The following introduction was delivered at the opening of the Hiroshima Library at BRUNA press + archive, Bellingham, WA, August 6, 2019:

I want to share a series of visions that contributed to the pre- and subconsciousness of the Hiroshima Library. When I first began to envision the Hiroshima Library, I envisioned an empty storefront in a strip mall in a nondescript town in America, the kind of strip mall that seems, to the outsider, to be abandoned, and yet is, for the locals, one of the town’s main and most vital organs. Although it could be both: vital and abandoned. Because the town is abandoned. As are the people. And yet the people are alive, still producing themselves, so the town is alive, drawing its breath from the life support of inertia, the shadow reality of which is the death-grip of white endangerment. Picture a strip mall in a nondescript town in America. Picture between the shoe store and the beauty salon, for example, an empty storefront. The windows are dark, because the inside is dark, but if you press your nose to the glass, you will see a large and surprisingly beautiful room, the floor covered with a half-inch of dust. I envisioned the Hiroshima Library occupying this empty storefront. I envisioned the books arranged on the floor, in the dust. I envisioned, in the window, a neon sign, light blue, with the words: HIROSHIMA LIBRARY. I envisioned the books appearing, one day, without announcement, occupying the space for an indeterminate length of time, then disappearing, without explanation. Only, the neon sign would remain. Until its tubes burned out. That, and the imprint of the books in the dust, would be the Hiroshima Library.

There is a book by the Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai called, in English translation, The Melancholy of Resistance. In the book, a nondescript town in Hungary is visited by a circus, the sole feature of which is the decaying corpse of an enormous whale. The whale occupies the town’s central square for three days, during which time is provokes the townspeople into extraordinary and ultimately inexplicable anger, chaos, and madness.

It occurred to me that in this empty storefront scenario a library of books that exposes and reiterates, ad infinitum, the evils of imperialism, might provoke anger, chaos, madness, at least, vandalization. But I was thinking of something more serene. How long would it take before someone walked into the Hiroshima Library? How long would it take before someone stayed for longer than, say, thirty seconds? How long before someone touched a book, picked up a book? How long before someone started reading a book? How long before someone visited for a second time, a third? How long before someone fell asleep? How long before someone spent a night? How long before someone moved in?

On August 6, 2011, I attended, in Hiroshima, the 66th memorial for the atomic bombing. My partner Lisa and I spent 13 hours wandering the Peace Park. A group of five hibakusha told their stories in the basement of the Memorial Museum. They told their stories in Japanese. There was an intermission. Then they told their stories again in English. The basement was packed. During the intermission, however, most of the audience left, so that only a small number of people remained to listen to the hibakusha tell their stories in English. To set the small audience—of 10 people, at most—against the gravity of what the hibakusha shared, illuminated the kind of indifference with which their testimonies were, and continue to be, met, in particular by the western world. There were over 60,000 people at the memorial, and yet, with the audience of 10, it became clear: testimonies of unimaginable violence are spoken, across the globe, to largely invisible, if not entirely absent audiences. There are a variety of circumstances that might have resulted in such a small audience: the fact that it was in English, in particular. It is worth considering what of the hibakushas’ stories changed, was forced to change, when they retold them in a different language. The smallness of the audience also seemed, in some way, to reinforce the fact that very soon no hibakusha will remain on this earth to tell stories of what happened on August 6 and August 9, 1945, that the story will very soon pass into the realm of translation, as much of it already has.

Just north of the museum, and across the Motoyasu River from the atomic bomb detonation point, is an information center/gift shop with brochures, benches and beverage machines, where people can use the restroom, have a drink, and let their minds go blank. Before the war, the building housed a kimono shop. During the war, it was turned over to the war effort. Thirty-six people were in the building on the morning of August 6, 1945. All thirty-six died instantly.

Not all who spend time in a death memorial contemplate death. Which seems impossible. Especially in a place where hundreds of thousands of people were killed, where 80,000 were incinerated instantaneously. You would think that the consciousness of each visitor would be automatically tuned to death’s frequency. But because the atrocity was and remains unimaginable, it often can only be confronted from behind the veil of the contemplation of peace. And yet, any contemplation of peace is incomplete without a contemplation of war, therefore death. And any deep or true contemplation of death has the potential to deliver a person into a stultifying, ultimately impossible space, one in which all abstraction disintegrates to reveal, even if only for a second, and yet with horrifying clarity, the material substance of human existence.

What happens to the soul of a person who is reduced, in less than a second, to ash? What happens to the soul of a person whose body is deprived of its transition between being alive and death, is deprived of its corpse?

A week before attending the memorial in Hiroshima, Lisa and I visited Nagasaki. We stayed with a woman, Mayumi Kondo, and her two young children. Mayumi’s grandmother was hibakusha; she was working in a bank downtown when the bomb was dropped. A bottle of red ink exploded on her desk. Customers and coworkers thought the red ink was blood. But the bomb detonated north of downtown, in Urakami, the Catholic district, the suburbs. We visited the detonation point, which is now a small park. An old woman was selling ice cream. Her ice cream cart was small. Metal chest, glass on top. Towers of sugar cones leaned against the glass. When someone approached her, she leaned the cart back on its legs, and spooned ice cream out of the chest. I have told many people about this woman and her ice cream, and it has, among some people, caused alarm, and for the same reason: the juxtaposition between death and refreshment. Most of the people for whom this has caused alarm are American. Americans occupy a very specific genre of subjectivity, and prefer death to be compartmentalized, to exist in juxtaposition with nothing, which is, I think, a consequence of being both the benefactors and beneficiaries of death, one of the most perverse conditions of which is not knowing it—or, more accurately, of organizing oneself and one’s life so as to never have to know it. The flavor of the ice cream, by the way, was rosewater.

This was one of the main organizing principles of the Manhattan Project, which produced the bomb: total compartmentalization between the different phases of the project, so that none of the many thousands of people working to produce the atomic bomb knew what the other departments were doing, or even that what they were doing was producing an atomic bomb.

There are, in the memorial museums in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, small libraries devoted to the bombings. The libraries are just beyond the reach of the average tourist’s capacity, or desire, to maintain themselves in such a state of death contemplation. The libraries are, then, appendices, even though their contents far outweigh and outstrip what is presented in the museums. There is, in each library, a young person sitting behind a counter, waiting to be asked a question, to provide assistance or instruction. Their presence is encouraging. They are like the grandchildren of the old woman selling ice cream. Both generations, and their contribution to the aftermath, are necessary. I wonder: when someone does finally approach one of the young people sitting behind the counter, what do they ask? If you were to find yourself, beyond the end of the worldly museum, in the library, in the light of the appendices, and in the shadow of atrocity, what would you ask?  

—Brandon Shimoda, August 6, 2019