MINAMI-SOMA, Fukushima Prefecture--“Many people who know me think this is another abrupt and off-the-wall act,” said award-winning author Yu Miri. “But it's not. I have been planning this for a long time.”
MINAMI-SOMA, Fukushima Prefecture--“Many people who know me think this is another abrupt and off-the-wall act,” said award-winning author Yu Miri. “But it's not. I have been planning this for a long time.”
The award-winning novelist moved her stuff, including 150 cardboard boxes packed with books, into Minami-Soma in April.
So why has the popular writer, who won the prestigious Akutagawa Literary Prize, decided to settle in the city, which is just 25 kilometers north of the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant?
Yu, 46, has a personal history combined with artistic ideas that are linked to the town. That's why.
The Odaka district in southern Minami-Soma, which is 20 km from the Fukushima plant, was designated an evacuation zone on April 22, 2011. Yu entered it the day before without protective gear.
She remembered her mother, who had lived in the Oku-Aizu area in the prefecture, telling her a story of a “Xanadu”--a community that had disappeared, sinking beneath a lake.
Yu, who is of Korean descent, linked this to the Odaka district, which would soon be an empty ghost town after the evacuation.
She made the trip there thinking it might be the last time she could visit the place.
Since then she has continued to visit Minami-Soma.
In 2012, she started working as a host on a radio talk show there, which was part of a city-sponsored disaster-preparedness effort.
With help from local guests on the show, Yu was able to locate the site of the pinball parlor operated by her grandfather, who had fled from his home country during the Korean War.
The research bore fruit in the form of the novel “JR Ueno Eki Koen Guchi” (JR Ueno Station park exit), and also in another book, “Keikai Kuiki” (Caution zone), which is expected to be published by the end of the year.
Both books feature people who are forced to live away from their loved ones or the community where they were raised, losing a place to call home.
Among such people are her Korean grandfather, who abandoned his homeland, the lake community her mother told her a story about, and the evacuees from the Fukushima nuclear disaster who cannot, even now, return home.
“What is home for me, a third-generation Korean resident in Japan?” she keeps asking herself.
One reason she moved to Minami-Soma, she said, was to think.
“I want to continue to think (about home) by settling here, not by commuting here,” Yu explained.
She has now sold her house in the tranquil town of Kamakura in Kanagawa Prefecture.