Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone

by Richard Lloyd Parry

Overview

Named one of the best books of 2017 by The Guardian, NPR, GQ, The Economist, Bookforum, and Lit Hub

The definitive account of what happened, why, and above all how it felt, when catastrophe hit Japan—by the Japan correspondent of The Times (London) and author of People Who Eat Darkness

On March 11, 2011, a powerful earthquake sent a 120-foot-high tsunami smashing into the coast of northeast Japan. By the time the sea retreated, more than eighteen thousand people had been crushed, burned to death, or drowned.

It was Japan’s greatest single loss of life since the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. It set off a national crisis and the meltdown of a nuclear power plant. And even after the immediate emergency had abated, the trauma of the disaster continued to express itself in bizarre and mysterious ways.

Richard Lloyd Parry, an award-winning foreign correspondent, lived through the earthquake in Tokyo and spent six years reporting from the disaster zone. There he encountered stories of ghosts and hauntings, and met a priest who exorcised the spirits of the dead. And he found himself drawn back again and again to a village that had suffered the greatest loss of all, a community tormented by unbearable mysteries of its own.

What really happened to the local children as they waited in the schoolyard in the moments before the tsunami? Why did their teachers not evacuate them to safety? And why was the unbearable truth being so stubbornly covered up?

Ghosts of the Tsunami is a soon-to-be classic intimate account of an epic tragedy, told through the accounts of those who lived through it. It tells the story of how a nation faced a catastrophe, and the struggle to find consolation in the ruins.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374253974
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	10/24/2017
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Richard Lloyd Parry is the Asia editor and Tokyo bureau chief of The Times (London) and the author of In the Time of Madness and People Who Eat Darkness.

Table of Contents

Maps xi

Prologue: Solid Vapor 3

Part I The School Beneath The Wave

Having Gone, I Will Come 17

Where Are The Children? 29

Jigoku 38

Part II Area of Search

Abundant Nature 53

The Mud 65

The Old and The Young 76

Explanations 85

Ghosts 98

What It's All About 115

Part III What Happened at Okawa

The Last Hour of The Old World 127

Inside The Tsunami 144

The River of Three Crossings 156

Part IV The Invisible Monster

In the Web 165

What Use Is The Truth? 177

The Tsunami Is Not Water 189

Predestination 203

The Rough, Steep Path 214

There May Be Gaps in Memory 223

Part V Gone Altogether Beyond

Consolation of the Spirits 237

Save Don't Fall to Sea 250

Notes 271

Acknowledgments 281

Index 283

Editorial Reviews

07/31/2017
British journalist Lloyd Parry (People Who Eat Darkness) sheds more light on the March 2011 earthquake and subsequent tsunami off Japan’s northeastern coast, focusing on fatalities in the small coastal community of Okawa. Lloyd Parry notes that the disaster caused “the greatest single loss of life” in the country since the 1945 atomic bombing of Nagasaki and triggered a meltdown of three plutonium reactors in the Fukushima Dai-ichi power station, “the world’s worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl.” He calls attention to Okawa Primary School where scores of students and teachers perished and describes how Okawa’s residents coped in the aftermath. He introduces readers to some of the parents of the hundreds of youngsters who died and traces the villagers’ determined search efforts: “Almost as carefully as the bodies, they retrieved and set aside the distinctive square rucksacks, carefully labelled with name and class, which all Japanese primary schoolchildren carry.” Later chapters deal with political fallout and resultant lawsuits, as numerous questions are raised about evacuation procedures, which parties were responsible for the deaths, and the proper ways for families to grieve their losses. Six years after the tsunami, the magnitude of the catastrophe remains difficult to fully grasp, but Lloyd Parry makes some sense of a small part of it. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"An eerie, brushstroked evocation . . . A strikingly vivid, even visceral writer, Lloyd Parry sweeps away distractions . . . to offer tightly focused and consuming human stories . . . Lloyd Parry is uncommonly sensitive to all such spirits, and in the tsunami he has found a horrifying metaphor for those subliminal forces that swirl underneath the manicured surfaces of Japan . . . The ghosts that hover just above his charged and elemental pages are a reminder of how much this land of order remains ruled by things that can't be seen." —Pico Iyer, The New York Times Book Review

"A lively and nuanced narrative by the British journalist Richard Lloyd Parry, the longtime and widely respected correspondent in Tokyo for the London Times. Though in part he presents vivid accounts of what was a very complex event, with this book he wisely stands back . . . to consider the essence of the story . . . Heartbreaking." —Simon Winchester, The New York Review of Books

"Powerful . . . Lloyd Parry's account is truly haunting, and remains etched in the brain and heart long after the book is over." —Lisa Levy, New Republic

"Richard Lloyd Parry wrote People Who Eat Darkness, easily one of the best works of true crime in the past decade . . . [Ghosts of the Tsunami is] a stunning portrait of devastation and its aftermath." –Kevin Nguyen, GQ

"A wrenching chronicle of a disaster that, six years later, still seems incomprehensible . . . Any writer could compile a laundry list of the horrors that come in the wake of a disaster; Lloyd Parry's book is not that . . . Lloyd Parry writes about the survivors with sensitivity and a rare kind of empathy; he resists the urge to distance himself from the pain in an attempt at emotional self-preservation." –Michael Schaub, NPR.org

"Remarkably written and reported . . . a spellbinding book that is well worth contemplating in an era marked by climate change and natural disaster." –Kathleen Rooney, The Chicago Tribune

"Vivid, suspenseful . . . [Lloyd Parry] re-creates the tragic events in a cinematic style reminiscent of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood . . . There's a harrowing intimacy here, as he brings us into families senseless with grief, the desire for a justice that eludes them . . . Lloyd Parry's elegant, clear-eyed prose allows him to circle ever closer to the heart of Okawa's mystery . . . Part detective story, part cultural history, part dirge, Ghosts of the Tsunami probes the scars of loss and the persistence of courage in the face of unspeakable disaster." —Hamilton Cain, Minneapolis Star Tribune

"[Lloyd Parry's] writing is always graceful and filled with compassion." —Adam Hochschild, The American Scholar

"[The book’s] testimonies are almost unbearably moving . . . In an understated way, Ghosts of the Tsunami is not only a vivid, heartfelt description of the disaster, but a subtle portrait of the Japanese nation." —Craig Brown, The Mail on Sunday

“The stories that Lloyd Parry gives voice to are not only deeply personal but . . . accompanied with essential historical and cultural context that enable the reader to understand the roles of death, grief, and responsibility in Japanese culture—and why some survivors may always remain haunted.” —Amanda Winterroth, Booklist (starred review)

“A brilliant, unflinching account . . . Singular and powerfully strange . . . It is hard to imagine a more insightful account of mass grief and its terrible processes. This book is a future classic of disaster journalism, up there with John Hersey’s Hiroshima.” —Rachel Cooke, The Guardian

“Lloyd Parry combines an analytical dissection of the disaster in all its ramifying web of detail with a novelist’s deft touch for characterization . . . Heartrending . . . it will remain as documentation to the inestimable power of nature and the pitiful frailty of our own.” —Roger Pulvers, The Japan Times

"Pensive travels in the wake of one of the world's most devastating recent disasters, the Tohoku earthquake of 2011 . . . The author's narrative is appropriately haunted and haunting . . . A sobering and compelling narrative of calamity." –Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

09/15/2017
In March 2011, Japan was struck by multiple disasters: an earthquake, a tsunami, and a nuclear catastrophe. Parry (People Who Eat Darkness) specifically focuses on the effects of the tsunami on the severely hit community of Okawa. At the town's primary school, 74 children lost their lives, the most deaths out of all the primary schools in the country. This book follows families from the day the tsunami struck to the present; documenting the momentous lawsuit residents filed against the educational district in order to obtain the truth of what happened at the school. Through numerous interviews with the families and an intimate knowledge of Japanese society, Parry weaves a heart-wrenchingly bittersweet but resilient story. By focusing on one community, he deftly displays the process of grief and bureaucratic sidestepping in addition to the strength that individuals and families showed after the tragedy. VERDICT While other books have focused on the science behind earthquakes and tsunamis, Parry brings a human element to the disaster, perfectly highlighting how narrative nonfiction can shed light on an otherwise unfathomable event for any type of reader.—Laura Hiatt, Fort Collins, CO

Library Journal

2017-07-03
Pensive travels in the wake of one of the world's most devastating recent disasters, the Tohoku earthquake of 2011.As Parry (People Who Eat Darkness, 2012, etc.), Tokyo bureau chief of the Times of London, writes, Japan is readier than any other nation for disaster, especially earthquake. Tokyo buildings are meant to stand up to shaking, even if they're highly flammable, and Japanese citizens have been drilled and know what to do. So, too, the author: "I had lived in Japan for sixteen years," he writes, "and I knew, or believed that I knew, a good deal about earthquakes." Yet, when the seafloor started shaking off the northeastern coast of Honshu on March 11, 2011, only a few experts could foresee what would soon unfold: the destruction of the nuclear reactor at Fukushima, the landfall of a wall of water 120 feet high, and a wave of death as people struggled to find safety on higher ground. An enterprising journalist, Parry visited the devastation in the immediate aftermath, and he recounts his experiences among grieving and dazed residents, many of those survivors having lost children as schools were swallowed up in seawater. The author's narrative is appropriately haunted and haunting. One memorable moment comes when he describes someone brought back from the brink of madness by a perhaps unlikely method: namely, being sprinkled with holy water and thus freed from the hold of "the dead who cannot accept yet that they are dead." Parry's set pieces come to have a certain predictability: expert-victim-expert-survivor. Yet they retain their urgency, for, as he writes, it won't be long before another earthquake of similar or even greater intensity strikes Tokyo proper, with its millions of inhabitants; in that event, "the Nankai earthquake, which might strike at any time, could kill more people than four atomic bombs." A sobering and compelling narrative of calamity.

Kirkus Reviews

In an understated performance, Simon Vance details one of the stunning tragedies arising from the tsunami that struck Japan in 2011. He expertly balances the details of the author’s heavily researched investigation and the emotionally charged survivors' stories. The tsunami was precipitated by the largest recorded earthquake in Japan. That said, earthquakes are so common in Japan that precautions are systematic and considered in everything from building construction to evacuation plans. These customary precautions make the tragedy that occurred in Okawa, a small village that lost 74 children that day, all the more devastating. Vance's steady pacing, crisp enunciation, and careful inflection enhance the weight of the story, which moves between reportage and interviews, and ultimately reveals unsettling truths about this particular disaster. A.S. 2018 Audies Finalist © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

JANUARY 2018 - AudioFile

In an understated performance, Simon Vance details one of the stunning tragedies arising from the tsunami that struck Japan in 2011. He expertly balances the details of the author’s heavily researched investigation and the emotionally charged survivors' stories. The tsunami was precipitated by the largest recorded earthquake in Japan. That said, earthquakes are so common in Japan that precautions are systematic and considered in everything from building construction to evacuation plans. These customary precautions make the tragedy that occurred in Okawa, a small village that lost 74 children that day, all the more devastating. Vance's steady pacing, crisp enunciation, and careful inflection enhance the weight of the story, which moves between reportage and interviews, and ultimately reveals unsettling truths about this particular disaster. A.S. 2018 Audies Finalist © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

JANUARY 2018 - AudioFile