Black Rain by Masuji Ibuse
Published 1966 · 403 pages · 95,000 words · about 8 hours at an average pace · Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, War Fiction
How hard is Black Rain to read?
Black Rain scores 63 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 52 out of 100
- Bester's translation carries Japanese food, agricultural and administrative vocabulary, wartime terminology and medical language for radiation injury, most of it unglossed.
- Sentence structure: 46 out of 100
- Deliberately plain diary prose with short declarative sentences, though the layering of quoted documents requires attention to who is writing.
- Abstraction: 44 out of 100
- Almost entirely concrete — meals, distances, injuries, weather — with the moral weight left to accumulate from detail rather than from any statement about it.
- Information density: 68 out of 100
- Dense with specifics: street names, ration quantities, medical symptoms, dates and times, and the internal chronology of several overlapping documents.
- Narrative indirection: 68 out of 100
- The bomb is never narrated directly in the present; it reaches the reader through diaries copied out years later by a man whose reason for copying them is a marriage negotiation.
- Symbolic density: 64 out of 100
- The black rain itself, the carp Shigematsu raises, the eels, and the rainbow he wishes for at the end operate as the novel's few but sustained figures.
- Ironic distance: 62 out of 100
- The gap between the domestic problem — finding a husband for a niece — and the catastrophe being transcribed to solve it gives the whole book its cold, quiet anger.
- Resolution withholding: 78 out of 100
- Yasuko's illness arrives, the marriage is impossible, and the novel ends with an old man watching for a rainbow that would mean recovery, in a sentence that does not say whether it appears.
- Structural complexity: 64 out of 100
- A frame in 1950 containing at least four transcribed documents from 1945, cut against each other and interrupted by present-day village life, with the copying itself as the organising action.
How Black Rain is regarded
Black Rain holds a literary regard score of 76 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.