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276 pages, Hardcover
First published August 31, 2017
It was the biggest earthquake ever known to have struck Japan, and the fourth most powerful in the history of seismology. It knocked the Earth ten inches off its axis; it moved Japan four feet closer to America. In the tsunami that followed, 18,500 people were drowned, burned or crushed to death. At its peak the water was 120 feet high. Half a million people were driven out of their homes. Three reactors in the Fukushima Dai-ichi power station melted down, spilling their radioactivity across the countryside, the world’s worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl. The earthquake and tsunami caused more than $210 billion of damage, making it the most costly natural disaster ever.
Naturally, invisibly, without fuss or drama, order crystalized in the chaos of the evacuation centers. Space was allocated, bedding was improvised, and food was pooled, prepared and distributed. Rosters, for fetching, fixing, cleaning, and cooking were quickly established and filled. Everything was eased by the instinctive Japanese aversion to anything that could be judged messy, selfish, or otherwise antisocial...There was no significant looting; despite the chronic shortages of everything from gas to toilet paper, no one took the opportunity of scarcity to raise their prices. I never saw fighting or squabbling or disagreement…I pictured a school gymnasium in northeast England, rather than in northeast Japan, in which hundreds of people were sleeping literally head to toe. By this stage they would have been murdering one another.
"Something is moving across the landscape as if it is alive, a brown-snouted animal hungrily bounding over the earth. Its head is a scum of splintered debris; entire cars bob along on its back. It seems to steam and smoke as it moves; its body looks less like water or mud than a kind of solid vapour. And then a large boat intact, spinning across the inundated fields with orange flames dancing on their roofs. The creature turns a road into a river, then swallows it whole, and then it is raging over more fields and roads towards a village and a highway thick with cars. One driver is accelerating ahead of it, racing to escape – before the car and its occupants are gobbled up by the wave."