Summary
Twelve days after the bombing, Father Kleinsorge leaves the Novitiate to bring the Jesuits' money back into the bank in Hiroshima, which has reopened. He is now accustomed to seeing the terrible ruins of the city on this walk. In the center of the city there are four square miles of reddish-brown scar, where nearly everything has been knocked down and burned in the blast. Only a few buildings are left standing. Though it is days after the bombing and he is not badly injured, Father Kleinsorge frequently feels a rush of weakness and faints.
Mrs. Nakamura realizes that her hair has begun falling out, and within a few days she is entirely bald. She and her youngest daughter, Myeko, also feels extremely weak and tired, though they have not been injured. Mr. Tanimoto experiences a similar sensation. These four people do not know it, but they are coming down with radiation sickness, a strange disease that was not named until later. Miss Sasaki is still in pain from an infection, lying in a makeshift hospital in a primary school and reading translations of Guy de Maupassant stories that a man who had taken a liking to her gave her. At the end of August, she is taken to the Red Cross hospital in Hiroshima, and gets her first look at the ruins of her city. Strangely, the bomb stimulated the growth of plants, and many surfaces are now covered in the optimistic green of new life.
At the hospital, Dr. Sasaki, somewhat better rested now, but still drained from the ordeal, treats Miss Sasaki. Dr. Fujii is living in the summer house of his friend, Mr. Okuma, on the banks of the Ota River; however, in early September there are many rain storms, and terrible floods wash the house away. In Hiroshima, rumors begin to spread that everyone is sick because the atomic bomb dropped a poison that made the city uninhabitable for seven years. Japanese physicists enter the city to investigate the radiation; eventually, they determine that it is not high enough to cause serious effects on the human body, and that people can reenter the city after all.
This pleases Mrs. Nakamura, who then sends her brother-in-law to go look for the sewing machine, her family's entire livelihood, which she had submerged in a concrete water tank immediately following the bombing. Unfortunately, it has rusted away and is useless. At the same time, Father Kleinsorge is getting progressively sicker, and his colleagues send him to the Catholic International Hospital in Tokyo. Not many atomic bomb patients have reached the doctors in Tokyo yet, and they are unsure how to treat him and whether or not he will die. He does not begin to recover until October; after that, he starts to enjoy being in Tokyo, where many people come to visit him because they are curious about the Hiroshima survivors.
Mrs. Nakamura does not have enough money to seek treatment, but eventually she and her daughter begin to feel better on their own. Mr. Tanimoto has a doctor come to examine and treat him, then rests for two months in bed at his mother-in-law's house, and then at his father's after that. Dr. Sasaki and the other doctors at the Red Cross Hospital watch this strange disease unfold. Many patients die as they slowly begin to understand its cause and its effects. Doctors begin to base their treatment on the way they would treat a patient who had been overdosed with X-rays, since radiation poison seems similar to them.
Dr. Fujii hears about a vacant private clinic in Kaitaichi, purchases it immediately, and moves there to begin his own practice. He does great business, and enjoys when members of the former Allied troops who are occupying Japan in its postwar reconstruction period come to him in the evenings—it allows him to practice his English. Miss Sasaki's leg takes a turn for the worse as Dr. Sasaki treats her, and she wonders if the man to whom she was engaged has not come back to her because he heard about her injuries.
A new municipal government is set up in Hiroshima, and citizens begin to crowd back in to help rebuild the city. Because Hiroshima will no longer be adjacent to many important military bases, they have a hard time deciding what the city should be like in the aftermath. During this process, more and more bodies are recovered from the ruins, and the estimated death toll rises to at least one hundred thousand. Scientists come in to try to work backwards and discover the power of the weapon that was used. Much is revealed about the potential for further nuclear weapons development, though the American government attempts to keep their knowledge under wraps.
When a dying friend of Miss Sasaki asks Father Kleinsorge to call on him in the hospital, Miss Sasaki asks him how God could allow something like this to happen; Father Kleinsorge says that man has fallen from grace, and explains the reasons why he believes everything happened. Mrs. Nakamura manages to use her bonds and wartime savings to rent a small shanty for her family near the site of her former house, and is finally able to send her children back to school. Mr. Tanimoto moves back to Hiroshima as well, and becomes friendly with Father Kleinsorge and the other Jesuits.
Eventually, the Jesuits are able to commission the building of a mission house similar to the one they had lived in before fire from the bomb destroyed it. By then, Father Kleinsorge is back from the Tokyo hospital, though he still finds it hard to exert much energy. Miss Sasaki took strength from her conversation with Father Kleinsorge, and slowly heals. She prepares to convert to Catholicism. It takes six months for the Red Cross Hospital and Dr. Sasaki's job to get back to normal.
A year after the bombing, the survivors are still struggling. They all feel different things in the aftermath of the bombing, but a common sentiment among them is pride in the resilience of their community. They believe that all lives lost were for the sake of their beautiful country. Not many citizens in Hiroshima bother to spend time understanding the way the atomic bomb works or debating the ethics of its use, but many harbored a hatred of Americans long into the future. The Jesuits, however, as foreigners, often discuss the ethics problem, and are fairly split on it. Hersey finishes by remarking that it is impossible to understand how the children of Hiroshima, like the Nakamuras, will be affected by this experience into the future.
Analysis
While time moved slowly in the previous three chapters, it goes by quickly in Chapter 4, as Hersey narrates the experiences of his six subjects throughout the recovery process in the first year after the bombing. This chapter conveys a powerful message about the resilience of a community after tragedy. The residence of Hiroshima are proud of their ability to quickly get back up on their feet and rebuild their devastated city, despite so many unknown challenges, such as radiation sickness. This is a common phenomenon for communities affected by war: even though what they experienced was abhorrent, tragedy gives them a chance to prove their strength and come together to help each other, making them stronger in the long run.
Hersey does not attempt to conceal the extent of the bomb's damage, very explicitly describing not only the physical injuries of people, but also the terrible state this once beautiful city is in. However, he does plant some seeds of optimism that serve as powerful symbols of hope for a city that has been torn apart. The most prominent of these are the sprouts of "panic grass and feverfew," the plants that give this chapter its name. Somehow, radiation from the bomb has stimulated growth, and shades of fuzzy green cover the bare Hiroshima ground as plants begin to appear. They are only a small solace, but they indicate that Hiroshima will be reborn.
Because Hersey chose to follow characters like Father Kleinsorge and Mr. Tanimoto, who are religious leaders, much of this piece is about finding strength in faith in the aftermath of war or terror. Miss Sasaki, the most severely injured of all this piece's subjects, is able to do just that after speaking with Father Kleinsorge. Father Kleinsorge's perspective is that, through humans' destructive actions like war, they have distanced themselves from the protection of God; a terrible event such as this is meant to align them back onto the path of faith. Needing some sort of motivation to recover from her wounds, Miss Sasaki latches onto this thought, and it empowers her to heal. Faith, as a force, is extremely potent, especially in wake of tragedy.
Though Hersey's form of New Journalism does add some level of subjective experience to a piece of reporting, he still keeps it objective by refraining from inserting his own opinion on the atomic bombing into the piece. He does not dramatize anti-American sentiment in Japan, keeping this article about the individual experiences of the victims rather than commenting on the war itself. However, in this last chapter of the original report, he does bring up the important discussion of the morality of the bombing.
He presents the two sides of the issue: some argue that the bombing was acceptable on moral grounds, because Japan and the United States were in a state of total war where anything goes. Mrs. Nakamura even says, "It was war and we had to expect it" (Chapter 4, pg. 109). However, others argue that it is morally wrong to use a weapon that deals so much destruction without the ability to discriminate between soldiers and civilians. This debate about the morality of nuclear weapons continues today, in a nuclear age that was set in motion by the event that John Hersey has investigated so thoroughly: the 1945 bombing of Hiroshima.
