Human Experience over Time
(Nagai jikan wo kaketa ningen no keiken)

GERMAN / Peter Raff 

RUSSIAN / Evgeny Kruchina

Kodansha (2000)

Since being bombed by the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki on August 9th 1945, "I" have been seeking for both physical and mental comfort. Sometimes she finds her peacefulness in her mother, her husband, or the pure eyes of her child, but all of them were momentary. After all, she has to go on with facing August 9th each year. People who suffered from the atomic bomb have to carry their atomic-bomb syndrome: "I" am destroyed on that day and have been living with lots of deaths, sending off many those who died. There are friends and teachers who had died from the bomb, but "I" have survived. Before her sixtieth birthday, "I" goes on a pilgrimage. "I have lived till this day. I'm okay now!" She shouts for joy. Then she wonders: Whom am I shouting for, and what is okay?

This novel features two stories; the name piece and From Trinity to Trinity. The author was bombed at 1.4 kilometers from the ground zero when she was on duty as a student worker at the factory. Based on that experience, she has been writing novels for requiescat and prayer. In Human Experience over Time, the author looks back on the latter half of her life and describes her relationships with her friends who died. In From Trinity to Trinity, the author questions the meaning of lives as one of all creatures. This work was written based on her experience of visiting the 'Trinity site' in New Mexico, in which the first nuclear test was taken in July 1945, and her compassion for the first nuclear-bomb victims: the deserted land and the creatures there. This novel was published in 2000, 55 years after the drop of the atomic bombs, and it won the Noma Literary Prize for excellent writers and their works.