Hiroshima is the point of return in Lieutenant Mamiya’s account of war, captivity, and loss. After twelve years away, he reaches a city where his family has died and the life he might have resumed has vanished; the return does not restore him, but confirms his sense that he has come back to an empty world.

Return After the War

Lieutenant Mamiya says that he came back to Japan having lost his left hand and twelve years. By the time he arrived in Hiroshima, his parents and sister were dead. His sister had been working in a factory when the atomic bomb fell; his father was on his way to visit her and was also killed. His mother, overcome by the shock, remained gravely ill and died in 1947.

The family losses were only part of what awaited him. A woman to whom he had been secretly engaged before leaving Japan had married someone else and had two children. In the cemetery, Lieutenant Mamiya found a grave that had been made for him while he was presumed dead. That discovery gives physical form to the years in which his former life continued without him: he returns alive, but encounters the place where others had already buried him.

From Survival to an Empty Life

Lieutenant Mamiya describes his return as a profound emptiness and says he felt he should not have come back. He became a high-school social studies teacher, teaching geography and history, but understood himself as merely carrying out routine tasks rather than truly living. He had no close friendship with students, no real human ties, and no capacity to love another person.

His numbness is connected to the experience he associates with the well in the Outer Mongolian desert, where he believed the core of his life had burned away. In his recollection, the losses in Hiroshima do not begin that emptiness so much as make it impossible to mistake for a temporary condition. He had survived the war and returned to Japan, yet survival could not restore the feelings and relationships he believed had already died.

Memory and the Meaning of Homecoming

Hiroshima stands in Lieutenant Mamiya’s story between his years of wartime experience and the life he leads afterward. His return brings together the deaths of his family, the end of his former engagement, and the grave prepared for him in his absence. The city is therefore not presented as a place of reunion, but as the setting in which he recognizes the finality of separation.

When Lieutenant Mamiya later tells Toru Okada about these events, he frames his postwar existence as the continuation of an empty shell. His memories of the war and the losses at home remain part of that account, but he does not describe them as leading to recovery. Hiroshima marks a homecoming in geography alone: the return leaves him alive in Japan, while the life he had known before departure remains irretrievable.