Book: Facing the Wave ~ A Journey in the Wake of the Tsunami by Gretel Ehrlich

One of the best books I've read lately.

Gretel Ehrlich spent many weeks in Japan very soon after the tsunami that devastated so much of that country on March 11, 2011. She travels up and down the eastern coast bearing witness to the devastation. It is beautifully written:

"Upstairs I roll up my futon. The smell of green tea, coffee, rice and fried eggs wafts through the small house, mixing with the savage beauty of geological violence that continues to take place. There have been over 800 aftershocks greater than 4.5 since March and it's only June now....."

"On March 11, 2011, Japan's earth-altar broke. The descending oceanic plate--a slab of lithosphere--slid under the overlying plate that carried the island of Honshu. Pulling and grinding, the subduction zone was pulverized. Its topmost plate bulged and dropped and a rupture occurred: an undersea rip, 6 feet across, 310 miles along, and 120 miles wide."

She tells of the ongoing radiation, the rescue of animals, the woman who rents a bulldozer and spends her days looking for her lost child; she visits with an elderly geisha; she quotes from Hirayama's blog: "Urchins were cancelled this year. We thought abalone season might be stopped too, but it wasn't."

Radiation News (a continuing disaster and a theme that runs through this book):

"Five thousand, two hundred tons of stone from the town of Namie were quarried and used to build condominiums for refugees from the no/go zone. The stone is all radioactive and has to be removed."

"The Daiichi nuclear plant scraps plans to dump its contaminated water into the ocean. TEPCO's new insurance policy cost three hundred million yen a year."

The writing is sparse and powerful:

"Death leaves marks: a woman told Abyss-san that her 14-year-ld grandchild was practicing with the school's swim team when the tsunami occurred. The wave came over the pool. The granddaughter survived but she had scratch marks all down her legs made by the other girls as they tried to claw their way up to air. They drowned."

Some of the fisherman raced out of the harbors and "took their boats up the face of the wave. It was steep and they had to use all their power. The ones who went out too late died. One boat climbed the wave and ran out of gas. The fisherman just ahead threw him a line and the bigger boat pulled him that way. They both made it."

28,700 people perished and 4000 bodies have yet to be found.

"Yet I see aqueous corruption: the ruined, broken, bloated; the sickening to-and-fro of corpse-thickened water, and ghost-thickened air. An odd smell pervades--one that is hard to pin down. It is decomposing plants, fish and flesh, and the mineral smell of bodies being burned; the the radiation that moves through flesh has no scent at all."

Reading this book is the least any of us can do for the victims and survivors.