A harrowing account, deftly told, of 2011 Japanese tsunami
In sheer scope, certain natural disasters outstrip all quantitative efforts to describe them. Undoubtedly, the data on the Tohoku earthquake can help to express the vastness of the catastrophe: On March 11, 2011, the most powerful earthquake recorded in Japan — 9.1 on the Richter scale — occurred 20 miles beneath the sea about 250 miles from Tokyo. The quake triggered a 120-foot tsunami that devoured the coast of northeast Japan, killing more than 18,000 people and causing Level 7 meltdowns at three reactors in the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
Past a certain point, though, such figures defy comprehension, and a more narrative and personalized approach is required to achieve real understanding of the human, environmental and monetary costs. Fortunately, Richard Lloyd Parry’s remarkably written and reported “Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan’s Disaster Zone” provides such an account of the Great East Japan Earthquake, which caused “the greatest single loss of life in Japan since the atomic bombing of Nagasaki in 1945.”
A British author and an award-winning journalist who since 1995 has lived in Tokyo, where he works as the Asia editor of The Times of London, Parry is the author of two previous books of nonfiction, including 2007’s “In the Time of Madness: Indonesia on the Edge of Chaos” and 2012’s true-crime tale “People Who Eat Darkness” about the disappearance and murder of Lucie Blackman in Tokyo.
No stranger to covering distress and calamity, he turns his lucid journalistic gaze — as well as his mastery of plot and character — here on the events of that fatal March day. He mentions Fukushima but concentrates on the tsunami itself, wisely finding an “exceptional tragedy” within the greater morass to give shape to what might otherwise remain overwhelming. Parry homes in on the Okawa Primary School, which — despite its frequent disaster preparedness drills and a 700-foottall hill behind it — lost 74 of its 108 students and 10 of its 13 teachers and staff.
In a gripping fashion, Parry builds his account around solving the excruciating mystery that haunts the parents of those killed: “the earthquake had struck at 2:46 p.m. The hands of the school clock were frozen at 3:37 p.m., when the building’s electricity was quenched by the rising water. This was the central question of the Okawa tragedy: What exactly happened between the first event and the second? What was going on … for the last fifty-one minutes of its existence?”
In doing so, he produces a page-turner. In lesser hands, this tactic could seem ghoulish or exploitative. But in Parry’s, the material gets assembled into a moving study of character and culture, love and loss, grief and responsibility.
Parry studs the story with gems of language and detail, like how in the remote part of the countryside worst hit by the wave, the local brand of rice is called “Love at First Sight,” and how in Japan, people rarely say sayonara as Westerners think, but more often use the phrase itte kimasu, “which means literally, ‘Having gone, I will come back,’ ” a grimly ironic turn of phrase, considering how many people never did.
He constructs the book as an exquisite series of nesting boxes of sorrow and compassion, giving readers the tale within the tale of Naomi, who becomes so determined to extract her daughter’s corpse from the ruins that she attends a weeklong course where all the other participants were men to earn her license to operate earthmoving equipment to up her chances of achieving her aim.
Reminiscent of John Hersey’s classic “Hiroshima,” a devastatingly calm and matter-of-fact look at the dropping of the world’s first atomic bomb, Parry recounts this story with a necessary balance of detachment and investment. Significantly, unlike Hersey, Parry was in Japan during the disaster he’s describing, and so he includes the occasional first-person experience in his multilayered account. The result is a spellbinding book that is well worth contemplating in an era marked by climate change and natural disaster.
Kathleen Rooney is the author, most recently, of the novel “Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk.”