Hiroshima The Book, by John Hersey

Republished Account of What Happened in Hiroshima in August 1945

Jul 15, 2009

Hersey takes six people and uses their stories to show what happened on both the day Hiroshima was bombed and afterwards.

Hiroshima by John Hersey is straight in there telling the story of the bombing of Hiroshima.

This is not a major political or historical analysis but a simple retelling of that momentous day from the oft-neglected human or civilian side.

Stories of Six Survivors Woven Into a Much Bigger Narrative

Hersey’s structure is simple he uses the stories of six survivors to tell what happened on that day and in the period immediately afterward. The six are a Jesuit Priest long resident in Japan, a widowed seamstress, two doctors, a minister and a young woman clerk at the tin works.

In a sense not a particularly representative group but an illuminating one and with a minimum of description they are all rather engaging even if the two doctors rather cancel each other out.

Started as a Story for the New Yorker Magazine

It was originally done as a story for the prestigious New Yorker magazine but in a world before rolling TV bulletins and the internet, the magazine article was deemed such news, and of such resonance, it took over an entire edition.

That’s the first part of the book. This edition published by Penguin with some photos from the Magnum photo agency as front, back and inside covers adds a second article written forty years later where Hersey tells the history of the since then.

Told Without Clutter and With Great Clarity

For so important a date and event the book is low-key with a straightforward almost simple style that reflects Hersey’s journalistic background. It also allows the story to be told without clutter.

On one level this is highly effective. “Dr Sasaki found himself the only doctor in the hospital who was unhurt” is the kind of sentence that says it all. Especially as it is followed by a paragraph outlining Sasaki’s mistaken belief that only his hospital had been hit “while outside, all over Hiroshima, maimed and dying citizens turned their unsteady steps toward the red cross hospital to begin an invasion.”

Later on, recounting the journey of the Japanese Methodist Pastor Kiyoshi Tanimoto into the city, and against the flow of refugees quitting the city shortly after the bomb has dropped this maybe doesn’t work as well.

”Almost all had their heads bowed, looked straight ahead, were silent, and showed no expression whatever,” Hersey writes. It’s a detail, maybe a chilling one, but not a particularly telling one.

And this is the fundamental flaw of this book. That whilst it is a good account of what happened on that day it isn’t really dramatic or forceful enough to capture the attention it originally drew. Against this its calmness is reassuring at a time when an increasingly fraught world has put more bombs in the reach of more regimes.

The copyright of the article Hiroshima The Book, by John Hersey in History Books is owned by Michael Mackey. Permission to republish Hiroshima The Book, by John Hersey in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.