Hiroshima by John Hersey

“In a city of two hundred and forty-five thousand, nearly a hundred thousand people had been killed or doomed at one blow; a hundred thousand more were hurt. At least ten thousand of the wounded made their way to the best hospital in town, which was altogether unequal to such a trampling, since it had only six hundred beds, and they had all been occupied. The people in the suffocating crowd inside the hospital wept and cried, for Dr. Sasaki to hear, “Sensei, Doctor!,” and the less seriously wounded came and pulled at his sleeve and begged him to go to the aid of the worse wounded. Tugged here and there in his stockinged feet, bewildered by the numbers, staggered by so much raw flesh, Dr. Sasaki lost all sense of profession and stopped working as a skillful surgeon and a sympathetic man; he became an automaton, mechanically wiping, daubing, winding, wiping, daubing, winding.”

John Hersey may be remembered as one of the forerunners to the New Journalism movement that swept America during the 1960s and 1970s with magazines such as Esquire, Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair. Fusing elements of storytelling with cold, hard fact created more compelling works in stories that demanded an element of warmth and elaboration. The cover of my 1989 edition of Hersey’s Hiroshima (1946) boldly states, “Everyone able to read should read it – Saturday Review of Literature.” Frankly, I was sold at the word Hiroshima. It was when I brought the book home and my dad told me how it was required reading at his high school that fully sold me. This book should still be required reading alongside Esther Hautzig’s The Endless Steppe.

The book follows the day the atomic age began on August 6, 1945 through the personal accounts of six different citizens of Hiroshima that survived the blast. These six accounts included (as recounted from the book’s inner jacket):

Miss Toshinki Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just turned her head to chat with the girl at the next desk.

Dr. Masakazu Fujii, a physician, had just sat down to read the paper on the porch of his private hospital.

Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, a tailor’s widow, was watching a neighbor from her kitchen window.

Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a German priest, lay on a cot in the mission house reading a Jesuit magazine.

Dr. Terufumi Sasaki, a young surgeon, walked along a hospital corridor with a blood specimen for a Wasserman test.

The Reverend Mr. Kiyoshi Tanimoto, pastor of the Hiroshima Methodist Church, was about to unload a cart of clothes at a rich man’s home in the suburbs.

Hersey went to great pains to paint an accurate picture of the horrific events leading directly up to and the days following the explosion over Hiroshima. The Japanese are reclusive when it comes to documenting horrible memories and we should commend the author for getting honest accounts that do not seem doctored or censored. There is no shortage of passages that caused me to grimace or make exclamations aloud.

I read the updated version from the 1980s that includes an extra chapter that details each of the six respondents’ lives in the years following Japan’s recovery. Hersey’s exhausting quest for the truth is not lost in time and the new section fits well with the original text. There are some books in life we are instructed to read no matter what your preference for books is. They might be Huckleberry Finn or Night or even All Quiet on the Western Front. Hiroshima certainly fits into this category. Whether you are knowledgeable about the aftermath of the only atomic weapons used in war or you want to know a bit more from the Japanese perspective this book is for you.