John Hersey’s Hiroshima is a poignant work on the verge of oral history and reportage, giving voice to six Hiroshima residents who survived the nuclear attack on August 6, 1945. Among them were office worker Toshiko Sasaki, doctor Masakazu Fujii, dressmaker and mother of three Hatsuyo Nakamura, surgeon Terufumi Sasaki and two clergymen, Wilhelm Kleinsorge and Kiyoshi Tanimoto.
This story of the apocalypse seen through the eyes of real people, collected by Hersey a year after the bomb exploded, will allow everyone to better understand the evils of armed conflicts: powerless persistence in fear for the lives of loved ones, the constant contact with death. One explosion destroys many years of effort to build a hospital, a family, a community. Here is a testimony of a completely ordinary end of the world, one that finds one person in the kitchen and another while moving furniture. This is also a story of heroism without heroes, sacrifice without hope. Reach for Hiroshima and you’ll find out exactly what it means when an atomic bomb explodes somewhere in the world.
The author supplemented the book with an account of the life of his interlocutors after 40 years. You will learn how the survivors tried to understand the meaning of the catastrophe and, often unsuccessfully, to fight its consequences. You will see a gradual process of rebuilding life from the rubble and political attempts to shape collective memory. Hiroshima is one of those beautiful, rare books, thanks to which you can deeply experience Japan against the backdrop of emotions and events that are close to all of us today.
