LEILA FADEL, HOST:
The Australian writer Richard Flanagan traces his very being to his father surviving being a prisoner of war in Japan. And his dad only survives because a nuclear bomb is dropped on Hiroshima. It's the story he's telling in his latest book, a memoir of sorts, called "Question 7." The title is inspired by the work of Russian playwright Anton Chekhov asking some of life's trickiest questions.
RICHARD FLANAGAN: Why do we do what we do to each other? And I always loved Chekhov's stories because you start off in a world we think we live in of timetables and duties and demands. But underneath, what really matters to us is who loves longer, why do we love, how to live.
FADEL: Flanagan went to Japan to try and make sense of his father's lived experience.
FLANAGAN: I knew that he hated violence, and I knew he hated war. I just didn't understand why. And I knew that at some point, I would go to Japan. And when I went, I tracked down some of the people who'd been guards in the camps that he'd been at - and that the man I met was gentle. He was old, dignified, and I felt he tried as best he could to be honest with me. But he claimed to have no memory of the violence. There was a form of slapping that was used as discipline in the Japanese army. It was very violent, and people could be beaten to death with it, and it was used on the prisoners of war.
And I asked him to slap me. He arched his arm in a particular way and crooked his hand and tensed his body. And you knew that even if he'd forgotten the violence, his body remembered it. He hit me three times. And on the third time, the room started moving up and down, and things started falling off the wall when a force 7.3 Richter scale earthquake had hit Tokyo. And I looked across this old man, and he was very frightened. But I did know this much, that wherever evil was, it wasn't in that room with me and that frightened old man.
FADEL: I just wonder what your dad thought about you going back to talk to these people that...
FLANAGAN: He was very frightened.
FADEL: He was?
FLANAGAN: He asked about it. And I said that I'd met some of the men who'd been his guards and that I felt that they were ashamed, which was sort of true and sort of untrue. And I said that they apologized, which was sort of true and untrue. And he went very quiet. And then later that day, he lost all memory of the prisoner of war camps, everything of that 3 1/2 years of his life. And it was as if he was finally liberated of that terrible memory.
FADEL: The night that you tell your father that you finished the book, he passes away. Did he get to see any of what you wrote about his time as a prisoner of war in Japan?
FLANAGAN: No. He never asked to see anything, but I also felt a need to honor both the living and the dead in what I wrote and be true to an experience which was both mine and not mine. There's something James Baldwin says, and I just thought it was so true. He says each of us helplessly and forever contains the other. We are part of each other. And I think when you're confronted with these matters, you have to accept that when you see evil, that also was us.
FADEL: Is that what it was like? I mean, because ultimately you find - in Japan, you find people - complicated people.
FLANAGAN: Well, I find people behaving like they behave...
FADEL: Yeah.
FLANAGAN: ...In my homeland of Australia...
FADEL: Exactly.
FLANAGAN: ...That there was a huge denial of memory about Japanese war crimes. And here in my country, there's a huge denial of memory about our crimes towards Indigenous people, about the genocide that happened here, about the incredible violence of the invasion. And so we are no different. It's just that we're blind to our own lies. But I guess that's what we go to art for. We go to art, we go to literature because we discover we're not one, but many, that we contain a million possibilities of the greatest good and the most wicked acts, and none of those things are alien to us.
FADEL: You said your dad hated war. And reading this book, it felt like an anti-war book. On Page 212, you write none of this is an argument for the bombing of Hiroshima. All of it is an argument against war - an argument that can never be won but must never stop being made. What did you mean there?
FLANAGAN: Well, exactly that. I mean, there's great arguments about, was Hiroshima necessary? There are arguments about if that many people hadn't died, more people would have died. But there is no moral calculus to horror, to suffering. The death of one innocent can never be justified.
FADEL: You write of the man that dropped that bomb, Thomas Ferebee. But you also reference the days he was dropping other bombs, that a lot of people focus on the day that he dropped the bomb on Hiroshima but not the carpet-bombing of Vietnam, the killing of civilians in France and Germany. Why did you reference these other moments?
FLANAGAN: The atom bomb comes out of a mentality that you can just blow up this world and you can win. And the atom bomb is just an ultimate technological expression of that mentality. More people died in the firebombing of Tokyo than died at Hiroshima, but we don't remember them. We choose not to remember. God knows how many people who died in the aerial bombing of Vietnam - conventional bombing.
So the atom bomb, in a way, is a strange thing to fixate on, but it suits a lot of people. You know, it suits the Allies to focus on that and not their other crimes. And it suits some Japanese people to focus on the wickedness in that and not look at their own crimes during the war, and so on and so on. What's interesting about the atom bomb is that it's merely a technology. But what powers that technology is this terrifying mentality that we can - and we see it being played out everywhere from the Ukraine to Gaza - the technology of hell can somehow deliver us to peace. And it can't.
FADEL: Richard Flanagan is a Booker Prize-winning author out with his latest book, a memoir called "Question 7." Thank you so much for your time.
FLANAGAN: Well, thank you, Leila.
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