Summary
Prologue
In the Prologue, an unknown man is imprisoned and knows that he will be soon forced to wear an orange jumpsuit.
The Yet Unknowing World (Nagasaki, 9 August 1945)
This section of Burnt Shadows is set in Nagasaki, on the day that U.S. forces dropped an atomic bomb on the city, thus putting an end to Japanese involvement in the Second World War. Konrad Weiss, a German living in Nagasaki, is in a relationship with Hiroko Tanaka, a Japanese woman who works as a German translator. Hiroko works at a steel factory but has the day off because they have run out of steel to measure. Both Hiroko and Konrad are thinking about how the war has changed Nagasaki and reminisce of a time when the political atmosphere wasn't so tense, there weren't food and supply rationing, and the physical landscape of the city hadn't been transformed by the demands of war.
Due to the wartime atmosphere, both Hiroko and Konrad are facing public scrutiny: Konrad because he is a Western foreigner, and Hiroko because her father was deemed a "traitor" after he angrily burned down a cherry tree commemorating the death of a young kamikaze pilot who was one of Hiroko's students. Because of this, Hiroko and Konrad are forced to keep their romance out of public spaces, where they loudly praise Japan and are trailed by the military police.
On the morning of August 9, Hiroko and Konrad are in separate parts of the city when they hear an air raid siren. Konrad takes cover in a shelter on the property he is living in, Azalea Manor, where his one-time friend, Yoshi Wanatabe, joins him. (Yoshi no longer associates with Konrad in public because of the German's unfavorable political status, though he had promised Konrad that as soon as the war was over, their friendship would resume as normal).
Hiroko goes to a shelter in her neighborhood, which is packed full of people with little room to breathe. In each of their separate shelters, Hiroko and Konrad learn that a "new bomb" (the atomic bomb) was dropped on Hiroshima a few days prior and the devastation was unimaginably worse than anything that came before. Konrad leaves his shelter in search of Hiroko, deciding that if he is going to die he wants to do so beside her. Hiroko gets fed up of being crammed against her neighbors, who coldly regard her as the "traitor's daughter" and decides to leave the shelter as well.
Sirens give the all-clear signal before Konrad and Hiroko run into each other outside of her home. Hiroko invites Konrad in, where he asks her to marry him. Hiroko invites Konrad over to dinner that evening so that he can tell her father. Konrad tells her that he is going to leave and return so that his first meeting with Hiroko's father is under more appropriate terms, though Hiroko pleads with him to stay with her and enjoy their newly engaged bliss a little longer.
After Konrad leaves, Hiroko stands on her balcony feeling excited about her engagement. Then the atomic bomb drops. Hiroko's back catches on fire. She sees her father crawl towards the house, badly burned, but she does not recognize him at first and instead thinks he is a reptile. Konrad is killed by the blast.
Veiled Birds (Delhi, 1947) Chapters 1-4
Two years later, Hiroko arrives in the house of James Burton and Elizabeth Burton (formerly Ilse Weiss). Elizabeth Burton is Konrad's half-sister. James and Elizabeth are English colonial settlers in Delhi, part of the British Raj, or English colonial rule in India. At first, James and Elizabeth do not believe Hiroko's claim that she was once engaged to Konrad. Elizabeth and James argue about what to do with Hiroko and whether or not to let her stay at their home. Eventually, the Burtons tell Hiroko that she can stay with them while she gets settled in Delhi.
Sajjad Ali Ashraf works for James in the hopes of one day entering the legal field (James is a lawyer). Instead of teaching Sajjad much about his trade, however, James plays chess with him almost every day. Sajjad's family is looking for a potential woman who Sajjad can marry, with his mother, Khadija, spearheading the effort. The family is having a hard time finding a match for Sajjad due to the current political unrest in Delhi (for an explanation of the political context of this section, including British colonial rule and eventual Partition, see the "Political Context" section of the Analysis below). Most recently, the potential wife's family said that they would be moving to Pakistan and expected Sajjad to join them, which caused Sajjad's family to call off the engagement. Sajjad tells his mother that he wants a "modern wife" (53). Khadija tells Sajjad that he is spending too much time with the English, who are cutting him off from his culture and his past.
In the Burton household, Hiroko gets sick and is incapacitated for several weeks. During this time, Elizabeth cares for her, and they become friends. Once Hiroko is feeling better, she asks if Sajjad can give her Urdu lessons. They agree that he will teach her Urdu in the mornings, before his workday begins with James. Through these lessons, Hiroko and Sajjad learn about each other and Hiroko tells Sajjad about the trauma of enduring the atomic bomb.
Hiroko and Elizabeth bond over their shared connection with Konrad. They speak in German, which feels like their "secret language." Elizabeth is grateful to have a companion in her home, as her marriage with James has gotten more tense and difficult. Elizabeth and James take Hiroko to a party where the other English settlers treat her as both an insider and an outsider in their world. Elizabeth and Hiroko discuss the recent announcement that the British government is soon planning to pull out of India.
Analysis
Nagasaki in 1945 is the first of several war settings that we will experience in Burnt Shadows. What is important to note about these environments is what changes in daily life when a country goes to war and what stays the same. As Konrad notes in "The Yet Unknowing World," war changes everything about one's relationship to others and one's country: "but war fractures every view. Or it closes off the view completely" (6). For Konrad and Hiroko, the physical landscape of Nagasaki has changed due to the war. As Hiroko notes, as flowerbeds turn into potato crops, "everything is distilled into its most functional form" (7). More importantly, however, the rules of "polite" society and the prejudices that people carry stay the same, even in a wartime atmosphere. This frustrates Hiroko, who wishes that social codes were the one thing that would actually change. She asks Konrad: "Why should rules of conduct be the only things untouched by war? . . . Everything from the past is passed" (10).
Hiroko can see a way past "rules of conduct" because she is already considered an outsider in her neighborhood as the "traitor's daughter." This is because Hiroko's father protested the death of a young kamikaze pilot who was from their neighborhood and was one of Hiroko's students. Konrad also has the status of social pariah in wartime Japan. While Westerners enjoyed a favorable reputation in Japan before the war, Konrad is now seen as a proxy for his government and therefore treated with suspicion. This means that his journals have become dangerous objects in the eyes of the Japanese government: "ever since Germany's surrender shifted his status in Nagasaki from that of ally into some more ambiguous state which requires the military police to watch him closely, the lifeless words have become potent enough to send him to prison" (9). As a result, Konrad loses all of his friends, including Yoshi Watanabe, who was a close friend of his for many years. Yoshi tells Konrad, "Until the war ends, I'm staying away from all the Westerners in Nagasaki. But only until the war ends. After, after Konrad, things will be as before" (12).
In this way, the wartime atmosphere in "The Yet Unknowing World" brings to light a major conflict throughout the entirety of Burnt Shadows: that of the individual vs the nation-state. As Shamsie's characters move through the world, they find individual bonds with other people that might come into conflict with the way that their national identities relate to each other. In other words, Shamsie's characters move through the world as both individuals and as citizens. It is how they choose to navigate these different understandings of self that is important. Shamsie lays out this theme in an interview: "From the beginning [Hiroko] was, in my mind, a multilingual woman, in love with a German man and disdainful of official attitudes towards foreigners—but she was living in a highly xenophobic society and later experienced the most unspeakable act of war by one nation against the people of another nation. So these two divergent currents—her own open nature and the us versus them nature of wartime nation-states—were established early on, through Hiroko, as being important to the novel."
The tension between the individual and their political category/nationality extends into "Veiled Birds" with the relationships between Elizabeth, Harry, Sajjad, and eventually Hiroko. In this setting, Delhi has been colonized by the British Raj, under an almost-century-long rule that is quickly coming to an end. James and Elizabeth are individuals in one sense, but they also symbolize the colonizers in another. This is most apparent through how they relate to Sajjad. James likes to believe that he and Sajjad are on equal footing. However, Sajjad knows that their relationship is unequal in ways that James does not even pick up on. On James displaying camaraderie towards Sajjad, Sajjad notes: "He knew how important it was to James to enact these moments of camaraderie which undercut the rigidity of barriers between them. That it was only in James's hands to choose when to undercut and when to affirm the barriers was something Sajjad accepted as inevitable and James never even considered." (39).
James and Elizabeth are so blinded by their social position that they can only see the world in an "us versus them" dynamic where their people are vastly different from each other. Sajjad relates their way of thinking to their preferred style of landscaping. While Dilli (what Sajjad calls his side of their city where the colonizers don't live) is allowed to grow lush and overgrown, Delhi (where the colonizers live) is carefully gardened. Sajjad observes: "there was Delhi: city of the Raj, where every Englishman's bungalow had lush gardens, lined with red flowerpots. That was the end of Sajjad's ruminations on British India. Flowerpots: it summed it all up. No trees growing in courtyards for the English, no rooms clustered around those courtyards; instead, separations and demarcations" (33).
Here is perhaps where Sajjad and the Burtons are the most different. Sajjad understands the way that his relationship to the Burtons is inherently affected by colonization. However, he is also able to easily shift between the world of the colonizers and his own world: "I am like those occasional pigeons, Sajjad thought. At home in Dilli but breaking free of the rest of my flock to investigate the air of Delhi" (34). As Sajjad crosses boundaries, he is able to see people as individuals, beyond their national identity. Hiroko, who is an outsider in Delhi, neither on the side of the colonizers or colonized, can do the same. As the novel progresses, every character will be asked to see the people they interact with as more than just their political category or nationality. Almost everyone rises to the occasion, until the very end of the novel, when Kim, James and Elizabeth's granddaughter, makes a terrible miscalculation.
