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but his papier-mache suitcase, which had been under the desk, was unscathed and standing right side up on the floor. Missing its target by 800 feet, Little Boy had detonated in the air above Dr Kaoru Shima’s eponymous hospital. The building was obliterated and its staff and patients killed instantly, but Dr Shima himself, up early on his bicycle to do house calls on his suburban patients, was unharmed. A bookkeeper named Tsuneo Okimoto, whose house was 500 feet from ground zero, had left early for work that morning, remembering that a flat bike tire had slowed him down the day before and not wanting to be late. At 8.15 he was on a commuter train a mile from home. The bomb deposited him at the bottom of a heap of his fellow passengers; their bodies protected him from flying glass. Two passengers on what may have been the same train were sitting across from each other on the car’s south side. One opened the window next to him, the other kept his closed. When the blast came, the passenger beside the closed window was bloodied by projectile glass. The passenger with the open window, apparently unhurt, lifted his seatmate onto his back and headed off for help. Quickly, however, his face and body swelled with excruciating burns, and the men switched places.37

Survivors of the bomb thought the whole world was dying. ‘Before 1945,’ writes Michael Sherry, ‘it had been possible to see in air war the potential for global destruction, but survivors of Hamburg or Tokyo rarely connected the extinction of their cities with the fate of the species. For atomic bomb victims, that connection became indissoluble.’ A physicist, temporarily blinded, thought, ‘the world is ending’; a Protestant minister ‘thought this was the end of Hiroshima—of Japan—of humankind ... This was God’s judgment on men.’ The writer Yoko (Ota thought the bomb heralded ‘the collapse of the earth which it was said would take place at the end of the world’. Time stopped. When it resumed, Hiroshima’s calendar had changed: ‘Day One’ or ‘That day’ meant the day the atomic bomb was dropped. It was followed by ‘the next day’, ‘the day after’, and so forth. On the night of 24 August—eighteen days after the bomb had been dropped— Dr Hachiya had a nightmare:

It seems I was in Tokyo after the great earthquake and around me were decomposing bodies heaped in piles, all of whom were looking right at me. I saw an eye sitting on the palm of a girl’s hand. Suddenly it turned and leaped into the sky and then came flying back towards me, so that, looking up, I could see a great bare eyeball, bigger than life, hovering over my head, staring point blank at me. I was powerless to move.38

Finally, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima brought biological anomaly. What struck most observers of Hiroshima after 6 August was, of course, the unfathomable destruction of the city, the wasteland that had replaced the vital metropolis where people had lived and worked. But soon there was something weird: the blasted moonscape of browns and grays was coming alive with plants and flowers. Returning in early September to Hiroshima for the first time since she had been wounded by the bomb, Toshiko Sasaki, ‘horrified and amazed’ by the extent of the devastation, also saw something that ‘gave her the creeps’: Hiroshima was becoming verdant with new growth. ‘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 offresh, vivid, lush, optimistic green.’ She saw ‘bluets and Spanish bayonets, goosefoot, morning glories and day lilies, the hairy-fruited bean, purslane and clotbur and sesame and panic grass and feverfew’. In less than two years, those who had returned to Hiroshima were able to grow grains and vegetables on a scale that dwarfed production in nearby villages. Tomatoes had always been nearly impossible to grow in the city; 1947 yielded a full harvest of them. That the bomb had eradicated predators was one reason for the newfound bounty. Scientists suggested another: the radiation from the