1. Allegory for the relationship between the West (she/Riva) and Japan (he/Okada)

• "Thus their initial exchange is allegorical" (Duras 9).
• first scene shows bodies without identities
  
• viewers never learn the characters' names
• She is "like a thousand women in one" (Duras 27).
  
• an "allegorical float" appears in the parade (44)
• "She: Hi-ro-shi-ma. Hi-ro-shi-ma. That's your name. . . . He: That's my name. Yes. Your name is Nevers. Ne-vers-in France" (Duras 83).
  

2. Narrative: A married Japanese man has a short-lived affair with a French actress (also married with children) while she films a documentary about the bombing of Hiroshima. She reveals that during the war, she had an affair with a German soldier, who died at the war's end.

3. Lessons:

a. The West's relationship to Japan's suffering amounts to a one-night stand. The West (she/Riva) purports to care about Japan, but that sentiment is a superficial performance (symbolized by her role as a nurse, and enacted through her sexual relationship with the man/Okada). In other words, Westerns will forget about the pain of Japan's victims.

- "She: . . . Just as in love this illusion exists, this illusion of being able never to forget, so I was under the illusion that I would never forget Hiroshima. Just as in love" (Duras 19).

- "She: . . . And then, indifference. And also the fear of indifference . . . " (Duras 33).

- "He: In a few years, when I'll have forgotten you, and when other such adventures, from sheer habit, will happen to me, I'll remember you as the symbol of love's forgetfulness. I'll think of this adventure as of the horror of oblivion" (Duras 68).

b. No matter how many documentaries they make or monuments they visit, Westerners cannot truly understand the suffering of the victims of Hiroshima (and Nagasaki).

- "He: You saw nothing. Nothing" (Duras 18).
- "He: Nothing. You know nothing" (Duras 21).

c. For the West is ultimately compromised itself, symbolized by her relationship with the German soldier during the war, when the French Vichy regime cooperated with Nazi occupiers.

- She has "doubtful morals" (Duras 35).

- Parallels in shame: he starts to transform into her dead German lover (54, 106)

- "My mind was already confused by different standards of morality" (Duras 104).





Duras, Marguerite. Hiroshima mon amour. Trans. Richard Seaver. New York: Grove Press, 1961.

Renais, Alain, dir. Hiroshima mon amour. Starring Emmanuelle Riva and Eiji Okada. 1959.

Wendy C. Nielsen, English Dept., Montclair State University, October 2011