Death and Life in Japan

Ghosts of the Tsunami

Richard LLoyd Parry uncovers the immediate aftermath and long-term effects of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami of 2011, which resulted in the loss of 18,500 souls.

Every time I think of it, I’m filled with wonderment... This book is a future classic of disaster journalism, up there with John Hersey’s Hiroshima.

Mr Lloyd Parry offers a voice to the grieving who, too often, found it hard to be heard. It is a thoughtful lesson to all societies whose first reaction in the face of adversity is to shut down inquiry and cover up the facts. You will not read a finer work of narrative non-fiction this year.

A stunning book from the man who has a strong claim to be the most compelling non-fiction writer in the world.

A book of absolute, harrowing truth and beauty. I'd give up four of my novels to have written this book.

A breathtaking, extraordinary work… Parry writes with great fluency and timing, like a novelist alternating cadences and withholding information from the reader so as to create moments of tension and surprise. And there is something of the folklorist in the way he discusses the tradition of ghost stories in places such as Tohoku and Sendai.

Compassionate and piercing... giving it the character of a finely conceived crime fiction or a psychological drama… Tragic, engrossing.

Parry, a journalist and long-time Tokyo resident, is able to draw something meaningful, even lovely, from the well of misery… Overall, the strength of the book lies in its stories, its observations and its language… The language is daring throughout.

Ghosts of the Tsunami is alert to the social and political ramifications and transfixed by the spectral quality of the post-disaster landscape… These twin streams – one universal, the other intensely particular – come together in the mystery that is at this book’s core… Some of his most fascinating chapters take in the disaster’s psychological aftermath… It is full of stories of human endeavor, of individual and collective triumph over well-nigh insuperable odds… As well as being full of ghosts, Lloyd Parry’s A-grade reportage is also full of metaphors.

The definitive book on the quake which killed more than 15,000 people and led to the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

A remarkable and deeply moving book – describing in plain and perfect prose the almost unimaginable devastation and tragedy of the Japanese tsunami.

Ghosts of the Tsunami is enthralling and deeply moving, fully conveying and involving the reader in the sheer horror and tragedy of all that happened yet with such beauty, honesty and sincerity. Richard Lloyd Parry has returned the trust and done justice to the victims and their families a hundredfold.

When Lloyd Parry wrote Ghosts of the Tsunami, he was seeking “the gift of imagination… the paradoxical capacity to feel tragedy on the surface of the skin, in all its cruelty and dread, but also to understand it… with calm and penetration”. It is to his great credit that, once he attained this gift, he so generously shared it with us here.

Ghosts of the Tsunami is a deeply moving and powerfully intimate work about the enduring strength of community and family in the face of unimaginable destruction and loss. This is a haunting, beautiful, and unforgettable book.

A well-researched, polyphonic narrative of what happened on the day 133-ft waves swept in — and how the story continued long after the news cameras left… Lloyd Parry offers a rare glimpse into the history and culture of a region where entire villages were wiped out… By gaining the trust of those on the ground, the author has created an unrivalled account of how Tohoku grieved, and is still grieving.

The character sketches are colourful; the chapters end on cliffhangers. Lloyd Parry’s prose is fast-flowing, occasionally stopped short by a blunt sentence… His treatment evokes John Hersey’s Hiroshima, published a year after the dropping of the bomb… He has done a fine job of fashioning a focused story, and some powerful arguments, from the tsunami’s wreckage. But his book gives vivid expression to what should be obvious: there is nothing neat or aesthetic about a natural disaster like this.

Extraordinary… Lloyd Parry writes movingly about the emotional chasm that now separates the parents who saved their children and those who assumed the authorities knew best… God isn’t very popular in the West these days, so it’s striking to read a book written in civilized, elegant prose that doesn’t rip apart Buddhist priests and Christian pastors at the first mention.

Ghosts of the Tsunami is a brilliant chronicle of one of the modern world's worst disasters, but it's also a necessary act of witness. The stories Parry tells are wrenching, and he refuses to mitigate the enormity of the tsunami with false optimism or saccharine feel-good anecdotes. Above all, it's a beautiful meditation on grief.

Parry studs the story with gems of language and detail... The result is a spellbinding book that is well worth contemplating in an era marked by climate change and natural disaster.

Parry spoke to the parents and friends of the children and staff involved, and his relating of first-hand accounts of the tragedy is almost unbearable to read at times… Not an easy read, but a rewarding one all the same.

The human cost of the deadly Japanese tsunami is examined in this powerful and absorbing work that exposes the emotional trauma the mountain of water left in its wake… Parry, who has worked in Japan for years, documents with great closeness and insight the impact of such staggering loss on people living in a society not noted for its emotionality.

His central narrative swirls around the black hole formed in those 45 critical minutes between quake and tsunami. He knows that its awful gravity may pull some readers in, and push others away.

Natural disaster is given a jarringly human constitution in Ghosts Of The Tsunami… This is "literary non-fiction", full of gilded language and sensations as Parry recounts the scene he was met with when he travelled up the coast of Japan to where the giant waves had hit. A transcendental reading experience.

Ghosts of the Tsunami deals mainly with the aftermath of the tragedy – days, weeks and months in which parents continued doggedly looking in the mud for their children, knowing full well that there was no chance of finding them alive. Their testimonies are unbearably moving.

This is a haunting account of Okawa’s loss and it is almost unbearably sad. Parry rarely speaks of his own reactions but he is the most compassionate of writers, allowing the voices of those he encounters to be heard… Exceptional.

A sobering and compelling narrative of calamity.

This is a piercing look at the communities ravaged by the tsunami

Richard Lloyd Parry is Asia Editor of The Times. He was born in 1969 and was educated at Oxford. He has been visiting Asia for eighteen years and since 1995 has lived in Tokyo as a foreign correspondent, first for the Independent and now for The Times. He has reported from twenty-one countries and several wars, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Indonesia, East Timor, North Korea, Papua New Guinea, Vietnam, Kosovo and Macedonia. His work has also appeared in the London Review of Books and the New York Times Magazine. He is the author of In The Time of Madness, an eyewitness account of the violence that interrupted in Indonesia in the 1990s, and People Who Eat Darkness: The Fate of Lucie Blackman.

'A remarkable and deeply moving book' Henry Marsh, bestselling author of Do No Harm 
 
'A breathtaking, extraordinary work of non-fiction' Times Literary Supplement 
 
On 11 March 2011, a massive earthquake sent a 120-foot-high tsunami smashing into the coast of north-east Japan. It was Japan's greatest single loss of life since the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. 
 
Richard Lloyd Parry, an award-winning foreign correspondent, lived through the earthquake in Tokyo, and spent six years reporting from the epicentre. Learning about the lives of those affected through their own personal accounts, he paints a rich picture of the impact the tsunami had on day to day Japanese life. 
 
Heart-breaking and hopeful, this intimate account of a tragedy unveils the unique nuances of Japanese culture, the tsunami's impact on Japan's stunning and majestic landscape and the psychology of its people. 
 
Ghosts of the Tsunami is an award-winning classic of literary non-fiction. It tells the moving, evocative story of how a nation faced an unimaginable catastrophe and rebuilt to look towards the future. 
 
**WINNER OF THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE**

Love, Grief and a Journey into Japan’s Shadows

People Who Eat Darkness

A deeply compelling and chilling journey into the dark side of Japan, centred on the tragic case of Lucie Blackman.

An extraordinary, compulsive and brilliant book...very, very moving

Difficult to put down... impossible to forget

A skilful, definitive history of one of the most notorious crimes of the past decade

This is In Cold Blood for our times... Everyone who has ever loved someone and held that life dear should read this stunning book, and shiver

Open-minded and sympathetic, despite being driven half mad by the case, Parry, former Asia correspondent for the Independent and The Times, is the best kind of narrator of a tale that isn't just a murder case but a book that sheds light on Japan, on families, on the media, and on the insidious effects of misogyny

This is an extraordinary book which stands as far above the 'true crime' label as Paradise Lost does above the category 'verse'... No avenue is left unexplored, no thought is too oblique to be uttered, no psychological puzzle too disturbing to be investigated

Richard Lloyd Parry has produced a work not only of page-turning intensity but also of touching sensitivity and deep insight. That he could have created something almost noble from such base material is a minor miracle of literary alchemy. The book is brilliantly written

An extraordinary book, passionately and meticulously told... I read it with my breath held and found I couldn't relax, think or get on with my life until I'd finished it

Parry shows a rare compassion and a refusal to judge

A sobering affair... A true crime thriller, sensitively handled and unsparing in its quest for answers

At the heart of this extraordinary and brilliant book about the search, and its aftermath, in 2000 for a 21 year old British girl, Lucie Blackman, who disappeared one summer in Tokyo, in one of the darkest stories I’ve ever read…a truly disturbing but fascinating read.I read it in one horrified gulp

As mysterious as its title, this extraordinary true crime tale is up there with Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood

*** Richard Lloyd Parry is the Winner of the 2018 Rathbones Folio Prize *** 
 
In the summer of 2000, Jane Steare received the phone call every mother dreads. Her daughter Lucie Blackman - tall, blonde, and twenty-one years old - had stepped into the vastness of a Tokyo summer and disappeared forever. That winter, her dismembered remains were found buried in a desolate seaside cave. 
 
Her disappearance was mystifying. Had Lucie been abducted by a religious cult? Who was the mysterious man she had gone to meet? What did her work, as a 'hostess' in the notorious Roppongi district of Tokyo, really involve? And could Lucie's fate be linked to the disappearance of another girl some ten years earlier? 
 
Over the course of a decade, Richard Lloyd Parry has travelled to four continents to interview those caught up in the story and been given unprecedented access to Lucie's bitterly divided family to reveal the astonishing truth about Lucie and her fate.

In The Time Of Madness

A brilliant eyewitness account of the violence that erupted in Indonesia at the end of the nineties.

A fine book, the best I've read on the implosion of human decency that took place in Indonesia...Lloyd Parry was there for all the great stories. He writes sensitively and well...A great hit...Bold and beautifully written

One of the most incisive portraits of moral failure by the so-called 'international community'... In its refreshing modesty of tone and subtlety of message, it beats the more epic accounts of "heroic" journalists such as John Simpson hands down

Combining sassy reportage with a quiet commentary on his own emotions, he draws indelible portraits of countries where events have revealed how fine a line exists between civilisation and barbarity

Written in the best tradition of journalist's dispatch from a strange land...Lloyd Parry does a worthy job navigating the complexity of Indonesian politics and history

Mr Lloyd Parry's volume fills a void...Harrowing...Well-written

** Richard Lloyd Parry is the winner of the 2018 Rathbones Folio Prize ** 
 
In the last years of the twentieth century, Richard Lloyd Parry found himself in the vast island nation of Indonesia, one of the most alluring, mysterious and violent countries in the world. For thirty-two years it had been paralysed by the grip of the dictator and mystic General Suharto. But now the age of Suharto was reaching its end, giving way to a new era of chaos and superstition - the 'time of madness' predicted centuries before by poets and seers. 
 
On the island of Borneo, tribesmen embarked on a savage war of head-hunting and cannibalism. Vast jungles burned uncontrollably; money lost its value; there were plane crashes and volcanic eruptions. After the tumultuous fall of Suharto came the vote of independence from Indonesia for the tiny occupied country of East Timor. And it was here, trapped in the besieged compound of the United Nations, that Lloyd Parry reached his own painful, personal crisis.

Richard Lloyd Parry

Richard Lloyd Parry's gripping fiction debut is a parable and a cracking good yarn, an intelligent adventure told with the precise and horrified eye of a news correspondent. Immersive and immensely readable, never not terrifying

In the Green Heart is a brilliant, harrowing and heartbreaking, yet utterly compelling and profoundly moral novel which speaks to us all in our age of conflicts and wars, and which stands shoulder to shoulder with Waiting for the Barbarians and The Constant Gardener, and confirms Richard Lloyd Parry as one of the great writers of our times

The thrilling story of individual resistance to state power and a heartbreaking tale of fatherly love 
 
'Brilliant, harrowing and heartbreaking, yet utterly compelling' David Peace 
 
Deep in a vast tropical rain forest, Kit and Lara escape the hollowness of modern life doing charitable work in a jungle village. With them is their tiny baby, Helen, who flourishes under the anxious care of her father. 
 
Their life of idyllic isolation is shattered by the arrival of an outsider with frightening news: close at hand, across the border, violence is looming. Hidden in a tiny memory card, Kit unwittingly holds evidence of the world-shattering event that is unfolding, the desperate power-play of a flailing superpower. 
 
Separated from Lara, with war erupting around them, Helen and Kit are forced to flee through the forest with a band of local children, pursued by a ruthless and determined army. Caught between the struggle of rival powers, Kit must keep his baby daughter alive while protecting the secret that his pursuers will kill to get their hands on. 
 
'Immersive and immensely readable, never not terrifying' Richard Beard 
 
Praise for the award-winning Ghosts of the Tsunami: 
 
'A remarkable and deeply moving book' Henry Marsh, author of Do No Harm 
 
'Every time I think of it, I'm filled with wonderment... A future classic' Observer 
 
'A book of absolute, harrowing truth and beauty. I'd give up four of my novels to have written this book' Jim Crace, author of Harvest

Richard Lloyd Parry

Praise for In the Green Heart

Richard Lloyd Parry's gripping fiction debut is a parable and a cracking good yarn, an intelligent adventure told with the precise and horrified eye of a news correspondent. Immersive and immensely readable, neve ...

In the Green Heart is a brilliant, harrowing and heartbreaking, yet utterly compelling and profoundly moral novel which speaks to us all in our age of conflicts and wars, and which stands shoulder to s ...

Books by Richard Lloyd Parry

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