Bombs, Scars And Compassion

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday July 7, 2007

Reviewed by Conrad Walters, Conrad Walters is a Herald journalist.

Radiance

By Shaena Lambert

Virago, 326pp, $29.95

THE CONCEPT OF ground zero is so etched into the modern consciousness that we can overlook the suffering that radiates beyond it. Faced with talk of the megatonnage power from weapons of mass destruction, we instinctively shield ourselves from the fallout.

In the middle of one blast, however, Canadian novelist Shaena Lambert has opened her eyes to tell a story about those who wear the scars of war and those who wear its guilt.

The blast in question is the August 6, 1945, bombing of Hiroshima - the original WMD - and Radiance concerns a Japanese teenager, one among the thousands disfigured by the bomb, who is sent to New York for medical help.

But the girl, Keiko Kitigawa, is recruited not just for reconstructive surgery on her face, but for a political reconstruction being stage-managed by a group that wants nuclear weapons banned forever.

This "Hiroshima Maiden" is entrusted to the care of suburban housewife Daisy Lawrence, who is charged with looking after Keiko and with overcoming the young woman's reluctance to discuss her experiences for the aid of the anti-nuclear campaign.

Amid increasing doubts about the campaign's tactics, Daisy does everything she can to help the group as Keiko recovers from her operations, but to little effect. The girl, trapped between guilt and gratitude, gives little away. Eventually, mysteries peel away. At night, Keiko reveals portions of her past, as does Daisy. But when daylight returns, Keiko's every response is again masked in politeness.

Lambert's exploration of "the other" delivers a complexity that forces us to constantly re-evaluate our response to Keiko. She is variously shy, then cunning; open, then secretive; polite, then manipulative; a pitied victim, then a petty, unrepentant thief who betrays the deepest intimacy Daisy offers.

This behaviour drives us forward as we search for some definitive clue that will let us pigeonhole Keiko, but Lambert refuses to bow to simplistic conventions and insists that we, like Daisy, flounder among the contradictions.

Lambert's premise for Radiance is real. In May 1955, 25 carefully selected young women from Japan went to New York for reconstructive surgery. They were, indeed, dubbed by the media as the Hiroshima Maidens. And as part of the bargain, they were marched around North America to propagandise against nuclear weapons.

They appeared on shows such as This is Your Life, which staged a meeting between two of the girls and Captain Robert Lewis, co-pilot of the Enola Gay, which dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. The girls were silhouetted, either out of respect for their injuries or because the State Department prohibited broadcasting images of Hiroshima's victims.

Elsewhere, an interview excruciating for its extraction of gratitude from the girls is on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's website. (archives.cbc.ca/IDC-1-71-1794-12162/conflict-war/hiroshima/clip6).

Given the overt manipulation of the real maidens and Lambert's acknowledged work as a peace activist, one might fear polemics from Radiance, but the author categorically resists moralising. Rather, she concentrates on actions and motivations that blur and shimmer like the atomic disruptions that set her story in motion.

Among the perspectives on offer is that of a doctor who wants to heal Keiko yet equally wants to understand the medical phenomena at play, and that of Irene, a socialite journalist who demands Keiko do more to show her gratitude and aid the cause of peace.

And there's Daisy's neighbour, who was tortured in a Japanese prisoner of war camp. Against a backdrop of McCarthyist paranoia and fears of a nuclear holocaust, the neighbour silently digs the foundation for a bomb shelter under Keiko's equally silent gaze.

Despite the unresolved contradictions, Radiance is not a blank canvas upon which we can project anything. It is an open-ended story that suggests we can strive to reach beyond betrayal and anger to locate an epicentre of compassion.

© 2007 Sydney Morning Herald

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