Up From The Sea

Up From the Sea by Leza Lowitz   272 pages

On March 3, 2011, the Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami happens. It was a disaster of epic proportions where “approximately 15,889 people died, 6,152 were injured, and 2,601 people are still missing. And 127,290 buildings were destroyed, with a million more severely damaged.”

Leza Lowitz, who lives in Toyoko, used that premise as the basis for her powerfully haunting novel about a teenage boy and the devastation that rocks his costal Japanese village.Kai is at school when the earth begins to shake. A 9.0-magnitude quake rattles and rolls his small village. The aftershocks, which number 11,106, often measured over 7.0.

This scenario would make an excellent novel, but Lowitz doesn’t take the easy way to tell of Kai’s life. Instead she has chosen a novel-in-verse.

Readers run with Kai as he heads for high ground with his teachers and classmates. We feel his weary arms cling to a tree as a wave hits. We reel at the loss of his mother, grandmother, and grandfather, his village, his friends, everything. Everything.

The only bright spot is that Kai’s estranged dad live in New York City; he hopes he can make contact with him, and that, somehow, they can be reunited.

Watching Kai search for his family’s remains and to try to pick up the pieces of his village is eerily reminiscent of watching New Yorkers combed hospitals, leave notes and pictures in the hours and days after 9/11. One thing I learned from this tale is that to the Japanese, 3/11 conjures the same type of painful memories that Americans feel every time 9/11 is mentioned.

Kai is selected to go to New York to participate in the 10th anniversary of 9/11. That part of the story was not delved into enough for me. It almost sounded like a vacation.

I read Up From the Sea in less than two hours. The prose is highly visual and emotionally gut- wrenching. I could not put the book down until I learned how Kai came to terms with what he had endured.

I give Up From the Sea 5.5 out of 5 stars. The whole 9/11 thing could have been left out without hurting the story at all.