In 1960s China, French diplomat Rene Gallimard falls in love with an opera singer, Song Liling - but Song is not at all who Gallimard thinks.

The passionate romance between an Irish-American man and a Japanese-American woman is threatened when the Pearl Harbor attacks happen and the woman is forced into a prison camp because of her ethnicity.

Life in Hiroshima, following different Japanese, a German priest and church, and some American POWs, before and after the atomic bomb was dropped August 6, 1945.