Facing the Wave

February 25, 2013
Rarely has "you-are-here" reporting been as eloquent and searing as Ehrlich's visit to Japan's Tohoku coast. This is where, in March of 2011, an earthquake and subsequent tsunami "devastated almost four hundred miles of Japan's northeastern coast and caused the cooling apparatus of the Fukushima Daiichi power plant to fail, resulting in three hydrogen explosions and the massive nuclear meltdowns in four nuclear reactors." Ehrlich journeys throughout the region with Japanese friends, meeting survivors and hearing their harrowing stories. With stories of water that "was black with diesel and gas, sewage, dirt, and blood," this book is not for the faint of heart, but memorable portraits emerge: a woman learns to use a backhoe to dig for her daughter's body; a man carries one town's beloved geisha to safety on his back. Meanwhile, an uncle of Ehrlich's friend has made his peace, observing: "I lost everything. Now I feel better." The vividness of these people and the invitation to readers to meet and know them make up for the book's one major fault: a seeming reluctance on Ehrlich's part to define her own connections to Japan and the people she clearly knows and loves there.

December 1, 2012
Lyrical, meandering dispatches and eyewitness accounts from the devastation of the 2011 tsunami in Japan. Deeply engaged in Japanese culture and history since her first trips to Japan in 1968, poet and nature writer Ehrlich (In the Empire of Ice: Encounters in a Changing Landscape, 2010, etc.) made several visits to Japan in the months after the shattering earthquake and tsunami. Moving along the coast in the company of her friend Masumi and her family, who live in Sendai, near the epicenter, Ehrlich tried simply to make sense of the unspeakable horror the Japanese experienced, recording accounts by traumatized survivors and her own poignant on-the-ground observations. The tsunami waves wrecked 400 miles of Japan's northeastern coast and caused the lethal meltdown of the Fukushima Dai-ichi power plant, which had long needed repairs, resulting in a national scandal. Exploring the coast where Masumi spent her childhood, wearing protective clothing against radiation, Ehrlich viewed a "wild place of total devastation," where the sea wall was useless in keeping back the towering waves and entire towns were wiped out. The author records eyewitness blogs, such as by the fisherman who rushed out to sea just after the last big earthquake struck (preceded by several smaller ones) and watched the tsunami devastate his home, before being stuck for days on his boat without food. Ehrlich visited shrines that became evacuation centers and crematoriums during the crisis, and she mixes some Buddhist ideas of perishability with haiku from Matsuo Basho and her own work. Ehrlich renders the enormity of loss in a fashion comprehensible to her American readers. An eloquent attempt to grasp the Japanese experience of the "The Wave," which was "center and fringe at once, a totality, both destructive and beautiful."

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September 1, 2012

The author of fiction, poetry, and especially creative nonfiction both deeply observant of the natural world and imbued with personal understanding, Ehrlich deservedly won PEN New England's Henry David Thoreau Prize for excellence in nature writing. Here, she explains how a fascination with Japanese art and poetry drove her to Japan's devastated Tohoku coast after last year's tsunami.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from December 15, 2012
Gifted, adventurous, and extolled nature writer Ehrlich has abiding connections to Japan, so she returned there soon after the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami. With the valiant assistance of her guides and interpreters, especially photographer Yajima Masumi, she explored the devastated Tohoku coast and listened to survivors' stories as they endured strong daily aftershocks. Fisherman Kikuchi-san describes being swept into a 30-foot tsunami wave of water black with diesel and gas, sewage, dirt, and blood and dense with smashed houses, boats, cars, and bodies. Others remember running for their lives as the water surged toward them and seeing loved ones drown as entire towns were erased. Having farmed in the Sendai region for centuries, Masumi's family struggles to replant after the tsunami only to lose it all again in a brutal typhoon. Many of the people Ehrlich meets, including Ito Tsuyako, a lovely 84-year-old geisha, are determined to adapt, but others have no hope. And the catastrophe is ongoing, as radiation from the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant contaminates land and sea. 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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)