Sacred Cesium Ground and Isa's Deluge Two Novellas of Japan's 3/11 Disaster
Produktdetaljer
Biographical note
Kimura Yūsuke was born in 1970 in Hachinohe, Aomori Prefecture. He is the author of several acclaimed works, many of which are set in this region. These are the first of his works to be translated into English.Doug Slaymaker is a professor of Japanese at the University of Kentucky. He is the translator, with Akiko Takenaka, of Hideo Furukawa’s Horses, Horses, in the End the Light Remains Pure (Columbia, 2016).
<i>Sacred Cesium Ground and Isa’s Deluge</i> is a potent representation of stubborn locals and places that refuse to be forgotten, clinging to integrity and humanity in the face of disaster and apathy. Defiant and awake, Kimura’s work speaks softly and carries a wallop.
Foreword Reviews (starred review)
Two haunting novellas that are slight in length yet dense with meaning, enhancing the growing genre of post-3/11 literature in response to the catastrophic March 11, 2011, Tohoku earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima nuclear meltdown. . . . Kimura's novellas offer a piercing portrait of the abandoned and forgotten.
Booklist
Both novellas highlight peripheral voices in the post-3/11 period and ultimately return time and again to that tension between a “sacrificial” Tohoku and an all-powerful capital. These perspectives are those not frequently heard and challenge the widespread narrative of an ever-dominant Tokyo.
Japan Times
Kimura Yūsuke's novels are expanding the frontiers of Japanese-language literature. Literature consists of giving voice to the speechless, so novels at the frontiers often take on strange shapes. Kimura Yūsuke is attentive to and gives shape to vital voices of the people and animals of northeastern Japan that few have been able to hear. His vision goes far beyond Tohoku; it captures the future of the planet.
- Hoshino Tomoyuki, author of <i>We, the Children of Cats</i>, winner of the Tanizaki Jun'ichiro Prize,
Animals are speechless. In <i>Sacred Cesium Ground, </i>Kimura speaks up for them. The residents of Japan's disaster-ravaged northeastern region are voiceless. He gives them voice in <i>Isa's Deluge</i>. In a spirit of solidarity with the silenced and marginalized, he reexamines the logic behind Japan’s modernity. The result is this volume: outrageously honest and powerfully haunting.
- Suga Keijirō, author of <i>Transversal Journeys</i>, winner of the Yomiuri Prize for Literature,
Kimura pulls the reader into the irradiated zone where residents struggle for justice against a government that treats them as disposable as the cattle they illegally tend. <i>Sacred Cesium Ground</i> asks tough questions: What will happen to Japan’s irradiated areas? Who is responsible for this nuclear tragedy? Slaymaker’s translation brings this important novel into dialogue with nuclear fiction worldwide.
- Rachel DiNitto, University of Oregon,
<i>Isa's Deluge</i> is at once a story of the triple disaster in northeastern Japan and of one man's search for his roots. Kimura's themes of destruction and ancestry culminate in an unforgettable, searing attack by the long marginalized against the powers that be.
- Davinder Bhowmik, University of Washington,
Kimura has woven a surprising subtle mosaic of feelings surrounding the abandoned and forgotten.
International Examiner
Produktdetaljer
Biographical note
Kimura Yūsuke was born in 1970 in Hachinohe, Aomori Prefecture. He is the author of several acclaimed works, many of which are set in this region. These are the first of his works to be translated into English.Doug Slaymaker is a professor of Japanese at the University of Kentucky. He is the translator, with Akiko Takenaka, of Hideo Furukawa’s Horses, Horses, in the End the Light Remains Pure (Columbia, 2016).