Facing the Wave: A Journey in the Wake of the Tsunami by Gretel Ehrlich (Author). A passionate pupil of Japanese poetry, theater, and artwork for a lot 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 cities where all shelter and hope appeared lost. In an eloquent narrative that blends robust reportage, poetic remark, and deeply felt reflection, she takes us into the upside-down world of northeastern Japan, the place nothing is certain and where the boundaries between dwelling 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 handy down a music that solely she still remembered are each harrowing and inspirational. Going through loss of life, going through life, and coming to phrases with impermanence are equally compelling in a landscape of surreal desolation, as the ghostly specter of Fukushima Daiichi, the nuclear power advanced, spews radiation into the ocean and air. Going through the Wave is a testomony to the buoyancy, spirit, humor, and strong-mindedness of those that should find their method in a all of a sudden shattered world.
This book is to documentary writing what Haiku is to epic poetry. Though it has all the grim realism of factual description of the catastrophic occasions of the tsunami, nuclear power plant meltdown and subsequent hurricane which beset Japan in 2011, it's informed in vivid understatement.
Ehrlich is an out of doors observer, but one who manages to be intimately and personally connected with those that have survived the unbelievable losses ensuing from this multilayered disaster.
Though it is under no circumstances a polemic, she manages to current just enough arduous data about the unbelievable contamination caused by the ability plant meltdown and the incompetence and perfidy of the government to make it plain that the folks might have been able to cope significantly better had this been "only" a pure disaster. She gives grim consciousness that not only the individuals in the fast neighborhood of Fukushima Daiichi, but these elsewhere, maybe even unknowing folks in Third World nations where nuclear-contaminated rice is being unloaded by unscrupulous revenue-mongers, may suffer the long-time period effects of this disaster.
Far more essential than the description of the fabric destruction she considered, nonetheless, is Ehrlich's immersion in the ongoing lives of the a number of individuals who function her guides and contribute their tales to her narrative. Although this story is grippingly painful, it is usually exquisitely beautiful. In a dream sequence near the end, she says, "We see how ache and pleasure usually are not opposites, but spark off each other. We will see the ache of loss and swing the other method, encountering the unexpected pleasure of survival."
It is a beautifully written travelogue of the devastation of the 3/eleven tsunami in the Tohoku area of Japan.
I ought to say, though, that the guide is much less about the destruction and more in regards to the great loss, dedication and spirit of the survivors. Relatively than comply with the story of a specific individual or family, the writer instead chose to travel round northeastern Japan with a group of buddies and acquaintances quickly after the catastrophe and writes of her observations, conversations and expertise, which included extra radioactive exposure than really useful, given the state of the Fukushima nuclear power plant at the time.
Her polished narrative makes this ebook work, even when every chapter comes throughout as disjointed from the subsequent at times, and thus appears like a travelogue and never a recitation of events or single story. Within the nearly two years following the devastation of the tsunami, the world has moved on and mourned the lack of others because of tragic occasions, man-made or not, but books like this are important because they remind us of the ongoing pain and struggling consistently round us, the power of mom nature and the fantastic thing about the human spirit.
Facing the Wave: A Journey in the Wake of the Tsunami
Gretel Ehrlich (Author)
240 pages
Pantheon; 1 edition (February 12, 2013)
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