David Peace: ‘I had never missed England. And being back I missed Tokyo’
PICTURE an iron castle in a ruined garden, where a lonely poet sits in a bare, round room, writing about another lonely poet in a bare, round room, who is writing about another lonely poet … and so on. David Peace draws on this image in Patient X: The Case-Book of Ryunosuke Akutagawa, which he calls “a novel of tales” about the eponymous short-story writer. Akutagawa was a major figure in the Japanese literature of the early 20th century whose tormented personal pathology led to his suicide in 1927 at the age of 35.
Notes from a haunted land: Richard Lloyd Parry on documenting the devastating aftermath of the 2011 Japanese tsunami
AFTER the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami of March 11, 2011, I worked with a post-disaster clean-up crew in a largely obliterated fishing port called Onagawa. We shovelled mud and debris, and did myriad odd jobs for newly homeless locals packed into evacuation shelters. Everyone had lost someone, and the more talkative survivors told us brutally upsetting stories of wives drowned in waterfront factories, elderly parents dragged away by the wave, entire families killed in their cars while trying to outrun it.
