading to the unknown object (the bird):

“Hello? Who is it?”¹⁹ She shouted up toward the second floor. “There you go again! I told you, if someone’s broken in, he’s not going to answer you back, is he?” As I spoke, I felt the familiar faintness come over me again. Everything got far away. Particles of white light seemed to run down the stairs like water. From somewhere up above me, I thought I heard a voice call out, “Who are you?” It was impossible to tell whether it was a man’s or a woman’s (Seirai 2015a: 173).

The search for the unknown and the first-person narrator’s description of his loss of consciousness are overlapping here. The first question in this passage, uttered by the wife, is written in hiragana and Nagasaki dialect, thus being differentiated from the second question, that of the unknown voice. The enigma of the unknown is further enhanced by the fact that the question “dare da” ダレダ / “Who are you?” is written in katakana, so that it is associated with the hallucination caused by the unconscious. Some white particles of light stream down from the upper floor, associated with a voice that can be either male or female, evoking an analogy to the record metaphor. What the first-person narrator feels when he loses consciousness for the first time is realistically reconstructed in retrospect with the help of an inner monologue:

I’d unzipped my fly when I suddenly felt the weight drain out of my body. Everything turned white before my eyes, and I felt myself floating in the air, transformed into something soft and light that I can only describe as “soul-like”. My mind remained surprisingly calm. I remember thinking. “Ah, so I’m dying,” as I flew on into the white light. I remember hearing a voice asking, “Who are you?”²⁰ When I came to, I was lying on the floor next to the toilet bowl. I must have fallen hard against the porcelain. I felt a throbbing pain at the base of the scrotum, but had no clear memory of my fall – just the airy sensation of being enveloped in white light (Seirai 2015a: 161).

This quote is followed by the explanation that the protagonist’s foster father fell at this very spot, got injured on this toilet, and suffered a cerebral hemorrhage that led to his death. The first-person narrator associates the loss of consciousness with a cerebral hemorrhage, and, although he is not related to his foster father by blood, he believes that he has inherited the same physical constitutions, and associates his dizzy spell with such a death. The white light indicates the time span he was unconscious, i.e., it represents the nearness of death. He hears (or thinks he does) the question “Who are you?” just at the moment he feels that he is about to die, which means that this question is the most important one of his entire life – and thus wants to clarify it before passing away. Overall, the white light in Seirai’s text symbolises the unconscious and simultaneously refers to a world after death.

8 The Family and the House

The main character, his wife, and the main character’s adoptive parents are not given individual names but are solely referred to according to their familial relationships. However, the sister-in-law’s name is Keiko 恵子 (literally, “wealthy child”), her husband is Kōkichi 幸吉 (litterally, “fortunate fate”), and his family name is Daikoku 大黒 (referring to the God of wealth). These two characters are portrayed as greedy and self-centred, and their names are thus telling: Daikoku is the name of a guardian deity in Buddhism, but the individual kanji literally means “big black,” symbolising great evil. Black is the opposite of white, which together express evil and good, guilt and innocence, wrong and right, as in the sayings kokubyaku o arasou 黒白を争う (fight for wrong or right) or haraguroi 腹黒い (black-hearted).²¹ The first-person narrator, on the other hand, is presented with the name Ryō 良 (good). The names of the characters are used in a very overt manner. The white and black colours are used effectively and help characterise the protagonist and the antagonist. The stepsister is stereotypically mean to the adopted child, and her husband behaves like a typical merchant in Kansai 関西, known for being greedy and rude. When the foster mother hears his name for the first time, and due to the bad impression she has about him, she says ironically: “Daikoku. Like the god of fortune?²² Well, it certainly sounds like a lucky name” (Seirai 2015a: 167).

These allusions to premodern (religious) beliefs and the structure of the short story “Tori,” in which an old couple changes their lives through a visit from an animal, show a closeness to Japanese folktales such as Tsuru no ongaeshi 鶴の恩返し (Crane’s Return of a Favor). This story is about a crane who is saved by a man and returns in the form of a woman to show its gratitude. They get married and the woman starts weaving beautiful kimono fabrics and sells them to make a living. She asks her husband not to look into her room while she works. However, the protagonist violates the rule and eventually does so, and it turns out that she was actually the rescued crane. When this becomes clear, she leaves him. The story has two didactic messages: first, that even an animal does not forget gratitude; second, that a taboo must not be broken. In “Tori,” the bird falls into a trap and the protagonist tries to save it, but his help comes too late and the bird dies. Here, the bird is a metaphorical representation of the protagonist’s biological mother, therefore also a figure coded as female. These similarities between Seirai’s text and Japanese folktales are crafted in such a way that the narrative’s didactic message becomes very clear: the bird’s death symbolises for the protagonist his eventual ability to become a real member of the family – that is, a sacrifice helped him feel like he could remedy his lack of identity.

The aging of the couple and their house is described as a parallel process. These comparisons continually take on new forms: “The wood creaked loudly as we started up the stairs. It made for an uneasy feeling, as if the frame of the house were being twisted out of shape” (Seirai 2015a: 156). Just as the appearance of the protagonist’s wife changes, the changing shape of the house is also described in detail. The creaking of the floor, the difficulty of opening and closing the doors, etc. indicate the house’s old age. The first-person narrator and his wife, who feel uncomfortable in the house, have the feeling that they are not liked by it (which is often described as a living being): “It was as though the old house were taunting me – as if the place my foster father had built were refusing to accept the idea of two people with no blood tie to the family moving in and taking over” (ibid.: 173). There are some other depictions showing that the house reveals its feelings, and the main character and his wife live their lives while feeling these messages of the house. Therefore, the house can be read as a member of the family, while also becoming a symbol of the Japanese patriarchal ie-system (Japanese family system): although the protagonist was raised to be the heir of this family, he is not accepted by the house built by his adoptive father because he is not related to him by blood, and thus always feels out of place.

The main character has a son and a daughter; the son moved to Okinawa 沖縄 after his divorce and became estranged from his parents and home, and the daughter is also distant because she is married and has a family of her own. Only minimal information is given about these two children, and although their rooms have been preserved, they are not used. Even after turning thirty, the son has no fixed work and lives the life he wanted as a diving instructor without contacting his parents to celebrate their sixtieth birthday. The importance of celebrating kanreki in Japan has already been mentioned, and the attitude of not even contacting one’s parents on this special occasion indicates a growing emotional distance within the family, implying as well that the younger generation rejects conventions. The main character’s inner voice says: “Like my sister in Osaka, he’s drifting away from his family, leaving the two of us here more alone than ever” (Seirai 2015a: 175). The representation of the house as a symbol of the family system (being in the process of increasing estrangement) and the expression that the younger generation does not value the house, the family, or stable work suggest that the Japanese ie-system can no longer be maintained and the younger generation has not taken over the values of their parents’ (Shōwa) generation; thus, the changes in society are reflected in Seirai’s text. Following the above analysis, it is evident that the short story uses social change as a powerful metaphor for the transformation and fading of memory. “Tori” depicts the house as a medium for conveying memories; it can moreover be read as an expression of the difficulty or impossibility of passing on memories to the next generation.

9 The Role of the Bird

The metaphorical meaning of the eponymous bird in Seirai’s story is linked to an anecdote described in the first-person narrator’s memoirs. Towards the end of 1945, when he was still a baby, a white heron-like bird came to the small pond next to the house:

Afterward, she said that the white bird had looked at me sadly as I lay crying in her arms. Apparently, I fell silent as soon as I noticed the bird and stared at it intently. And out of this little episode she spun a story. She imagined the bird was the spirit of my real mother, who had escaped from the death and desolation of the Urakami River²³ and come to make sure I was safe (Seirai 2015a: 164–165).

A white heron/egret as a guardian spirit refers to a premodern conception of birds in Japan. The anthropologist Okuno Takuji 奥野卓司 (b. 1950), who is also an expert in ornithology, writes that in the eighth century Izumo no kuni fudoki 出雲国風土記 (Landscape Description of Izumo) there is the following myth: Ajisukitakahikone 阿遅鉏高日子根, one of the two sons of Ōkuninushi 大国主 (central deity of Izumo Province), could not speak. Ōkuninushi took him to a pond and left him sitting in a boat. There he met a swan flying down to the pond. The moment he saw the swan, he screamed, and since then Ajisukitakahikone has been able to learn to speak (Okuno 2019: 27). According to Okuno, there are several other myths in which birds play a similar, supportive role for humans. For example, the image of a sacred medium that intercedes between life and death is attributed to migratory birds (ibid.). “Tori” describes in detail what species of herons can be seen in Japan, and the first-person narrator notes that the bird that came to his house must be a kosagi 小鷺 (little egret) or a daisagi 大鷺 (great egret), which is a migratory bird. The idea of the foster mother, who sees the bird as an incarnation of the biological, dead mother, arises from the cultural idea of birds as medium. The situation in the story of Ajitsukitakahikone is the same as the one described by Seirai in “Tori”: both take place in a small pond, and the birds play a supporting role for a child. The bird in Seirai’s text also creates a connection between the world of the dead and the living, based on the Japanese cultural image of birds as a sacred medium.

The bird that came to the house was found hanging under the gutter in a horrible state. The couple tried to free the bird, which was on the verge of death as it was caught and tangled in a fishing line, but the damage done to the bird was too severe: “Despite all its plumage, the bird felt almost pathetically light. It was like holding a fluff of white cloud I’d cut down out of the sky. There were fine lines of blood on the bird’s beak, neck, and breast, as though someone had whipped it with a thin strap” (Seirai 2015a: 179). The cloud mentioned in this quote bears a subtle allusion to the cloud that was a decisive factor in the dropping of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki,²⁴ which is why it can be understood as a reference to the atomic bomb. Later, there is another passage that refers to the motif of the cloud: “That afternoon, dark clouds covered the sky, and I watched as warm spring rain fell on the azaleas” (ibid.: 181). In this depiction, the cloud is directly associated with the (black) rain that followed the atomic bomb. What was translated here as warm spring rain is described even more precisely in the Japanese original: “nebaritsuku haru no nama-atatakai ame” (粘りつく春のなまあたたかい雨; Seirai 2010: 316) (sticky lukewarm spring rain). Spring rain usually is gentle and long-lasting – and one may associate it with a disappointing effect (especially when it is in the cherry blossom timing, as rain causes the blossoms to fall off) – but not sticky. This characterization, in connection with that of “lukewarm,” thus is abnormal and reminiscent of the black rain containing radioactive fallout after the atomic bombing. Furthermore, when the first-person narrator sees the dying bird, he imagines that his parents died in agony in the atomic bomb explosion. However, upon closer inspection of this passage, it becomes apparent that the bird’s condition does not resemble the injuries caused by the bomb, but rather those associated with torture. The image of its neck hanging limply, as described in the text, or the image of the bloody welts, can rather be linked to the historical persecution of Christians in Urakami. This is also supported by the fact that there is an earlier passage in which the first-person narrator retrospectively tells how he visited Urakami in his teenage time:

A white crucifix hung above the altar. My foster father eventually caught up and stood by my side. “That might be your god up there,” he whispered. It was quite possible that my real parents had been Christians who used to pray in this church – but I was shocked to hear him allude to it so openly. I felt I had finally found my own Urakami (Seirai 2015a: 170).

Thus, in Seirai’s text, the bird as a metaphor is not only a medium between life and death, but also stands for the Christian God who was crucified. The white colour of the crucified Christ and that of the egret stained with red blood overlap. In the dying bird, the first-person narrator sees his ancestors who had died many generations ago, presumably Christians who suffered martyrdom as a result of torture in Urakami. At the same time, he may also see the bird as a symbol of his biological parents who also died in Urakami hundreds of years later. In this way, Seirai makes the many memories attributed to one place visible.

10 Conclusion

The short story “Tori” describes the lost memory of an individual character that simultaneously represents the collective suppressed memory of the atomic bomb in Japan. The sixty-year-old protagonist lives his life with a dual identity, which triggers within him a feeling of insecurity. His memory of the atomic bomb is an indirect one: he cannot remember it himself, but the fragments he heard from his foster parents became his own memory, which is like a shadow that overwhelms him greatly and affects his whole life. The protagonist’s foster mother repressed her memory of the atomic bomb only sharing one part of her memories with him in the form of an episodic narrative, whereas his foster father buried his memory of the war in China completely and told him nothing about his war memories. Both died without sharing any detail of their past experiences. This underlines the difficulty of conveying any personal experiences and the passage of time sixty years after the atomic bombs were dropped.

When looking at the family described here, it becomes clear that the patriarchal ie system in the first-person narrator’s home can no longer be maintained, as his children are only concerned with their own lives and have become estranged from their parents. The old, dilapidated house symbolises the unstable relationships between the family members, and it also shows that the house cannot function anymore as a medium for transmitting memories. The couple is convinced that they will be its last inhabitants. This reflects social transformation in Japan: family cohesion is weakening and the patriarchal system is no longer considered important, while, at the same time, there is no one alive anymore to keep the memory of the atomic bombings alive. In addition, the absence of the couple’s children indicates that the younger generation has no interest in the past and therefore memories are no longer passed on. The analysis has yielded that Seirai’s descriptions of social and familial transformations are actually about the difficulty or impossibility of passing on memories to the next generations.

In analysing the narrative elements, it became clear that “Tori” also relies on allegories: the visit of an animal, a bird, changes the lives of the elderly protagonist couple, with the animal having a similar symbolic meaning as in Japanese folk tales, here symbolising a medium that connects the dead and the living. With the help of Japanese folklore, which creates a nostalgic effect, a temporal distance is expressed that can be seen as a parallel to the memories of the atomic bombing, an event that occurred sixty years ago in the narrative timeline.

The ageing of the protagonists is expressed through the repeated loss of consciousness of the first-person narrator as well as by the changes in his wife, which are emphasised by using animal comparisons. In this way, the transience of life is implicitly thematised. The house and artefacts, such as the record player, become obsolete and slowly decay, just like the living beings, while the blue sky and the flowers in the meadow always remain the same. These contrasts emphasise the fragility and finiteness of life. Furthermore, the Buddhist concept of the endless cycle of life is symbolised by the white light, which suggests that although the souls of living beings are invisible, they still exist somewhere. By depicting this Buddhist concept of the coexistence of the living and the dead, or by representing the metaphor of the protagonist’s dead biological mother as a bird, it is illustrated that the voice of the dead can be heard. However, it is highlighted that one’s own repressed memories – or even the soul or voice of the dead – are only heard/recognised when the living “try” to listen, i.e., come to terms with the past.

With regard to the first-person narrator’s memories, it was firstly established that his life begins in Urakami when he was found there by his foster mother. Concurrently, this place indicates that his biological mother and his family were killed in the atomic bombing. Secondly, the historical events in Urakami during the time of the persecution of Christians are addressed through the depiction of the crucified Christ. Thirdly, the death of the metaphorical mother as a bird indicates that the ancestors of the first-person narrator in Urakami had to die because of their presumably Christian faith. Various events leave their traces in the place where they occurred, as described in “Tori” using the example of Urakami and the multi-layered memories that are connected to it. The text shows the protagonist’s endeavour to awaken suppressed, unconscious memories by writing them down. This process is similar to coming to terms with a traumatic memory, a painful confrontation with the past.

The repeated question “Who are you?” increases the pressure on the narrator and can also be understood as an invitation to readers to ask the same question about their own identity and their attitude to the historical events which are central to this literary text. The narrator’s search for his own identity ends with the death of the bird, which is a metaphor for his biological mother, and which makes him realise that he has not mourned his ancestors until then. In the process, he also becomes aware that his ancestry dates back a long way and that historical events in Nagasaki, namely, the persecution of Catholics, could have something to do with him.

The awakening of the first-person narrator, who begins to realise his identity as someone affected by the historical events directly and indirectly addressed in Seirai’s text, suggests that the atomic bomb issue is a universal concern due to its impact on the entire planet. Moreover, this short story conveys the message that it is difficult to come to terms with one’s own memories and also how important it is to pass them on to the next generation in order to learn from humanity’s mistakes and avoid the occurrence of man-made disasters. Attempting to fathom past historical events from a specific location, such as Nagasaki, opens a path where the voices of the dead can be heard. At the same time, it is an invitation to reflect on one’s own identity and question one’s own view of history.