Hiroshima
(John Hersey)

Chapter One

It is the morning of August 6, 1945, and the residents of Hiroshima, Japan are either going about their normal daily business or preparing for a possible B-29 raid. Hiroshima has yet to be attacked by the United States, but there is talk the Americans having planned something for them. Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto feels the need to prove that he is loyal to Japan, as he was educated in America, so he volunteers to reorganize Hiroshima’s air-raid defenses. When the bomb strikes Mr. Tanimoto is helping a friend move only two miles from the blast; though the house is leveled he manages to survive by taking cover in a rock garden.

Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamuro is a widow who has taken her children to safety every time there has been an attack warning. The morning of the bombing she hears a warning but decides, with the help of her neighbor, that she will ignore it unless she hears something more urgent because she wants to let her children sleep in. Mrs. Nakamuro is only ¾ of a mile away when the bomb drops and she is watching her neighbor tear down his house to make more accessible fire lanes.

In a private hospital next to the river, Dr. Masakazu Fujii has been turning away patients because he knows how difficult it will be to evacuate them in the case of an air-raid; he allowed only two patients to come in. Because Dr. Fujii has so much time on his hands without any patients, he spends it leisurely. The day of the bombing he accompanies a friend to the train station and then has time to sit on the porch in his underwear reading the paper. The bomb knocks over Dr. Fujii’s entire clinic and sends the clinic, along with the doctor, into the water.

Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge is a German man who is stationed in a mission house in Hiroshima during the war, as he is a Jesuit priest. Father Kleinsorge has been ill recently because of the poor wartime food he has been consuming and is recovering in bed with a magazine when the bomb strikes. Kleinsorge is lucky that the mission house has been reinforced so it will not be destroyed in the event of an earthquake so it survives the explosion, and so do Kleinsorge and his fellow priests.

A surgeon at the Red Cross Hospital, Dr. Terufumi Sasaki, is lucky enough to survive the bombing unscathed but only for a few extenuating circumstances that morning. The doctor had a hard time sleeping in that morning, so he took an earlier train than usual; the bomb would have struck while he was on his normal train, and likely would have killed him. Also, when the bomb did strike Dr. Sasaki was standing next to an open window and managed to escape injury though he is the only doctor who did. Immediately after the bombing, Dr. Sasaki starting bandaging and treating the wounds of those who were injured.

Toshiko Sasaki is a twenty-year-old woman who was working at her job at East Asia Tin Works when the bomb struck. Miss Sasaki’s income as a clerk at the Tin Works serves to support herself, her parents, and her brother. As the bomb strikes Miss Sasaki is sitting at her desk and the bookcase next to the desk falls over on her; the impact crushes her leg, and knocks her unconscious.

Chapter Two

Mr. Tanimoto climbs to a higher place to survey the damaged areas, at first believing that it is only near him, but he soon realizes the extent of the bombing. The bomb hit in the center of Hiroshima and caused fire and smoke that is spreading rapidly with the wind. He runs toward the mass of destruction in desperate search for his wife and baby, alarmed and overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the situation and number of injured people surrounding him. Mr. Tanimoto apologizes to people as he passes, feeling bad for the fact that he is uninjured. He finds his wife and baby wandering through the streets, uninjured, as well.

Mrs. Nakamura runs to her children as soon as the blast hits and miraculously finds them unharmed underneath piles of rubble. She knows they must evacuate right away so she puts her sewing machine, which is her means of surviving, into a cement tank and heads to Asano Park, an estate out of town that has been turned into an evacuation area. On the way, to Asano Park Mrs. Nakamura notices the many people who are still trapped under buildings and wreckage, unable to help themselves.

Father Kleinsorge finds himself basically unharmed though one of his fellow priests is not as lucky, he is bleeding badly from a head wound. As other priests try to find a doctor for the bleeding man and attempt to rescue as many people as possible, Kleinsorge tries to gather some of his belongings including a paper-mache suitcase that holds his important papers and money. The suitcase remained unharmed, and Kleinsorge believes that God spared it for him. The priests all must escape to Asano Park to get away from the fire, though Mr. Fukai who is the secretary of the diocese does not want to leave and must be forcefully carried by Father Kleinsorge. Kleinsorge, who is still recovering from his illness, cannot carry Mr. Fukai for long, and when he puts him down Fukai runs back into the fire and no one ever hears from him again.

Both of the Doctors, Sasaki and Fujii, survive the blast though Dr. Fujii is injured and stays in the water to escape the fire; the four nurses and two patients who were in his clinic all died. Dr. Sasaki is the only doctor who is not injured and his hospital, which only has 600 beds, is surrounded by about 10,000 injured people wanting to get in. Dr. Sasaki tries to frantically treat as many people as possible while Dr. Fujii eventually retreats to his parents’ house baffled over the destruction that has occurred. Miss Sasaki cannot move the leg that is trapped under the bookcase, and it hurts so badly she thinks it might have actually been cut off. She is pulled out of the wreckage and finds herself in a shelter with other injured people.

Many people have fled to Asano Park, which has escaped devastation. Mrs. Nakamura and her children drink water from the river, as they are thirsty and have nothing to eat or drink, but it makes them ill and they vomit all day. The fire, which is still spreading, threatens the park, and, as people crowd the riverbanks for safety, many people fall in and drown. Mr. Tanimoto, Father Kleinsorge, and other volunteers attempt to stop the spreading fire with water and blankets, also Mr. Tanimoto tries to evacuate people using a boat he found. As Mr. Tanimoto and Father Kleinsorge get back to the park with provisions, Mr. Tanimoto finds his neighbor crying and clutching her dead baby while she searches for her husband who Mr. Tanimoto is sure must be dead.

Chapter Three

That night a naval ship is seen travelling up and down the coast telling people to be patient as help is on its way; many people are relieved to finally be hearing some news. Some priests from a nearby mission, Novitiate, bring stretchers to gather the injured priests and bring them back to their mission, 3 miles away. Father Kleinsorge is very ill but still manages to get water to the people in the park. Father Kleinsorge finds soldiers in the woods which are badly burned and promises that help will be there soon, though he knows that is not the truth. The priests from Novitiate return the next day and take Mrs. Nakamura and her children back to their mission. Kleinsorge heads to the city to file a claim at the police station and learns via a news broadcast that the bombs dropped on Hiroshima seem to be a new kind that are still unidentified.

Mr. Tanimoto travels around in his boat trying to help as many people as possible, but most of his efforts are fruitless. He pulls people out of the river and brings them to a spot he thinks is safe, though later realizes that most of them have been swept up with the tide again. Many of the people he tries to help are so badly burned that their skin comes off when he tries to carry them. Mr. Tanimoto finds a doctor on the East Parade Ground and asks him why he is not helping the people in the park, but the doctor tells him he is only treating people with minor injuries because those who are badly injured will likely die anyway.

Dr. Sasaki is totally overwhelmed with the number of bodies that are piling up around him as there is no one available to take the dead away. After working for nineteen hours straight he takes an hour nap only to begin working again for the next three days straight. Dr. Fujii is too injured to offer any help to others still as he lies in pain at his parents’ home. He manages to leave his parents’ house and heads to the house of a friend where Father Cieslik visits him. Miss Sasaki remains in a shelter in the courtyard of Tin Works for two days before she receives word that her family is presumed dead and she is evacuated to a series of hospitals who do not know whether to amputate her leg. She is eventually brought to a military hospital in Ninoshima and finds that her leg is fractured but not gangrenous.

Just a few days after the bombing, a second bomb is dropped on Nagasaki. The people finally begin to look around them and take in the extent of the damage and most of them find out the fate of their loved ones. The Nakamura family remains in the mission where they are safe but still ill from the water. Mrs. Nakamura finds out that her mother and siblings have died. Mr. Tanimoto goes to the aid of a man name Mr. Tanaka whom he has never gotten along with; he reads the man a psalm as he dies. In the week that follows the bombing, the doctors still cannot get to all of the injured people nor can they accommodate them in the hospitals. Miss Sasaki is taken from the military hospital and moved to a ship deck; after being in the sun on the deck her leg infection spreads. At the Red Cross Hospital, the corpses are finally being disposed of by cremation and their ashes are put into envelopes and kept in a sort of shrine to the fallen. On August 15, the Japanese receive word that Japan has surrendered and the war is over.

Chapter Four

The radiation from the bombing begins to cause illness in the people of Hiroshima in the weeks after the attack. Father Kleinsorge becomes too weak to function, Mrs. Nakamura begins to lose her hair, and her daughter falls ill and Mr. Tanimoto is bedridden. Miss Sasaki is transferred to the Red Cross Hospital where she is treated by Dr. Sasaki who notices small spots of blood on her skin that many survivors are developing from the radiation. Dr. Fujii was staying at a friend’s house and became well enough to take on patients again. Due to the almost non-stop rain serious flooding happens all over Hiroshima and destroys almost everything that the bomb did not destroy, including the house that Dr. Fujii had been staying in.

The radiation sickness plagues and baffles the people of Hiroshima as some of them get better but others do not. Mrs. Nakamura and Mr. Tanimoto slowly improve, but Father Kleinsorge does not and is sent to a hospital in Tokyo where the doctors assume he will die. Over the next couple of weeks, Kleinsorge’s blood cell counts fluctuate wildly until eventually the sickness just leaves him. The doctors are amazed and confused by what they have witnessed with Father Kleinsorge. As the blast area in Hiroshima is studied and research is done Dr. Sasaki and his fellow doctors gather information about radiation poisoning from what they have seen in their patients. Miss Sasaki remains ill from the infection in her leg and is quite depressed and lonely until Father Kleinsorge comes to visit her. Over the next couple of months, she gains strength from Father Kleinsorge and the infection in her leg dissipates, allowing her to walk on crutches.

Each of the six survivors mentioned slowly returns to their normal lives in the months following the bombing disaster. Dr. Fujii starts a new clinic as his was destroyed and even begins taking on American patients as there are so many Americans visiting Hiroshima these days. Father Kleinsorge works with other priests to build a new mission, much like the one they had lost. He works so hard and diligently that he falls ill again and has to return to Tokyo to rest in the hospital there. Mr. Tanimoto wants to restore his church as well, but he has a hard time doing so, as he does not have the sort of financial resources that the Jesuits do. Mrs. Nakamura returns her family to Hiroshima, and rents a shack next to the house they once lived in, so her children can return to their school. Dr. Sasaki does not leave the hospital for months because there are so many people to treat though eventually he returns to his normal life and that April he is married.

Chapter Five

In the months and years following the attack many companies do not want to hire people who have suffered from radiation illness, which leaves Mrs. Nakamura, or Nakamura-san as Hersey now refers to her, forced to work in a mothball factory. Once Nakamura-san’s oldest son is able to get a job she can finally retire, after thirteen years in the factory. She lives off her pension once her children grow up and move out until 1975 when a law is passed that provides a monthly income to those who were affected by the bombing. Forty years after the attacks Nakamura-san dances in a flower festival on Peace Boulevard.

Dr. Sasaki remains at the Red Cross Hospital for years after the attack, dealing with keloids (burn scars that will not heal over) that affect many of the victims. Finally in 1951 he leaves the hospital because there are too many awful memories there and sets up his own clinic in Mukaihara. In 1963 Dr. Sasaki, has to have one of his lungs removed and he nearly dies, and in 1972 he loses his wife to breast cancer. The loss of his wife and the near loss of his own life spark a desire in Dr. Sasaki to work harder than ever before to make medical advancements. Forty years after the bombing Dr. Sasaki puts all of his time and effort into healing others.

After the bombing Father Kleinsorge becomes a citizen of Japan and changes his name to Makoto Takakura. His radiation illness never fully goes away and leaves him weak and susceptible to severe illness for the rest of his life. In 1961, he moves from the mission to a small church in the town of Mukaihara where he meets a woman who becomes his closest friend, Satsue Yoshiki. In 1976 Takakura suffers a fall that leaves him bedridden, and in 1977 he dies with Yoshiki-san sitting by his side.According to Hersey, Takakura’s grave is always decorated with fresh flowers.

Miss Sasaki, now referred to as Sasaki-san, has several operations to help her leg though it never fully returns to its former condition. In 1957, she takes her vows to become a nun at the urging of Father Kleinsorge and her new name becomes Sister Dominique Sasaki. Sasaki-san travels often throughout her career as a nun and makes many speeches about the second chance at life she was given in the wake of the attack on Hiroshima. In 1980, a dinner is thrown in her honor in Japan where she vows to those honoring her that she will keep trudging forward.

Dr. Fujii ends up rebuilding the clinic he lost in the bombing in 1948. He decides that the only and best cure for the pain he has experienced is pleasure and spends his leisure time drinking and golfing. He takes a trip to New York with unmarried female burn victims who are in need of reconstructive surgery, known as the Hiroshima Maidens. In 1963 Dr. Fujii is found unconscious in a hotel room where there has been a gas leak and he is taken to a hospital where he falls into a coma. He remains comatose until his death in 1973.

Mr. Tanimoto dedicates the rest of his life to creating peace. He travels many places, including North America, to raise money to develop a peace center in Japan. Mr. Tanimoto’s cause becomes well-known when he receives help in promoting his ideas from Pearl Buck and Norman Cousins, author and editor respectively. He gives the opening prayer for the US Senate and appears on television with Enola Gay, one of the pilots from the plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. When Mr. Tanimoto works with Norman Cousins to help the Hiroshima Maidens he is labeled as someone who just wants publicity, which does not help his cause. Mr. Tanimoto’s peace center ends up being a small agency run from within his own home. Forty years after the bombing, Mr. Tanimoto has retired and he and his wife live off his pension.