I started Richard Lloyd Parry's
Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan’s Disaster Zone. I found myself devouring it. Last year,
Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey was in my top ten of the year, and I think this will be as well. Mockett's book focused more on Shinto and Zen priests and their work, but both are stunning accounts of how the Japanese people grieve.
From the description:
Quote:
Richard Lloyd Parry, an award-winning foreign correspondent, lived through the earthquake in Tokyo, and spent six years reporting from the disaster zone. There he encountered stories of ghosts and hauntings. He met a priest who performed exorcisms on people possessed by the spirits of the dead. And he found himself drawn back again and again to a village which had suffered the greatest loss of all, a community tormented by unbearable mysteries of its own.
What really happened to the local children as they waited in the school playground in the moments before the tsunami? Why did their teachers not evacuate them to safety? And why was the unbearable truth being so stubbornly covered up?
Ghosts of the Tsunami is a classic of literary non-fiction, a heart-breaking and intimate account of an epic tragedy, told through the personal accounts of those who lived through it. It tells the story of how a nation faced a catastrophe, and the bleak struggle to find consolation in the ruins.
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