Burnt Shadows is filled with birds, literal and symbolic, from the earliest pages of the novel. Birds variably relate to violence, beauty, native inhabitants, and the freedom of self-determination. The most prominent birds of the novel, Hiroko’s scars, represent each of these concepts in turn and are at times personified in the novel, as Hiroko imagines “her birds,” as she calls them often, to have desires of their own. Hiroko’s birds, burned into her skin from her mother’s silk kimono in the nuclear blast, symbolize her inescapable connection to Japan and the bombing of Nagasaki, and her struggle to define her identity outside of her traumatic experiences. Hiroko figuratively blames the birds for her miscarriage and imagines them to be pursuing Raza or stirred by rising nuclear tensions in Pakistan and India. However, Sajjad considers Hiroko’s bird-shaped scars to be beautiful, just as Sajjad accepts Hiroko’s past unconditionally.

Birds also appear in the form of Konrad’s purple notebooks, hung from a tree and said to resemble birds in flight. Here, birds represent the possibility of liberation and the ideals of cosmopolitanism, setting up a contrast to Hiroko’s bird scars, which are created by the same explosion that destroys Konrad’s birds.