Hiroshima: Chapter 2 Summary & Analysis

After the explosion, Reverend Tanimoto stares at the wounded soldiers crawling out of their dugout. He sees an old woman with a small child in her arms; Tanimoto carries the child and leads the old woman down the street to a grammar school that has been designated as an emergency base. Inside, Tanimoto is amazed to see dozens of injured people.

Tanimoto runs back to the garden outside the house where he’d been carrying the cabinet. From this high point, he can see that Hiroshima is covered in smoke, and he wonders how the Americans could have caused so much damage without a huge fleet of airplanes. He suddenly hears Mr. Matsuo calling out. Tanimoto begins to worry for his wife and child, as well as his congregants. He runs back into the city center.

Hatsuyo Nakamura crawls through the ruins of her house, toward her youngest child, Myeko. As she moves, she hears the crying voices of her two other children. Faced with a dilemma, Nakamura turns away from Myeko—who is clearly breathing—and toward her other two children, Toshio and Yaeko. Underneath some wreckage, she finds Toshio and Yaeko. Miraculously, neither child is injured. Nakamura gathers her children and brings them outside. Myeko asks, “Why is it night already?”

Nakamura’s neighbor, Mrs. Nakamoto (wife of Mr. Nakamoto), runs to the house and asks Nakamura if she has any bandages; Nakamura gives her a white cloth. Nakamura also finds that her sewing machine—her only source of money—has survived the bomb. She decides to store it in the water tank outside her home and then she leaves her house, along with her children and a neighboring family. Carrying a blanket, some clothes, and a suitcase, Nakamura and the others venture toward Asano Park nearby. On their walk, they only see one other building still standing—the Jesuit mission house, from which Father Kleinsorge emerged, carrying a suitcase of his own.

Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge wanders out to the garden outside his mission; meanwhile another priest, Father LaSalle, runs around the corner of the building, covered in blood, followed by two other priests, one of whom, Father Schiffer, is badly cut. The young daughter of Mr. Hoshijima, the mission catechist, runs up to Kleinsorge, saying that her mother and sister have been crushed in wreckage. Kleinsorge runs to help the mission catechist’s family, while Father LaSalle helps others out from under the wreckage. Luckily, Kleinsorge is able to free Mrs. Hoshijima and her daughter. Then he runs to save some of his things from his room. Somehow, his flimsy, papier-mâché suitcase, which contained his account books, his money, and his breviary, has survived the bombing—an event that he attributes to God’s mercy.

Dr. Fujii is still in the river, struggling beneath two beams that had once been a part of his hospital building. He is able to free himself from the beams and wade out of the river—somehow, he hasn’t been seriously injured. As he runs away from the river, he sees a colleague, Dr. Machii. They wonder why there are few fires in sight—as one would expect fire in the aftermath of a bombing, especially considering how many burn victims are moving through the streets. Fujii helps his servants to free themselves from the hospital wreckage. However, four nurses, two patients, and his niece die that day.

There were about 150 doctors living in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945—approximately sixty-five die immediately. The city’s hospitals are in ruins, like most other buildings. The only uninjured doctor in the Red Cross Hospital is Dr. Sasaki, who is frantically gathering bandages from the storeroom. Without his glasses, Sasaki can barely walk—he grabs a pair of glasses off a wounded nurse’s face and gets to work helping the most serious burn victims. Sasaki tries to focus on one patient at a time, but the hospital is full of screaming, wounded people. In the city itself, 100,000 people have been wounded in the explosion, in addition to the 100,000 who’ve died immediately. Forced to work quickly, Sasaki “becomes an automaton,” mechanically treating each patient.

In the East Asia Tin Works office, Toshiko Sasaki lies on the floor, crushed by books. After about three hours she regains consciousness and immediately becomes aware of a pain in her leg. She hears voices calling, “Please help!”

Father Kleinsorge treats priests’ injuries with bandages that Dr. Fujii gave him a few days before. Then, he runs into the mission and puts on his military uniform. Staring out at the thousands of wounded people, Kleinsorge feels a strange sense of apathy. Suddenly, a woman calls for his help—her husband is buried under her house, which has just caught fire. Kleinsorge runs to the house, but doesn’t hear anything when he shouts for the woman’s husband. The house is burning down—Kleinsorge shouts, “We must get away or we will all die.”

A kindergarten teacher points Father Kleinsorge to the mission, where the secretary, Mr. Fukai, is standing by a window, weeping. Kleinsorge runs to the slowly burning building, where he finds Mr. Fukai in a state of eerie calm. Fukai asks Kleinsorge to leave him alone, but Kleinsorge begs him, “Come with me or you’ll die.” When Fukai refuses, Kleinsorge, along with another priest, forcibly pull Fukai out of the building. Fukai murmurs, “I won’t leave.” As Kleinsorge looks out in the distance, he sees fires breaking out in the few buildings left standing. When Kleinsorge notices a group of passing soldiers, he asks them to keep an eye on Mr. Fukai, but it is too late—Fukai runs away from Kleinsorge, back into the burning mission.

Mr. Tanimoto runs into the city of Hiroshima, desperate to find his family and his church. He brushes shoulders with hundreds of people fleeing the city center, many of whom are severely injured. Most of these people are totally silent. Tanimoto makes his way over the Kannon Bridge, and, as he gets closer to the city center, the destruction grows more severe. He passes by thousands of ruined buildings and burning houses. He feels overwhelmed with shock, and he also feels guilty for being unharmed. As he passes others, he mutters, “Excuse me for having no burden like yours.”

Tanimoto comes to a large Shinto shrine surrounded by burning buildings. There, by incredible coincidence, he runs into his wife, who is carrying their infant child. Instead of embracing his wife, he simply says, “Oh, you are safe.” She explains that she’d nearly been buried in the wreckage of her home, and that she is going to the suburb of Ushida. Mr. Tanimoto nods and says he wants to visit his church. They part without another word.

Mr. Tanimoto continues toward his neighborhood, which is full of injured, bleeding people. He notices a small boat ferrying people across the river into Asano Park; Tanimoto jumps into the boat and travels across, into the park, where he finds some of his neighbors and Neighborhood Association colleagues. He also notices Father Kleinsorge, a friend, but can’t find his friend Mr. Fukai. Kleinsorge simply says, “He ran back.”

Toshiko Sasaki hears voices crying out for help. She begins calling back to them—the closest person to her, she quickly finds, is a high school girl who’s been working in the factory. A while later, a digger finds his way into Sasaki’s office. Seeing that Sasaki’s leg has been crushed under the bookcase, he calls some other men to drag her outside, where it is raining. Sasaki’s leg is badly broken, and as a result Sasaki spends the morning in the courtyard with two other victims.

The former head of the Catholic priests’ Neighborhood Association is a man named Yoshida. As Mrs. Nakamura and her children, along with Father Kleinsorge and Mr. Fukai, run through the streets, Yoshida cries out for help from beneath the ruins of his house. But there are so many other people crying for help that nobody notices him. As he cries out, Yoshida sees the mission house go up in flames. Frantic, Yoshida manages to free himself from the rubble and run away from the fire.

Dr. Fujii wades into the river to avoid the heat of the fire. Along with his two surviving nurses, he moves along the river to a sandspit near Asano Park. There, Dr. Machii sits with his family, including his daughter, who is horribly burned. Fujii begins to feel ashamed of his appearance—he is still dressed in nothing but his underwear from that morning, He stares out at the victims of the bombing and wonders what kind of bomb could have caused so much damage. That evening, he makes his way to his family’s house, miles away. The house is in ruins.

All day long, the population of Hiroshima floods into Asano Park. The park is far enough from the bombsite that its flora is still alive. Mrs. Nakamura and her children arrive at the park and later become so nauseated that they begin to retch and vomit. There is a strong odor of ionization (“electric smell”) in the air, and some people think that the Americans have dropped gas on the city. Father Kleinsorge and the other priests come into the park, and Father LaSalle falls asleep almost immediately.

Mr. Tanimoto arrives in the park, where he finds it difficult to distinguish between the living and the dead people gathered there. Tanimoto greets Kleinsorge and the other priests, who are gathering water from the river to give to burn victims. Tanimoto walks along the river, searching for a boat to transport bomb victims away from danger. He finds a small punt, in which there are three dead bodies, and removes the bodies, murmuring, “Please forgive me for taking this boat. I must use it for others, who are alive.”

Later in the day, a fire breaks out in the woods near Asano Park. A team begins filling buckets of water to put out the fire. However, the crowd begins to edge closer and closer to the river. This makes it difficult for the team to fill their buckets, and it also pushes people into the water, some of whom drown.

The sound of airplanes fills the air, and people naturally assume that there is another attack. Someone yells out for victims to take off their white clothing in order to hide from the planes. The airplanes pass overhead, evidently part of a reconnaissance mission of some kind. Then, it begins to rain. However, some people believe that the rain is really gasoline, which the Americans are dropping on the city in preparation for another bombing. A rumor circulates that the city was destroyed by a single plane, which sprayed the city with gasoline and then ignited it.

The rain subsides, and Mr. Tanimoto and Father Kleinsorge resume helping the bombing victims. Tanimoto and Kleinsorge decide to run into town to get rice from the mission shelter, but when they arrive they find that the shelter is nothing but ashes now. However, Kleinsorge finds that a pumpkin from the garden outside has roasted on the vine—quickly, he eats some of it. Kleinsorge and Tanimoto gather pumpkins, along with potatoes that have been baked in the ground. In the end, this food is enough to feed almost a hundred people.

As evening falls, Mr. Tanimoto encounters his neighbor, a young woman named Mrs. Kamai. She begs him to help her find her husband, who had been inducted into the army the day before. Knowing he has no way of finding this man (who is probably dead, since he must have been in the city’s army barracks) he just says, “I’ll try.”