Plagiarism, Hiroshima, and Intertextuality:Ibuse Masuji's Black Rain Reconsidered

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This paper examines the ongoing controversy about whether or not Ibuse Masuji plagiarize(tōsaku/hyōsetsu/tōyō) from the diary of Shigematsu Shizuma, the most important source that Ibuse used in writing his highly acclaimed a-bomb novel Kuroi ame (Black rain, 1966). By analyzing　the contexts of Ibuse’s composition, the strategies and motives of Toyota Seishi(who initially stirred up the plagiarism controversy), and the textual difference between Ibuse’s novel and Shigematsu’s diary, this paper demonstrates that the accusation of Black Rain as a work of plagiarism is a decontextualized and misleading oversimplification that neglects the complex process of literary creation. The intertextual inquiry not only shows that Ibuse’s augmentation of the diary has transformed his most important source and created new meanings but also calls for a rethinking of the place of intertextuality in relation to the creative process in the extraordinary number of plagiarism cases in twentieth-century Japanese literature.

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