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.