Ganbare!: Workshops on Dying - (Polish Reportage) by Katarzyna Boni (Paperback)

About the Book

Oral history of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, and the Fukushima accident in a style resembling Svetlana Alexievich

Book Synopsis

The March 11, 2011, earthquake and subsequent tsunami that ravaged Japan lasted a mere six minutes. But the fallout--the aftershocks, the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the country-wide devastation--from this catastrophic event and the trauma experienced by those who survived it is ongoing, if not permanent.

In Ganbare! Workshops on Dying, Polish writer and reporter Katarzyna Boni takes us on a journey through the experience of death and how the living--those of us left behind--learn to grieve. In Ganbare!, some learn how to scuba-dive for the sole purpose of recovering their loved one's remains; some compile foreign-language dictionaries of "prohibited," tsunami-related words so they don't have to think of them in their mother tongue; many believe in the lingering presence of the ghosts of those whom the wave claimed for itself. Whatever their methods, whatever their mechanisms, whatever their degree of success, the survivors Boni gives voice to in Ganbare! provide an intimate, soul-aching, and above all human look at how people come to deal with loss, trauma, and death.

Review Quotes

"Boni is writing a different history of Japan. A country that, despite Hiroshima (a great scene in which the author tastes sake with the victims of an atomic bomb), has convinced itself that nuclear energy is the safest in the world, and has now become a victim of its own pride. A nation that made the recipes for natural disasters into the heart of its own culture, and then, in the race for modernity, forgot what helped it survive on constantly trembling islands. But Ganbare! ("we can do it!") is not just a book about Japan. It is also a fascinating journey deep into the experience of death."--Books. Magazine for Reading

"Katarzyna Boni is a master at using form. Thanks to this Ganbare! is a strong and extremely interesting report, in which the content is as important as the form. . . . One of the most interesting books of the year."-- PrzechamRecenzuje.pl

About the Author

Katarzyna Boni graduated in cultural studies at the University of Warsaw and in social psychology at the SWPS University, as well as from the Polska Szkola Reportażu (Polish School of Reportage). She publishes in travel magazines and the Duży Format magazine. Boni specializes in writing about Asia, where she spent over three years working in Japan, China, Cambodia, Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia. She is a co-author of Kontener--a book about Syrian refugees in Jordan, written together with Wojciech Tochman.

Mark Ordon is a writer and translator based in Poznań, Poland. His work has appeared in the English edition of Przekrój magazine and The Thornfield Review, as well as academic publications commissioned by the Polish Academy of Sciences. His focus to date has been on short fiction and non-fiction, as well as translations of academic papers and lectures, such as "On the Importance of Sadness," a lecture given by philosopher Tomasz Stawiszyński at A Night of Philosophy and Ideas in Brooklyn, New York in February 2020.