‘there is only one narrative & nothing else’:

Building the One-Legged Shrine

Reviewed by Dennis James Sweeney

 

Mariko Nagai, “Irradiated Cities”
Les Figues Press
2017, 144 pages, softcover, $17
 

I was walking from a dark room into a light room when I turned to page 40 of “Irradiated Cities.” In the dark room I could see the image on the page only as a silhouette, so I waited for the light room in which I would be able to make out the texture of “One-Legged Shrine.” But all the light room revealed was more darkness: the photograph amounts to only a silhouette of a pedestal balanced on one pillar where there must have once been two. It is either backlit or underexposed, so the partial shrine is nothing more than a dark shape. But the impossibility is still communicated: the pedestal could only cling to the pillar with some aid other than gravity. “Irradiated Cities” is the same. With sections titled after Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Tokyo, and Fukushima, Mariko Nagai could easily rely on the gravity of its subject matter to bind the book. But it is bound with something else, something I don’t know how to name, which results in a silhouette not of simple horror but of the past’s uncanny jut into spaces in which it has been nominally dealt with, grasped, and thereby erased.

As you traverse Nagai’s often close-up photographs of the four cities, whether of nuclear shadows burned into tree bark or of a puddle’s reflection of Tokyo’s sky, you begin to grasp that each texture bears the invisible mark of radiation. The head of a streetlamp glowing against the night is a white terror from above that cannot be fled. A photograph of the light rail platform 27 kilometers from Fukushima traces electrical lines to the horizon, where the radiation originated, and to which all locations are linked. The photographs are Sebaldian in not prizing technical accomplishment; they are not Sebaldian in the unambiguity of their grief, invested in them by the page-long prose blocks that accompany the photos at a ratio of roughly one to four.

These prose blocks are punctuated simply, with colons between each short phrase as if to draw an endless stream of conclusions that cannot conclude. In the space Nagai inhabits “before the after,” time proceeds as a continual iteration of the devastation of the bomb. Even the time before the before, when “no cloud is in the sky” is patently impossible: “mothers are always beautiful, & fathers are always strong and kind.” As if all that preceded the book cannot be contained by it, the first motion of the book is a colon. The last, unlike any other motion in the book, is two.

The two colons (“::”) that end “Irradiated Cities” might be a final generosity, a gesture toward closure in a work that is primarily concerned with the impossibility of that. It might represent the two pillars that stood beneath the dark pedestal before one disappeared. My feeling, however, is that it represents the interminable present, the fact that the ongoing interrogation Nagai undertakes must finally end in being—not for those who interrogate, but for the victims of irradiation, whose stories are no longer stories but a life.

The most moving sections of a continually moving (and often graphic and unsettling) book are those in which Nagai voices the tiresomeness of being a hibashuka, an irradiated person:

: there is only one narrative & nothing else : their stories must be tragic : their lives must be bound to loneliness & pain & loss : they must carry the visible wounds for all to see :

These are the spaces in which unambiguous sorrow is no longer sustainable, no longer adequate. This does not mean that we must close the book on tragedy, acknowledge the past, and go on with our lives. It means that the past, the radiation, is an inextricable part not only of our sorrow but of what follows it. The hibashuka are oppressed by the very “kindness [that] is pushed on them”; they are humans still, and the intervention of those who are not affected often implies that they are tainted, not fully alive.

This is what the two colons at the end of “Irradiated Cities” mean to me: that efforts to interpret finally devour themselves, unable to grasp suffering even by calling it suffering.

Every image is contaminated, and every non-image too. “Irradiated Cities” is printed on glossy paper, presumably to better convey the photographs. But this gloss has a way of reflecting overhead light, so that no matter how you hold the book there is always a glare obscuring some of its words. This inescapable light was my reminder of how deeply radiation is bound up in the electricity that fuels our cities, as Nagai reminds us, and in the words that quietly, in an endless syllogism, seek a home that has already been destroyed.

 

Dennis James Sweeney’s writing has appeared in The Collagist, Crazyhorse, Five Points, Indiana Review, and Passages North, among others. He is the Small Press Editor of Entropy, an Assistant Editor of Denver Quarterly, the recipient of an MFA from Oregon State University, and a recent Fulbright fellow in Malta. Originally from Cincinnati, he lives in Colorado, where he is a PhD student in creative writing at the University of Denver.