Hiroshima: Chapter 1 Summary & Analysis

It is 8:15 am on August 6, 1945, in Hiroshima, Japan, and an atomic bomb explodes over the city. At this precise moment, a clerk named Miss Toshiko Sasaki is sitting down to her job at the East Asia Tin Works. Also at the same time, Dr. Masakazu Fujii is reading the paper in his hospital; Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura is standing in her kitchen; Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a German priest, is sitting in his mission house; Dr. Terufumi Sasaki is walking through the city hospital; and Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto is standing outside a house in the western suburb. A hundred thousand people die in the explosion, but these six are among the survivors.

Reverend Tanimoto awakes early at his parsonage. His wife and child are staying with a friend in Ushida, a northern suburb. Hiroshima is one of the only Japanese cities that hasn’t been bombed during the war with America—as a result, city dwellers are “sick with anxiety.” Rumors circulate that America is “saving something special for the city.” Tanimoto is a talkative, energetic man. In the days leading up to the bombing, he moves most of the items from the parsonage to a neighboring district. Today, he’s risen early to help a friend, Mr. Matsuo, remove some of Matsuo’s daughter’s belongings.

Tanimoto has studied theology in Georgia, so he speaks good English. He has many American friends, and has kept up with them in the years leading up to World War Two. The police have questioned him about his ties to America and, partly to compensate for police suspicion, he’s volunteered to lead the local Neighborhood Association. As a part of his duties, Tanimoto has to organize air-raid defenses.

Around six am, Tanimoto leaves for Mr. Matsuo’s house. When he arrives, he finds that Matsuo wants help moving a cabinet. The two men carry the cabinet through the streets, until the air-raid siren goes off. Neither of them is perturbed, since the siren often goes off, whether or not planes are coming. At the time, Hiroshima is home to about 245,000 people. It is also a notable manufacturing center. Matsuo and Tanimoto make their way through the city streets, eventually reaching the house where they are supposed to store the cabinet. Then, out of nowhere, a flash of light appears in the sky. Matsuo and Tanimoto are terrified—they have time to react, since they are about two miles from the center of the explosion. Matsuo dives under the steps of the house, while Tanimoto crouches beside some large rocks. Tanimoto feels pieces of board and tile falling on him.

When Tanimoto rises again, he sees the house collapsing. There is dust in the air, to the point where it seems like twilight. He sees soldiers coming out of their secret underground dugouts, blood streaming from their heads.

The narrative shifts back to the night before the bomb drops. The radios announce that a fleet of B-29s is coming for Hiroshima and advise civilians to go to their “safe areas.” Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, a tailor’s widow, gathers her three small children—a boy named Toshio, a girl named Yaeko, and a girl named Myeko—and walks them to the East Parade Ground, a military area for evacuated families. They put out some mats and fall asleep until two in the morning, when the fleet of planes fly over the city. Afterwards, Nakamura wakes her children and brings them back to her home. Although the radio is broadcasting a new warning, she decides to stay in the house that night.

Around seven am, Nakamura wakes up to the sound of the siren. She runs to the home of Mr. Nakamoto, the head of the Neighborhood Association, and asks for advice. Nakamoto tells her to stay at home. Around eight, the siren stops, to Nakamura’s relief. She feeds her children breakfast, and notices that there is a man outside, trying to build special fire lanes in case of a bombing. Nakamura has had a hard time during the war. Her husband fought in the Army and died in 1942. Since her husband’s death, she’s begun sewing to support her children—however, she isn’t very good at her job.

As Nakamura watches the man building the fire lanes, light flashes across the sky. Instinctively, she runs to take care of her children, but the explosion reaches the house before she can move more than a few feet. Her house collapses around her, and she sees Myeko buried in rubble, crying out for help. Nakamura can’t see or hear her two other children.

Dr. Masakazu Fujii, aged fifty, is a rich, hedonistic man. He usually sleeps late, but he wakes early on the day of the bombing. Around six am, he gets up and walks to the train station with his friend. He returns to his home (which doubles as a private, single-doctor hospital) around seven, and eats breakfast on the porch overlooking the Kyo River. Fujii is the proprietor of the hospital, but lately he’s decided not to admit too many patients, recognizing that, in an air-raid, he wouldn’t be able to evacuate them all. Fujii’s wife and son are living in Osaka, and his other son and two daughters are living in the country. He is a successful, middle-aged man.

When the light flashes across the sky, Fujii barely has time to react. Before he knows what is happening, the porch has collapsed into the river below. Fujii finds himself beneath two heavy timbers with the remains of his hospital all around him.

Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, aged thirty-eight, has been in poor health in the months leading up to the bombing. He’s had very little to eat all week, and he is feeling paranoid because of the xenophobia common in Japan at the time—although the Germans have allied with Japan, Germany had surrendered to the Allies (the coalition fighting Japan and Germany in WWII) just a few months before. At six am, he reads Mass in his mission’s chapel. The only worshippers that morning are a theological student, the mission’s housekeeper (named Murata), and some priests. When the siren sounds, Kleinsorge changes into the military uniform that he always wears during air raids, but when no planes arrive, he retires to his room.

When the bomb drops, Kleinsorge’s mind goes curiously blank. He still has no memory of how he left his house, but somehow he manages to stumble out of the mission into the garden nearby. Murata staggers out to the garden and cries, “Our Lord Jesus, have pity on us!”

On the morning of the bombing, Dr. Terufumi Sasaki, a twenty-five-year-old Red Cross Hospital surgeon, is on the train back to Hiroshima from the country. In addition to his duties at the hospital, Sasaki practices medicine without a permit—a major crime—and he has dreams about being arrested and punished for his actions. On the train, he thinks about how he should give up his private practice, since it isn’t worth the risk.

Dr. Sasaki arrives at the terminal and takes a streetcar to the hospital. There, he draws blood from a patient and carries the blood to the laboratory. When the bomb drops, Sasaki is a few steps away from a window. Seeing the explosion in the distance, Sasaki ducks down and tells himself, “Be brave!” The blast is so powerful that it rips the glasses off of his face, and he shouts out the name of the hospital’s chief surgeon. He runs into the surgeon’s office, where he finds that the surgeon is bleeding heavily. Sasaki seems to be the only doctor in the hospital who hasn’t been injured. He quickly finds some bandages and begins tending to the wounded—an act that will make him “forget his private nightmare for a long, long time.”

Toshiko Sasaki, aged twenty, isn’t related to Dr. Sasaki—she is a clerk for East Asia Tin Works. At three am, she wakes up to do some housework. She is the cook and housekeeper for her father, brother, and sister while her mother is in the hospital with a baby. Around seven, Sasaki takes the train to the tin works; at the plant, she prepares to attend a funeral service for a coworker who has recently committed suicide. When the bomb drops, Toshiko Sasaki is thrown to the floor and loses consciousness. A heavy bookshelf collapses in the explosion, crushing her left leg, so that “in the first moment of the atomic age, a human being was crushed by books.”