The Atomic bombing of Nagasaki enters the novel both as a historical catastrophe and as a problem of remembrance: its victims are commemorated by a monumental statue, yet Etsuko cannot make the monument embody the event for her. Her account of the memorial, alongside Sachiko’s recollections of wartime Tokyo, shows how public symbols and personal memories offer different, incomplete ways of approaching wartime suffering.

The memorial in Peace Park

During a visit to Nagasaki with Ogata-San, Etsuko goes to Peace Park, a large green space whose sparse shrubs and fountains lend it an austere character. A massive white statue commemorates those killed by the atomic bomb. Its seated figure points upward with one hand toward the direction from which the bomb fell and stretches the other arm outward, supposedly holding back the forces of evil; its eyes are closed in prayer.

The statue gives the catastrophe a formal public image, but its gestures do not secure a shared meaning for Etsuko. She finds it cumbersome and, from a distance, almost comical, like a policeman directing traffic. Although she senses that many people in Nagasaki value it as a gesture of remembrance, she cannot connect its shape to the bombing or to the terrible days that followed. Its presence makes commemoration visible without making the past fully graspable.

Etsuko’s memory of the visit

Etsuko’s recollection is organized less around a description of the bombing than around the morning she visited the memorial with Ogata-San. What stays with her is the gap between the statue’s solemn purpose and her own inability to experience it as an adequate image of the event. Later, the large white figure calls back not only the visit to Peace Park but also Ogata-San’s postcard of the monument.

At the statue, Ogata-San remarks that it looks less impressive in a picture and says he has been meaning to send a postcard to a friend in Fukuoka. He buys one, then pauses over its blank side with his pen poised, glancing between the card and the statue as if searching for inspiration. The small, unfinished act of writing becomes part of Etsuko’s memory of the memorial: the public monument is encountered through an ordinary visit and an intended message that has not yet been composed.

Wartime suffering beyond Nagasaki

In a separate conversation, Sachiko insists that the suffering in Nagasaki was not the only devastation of the war. She recalls Tokyo’s repeated destruction: people lived in tunnels and derelict buildings amid rubble, and, as she tells Etsuko, Mariko also saw terrible things there. Her account does not equate the two places or describe the Nagasaki bombing itself; it broadens the frame in which wartime loss is remembered.

Sachiko says that Mariko continued to remember a woman she had encountered near a canal in Tokyo. The episode belongs to the novel’s wider record of wartime distress rather than to the bombing of Nagasaki. Set beside Etsuko’s account of Peace Park, it contrasts an official memorial to mass death with painful experiences carried in family recollection, where what is remembered is personal, fragmentary, and not readily resolved by a public image.