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From Trinity to Trinity

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FROM TRINITY TO TRINITY recounts the pilgrimage of Japanese atomic-bomb survivor Kyoko Hayashi to the Trinity Site in northern New Mexico, where the world's first atomic bomb test was conducted. Her journey takes her into unfamiliar terrain, both past and present, as she not only confronts American attitudes, disconcertingly detached from the suffering of nuclear destruction, but discovers as well a profound kinship with desert plants and animals, the bomb's "first victims." Translator Eiko Otake, a renowned artist in dance (Eiko & Koma), offers further insight into Hayashi's life and work, illuminating how her identity as "outsider" helped shape her vision. Together author and translator present one woman's transformation from victim to witness, a portrait of endurance as a power of "being" against all odds.

97 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2010

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About the author

Kyōko Hayashi

19 books2 followers
Kyōko Hayashi (林京子) is a Japanese author born in Nagasaki in 1930.

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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
Profile Image for Raychel Kool.
71 reviews
March 9, 2023
Short but powerful, and evidence of how American narratives+feelings about the atomic bombs are sterilized and detached from the bodily harm they’ve caused. Hayashi’s identification of the New Mexico landscape as her senior hibakusha is poetic and moving, but I think it also perpetuates the idea that atomic bomb tests in NM did not affect the people living here (though ofc not in the way they did in Japan); that’s not necessarily the fault of the author, but more likely a product of the narratives that nuclearism pushes about the Trinity test (and, like, all nuclear “tests”).
Profile Image for Anael.
70 reviews
August 8, 2023
Didn't need to be even more convinced that American culture is a death cult celebrating genocide, but damn thanks for the reminder.

Kyoko portrays the fetishization of the atomic bombings in the American imagination so thoroughly with a just a recounting of a quiet visit to the Trinity Site in Los Alamos, New Mexico (the site of the first atomic bomb test).

The translator does a great job in allowing Kyoko her voice and not making her sound like an American women through her translations.
Profile Image for Morgan Wallace.
28 reviews2 followers
November 23, 2022
Decades after she survived the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, Hayashi Kyoko made a pilgrimage to the Trinity site in New Mexico, where the world's first nuclear bomb detonation took place. This is her account of both the 1945 attack and her travels in the United States that culminated in her visit to Trinity.

Hayashi's story is introduced (and translated) by Otake Eiko. She helps fill out Hayashi's story, providing background, context, and clarification.

Hayashi is not angry. Instead, she is interested in America's history and geography. She wants to know what Americans think, especially what they think about the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks.

About her visit to the "National Atomic Museum" in New Mexico, she notes: "There were no black or Mexican visitors.... [A]ll the visitors were white.... [C]onsidering that this place is of fundamental importance to the United States, seeing only white people felt peculiar to me."

She writes elsewhere, "Whether I liked it or not, I wanted to know America's real mind."

As I read this book, I found myself questioning how we look at our history. We should not be quite so comfortable with much of it.

Highly recommended.
Profile Image for Eeke Van Der Wal.
13 reviews1 follower
May 10, 2017
Atomic-bomb survivor Kyoko Hayashi recounts of her pilgrimage to the Trinity Site in northern Mexico, where the world's first atomic bomb test was conducted. A profound story of her journey into unfamiliar terrain, in which she recounts of her experiences of August 9, 1945 (the day that the atomic bomb Fat Man was dropped on Nagasaki). She also elaborates on her experiences of kinship with the desert plants and animals at the Trinity Site; the first victims of nuclear bombing.

"Trinity," Hayashi writes, "is the starting point of my August 9," it is the starting point of atomic bombing - thus of the nuclear bomb dropped on Nagasaki; the attack which she survived. She indicates that this will be the end of her journey that started on this particular day; this will be the final destination of this journey: from Trinity to Trinity.

A beautiful, extraordinary and passionate story. A plea for remembrance of the destructivity of nuclear weapons. A book we all should read...
Profile Image for Shane.
389 reviews9 followers
June 25, 2020
The haunting story of a visit to the test site for the first nuclear bomb that bends time.

Hayashi transports us from Nagasaki in 1945, where she experienced a nuclear bomb first hand, to tourist gift shops and museum cinemas in New Mexico in 1999. The effect made me feel like one of those pieces of trinitite, a glass pearl formed from a nuclear explosion that disconnected me from the ground beneath my feet.

The translator's notes and introduction are valuable, both as information and as artistic response. Otake, the translator, is a performance artist, and chooses her interpretation as an exact, metered translation of Hayashi's original text. The effect is engrossing and a constant reminder of the "otherness" of Hayashi as a hibakusha (a person who survived either the Hiroshima or Nagasaki nuclear bombings).

The world does need Hayashi's experiment.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews

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