Summary
The chapter "Hiroshima" centers on a young Japanese girl named Mayako who has been taken away from the center of the city during WWII. Mayako’s life has been dictated by war and she fears for her future. Written in the first person, this story utilizes simple and abstract language, showing how Mayako doesn’t fully understand her circumstances.
The story opens with Mayako talking about how she now lives outside of Hiroshima in a refuge with other children. Mayako’s parents sent her away from the city because of threats from the Allied forces that they would bomb Japan. Mayako talks about daily life at the refuge, such as learning lessons from her teachers and playing games with the other kids.
Mayako feels a strong sense of connection to her nation and has been taught to be brave. Although she misses her parents and speaks frequently of seeing her family at the Next Visiting Day, she distracts herself by playing role-playing war games with her friends. She's friends with two other girls her age, Tomiko and Yukiyo. Mayako is also influenced by her teacher Mrs. Sasiko, who teaches her to be brave and not to give in to the enemy.
Mayako feels very homesick for most of the story and doesn't understand why her parents and Big Sister couldn't join her at the refuge. She finds solace in listening to war updates on the radio, which becomes increasingly full of static as the days go on.
Mayako doesn't know when she will be able to leave. As the days pass, her sense of fear and confusion increases as she notices the teachers at the refuge become tenser. The story ends with Mayako having a vision of seeing her parents again as the atomic bomb is dropped on Hiroshima.
Analysis
A common feature of Nam Le's short stories is that many take place during times in history when a country is going through a significant upheaval. To understand the context for this story, "Hiroshima," a reader must verse themself in the history of the Pacific War, an element, or "theater," of World War II. Throughout the war, the Allied forces bombed over 50 Japanese cities. They also dropped leaflets with warnings about air raids from planes, as is depicted in Le's story. These bombings increased in 1945 until the United States famously dropped two atomic bombs: one on Hiroshima on August 6 and one on Nagasaki on August 9. These two bombings and subsequent radiation poisoning killed around 200,000 Japanese people, mostly civilians.
Le's historical fiction stories focus on the experience of a single character, often a young character that does not understand the full scope of what is happening. This causes the reader to have more empathy, which is important since Le's readership is likely to be citizens of countries that were part of the Allied powers in World War II, since Le is writing in English. One device Le uses to show Mayako's limited understanding of the war going on is her personification of the radio. Mayako repeatedly says that the radio is sick, such as when at night she narrates, "The radio did not speak but made the sounds of a sick person breathing" (p.164). This description shows that Mayako does not understand the seriousness of the Allied forces' campaign to block radio communication used by the Japanese military. The comparison to a sick person breathing also gives Mayako's living situation an eerie, unpleasant quality.
Similarly, Le uses onomatopoeia and references to nature to demonstrate how Mayako's youthful mind makes sense of elements of the war. Mayako thinks to herself, "I imagine I can hear the engines of a B-24 behind it. Father taught me the difference between the sounds. It will also depend on how high they are, he said. The natsuzemi cicada says ji-i-i, the higurashi sounds like a bell: kana kana kana, the minminzemi makes the sound of the lotus sutra. Do you hear that? It's a plane" (p.169). Since it is so difficult for Mayako to understand the new sounds and experiences of Japan being under attack, she turns to memories of her father teaching her about the natural order of the world; this allows her to feel calm enough to go to sleep.
The theme of parents is once again present in this short story. Mayako has been forced to live without her parents at a young age, and she thinks about them constantly. It is clearly confusing to Mayako that she has responsibilities to her family and her country that seem to be in conflict with one another. This tension is brought out by the repeated use of the word "Fatherland" (p.166) to refer to Japan.
In contrast to "Halflead Bay," the story directly before this one in the collection The Boat, "Hiroshima" is the shortest story that is included. The brevity of this story, along with the suddenness of the ending, gives the reader a vivid sense that Mayako's life was cut short.
