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

About

In March 2011, Hideo Furukawa traveled to Fukushima — his home prefecture — in the aftermath of the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster. What he found was not the apocalyptic wasteland he expected but something more unsettling: ordinary life continuing in the shadow of invisible contamination. People without masks. Crossing guards with yellow flags. A landscape that looked normal and was not. This genre-defying work combines reportage, fiction, and personal essay into a document that refuses to process the disaster through conventional narrative. Furukawa writes from inside the confusion — not with the clarity of hindsight but with the bewilderment of a man driving through his ruined homeland, counting surgical masks. A book that begins with Fukushima and arrives somewhere language has difficulty reaching — the place where catastrophe and normalcy coexist without explanation.