Desert Hawk Books

 

Hiroshima Bugi
Atomu 57

By Gerald Vizenor

 

Cloth

Quantity:  $26.95 & S/H  



"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 fully grasp its presence or its legacy.

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).