The Tohōku earthquake was the most powerful earthquake in recorded history to hit Japan, at 9.0-9.1 Mw. The earthquake happened at 2:46 in the afternoon on March 11, 2011. The earthquake caused Japan to move east closer to North America by 13 feet and accelerated the rotation of the earth. This case study illuminates the multiplicity of disaster and the impossibility of separating a “natural event” from its many contexts and resonances.
Three collections of literature were published in the year after the Tohōku in direct response to the catastrophe. The proceeds of each were directed to relief funding and they promoted charitable donations. 2:46: Aftershocks from the Japan Earthquake and Shaken: Stories for Japan were both created immediately after the event, being published in April and June 2011 respectively. 2:46: Aftershocks was spearheaded by the Red Cross. Shaken: Stories for Japan was created by the Japan America Society of Southern California and includes predominantly the work of mystery writers. These texts are examples of how literature and narrative can be a commercial actor in disaster networks.Published just one year after Tohōku, March Was Made of Yarn: Reflections on the Japanese Earthquake, Tsunami, and Nuclear Meltdown (Luke and Karashima 2012) is another charitable collection of literature by well-known writers across the world. As these three charitable collections of texts demonstrate, the Tohōku event played out in a global arena. While these three works facilitate the movement of both capital and narrative between Japan and the rest of the world, the Pacific Ocean physically moved the disaster from Japan across the world.
Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being
Ruth Ozeki wrote a manuscript before the earthquake, but felt strongly that the world in her novel was no longer relevant to Japan after Tohōku. So, she rescinded the manuscript and rewrote a novel grappling with Tohōku’s catastrophes from across the ocean. Ozeki discusses the novel as an exploration of how she could respond to catastrophes as a fiction writer.
A Tale for the Time Being is an artifact of the earthquake culture in the Pacific Northwest because it was written in British Columbia. However, it contends the Japanese earthquake. The novel begins when a woman on a coastal island in BC discovers a package on the beach. The package contains the personal diary of a young girl in Japan. The woman in British Columbia is a writer named Ruth suffering from writer’s block. Ruth is a character who represents the author of the novel, Ruth Ozeki. The novel is guided by the relationships between authors, readers, and the texts that pass between them.
The settings of the novel form a rim around the Pacific Ocean. As an important conduit, the ocean brings Nao’s diary from Japan to British Columbia, likely by the tsunami waves from Tohōku. Through the novel was written in response to the Japanese disaster, it is set simultaneously in Japan and Pacific Northwest, two places with similar seismic circumstances. In the novel, Ruth learns of the Cascadia Subduction Zone and discovers the hazards of her own home.
This network demonstrates the nested texts in Ozeki’s novel alongside the other literary actors responding to Tohōku. Ozeki’s own story of writing demonstrates how the Japanese disaster transformed her creative work. The network shows the overwhelming connections Ozeki’s novel draws between readers, writers, places, and disasters. A Tale for the Time Being contains two concentric texts – the two diaries in grey – that move from Japan to the Pacific Northwest across the ocean. The connections within the novel breach time, space, and text, and save the lives of several characters. The diary on the beach is like a carrier bag full of fragile relationships, carried by the ocean into the hands of Ruth the reader. Ozeki’s novel is like a carrier bag that holds these texts, readers, writers, and disasters in a particular relationship that emphasizes fiction as a conduit for human connection.