Horses, Horses, in the End the Light Remains Pure: A Tale That Begins with Fukushima

by Hideo Furukawa, Doug Slaymaker (Translator), Akiko Takenaka (Translator)

"As we passed from the city center into the Fukushima suburbs I surveyed the landscape for surgical face masks. I wanted to see in what ratios people were wearing such masks. I was trying to determine, consciously and unconsciously, what people do in response. So, among people walking along the roadway, and people on motorbikes, I saw no one with masks. Even among the official crossing guards outfitted with yellow flags and banners, none. All showed bright and calm. What was I hoping for exactly? The guilty conscience again. But then it was time for school to start. We began to see groups of kids on their way to school. They were wearing masks."Horses, Horses, in the End the Light Remains Pure is a multifaceted literary response to the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown that devastated northeast Japan on March 11, 2011. The novel is narrated by Hideo Furukawa, who travels back to his childhood home near Fukushima after 3/11 to reconnect with a place that is now doubly alien. His ruminations conjure the region's storied past, particularly its thousand-year history of horses, humans, and the struggle with a rugged terrain. Standing in the morning light, these horses also tell their stories, heightening the sense of liberation, chaos, and loss that accompanies Furukawa's rich recollections. A fusion of fiction, history, and memoir, this book plays with form and feeling in ways reminiscent of Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory and W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn yet draws its own, unforgettable portrait of personal and cultural dislocation.

Genres: Japan, Nonfiction, Memoir, Japanese Literature, Asia, Literary Fiction, Essays

162 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

Hideo Furukawa is a novelist based in Tokyo. He has received the Noma Literary New Face Prize, the Mystery Writers of Japan Award, the Japan SF Grand Prize, and the Yukio Mishima Award.

(from http://cup.columbia.edu/book/horses-h...)

Reviews

[♑︎♑︎♑︎ ♑︎♑︎♑︎ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Even the title makes me cry.

I had trouble reading this, because I had trouble breathing while reading this.

I might write more about it later, I might not.

Read it.

[Shawn Mooney (Shawn Breathes Books) · Rating 5 out of 5]

This Japanese memoir-novel-essay hybrid blew me away. Most attempts at genre-bending fall flat: this one soars.

Hideo Furukawa is a native of Fukushima but had lived in Tokyo for years by the time of the 3.11 earthquake and tsunami. A month later, haunted by the TV images and the dire warnings about nuclear radiation, he and a handful of writer friends rented a car and drove up to Fukushima to see the devastation for themselves.

Ostensibly, that's what the book is about. But Furukawa keeps bringing up his most recent novel, Seikazoku (The Holy Family). He can't stop thinking about the pair of brothers at the heart of that novel, which was set in Fukushima, and damned if one of those brothers doesn't materialize in the backseat of his rental car and start jabbering away to his author!

It's at this point that the memoir becomes something slippery, unpindownable, and unputdownable . Furukawa and his buddies are still on their mournful road trip, yes, but Horses, Horses meanders between boundaries of reality and literature and history and time in ways that might cause the literary equivalent of carsickness in some readers; I was electrified.

I learned stuff about the samurai and the history of horses in Japan and the martial arts that I'll probably never forget. I fell in love with Furukawa's narrative voice, beautifully translated here, somewhat reminiscent of Murakami's fiction but so much more vibrant than Murakami's incredibly dull nonfiction.

Horses, Horses is a book that won't quite sit still on the page. Its sad, whimsical wisdom never quite comes into focus, beckoning just off the center of your mind's eye. Get ready to be discombobulated: you're in for one hell of a wild ride.

[BookMonkey · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a strange and wonderful hybrid of a book. Review to come once I figure out how to do it.

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

"'Go. Get yourself radiated...Go. See.' I was born in the central Nakadōri section of Fukushima Prefecture. Now I had to go to the ocean side, the Hamadōri.
What can I do to share in their pain?" (p27)

▫️HORSES, HORSES, IN THE END THE LIGHT REMAINS PURE By Hideo Furukawa, translated by Doug Slaymaker and Akiko Takenaka, 2011/2016 by Columbia University Press

An experimental essay / memoir / fantasy / interrogation of history surrounding the triple disaster that began on March 11, 2011 - the earthquake, the tsunami, and the nuclear meltdown - that struck Furukawa's home of Fukushima.

He wrestles with the guilt and grief of not being there when it happened - he was in Kyoto and unable to reach his family members. Along with a small group of others, he travels to Fukushima to SEE.

The essay is a travelogue of this trip north, but also a fluid time warp (the translators refer to "spirited-away time") that includes poetry and fictional diversions that imagine characters from Furukawa's notable (and unfortunately untranslated) SEIKAZOKU (The Holy Family) experiencing the earthquake and tsunami, and telling their tales.

The most arresting (as in it completely stopped me in my tracks) pieces was his interrogation of history, Japanese nationalism and hero worship, genocide and subjugation of Indigenous and Korean people, and relating it to the titular history of the horse 🐎 in Japan, the horses that have fallen an survived in battle, and the rise of the modern "castle" of the Shōwa period: nuclear power plants.

"Our history, the history of the Japanese, is nothing more than a history of killing people." (p73)

It is devastatingly beautiful the way he poses the narrative, the way he questions - he returns to this imagined occurrence of a wandering white horse who has survived the meltdown.

How do we remember after devastation? How do we move forward and make sense of it?

✍️ Nonlinear and experimental, heavy on fluid memory, recollections, imaginings - Sebald and Modiano came to mind - this one will stay with me for a long time. While it took some time to get into (~25 pages or so), once I was in, I was invested and did not want to stop.

[Elena Sala · Rating 5 out of 5]

On March 11, 2011 a very powerful earthquake struck off the coast of the Tohoku region in Japan. Tsunami waves 40 meters high (135 feet approx.) crept inland, triggering meltdowns at several nuclear reactors in Fukushima prefecture. More than 18.000 were killed, 228.000 were displaced from their homes as a result of this disaster.

HORSES, HORSES, IN THE END THE LIGHT REMAINS PURE (2016, first translated in 2011) is the story of a road trip that the author, Hideo Furukawa, made to Fukushima almost immediately after the disaster. He was in Kyoto when the earthquake hit but he is a Fukushima native, and his family were in their farm in the Tōhoku region at the time of the tsunami. Furukawa describes how he watched the shocking news on the television in his hotel room, unable to process what he was seeing but unable to look away.

At one point, Furukawa explains that he was shaken from his torpor by the voice of Gyuichiro Inuzuka, a character from one of his earlier novels, who urges the author to go to the disaster area and see things for himself. Gyuichiro Inuzuka's voice and “memories” of northeastern Japan appear at various moments throughout the book. By means of this device Furukawa narrates an imaginative history of the region's particular horses, from war horses at the fall of the Kamakura shogunate in 1333 to the traumatized horses which survived the tsunami which the author meets at an abandoned shrine during his trip.

This surprising genre bending book which blends fiction, history, and memoir can be a challenging read for several reasons. In the first place the reader will find a considerable amount of religious terminology and historical references which require extra effort from the non-Japanese reader. In spite of this, the wonderful translation flows smoothly. Secondly, perhaps as a reflection of his distraught state, Furukawa follows his train of thought without stopping and makes no attempt to impose a structure or an order to his discourse. It is a short book, but a demanding one, and one that you will hardly forget.

[Marieke · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't know what I was getting into with this book and the author was not one I had read or even heard of before. But I love what he did here. Some historical stuff was way over my head, but his poetic writing made it very readable. Up to a certain point I wasn't really sure what he was doing, but it all came together. The translator's note was also very helpful to clear up some questions I had. This is a great literary piece that works toward national healing, and though it comes from the Fukushima tsunami, there is something universal about it. I'm very glad it got translated.

[Saadia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Definitely a book I’ll understand more on multiple re reads. Love what the book is trying to do tho, and too in such a short page count. Stroke of genius

[Morbid Swither · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a marvel.

[Leanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Imagination breakdown.... what happens when life goes beyond anything you can imagine? That is how we all felt watching the TV as the mega-earthquake was followed by a massive tsunami, followed after that by nuclear meltdowns. It was surreal and utterly heartbreaking. We can only turn to artists to help us understand. "Horses" was the first work of fiction I read on the nuclear disaster. I say fiction but it was genre-bending, memoir, philosophy and novel.

Ao many artists have focused on the animals of the exclusion zone. At Chernobyl too, but especially at Fukushima, I've read and seen a lot of attention on the sweet animals. How to understand anything if you are in the thick of it?

We learn about the tradition of horses in Japan--not something so well known, we travel to the exclusion zone with the author and two characters from one of his novels. We learn about military history in japan--and again about horses and literary figures... all these eyes on the disaster.

Beautiful book, beautiful translation.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this book on the New Fiction shelf at my local library. It looked so small next to all the new Mysteries that I had to pick it up and see what it was about. Written in the immediate aftermath of the 3-11 triple disaster by a novelist that grew up in Fukushima Prefecture, this can best be described as a visceral scream of a prose piece written by an artist that is witnessing the devastation of the land he was raised on. In turns, this book is an eye witness report, an alternative history, and the emotionally poetic attempt of a single human to make sense of destruction that cannot be comprehended.
I have been haunted by the images of 3-11 and was hoping to unpack some of that mental baggage with this book. I think it put some things into perspective, but time will tell.

[Janne Albert · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reading this book brought back so many memories.
First of all, sitting in my living room and seeing the emergency notice in the TV. Waiting for hours before hearing from my friends that they are alright. And then days of being in a daze.

And then 4 years later - The Tohoku highway, the empty fields where houses used to be, the frozen clock, and the ocean - far but visible - and you wonder how can it be this calm right now?

I first visited Japan in 2010 and I lived with host family near Tokyo. In 2014 I moved to Sendai so I saw the affected areas and heard the experiences of the local people. It was ~4 years after the tragedy but it was still there and I think it will always be there.

[Sharehan Widdi · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an interesting read, but not for me because I disliked the chaos of his writing, even though I understand that the author is mirroring the disaster. But nevertheless, it exposed me to a different type of literary work. I also found the way he talks about the tsunami very interesting because he doesn’t give humans all the attention as most writers do. He focuses on horses which is a great way to introduce to people the idea that people aren’t the only ones who suffer when a disaster falls upon them, animals are affected greatly but animals are not able to express their pain the way humans do.

[Mario Menti · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hideo Furukawa's "Horses, Horses, in the End the Light Remains Pure" is the second book I read this month to remember 3/11. It's a difficult but very compelling mix of journal entry and novel, with interesting insights into the history of horses, which of course somewhat parallels that of humans - in the sense of horses being slaughtered at the whim of governmental powers, and the Fukushima nuclear power plant serving almost exclusively Tokyo (which was relatively unaffected by the disaster).

Not an easy read (it's too weird and infuriating for that), but very powerful.

[Don Flynn · Rating 3 out of 5]

A somewhat rambling memoir of the author's trip to Fukushima just weeks after the accident. It's all a bit impressionistic as he weaves in segments of one of his novels, The Holy Family. The glimpses of the flood site are as shocking as you might think, but he doesn't dwell on them. One is left with the feeling that the author and his companions are kind of floating through this ruined world, wondering how to make sense of any of it.

[julien · Rating 5 out of 5]

this was my first introduction to post-3/11 japanese lit through a module im taking and WOW was it incredible (˶ᵔ ᵕ ᵔ˶) i absolutely adore stream of consciousness writing and it was really enlightening to spend a few days with furukawas mind. i feel like the novel definitely has its full impact having read the holy family and i would love to revisit it after reading furukawas other works. that being said i loved it anyway!! cheers xx

[Gina · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's certainly inventive and some people might find it interesting, but I was mostly irritated by the repetition and sections on the author's writing method. The road trip itself and focus on the specificity of places was good but had to compete with a number of other things for attention.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Horses, Horses is, as Slaymaker says in his afterword, compelling and important, exasperating and demanding. It reflects the way people process overwhelming events: emotionally, imaginatively, chaotically, haphazardly and ultimately perhaps incompletely.

[Susie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wasn't a fan of the author's writing. It got very confusing when he brought his fictional character to life.

Read for JAPA 310

[Jagna · Rating 5 out of 5]

A marvel. A powerful prose. I would give it not just 5 stars, but rather a bright constellation of admiration, if I could.

[Bailey]

i don't even know how to rate this

[Natalie Frank · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book shows an emotional and vulnerable accounting of experiencing disaster in relation to Fukushima. The structure was difficult to follow sometimes.

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

Digressive novella by its nature--exploring the everyday and environmental violence of Japan from the historical to the present--but it definitely picks up in the second half. Great closing 10 pages.

[Xander · Rating 2 out of 5]

I see the reviews on this book and am shocked. I think if anyone were forced into reading this book I’d suggest reading it all at once. I agree the genre bending is fun but honestly quite unnecessary! There are books that I read and think wow there’s a lot here that I don’t understand and then there’s this book, where I’m not sure what is supposed to be here. I feel like I’m bashing it too much. It was fine! It just wasn’t made into a whole well - which I know is supposed to be reminiscent of the tsunami but there are better ways to do it I think! Also annoyed because I didn’t realize it was nonfiction before I picked it up. I don’t give a hoot about your life as an author!

[Heidi ✨ · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book feels very important. I wish the translator’s note was longer.

[World Literature Today]

"Although the cataclysmic destruction visited upon Japan on March 11, 2011, by an earthquake of unprecedented magnitude and its attendant tsunami still loom large in the national consciousness, it is the nuclear meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant that are most painfully seared into the collective Japanese psyche. Furukawa Hideo (b. 1966) has, in Horses, penned a reaction to these events, memorialized as 3.11, that resists facile classification and challenges readers by continually shifting the focus and style of his narrative." - Erik R. Lofgren

This book was reviewed in the September/October 2016 issue of World Literature Today magazine. Read the full review by visiting our website:

http://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2...

[Edward]

This is a dizzying tale of a novelist from the Fukushima area, now living in Tokyo, who returns after the earthquake-tsunami-nuclear meltdown in the weeks following. It is dizzying because our narrator, the novelist, slips into his book about characters who tour around the region, so it's a blend of fiction and memoir and history. I'll be reviewing it in more depth elsewhere, but if you're looking for insights about the kinds and extent of the damage, I'd recommend Gretel Ehrlich's Facing the Wave. Furukawa seems too close for that kind of "facing" and so even as he physically directly confronts reality the book is more a journey of psychological displacement instead.

[Zelda Rhiando · Rating 5 out of 5]

Furukawa wrote this novella in one month, immediately following the tsunami of 2011. He is a native of Fukushima Prefecture, but was away when the disaster occurred. It’s both a memoir, and a meditation on the redemptive power of writing, this book plays with form, in a way that is reminiscent of Nabokov, to create a sense of liberation, chaos and loss.

[flum · Rating 3 out of 5]

having read none of the authors work prior or any knowledge of empirical japanese history i still found myself enjoying the pastiche of modes the author deployed in trying to account for tragedy.

[Aaron · Rating 4 out of 5]

“It’s OK to have been born, you know.” (117)