Hiroshima Chapter 3 Summary

Details Are Being Investigated

  • Early that evening, a Japanese naval boat came by the park, and a young officer used a megaphone to shout assurances to the evacuees. He claimed medical help was coming.
  • The assistance Father Kleinsorge had sent for (which consisted of roughly six priests from the Novitiate) arrived.
  • With Mr. Tanimoto's assistance in getting them across the river, the Novitiate party helped get Father Schiffer and Father LaSalle out of there via stretchers. Father Cieslik also joined them, believing he could walk. However, Father Kleinsorge was feeling too badly to come along, so he said he would wait until the next day. He asked that they send a cart back for Mrs. Nakamura and her children.
  • Alongside all this, Mr. Tanimoto was trying to rescue people in danger of drowning.
  • Meanwhile, Dr. Fujii was spending the night at his parents' house, in a great deal of pain from his injuries.
  • At the Red Cross Hospital, Dr. Sasaki was overloaded and totally exhausted. After working for nineteen hours straight, he and some others tried to go get some sleep, but before they could get an hour of rest in, some patients found them and demanded their assistance.
  • Meanwhile, Fathers LaSalle and Schiffer were successfully transported to the Novitiate, where they received care and got to sleep in clean beds.
  • At the same time, Miss Sasaki and her companions under the lean-to hadn't been rescued yet. She remained outside all night, in too much pain to sleep.
  • Back in the park, Father Kleinsorge was feeling more than ready to sleep, but Mrs. Murata wasn't about to let him, and kept him up late talking. The Nakamura children also had trouble sleeping.
  • When Mr. Tanimoto woke the next morning, he discovered that a number of immobilized people he'd helped move up the sandspit (and away from the tide that threatened to drown them) had drowned anyway when the water got up higher than he had anticipated.
  • Mr. Tanimoto was annoyed that no doctors had come to help yet, despite the military's assurances, so he went to find some.
  • He found an Army medical unit and started to chew them out, but he soon saw that they were in way over their head with patients. The doctor wearily brushed Mr. Tanimoto off, basically saying they were doing the best they could to help the people who could make it survive. Defeated on the medical front, Mr. Tanimoto went off to find some food to bring back to the wounded in the park.
  • Meanwhile, Father Kleinsorge was fetching water for the wounded, coming across some pretty gruesome scenes in the process.
  • He met two children whose last name was Kataoka. They had been separated from their mother.
  • People from the Novitiate came with the promised handcart. They collected the Nakamuras and Father Kleinsorge's things and headed out.
  • Kleinsorge, meanwhile, went to the police to see if he could collect some compensation from the government for the destruction of their mission.
  • After filing the claim, he headed to Nagatsuka. Once there, he collapsed into bed, pausing just long enough to ask that someone go back for the Kataoka children.
  • Miss Sasaki, meanwhile, still hadn't been rescued. She stayed under that lean-to for two days. On the third, some friends, thinking she was dead, came looking for her body. Instead of rescuing her, they told her that her parents and baby brother were presumed dead and then wandered away. Later, some men arrived and carried her to a truck. She was then transferred to a couple of different hospitals, where the doctors were unsure of how to treat her massively injured and infected leg.
  • On August 8th, Father Cieslik went looking for Mr. Fukai, but had no luck finding him.
  • Dr. Sasaki, meanwhile, had been working for three straight days (with one hour of sleep) at the Red Cross Hospital. Eventually, he decided he should let his mother know he wasn't dead. So, he traveled back to Mukaihara, where he went to bed and slept for seventeen hours. We can't blame him.
  • Back at the Novitiate, Father Kleinsorge tried to rest and process what he had been through. He went into the city and was floored by all the damage he saw.
  • On August 9th, the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.
  • On that same day, Mr. Tanimoto was still in the park trying to help people. He felt watched by Mrs. Kamai, whose husband still hadn't turned up.
  • Mrs. Nakamura and her children were set up at the Novitiate, but they continued to feel ill.
  • Having heard that Dr. Fujii was injured and staying with a friend named Okuma in Fukawa, Father Kleinsorge asked Father Cieslik to go look in on him. When Father C. reached there, he and Dr. Fujii drank whiskey and discussed rumors regarding what exactly that bomb had been made of.
  • After five days of working in the park, Mr. Tanimoto headed back into the city to dig around in the rubble of his parsonage.
  • While he was there, Miss Tanaka came looking for him. She was the daughter of the Mr. Tanaka who had been spreading rumors about his loyalty to the Japanese. She said her father was dying and was looking for religious comfort. Mr. Tanimoto agreed to come minister to him. He died while Mr. Tanimoto was there.
  • Meanwhile, Miss Sasaki was still very ill and being bounced around from hospital to hospital.
  • At the Novitiate, the Kataoka children were still very much missing their mother. Eventually, Father Cieslik was able to locate their family, including the mother, and reunite them.
  • Alongside all this, rumors continued to swirl about the bomb and what type it was, and scientists milled into town with devices to measure its impact.
  • The Nakamuras went to live with Mrs. Nakamura's sister-in-law. Mrs. Nakamura set out one day to try to find her mother, brother, and older sister back in Hiroshima, only to discover that they were all dead. She was unable to speak that night when she got home after that discovery—and seeing all the destruction in the city.
  • After resting at his mother's house, Dr. Sasaki went back to the hospital and started burying the dead.
  • On August 15th, the Emperor got on the radio (which was unprecedented) and announced that Japan had surrendered to the Allied Forces. Mrs. Nakamura heard the news when she ran into her younger sister during another trip into Hiroshima to find some food she'd stored in an air raid shelter.