How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
Mrs. Nakamura had gone to the city again, to dig up some rice she had buried in her Neighborhood Association air-raid shelter. She got it and started back for Kabe. On the electric car, quite by chance, she ran into her younger sister, who had not been in Hiroshima the day of the bombing. (3.58)
Again, as with the story of Mr. Tanimoto randomly meeting his wife on the street the day of the bombing, it's kind of incredible that Mrs. Nakamura would run into her sister so randomly. By drawing attention to these incidents, Hersey really does point out the randomness of basically everything.
Quote #8
If fever remained steady and high, the patient's chances for survival were poor. The white count almost always dropped below four thousand; a patient whose count fell below one thousand had little hope of living. […] Some victims recovered in a week; with others the disease dragged on for months. (4.17)
In a fairly extensive discussion of how doctors viewed/treated patients suffering from the bomb's aftereffects, Hersey spotlights the randomness of survival/thriving among patients. Hersey starts out by drawing a direct relationship between fever/white count and survival, but by the end of this paragraph, he basically indicates it was a matter of pure chance whether people were going to thrive or not; some people lasted a week and others for months.
Quote #9
And, as if nature were protecting man against his own ingenuity, the reproductive processes were affected for a time; men became sterile, women had miscarriages, menstruation stopped. (4.18)
While most of the time Hersey's narrative seems to be pointing out randomness and chance, here he veers in the other direction and suggests that the reproductive problems men and women suffered after the bomb almost seemed "intentional"—or, at least, designed protect the human race from perpetuating the kind of destruction/destructive behavior associated with the bomb. Of course, we know he doesn't mean that literally, but the mere suggestion once again gets us thinking about the notions of fate, destiny, chance, and intention, and how they relate to something like atomic war…