
After the Deluge
Richard Lloyd Parry’s very touching and thought-provoking book Ghosts of the Tsunami tells how the community of Okawa, Japan, was affected by the Great Tohoku Disaster: the earthquake and resulting tidal wave of March 11, 2011. On that day, the tidal surges struck Okawa’s primary school, killing seventy-four of the seventy-eight children present, and ten of the eleven teachers.
To write his account, Lloyd Parry—the Tokyo bureau chief of The Times of London and the author of the true-crime book People Who Eat Darkness—visited the locality for six years. His achievement reminds me of the