Review: Irradiated Cities by Mariko Nagai

Reviewed by Katharine Coldiron

Irradiated Cities
Poems by Mariko Nagai
Les Figues Press, August 2017
$17.00, 144 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-1934254684

Irradiated Cities is impossible to leave at a remove from one’s own body. It is a discomfiting revelation and a devastating indictment of one of the twentieth century’s defining forces: nuclear power. The book is a narrative of cities, not a story told via the standard Aristotelian model, and as such it continually zooms in and out. In to the granular details of people’s individual lives and sufferings, and out to an atrocity that stains an entire nation. In to the shape and subject of a historical photograph of a radiation victim, and out to an archive that contains tens of thousands of similar photos.

The book offers the stories of four cities: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Tokyo, and Fukushima. Of these, reasonably well-informed readers might wonder at Tokyo, because no nuclear bomb or accident ever caused in Tokyo the kind of catastrophe the other three cities have undergone. But Nagai uses Tokyo as a point of transition between war-devastated Japan and how, in rebuilding, the nation returned to nuclear devastation of a different kind. From “How to Build Nuclear Power Plants” in the Tokyo section:

: it must be a place that believes in the goodness of the government : it is for the national prosperity, your sacrifices are small compared to what Japan can be—economically rich : it must be a place that will believe you when you tell them, nuclear energy is a clean energy, no one has ever died from nuclear energy : it must be a place where people are practical because practicality is how they have survived during lean months : it must be a place where when they see deformed fish, they will shrug and keep eating them : it must be a place that when you tell them you will build real roads & hospitals, & better schools, they will look at you (you think) in gratitude for the future now possible :

This fragmented, low-punctuation prose style is how the entire book is written—uncapitalized bits of language divided by spaced colons. The work on these pages feels like neither poetry nor prose, and is often more matter-of-fact than it is lyric. But the effect, as the facts and figures of the collection build and build, is overwhelming. The injustices done to these places, and the people who inhabited them, screams in blood and fire, even though the photographs are (mostly) nonviolent, black and white, and sometimes as simple as a shadow or a brick wall.

The language is usually as simple as the photographs, but it’s a deceptive simplicity. The pieces build individually, from the top of the page to the bottom, as well as building over the collection. “Twenty-Four Hours,” in the Fukushima section, begins:

: it is always beautiful on a catastrophic day : it is beautiful because the before is beautiful & the after dreadful : it is a beautiful day because it must be :

And the closing of “Before the Before & After the After,” in the Nagasaki section, reads:

: each retelling puts rumors closer to truth until truth & hearsay become one & the same :

Certain terms haunt the collection. The Japanese words for the nuclear flash and its following sound, pika and don; the name for the survivors of either of the twin nuclear blasts in 1945, hibakusha. But the true specter of the book is the men who make world-altering decisions, toying with forces greater than they can contain, without considering the human cost. The callous choices leading to these nuclear disasters—whether wartime or peacetime—are impossible to contemplate without rage. Yet this is not an angry book. Implacably, Nagai holds up a mirror to the wretched consequences of these men’s choices. One of the pictures is of the blood-drenched coat of a doctor who worked in Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, and it is perhaps the truest picture in the book.

Hence, there is only one piece in the collection that is enjoyably impactful instead of distressingly so: “A Man, Hiroshima, and Bikini Atoll.” The pleasure of this piece derives from its subject, a certain monster who has alternately destroyed and protected Tokyo since his birth in 1954, even unto the present day.

: a creature is born : gojira : the divine, the destroyer, the avenger, the godlike : it rises from the sea : Godzilla :

Even though it’s a treat to see him show up in Irradiated Cities, Godzilla is not played for laughs in this piece. It’s no stretch to envision him as a consequence of the nuclear horrors undergone by Japanese citizens (just as the bomb inspired so many Big Bug movies in America in the 1950s). But in this piece, Nagai points out that Godzilla’s creator was directly inspired by his experiences in Hiroshima and of the Bikini Atoll tests. And she notes, through the depth of language and the accelerating rhythm of the piece, that Godzilla is no less important, no less a cultural force, than the bloodier consequences of the war. He just works in a different register than children trapped in hospitals while their flesh rots from the inside out.

Thus, Nagai demonstrates herself capable of working in multiple registers as a writer. Perhaps it’s her versatility (she is also the collection’s photographer) that makes this collection so extraordinary, or perhaps it’s the source material, but the real reason may be the calm way that the atrocities Nagai writes on are presented. In its own way, the book is as convincing as the terrible men who caused its horrors.

Katharine Coldiron‘s work has appeared in Ms., the Guardian, LARB, the Rumpus, and elsewhere. Full disclosure at kcoldiron.com.