Psychological Ground Zero

DEATH IN LIFE: SURVIVORS OF HIROSHIMA by Robert Jay Lifton. 594 pages. Random House. $10.

John Hersey's Hiroshima, published in 1946, consisted of 35,000 simple, meticulously arranged and muted words that told the story of six people who, a year earlier, had survived the biggest unnatural disaster in history. In that account, eyes ran from sockets, flesh bubbled from bone, a city disappeared in a flash. Yet the damage report was not complete, as Yale Research Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton shows in this compassionate and important study of the malaise that still pollutes the spirits of many survivors. They are known as hibakusha (pronounced hi-bak-sha), which literally means "explosion-affected persons." To the Japanese the word incorporates the chill of such terms as zombie and leper.

Low Esteem. Hibakusha, who number about 90,000 and account for one-fifth of Hiroshima's present population, are often refused employment on the grounds that they tire easily, lack drive or are prone to fatal malignancies. They are frequently shunned as mates for fear that they carry radiation-tainted genes.

In general, Lifton discovered, hibakusha hold themselves in lower esteem than do other Japanese. In telling of the hibakusha experience, the late Yoko Ota, Japan's best-known writer of "Abomb" literature (Town of Corpses, Human Rags), depreciated her work and herself with such statements as "Do I have the right to imagination? Can what I say about the dead ever be authentic?" A Japanese professor of English expressed the same idea with lines from T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets: "They can tell you, being dead: the communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living."

As is often the case in tragedy, the most affecting lines come from less tutored lips. A hospital worker, hideously disfigured at the age of 13, told Lifton: "I could not help believing that for a woman to lose her beauty is equivalent to death. All I could do was live in a corner of my house."

Shame of the Living. Many of the 75 hibakusha whom Lifton interviewed told of being torn between the gladness of survival and the pain of being alive because someone else was dead. In many cases, hibakusha survived because they ignored those in need.

Lifton sees this "shame of the living," as Yoko Ota called it, as perhaps the most fundamental human guilt. "The survivor," he writes, "can never, inwardly, simply conclude that it was logical and right for him, and not others, to survive."If [others] had not died, he would have had to; if he had not survived, someone else would have." In discussing this phenomenon, Lifton makes the argument that all men are survivors of Hiroshima.

Encounters with mass death are not new to mankind, and, indeed, Lifton draws comparisons between hibakusha and the survivors of the plagues of the Middle Ages. But, he says, the man-made holocausts of the 20th century have imposed a series of real and symbolic encounters with death on a scale so huge as to envelop people with a generalized psychic numbness.

Work of Mourning. Lifton recalls that he once gave a lecture on Hiroshima to a group of psychiatrists; some of them later told him that they resented subsequent speakers who dealt with ordinary concerns. He notes that a similar reaction occurred after President Kennedy's assassination. To accomplish what Freud called "the work of mourning"--the process of coming to terms with loss--Americans remained glued to their TV sets, absorbing every detail of the killing and the funeral. When the stations returned to routine programming, many viewers felt annoyed and let down. The work of mourning had "opened them up," and had given them a sense of belonging to a continuous human race.

Psychic "opening up," Lifton concludes, becomes in itself a treasured experience. This is the goal of numerous emotional experiments in contemporary life--including the use of psychedelic drugs. Lifton is quick to add, however, that these drugs can produce their own brand of psychic numbing.

In its breadth and richness, Death in Life has the potential of becoming a treasured experience. It only needs people willing and patient enough to confront it--which is to say, people willing to confront themselves.

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