Ghosts of Hiroshima, the book behind James Cameron's upcoming historical drama, is officially out as of August 5 — and readers can now glimpse an excerpt of the harrowing recollections within its pages. Written by Charles Pellegrino, Ghosts of Hiroshima explores the aftermath of the U.S. dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
The book accomplishes this by compiling archaeological records and the accounts of survivors, looking at the tragedy from the perspective of those residing in the two Japanese cities rather than those creating the weapons of mass destruction. Cameron noted that this will differentiate his movie from Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer.
Courtesy of Blackstone Publishing, here is a description of Pellegrino's new book:
Based on years of forensic archaeology combined with interviews of more than two hundred survivors and their families, Ghosts of Hiroshima is a you-are-there account of ordinary human beings thrust into extraordinary events, including the men who dropped the two atomic bombs and the dozen “double-survivors” who miraculously lived through both. Pellegrino is the New York Times bestselling author of Her Name, Titanic and was the technical advisor on Cameron’s films Titanic and the Avatar pentalogy.
There's no word on when Ghosts of Hiroshima's film adaptation will release, but Screen Rant has obtained an exclusive excerpt of Pellegrino's non-fiction book. It transports readers to the moment the atomic bombs detonated, detailing what the people in its range would have experienced as it happened.
Those interested in picking up Pellegrino's latest can read the excerpt, titled "Ghosts of Hiroshima: The Same Key to Heaven Opens the Gates to Hell," below.
Read An Excerpt From Ghosts Of Hiroshima By Charles Pellegrino
From "The Same Key to Heaven Opens the Gates to Hell"
On the first day of humanity's nuclear adolescence, there existed only three atomic bombs in all the world. We humans tested one in the New Mexico desert, to be certain that the machine would work. We dropped the other two on ourselves.
What human beings had experienced within the very first instant of the bomb’s awakening was unprecedented. Trapped at the bottom of that tiny crevice in time, Setsuko Hirata was almost twenty years old and a bride of only ten days. From a certain quantum point of view, there really existed no “here” and “then” and “now.” Setsuko lived in human time frames, in the realm of days and hours. The process that cost a hundred thousand Hiroshima souls was born in the realm of jiffy time: the travel time of light across the diameter of a proton. The universe smaller than the jiffy and the proton acted by its own rules and never failed to confound whenever observers from the universe of the very large were permitted to get into the act—which meant quite a lot when the confounded included Szilard, Fermi, and Einstein.
At Moment Zero, Setsuko was seated in her living room, slightly south of the detonation point. Deep within the bomb, from a volume of maximum fission no wider than a wedding band or a child’s marble, sprayed the ghostliest particles in the known universe, called neutrinos. A trillion of them passed easily through Setsuko’s body, tracing a straight line between the bomb core and her heart, at the speed of light, without “noticing” that they had passed through anything at all—without, by themselves, being capable of causing any harm at all. The very neutrinos that passed through Setsuko’s heart continued traveling along that same diagonal line (with the same quantum indifference) down through the Earth itself. They shot through five thousand miles of rock and magma and up through the floor of the southern Indian Ocean toward interstellar space. Setsuko’s neutrino stream will still be lancing out beyond the stars at light speed, beyond the far rim of the galaxy itself, a million years after the last stone blocks of the Great Pyramid were eroded down to lime.
When Setsuko’s neutrino stream erupted unseen near the French islands of Amsterdam and Saint-Paul, not quite one-tenth of a second after detonation, she was still alive. Ceramic roof tiles ten feet above her head were just then beginning to catch the infrared maximum from the flash—which peaked just shy of two-tenths of a second after the first atoms of uranium-235 began to surge apart. The tiles threw a small fraction of the rays back into the sky, but in the end, they provided Setsuko with barely more protection than the silk nightgown her beloved Kenshi had bought her only a few days earlier during their honeymoon at the Gardens of Miyajima.
Overhead, the instantaneous transformation of matter into energy had produced a light so intense that if Setsuko were looking straight up, she would have seen a nuclear shock bubble’s lower hemisphere shining through the single layer of roof tiles and wooden planks, as if it were an electric torch shining through a window of stained glass. And within those first two-tenths of a second, she might have had time enough to become aware of an electronic buzzing in her ears, and a tingling sensation throughout her bones, and a feeling that she was being lifted out of her chair, or pressed into it more firmly, or both at the same instant. And the growing sphere in the sky . . . She might even have had time enough to perceive, if not actually watch, its expanding dimensions before its shock wave pressed down against the roof.
It was the morning of August 6, 1945, and on this day nothing could have been further from the mind of seventeen-year-old Saito Michiko than the paths of neutrino streams. She was located just beyond ten city blocks from Setsuko Hirata's home, down on the second level of a mostly underground communications and command bunker. Here, unlike in other offices around the city, the men had realized that there was a certain efficiency in pulling the mobilized female students away from cleaning and groundskeeping chores and instead training them to maintain and help operate the electronic equipment. Saito’s steel-and-concrete-reinforced compartment had been designed, so she was told and so she believed, to withstand a half-ton bomb detonating only twenty feet over her head.
When the clock on the compartment wall cracked open at a quarter past eight, all those standing outside the building either died instantly or were alive-seeming only to themselves for a little while. Saito should have been among them. She was supposed to have been released from her midnight-to-eight-a.m. shift fifteen minutes before Moment Zero; but an air-raid alert, triggered by one of the “sightseeing” planes that seemed to be constantly flying over the city, delayed the morning relief crew’s arrival.
Then three new planes approached. One of them dropped ray-and-blast monitors attached to radio transmitters and rip cords. Large parachutes bloomed over the city, and the planes reportedly peeled away from their path and were suddenly flying away like bats out of hell—definitely trying to get away from something.
A man shouted for Saito to press the warning switch and send out a new air-raid alert. Mere seconds later, as a siren began to rev up and as Saito tapped out words on a telegraph, there had erupted, through the tiny slit of a bulletproof observation window, “the light of a thousand flashes of magnesium and phosphorus igniting at once.”
The saber of wood-searing light, lancing deep into the room, did not touch Saito; but the blast did. Pounding up through the concrete flooring itself, the concussion felt like a triple crack of thunder and a roar, with the floor breaking like eggshells and shooting fragments into the air. “And this was accompanied by a wind blowing like a tornado.” She had a sense of being hoisted off the ground. And her world faded to black—flashed to black, snapped to black. Her period of unconsciousness must have been very brief, or history would never have recorded what Saito did during the next three minutes. She sat up and looked around in utter confusion. Everyone was gone or buried and unmoving under a thick layer of dust and concrete.
This building absolutely does not stand up so well against a direct hit from a half-ton bomb, as advertised, she told herself. But when she stepped outside, Saito knew at once that something much more wide-ranging than a direct hit had occurred. The sun was gone. Cicada song—in August, normally loud and shrieking from every direction—silenced. No insects. No birds. No blades of grass. All the buildings nearby were gone or going—going down in ashes and flames, sinking into the earth. The people were gone. The main headquarters building was gone with them.
“Defend your position to the death!” she had been taught. Even if you are the last Japanese on Earth, she supposed, the call to duty must hold.
The war, it seemed, had finally reached a stage at which someone invented a weapon that made everyone disappear, perhaps all over the world—every living creature except herself lost, the moment someone tried to test the damnable thing.
Saito did not stay on the surface for very long. When she climbed down again into the pit, the last girl on Earth heard a telephone ringing.
Setsuko Thurlow's plans for college had been diverted by war and an IQ test. During the spring of 1945, as other students were receiving summer assignments to help the army build firebreaks, a young officer separated Thurlow from the other thirteen-year olds and brought her to army intelligence headquarters.
On the test, she and about thirty other kids her age had demonstrated a special skill for recognizing patterns quickly and for decoding. Major Yanai had said of the long and difficult work hours the girls faced, “This is the time to prove your patriotism and your loyalty to the emperor.”
“Yes sir, we will do our best!” Thurlow had immediately said with all the others. However, to herself, she had quietly longed to be with her friends instead, working outside in the fresh air and not inside a dark and windowless room near the city’s Communications Hospital. She did not know yet that within the first three seconds, all of her friends had perished near the Hirata house and Major Yanai along with them. Even in a windowless room, the killing light entered dazzlingly, through hallways: Thurlow had very much the same experience as Saito and others who survived at this same radius of nearly one mile: “A beautiful blue flash. There was no noise. Then my body began floating in the air. Then everything caved in.”
While the planes circled in for a closer look, Thurlow heard another girl utter her last words: “Where is my mother?” A hand reached out through the rubble, grabbed Thurlow’s shoulder, and saved her.
“We must hurry. You must hurry,” a soldier said. From the sound of it, something above and behind them was burning, working its way nearer. They dug toward the surface—or, rather, burrowed like a pair of frantic moles. Only two other girls made it with them to the top of the rubble pile. Nearby, the roofs of the Communications Hospital and another still-upright building were in flames.
It struck Thurlow as odd that whatever the flash was, it seemed to have set the roofs of buildings afire first. Smoke, black and full of thick soot, came blowing through the apparently deserted streets. The soot carried a stench like scorched squid. It did not occur to her yet that she might be inhaling people. After a minute passed, and then another, Thurlow began to see shapes moving within the twilight—“human beings, but they didn’t exactly look like humans anymore. They looked like ghosts. Nobody was yelling. Nobody was running. Even their steps were silent, like the steps of cats—so ghostly.”
Engine noise managed now and again to penetrate the black fog. “B-sans” were still circling—their crews gloating, Thurlow guessed. To her, Hiroshima was a city of mostly wives whose husbands and seventeen-year-old sons had been taken away to war and lost. This world was madness. The ghosts in the fog were mostly schoolchildren, and men too old to fight. Humans (all human beings) were becoming scary to her—scarier still when they went mad. Scariest of all when they went mad together, by the multiple millions and all across the world.
No longer fearing herself to be the last person on Earth, Saito listened carefully to a young woman at the other end of the phone line, finding it difficult to interpret words through a wall of static. Someone was trying to relay a message from Tokyo to anyone in or near the main headquarters building. “It seems Hiroshima has been hit,” the caller said. “What is the situation?”
“I have no idea what has happened,” Saito replied. “But the whole city is destroyed.” She spoke these words into what was, by most accounts, the only phone line still functioning in all Hiroshima. An officer took the phone away from the woman on the other end. “Repeat . . .” Static cut into his words. “Give time . . . the sound . . . the status of the city is . . .”
She tried to explain that there was only one drawn-out series of sounds—only one weapon, in one moment: “I do not know exactly what time it was, but the clock is stopped at 8:16. There was only one—one long thundering and shaking. Only one sound, one bomb blast. And the whole city appears destroyed.”
“Only one blast? And . . . city appears destroyed?” the officer shouted. “What kind of ridiculous story is that?”
Saito thought of something cleverly sarcastic to say but kept it to herself. She was trying to present a calm, logical response when either the man on the other end of the line hung up or the line simply went dead. For many long seconds, she held the silent phone, wondering what to do next, until a moderately dangerous avalanche of loose rubble slid into the compartment, and a rescue worker called out from above, “Anyone here? Anyone need help down there?”
“I’m fine,” Saito called back.
“Not for very long,” the man said. “Hurry with me and get out of there. A fire is coming.”
Not for very long, indeed. Actual tornadoes of flame were emerging like dragons awakened—dragons of a particularly evil kind. Incomprehensible. As Saito and the rescuer fled north, flames erupted and spread everywhere. Upright tree trunks and leaning telephone poles were spontaneously smoldering and setting themselves afire.
“This can’t be,” said the young woman who had just transmitted the first on-site, immediate description of central Hiroshima dying.
“No, this can’t be,” her rescuer agreed. The city was smashed like a cup, and a hellish irrationality held dominion over all the land. In the exact antithesis of what Saito’s own change of schedule had produced, her mother had volunteered the night before to take the place of a neighbor on a work detail. This swerve of history placed her very near Setsuko Hirata and the Hiroshima Dome when the sky opened up. Later in life, Saito would derive some small comfort from the realization that Mother had died so immediately that the nerves in her body did not last long enough to begin transmitting even hints of pain. But truly, as even a quick look around the bunker had already taught her, the line between life and death is as thin as a knife’s edge.
Ghosts of Hiroshima is already getting stellar reviews, offering readers further incentive to experience Pellegrino's deep dive into one of the most important historical moments of the past century. There's a reason Cameron is so passionate about adapting the 2025 book. The filmmaker sang its praises, noting what a powerful and emotional read it is:
“Not since Titanic have I found a powerful, heartbreaking, and inspiring real-life story as found in Ghosts of Hiroshima by Charles Pellegrino. This is an amazing book and a film I am excited to direct.”
The excerpt from Ghosts of Hiroshima's "The Same Key to Heaven Opens the Gates to Hell" proves Cameron right about the impact. And he's far from the only one affected by its contents. The book already has several standout reviews on Goodreads, and it received a starred review from Library Journal.
Needless to say, Ghosts of Hiroshima is worth a read; the subject matter may be difficult at times, but it's certainly one of the most important books out this year. Its excerpt perfectly encapsulates why, and the rest of Pellegrino's latest is now widely available to read as well.
Post a Comment