Grand total - 1 book and 10 pages read / 0 books and 259 pages goal
Banner day! :D
Not only did I read the most per day so far, I've now caught up to my goal and surpassed it!
Black Rain is still....going. I am happy that I'm now closer to the end than the beginning. I feel a bit bad being so hard on it, but instead of surprising me, it just keeps doing what I think it's going to do over and over, which is focus almost exclusively on putting the family in yet another situation again and again that puts them in the middle of the horribleness.
This last reading, the uncle, while hurt himself, was enlisted by the factory manager (who apparently is fine but can do nothing but give stupid orders), to act as a priest for all the refugees dying at the factory before they burn the bodies.
Then, while still officiating as priest, the manager enlists the uncle Shigematsu to go back into Hiroshima, despite his wounds and ordeal, to deal with a coal situation. Ridiculous. I know it's a different time and culture, but I don't know, it just seems beyond the borders of the real. That someone who was in the bomb and hurt and manages to make it out to a slightly farther-out factory that he works for as refuge, and then being enlisted to act as a priest and being told again and again to go into Hiroshima for business is just too much in my opinion.
And when he goes into Hiroshima, it's to find stench, bodies all over with maggots, etc., etc., very hazardous conditions even if they didn't know about the radiation yet. Maybe that's what really happened but it just seems beyond senseless to me. Businesses like the town hall, which was almost completely blown away and burned down, and a military clothing company branch, would really stay open in the middle of the devastation and most everything around being destroyed and fires and bodies and unsanitary conditions everywhere around? They wouldn't move to a different location outside the city and leave a notice on their buildings (or ruins)? Just seems absurd. But of course, in reality many absurd things have happened in history.
I suppose the way to put it is, I don't trust the author. I don't feel that he's good enough to trust that the way he presents things are realistic. The gruesomeness and details of the bomb, yes. I think he did extensive research for that. But the plotlines of the story, just don't ring true. They seem as if he heard somewhat similar, but real, stories, and forced them altogether into this unrealistic story.
As it is, I left off where the manager has ordered the uncle back to Hiroshima, again to try again at securing some coal from a business in Hiroshima.
While I'm being very harsh on this book, I'm not usually so harsh. I usually enjoy most books I read. It's actually somewhat rare I'm so harsh. It just happened to be one of the first of the year because of the book club vote.
And I don't completely hate the book. While I was originally dreading the long and drawn out details of living with radiation poisoning for years and years, that part of the story is thus far very short and only serves as a framework for the journal entries detailing the days of the bomb and just after. The "present" story years later that I was dreading is actually turning out to be the better part.
Here's one passage I especially liked. Old Shigematsu is remembering a tree by a neighbour's house that was torn down for the war effort, and how the kids liked it:
When the frosts came and the gingko tree began to shed its leaves, the roof of Kotaro's house would be transformed into a yellow roof, smothered with dead leaves. Whenever a breeze sprang up, they would pour down from the eaves in a yellow waterfall, and when it eddied they would swirl up into the air - up and up to twice, three times the height of the roof - then descend in yellow whirlpools onto the road up the slope and onto the oak grove.This always delighted the children. As the wind dropped and the leaves came dancing down, the boys would stretch up their hands to clutch at them, and the girls would catch them in their outspread aprons.
Lovely little passage, and there's more like it sprinkled throughout the story, but unfortunately rather rarely.
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