The atomic bombing of Nagasaki is a turning point in Kensuke Ogawa’s remembered wartime history: news of the attack reaches him at sea, and he concludes that his family has been killed. That belief shapes his decision to remain isolated on the island, even after the war ends, and helps explain why Michael’s arrival first appears to him as a threat rather than a possibility of companionship.

The report at sea

Kensuke recounts the bombing while fishing with Michael from his outrigger boat, telling the story he had promised to share. Before the war, he had grown up in Nagasaki, studied medicine in Tokyo and at Guy’s Hospital in London, then returned to the city. He became a doctor, married Kimi, and had a son, Michiya. He describes himself as a proud and happy person, caring for mothers and babies before the war sent him to serve as a doctor aboard a large Japanese warship.

As the war turned against Japan, American aircraft attacked the ship. Kensuke stayed with his patients while successive attacks destroyed the people around him; he believed he would die, but discovered that he was the only survivor aboard. The engine continued to run, while he could neither steer the ship nor control where it went. In that helpless situation, he listened to the radio and heard that an atomic bomb had fallen on Nagasaki.

Loss and presumed death

Kensuke’s account links the broadcast directly to his fear for the family he had left behind. Kimi and Michiya were in Nagasaki, as was his mother; hearing of the bombing, he concluded that they had all died. The account establishes what he believed, not an independently confirmed account of their fate. For Kensuke, however, the uncertainty closed into certainty: he imagined his family gone and understood himself as the one left alive.

The radio report is therefore more than news of a distant catastrophe. It reaches a survivor with no means to return, unable to steer his ship and cut off from any confirmation about home. When he later hears Japan has surrendered, he says that he is so sad he wants to die. The loss he associates with Nagasaki remains bound to his survival, turning the fact that he lived into a source of grief rather than relief.

From shipwreck to isolation

After the war, the ship’s engine stopped, but the vessel did not sink at once. A storm carried it to the island, where Kensuke found food and water and salvaged supplies, including clothes, sheets, pots, bottles, a knife, binoculars, medicine, and tools. He hid these things in a cave; after another storm drove the ship onto rocks, it sank. The rusting wreck Michael later finds is thus a material trace of the journey that separated Kensuke from his former life.

Kensuke explains that he initially did not want to live. Meeting the orangutans and finding the island peaceful gave him a reason to stay, and he gradually learned to survive by watching what they ate and how they behaved. Yet survival did not mean that he had forgotten his family: he says he never forgot Kimi or Michiya. His account shows how a remembered catastrophe continued to govern his life long after the shipwreck, sustaining both his attachment to the island and his refusal to seek a return to Japan.

The bombing’s later consequences

Kensuke’s belief that his family died also shapes his response to other people. When American soldiers later landed on the island, he hid in the forest. He says he heard them claim that everyone in Nagasaki was dead and heard them laugh; this reinforced his certainty that his family had been lost and his decision to stay away from people. Much later, after hunters arrived and harmed the island’s gibbons, he began to think of all people as killers and wanted no human company.

That history informs his first response to Michael. After rescuing the boy and Stella from the sea, Kensuke carried Michael to the beach, left him food and water, then tried to keep him at a distance. He feared that people might find the island, harm its wildlife, or take him away. Over time, however, the two became close. Kensuke eventually tells Michael that he has come to regard him as a son, even while making clear that returning to Japan would be right for Michael but painful for himself. The bombing’s narrative significance lies in this enduring division: Kensuke’s assumed loss drove him into isolation, while the act of recounting that past helps him form a new family bond without erasing the one he still carries in memory.