Manoa, published by the University of Hawai'i, is a twice-yearly journal of Pacific Rim writing and graphic art, with each issue devoted to a particular country or region. The latest, very impressive issue focuses on Japan -- not turn-of-the- millennium Japan, the stumbling economic megapower, but Japan as seen through the prism of the Pacific War. It is the appropriate perspective, given that this year marks the 60th anniversary of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor and the 70th anniversary of its invasion of China, the real starting point of that war.
The contributions are varied: Japanese, non-Japanese; wartime, immediate postwar, contemporary; fiction, poetry, essays, photography, "manga," letters and other documents, even a film script. Yet they all add up to a coherent perspective, neatly captured in the somewhat gnomic title, "Silence to Light." The phrase, attributed to Louis Kahn, is taken from the script of a documentary film by Keiichi Ogata about Hiroshima, that quintessential city of silence, shadows and light.
The "cinepoem," included here, tells the story of Keiko Sonoi, a young actress who was killed by the atomic bomb but whose image was preserved on celluloid. "As long as we project light through [her] one remaining film," the script runs, "her image will not be erased from our memory. . . . In the beginning was light, followed by dark. The city was frozen in an instant. But when light is given again to the images, they can be released from silence and begin to breathe."