Climate Grief and Collective Trauma: On Katazyna Boni’s “Ganbare! Workshops on Dying”
Katarzyna Boni, transl. Mark Ordon | Ganbare! Workshops on Dying | 2021 | Open Letter Books | 296 Pages
A specific image unfolds in my mind when I think of the Tohoku Earthquake and subsequent tsunami on March 11, 2011, referred to in Japan simply as 3.11: thick, dark water easily pushes against the opposing flow of a river. Then, a sudden shift in perspective away from the river, itself now an enormous inky darkness spilling over neat squares of agricultural fields. An impossible number of homes, buildings, and cars become indiscernible clumps of detritus in the water, the water’s progress unstoppable. The disconnect between the gentle fluidity of the water and the amount of destruction caused by it remains with me.
For the first time in over a decade, I search for the video where this image comes from. On YouTube, the view count is now at over 8.6 million. Within a minute of watching, I feel queasy and must pause it. The city is Sendai. I once lived in this city. It is where I hunted for tiny wild strawberries growing behind our home, where I walked with my family to the beach to see these very waters that would, decades later, encroach six miles inland.
I remember watching this live alone in my college dorm room in Northfield, Minnesota. In the middle of the news broadcast, my mother called. There was shock in her voice. “Your preschool, the grocery store we would go to, even our old neighborhood,” she said. “It's all completely gone.”
Official figures released in 2021 from Japan's Fire and Disaster Management Agency report 19,759 deaths and 2,553 missing. These numbers don't include the tens of thousands who were displaced because of the damage caused by the water itself or by secondary effects like the ensuing Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster, and the leaking of nuclear material into the ocean. The voices of those who remain and the memories survivors carry of those who died echo the many stories of loss, terror, resilience, hope, and despair.
How do we talk about catastrophes at this scale?
Japanese literature has a long history of knitting together multiple survivor stories in an attempt to make sense of the unthinkable. This desire to craft something meaningful out of individual and collective experiences has led to literary classics like Masuji Ibuse's Black Rain or Kenzaburo Oe's Hiroshima Notes. While both Ibuse and Oe act as the medium for the story of the Hiroshima bombing and its aftermath, the focus always remains on the stories of the victims. A similar impulse to commit survivors' voices to paper propelled the work of Michiko Ishimure, whose extensive bibliography highlighted the impact of decades of mercury poisoning on fishing towns caused by the Minamoto Corporation.
Yet, some things resist collective narrativizing. Writer and activist Kyoko Hayashi, herself a survivor of the Nagasaki atomic bombing, found she could not fully understand the pain experienced by the survivors of the Hiroshima bombing. The individual experience can be too singular for even the most well-intentioned generalizations to land.
In the hybrid work Ganbare! Workshops on Dying, journalist Katarzyna Boni offers one approach to grappling with collective grief: a cascade of disparate stories, rather than a focalized narrative. Boni follows the reportaz style of Polish literary reporting, which dances on the line between novelistic and documentary prose. Made up of a jumble of survivor accounts, historical anecdotes, excerpts from official documents, religious practices and rituals, folktales, and more, Ganbare’s format makes it impossible to trace a single linear arc across its pages as it moves between perspectives, locations, and time. What arises is a surplus of experiences placed alongside one another like pieces of a mosaic. There are no chapters in the book. Instead, the text is separated into sections that range from a few short paragraphs to several pages long, with no explicit theme grouping these sections together. Each section is an individual case study that, when considered alongside those around it, allows glimpses into what survivors experienced, along with their attempts to come to terms with that experience. The format guides readers to see connections between seemingly disjointed things.
Boni chooses to begin the book from a distance, circling around the topic before landing on the event itself. The first section, “Japanese Tales of Horror,” briefly discusses Japanese horror in the Edo period, of ghost stories told by candlelight, a point of entry that initially feels disingenuous, if not a little reductive. Japanese horror is, after all, one of the country's most popular cultural exports. But an affective logic is at work here: to speak of trauma is often to begin with a refusal, silence as self-preservation, a holding back. Approaching the trauma sideways and stepping into horror first through a familiar, clearly marked path allows for some preparation before meeting the real ghosts haunting these pages.
This cautious distance remains in the second section, “Garbage.” Here, Boni inches closer to the tsunami, though looking at it from the shores of Alaska. She describes the sudden appearance of detritus beginning to wash up along Alaskan beaches in 2012—a bottle of shampoo, a child's shoe, a lighter, a yellow buoy with kanji painted on it. Through this flotsam and jetsam, she tells the story of David Baxter, who collected items on the beach and managed to return them to their owners in Japan. Baxter even set up a website called Tsunami Return in an attempt to reunite more owners with these lost objects. The tsunami remains off the page, though we are brought steadily closer to it.
It isn't until the third section, “The City That Is Not There,” that the devastation of the tsunami in Japan is discussed directly though even then it is presented as a negation: lush, vibrant descriptions of a city that no longer exists, the city of Rikuzentakata, population 24,000; the schools, restaurants, hospitals, the meadows, gardens, and forests, each inconceivable loss punctuated with the refrain, “It was all there. Now it's gone.”
These first three sections are representative of the mosaic approach Boni takes throughout the book. Each individual snapshot is haunting, but they resonate more deeply when read in conversation with one another. One section, “The Island of Happiness,” delves into the etymology of the kanji characters for Fukushima (the city and the prefecture). “The kanji may have become contaminated in very much the same way as the soil,” Boni writes, as residents of the prefecture begin to use hiragana, ふくしま, in an attempt to separate themselves from the nuclear disaster in the city of the same name, represented by the kanji 福島. This is immediately followed by “The Most Beautiful Village in Japan,” a section which explores the natural landscape and resources of Iitate, a village in Fukushima Prefecture. The most beautiful village in Japan has been left empty and abandoned in the aftermath of 3.11. Alone, each section highlights the impact of the tsunami and nuclear disaster on the region. Yet the interplay between these two sections brings the multi-layered impact of the tragedy on human life into sharper focus. Human lives were lost, property and livelihoods were lost, but so too was a sense of identity and belonging.
Between heart-wrenching accounts of survivors continuing to search for their loved ones’ remains years after the tsunami and the continued struggle of those still displaced from their homes, Boni inserts asides revolving around elements of folklore, historical facts, and regional religious practices. These offer a respite from the accounts of grief and loss, but also provide an opportunity to see the tsunami within a broader context. While Boni makes space for the individual humanity of the victims, there is always the sense that this is part of a collective whole: how can what these people suffered guide us forward?
It is tempting to view the events of 3.11 as an anomaly. The earthquake was a staggering 9.0 magnitude, the fourth largest ever recorded. But our climate is changing and the effects of human action cause storms that are just as devastating as those caused by the invisible movement of the earth's crust. Even if we do not cause all of the disasters we find ourselves in, we so often make them worse, repeating the same mistakes over and over. In a section called "Kami," Boni recounts a conversation she had with a monk who has worked with survivors of the tsunami for several years:
“Are you sure,” Kaneta, the monk, asked, “that the fact that they brought the situation in Fukushima Daiichi under control is a triumph of technology and not a warning?”
As I read this passage, I felt a chill. Yes, the Fukushima disaster could have been far worse were it not for the bravery shown by the staff of the power plant. But to celebrate it as a triumph and not reckon with what it may portend, as Kaneta notes, would be to learn the wrong lesson.
The section “The Four Tsunamis of Mr. Sato” focuses on the generational impact of catastrophic tsunamis on the family history of Mr. Sato, beginning with his great-grandmother in 1896. After surviving a massive 125 foot wall of water displaced by an 8.5 magnitude quake, Sato's great-grandmother moved her home further inland, making sure to keep it nearly 40 feet above sea level. These adaptations to the movement of the earth and the sea paid off in 1933 when an earthquake of a similar magnitude caused a tsunami to hit the region again. Boni notes that “people had remembered the stories their parents had told them, so when the swollen ocean spilled over the cities, most of them were already standing on the snowy hillsides.” The third tsunami occurred in 1960 and was caused by an earthquake all the way in Chile. At a magnitude of 9.5, it was the largest earthquake ever registered. This tsunami spurred the Japanese government into action: enormous sea walls made of concrete were erected to screen cities off from the sea, so massive that they were included in the Guinness Book of World Records. But for all their impressive size, these walls were not big enough to protect against the fourth tsunami on 3.11, which flooded the entire ground floor of Sato’s 120 year old house.
Sato’s intertwining of family history and catastrophic climate events could be understood in multiple ways: the need for tsunami preparation, the benefit of knowing where to evacuate, and the strength of early warning systems. But it is also a lesson in memory, in learning to see how these larger natural catastrophes are linked. In the end, Sato himself worries about what will happen when even the events of 3.11 fade into the past. He readily lists the warning signs he had learned as a child: the stones that had been carved with cautionary markings and the temples that had been erected to mark how high the water reached. Yet, much of this history was ultimately lost: “Bushes grew over the stones, and people forgot why the temples were built. Who would have thought about that four hundred years later?”
Sato’s account shows how easy it is to see catastrophic climate events as singular moments separated by decades and even centuries. But when the four tsunamis in Sato's family history are placed beside one another, we see a pattern in how human beings respond, moving their homes to higher ground when possible, passing on knowledge of what signs to look out for, and what to do when the water recedes. I think about all of this as I write from my home in the Upper Midwest, in a state that has been forecast to be a future climate refuge. I have no fear that the water will sweep me, my loved ones, or my community away. We do not yet suffer the same devastation as those living in regions most impacted by the climate crisis. But even here thunder- and windstorms tear through the state during the summer and the heat now lingers far into autumnal months. I see old-growth trees toppled by these winds in a nearby neighborhood, huge trunks ripped up from the grass with their entire teeming root systems exposed. I feel their absence during the summer walking through this neighborhood, the sun’s sweltering rays no longer impeded by the shade once offered by the trees. I pass ponds and lakes that are now dry beds, the waterfowl that once relied on them for food and shelter gone. At gatherings, friends and family talk about the climate anxiety they see in the children they work with. “They look outside and they can see it,” one of them tells me.
Things have changed.
It is increasingly necessary to look at crises within larger contexts rather than seeing catastrophes like Hurricane Katrina, 3.11, or the wildfires that burn through so much of the western United States as singular anomalous horrors. As these climate catastrophes continue, so too will climate grief. We must look back on how we have faced these losses in the past to push forward. Memory is crucial. But memory without action is not enough.