Satō Atsushi 佐藤厚志. Arechi no kazoku 荒地の家族. Shinchōsha, 2023.
This tied for the 168th Akutagawa Prize, for late 2022, sharing it with Idogawa Iko. Satō is a Sendai native, born in 1982; he still lives there, and works in a bookstore. Debuted in 2017. His fiction seems to center around the 3/11 disaster; this book certainly does.
The title might be translated as Families of the Wasteland – of course it could also be Family of the…, and since it focuses pretty tightly on one man’s deteriorating family situation, one could argue for the singular. But we get enough glimpses of other families that the plural is worth considering.
The protagonist, Yūji, is a forty-ish single father, struggling to make ends meet as a gardener who does odd jobs on the side. He lives with his mother and his sixth-grade son in a neighborhood not far from the coast, in a region devastated by the tsunami. The book takes place ten years after the disaster, but features extensive flashbacks to points before, during, and after the cataclysm.
Which of course means it’s a 3/11 book; but the author is careful to ensure that it’s more than that. We’re vaguely aware that the protagonist lived through the disaster, but despite the book’s flashback-heavy structure it’s not until halfway through that we get any flashbacks dealing with 3/11 itself. By the time it “arrives” in our readerly awareness, in other words, we already know Yūji’s life fairly well, and we have a good sense of how much, and how little, his life’s course was changed by the tsunami. Here’s what I mean: Yūji’s problems have to do with being stuck in a profession he’s not particularly happy in; caring for a son he’s feeling increasingly estranged from; grieving for his first wife, who died young, and for the child he and his second wife lost to a miscarriage; and dealing with his second wife’s unexplained decision to leave him. None of these things are a direct result of 3/11 – by the time we relive his harrowing experiences on that day, we’ve more or less concluded that his life already sucked before then, and might well have continued to suck even if the earthquake had never happened.
In other words, if you take 3/11 out of it, you have a novel that stands on its own perfectly well as a piece of social realism, exploring the hardscrabble life of a man, and a community, ravaged by domestic violence and alcohol, economic hopelessness and existential angst. As a protagonist Yūji comes right out of the old-school naturalist mold: a passive struggler, inarticulate in the extreme, a nearly empty vessel for the narrator’s meditations on society, on life itself. It’s a grim story, but not entirely without hope. Yūji’s physicality and frustrations seem at times to hint at violence, but he controls himself, determined not to repeat the mistakes of his father (and his abusive first boss); Yūji’s fundamentally a good man, to whom life keeps dealing losing hands. His persistence might even be inspiring.But then the earthquake happens. And here’s where the book’s flashback-heavy structure works to its advantage, because from the present moment of the narration, we know from the start that the earthquake has already happened, but we don’t “experience” it until Yūji’s memories take us there halfway through. It hits us suddenly, just as we’re beginning to wonder if he’s going to remember it for us at all: it feels both surprising and inevitable. We realize that from the start of the narrative he’s been struggling to keep it together, to suppress the horror of that day. The one thing he seems to like about his backbreaking job is that it allows him to keep his mind off things (much like the protagonist of Black Box, actually). Because in addition to the normal burdens of his life, he’s dealing with the dread of knowing that the sea could rise again at any time and wash it all away.
The novel’s sense of place is crucial here. The “wasteland” of the title refers to a strip of land right next to the waterline that was once a neighborhood, protected only by a small embankment. Yūji’s neighborhood. Then the tsunami came and washed that neighborhood away. In the ensuing ten years the land has been cleared, leveled, separated from inland areas by a big new seawall; redevelopment has begun, too, but slowly. After losing everything, Yūji settled not far away – this is still his home – and so every day he gets to gaze at the sea that took everything, and that someday will again. A sea that he sometimes envisions as being full of the dead, reaching out for him (he escaped the tsunami by taking refuge on a rooftop; he watched as the streets below him, full of fleeing cars, were engulfed).
The author’s choice of career for Yūji has a particular resonance here. We learn that he more or less stumbled into his career as a gardener, and has no great love for plants. Still, his role is to care for them, to nurture and preserve them, and most of his job as we see it has to do with transplanting trees to new locations. This involves him in the post-3/11 landscape in a couple of ways. First, in the immediate aftermath he was employed in the gargantuan task of clearing away debris; later, although he doesn’t seem to register any pride in it, his job contributes to the rebuilding – relandscaping, in a broad sense – of the area. The novel portrays him unsentimentally, but it’s not hard for the reader to see him as a kind of saint; we wonder if he’ll succeed in healing the land before its wounds destroy him.
I’m aware that there’s a vast literature of 3/11, and that I’m unfamiliar with it except for those A-Prize novels that have dealt with it (see Numata Shinsuke and Ishizawa Mai). So I won’t try to guess at how this novel fits in. I’ll just say that I found it quite moving. Well constructed, and written in an unflashy but highly effective style. Just one small but persistent example. When Yūji thinks about the tsunami, he never calls it that; he also doesn’t talk about the sea “rising” or flooding or any other word that might normally come to mind. He thinks of it swelling or expanding: bōchō 膨張. A quietly ominous image.
(Go here for an explanation of my Akutagawa Prize project, if you’re curious.)