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Facing the Wave: A Journey in the Wake of the Tsunami
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Facing the Wave: A Journey in the Wake of the Tsunami Hardcover - 2013 - 1st Edition

by Gretel Ehrlich


From the publisher

**"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."

Details

  • Title Facing the Wave: A Journey in the Wake of the Tsunami
  • Author Gretel Ehrlich
  • Binding Hardcover
  • Edition number 1st
  • Edition 1
  • Pages 224
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher Pantheon Books, New York
  • Date 2013-02-12
  • Illustrated Yes
  • ISBN 9780307907318 / 0307907317
  • Weight 0.91 lbs (0.41 kg)
  • Dimensions 8.43 x 5.75 x 1.05 in (21.41 x 14.61 x 2.67 cm)
  • Library of Congress subjects Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami, Japan, 2011, Tsunami damage - Japan - Taohoku Region
  • Library of Congress Catalog Number 2012020400
  • Dewey Decimal Code 363.349

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.”

Media reviews

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

“Ehrlich offers always startling work that has deservedly won her a PEN New England’s Henry David Thoreau Prize for excellence in nature writing…expect first-rate observation offered with intimate insight.” –Library Journal

“Lyrical, meandering dispatches and eyewitness accounts from the devastation of the 2011 tsunami in Japan…Ehrlich renders the enormity of loss in a fashion comprehensible to her American readers…eloquent.” –Kirkus  

“Gifted, adventurous, and extolled nature writer Ehrlich has abiding connections to Japan, so she returned there soon after the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami…Ehrlich’s invaluable chronicle subtly raises questions about coastal disasters, global warming, and nuclear power as the beauty and precision of her prose and her profound and knowledgeable insights into nature’s might and matters spiritual and cultural evoke a deep state of awe and sympathy.”—Donna Seaman, Booklist 

“Ms. 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 

“As Ehrlich concludes after her nine months there, ‘We can see the pain of loss and swing the other way, encountering the unexpected joy of survival.’ Her own account in this brief but unforgettable book is itself a heartrending and unexpected marvel.” —San Francisco Chronicle 

“Skilled reportage…As Ehrlich concludes, ‘We can see the pain of loss and swing the other way, encountering the unexpected joy of survival.’ Her own account, both harrowing and beautifully told, in this brief but unforgettable book is itself a heartrending and unexpected marvel.” —Huffington Post 

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

“A haunting elegy and story of renewal in a world torn apart by disaster following the 2011 disasters in Japan…Erhlich writes beautifully, with a poet’s sensitivity towards not only what to write but also what to observeNewsweek Daily Beast 

“A poetic, heartbreaking look at the immediate aftermath of Japan’s earthquake and tsunami – and all that followed…In sum, the book is a masterpiece of narrative reportage that balances Ehrlich’s own reaction with the voices of the victims.” —Minneapolis Star-Tribune 

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

“Brave…The language is beautiful and frail, but readers will not find a conventional ending. Instead, Facing the Wave ends with the troublesome realization that the same chaos could crash into one’s own life.” —Fredericksburg Freelance Star 

“Gretel 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   

“[Gretel Ehrlich's] frequent theme is the relationship of people to the environment and how often harsh and ever-changing natural conditions affect their lives. Here, her focus is aftermath, how the survivors of Japan's March 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami continue on post cataclysm. Ehrlich 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 blends lyrical prose and astute reportage in this portrait of Japan’s splintered Tohoku coast months after a devastating earthquake and tsunami.” —Kansas City Star, Best Books of 2013

About the author

Gretel Ehrlich is the author of "This Cold Heaven," "The Future of Ice," and "The Solace of Open Spaces," among other works of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. She lives in Wyoming.

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