Try to imagine an earthquake deep below the sea bed and a force so intense that it moved an entire country thirteen feet.  Then try to imagine a wall of water more than a hundred and twenty feet high, so irresistible that when it made landfall it picked up a large forest and dropped it miles away, snuffing out more than 18,000 lives as it made its unstoppable path inland. Now imagine, days later, picking the body of your dead child, covered in foul-smelling mud, from the remains of what had been an elementary school.  Of course, you can’t imagine.  Not really imagine.  That’s the point. The earthquake and tsunami that struck northern Japan on a cold afternoon in March 2011 are beyond our imaginations.  The hours of video footage taken that day and posted on sites like YouTube don’t begin to capture the fearsome power of what was unleashed or the pain in the years that followed.  Pictures aren’t always enough.  Sometimes only words will do, inadequate as they are.

Ghosts of the Tsunami is reportage at its very best; meticulous, truthful, restrained.  Detached but compassionate, rendered with just enough distance, sympathetic but never sentimental.  But somehow the book transcends journalism and has a bigger ambition: to look inside the character and spirit of the Japanese people and their extraordinary response (emotional, spiritual, and material) to the devastation wreaked upon them by the events of March 2011.  It’s been my good fortune to visit Japan some twenty times in the past five years.  I’ve grown to love the country and to admire greatly its people.  Ghosts of the Tsunami deepened those feelings.

Quite early in this melancholy, unsettling, and slightly sinister novel, one character asks another “Do you ever get a bad feeling about something?  A bad feeling about something that’s going to happen?”  A lot of bad things have already happened to Futh by the time we meet him on the ferry taking him to his solitary walking holiday in Germany.  His mother abandons him in childhood, leaving him with his closed-off, unpredictable, violent father.  He drifts through his school years, unnoticed and friendless.  His wife leaves him too, perhaps because they can’t have children, but more likely because she’s repulsed by the cold, unreachable heart that Futh seems to have inherited from his father.  Does this sound very bleak? It is.  Reading the acclaimed novel, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, I was reminded often of the famous lines from Philip Larkin’s poem: Man hands on misery to man/It deepens like a coastal shelf/Get out as early as you can/And don’t have any kids yourself.

Futh moves through his walking tour of Germany as he moves through his life, as someone to whom bad things happen, as someone unable to impose himself on his surroundings and relationships, as someone no one else seems to see, as someone entirely controlled by the fear of imminent dangers mostly imagined.  Everything of significance in Huth’s life has already happened, the profound and decisive influences that shape him, so it’s no surprise that nothing happens in this eerie story.  This is a cold, hard, memorable novel.

The very best novels often leave me with the same uncomfortable feeling.  That feeling that something important has eluded me, that some “way of seeing” is just beyond my grasp and, if I only concentrated a little more or reflected a little differently, I would unlock the meaning or meanings of the art. It’s always an unsettling thing, but it’s even more so when a novel is apparently so simple and artless.  I felt it as I turned every page of Ali Smith’s Autumn, so much so that I wanted to start it all over again immediately.  Woven into the fabric of the straightforward and simply told story, the anything-but-simple matter of how we experience time and memory in our lives twisted and turned, leaving me with that maddening impression: I’m missing something.  I’ve heard Autumn is the first in a planned tetralogy, so we’ll see if the mists lift as I read the others.

Critics loved Autumn.  It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction.  Reviewers greeted it as the first Brexit or post-Brexit novel, though I’m not sure what that means.  The Britain portrayed in Autumn is a grim place: broken by inequality and division, fearful of strangers and change, yet somehow redeemed by the sincere, touching love between Daniel and Elisabeth.  As I continue to puzzle over this wonderful novel, I want to quote a passage that seems (confused as I am) to get close to the heart of its meaning:

“It’s a question of how we regard our situations, how we look and see where we are, and how we choose, if we can, when we are seeing undeceivedly, not to despair and, at the same time, how to act.  Hope is exactly that, that’s all it is, a matter of how we deal with the negative acts towards human beings by other human beings in the world, remembering that they and we are all human, that nothing human is alien to us, the foul and the fair, and that most important of all we’re here for a mere blink of the eyes, that’s all.  So it’s important not to waste the time, our time, when we have it.”

If the crowds of young people in the store are any guide, BooksActually isn’t exactly a well-kept secret.  It seems to be one of those small neighborhood bookshops with a large and loyal clientele.  It isn’t difficult to see why.  From the vending machine outside selling “mystery books”, to the cramped, cat-ridden interior, this is a shop that celebrates its quirkiness and sense of fun.

Small, independent publishers feature prominently, especially those that showcase South East Asian writing.  I guarantee you’ll find curiosities and treasures, especially if your tastes run to quirky fiction and poetry.  At the back of the store you’ll find a few shelves of collectible and second-hand titles, as well as tote bags, postcards, and other gifts.

When you finish browsing and shopping at BooksActually, take a stroll further down Yong Siak Street and grab a bite at Cheng’s@27.  Its specialty is Hainanese cuisine.  Have the crispy chicken and ginger (and a glass of fresh lime juice).  You’ll be very glad you did.

There are many biographies on my bookshelves at home.  Most are of writers whose work I love.  It surprises me slightly that I should be able to remember the names of the biographers as easily as their subjects.  Norman Sherry’s account of the life of Graham Greene, for example, or Richard Ellman’s biographies of James Joyce and Oscar Wilde.  Autobiographies feature less, but I have a small collection of memoirs by those who kept the company of writers – publishers and editors mostly – and who became good writers themselves. The wonderful Diana Athill is the standout example in this category.

Autobiographies of biographers: now that’s a specialized genre.  Who, after all, would be interested in reading about the lives of those who devoted themselves to writing about the lives of others? Claire Tomalin is one of the finest literary biographers and over a long career has written brilliantly about subjects such as Pepys, Dickens, and Hardy.  Many of her books can be found on my shelves, but I don’t think it would have occurred to me to buy her autobiography, A Life of My Own, unless I’d read such a glowing review of it in The Financial Times.  After all, how interesting could the life of a biographer be?

Tomalin’s life, rich in friendships and in highly acclaimed work, has had more personal tragedy than most could bear.  Her husband, Nick Tomalin, a very well-known journalist, was killed in Israel in 1973 when a missile launched from Syria hit the car in which he was traveling.  One of their children died shortly after birth and another committed suicide in her teens.  All of this – tragedy, success, happiness – is presented in the book in a direct and matter-of-fact style that comes across at times as chilly and a little disengaged.  Tomalin is well aware of this.  “I have tried to be as truthful as possible, which has meant moving between the trivial and the tragic in a way that could seem callous.  But that is how life is.  Even when you are at the worst moments and would like to give all your attention to grief, you still have to clean the house and pay the bills; you may even enjoy your lunch”.

In her work Tomalin has enjoyed much success, most of it earned in a period and in a profession in which women were often overlooked.  Prizes for her books, prestigious appointments, and the top jobs in literary journalism all came her way and were all deserved, so it came as a surprise to read this modest insight into her distinguished life: “One thing I have learnt is that, while I used to think I was making individual choices, now, looking back, I see clearly that I was following trends and general patterns of behaviour which I was about as powerless to resist as a migrating bird or a salmon swimming upstream”.

There is a quiet, narrow street that runs alongside the train tracks close to Ebisu station.  It connects the crowded and busy neighborhood near the station to the more obviously upscale Ebisu Garden Place on top of the hill.  It’s home to a handful of modest restaurants, one of which, Osteria La Libera, is a particular favorite of mine.  It’s an easy place to miss and doesn’t do a great job advertising its presence.  Perhaps that’s just as well; it only seats fourteen people, four at the counter and ten at tables, so you’re likely to be disappointed when you show up.

I dropped by on an early November evening after buying too many books at Tsutaya’s store in Daikanyama, early enough to get a seat at the counter without waiting.  Unless you read Japanese (which I don’t), your only option is to put your faith in the sweet-natured waitresses.  “Salad.  Pasta with meat.  Barbera”.  That seemed to do the trick.  As I waited happily for my meal, immersed in the weekend edition of the Financial Times, a young and very beautiful woman, dressed in a silver grey kimono, obi, and zori, took her place, with much elegance and a little difficulty, on the bar stool next to mine.  She unfolded several paper napkins, placed them carefully into the various folds of the kimono to protect the silk fabric, and tucked into a hearty plate of pasta, all the time studying her phone.

A few minutes later, a couple, very obviously from Tokyo’s transsexual community, took their seats next to hers at the counter.  It’s hard to imagine a more diverse group but, within an hour, we were all laughing together, chatting with the waitresses and each other in very broken English and even more broken Italian.  Good wine consumed in sufficient quantities will dissolve most barriers, but I couldn’t imagine such a scene playing out in any other city.  Traditional and modern, conservative and funky – all side by side, all comfortable and easy. There’s just something about Tokyo.

There’s a handful of outstanding Irish writers whose business is the meticulous dissection of domestic relationships.  I’m thinking of the likes of John McGahern, William Trevor, Anne Enright, and Colm Toibin, writers whose work is acclaimed by critics and loved by readers and who practice quiet craft, not grand gestures.  To my mind, one of the very best of this group is Bernard MacLaverty.  Don’t feel bad if you’ve never heard of him.  In a writing career of forty years, MacLaverty has published only five novels and five collections of short stories.

Midwinter Break is his first novel for sixteen years.  It tells the story of an apparently unremarkable and long-married couple, Gerry and Stella. Born in Northern Ireland but now living in quiet retirement in Scotland, the opening of the novel finds them preparing to set off on a short winter break.  The tensions between the couple are evident from the first page, but it’s only as they explore, separately and together, the cold streets of Amsterdam that the depth of the fault line between them starts to show.  Alcoholism has its grip on Gerry, driving Stella to contemplate the possibility of living the final years of her life alone.

Midwinter Break is that rare thing: a completely truthful account of old age and marriage – the compromises, stresses, and small betrayals, and, ultimately, the redemptive potential of love.

“Sitting beside Stella in this grey light seemed to Gerry such a privilege, such a wonderful thing to be doing, despite the nightmare of their surroundings.  He believed that everything and everybody in the world was worthy of notice but this person beside him was something beyond that.  To him her presence was as important as the world.  And the stars around it.  If she was an instance of the goodness in this world then passing through by her side was miracle enough.”