The river flows like blood, the blood flows like the river

“When the great etch-a-sketch is shaken”, Gregor Hens writes in The City and the World, “and the public streets are erased, this microcosm always remains, the memory of the most familiar paths, of the sun falling at a certain angle on the breakfast table, of a window reflected in a window. Carpet bombing doesn’t destroy the experience of the city, its grid or aspect, because it’s within us.” (p. 205, emphasis in the original)

Carpet bombing does not, and neither does a nuclear bomb, nor however one would describe the obliteration of Gaza, an accumulation of presumed precision strikes that through their indiscriminate application is all but indistinguishable from carpet or nuclear bombing.

The closest historical equivalence for Gaza I can think of is the systematic destruction of Warsaw during World War 2 by the German military, which description might get me in trouble with the Germans who, in the name of not forgetting the lessons learned from their past, with the insistence that their crimes surely cannot compared to other people’s are doing exactly that: forgetting the lessons learned from their past (assuming that any lessons were actually learned, an increasingly uncertain idea).

In any case, however one wants to describe how a city is destroyed is not visible from what that city looks like afterwards: a jumble of rubble, stretching as far as the eye can see, with outlines of mostly major roads and the few surviving structures providing points from which to possibly find one’s bearings. The city is gone, and those who somehow survived its destruction and possibly the various later afflictions that might hit them (unexploded bombs, radiation poisoning, or other health problems) find themselves tasked with rebuilding.

In the popular imagination, both in Japan and outside of the country, the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has played a particular role. That destruction initiated the so-called nuclear age, the age whose crowning achievement it has been (if that’s even a way to describe this) that all of humanity can now be destroyed in a large enough nuclear war.

Thus Hiroshima (to a lesser extent Nagasaki, much like a younger sibling will always get less attention than the oldest one) not only rose from its ashes but became a symbol in a way that Warsaw did not. Consecutive Japanese governments contributed to the symbolism by leaving what had been the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall as it had been found after the bombing. “It is permanently kept in a state of preserved ruin,” Wikipedia states, “as a reminder of the destructive effects of nuclear warfare.”

Across the river from what now is commonly called the Atomic Bomb Dome (officially Hiroshima Peace Memorial), there is the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park that every year holds a large ceremony to honour the memory of those who lost their lives on that August morning in 1945.

But life has also largely continued in Hiroshima, as it has in all of the locales destroyed by modern warfare I can think of. Today, more than eight decades after its destruction, the city has over one million inhabitants, and it is known not only for its nuclear past but also for, say, its okonomiyaki (think of it as some sort of elaborate Japanese pancake), its baseball team (Hiroshima Toyo Carp), or as the hometown of Suzuka Nakamoto, a member of Babymetal.

In Aya Fujioka‘s 川はゆく (English title Here Goes River; originally published in 2017, a second edition came out in 2025), all of the above and more weave through the photographer’s pictures, taken in and around Hiroshima.

As far as I can tell, the publisher’s description of her “snapshot approach” makes sense in Japan where this wording carries slightly different connotations than in the West. Here, snapshots are often seen as something done out of a lack of consideration or as some sort of throw-away approach.

But that’s not how the term is used in Japan; for sure, that’s not the spirit of the work. Fujioka walked around the city and took photographs of things or people that caught her attention. There also is the occasional portrait that, one might assume, must have involved asking the sitter for permission.

There is an incredibly looseness around the photographs, which serves the work well (it might have been tempting to cover a weighty topic with equally weighty pictures). It also allows the artist to sneak in an overall complexity into the work that its visual language might belie (at least at a first, possibly somewhat superficial, exposure).

As a viewer, I often have trouble with photography that uses this approach because the risk that the pictures will in fact end up being merely throw-away photographs is considerable. The moment you fall into that trap as a photographer, the work doesn’t add up to much — well, in my book anyway (as always, your mileage might vary).

When I look at photographs, I personally want to see the urgency with which someone took them conveyed — urgency here not arising from a lack of time or from a deadline. Instead, the urgency stems from the feeling that if the work does not live up to what its maker needs it to be, then that would be too colossal an artistic failure to bear.

And that’s what pervades this work for me, that urgency, an urgency that ties the sheer horror of the destruction of a whole city with the mundane beauty that sprang up in its place.

Comparisons are always the pest, in particular since we live in a time where they have been broadly misused for nefarious purposes in a fashion that often does not allow us to sit with possible complexities. Still, while 川はゆく is very different than Kikuji Kawada‘s famed The Map (a few years ago, I wrote a piece about it that I think still holds up well), if you manage to ignore the obvious photographic differences (Kawada’s stark black and white versus Fujioka’s light colour etc.) you will find two books that employ some of the same visual strategies.

In contrast to Kawada, though, Aya Fujioka ends up embracing a much more tender approach. While there are frequent depictions of the horror of that day in August 1945 (or allusions to them in all kinds of ways), there also is simple life as it goes on. There is, after all, the difference in time — and generation: Kawada barely avoided getting drafted into the war, while Fujioka was born two generations later.

We need to remember as much as we need to forget. While we need to remember the horrors of the past, we must not insist in the supremacy of those horrors. What I mean by that is that we must not allow ourselves to fall into that trap of self-righteousness that the Germans now inflict upon themselves: accepting today’s life and suffering does not mean that somehow, the suffering of the past is pushed aside.

In the end, life always springs from the ashes, wherever those ashes might be; and we can only take care of those who somehow managed to find themselves in those ashes.

That is our duty: not to forget so that we might help them live (and not to remember so that we can heartlessly celebrate our own remembering — as if we somehow were engaged in an elaborate contemporary kabuki play); not to forget so that we might become better people who will do their utmost to prevent the production of further ashes.

Maybe the most important photograph in 川はゆく is one of a baby. There first is a landscape above which the sky is bright yellow-orange, as if on fire. Then, there is a photograph of a flame, seen as if emerging from the woods (or maybe park). And then there is that baby, happily asleep in their mothers arm, and the bright sunlight filtering in from the right is completely blown out.

In Kawada’s book, that light would stand for the explosion of the bomb. Here, the light can be read as an allusion to the bomb; but it can also be read as the bright light from which all life might emerge. If as a viewer, you allow for the possibility of both interpretations to exist at the same time, you’re in business.

Highly recommended.

川はゆく(Here Goes River); photographs by Aya Fujioka; 240 pages; Akaaka; 2017 (first edition; second edition: 2025)

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With the exception of books originally written in German or in English, I have to rely on translation in order to access world literature. As someone who grew up with and in one language but who now lives with and in another, I know that translation involves more than merely replacing words. Even languages such as German and English that, in the larger scheme of things, are fairly similar often express ideas very differently. In addition, social contexts and expectations differ significantly.

The farther apart two languages are, the higher the stakes of translation can be. As a reader, you will in effect have no direct access to an author’s work any longer. Instead, you will be exposed to an interpretation of it. With translation, the interpretative aspects typically are not discussed widely because the assumption is that a translator will be truthful to the original text.

But what does truthfulness mean when two languages and the contexts they operate in are very different? Without going into the details of what translation might mean — do you stay true to the language at hand or to what you perceive as the author’s intent, and do you take the target language and social context(s) in mind? — I personally do not approach translated books as exact versions of their originals. To get access to the originals, I need to be able to read the language they were originally written in.

All of the above might sound fairly abstract for someone who is not particularly interested in languages (as I am) or in translation (ditto). But if you’re interested in getting some form of access to societies, cultures, or mindsets that exist in other cultures and/or societies, you at least need to keep the aspect of translation in mind.

Yáng Shuāng-zǐ’s Taiwan Travelogue is not necessarily a book about translation, or rather it is not a book that only focuses on translation; but translation, either in the form of translating from one language to another or of translating one cultural background into another, forms its very core. The book is easily one of the most ambitious and daring novels I have read in a long time.

The premise of the book is as simple as an onion: peel back one part to get exposed to another. Set in 1938, when Taiwan was a Japanese colony, Aoyama Chizuko, a Japanese novelist, travels to Taiwan for work. Chizuko does not speak Mandarin, so she has to rely on translators to speak with most people on the island. She quickly becomes infatuated with one of her translators, a young woman named Wáng Chiēn-hò (Ō Chizuru in Japanese, which Chizuko uses), and attempts to become friends with her.

Traveling across Taiwan for months, the duo visit a number of places — against her will (or so she says and thinks) the Japanese writer becomes a representative of the colonial regime — and sample the food (of which there exists a richly bewildering variety). Chizuko writes a number of articles about her travels and eventually compiles her experiences into a novel.

That novel was then supposed to have been published in Japan, only to be quickly forgotten after World War 2. Eventually, it was rediscovered, translated into Mandarin and republished a number of times, with additional notes and explanations about its background. That’s Taiwan Travelogue — at least in its Mandarin original: it pretends to be the latest edition of the republication of a novel written by a Japanese author, but everything about this is completely fictional.

The English translation, done by Lin King, adds another layer of complexity, given that Mandarin and Japanese share a writing system from which English is excluded. In the English edition, the translator had to make a decision: would she take the Japanese or Mandarin reading (pronunciation) of names? In the original text, the reading would occur in the reader’s mind (obviously for a reader able to read the original text).

King added footnotes with explanations to her translation — and those footnotes (based on real concerns) now sit next to the many fictional footnotes produced by Shuāng-zǐ for the original novel (remember, the novel presents the translation of an obscure text originally written in Japanese alongside the kinds of footnotes and comments that tend to come with such projects).

You might imagine from the description above that Taiwan Travelogue might be a tedious read. It absolutely is not. In fact, it’s incredibly charming and engaging; Shuāng-zǐ deftly proves that ideas that open up many layers of complexity need not result at all in an overly complex outcome that is difficult to access.

I don’t know whether the publisher’s description is able to convey how the book ends. Knowing what I know now (having finished reading the book), I don’t know how anyone could produce PR copy of the book without giving away its ending. I certainly do not intend to give away how the book ends; all I will say is that I didn’t expect it to be this heartbreaking.

There is ample talk about food in the book. If, like me, you love East Asian food, you might want to read the book only on a full stomach (I made the mistake of not doing so) — especially not if you do not have easy access to high-quality food from Taiwan (alas, I do not). Things can be a bit too mouth watering.

That said, though, for me the extent of the descriptions of food at times went a bit overboard — there are only so many times that you can read about endless details of how yet another dish is being made. Photolandians, take note: nobody wants to know every little detail, however irrelevant it might be, about your process (different area, exact same problem).

Of late, there have been ample amounts of gnashing at the teeth because of the possible impacts of so-called artificial intelligence (AI) on writing. I think Taiwan Travelogue demonstrates that we needn’t worry. AI will never be able to match the sheer inventiveness and skill necessary to write a book like this. It’s just not going to happen.

And for every famous writer deciding to now work with AI (sadly, Olga Tokarczuk decided to do so), there will be someone like Yáng Shuāng-zǐ who demonstrates that real literature needs to be written by real people — without the use of what someone called a stochastic parrot. In effect, Taiwan Travelogue works so well because it centers of many of the kinks that the use of AI is intended to remove.

Highly recommended.

Yáng Shuāng-zǐ: Taiwan Travelogue; translated by Lin King; 300 pages; Graywolf Press; 2024

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