Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone (2017) by Richard Lloyd Parry3/21/2018
Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan’s Disaster Zone by Richard Lloyd Parry
My rating: 4 of 5 stars "The sense of power discharging at the end of pain".... Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone (2017) by Richard Lloyd Parry is an absorbing, terrifying, and moving book about the March 11, 2011 Tohoku, Japan earthquake and tsunami and its aftermath. Parry bases his book on his six years of interviews with survivors and on his two decades of life in Japan. He recounts what happened on that day, the terrifyingly alien and yet supremely natural nature of the tsunami (a black mass moving at over 40 mph with the dust of demolished buildings floating above it, crunching and swallowing the human world in its way, killing 99% of the 18,500 Japanese who died after the quake), as well as the psychological devastation of the survivors who lost children, parents, spouses, siblings, friends, houses, work places, and villages. Parry focuses much of his account on what happened at the Okawa Elementary School when 74 of 75 children and 10 of 11 teachers died in the tsunami, "the single grossest tragedy of the whole immense disaster, a distillation of its arbitrariness and horror." Why were the children kept waiting at the school after the earthquake instead of being led to safety up the hill right there? What exactly happened at the school during the 51 minutes before the tsunami struck? Such questions may never be completely answered, due to the small number of survivors, the subjective nature of memory, the desire of the school board to avoid responsibility for negligence, and the refusal (or inability) of the one surviving teacher to consistently (and honestly) say what happened. One of the most moving and unexpected parts of the book concerns the divisions that arose in the Okawa Elementary School community in the aftermath. These divisions came about due to the different degrees of loss different families experienced and to their different responses to the losses. Some parents wanted to forget the horrible tragedy and move on, while other parents fought for years to find out what happened. As Parry writes at one point, "It is easy to imagine grief as an ennobling, purifying emotion--uncluttering the mind of what is petty and transient, and illuminating the essential. In reality, of course, grief doesn't resolve anything. It multiplies anxiety and tension. It opens fissures into cracks, and cracks into gaping chasms." Another moving and unexpected part of the book is the intense presence of the supernatural. Despite the title and the Japanese affinity for ghosts, I didn't expect to encounter so many ghost sightings and possessions in the book and especially not to believe them deep beneath my rational, conscious mind. A woman's ghost sitting down to tea with her surviving neighbors and leaving the cushion wet; a taxi driver giving a lift to a fare whom he eventually noticed had vanished from his taxi; a young nurse being possessed by a series of ghosts of men, women, children, and even a dog; a man publishing ghost stories in his magazine and hosting ghost story meetings. . . Regardless of my lack of belief in ghosts, Parry's accounts of the widespread phenomenon in Tohoku are by turns moving or harrowing and always feel real. The book is also full of interesting and telling features of Japanese culture, like the following: -The ingrained desire to live by ethics of "gaman" (quiet endurance) and "ganbaro" (let's do our best). -The inevitable feature of life that are natural disasters, requiring "gaman" and "ganbaro." -The reluctance to stand out from the group. -The political apathy and stagnation stifling Japanese democracy. -The vision of death not as a negation of life but as a continuation of it different from but connected to living (as with the cult of ancestors). The book is well-written: tight and vivid, engaged and objective, as in the following description: "Today, though, the school was the first thing Hitomi saw, or its outline. It was cocooned in a spiky, angular mesh of interlocking fragments, large and small--tree trunks, the joists of houses, books, beds, bicycles, sheds, and refrigerators. A buckled car protruded from the window of one of the upper classrooms…. The village, the hamlets, the fields, and everything else between here and the sea had gone." One of the themes of the book is the difficulty and importance of imaginatively experiencing the suffering of others. On the recent anniversary of the natural disaster, I felt ashamed that even though I'd been living in Japan for 15 years, I didn't pay enough attention to the earthquake and tsunami when they hit, because of my geographical distance from them, my preoccupation with the meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear power plant there, and my reluctance to empathize with victims and survivors. Seven years later, I tried to rectify my failure of courage and imagination by reading this book. It couldn't fully convey what it would be like in a moment of terror to lose one's child and or family and or home to a natural disaster (especially one exacerbated by avoidable human error), but it deeply affected me, and I recommend it to anyone wanting to know about such things, especially in the context of Japanese culture. Parry ends his book with a gripping account of the last exorcism by the priest who had exorcised a series of ghosts from inside the nurse. The last ghost brought to the light was that of a girl who'd died in the tsunami. At the moment of exorcism, the priest felt "pity at her lonely death, and for the twenty thousand other stories of terror and extinction," but his wife "was aware only of a huge energy dissipating. It made her remember the experience of childbirth, and the sense of power discharging at the end of pain, as the newborn child finally enters the world." View all my reviews
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