Sacred Cesium Ground and Isa's Deluge

I was so excited for this book! While I think some of the ideas were really interesting, I was a little bummed when it came to how the story developed, particularly when it came to Sacred Cesium Ground. The concept is fascinating and necessary, but the novella itself felt like more of a case study of particular character's experience (which is cool in its own way} rather than a story.

This book includes two Japanese novellas, both set in the region of Japan that was heavily damaged by the Fukishima nuclear disaster and the tsunami.

The first one tells the story of a woman from Tokyo who volunteers to work on a farm in the affected area. The farmers who lived in the area were told to slaughter all of their animals, but many were unable or unwilling to do so. So one man gathers these irradiated animals together and tries to keep them fed and healthy, relying on volunteer helpers and feed that he can scrounge up in this deserted region. The woman chooses to volunteer partially as an escape from her overbearing husband, but she finds so much meaning in caring for these animals that she begins to perceive her life and goals differently.

The second story is the story/legend of a samurai who lived in the region. This story takes the form of some men sitting around a fire telling stories, and includes flashbacks of the samurai's story. There is an element of magical realism to the story as well, and elements from the historic story begin to merge with the experiences of the men sitting around the campfire.

I really enjoyed the first story--her experiences learning to care for the animals were interesting and humorous, and her discomfort about the way the farm is commercialized is believable and relatable. The second story did not work as well for me--it felt as if the whole story was referencing cultural history and knowledge that I did not know, and so I felt as if I lost much of the underlying meaning. I also had a difficult time following the switches between time frames and reality and magic--but that is a common problem for me in general, so I won't blame this book itself.

I received an advanced reading copy from the publisher via NetGalley. Thanks!

These two short stories differently reflect how people were affected by the tsunami and nuclear meltdown in Japan in 2011. It is not fear mongering post-apocalyptic type fiction but how these disasters affected families, livelihoods, home, and even animals. I think this was done well, it is subdued and nicely woven into the stories. The translation is good too, it is very readable.

Sacred Cesium Ground was interesting but at times felt more like journalism, 'a day in the life of a volunteer on a cattle farm' rather than a story.
Both stories touch a little on Tokyo (East) versus other areas of Japan, which I found interesting. This was expanded a little in the second story, Isa's Deluge. I liked these little bits of Japanese history/sentiment and the magical realism incorporated into the second story.

Thanks to NetGalley, the publisher, and author, for providing me a copy of this book for an unbiased review.

I didn't care for the prose style in the story, finding it flat and uninteresting. Thus, I did not finish it.

In April of 2011, northern Japan suffered a trio of disasters. A massive offshore earthquake triggered an even bigger tsunami, which immediately caused a nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Power Plant. These disasters and the long (still partly unfinished) cleanup after are never far in the background in Yusuke Kimura’s two novellas, Sacred Cesium Ground and Isa’s Deluge (translated by Doug Slaymaker).

In Sacred Cesium Ground, our protagonist gives us a front row seat to one of the more gutting consequences of the three disasters. Because of the catastrophic and wide-reaching radiation contamination, people were told to leave their animals behind when they were evacuated. Some animals starved to death before their owners could return for them. Nishino, our narrator, has heard of a farm called the Fortress of Hope, where a rancher is collecting abandoned cattle instead of putting the animals down per government orders. Nishino has left her unsatisfying and abusive life in Tokyo to volunteer at the Fortress. In Isa’s Deluge, a young man named Shōji begins collecting stories about his notoriously violent uncle Isao (called Isa). The stories and the possibility that he might someday publish a slightly fictionalized version of them keep him going even though his life is nearly as depressing and purpose-less as Nishino’s is. Reading Sacred Cesium Ground and Isa’s Deluge reminded me strongly of Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata in that all three of these stories are about characters who don’t fit, who don’t have the same reactions as other people. Sacred Cesium Ground and Isa’s Deluge, however, pack a bigger emotional punch.

An interesting wrinkle to these stories is revealed in the translator’s afterword. Slaymaker writes that Kimura’s novellas are based closely on the author’s own experiences. The Fortress of Hope is modeled on an actual farm of rescued cows. The stories about Uncle Isa are based on family stories from the author’s own family. These two novellas, however, didn’t strike me as auto fiction. Described purely in terms of plot, these novellas seem relatively simple. What makes these stories complicated is the emotional depth and their commentary on Japanese society and the official response to the disaster. As I read both of them and followed the action, I could also see Nishino and Shōji winding themselves up in frustration, helplessness, sense of misunderstanding, and anger at everything until they snap. Autofictional stories—at least the ones I’ve read before—are heavier on the plot than they are on the character studies.

Slaymaker writes in that same afterword that he struggled to convey the Northern Japanese dialect the characters speak, but I didn’t notice anything too unnatural with his solution of having the characters talk a bit like lower class New Yorkers. The accent doesn’t detract from the emotional struggles of the characters or the unsettlingly detailed descriptions of the tsunami ravaged landscape. I can’t exactly say that I enjoyed reading these novellas, given the subject matter. (Sacred Cesium Ground is particularly wrenching for me.) But I can say that I appreciated them a lot for the way they grapple with the Japanese psyche and the unhealed wounds of April 2011.

Yusuke Kimura comes from the north of Japan, where the 2011 tsunami and the subsequent nuclear accident occurred. These two novellas are about the lives of the people left to struggle on in the aftermath of these twin disasters.

Sacred Cesium Ground is about a woman who leaves her abusive husband to volunteer at a ranch that looks after cattle that have been subjected to massive radiation. The rancher has been ordered by the government to put the animals down but refuses to do so. (This is based on a real case, apparently). Kimura conveys an excellent study in the ethical quandaries of exposing oneself to unnecessary risk and of prolonging the lives of doomed animals.

Isa's Deluge is about a young man who returns to his home town from Tokyo, and his interest in tracking down his black sheep uncle Isa. The other members of his fishing family scorn him and oppose his digging up the past, and the wider community now treats him as an outsider, since he does not share their defining experience of the tsunami.

I preferred the first story, but both of these are well worth a read.