In the face of several grief manuals that have been published this year, Richard Lloyd Parry’s account of the 2011 Japanese tsunami and its aftermath arrives like a ghost at the feast, its mind set not on platitudes, but on the very hardest kind of truth-telling ... This is not, then, a book of easy consolation. It is, as it should be, painful to read. All the same, every time I think of it, I’m filled with wonderment (and, I suppose, professional envy). Lloyd Parry is such a good reporter: discreet yet unsentimental; ever-present, but able also swiftly to absent himself from the page. He never overwrites. His capacity for intimacy with relative strangers is a kind of gift ... It is hard to imagine a more insightful account of mass grief and its terrible processes. This book is a future classic of disaster journalism, up there with John Hersey’s Hiroshima.
...remarkably written and reported ... In a gripping fashion, Parry builds his account around solving the excruciating mystery that haunts the parents of those who were killed...In doing so, he produces a page-turner. In lesser hands, this tactic could seem ghoulish or exploitative — 'an effort to squeeze spooky entertainment out of the tragedy.' But in Parry’s, the material gets assembled into a moving study of character and culture, love and loss, grief and responsibility ... He constructs the book as an exquisite series of nesting boxes of sorrow and compassion ... Reminiscent of John Hersey’s classic Hiroshima, a devastatingly calm and matter-of-fact look at the dropping of the world’s first atomic bomb, Parry recounts this story with a necessary balance of detachment and investment. Significantly, unlike Hersey, Parry was in Japan during the disaster he’s describing, and so he includes the occasional first-person experience in his multilayered account. The result is a spellbinding book that is well worth contemplating in an era marked by climate change and natural disaster.
...caught something far deeper than the financial fallout and collateral damage other journalists were covering ...in Ghosts of the Tsunami, Lloyd Parry has opened out his celebrated essay to offer an eerie, brushstroked evocation of a whole realm of remote villages struggling to find order in a world of absences ...less a continuous narrative than a collection of shards. Torn pictures from a family photo album, as they seem, his individual stories form a fractured portrait of a country we’re more accustomed to seeing as a polished whole ...strikingly vivid, even visceral writer, Lloyd Parry sweeps away distractions...to offer tightly focused and consuming human stories ...it’s in the realm of the ineffable that Lloyd Parry’s elliptical vignettes come to strongest life ...in the tsunami he has found a horrifying metaphor for those subliminal forces that swirl underneath the manicured surfaces of Japan.
It's a wrenching chronicle of a disaster that, six years later, still seems incomprehensible ... Any writer could compile a laundry list of the horrors that come in the wake of a disaster; Parry's book is not that. He takes his readers deep into Tohoku, 'a remote, marginal, faintly melancholy place, the symbol of a rural tradition that, for city dwellers, is no more than a folk memory' ... Parry writes about the survivors with sensitivity and a rare kind of empathy; he resists the urge to distance himself from the pain in an attempt at emotional self-preservation. The result is a book that's brutally honest, and at times difficult to read ... Ghosts of the Tsunami is a brilliant chronicle of one of the modern world's worst disasters, but it's also a necessary act of witness. The stories Parry tells are wrenching, and he refuses to mitigate the enormity of the tsunami with false optimism or saccharine feel-good anecdotes. Above all, it's a beautiful meditation on grief.
Because of his focus on the school, Lloyd Parry, a father of two, does his best to empathize with the parents of Okawa’s children. It is these people—along with the few children who survived the tragedy and discussed it with Lloyd Parry—who emerge as the downtrodden yet heroic figures of the book, which tells a story that desperately needs heroes ... It’s a search for justice that becomes a search for lost possibility. Both Perry and the parents grapple with the futility of searching for ways to to save children who have already been lost ... It’s hard to think about the waves crashing on the beach in quite the same way, so powerful is Ghosts of the Tsunami. Lloyd Parry’s account is truly haunting, and remains etched in the brain and the heart long after the book is over.
Ghosts is less an analytical or journalistic account than it is a character-driven, novelistic narrative about loss and trauma in a community disfigured by tragedy. While it is filled with meditations on the rituals and possible meanings of death, it begins with a new life ... Opening in the first-person voice helps ease non-Japanese readers into a cultural milieu studded with names (Sayomi, Takahiro) and locations (Tohoku, Ishinomaki) that they might not easily recognize or remember. But it also serves a more resonant function ... As with Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, the author is complicit with the reader: We don’t know these people who at first seem so different. But through unflinching observation and patience, we can begin to understand the emotions that connect ...Ghosts reveals an undertow of rage and distrust in unforced, metaphorical lyricism ...Lloyd Parry’s real achievement is to humanize the survivors of the catastrophe, to infuse their haunted lives with intimately recognizable humanity.
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] is able to draw something meaningful, even lovely, from the well of misery ... Overall, the strength of the book lies in its stories, its observations and its language ... There is, as Parry notes towards the end of the book, 'no tidying away of loose ends.' If anything, it is the accounts of the dead, both while they were living and in their absence, that illuminate our own brief existence and give it a kind of meaning. The 'stories alone show the way.'”
That memory of this disaster endures is thanks in no small measure to books like Ghosts of the Tsunami, a lively and nuanced narrative by the British journalist Richard Lloyd Parry, the longtime and widely respected correspondent in Tokyo for the London Times. Though in part he presents vivid accounts of what was a very complex event, with this book he wisely stands back — after what is now a decent interval — to consider the essence of the story, the manner in which the earthquake might have in some way effected a change of sorts upon Japan ...The dreadful consequence of the dithering incompetence of the more culpable of the staff at the Okawa Primary School makes for heartbreaking reading ...in his account Parry is careful not to suggest that anything akin to a major change is in the works, or that the Japanese are, as a result of so huge a disaster, at last becoming comprehensively distempered and litigious — are becoming a little more like us, in short.
Mr Lloyd Parry deftly, even lovingly, tells [these] stories ... The portrait of obfuscating officialdom that Mr Lloyd Parry paints has parallels in the account he wrote in 2011 of the murder in Tokyo of Lucie Blackman, the young woman at the centre of his earlier book, People Who Eat Darkness. In both, Japanese officials made wild denials in the face of accountable wrongdoing, ignored and hid evidence, hoping the annoying inquiries would go away. By refusing to accept their evasions, and by laying out in panoramic detail what happened after the tsunami, Mr Lloyd Parry offers a voice to the grieving who, too often, found it hard to be heard. It is a thoughtful lesson to all societies whose first reaction in the face of adversity is to shut down inquiry and cover up the facts. You will not read a finer work of narrative non-fiction this year.
Richard Lloyd Parry’s book reminds us that preconceived ideas about regions and their peoples are no more than half-truths. Other realities existed beneath the surface of post-disaster life ... a compassionate and piercing look at the communities ravaged by the tsunami ... There is another set of spirits that inhabit the pages of Lloyd Parry’s book – the ghosts of Japan’s political failures at every level of society, from village communities to local authorities to city and prefectural governments, all the way to the central government that proved unable to respond fully to the disaster.
Parry follows the parents of the children who died—as well as the few who survived—as they struggle to uncover the mistakes that led to their children’s deaths. The stories that Parry gives voice to are not only deeply personal but they are accompanied with essential historical and cultural context that enable the reader to understand the roles of death, grief, and responsibility in Japanese culture—and why some survivors may always remain haunted.
...nothing quite compares to the tsunami that struck the northeastern coast of Honshu, the archipelago’s largest island, on the flurry-flecked afternoon of March 11, 2011. In his vivid, suspenseful Ghosts of the Tsunami, British journalist Richard Lloyd Parry opens with his own account of that day in Tokyo...re-creates the tragic events in a cinematic style reminiscent of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, weaving in and out of the central mystery...a harrowing intimacy here, as he brings us into families senseless with grief, the desire for a justice that eludes them ... Lloyd Parry’s elegant, clear-eyed prose allows him to circle ever closer to the heart of Okawa’s mystery — why virtually all the children there died, unlike any other school in the country. Part detective story, part cultural history, part dirge, Ghosts of the Tsunami probes the scars of loss and the persistence of courage in the face of unspeakable disaster.
Richard Lloyd Parry’s very touching and thought-provoking book Ghosts of the Tsunami tells how the community of Okawa, Japan, was affected by the Great Tohoku Disaster: the earthquake and resulting tidal wave of March 11, 2011 ... A lesser writer might have exploited their ugly, gruesome stories. This man has a heart. He transmits to us not only the facts but also, through that special emotional conduction that requires both skill and sincerity, a portion of his subjects’ sufferings ...an uplifting book ...powerful and thoughtful arrangement of testimonies, enriched by time, change, and some descriptive talent, would have been better still had the author been more temperate in the expression of his prejudices ... With well-meant interjections, Lloyd Parry mars his own achievement, which is too bad. This significant lapse aside, Ghosts of the Tsunami approaches the highest standards of journalism.
...Ghosts of the Tsunami is an exploration less of the instrument of disaster than of the damage that it inflicted on a particular community that had 'suffered an exceptional tragedy.' Through the traumas of the people of Okawa, a small coastal town 'in a forgotten fold of Japan,' Lloyd Parry allows us to imagine what would otherwise have been unimaginable ... Gaman – which loosely means 'endurance' – is an admirable trait in the wake of disaster. It binds people together and allows them to focus on the common good before seeing to their own needs. Yet Lloyd Parry ultimately comes to see it as part of a 'cult of quietism' choking the Japanese, making them put up with unacceptable conditions in obedient silence ...to his great credit that, once he attained this gift, he so generously shared it with us here.
The author’s narrative is appropriately haunted and haunting. One memorable moment comes when he describes someone brought back from the brink of madness by a perhaps unlikely method: namely, being sprinkled with holy water and thus freed from the hold of 'the dead who cannot accept yet that they are dead.' Parry’s set pieces come to have a certain predictability: expert–victim–expert–survivor. Yet they retain their urgency, for, as he writes, it won’t be long before another earthquake of similar or even greater intensity strikes Tokyo proper, with its millions of inhabitants; in that event, 'the Nankai earthquake, which might strike at any time, could kill more people than four atomic bombs.' A sobering and compelling narrative of calamity.
Six years after the tsunami, the magnitude of the catastrophe remains difficult to fully grasp, but Lloyd Parry makes some sense of a small part of it.
