When a 40-meter-high tsunami wave hit Japan’s northeastern coast on March 11, 2011, it generated an estimated 25 million tons of wreckage that would be dragged into the Pacific Ocean. While Japanese authorities believed that approximately 70% of it has sunk right to the seabed, floating materials weighing as much as 1.5 million tons were found drifting along Pacific Ocean currents, heading towards North America. As of 2015, 64 items washed ashore on the coasts of Hawai‘i, Alaska, Washington, Oregon, California, and British Columbia had been officially identified as tsunami debris, some of which were able to be eventually
returned to their owners. Stories focusing on Japan’s tsunami debris and its journey across the Pacific have in fact provided a point of departure for artists and filmmakers to address and examine the transpacific implications of the 3.11 disasters. For instance, Jave Yoshimoto, a Chinese-Japanese-American artist, has created a scroll painting called “Vultures of Fragments Past” (2012) which imagines Godzilla, Japan’s renowned fictional radioactive monster, and a cluster of confirmed tsunami debris—a fishing vessel, a football, and a Harley-Davidson motorcycle—arriving at the end of their journey (tabi no owari), with landmarks of Seattle including an orca whale, the Space Needle, and Mount Rainier in sight.16 Preoccupied with an urgent sense to “know the story behind” the debris, Toronto-based filmmakers Nicolina
16 For a glimpse of “Vultures of Fragments Past,” see Yoshimoto’s official website:
https://www.javeyoshimoto.com/.
Lanni and John Choi decided to work on a feature length documentary entitled Lost & Found (2015), capturing the relentless efforts of those who have dedicated themselves to returning items found on North America’s shores to their “rightful owners in Japan.”17 Sharing a similar interest with Lanni and Choi, Vancouver-based filmmaker John Bolton produced a short documentary named Debris (2015), featuring Peter Clackson, a beachcomber and a self-trained environmental artist based in Tofino, British Columbia, whose artistic projects involve building a memorial of Japan’s 3.11 disasters using materials from the tsunami debris that he collected.18
Tsunami debris washing up on North America’s shores has not only served as a major source of creative inspiration for artists and filmmakers including Yoshimoto, Lanni and Choi, Bolton, Clackson and others; it has also allowed writers such as Ruth Ozeki to realize, in her words, the “many different ways we are connected, and interconnected, especially on the Pacific Rim,” prompting her to write a novel that could interrogate the transpacific connections of lives touched by unprecedented disasters (McMartin). Published in 2013, a time when the amount of debris arriving at North America was expected to peak, Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being narrates the imaginative encounter of characters whose lives would not have come into each other’s contact had a plastic freezer bag and its contents failed to escape from “the orbit of the Pacific Gyre” (13) and reached the shore of Cortes Island, British Columbia. Inside the freezer bag was a Hello Kitty lunchbox containing an antique kamikaze wristwatch, a stack of handwritten letters, and the diary of Naoko Yasutani (also known as Nao), a sixteen-year-old Japanese schoolgirl who suffers from intense loneliness, depression, and bullying—both online and at school. Ozeki created a fictional version of herself named Ruth to pick up this freezer bag, ponder its origin, and explore every possible means to contact Nao, a potential victim of Japan’s disasters. Through Ruth’s investigation,
17 For further information about Lost & Found, see its official website: http://www.lostandfoundthefilm.ca/.
18 At the time of writing, a trailer of Debris can be seen at: https://www.nfb.ca/film/debris/clip/debris_clip/.
stories relating to the history of Japanese and American wartime competition and postwar complicity in which Nao and her family members are entangled come to the surface, creating confusion, frustration, and bringing forward the difficulty of what Ozeki’s novel calls “not knowing” (400). In imagining transpacific crossings and connections between Asia and America illuminated in a post-3.11 world, Ozeki’s text tactically weaves together the threads of diverse historical moments—from wars, conflicts, disasters, and more.
In its initial reception, A Tale was identified by numerous reviewers as a variation of a
“message in a bottle” story (Sethi; Hendry; Fisher), one that places narrative emphasis on desperate characters who seek help in times of crisis by sending their last message off into a vast body of water. This comparison is echoed by a book trailer of A Tale that Viking Books released online, a trailer that encourages its viewers to find out “what happens when the right book falls into the right readers’ hand.”19 Taking a cue from this analogy, my analysis in this chapter will place particular emphasis on the secret diaries of Nao and her great-uncle, Haruki #1, the messages in a Hello Kitty Lunchbox, and ask: what kind of responses are they demanding from their readers? What happens when they travel out of the historical contexts from which they are produced and arrive elsewhere—in Ruth’s hands, and in the hands of Ozeki’s readers? In trying to arrive at workable answers for these questions, this chapter will attempt to read Nao and Haruki #1’s “messages” as an invitation for readers to revisit ghostly and living memories of violence and suffering—linked to, if not determined by, the workings of empires that continue to jeopardize human and non-human lives from dispersed but interconnected locations. In so doing, this chapter seeks to demonstrate how A Tale can potentially open up imaginative space for readers to challenge what I have called discourses of “hope” that have served as useful tools for the United States and Japan to render justifiable their transpacific imperial projects.
19 At the time of writing, a trailer for the Viking Books edition can be found at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAPeWSHdEWg.