2018-08-08, 05:34 PM
Ghosts on the shore by Christopher Harding
Quote:Survivors of the disaster soon began seeing and feeling ghostly presences. Men and women dressed in warm clothes at the height of summer, hailing taxis and then disappearing from the back seat. A toy truck, belonging to a young boy killed in the tsunami, pushing itself haltingly around the room. One woman answered her door to a sopping wet stranger, who asked for a change of clothes. She went off to find something. When she came back, a whole host of people were standing there, all of them soaked to the skin.
Here was a new Legends of Tōno in the making. But why would Japan, a country so often associated with a secular, high-tech modernity – the fulfilment of much of what Yanagita had feared – find itself home to all this? Where do Japan’s ghosts come from? And what message do they bring?
