"The death of the self of which the great writers speak is no violent act. It is merely the joining of the great rock heart of the earth in its roll"
                              Annie Dillard in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Hersey's Narrative Threads, and Knots

Hersey weaves his individually collected narrative threads in Hiroshima to form a vivid patchwork of the first hand accounts of atrocities suffered during, and long after, the bombing.

The character sketches and brief personal introductions each begin separately, and urgently, just before the explosion. Despite their terse nature, dominant personality traits are offered immediately as a foundation to build upon; a struggling widowed mother, a young idealistic medical student, a seasoned physician on the brink of retirement, two morally conscientious priests (one Japanese, one German), and a young female factory worker. In this narrative, if not in actuality, their lives become intertwined at the poignant moment of atomic impact; this turning point is a marked private memory for each, which then propels them into the paths of each other.

The vantage point of each character is unique from the outset. Each persons individual position and distance from the impact site is different; however scattered, they soon become part of an anonymous crowd of agony and desperation. For Mrs. Nakamura, “everything flashed whiter than any white she had ever seen”, for Dr. Fujii, the flash was a “brilliant yellow”, for Father Kleinsorge it was reminiscent of a meteor impact, and so on. That one traumatic starting point marked a particular, peculiarly personal moment in time when the lines between organized private and public selves and functions were annihilated.

Certain characters embody the chaos differently. Reverend Tanimoto represents action; he is panic in motion; even his visual perspective above and throughout the city on foot build the scene in its necessary scope. The two women and children are buried; one can free herself, the other cannot. The horror of hidden immobility is Miss Sasaki’s, the representative voice of the thousand others trapped and helpless in their own desperate circumstances, overlooked. Dr. Fujii flails in the river water, which will claim many others unable to move to safety. Father Kleinsorge finds himself alone and nearly naked in a garden in an ironic biblical twist. Dr. Sasaki is a prisoner within his own hospital, held captive by both critically ill patients and corpses alike.

In the midst, they meet, most at Asano Park, some as acquaintances-come-refugees. Later Miss Sasaki becomes the forlorn patient of Dr. Sasaki, and is later consoled by Father Kleinsorge, who wrestled with his own complications from radiation sickness.

As a collective, these individuals are emblematic of the greater Japanese culture; they are compassionate, steadfast, and stoic individuals of remarkable endurance. People afflicted with the most disfiguring burns and wounds maintain social graces of extreme gratitude and concern for their family and neighbors to a staggering degree of humility. As an American reading these accounts, the sense of inherited responsibility is marked.

Then, the knot of close-kit threaded stories begins to separate again, unraveling back into more obscure private lives. The mundane day-to-day is always marred by scars and sickness physical/psychological. The spiritual is a constant though, also, especially in the convert Miss Sasaki’s case. Lives trail off into newspaper headlines about new nuclear experiments, ominous stitches stretching into the future, building on and bleeding away from the survivors of the past.

Dates and Times

Rearrangement. The inevitable fade of even color-fast fibers overtime, tamped down, subdued by familiarity. Impressions left by furniture’s burdens, the cavernous cistern outside always hiding some stage of emptiness or fulfillment.

We are sitting in the room which used to be my teenaged father’s bedroom. It has been a living room as long as I can remember however, from the times of my childhood when the carpet was a short, sheared green, and multi-colored woven rugs, soft as old t-shirts, rested in front of my grandparents’ recliners.

“Does October 19^th mean nothing to you?” my father asthmatically wheezes, glaring ahead at the TV screen, swaddled in his housecoat.

“Well…” my mother scoffs at his dead-pan condescension, tucking her straightened auburn hair behind her ear “she wants to know the first time we met…that’s not the first time.”

She and her family had moved in next to my father and his parents in 1972. Separated only by young Maple saplings and the winding gravel driveway, her family soon sauntered over for a visit. They sat in what is now the dining room on that Sunday afternoon in August, my mother nervous because she had brought the family dog along, a wily Scottish terrier named Elfie. My paternal grandmother did most of the talking; my father had to be coaxed out of his adjoining bedroom, being marginally sociable for only twenty minutes or so.

My mother looks over her shoulder into the room. She volunteers, pointing, that there may have been a loveseat there; maybe there were slip covers; maybe the carpeting was the same as the archaic remnant still in the hall closet, olive green and blue and yellow, splotched by geometric shapes. My father squints, square-jowled, not moved to contribution or even correction.

He mutters something about the time they first saw each other, pre-formal introduction, if she remembered that. She does.

It was May, 1972. My mother was standing at the bottom of her parents’ driveway, waiting for her friend Maria to pick her up for high school commencement rehearsal. It was pouring down rain. My mother was wearing a neutral knit cap with a brim, protecting her brown locks that she had curled around empty orange juice cans the night before. Then my father came speeding by.

He was driving the 1954 two-toned green Chevy, baring patches of primer paint in spots where his handiwork was incomplete. He craned his neck, tugging the wheel in a double-take. He said she had a sweet, innocent look, and he said, that’s the one for me.

“But you need more than that to make a story, don’t you?” my mother winced, adjusting her legs folded beneath her on the brushed blue couch.

October 19^th, my maternal grandmother nudged both my mother and Elfie through the orange-crowned Maple trees onto my paternal grandparents’ property, where my dad was cruising along on the riding mower. She pretended Elfie had gotten loose; she needed my father to catch him. That’s when the real conversation began.

“So there”, my mother concludes.