Elmer Luke - March Was Made of Yarn: Reflections on the Japanese Earthquake, Tsunami, and Nuclear Meltdown

Elmer Luke is a writer and editor who has worked in publishing houses in New York and Tokyo, with a range of authors including Tom Wicker, Haruki Murakami, Colleen McCullough, and Robert Whiting. He is adviser to the Read Japan project of The Nippon Foundation.

David Karashima is the manager of The Nippon Foundations Read Japan programa partnership among authors, translators, editors, publishers, and universities to facilitate the publication of Japanese literature in translation. He is the author of an award-winning novel in Japanese, and a widely published translator of contemporary Japanese fiction into English, among them works by Hitomi Kanehara, Taichi Yamada, and Yasutaka Tsutsui.

A VINTAGE BOOKS ORIGINAL, MARCH 2012

Introduction and compilation copyright 2012 by Elmer Luke
All translations are copyright 2012 in the name of their respective translators.

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by
Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

The following pieces were originally published separately in Japan in 2011,
except where otherwise noted:
The Crows and the Girl copyright 2011 by Brother & Sister Nishioka
The Charm copyright 2011 by Kiyoshi Shigematsu
Box Story copyright 2011 by Tetsuya Akikawa
Nightcap copyright 2011 by Yoko Ogawa
God Bless You, 1993 and God Bless You, 2011 copyright 1993, 2011
by Hiromi Kawakami
March Yarn copyright 2011 by Mieko Kawakami
Ride on Time copyright 2011 by Kazushige Abe
Words copyright 2011 by Shuntaro Tanikawa

The remainder of the pieces were commissioned for this book and are
copyright 2012 in the name of their respective authors.

This book is published with the support of the Read Japan
program of The Nippon Foundation.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
March was made of yarn : reflections on the Japanese earthquake, tsunami, and
nuclear meltdown / edited by David Karashima and Elmer Luke.
p. cm.
A Vintage Books original.
eISBN: 978-0-307-94887-8
1. Japanese literature21st centuryTranslations into English.
2. Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami, Japan, 2011Literary collections.
3. Fukushima Nuclear Disaster, Japan, 2011Literary collections.
I. Karashima, David James. II. Luke, Elmer. III. Title.
PL782.E1M29 2012
895.6080358520512dc23
2011050010

www.vintagebooks.com

v3.1

* Words *

Losing everything

We even lost our words

But words did not break

Were not washed from the depths

Of our individual hearts

Words put forth buds

From the earth beneath the rubble

With accents like old times

With cursive script

With halting meanings

Words grown old from overuse

Come alive again with our pain

Grow deep with our sadness

As if backed by silence

They grow toward new meanings

Shuntaro Tanikawa

Translated by Jeffrey Angles

Foreword
John Burnham Schwartz

Introduction
Elmer Luke and David Karashima

I magine, for a moment, that you know nothing of what is happening here, or what is to come. Imagine that this is all still in the yet-to-be, or never-was, and that this is all you have to go by: this random clip on YouTubedigital, of course, and hauntingly crude. A home movie, it used to be called, back in those touching, innocent days when there were homes.

The title heading on the clip tells you that what you are watching is a scene at Sendai Airport. A live feed, as it were. The original title, in Japanese, is there too, palimpsest kanji. The date attached to the footage is March 11, 2011.

Someone is holding the camcorder, or phone; you will never know who. Maybe it doesnt matter. For a good minute or so, the public scene is so calm, so indifferently banalthe wide-open, expansive mouth of the Sendai terminal, with its huge wall of glass designed to beckon the natural world in, populated by people standing and walking, apparently without urgencythat you think there must be some mistake: what you are watching is nothing.

The view is fixed, passive. As if the camera itself, to begin with, has no idea that any possible subject, or object of interest, is even in the vicinity.

It is a sound first, a low and faint rumbling that has you fiddling with the volume control on your laptop, trying to adjust away what you assume to be artificial white noise, because, whatever its source, the sound is not particular or recognizable in a human sense.

The people visible on screentravelers, commuters, the odd uniformed transportation workerproduce their own noise too, an absentminded hum. It takes a while for these two noises to meet, and then separate. The first distinguishing moment arrives when one personthen two, then fiveturns his head as if to listen to some song he thinks he might remember, but otherwise didnt catch.

What song? We can only try to imagine.

The sound becomes a gathering roar. The roar grows louder and more imminent, pressing invisibly on the scene were witnessing. And now the first small cries of alarm can be heard inside the great space. A woman wheeling a carry-on whirls around to face the huge window. Then others do the same, staring out at the cold white glare of the tarmac that, in the construction of all this, has been poured over every inch of green. In the upper corner of the screen, a father picks up his small child. A few people begin to run, disappearing out of frame. The camera moves to catch them; then, perhaps sensing something, it scurries back to the great glass wall, and freezes there in terror.