Facing the Wave: A Journey in the Wake of the Tsunami

by Gretel Ehrlich Narrated by Sumalee Montano

Overview

**Kirkus Best Books of the Year (2013)**
**Kansas City Star Best Books of the Year (2013)**

A passionate student of Japanese poetry, theater, and art for much of her life, Gretel Ehrlich felt compelled to return to the earthquake-and-tsunami-devastated Tohoku coast to bear witness, listen to survivors, and experience their terror and exhilaration in villages and towns where all shelter and hope seemed lost. In an eloquent narrative that blends strong reportage, poetic observation, and deeply felt reflection, she takes us into the upside-down world of northeastern Japan, where nothing is certain and where the boundaries between living and dying have been erased by water.
*
The stories of rice farmers, monks, and wanderers; of fishermen who drove their boats up the steep wall of the wave; and of an eighty-four-year-old geisha who survived the tsunami to hand down a song that only she still remembered are both harrowing and inspirational. Facing death, facing life, and coming to terms with impermanence are equally compelling in a landscape of surreal desolation, as the ghostly specter of Fukushima Daiichi, the nuclear power complex, spews radiation into the ocean and air. Facing the Wave is a testament to the buoyancy, spirit, humor, and strong-mindedness of those who must find their way in a suddenly shattered world.

Editorial Reviews

OCTOBER 2014 - AudioFile

Shortly after the three disasters of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown in March 2011, Gretel Ehrlich visited the Tohoku coast in Japan to survey the damage and interview survivors. Sumalee Montano’s narration is heartbreaking, understated, and even poetic. It perfectly captures Ehrlich’s grave but surprisingly optimistic storytelling. Montano rolls through the many Japanese names of people and places with authenticity. She renders the dignity and tragedy of victims, including an 84-year-old geisha carried to higher ground on the back of a younger man, those who rescued abandoned pets from radioactive towns, fishermen unable to accept government instruction to move away from the coast to grow vegetables, and the Fukushima 50, who remained to decommission the stricken power plant. Ehrlich is most impressed by the Japanese acceptance of impermanence and communal responsibility. A.B. © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

Rarely has "you-are-here" reporting been as eloquent and searing as Ehrlich's visit to Japan's Tohoku coast. This is where, in March of 2011, an earthquake and subsequent tsunami "devastated almost four hundred miles of Japan's northeastern coast and caused the cooling apparatus of the Fukushima Daiichi power plant to fail, resulting in three hydrogen explosions and the massive nuclear meltdowns in four nuclear reactors." Ehrlich journeys throughout the region with Japanese friends, meeting survivors and hearing their harrowing stories. With stories of water that "was black with diesel and gas, sewage, dirt, and blood," this book is not for the faint of heart, but memorable portraits emerge: a woman learns to use a backhoe to dig for her daughter's body; a man carries one town's beloved geisha to safety on his back. Meanwhile, an uncle of Ehrlich's friend has made his peace, observing: "I lost everything. Now I feel better." The vividness of these people and the invitation to readers to meet and know them make up for the book's one major fault: a seeming reluctance on Ehrlich's part to define her own connections to Japan and the people she clearly knows and loves there.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

From the Publisher

Unforgettable . . . a heartrending and unexpected marvel.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

“A masterpiece of narrative reportage that balances Ehrlich’s own reaction with the voices of the victims.”
—Minneapolis Star-Tribune

“A haunting elegy and story of renewal in a world torn apart by disaster. . . . Ehrlich writes beautifully, with a poet’s sensitivity.” 
—The Daily Beast

“Heartbreaking. . . . [Ehrlich brings] personal perspective to the vivid reporting about people whose lives and world were so utterly changed. . . . Accompanying [her] on these difficult but sometimes joyous journeys is reading that’s often hard to bear, but too compelling to set aside.”
—The Seattle Times

“Harrowing. . . . A sobering account of the human and environmental toll [of the tsunami]. . . . Readers of her book can witness the devastation through keen eyes. . . . The resilience of survivors is inspiring.”
—The Economist

“It’s not the numbers, the facts and figures, or the geology, but the stories that matter [in Facing the Wave]. . . . Ehrlich is an observer of the natural world”
—The Oregonian

“A riveting mosaic of reportage and reflection.”
—Elle

“Brave. . . . The language is beautiful and frail. . . . Ehrlich tries to define the scope of the tragedy as a mosaic. Survivors’ testimony, scientific measurements, personal journal entries and traditional Japanese poetry are arranged into artful fragments.” —Fredericksburg Freelance Star

“Ehrlich’s book adds flesh and soul and spirit to the bare bones of news reporting, filling the void left by the media and reminding us that real people live behind the headlines.”
—New York Journal of Books

“[Ehrlich’s] focus is aftermath, how the survivors of Japan’s March 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami continue on past cataclysm. [She] collects their stories, tying them together thoughtfully, even musically, with poetry, science, and her own observations, to achieve a sort of universal empathy that comes from unimaginable circumstance.”
—Santa Fe New Mexican

“Ehrlich is a lyrical and sensitive writer who has written about nature and her manifold mysteries. . . . Facing the Wave ends on a high and holy note of hope.”
—Spirituality and Practice Magazine

Library Journal

Ehrlich (The Future of Ice: A Journey into Cold) has done the mildly unthinkable: she traveled to tsunami-devastated Japan just months after the March 2011 deluge. The waters may have mostly returned to the sea, but the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant was still churning waste into the air and water. Bodies were still being uncovered; once tight-knit villages stood as ghost towns; sorrow hung in the air along with the summer heat. There she interviewed fishermen, farmers, teachers, monks, nuns, and even a retired geisha. All of these brave souls are survivors in one way or another—the loss of their parents, children, friends, homes, and/or lands is staggering, one horrific story followed by another.

Verdict Readers will certainly not find this type of journey recommended by Conde Nast or Travel & Leisure. The descriptions of the stench of the dead and the grief of the living are alternately numbing and horrifying. Nothing and no one was left unharmed: schoolchildren, elderly pensioners, cats, dogs, horses, cows, fish, crops. A well-written, important book to read—if you can take it. [See Prepub Alert, 8/3/12.]—Lee Arnold, Historical Soc. of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

(c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

OCTOBER 2014 - AudioFile

Shortly after the three disasters of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown in March 2011, Gretel Ehrlich visited the Tohoku coast in Japan to survey the damage and interview survivors. Sumalee Montano’s narration is heartbreaking, understated, and even poetic. It perfectly captures Ehrlich’s grave but surprisingly optimistic storytelling. Montano rolls through the many Japanese names of people and places with authenticity. She renders the dignity and tragedy of victims, including an 84-year-old geisha carried to higher ground on the back of a younger man, those who rescued abandoned pets from radioactive towns, fishermen unable to accept government instruction to move away from the coast to grow vegetables, and the Fukushima 50, who remained to decommission the stricken power plant. Ehrlich is most impressed by the Japanese acceptance of impermanence and communal responsibility. A.B. © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

Lyrical, meandering dispatches and eyewitness accounts from the devastation of the 2011 tsunami in Japan. Deeply engaged in Japanese culture and history since her first trips to Japan in 1968, poet and nature writer Ehrlich (In the Empire of Ice: Encounters in a Changing Landscape, 2010, etc.) made several visits to Japan in the months after the shattering earthquake and tsunami. Moving along the coast in the company of her friend Masumi and her family, who live in Sendai, near the epicenter, Ehrlich tried simply to make sense of the unspeakable horror the Japanese experienced, recording accounts by traumatized survivors and her own poignant on-the-ground observations. The tsunami waves wrecked 400 miles of Japan's northeastern coast and caused the lethal meltdown of the Fukushima Dai-ichi power plant, which had long needed repairs, resulting in a national scandal. Exploring the coast where Masumi spent her childhood, wearing protective clothing against radiation, Ehrlich viewed a "wild place of total devastation," where the sea wall was useless in keeping back the towering waves and entire towns were wiped out. The author records eyewitness blogs, such as by the fisherman who rushed out to sea just after the last big earthquake struck (preceded by several smaller ones) and watched the tsunami devastate his home, before being stuck for days on his boat without food. Ehrlich visited shrines that became evacuation centers and crematoriums during the crisis, and she mixes some Buddhist ideas of perishability with haiku from Matsuo Basho and her own work. Ehrlich renders the enormity of loss in a fashion comprehensible to her American readers. An eloquent attempt to grasp the Japanese experience of the "The Wave," which was "center and fringe at once, a totality, both destructive and beautiful."

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170058747
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	11/15/2013
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

The Swimmer
 
Mizu no michi. The Path of Water. How one swims in it and what it teaches along the way. A wave rises from a seismic rip in the seafloor. It spreads out low and travels at jet speed, mounding up as it hits shore. In Kamaishi, Japan, a forty-year-old fisherman is caught by the first thirty-foot-high tsunami wave to enter the narrow harbor after the 9.0 earthquake that hit northeastern Japan that March 11 day.
 
Kikuchi-san was driving when his car was almost shaken off the road. Six minutes later, he turned toward his parents’ house to rescue them, knowing that a tsunami would come, but his father was going the other way, bicycling toward the harbor.
 
“Don’t go there,” Kikuchi-san yelled out, but the elderly man didn’t hear. By the time Kikuchi-san caught up with him, his father had climbed the seawall and was clutching a steel ladder, facing the sea.
 
Kikuchi-san remembers a roar. Water was receding, surging backwards until the ocean floor lay exposed. “We’ve got to get out of here,” Kikuchi-san yelled, but his father didn’t move.
 
The roar intensified. A white line appeared at the horizon. The wave was coming fast. As Kikuchi-san climbed up to get to his father, water came at him. His father shook his head, refusing to budge. One last look, then the young fisherman jumped off the wall. When he turned back, his father was gone. “My father chose to stay, and in that second I accepted it, and thought it would be the same for me too.”
 
Water towered over him. He saw a nine-ton squid boat teetering on the wave’s crest, its glass attractor lamps swinging and shattering. The Wave swept him into the river that splits the town of Kamaishi in half. He climbed onto a metal roof, but the water caught him there too, sucking him backwards, pulling him out to sea. The water roiled. It was black with diesel and gas, sewage, dirt, and blood, and Kikuchi-san rolled and thrashed inside its debris-marbled night.
 
The collapsed wave took the fisherman all over the place. Heavy house beams and pieces of boats slammed into him. He grabbed a breath, went down, and shot up again. Shattered roof tiles skittered by. Water surged and retreated. Another wave drove him deeper, then tossed him sideways and up. He remembers seeing two concrete pillars zoom by as he was pulled under the bridge. His head broke water: he could breathe.
 
A piece of plastic buoy appeared and he grabbed it. “Retreating water took me back out and another wave carried me in again,” he told me. Dead bodies were floating, parts of houses catapulted, cars tumbled, a floating roof banged into a bridge and flipped on its side. The present was splintered. He was lost in a lost world.
 
“The wave came into the river behind the station. I must have been swept up from the ocean into it, past the petrol station.” As the first wave flattened out, the roaring stopped. He remembers silence. Because he could hear, he knew he was alive, not dreaming. “I was stranded in the debris. I couldn’t go anywhere. It was so quiet, I heard a dog whimpering somewhere, but couldn’t see it. It was so sad.” He was brokenhearted, and like the dog, thought he would die.
 
There was a roar. He looked: a wave was coming back again. Water covered him and he was driven toward one of the bridge pillars. He saw a rope dangling. “I barely got to the pillar before the ocean began dragging me back, so I reached for the rope and grabbed it. My lower half was submerged. Debris was being pulled out, but I kept holding on. As the water drew away, my legs were pulled out in front of me. I was holding tight, floating on my back with my head up. At first I wasn’t worried about losing my grip, but then, my hands got very cold.”
 
Water came in false tidal sequences. Between waves, he remembers another period of stillness. “The sea was a lagoon. A log floated past. I climbed onto it.” Sitting astride the dead tree he could see the extent of the destruction for the first time. The entire port had been demolished. Fishing boats had been hurled onto the tops of buildings. He lost his boat. Almost every house was gone, including his own. A beam floated by: he was swimming in the remnants of his past.
 
As the water retreated, he lay on top of the log and paddled toward land. With mud and debris under his feet, he stood, and realized the wave had taken his pants: he was naked. “There was nothing I could do,” he said. He saw people standing on a huge mountain of coal and climbed up to join them. A woman yelled, “There’s another wave coming.” He thought he would die this time, but the water never reached them. He remembers standing there, shivering, for a long time.
Finally he saw that the Kamaishi Port office building was still standing. “The third floor looked okay, so I went that way. I took off my jacket and tied it around my waist. I saw another sweater sticking out of the window of a wrecked car, so I tied it around my backside.”
 
Kikuchi-san swam and stumbled through rubble. He doesn’t remember how long it took. In a town of more than 39,000 people, 935 had already died. He crawled into the third-story window. There were 40 people inside. They tried to warm him. He was hypothermic and bleeding; they administered first aid and pulled a pair of gloves over his feet.
 
A woman he knew came to his side. They didn’t speak. Together they watched the sky grow dark. With no city lights on they saw bright stars. Someone lit candles. Desks were pushed together so he could lie on them. The night seemed peaceful; the tsunami, a dream. But the continuous aftershocks jolted him into an understanding of what had happened, and he wondered if his family was alive. When he woke, it was morning.
 
Up on the roof he looked out on a flattened city. He knew he had to join the throngs wandering through the debris. It was hard to move but he found a stick to use as a cane. Back across the rough plain of wreckage, he climbed up to the bridge. His wife passed him and their eyes met, but she only nodded. When she spoke it was to tell him that their sixteen-year-old daughter was still missing.
 
They set off to look for her. A few hours later, a fisherman stopped them, and said he’d seen the girl, that she was working with the city firemen who were giving first aid to tsunami victims. For the first time since the disaster, Kikuchi-san cried.
 
Later, he found his mother at an evacuation center. He kneeled in front of her and quietly told her that her husband had been washed off the seawall. She shook her head and said nothing.
 
In the next two days, Kikuchi-san went to find his father’s body. Fierce aftershocks continued. He dragged his aching body across the ruins of the town. His house was gone; he had seen only a few other fishermen. Many had taken their boats out to sea. He didn’t know who was dead and who was alive.
 
A temporary morgue had been set up in a school gym for unidentified bodies. Kikuchi-san found body #59, and a written description of his father. He unzipped the body bag. His father’s watch was still ticking but the man’s lungs had filled with seawater, and his heart had stopped. He was sixty-nine years old.
 
“He spent his whole life on the water,” Kikuchi-san said. “And even though it took him, I love the sea; it’s all I have.”

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