About This Book:
For fans of This Was Our Pact and Hayao Miyazaki films comes a breathtaking graphic novel about siblings who risk everything to return their grandmother’s ashes to her home inside the Fukushima Exclusion Zone.
Osamu hasn’t been the same since that day. When the tsunami hit Fukushima prefecture, it killed his parents, destroyed his home, and triggered one of the world’s worst nuclear disasters. Now, all Osamu has left is his grandmother, Bā-chan, and his big sister, Akiko. As he withdraws into his own world, he befriends friends yōkai―spirits only he can see.
Then, tragedy strikes again, and Bā-chan dies. Osamu and Akiko are determined to return her ashes to their family farm in Tomioka, a town within Fukushima’s forbidden zone. There, the siblings will face dangerous radiation and yōkai, both friendly and deadly―but they’re willing to risk it all to make it home.
*Review Contributed By Karen Yingling, Staff Reviewer*
Fantastical Look at the 2011 Fukushima Disaster
I Survived the Japanese Tsunami, 2011 by Lauren Tarshis and the nonfiction books Meltdown by Deirdre Langeland and Meltdown: The Nuclear Disaster in Japan and Our Energy Future… by Alfred B. Bortz. Adding a fantasy element that is culturally connected to the book is interesting, and the yōkai help out Osamu as he works his way through his dangerous and upsetting journey to place his grandmother’s ashes in a location where she would be comfortable.
The illustrations have a manga-like feel to them that also connects to Japanese culture, and have a muted green and yellow color palette interspersed with some darker nighttime shades of mauve and plum. The translation is very smooth, and young readers probably won’t even realize this is a translation from the French. I liked the notes at the end detailing the author’s research and showing some photographs of Fukushima.
Readers who were interested in the recent graphic novel Chernobyl, Life, and Other Disasters: A Graphic Memoir by Yevgenia Nayberg or who have found other stories about disasters like Faris’s Finding Normal, Brown’s Drowned City: Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans, and Bard’s Wildfire interesting will want to pick this up.
