Michael Paterniti wrote in GQ last month about the Japanese tsunami, focusing on the story of one single individual. It starts like this:
Later, lost far at sea, when you’re trying to forget all you’ve left behind, the memory will bubble up unbidden: a village that once lay by the ocean.
Pretty quickly he tells you what your name is. It’s Hiromitsu Shinkawa, and you have a farm.
You had a farm. Then, one day, in March on the 11th day, at a bit after 2 in the afternoon the ground started to shake and the waters came.
This force is greater than the force of memory, or regret, or fear. It’s the force of an impersonal death, delivered by thousands of pounds of freezing water that slam you into a dark underworld, the one in which you now find yourself hooded, beaten, pinned deeper. The sensation is one of having been lowered into a spinning, womblike grave. If you could see anything in the grip of this monster, fifteen feet down, you’d see your neighbors tumbling by, as if part of the same circus. You’d see huge pieces of house—chimneys and doors, stairs and walls—crashing into each other, fusing, becoming part of one solid, deadly wave. You’d see shards of glass and splintered swords of wood. Or a car moving like a submarine. You’d see your thirty pigeons revolving in their cage. Or your wife within an arm’s reach, then vacuumed away like a small fish. You frantically flail. Is this up or down? Something is burning inside now, not desperation but blood depleted of oxygen. What you illogically desire more than anything is to open your mouth wide and gulp. You scissor your legs. In some eternity, the water turns from black to gray, and gray to dirty green, as you reach up over your head one last time and whip your arms down, shooting for the light.
What you see when you explode into the air is a world swarming with burbling black water where one hundred homes once stood, pushing you inland on an oily swell. The mountains keep racing nearer. You’re submerged up to your neck and carried with the current, flying by treetops. It takes a moment to locate yourself here, to confirm that for the moment you’re still living in this thin line between water and sky. In the frigid flow is half a roof, which just so happens to be yours. Frogging forward, you close the gap, try to lift yourself aboard, but your heavy clothes drag you down. You try a second time. And a third, arms wobbling until you fall back, exhausted. On the fourth attempt, you propel enough of your body out of the water to beach on the roof, then wriggle the rest of yourself to momentary safety. This is when you’re overcome by two feelings: relief (I’m alive!) and disbelief (Where has the whole world gone?). The wave now surfs you deeper inland, over the homes of Mr. Yoshimura and Mr. Takahashi, Mr. Banba and Mr. Yamamoto (though the water is impenetrably black, you know this village by heart), and just when your forward progress slows (over the roof of the old-age home and the place where the hospital once stood) and is about to reverse direction, you think to jump, understanding that this may be your best opportunity to survive before the wave rushes back or another one speeds forward. The arm of a crane lies just ahead, at the water’s edge, and yet you hesitate a second too long. The reversal of water begins as a sucking sound that gains intensity, amplifying, and then you’re flying, faster and faster, backward over the village on a carpet of black water, to a line of froth where land and ocean formerly met, the mountains receding in a shot, and with them, everything you once thought immovable and holy. Where are you being taken? And what awaits you there?
Paterniti uses the second-person “you’ throughout the narrative, and normally I’d consider it gimmicky, literary-pretentious. It does its job in this case, though. The intent is to place the reader directly within the events unfolding here, and for a while the un-natural effect of the choice of grammatical case serves to instead distance the reader, due to being constantly reminded that it is such an uncommon way to tell a story. It’s a lengthy piece, however – you’ll want a cup of coffee, or perhaps green tea, and perhaps as much as a half an hour to read it all at once. After a few minutes of reading, whatever dissonance you felt at first due to the form of the narrative, quickly comes to seem not quite so odd. By the end, it seemed the only logical way to tell it.
A lot of us watched the video footage of tsunami that hit Japan last spring, some of us perhaps a few too many times. One of the criticisms of photography as a mode of expression lies in the nature of it only being able to show us the outsides of things, just bare exteriors of events, and seldom finds itself able to scratch the surfaces and convey true human experience. I know during all the reading of various accounts of the tragedy in the months that followed, it was a lack I had been looking to fill. In fact, we know that it is not possible to experience what someone else has.
Paterniti makes a good go of the attempt, though. It’s literature in the guise of journalism, or maybe the other way around. I was moved, and affected by what I read in ways that no other accounts or images of the disaster had been able to do.
Click through and read “The Man Who Sailed His House.”
