Hiroshima

Hiroshima, an account of the first atomic bomb used in warfare, is a nonfiction book by John Hersey. Alfred A. Knopf published it in 1946, several months after it first appeared as an article in the New Yorker. The magazine ran the article at the end of August 1946, just after the first anniversary of the dropping of the bomb, devoting the entire issue to the lengthy piece. The issue sold out immediately and was received with nearly unanimous praise. In 1985, on the 40th anniversary of the bombing, a new edition was published with an added chapter that described each character’s life during the ensuing years. (This guide is based on this expanded edition.)

Hiroshima’s influence has remained strong over the decades. Its style of adapting literary techniques of fiction to nonfiction made it a pioneer in what would later be called New Journalism. In 1999, a panel of journalists led by New York University’s journalism department chose Hiroshima as the best work of journalism in the 20th century. This guide refers to the 2019 Vintage reprint edition

Content Warning: The source text contains graphic descriptions of the injuries and illness caused by the bombing of Hiroshima. Some of these descriptions are presented in this guide to reflect the book’s content and intent.

Summary

The first chapter relates what happened the moment the bomb fell on Hiroshima, on August 6, 1945, at 8:15 a.m. Hersey chose six people to tell the story of the bombing: a Catholic priest, a Methodist minister, two doctors, a widow and mother of three young children, and a young single woman who worked in an office. The priest is a German man living in Japan; the rest are all Japanese. Some of them knew each other, and their tales intersect as the book goes on.

Chapter 1 tells what they were doing that morning just before and during the bombing. The second chapter covers the rest of the day, explaining what each of the six characters did as fire and chaos engulfed the city. Most of them made their way to Asano Park, an open space free of flames that became a refugee site, where they spent the night. Three of them—Kleinsorge, Dr. Sasaki, and Tanimoto—were largely unhurt and their stories include the many things they did to help people. The other three—Fujii, Nakamura, and Miss Sasaki—were unable to help others, either because they were hurt or had children to deal with.

Chapter 3 details roughly a week’s event; the author continues with the characters’ stories and describes efforts to learn what happened. Rumors circulated among the general population. Japanese physicists were well aware of what occurred and had already entered the city to study its conditions. In Chapter 4, Hersey covers the rest of the year until the first anniversary of the bombing. His focus remains at the individual level—what the characters go through as they deal with medical issues and try to put their lives back together. There’s not much about how the city as a whole recovers except for medical information learned during this period. Hersey wrote the final chapter in 1985, when he returned to Japan to report on the characters’ lives forty years after the bomb dropped. Here, rather than reporting in overall chronological order with the characters’ stories interwoven, as in the previous chapters, Hersey presents each story one at a time. He describes one person’s life from 1946 to 1985, then starts again at 1946 with the next. Like the original four chapters, this material was first published as an article in the New Yorker. It was then added to later editions of the book.

The book’s major themes navigate The Horrors of Nuclear Weapons, The Simultaneous Fragility and Tenacity of Life, and The Commonalities of Humans.