Reading Tragedy and Professing Hope

A few years back, one of my literature classes read Misha Nogha’s “Chippoke Na Gomi,”¹ an intriguing and provocative science fiction story exploring the repercussions of atomic weaponry and the responsibilities we have to one another.²

Misha’s³ story is experimental and its plot hard to nail down, mostly because it dwells somewhere between realism and dream vision. The unnamed protagonist himself has little grasp of what is actual and what’s imagined. As such, the story’s power stems from emotionally laden imagery that evokes the interconnectedness of the human race, bridging the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with the displacement and oppression of indigenous peoples in America and intertwining both with interpersonal estrangements and the domestic heartaches of everyday life.

It’s heavy stuff, and for those readers already predisposed toward empathy, the tragic depiction of a world shot through with immense suffering can feel overwhelming. That was exactly the case for one student. What do we do, she asked me after class, seeing the world in such need of help and knowing ourselves unequal to the task?

Christian academics, I suppose, are always facing such questions, given that our fields and their histories are replete with records of injustice and wrongdoing, of human foibles and great sorrows. For literature’s part, to be true to the human condition it represents, the texts we study can’t help but sound a discordant note, at least once in a while.⁴ The same is true no matter our specific discipline. As part of this fallen world, each bears in its own way the scars—and sometimes open wounds—of sin, human depravity, and profound grief.

When a story like Misha’s shines a light on life’s dark corners, the reading experience can sometimes be too heavy, as it was for my student.⁵ Facing such a prospect, we might be tempted to withdraw in self-protection, to shield ourselves from emotional entanglements lest we succumb to despair. But that approach can have trouble all its own. Misha’s story itself highlights how impersonal detachment in the face of misfortune often perpetuates the harm it seeks to avoid.

That’s the tack her protagonist takes, attempting to tame tragedy through empirical research and turn the effects of human hostilities into that which can be quantified ,measured, weighed, and thereby contained—or so he thinks. Chippoke na gomi, Japanese for “tiny dust” or “little trash,” has covered the train station where the unnamed protagonist waits for his transportation home, having spent an extended period in Nagasaki collecting dust samples in his role as a konologist.⁶ The dust is so thick, in fact, that it has churned up a storm and delayed the train for over two hours.

The protagonist passes the time by sharing his work with one he takes to be a fellow traveler. He pulls out vial after vial of the samples he collected: “Dust tells us so much about our history. You might be interested to know that this dust from Nagasaki is still radioactive. Even after all these years.”⁷ Pushing the human toll of war far from his mind, the protagonist focuses instead on its material fallout: “The dust,” he continues, “is full of pulverized buildings, books, dinnerware, bamboo stalks and grains of rice—remnants of a great city.”⁸

When his mysterious interlocutor suggests that some of the dust he’s brought back has escaped, he insists that’s not possible because “it’s all sealed in vacuum jars,”⁹ all tagged and cataloged for further study. And yet dust from somewhere or other has settled everywhere around him, even forming into humanlike specters that dissolve and disperse as he draws near. Try as he might, he cannot escape the dreadful ramifications of the grit and grime, the ash and cinders. No act of calculation can stem its tide. He breathes it in. It covers his shoes.¹⁰

The animating message of “Chippoke Na Gomi” is that human tragedy will not—cannot—stay contained. It reverberates, embroiling us all in a world profoundly marked by suffering and loss. Detached study of those effects may be valuable, with an important role played by measurement and description, documentation and assessment, analysis and classification. That the dust remains radioactive, and for how long, is surely important to know. Or, in the realm of literary analysis, identifying a story’s generic and other features can help us better understand authorial intent and textual meaning.

But once this analysis is complete, the tragic truth of our world persists: we are, all of us, much in need of rescue. Our study of Misha’s story, for example, can give us fresh insight into the nature and reach of our fallen condition, but what can it offer by way of help? Can reading “Chippoke Na Gomi” engender anything other than misery, anxiety, or callousness?

I admit, I found my student’s question quite provocative—in a good way. My Christian commitments often run in the background of my literary study, unacknowledged and automatic. But her earnest inquiry and pressing need for an answer forced me to bring those commitments into the open and reminded me of how necessary they are in responding rightly to human suffering uncovered by our research.

Stories like Misha’s may signal our longing for shalom and highlight how far we are from it. They may hint at our need for salvation and provide a glimpse of redemptive grace. But nothing in literary studies per se offers the solution to our deepest need. Contemporary critical theories like Marxism or feminism attempt a counterfeit solution by sketching out power imbalances and mechanisms of oppression, but on closer examination, they offer little more than analysis in a different form.

The hope we have in reading tragic works like “Chippoke Na Gomi” must come from elsewhere, beyond the bounds of our scholarly inquiry, even while that inquiry highlights the need for such answers. I daresay that’s the case no matter our discipline. In contemplating the broad sweep of injustice presented in “Chippoke Na Gomi,” we can and should turn to the same hope Christians through the ages have appealed to.

Although Misha’s characters are fictional, they represent real human beings we are called to love.¹¹ They remind us of our charge to enact justice and love mercy.¹² They provide specific situations where the gospel can be brought to bear. They offer particular examples of those who need to hear this good news, of those with wounds to bind, and of captives in need of deliverance.¹³

As Misha’s story makes clear, the effects of sin are far-reaching and long-lasting. Its consequences reverberate through the ages, carried forward by and affecting generation to generation. They leave no aspect of creation unsullied. As overwhelming as that truth is, our faith tells us there’s a bigger truth—a solution that can take on and redeem all comers. And, importantly, that same faith reminds us that we do not undertake this mission alone.

Our resources—personal and academic—will inevitably fail under such daunting challenges, a sense my student felt acutely. Even still, we serve a God who so loved the world Misha depicts that he gave himself up for it, with a love great enough to utterly defeat the death and sin she and her readers lament. However wrong the world has gone, whatever darkness or suffering we discover in our research, Christians scholars can and must cling to the promise that there is One who will indeed set it right.

1. Misha Nogha, “Chippoke Na Gomi,” The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2010), 630-636.
2. This article first appeared at MoralApologetics.com in a slightly different form: https://www.moralapologetics.com/wordpress/2018/12/21/mailbag-thoughts-on-saving-the-world.
3. The author is most often identified by only her first name.
4. Satirist Kurt Vonnegut says that “all great literature is about what a bummer it is to be a human being.” He may be exaggerating, but not by much. Kurt Vonnegut, “Cold Turkey,” In These Times, May 10, 2004, https://inthesetimes.com/article/cold-turkey.
5. Recent film Inside Out 2 provides a glimpse of how detrimental these unchecked emotions can be. It’s a beautiful reminder—from a secular perspective—of how emotions working in concert with reason can help us get in touch with truth and how crucial to our flourishing is our rightly ordered will (or what C. S. Lewis in Abolition of Man calls “the chest”).
6. More properly spelled koniology or coniology, the protagonist’s vocation is the study of the effects that atmospheric dust has on earthly biological life. “Coniology,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coniology, October 12, 2023.
7. Nogha, 635.
8. Nogha, 635.
9. Nogha, 634.
10. Nogha, 635.
11. Matthew 22:39.
12. Micah 6:8.
13. Isaiah 61:1.