Feverfew” (part 4). A fifth section, “The Aftermath,” written especially for a new edition published in 1985, summarizes the lives of the six over the ensuing forty years, showing them to be among the prosperous middle class of modern postwar Japan.

Using a panoramic technique evocative of cinematic methods, the narrative moves back and forth among the six survivors—a factory clerk, a tailor’s widow, a young surgeon, a middle-aged physician, a minister, and a German priest—in brief, pictorially clear segments, one or two major scenes for each survivor in each of the four parts.

Part 1 establishes, in a sort of freeze-frame, what each of the six was doing at the precise moment of the blast. The factory clerk was seated at her desk, about to chat with her office mate when the noiseless flash occurred. The tailor’s widow, having arisen early, had just peered out the kitchen window into her neighbor’s yard. The physician had just sat down to read his morning paper, while in another part of the city the priest was lying on his cot reading a Jesuit magazine. At the exact moment the bomb exploded the young surgeon was walking down a hospital corridor, while the minister had paused at the gate of a rich man’s house in the city’s western suburbs. In a series of flashbacks the account returns the reader to the beginning of each person’s day, to the sequences of events and details leading each to that precise moment.

Part 2, “The Fire,” records the progress each makes toward staying alive after the blast. Noting the testimony of each person, the narrative follows the six not in the order established in the previous section but in dramatic sequence, beginning with the minister, who runs toward the city to find his family, while the tailor’s widow, buried in debris, frees herself and, after gathering her nearly naked children, flees with them to a nearby wood. Sometime later the German priest with two of his injured confreres arrives in the wood and begins tending to some parishioners. The physician after the explosion ran to his hospital, only to find it blasted into the river on the banks of which it once stood. Without his equipment, himself bleeding from cuts, he comforts as many of the wounded as he can and waits in the water for the fires to burn out. The young surgeon has reached his family’s house five miles from the blast, passing scores of injured and dying along the way, while the factory clerk lies buried for hours until a relief party rescues her.

Part 3, “Details Are Being Investigated,” continues the account up to the evening of the first day of the explosion, once again following a different order from parts 1 and 2. This section begins with the minister and priest, who begin to help the many wounded. The minister finds a boat and begins ferrying people across the river to the safety of the wood. The surgeon has been working at the hospital without sleep for many hours, and the widow returns to the heart of the city to look for the rest of her family. Gradually, the authorities begin to speculate on the nature of the bomb.

Part 4, “Panic Grass and Feverfew,” opens on the morning of August 18, twelve days after the explosion. Some of the survivors begin to experience radiation sickness, though they do not yet know its cause. The priest is taken with a high fever. Rescued, the factory clerk is taken to the hospital, where she gradually recovers after weeks of pain. The widow’s hair begins falling out, and the minister succumbs to great fatigue. This section passes swiftly over the next few weeks, gradually shifting to a depiction of how the Japanese population, including its scientists, ultimately identifies the nature of the experience and comes to an understanding of what really happened on the morning of August 6, 1945.