Abstract

α & ω
α, a human cell, opens the novel by giving its setting: Futaba, Fukushima Prefecture, Japan. The town is known worldwide for the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant that was triggered by the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. Although more than a decade has passed, many former residents of the town have been unable to return to their homes because of the radioactive contamination.
α is the sperm cell that becomes Koichi, the novel’s protagonist. Koichi is born in Futaba Town, Fukushima Prefecture. His house comes to be in the zone where people are prohibited from living because of radioactive contamination. His family evacuates and stays in several shelters before resettling in Tochigi City.
ω is a dead human cell that tells of the tragic Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Concurrently, α describes the clinical processes of a victim who lost his life to radiation exposure in the 1999 Tokaimura JCO Criticality Accident. Their stories and the main story of Koichi run in parallel but are braided together to convey the tragedy of nuclear power plant incidents and to express the message that “Nuclear power plants are equivalent to nuclear bombs in hurting people,” because radiation damages the genes in cells, causing cells to no longer be able to grow and divide.
Koichi enters junior high school. He’s empathetic, deeply feeling what others feel. He finds the Fukushima NeoProject, an NPO, on the Internet. Takeshi, who heads the NPO, fosters Koichi by providing him with various learning opportunities. Koichi joins the NPO’s Fukushimap Project. This Internet map is planned to portray the memories and dreams of former Futaba residents through their own narratives, music, photos and text, toward reconstructing their devastated hometown as “a place where people live.” The project aims to “defeat the nuclear power plant through memories associated with the town.”
After a depressed Takeshi commits suicide, Koichi continues to produce the Fukushimap with assistance from the NPO’s subleader. Koichi goes to the Parliament Library in Tokyo to copy a residential map of the town from when the disaster occurred. He finds the contact numbers of former town residents who are now living in various places, calls up those residents, and visits them to interview them about their memories of their hometown.
When Koichi meets Takeshi’s mother at the first preview meeting of the map, he recognizes that his own unusual capacity for sympathy resonates with the feelings, memories, and profound dreams of others.
Soma was a close friend of Koichi in elementary school. Soma, who’s been living in a southerly part of Japan, comes to Tokyo to see his father, who has leukemia. Soma asks Koichi to accompany him. When they enter the father’s apartment, he’s not there, but there’s the atmosphere of him having been there. They’re drawn into the scene of a mysterious painting in the apartment that shows the ocean and a person, and they listen to a message from Soma’s father, who seems to have passed: “We must never repeat this mistake.”
They’re caught up in a vortex of space-time in which they recapitulate biological evolution, from the level of animals down to the moment when the first biological cell emerged.
This novel follows the lives and livelihoods of residents who’ve lived through the fear and tragedy of a catastrophic disaster. The tragic reality sharply hits the readers in a way that only fiction can.

Author’s Information

The novelist MURAKAMI Masahiko was born in 1958 in Mie Prefecture, Japan. He became a novelist after writing for a trade paper and managing a tutoring school. His novel Jun-ai (Pure Love) won the Kaien New Talent Award of Fukutake Shoten Co., Ltd. (now Benesse Corp.) in 1987. His works have been nominated several times for Japan’s most prestigious literary award, the Akutagawa Prize, which is presented by the Society for the Promotion of Japanese Literature.
Ah, Haru (Wait And See) was made into a movie that won the International Critics Association Award at the 49th Berlin International Film Festival in 1999.
Other works include Taiwan Seibo (Our Lady of Taiwan), Dorive-shinai? (Shall We Drive?), and Nice Ball.
Besides writing novels himself, he is enthusiastic about fostering new talent, having published Try Your Hand at Writing a Novel and currently lecturing part time at a university as well as at his Muramasa Novel Tutoring School, which was founded in 2014.
He is executive director for accounting of The Japan Writers' Association and a member of the Japan P.E.N. Club.