U.S. novelist Pearl Buck (1892-1973) won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1938 for "The Good Earth," which was set in China.
U.S. novelist Pearl Buck (1892-1973) won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1938 for "The Good Earth," which was set in China.
However, a work of fiction Buck wrote for children that uses Japan as its setting is now attracting new readers in Japan because a natural disaster forms the backdrop to the story.
Buck published "The Big Wave" in 1947. It revolves around a young boy who lost his family to tsunami and charts his process of putting his life back together.
At a monthly meeting at the Hotaiji temple in Shizuoka city in late September, the head priest, Toen Fujiwara, quoted from Buck's work in referring to the ordeal faced by survivors of the March 11 Great East Japan Earthquake.
In the novel, Jiya, the son of a fisherman, loses his family to tsunami. He is adopted by the family of his best friend, Kino, who lives in a mountain farming village.
One day, Kino asks his father if he ever felt disadvantaged at having been born in Japan.
His father's reply is that living in the middle of a crisis shows how wonderful it is to be alive. In that sense, all Japanese should be happy, the father said.
Fujiwara said of that passage: "I believe this is the view of life and death held by the Japanese. We have been made aware of just how precious ordinary daily life is and just what a dangerous place people have to live. We cannot be serious about how we live unless we are conscious of those factors."
Fujiwara heads an association of missionaries within the Myoshinji branch of the Rinzai Zen sect.
After learning about "The Big Wave," Fujiwara purchased 700 copies and distributed the book to missionaries around Japan because he felt it could help disaster victims.
Tetsugen Umezawa, the head priest of the Zenkoji temple in Taiwa, Miyagi Prefecture, also read the book.
After getting to the last page, Umezawa thought of a junior high school student in Kesennuma, who in an address at a graduation ceremony following the March 11 quake and tsunami, said, "I do not hold a grudge against nature" for the destruction and loss it caused.
Umezawa said: "There is also a consciousness of living together with nature in these parts. I felt that disaster victims would more readily accept the work. However, it is still a little too early. Some people are afraid to go near the ocean. I feel this book will help people organize and understand the path they have taken after a few more years have passed and when they have truly overcome the pain."
"The Big Wave" was a best-seller in the United States.
In Japan, the Komichi Shobo publishing company put out a reprint edition of a Japanese translation that was first published in 1988. It came out after the Dec. 26, 2004, tsunami triggered by an earthquake off Sumatra that claimed some 200,000 lives.
After those copies sold out, another edition was printed this year for the first time in six years. A total of 6,500 copies have been sold.
A video sent into the YouTube Internet site proved to be the catalyst for the reprinting.
Using illustrations by the artist Ken Kuroi, the four-minute long video--with passages written both in English and Japanese--introduced the conversation between father and son about being born in Japan that was taken from "The Big Wave."
The video was created by a Tokyo resident using the handle of Yubaru.
Soon after the March disaster, a friend in Europe sent an e-mail offering condolences that quoted from the Buck book.
Yubaru searched for the book and read it.
"I wanted many people to read it because it contained words that encourages the soul," Yubaru said.
The video was created even as aftershocks hit eastern Japan.
After it was posted on March 24, a stream of messages came in from overseas that said the video helped explain why Japanese did not flee. There were also words of encouragement.
The video has scored 17,000 hits.
Buck likely was inspired to write "The Big Wave" during the several months she spent in Unzen, Nagasaki Prefecture.
She grew up in China as the child of missionaries and lived there even after she married. However, in 1927 after the people's revolutionary army's Nanking offensive targeted foreign nationals, Buck fled with her 6-year-old daughter, who was mentally impaired, to Japan. Buck was around 35 years old at the time.
She later wrote about her experience and said her soul was soothed while she was in Unzen, after a lifetime of hardship.
Some five years before Buck arrived, Unzen and the Shimabara region of Nagasaki were hit by tsunami.
Kiyotoshi Matsusaka, professor emeritus at Mie University who comes from Shimabara, said, "The view of the Japanese found in 'The Big Wave' who live strongly while accepting nature is a reflection of what she saw and heard."
However, it would take Buck 20 years to transform what she experienced in Nagasaki into her piece of fiction.
Matsusaka has written a book about Buck and her daughter. He said Buck suffered for many years because of her daughter's disability.
"However, after she accepted her daughter for what she was, she worked to help other disadvantaged children," Matsusaka said. "While helping orphans, she learned how children recovered and what the best way to look after them was. Buck's entire life is a path of recovering from and seeking comfort for pain and suffering."
In the book, Kino says that he feels Jiya may never be happy again. However, Kino's father replies that Jiya will become happy again because being alive is much better than death. He tells his son to let Jiya cry all he wants because there will come a time when he will stop crying.