It was just over a year after the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima that John Hersey published his riveting 30,000-word essay, a piece of storytelling to which an entire edition of the New Yorker was dedicated. The power of his narrative arose not just from the fact that, contrary to the efforts of US censors, it exposed in graphic, heart-sundering detail the full extent of the tragedy. More particularly, by recounting the stories of individuals, it stirred into consciousness a horror simply too large to be comprehended as a whole.
It has taken Richard Lloyd Parry six years to achieve something similar of another Japanese tragedy — the tsunami that killed nearly 16,000 people and injured thousands more on March 11 2011. It has been worth the wait. In still, novelistic prose, he rescues from the depths of the ocean and the foul-smelling mud the lives that were ended on that day. As much as the dead, he deals with the half-dead, the living who trudge on through life with the guilt of the survivor, contemplating what they could or should have done to save their daughter or sister or husband.
Parry’s self-described purpose is to shake off detachment and to seek to imagine — really imagine — events so horrible that we take refuge in the trope that they are unimaginable. But there is an equal and opposite force in his remarkable treatment, which is to study the misery of tragedy from a safe distance.