From the Inside Flap
"Vizenor is at full speed in Hiroshima Bugi. This book is a natural dance of concepts. Vizenor does for Native literature what James Joyce does for Irish literature in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake." —Diane Glancy, author of Designs of the Night Sky. Hiroshima Bugi is an ingenious kabuki novel that begins in the ruins of the Atomic Bomb Dome, a new Rashomon Gate. Ronin Browne, the humane peace contender, is the hafu orphan son of Okichi, a Japanese boogie-woogie dancer, and Nightbreaker, an Anishinaabe from the White Earth Reservation who served as an interpreter for General Douglas MacArthur during the first year of the American occupation in Japan. Ronin draws on samurai and native traditions to confront the moral burdens and passive notions of nuclear peace celebrated at the Peace Memorial Museum in Hiroshima. He creates a new calendar that starts with the first use of atomic weapons, Atomu One. Ronin accosts the spirits of the war dead at Yasukuni Jinga. He then marches into the national shrine and shouts to Tojo Hideki and other war criminals to come out and face the spirits of thousands of devoted children who were sacrificed at Hiroshima. In Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57 acclaimed Anishinaabe writer Gerald Vizenor has created a dynamic meditation on nuclear devastation and our inability to grasp fully its presence or its legacy.
About the Author
Gerald Vizenor is a professor of American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of more than twenty books, including the American Book Award winner Griever: An American Monkey King in China and Wordarrows: Native States of Literary Sovereignty (Nebraska 2003).
Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57 FROM THE PUBLISHER
Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57 is a kabuki novel that begins in the ruins of the Atomic Bomb Dome, a new Rashomon Gate. Ronin Browne, the humane peace contender, is the hafu orphan son of Okichi, a Japanese boogie-woogie dancer, and Nightbreaker, an Anishinaabe from the White Earth Reservation who served as an interpreter for General Douglas MacArthur during the first year of the American occupation in Japan.
Ronin draws on samurai and native traditions to confront the moral burdens and passive notions of nuclear peace celebrated at the peace memorial Museum in Hiroshima. He creates a new calendar that starts with the first use of atomic weapons, Atomu One. Ronin accosts the spirits of the war dead at Yasukuni Jinga. He then marches into the national shrine and shouts to Tojo Hideki and other war criminals to come out and face the spirits of thousands of devoted children who were sacrificed at Hiroshima.
FROM THE CRITICS
Library Journal
Vizenor (Chancers) has a reputation for taking chances with his novels, for pushing the form in new directions. He outdoes himself in his latest, drawing on kabuki and samurai traditions to tell the story of a biracial man who is obsessed with the Peace Memorial Museum in Hiroshima and its place in the Japanese spirit. Ronin, son of a Japanese boogie-woogie dancer and Nightbreaker, an Anishinaabe interpreter for General MacArthur, uses a kabuki theater style to tell a portion of the narrative; and the best friend of the now deceased Nightbreaker employs a more conventional technique to explain Ronin's Japanese cultural references to an American audience. Ronin counts time from Atomu 1, when the bomb fell on Hiroshima. One of the great ironies of the Atomu age is that the Atomic Bomb Dome, the shell of the bombed out Industrial Promotion Hall, is maintained as is by a culture that rebuilds temples every 20 years rather than preserves the originals. Growing up among tributes to peace through devastation has led Ronin, a societal cast-off due to his parentage, into an ardent nationalism and a warrior stance. This is not a novel for the casual reader, but it does deserve a place in academic libraries, especially where there is interest in Native American and Japanese studies. Readers who have shared other adventures with Vizenor will not be disappointed.-Debbie Bogenschutz, Cincinnati State Technical and Community Coll. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
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