The bomb had not only left the underground
organs of the plants intact; it had stimulated them.
See Important Quotations Explained
Summary
Some weeks after the explosion, three of the main characters
fall victim to radiation sickness. Father Kleinsorge is walking
through the city to deposit money in Hiroshima when he suddenly
becomes weak and barely makes it back to the mission. Mrs. Nakamura’s hair
begins to fall out, and she and her daughter become ill. At the same
time, Mr. Tanimoto, weak and feverish, becomes bedridden.
Miss Sasaki is transferred to the Red Cross Hospital
in Hiroshima and placed under the care of Dr. Sasaki. Dr. Sasaki notices
small hemorrhages all over her bare skin, a mysterious symptom many
of his patients are beginning to show. He later discovers that this
is the result of her low white-blood cell count, another symptom
of radiation sickness. Dr. Fujii is living at a friend’s house in
nearby Fukawa and is beginning to treat patients again.
In early September, nature itself seems bent on destroying
what remains of Hiroshima when heavy rains result in floods. Dr.
Fujii must evacuate his friend’s house when the river floods and
washes the house away—water claims Fujii’s residence just a month
after his clinic fell into the river.
Radiation sickness baffles everyone well into September
and afterward. In the next few months Mrs. Nakamura and Mr. Tanimoto
gradually get better, but Father Kleinsorge continues to have a high
fever and low blood cell count, and he is sent to a hospital in Tokyo.
The doctor there predicts he will die in two weeks, but Kleinsorge
lives, his blood count swinging wildly up and down and his cuts
constantly reopening. He becomes a curiosity in Tokyo, and once
his fever is gone and his health relatively stable, he is interviewed
by curious doctors, experts, and newspaper reporters.
In Hiroshima, as Japanese physicists make observations
about the blast area, Dr. Sasaki and his colleagues develop new
theories about radiation sickness by observing their patients. Miss
Sasaki’s infection lingers on eleven weeks after the bomb, and she
remains in the hospital through November. She becomes extremely
depressed, especially since her fiancé will not visit her. Father
Kleinsorge, who has since returned to the city, comes to visit her
in the hospital. For the next several months, Miss Sasaki seems
to draw strength from the priest. By the end of April her infection
is gone and she is able to walk on crutches.
One by one each of the characters, like Miss Sasaki,
begins to resume some sort of a normal life. Dr. Fujii opens a new
clinic and capitalizes on Japan’s new visitors by treating American
patients. Father Kleinsorge and another priest commission a three-story
mission house exactly like the one they had lost; Father Kleinsorge eventually
becomes so busy that he falls ill again and must return to the Tokyo
hospital to rest. Mr. Tanimoto attempts to restore his own church
in the city, but he does not have as much money as the Jesuits.
Mrs. Nakamura, when her hair has grown back, scrapes together her
money and rents a small shack near the site of her old house, while
putting her children back into school in Hiroshima. Dr. Sasaki,
after almost never leaving the hospital building in the four months
after the blast, begins to focus on his own life and marries in March.
Analysis
In thinking of their experience of that
time Dr. Hiraiwa repeated, ‘What a fortunate that we are Japanese!
It was my first time I ever tasted such a beautiful spirit when
I decided to die for our Emperor.’
See Important Quotations Explained
Hersey’s narrative is compelling because he shows the
events following the bomb through the personal experiences of witnesses. Through
the eyes of Miss Sasaki, for instance, we learn that the bomb has
somehow greatly increased the growth of vegetation throughout Hiroshima,
and that wildflowers and weeds—the panic grass and feverfew that
give the chapter its title—have burst through the ruins to give
the city a “vivid, lush, optimistic green.” Miss Sasaki describes
a powerful image—nature takes over where civilization has been destroyed—but
Hersey does not delve into the image deeply in his own voice.
As Hersey’s characters slowly rebuild their lives in
Hiroshima, we also learn about the extent of the damage and the
blast, based on reports of Japanese physicists in the weeks and
months that follow. As in other chapters, Hersey mentions these
facts only in passing, so he does not distract attention from his
human stories, but these reports are noteworthy for the kinds of
information they contain. Most of his American readers in 1946 knew
little about the bomb. The accounts of the Japanese physicists,
which were heavily censored at the time, suggest the bomb’s absolutely
awesome power—the enormous heat generated at its center, and its
ability to melt the surface of granite thousands of yards away.
The flash generated by the bomb was so bright, notes Hersey, that
it left shadows of buildings and even human silhouettes imprinted
on walls. Moreover, the Japanese scientists discover that the bomb
dropped on Nagasaki, a plutonium bomb as opposed to a uranium one,
was even more powerful, and that the Americans are capable of developing
one that is ten or even twenty times as powerful. In short, Hersey
makes it clear to his readers that this is not like any other air
raid or attack; the atomic bomb should give everyone in the world
something to worry about.
Hersey’s own political agenda still remains unclear in
Chapter Four. While Hersey includes a number of vivid details and
accounts, we should also note a phenomenon that is absent from his
story: any kind of serious anti-American feeling in the wake of
Hiroshima’s destruction. Mrs. Nakamura develops a bitter hatred
of Americans when she believes that they have dropped a poison on
the city; but when this rumor turns out to be unfounded, her hatred
quickly fades away. Later she tells Hersey that the general attitude
of the Japanese is a kind of grim acceptance: “It was war and we
had to expect it.” Mr. Tanimoto writes a letter to an American friend
with a kind of pride in the way the Japanese reacted. He describes
a father and son consecrating their lives to their Emperor, or two
girls who sing the national anthem as they are crushed under a fallen
fence. Hersey notes that there is a “curious kind of elated community spirit”
among most of the survivors of the blast. Out of all the voices in
Hersey’s account, only Dr. Sasaki seems to maintain any sort of bitterness
toward those who dropped the bomb.
The end of this chapter, which was the end of the original
edition of Hersey’s book, includes somewhat ambivalent and ambiguous accounts.
Father Siemes, in his letter to Rome, offers a detached view of
the tragedy, proposing that total war—a concept promoted by the
Japanese in World War II—will necessarily include war against civilians.
Such a view would no doubt be amenable to Americans who support
the decision to drop the bomb. Toshio Nakamura’s account of the
day of the explosion is also short of moral judgments and instead
offers an impressionistic view of the day. Just as he has done throughout
the book, Hersey lets the image speak for itself: a ten-year-old
boy who progresses from eating peanuts in the morning, to seeing
“burned and bleeding” people walking around, to meeting a child
his own age whose mother is dead.
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