Miss Sasaki Toshiko, the East Asia Tin Works clerk, who was not related to Dr. Sasaki, got up at three o'clock in the morning on the day the bomb fell. There was extra housework to do. Her eleven-month-old brother, Akio, had come down the day before with a serious stomach upset; her mother had taken him to the Ta-mura Pediatric Hospital and was staying there with him. Miss Sasaki, who was about twenty, had to cook breakfast for her father, a brother, a sister, and herself, and—since the hospital, because of the war, was unable to provide food—to prepare a whole day's meals for her mother and the baby, in time for her father, who worked in a factory making rubber earplugs for artillery crews, to take the food by on his way to the plant. When she had finished and had cleaned and put away the cooking things, it was nearly seven. The family lived in Koi, and she had a forty-five-minute trip to the tin works, in the section of town called Kannon-machi. She was in charge of the personnel records in the factory. She left Koi at seven, and as soon as she reached the plant, she went with some of the other girls from the personnel department to the factory auditorium. A prominent local Navy man, a former employee, had committed suicide the day before by throwing himself under a train-a death considered honorable enough to warrant a memorial service, which was to be held at the tin works at ten o'clock that morning. In the large hall, Miss Sasaki and the others made suitable preparations for the meeting. This work took about twenty minutes.

Miss Sasaki went back to her office and sat down at her desk. She was quite far from the windows, which were off to her left, and behind her were a couple of tall bookcases containing all the books of the factory library, which the personnel department had organized. She settled herself at her desk, put some things in a drawer, and shifted papers. She thought that before she began to make entries in her lists of new employees, discharges, and departures for the Army, she would chat for a moment with the girl at her right. Just as she turned her head away from the windows, the room was filled with a blinding light. She was paralyzed by fear, fixed still in her chair for a long moment (the plant was 1,6oo yards from the center).

Everything fell, and Miss Sasaki lost consciousness. The ceiling dropped suddenly and the wooden floor above collapsed in splinters and the people up there came down and the roof above them gave way; but principally and first of all, the bookcases right behind her swooped forward and the contents threw her down, with her left leg horribly twisted and breaking underneath her. There, in the tin factory, in the first moment of the atomic age, a human being was crushed by books.

When Miss Sasaki heard the voices of the people caught along with her in the dilapidation at the tin factory, she began speaking to them. Her nearest neighbor, she discovered, was a high-school girl who had been drafted for factory work, and who said her back was broken. Miss Sasaki replied, "I am lying here and I can't move. My left leg is cut off."

Some time later, she again heard somebody walk overhead and then move off to one side, and whoever it was began burrowing. The digger released several people, and when he had uncovered the high-school girl, she found that her back was not broken, after all, and she crawled out. Miss Sasaki spoke to the rescuer, and he worked toward her. He pulled away a great number of books, until he had made a tunnel to her. She could see his perspiring face as he said, "Come out, Miss." She tried. "I can't move," she said. The man excavated some more and told her to try with all her strength to get out. But books were heavy on her hips, and the man finally saw that a bookcase was leaning on the books and that a heavy beam pressed down on the bookcase. "Wait," he said. "I'll get a crowbar."

The man was gone a long time, and when he came back, he was ill-tempered, as if her plight were all her fault. "We have no men to help you!" he shouted in through the tunnel. "You'll have to get out by your self."

"That's impossible," she said. "My left leg.. ." The man went away.

Much later, several men came and dragged Miss Sasaki out. Her left leg was not severed, but it was badly broken and cut and it hung askew below the knee. They took her out into a courtyard. It was raining. She sat on the ground in the rain. When the downpour increased, someone directed all the wounded people to take cover in the factory's air-raid shelters. "Come along," a torn-up woman said to her. "You can hop." But Miss Sasaki could not move, and she just waited in the rain. Then a man propped up a large sheet of corrugated iron as a kind of lean-to, and took her in his arms and carried her to it. She was grateful until he brought two horribly wounded people—a woman with a whole breast sheared off and a man whose face was all raw from a burn—to share the simple shed with her. No one came back. The rain cleared and the cloudy afternoon was hot; before nightfall the three grotesques under the slanting piece of twisted iron began to smell quite bad.

Altogether, Miss Sasaki was left two days and two nights under the piece of propped-up roofing with her crushed leg and her two unpleasant comrades. Her only diversion was when men came to the factory air-raid shelters, which she could see from under one corner of her shelter, and hauled corpses up out of them with ropes. Her leg became discolored, swollen, and putrid. All that time, she went without food and water. On the third day, August 8th, some friends who supposed she was dead came to look for her body and found her. They told her that her mother, father, and baby brother, who at the time of the explosion were in the Tamura Pediatric Hospital, where the baby was a patient, had all been given up as certainly dead, since the hospital was totally destroyed. Her friends then left her to think that piece of news over. Later, some men picked her up by the arms and legs and carried her quite a distance to a truck. For about an hour, the truck moved over a bumpy road, and Miss Sasaki, who had become convinced that she was dulled to pain, discovered that she was not. The men lifted her out at a relief station in the section of Inokuchi, where two Army doctors looked at her. The moment one of them touched her wound, she fainted. She came to in time to hear them discuss whether or not to cut off her leg; one said there was gas gangrene in the lips of the wound and predicted she would die unless they amputated, and the other said that was too bad, because they had no equipment with which to do the job. She fainted again. When she recovered consciousness, she was being carried somewhere on a stretcher. She was put aboard a launch, which went to the nearby island of Ninoshima, and she was taken to a military hospital there. Another doctor examined her and said that she did not have gas gangrene, though she did have a fairly ugly compound fracture. He said quite coldly that he was sorry, but this was a hospital for operative surgical cases only, and because she had no gangrene, she would have to return to Hiroshima that night. But then the doctor took her temperature, and what he saw on the thermometer made him decide to let her stay.

Miss Sasaki lay in steady pain in the Goddess of Mercy Primary School, at Hatsukaichi, the fourth station to the southwest of Hiroshima on the electric train. An internal infection still prevented the proper setting of the compound fracture of her lower left leg. A young man who was in the same hospital and who seemed to have grown fond of her in spite of her unremitting preoccupation with her suffering, or else just pitied her because of it, lent her a Japanese translation of de Maupassant, and she tried to read the stories, but she could concentrate for only four or five minutes at a time.

The hospitals and aid stations around Hiroshima were so crowded in the first weeks after the bombing, and their staffs were so variable, depending on their health and on the unpredictable arrival of outside help, that patients had to be constantly shifted from place to place. Miss Sasaki, who had already been moved three times, twice by ship, was taken at the end of August to an engineering school, also at Hatsukaichi. Because her leg did not improve but swelled more and more, the doctors at the school bound it with crude splints and took her by car, on September 9th, to the Red Cross Hospital in Hiroshima. This was the first chance she had had to look at the ruins of Hiroshima; the last time she had been carried through the city's streets, she had been hovering on the edge of unconsciousness. Even though the wreckage had been described to her, and though she was still in pain, the sight horrified and amazed her, and there was something she noticed about it that particularly gave her the creeps. Over everything—up through the wreckage of the city, in gutters, along the riverbanks, tangled among tiles and tin roofing, climbing on charred tree trunks—was a blanket of fresh, vivid, lush, optimistic green; the verdancy rose even from the foundations of ruined houses. Weeds already hid the ashes, and wild flowers were in bloom among the city's bones. The bomb had not only left the underground organs of plants intact; it had stimulated them. Everywhere were bluets and Spanish bayonets, goosefoot, morning glories and day lilies, the hairy-fruited bean, purslane and clotbur and sesame and panic grass and feverfew. Especially in a circle at the center, sickle senna grew in extraordinary regeneration, not only standing among the charred remnants of the same plant but pushing up in new places, among bricks and through cracks in the asphalt. It actually seemed as if a load of sickle-senna seed had been dropped along with the bomb.

At the Red Cross Hospital, Miss Sasaki was put under the care of Dr. Sasaki. Now, a month after the explosion, something like order had been re-established in the hospital; which is to say that the patients who still lay in the corridors at least had mats to sleep on and that the supply of medicines, which had given out in the first few days, had been replaced, though inadequately, by contributions from other cities. Dr. Sasaki, who had had one seventeen-hour sleep at his home on the third night, had ever since then rested only about six hours a night, on a mat at the hospital; he had lost twenty pounds from his very small body; he still wore the borrowed glasses.

Since Miss Sasaki was a woman and was so sick (and perhaps, he afterward admitted, just a little bit because she was named Sasaki), Dr. Sasaki put her on a mat in a semi-private room, which at that time had only eight people in it. He questioned her and put down on her record card, in the correct, scrunched-up German in which he wrote all his records: “Mittelgrosse Patientin in gutem Ernährungszustand. Fraktur am linken Un-terschenkelknochen mit Wunde; Anschwellung in der linken Unterschenkelgegend. Haut and sichtbare Schleimhäute mdssig durchblutet and kein Oedema," noting that she was a medium-sized female patient in good general health; that she had a compound fracture of the left tibia, with swelling of the left lower leg; that her skin and visible mucous membranes were heavily spotted with petechiae, which are hemorrhages about the size of grains of rice, or even as big as soybeans; and, in addition, that her head, eyes, throat, lungs, and heart were apparently normal; and that she had a fever. He wanted to set her fracture and put her leg in a cast, but he had run out of plaster of Paris long since, so he just stretched her out on a mat and prescribed aspirin for her fever, and glucose intravenously and diastase orally for her undernourishment (which he had not entered on her record because everyone suffered from it). She exhibited only one of the queer symptoms so many of his patients were just then beginning to show—the spot hemorrhages.

Giving Miss Sasaki a local anaesthetic of procaine, Dr. Sasaki made an incision in her leg on October 23rd, to drain the infection, which still lingered on eleven weeks after the injury. In the following days, so much pus formed that he had to dress the opening each morning and evening. A week later, she complained of great pain, so he made another incision; he cut still a third, on November 9th, and enlarged it on the twenty-sixth. All this time, Miss Sasaki grew weaker and weaker, and her spirits fell low. One day, the young man who had lent her his translation of de Maupassant at Hatsukaichi came to visit her; he told her that he was going to Kyushu but that when he came back, he would like to see her again. She didn't care. Her leg had been so swollen and painful all along that the doctor had not even tried to set the fractures, and though an X-ray taken in November showed that the bones were mending, she could see under the sheet that her left leg was nearly three inches shorter than her right and that her left foot was turning inward. She thought often of the man to whom she had been engaged. Someone told her he was back from overseas. She wondered what he had heard about her injuries that made him stay away.

Late in February, 1946, a friend of Miss Sasaki's called on Father Kleinsorge and asked him to visit her in the hospital. She had been growing more and more depressed and morbid; she seemed little interested in living. Father Kleinsorge went to see her several times. On his first visit, he kept the conversation general, formal, and yet vaguely sympathetic, and did not mention religion. Miss Sasaki herself brought it up the second time he dropped in on her. Evidently she had had some talks with a Catholic. She asked bluntly, "If your God is so good and kind, how can he let people suffer like this?" She made a gesture which took in her shrunken leg, the other patients in her room, and Hiroshima as a whole.

"My child," Father Kleinsorge said, "man is not now in the condition God intended. He has fallen from grace through sin." And he went on to explain all the reasons for everything.

Whether or not Father Kleinsorge’s answers to Miss Sasaki’s questions about life were final and absolute truths, she seemed quickly to draw physical strength from them. Dr. Sasaki noticed it and congratulated Father Kleinsorge. By April 15th, her temperature and white count were normal and the infection in the wound was beginning to clear up. On the twentieth, there was almost no pus, and for the first time she jerked along a corridor on crutches. Five days later, the wound had begun to heal, and on the last day of the months she was discharged.

During the early summer, she prepared herself for conversion to Catholicism. In that period she had ups and downs. Her depressions were deep. She knew she would always be a cripple. Her fiancé never came to see her. There was nothing for her to do except read and look out, from her house on a hillside in Koi, across the ruins of the city where her parents and brother died. She was nervous, and any sudden noise made her put her hands quickly to her throat. Her leg still hurt; she rubbed it often and patted it, as if to console it.

In August 1946, Toshiko Sasaki was slowly pulling out of the ordeal of pain and low spirits she had undergone during the year since the bombing. Her younger brother, Yasuo, and sister, Yaeko, had escaped injury on the day of the explosion because they had been in the family home in the suburb of Koi. Now, living with them there, she was just beginning to feel alive again, when a new blow came.

Three years earlier her parents had entered into marriage negotiations with another family, and she had met the proposed young man. The couple liked each other and decided to accept the arrangement. They rented a house to live in, but Toshiko's fiancé was suddenly drafted to China. She had heard he was back, but for a long time he had not come to see her. When he finally showed up, it seemed clear to both parties that the engagement was doomed. Each time the fiancé appeared, young Yasuo, for whom Toshiko felt responsible, would rush angrily out of the house. There were indications that the fiancé's family had had second thoughts about permitting their son to marry a hibakusha and a cripple. He stopped coming. He wrote letters full of symbolic, abstract images—especially butterflies—evidently trying to express his trembling uncertainty and, probably, guilt.

The only person who gave Toshiko any real comfort was Father Kleinsorge, who continued calling on her in Koi. He was clearly bent on converting her. The confident logic of his instruction did little to convince her, for she could not accept the idea that a God who had snatched away her parents and put her through such hideous trials was loving and merciful. She was, however, warmed and healed by the priest's faithfulness to her, for it was obvious that he, too, was weak and in pain, yet he walked great distances to see her.

Her house stood by a cliff, on which there was a grove of bamboo. One morning, she stepped out of the house, and the sun's rays glistening on the minnowlike leaves of the bamboo trees took her breath away. She felt an astonishing burst of joy--the first she had experienced in as long as she could remember. She heard herself reciting the Lord's Prayer.

In September, she was baptized. Father Kleinsorge was in the hospital in Tokyo, so Father Cieslik officiated.

Sasaki-san had some modest savings her parents had left, and she took in sewing to help support Yasuo and Yaeko, but she worried about the future. She taught herself to hobble without crutches. One day in the summer of 1947, she took the two for a swim at a beach at nearby Suginoura. There she got to talking with a young man, a Korean Catholic novice who was tending a group of Sunday-school children. After a while, he told her that he did not see how she could possibly go on as she was living, responsible for her brother and sister and so fragile herself. He told her of a good orphanage in Hiroshima called the Garden of Light. She entered the children in the orphanage, and a short time later she applied for a job as an attendant there. She was hired, and after that she had the solace of being with Yasuo and Yaeko.

She was good at her work. She seemed to have found a calling, and the next year, convinced that her brother and sister were well cared for, she accepted a transfer to another orphanage, called the White Chrysanthemum Dormitory, in a suburb of Beppu, on the island of Kyushu, where it would be possible for her to receive professional child-care training. In the spring of 1949, she began commuting by train, about a half hour each way, to the city of Oita, to take courses at Oita University, and in September she passed an examination that qualified her as a nursery-school teacher. She worked at the White Chrysanthemum for six years.

Her lower left leg was badly bent, its knee was frozen, and its thigh was atrophied by the deep incisions Dr. Sasaki had made. The Sisters in charge of the orphanage arranged for her to enter the National Hospital in Beppu for orthopedic surgery. She was a patient there for four-teen months, during which she underwent three major operations: the first, not very successful, to help restore her thigh; the second to free her knee; and the third to rebreak her tibia and fibula and set them in something like their original alignment. After the hospitalization, she went to a nearby hot-springs therapeutic center for rehabilitation. Her leg would give her pain for the rest of her life, and her knee would never again bend all the way, but her legs were now more or less equal in length, and she could walk almost normally. She went back to work.

The White Chrysanthemum, with space for forty orphans, stood near an American Army base; on one side was an exercise field for the soldiers, and on the other were officers' houses. After the Korean War began, the base and the orphanage were packed. From time to time, a woman would bring in an infant whose father was an American soldier, never saying that she was the mother--usually that a friend had asked her to entrust the baby to the orphanage. Often, at night, nervous young soldiers, some white, some black, having sneaked off the base without leave, would come begging to see their offspring. They wanted to stare at the babies' faces. Some of them tracked down the mothers and married them, though they might never again see the children.

Sasaki-san felt compassion both for the mothers, some of whom were prostitutes, and for the fathers. She perceived the latter as confused boys of nineteen and twenty who as draftees were involved in a war they did not consider theirs, and who felt a rudimentary responsibility—or, at the very least, guilt—as fathers. These thoughts led her to an opinion that was unconventional for a hibakusha: that too much attention was paid to the power of the A-bomb, and not enough to the evil of war. Her rather bitter opinion was that it was the more lightly affected hibakusha and power-hungry politicians who focused on the A-bomb, and that not enough thought was given to the fact that warfare had indiscriminately made victims of Japanese who had suffered atomic and incendiary bombings, Chinese civilians who had been attacked by the Japanese, reluctant young Japanese and American soldiers who were drafted to be killed or maimed, and, yes, Japanese prostitutes and their mixed-blood babies. She had firsthand knowledge of the cruelty of the atomic bomb, but she felt that more notice should be given to the causes than to the instruments of total war.

About once a year during this time, Sasaki-san traveled from Kyushu to Hiroshima to see her brother and sister, and, always, to call on Father Kleinsorge, now Takakura [he had taken the Japanese name Takakura Makoto and been naturalized as a Japanese citizen] at the Misasa church. On one trip, she saw her former fiancé on the street, and she was quite sure he saw her, but they did not speak. Father Takakura asked her, "Is your whole life going to be like this, working so hard? Shouldn't you be married? Or, if you choose not to marry, shouldn't you become a nun?" She thought long about his questions.

One day, at the White Chrysanthemum, she got an urgent message that her brother had been in an automobile accident and might die. She hurried to Hiroshima. Yasuo's car had been hit by a police patrol car; it had been the policeman's fault. Yasuo survived, but four ribs and both legs had been broken, his nose had been caved in, there was a permanent dent in his forehead, and he had lost the sight of one eye. Sasaki-san thought she was going to have to tend him and support him for good. She began taking accounting courses, and, after a few weeks, qualified as a Third Class Bookkeeper. But Yasuo made a remarkable recovery, and, using the compensation he was paid for the accident, he entered a music school, to study composition. Sasaki-san went back to the orphanage.

In 1954, Sasaki-san visited Father Takakura and said that she knew now that she would never marry, and she thought the time had come for her to go into a convent. What convent would he recommend? He suggested the French order of Auxiliatrices du Purgatoire, Helpers of Holy Souls, whose convent was right there in Misasa. Sasaki-san said she did not want to enter a society that would make her speak foreign languages. He promised her she could stay with Japanese.

She entered the convent, and in the very first days she found that Father Takakura had lied to her. She was going to have to learn Latin and French. She was told that when the knock of reveille came in the morning, she must cry out, "Mon Jésus, miséricorde!" The first night, she wrote the words in ink on the palm of one hand, so she could read them when she heard the knock the next morning, but it, turned out to be too dark.

She became afraid she might fail. She had no trouble learning about Eugenie Smet, known as Blessed Mary of Providence, the founder of the order, who in 1856 had started programs in Paris for care of the poor and for home nursing and had eventually sent to China twelve Sisters she had trained. But, at thirty, Sasaki-san felt too old to be a schoolgirl learning Latin. She was confined to the convent building except for occasional walks-two hours each way, painful for her bad leg—to Mitaki, a mountain where there were three beautiful waterfalls. In time, she discovered she had surprising hardihood and tenacity, which she credited to all she had learned about herself in the hours and weeks after the bombing. When Mother Superior, Marie Saint Jean de Kenti, asked her one day what she would do if she were told she had failed and would have to leave, she said, "I would take hold of that beam there and hold on with all my strength." She did hold on, and in 1957 she took vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience and became Sister Dominique Sasaki.

By now, the Society of Helpers knew her strength, and it assigned her, straight from the novitiate, to the post of director of a home for seventy old people near Kurosaki, on Kyushu, named the Garden of St. Joseph. She was only thirty-three, and she was the first Japanese director of the home—in command of a staff of fifteen, five of whom were French and Belgian nuns. She had to plunge straight into negotiations with local and national bureaucrats. She had no books to read on care of the aged. She inherited a decrepit wooden building—a former temple—and an institution that had had difficulty even feeding its enfeebled inmates, some of whom had had to be sent out foraging for firewood. Most of the old men were former coal miners from the notoriously cruel Kyushu mines. Some of the foreign nuns were crusty, and their modes of speech, unlike those of the Japanese, were blunt, harsh, and hurtful to Sister Sasaki.

Her hard-earned doggedness told, and she remained fully in charge of the Garden of St. Joseph for twenty years. Thanks to her schooling as an accountant, she was able to introduce a rational system of bookkeeping. Eventually, the Society of Helpers, with support from branches in the United States, raised money for a new building, and Sister Sasaki supervised the construction of a concrete-block structure cut into the brow of a hill. A few years later, a subterranean waterway began to undermine it, and she saw to its replacement with a more modern building, of reinforced concrete, with single and double rooms fitted with Western-style washbasins and toilets.

Her greatest gift, she found, was her ability to help inmates to die in peace. She had seen so much death in Hiroshima after the bombing, and had seen what strange things so many people did when they were cornered by death, that nothing now surprised or frightened her. The first time she stood watch by a dying inmate, she vividly remembered a night soon after the bombing when she had lain out in the open, uncared for, in dreadful pain, beside a young man who was dying. She had talked with him all night, and had become aware, above all, of his fearful loneliness. She had watched him die in the morning. At deathbeds in the home, she was always mindful of this terrible solitude. She would speak little to the dying person but would hold a hand or touch an arm, as an assertion, simply, that she was there.

Once, an old man revealed to her on his deathbed, with such vividness she felt she was witnessing the act, that he had stabbed another man in the back and had watched him bleed to death. Though the murderer was not a Christian, Sister Sasaki told him that God forgave him, and he died in comfort. Another old man had, like many Kyushu miners, been a drunkard. He had had a sordid reputation; his family had abandoned him. In the home, he tried with pathetic eagerness to please every-one. He volunteered to carry coal from storage bins, and he stoked the building's boiler. He had cirrhosis of the liver, and had been warned not to accept the daily ration of five ounces of distilled spirits that the Garden of St. Joseph mercifully issued to the former miners. But he continued to drink it. Vomiting at the supper table one night, he ruptured a blood vessel. It took him three days to die. Sister Sasaki stayed beside him all that time, holding his hand, so that he might die knowing that, living, he had pleased her.

In 1970, Sister Sasaki attended an international conference of working nuns in Rome and, after it, inspected welfare facilities in Italy, Switzerland, France, Belgium, and England. She retired from the Garden of St. Joseph at the age of fifty-five, in 1978, and was awarded a vacation trip to the Holy See. Unable to be idle, she installed herself at a table outside St. Peter's to give advice to Japanese tourists; later, she became a tourist herself, in Florence, Padua, Assisi, Venice, Milan, and Paris.

Back in Japan, she did volunteer work for two years at the Tokyo headquarters of the Society of Helpers, then spent two years as Mother Superior of the convent at Misasa, where she had taken her training. After that, she led a tranquil life as superintendent of the women's dormitory at the music school where her brother had studied; it had been taken over by the Church and was now called the Elizabeth College of Music. After finishing at the school, Yasuo had become qualified as a school-teacher, and now he taught composition and mathematics in a high school in Kochi, on the island of Shikoku. Yaeko was married to a doctor who owned his own clinic in Hiroshima, and Sister Sasaki could go to him if she needed a doctor. Besides continuing difficulties with her leg, she had endured for some years a pattern of ailments which—as with so many hibakusha—might or might not have been attributable to the bomb: liver dysfunction, night sweats and morning fevers, borderline angina, blood spots on her legs, and signs in blood tests of a rheumatoid factor.

One of the happiest moments in her life came in 1980, while she was stationed at the society's headquarters in Tokyo: she was honored at a dinner to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of her becoming a nun. By chance, a second guest of honor that night was the head of the society in Paris, Mother General France Delcourt, who, it happened, had also reached her twenty-fifth year in the order. Mother Delcourt gave Sister Sasaki a present of a picture of the Virgin Mary. Sister Sasaki made a speech: "I shall not dwell on the past. It is as if I had been given a spare life when I survived the A-bomb. But I prefer not to look back. I shall keep moving forward."

Hersey, John. Hiroshima. New York: Alfred A. Knopf; Revised ed., 1985; 21-23, 43-45, 72-73, 90-93, 103-04, 109, 112, 153-163.