Question 7

Flanagan reflects on why people search for their beginnings. He thinks people are looking for “the truth of the why,” but there is no such thing, only the “why” itself (4).

Flanagan describes the moment on August 6, 1945 when US Major Thomas Ferebee dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. At that moment, Flanagan’s father was working in the coal mine, fearing death.

Flanagan describes the “love hotel”—a place for clients to meet sex workers—that stood at the former entrance to the coal mine when he visited in 2012. He notes that the “oblivion” of sex is a moment that “prefigures and denies death” (5).

Flanagan stands in front of the hotel during a press event with an elderly Japanese man named Mr. Sato who had once been a guard at the POW camp. The press wants Flanagan and Mr. Sato to embrace, but Flanagan is embarrassed and reluctant to do so.

Flanagan recalls meeting with elderly people earlier that day who remembered WWII. He felt ashamed to meet them, but he wasn’t sure why. He remembers that his father had told him how kind the Japanese miners—possibly these same people’s fathers—had been to him and the other POWs.

Flanagan reflects on his work as a chainman—the person who carries the measuring line for surveyors—as a young man. He would find surveyors markers from decades ago carved into trees and the sap would still be weeping. He notes that “time hadn’t healed the tree, only scarred it” (8).

To make the press happy, Flanagan puts his arm around Mr. Sato. After the photograph is taken, Mr. Sato curls into Flanagan and doesn’t move. They stand together until the press leave.

Flanagan’s father joked about one of his fellow POWs who claimed to have seen the atomic bomb over Hiroshima at night when the bomb was dropped at 8:16 am.

Flanagan’s father survived three years in Japanese internment. During that time, the Japanese started losing the war. They directed their populace to commit suicide rather than be invaded. Instead of invading, the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Fifteen years after the atomic bombs were dropped, Flanagan was born. He was named after his father, also named Richard.

During his visit in Japan, a city employee named Kenji takes Flanagan to a “hostess bar.” Kenji tells Flanagan that his grandfather had fought in WWII in New Guinea, but he did not talk about it, and he became increasingly reclusive upon his return.

Flanagan tells one of the hostesses that he’s writing a book about “love” and that he’s in Sanyo-Onoda City because his father had been a “slave labourer” in the nearby coal mine. She asks what that means.

Flanagan responds that it’s “nothing important.” He reflects on how he “star[es] into time” (17) like Kenji’s grandfather.

In the tone of a historical narrative, Flanagan describes how Nazi scientists contemplated the creation of an atomic bomb at a conference on June 4, 1942. Physicist Werner Heisenberg proposed it, but [Minister of Armaments] Albert Speer felt its development would take too long. During the war, German nuclear scientists were captured and kept in a house in Cambridge that was bugged by British military intelligence.

When the German scientists learned on August 6, 1945 that the Americans had developed and dropped an atomic bomb, they were torn between disbelief, anger at having been bested, and horror.

The United States government poured massive amounts of human and economic resources into the production of the nuclear bomb through the top-secret Manhattan Project. Flanagan describes the inner workings of the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima, killing an estimated 60,000 Japanese people.

Flanagan notes that the exact number of casualties of Hiroshima is unknown—estimates vary from 60,000 to 140,000 people. He claims the event “defies measurement.”

Russian writer Anton Chekhov wrote a short story that includes a typical mathematical word problem, but which ends “Who loves longer, a man or a woman” (23). Flanagan describes the quandary “why do we do what we do to each other” as a “question 7” (23).

Flanagan describes how in Chekhov’s stories, the world is not what it appears to be on the surface. Chekhov felt literature should ask good questions rather than providing answers.

Flanagan claims that the US made the atomic bomb because a man named Leo Szilard was inspired by an H.G. Wells novel and persuaded the president to pursue its development.

Flanagan describes the first meeting of British science fiction writer H.G. Wells and a polemic young woman. He notes Wells was reading a book about discoveries in radium when she came into the room.

Flanagan identifies the woman meeting H.G. Wells as 19-year-old Cicely Fairfield who wrote under the nom de plume Rebecca West. She admired Nietzsche and wrote strident book reviews criticizing old-fashioned literature, including that of Wells.

The week before they met, West wrote a “scathing review” of Wells’s most recent novel, Marriage, for a radical feminist magazine. Wells was 46, married to his second wife, and having an affair with socialite Elizabeth von Arnim.

Wells’s career was on a downturn. His two most recent novels criticized conservative Victorian sexual morality, but West accused him of still living a conventional life. Wells decided to invite West for lunch.

West arrived at Wells house and met his wife, Jane. When she was shown into Wells’s library, she felt shocked at how ugly he was.

West and Wells plunged into conversation. As they talked, they began to like each other. They met again a few weeks later and kissed in his library.

Flanagan describes the kiss as catalyzing a chain reaction that connects death to Flanagan himself, to the book he is writing, and the life of his father. He suggests the source of the lovers’ passion was “question 7.”