“The tsunami was a thing of a different order, darker, stranger, massively more powerful and violent, without kindness or cruelty, beauty or ugliness, wholly alien. It was the sea coming onto land, the ocean itself picking up its feet and charging at you with a roar in its throat…”
I bought Ghosts of the Tsunami just days before my mum died and, for obvious reasons, couldn’t pick it up again for a long time. When I finally did, I found it to be an extraordinary and devastating book that I’d still thoroughly recommend - with the caveat that it’s a very heavy read.
I was aware of the ghost stories linked to the areas affected by the tsunami of 2011 - particularly the testimonies from taxi drivers who picked up passengers heading for now-ruined towns, only for them to vanish mid-journey – but I’d never really considered in detail the wider cultural impact of the 2011 tsunami on how people in Japan relate to their dead.
In this book, Richard Lloyd Parry writes that “the tsunami did appalling violence to the religion of the ancestors.” It didn’t just wash away homes, schools and villages; it also destroyed household altars, memorial tablets, and family shrines. Cemeteries were shattered, and the bones of those buried there were scattered. Survivors were left not only with the unsettled dead of the tsunami itself, but with the sense that their long-honoured ancestors had been disturbed too.
One priest explains to Parry that, in a disaster, where you or I might grab our important documents, pets, or laptop, many people in Japan will rescue the memorial tablets of their ancestors first - that’s how central they are. He goes on to say that some people almost certainly died in the waters because they ran back towards danger to save those tablets instead of evacuating. That detail stopped me in my tracks. The tsunami didn’t only kill the living; it also, in a very real sense for those communities, harmed the spirits of the dead.
Ultimately, Ghosts of the Tsunami is less about proving or disproving the existence of ghosts and more about how people make sense of unimaginable loss. The ghost stories – including reports of hauntings and possessions after the disaster – are woven into a wider exploration of grief, faith, and the social fabric of the affected towns. It’s a deeply humane, often heartbreaking piece of reportage.
It’s not an easy book to read, and I’d be cautious about recommending it to anyone in very raw grief. But if you’re interested in how culture, belief, and catastrophe intertwine, and in what it means to live with both the living and the dead after a disaster, it’s an incredibly powerful and important book.
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