Fukushima to Haiti: What Disasters Reveal

This month we have been discussing Haruki Murakami's short story collection, After the Quake and as an adjunct to that I wanted to bring attention to novelist Junot Diaz' essay, Apocalypse: What Disasters Reveal, from the Boston Review last May. (He also discusses the essay on NPR's On Point.) Diaz looks at the potential of apocalyptic events such as natural disasters to reveal and clarify our world,

After all, if these types of apocalyptic catastrophes have any value it is that in the process of causing things to fall apart they also give us a chance to see the aspects of our world that we as a society seek to run from, that we hide behind veils of denials.

Apocalyptic catastrophes don’t just raze cities and drown coastlines; these events, in David Brooks’s words, “wash away the surface of society, the settled way things have been done. They expose the underlying power structures, the injustices, the patterns of corruption and the unacknowledged inequalities.” And, equally important, they allow us insight into the conditions that led to the catastrophe, whether we are talking about Haiti or Japan. (I do believe the tsunami-earthquake that ravaged Sendai this past March will eventually reveal much about our irresponsible reliance on nuclear power and the sinister collusion between local and international actors that led to the Fukushima Daiichi catastrophe.) If, as Roethke writes, “in a dark time, the eye begins to see,” apocalypse is a darkness that gives us light.

Diaz goes on to discuss how natural disasters expose the kinds of societal choices (eg. the neglect of the levee system that protects New Orleans) that create social disasters, and to explore the way in which the communities most vulnerable in a disaster, such as Haiti, are those least likely to benefit from the trend towards greater global inequality. I urge you to read the entire essay.

Having previously blogged about a documentary narrated by another of our authors which won a regional Emmy, I wanted to note that the Miami Herald recently won an Emmy for it's documentary, Nou Bouke,  narrated by Edwidge Danticat (Brother I'm Dying), a good visual complement to Diaz' piece,

Nou Bouke, a Creole term for "We're Tired," focuses on Haiti's past, present and future in light of the apocalyptic January 12, 2010 earthquake that now marks a new chapter in the nation's history. The documentary presents a comprehensive look at the Haitian polemic as the Caribbean nation faces its most challenging crossroads due to the immense loss of life and destruction. 

Murakami and After the Quake: Reality Check

The video above is the trailer for a play by Frank Galati formed from two of the stories in Haruki Murakami's short story collection After the Quake, yet another of the creative spin-offs of his work.  In the book, the actual earthquake takes place offstage. As a reality check, here's a bit of BBC coverage of the 1995 Kobe earthquake. Of course, it's impossible to read this collection now and not think about the more recent Fukushima earthquake and tsunami. Must reading in that regard is Murakami's acceptance speech ("As an Unrealistic Dreamer") given for the Catalunya International Prize in Barcelona this summer. In it, he talks about the resilience of the Japanese people in the face of natural disaster but focuses most of his attention on the relationship of Japan and nuclear power,

We should have been working to develop alternative energy sources to replace nuclear power at a national level, by harvesting all existing
technologies, wisdom and social capital. Even if people throughout the world had mocked us, saying, “Nuclear power is the most effective power generation system, and Japanese people are really stupid not to use it”, we should have retained the aversion to nuclear power that was triggered by our experience of nuclear weapons. 

We should have made the development of non-nuclear power generation the cornerstone of our policy after World War II. This should have been the way to assume our collective responsibility for the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In Japan, we needed strong ethics, strong values, and a strong social message. This would have been a chance for the Japanese people to make a real contribution to the world. We neglected to take that important road, however, preferring to pursue the fast track of “efficiency” in support of our rapid economic development.

This month National Geographic has a package with photoessays (Japan Nuclear Zone) of scenes from within the "exclusion zone" and nuclear radiation clean-up, an area already beginning to resemble Chernobyl, a disaster we've read about and discussed here previously.

The New York Times also has a fresh multi-media report out on the clean-up,

So far, the government is following a pattern set since the nuclear accident, dismissing dangers, often prematurely, and laboring to minimize the scope of the catastrophe. Already, the trial cleanups have stalled: the government failed to anticipate communities’ reluctance to store tons of soil to be scraped from contaminated yards and fields.

If you're looking for a more upbeat story about the disaster, I enjoyed this PBS Newshour piece about scientist-activists working with citizens to crowdsource radiation data in the interests of providing information about the safety of living conditions.

Murakami donated the prize money from the Catalunya prize to earthquake victims.  I just wanted to note here too, that another of our favorite authors, Naomi Hirahara (Summer of the Big Bachi) contributed a short story to the Kindle collection Shaken: Stories from Japan which benefits Japan America Society of Southern California's 2011 Japan Relief Fund. Loyal Readers might want to check that out.

More Murakami posts can be found here.

More Murakami: Representations and Translations

This post is mostly an excuse to share the video above showing the creation of a mural inspired by "Super Frog Saves Tokyo" from the short story collection After the Quake by Haruki Murakami. The work, by artist Mark Licari,  was installed at Equator Books in Venice which unfortunately has closed. I hope the new tenants in the space are appreciative. Still photographs of the mural can be found at marklicari.org for closer inspection, but I think seeing the process of creation speaks to the improvisatory wonder of Murakami's work.

So just to throw a few more links into the discussion mix, I wanted to acknowledge the translator of After the Quake, Jay Rubin. Here is a brief interview with Publisher's Weekly and another brief audio interview with the New Yorker. And Rubin covers the same territory a bit more expansively in this UC-Berkeley panel discussion (Haruki Murakami: Japanese Literature on the Global Stage). The discussion also includes some other interesting presentations, including an exploration of the use of language in the story "Thailand", also from After the Quake, but requires some serious dedication at 2 and 1/2 hours and is probably only for language-nerds and Asian-lit geeks like yours truly.

See our other Murakami discussion posts here.

Rights Reel: Murakami on Film

I was surprised to learn that there is a 2008 movie version of the Haruki Murakami short story "All God's Children Can Dance" from the collection After the Quake, our discussion selection for this month. The climactic scene at the baseball park can be seen above and although it is not clear from that excerpt, the director, Robert Logevall, transferred the story to Koreatown in Los Angeles (You can definitely see some familiar terrain in the trailer). The film does not appear to have gotten any US distribution, nor even a straight-to-DVD release, so chances of seeing it are slim.

On the other hand, the film version of Murakami's Norwegian Wood (Tagline: A story of love and heartbreak in a time of global instability) will be released early in January. So if After the Quake was tempting enough for you to consider trying another book by the author, maybe that's the one you should pick up. The film is directed by Tran Anh Hung, who also did the wonderful The Scent of Green Papaya and Cyclo, so it will definitely be on my list. (And come to think of it, those two movies would be great to revisit before next month's discussion of Eaves of Heaven.) More on the film Norwegian Wood here.

And on the subject of more Murakami, you might want to check out the Slate article Which Books Should I Read First? which indeed recommends Norwegian Wood and if you have more questions about how to go about it you can consult the companion Slate article Is the Japanese novelist a great writer? or The Daily Beast How to Read Haruki Murakami. The gist is something like, "Don't sweat the details, just enjoy the ride!"  See other Murakami posts here.

Our December Author: Haruki Murakami

We are reading Haruki Murakami this month, but unlike the rest of the blogosphere, we are not reading 1Q84, but opted for the more modest short story collection After the Quake. In the video above, the author reads one of the stories, "Super Frog Saves Tokyo."  Random House has a slick multi-media Murakami website where you can get a musical playlist for your reading pleasure or a screensaver, or connect with other fans, but this website might actually be more useful for finding links to articles and interviews, although I found many expired links.  Here are a few interviews and articles I found useful for reading After the Quake and for general introduction to Murakami's work:

In a comprehensive 2004 interview (The Art of Fiction No. 182) with the Paris Review, among other interesting insights, Murakami denies that Japanese manga were the inspiration for "Super Frog Save Tokyo" but allows for some folkloric influence,

When I was a child, I was told many Japanese folktales and old stories. Those stories are critical when you are growing up. That Super-Frog figure, for example, might come from that reservoir of stories. You have your reservoir of American folklore, Germans have theirs, Russians have theirs. But there is also a mutual reservoir we can draw from: The Little Prince, McDonald’s, or the Beatles.

In a recent Guardian profile ('I took a gamble and survived'), Murakami comments on the Fukushima earthquake and tsunami,

He was in Honolulu earlier this year when the earthquake and tsunami hit Japan. It has changed the country, he says. "People lost their confidence. We had been working so hard, after the end of the war. For 60 years. The richer we became, the happier we become. But at the end, we didn't get happy, however hard we worked. And the earthquake came, and so many people had to be evacuated, to abandon their houses and homeland. It's a tragedy. And we were proud of our technology, but our nuclear power plant turned out to be a nightmare. So people started to think, we have to change drastically the way of life. I think that is a big turning point in Japan."

Charles Baxter, writing about 1Q84 in the New York Review of Books (Behind Murakami’s Mirror) made this observation which I feel is also helpful for reading many of the stories in After the Quake,

Murakami’s novels, stories, and nonfiction ... display, often very bravely and beautifully, the pull of the unreal and the fantastical on ordinary citizens who, unable to bear the world they have been given, desperately wish to go somewhere else. The resulting narratives conform to what I have called Unrealism. In Unrealism, characters join cults. They believe in the apocalypse and Armageddon, or they go down various rabbit holes and arrive in what Murakami himself, in a bow to Lewis Carroll, calls Wonderland. They long for the end times. Magical thinking dominates. Not everyone wants to be in such a dislocated locale, and the novels are often about heroic efforts to get out of Wonderland, but it is a primary destination site, like Las Vegas. As one character in 1Q84 says, “Everybody needs some kind of fantasy to go on living, don’t you think?”

And in the lengthy New York Times Magazine profile (The Fierce Imagination of Haruki Murakami) which explores the geography of Murakami's world there is this observation,

The defining disasters of modern Japan — the subway sarin-gas attack, the Kobe earthquake, the recent tsunami — are, to an amazing extent, Murakami disasters: spasms of underground violence, deep unseen trauma that manifests itself as massive destruction to daily life on the surface. He is notoriously obsessed with metaphors of depth: characters climbing down empty wells to enter secret worlds or encountering dark creatures underneath Tokyo’s subway tunnels. (He once told an interviewer that he had to stop himself from using well imagery, after his eighth novel, because the frequency of it was starting to embarrass him.) He imagines his own creativity in terms of depth as well. Every morning at his desk, during his trance of total focus, Murakami becomes a Murakami character: an ordinary man who spelunks the caverns of his creative unconscious and faithfully reports what he finds.

Murakami is an author who inspires his readers to react creatively to his work--take for instance this musical fundraiser for quake victims inspired by the short stories in After the Quake. We will be featuring additional homages in posts later this week as well as additional insights into the author and the subject of the literature of disaster.

For December: After the Quake by Haruki Murakami

For December we have chosen Haruki Murakami's short story collection, After the Quake,

The six stories in Haruki Murakami's mesmerizing collection are set at the time of the catastrophic 1995 Kobe earthquake, when Japan became brutally aware of the fragility of its daily existence. But the upheavals that afflict Murakami's characters are even deeper and more mysterious, emanating from a place where the human meets the inhuman. 

An electronics salesman who has been abruptly deserted by his wife agrees to deliver an enigmatic package?and is rewarded with a glimpse of his true nature. A man who has been raised to view himself as the son of God pursues a stranger who may or may not be his human father. A mild-mannered collection agent receives a visit from a giant talking frog who enlists his help in saving Tokyo from destruction. As haunting as dreams, as potent as oracles, the stories in After the Quake are further proof that Murakami is one of the most visionary writers at work today.

After the Quake

This month we are reading Greg Mortenson's Stones into Schools: Promoting Peace with Education in Afghanistan and Pakistan. I envisioned our discussion focusing largely on the question of the U.S. role in Afghanistan. But after a week of observing the devastation in Japan, I'm thinking there will be heightened interest in the aspect of the book that deals with rebuilding after the Kashmir earthquake. The New York Times has assembled a collection of opinions on the question of appropriate aid to Japan and Takashi Inoguchi, president of the University of Niigata Prefecture and professor emeritus at the University of Tokyo, has a response that I think "Dr. Greg" would heartily approve of, urging us to find ways to help the young people of Japan who have lost relatives and friends and face an uncertain future,

Those youngsters will be handicapped financially and psychologically, yet they will also shoulder Japan's reconstruction. The international community can encourage them by setting up opportunities to study abroad and educational programs and scholarships for acquiring foreign language and other important skills. This will help give Japan's young people the hope and courage to move on amid sorrow and despair.

Whether the disaster is war or an earthquake, the sensible solution does always seem to be to look to the future and prioritize the needs of our children, no?  And they will lead the way. Greg Mortenson points us to an account of Hazara children rallying in sympathy for the children of Japan.

The other book we have read that most closely relates to this catastrophe is Svetlana Alexievich's Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster.  If you need a refresher, n+1 is running an excerpt from Voices.  The twenty-fifth anniversary of the event is next month and news organizations are revisiting the site. Here's NPR's Talk of the Nation talking to reporter Henry Shukman from Outside magazine, or read his article here. News reports emphasize how the Japanese nuclear reactor crisis has not reached Chernobyl levels of catastrophe. See this article from TPM and ProPublica for both the technological and sociopolitical reasons this current accident is different. As human rights activists, we can be happy that, although there are some complaints about lack of information from Japanese authorities in this crisis, the level of transparency far exceeds that of Soviet-era Ukraine.  Worth thinking about as we move forward in thinking about the use of nuclear power around the world, which governments can we trust with a similar level of disclosure?

Also worth noting, Rob Gifford (China Road) is reporting for NPR from the earthquake region, adding just the kind of details (such as finding a woman sort her recycling) that make the monstrous scale of the tsunami and earthquake more human.

Finally, here's a good place to start if you want to help, or maybe one of the best things you can do, especially if you live in a fault zone, is be prepared.

Hirahara Family Interview

Here's an interview Weekend America did with Naomi Hirahara, (Summer of the Big Bachi), and her parents a year ago, focusing on their experience as survivors of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.  There's also a little gallery of pictures of the family.

Tags: Naomi Hirahara, Japan, Hiroshima, atomic bomb