Book Review - Fracture
Fracture begins
in Japan during the 2011 earthquake and subsequent tsunami which devastated the
nuclear reactor at Fukushima. Yoshie Watanabe, a retired business executive,
lives alone. News of the catastrophe takes him back to the end of World War II.
As a boy, Yoshie miraculously survived the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs,
but has spent his entire life trying to escape his memories of the horror and
shame at his double hibakusha status. Yoshie lost his closest family and
was brought up by his aunt and uncle. As soon as possible, he moves abroad to
study economics in Paris.
We
follow Yoshie on an epic journey through Paris, New York, Buenos Aires and
Madrid at pivotal moments in their history, told from the perspectives of the
four different women he encounters. A prolific writer, Neuman - Argentine-born,
now based in Granada - delights in language and linguistic ambivalence. In Fracture,
he explores the fragmented nature of memory, emotional scars, a city’s wounds
after a disaster and the cracks in a relationship caused by cultural
difference. Neuman draws profound parallels between collective traumas – Japan’s
bombing, Vietnam in 1968, Argentina’s ‘disappeared’, Chernobyl and the 2004
Madrid train attacks. Recalling Japan’s enforced silence in the war’s aftermath,
Yoshie’s Argentinian girlfriend Mariela ponders: “Maybe the most brutal thing
is not that you were bombed. Most brutal of all is that they don’t even allow
you to tell people that you’ve been bombed. During the dictatorship here they
would kill one of your children and you couldn’t tell anyone.”
Only
in old age does Yoshie realise the damage of having failed to confront his
trauma, of having “averted his gaze”, and decides to travel to Fukushima’s
disaster site. Neuman depicts his journey with poignant lyricism: “Spring
cushions Route 45 like a parenthesis. The asphalt is one dark sentence; the
digression of flowers does its best to change the subject.” Striving to unite his “scattered memories” Yoshie
visits a town on the periphery of the Fukushima plant’s danger zone:
“Everything looks as unscathed as it does deserted. Streets without cars.
Houses without inhabitants. Shops without customers. Schools without students.
This is the without town, he thinks. There’s no destruction: just subtraction.”
Perceptively
translated by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia, Fracture is a novel for
our times and astonishingly relevant. Radiation, like coronavirus, is an
invisible killer. After Fukushima, the official communications about the catastrophe
prove unreliable. As one character observes: “the politicians say one thing and
then the exact opposite. They don’t want people to panic, only to be reasonably
fearful. That’s impossible.” Neuman suggests “truth depends less on data than
on underlying metaphors”, and that it lies somewhere in the cracks between real
events and fictions.
Originally published by The Observer