When real-life accounts about Japan’s earthquakes are so powerful and poignant, it feels wrong, in a way, to read and write fiction about these natural disasters. Fiction involves a certain degree of inauthenticity, and to try animate such intense human suffering that isn’t even real doesn’t it take away from the actual human suffering that occurred?
Jay Rubin’s book about Japan’s historic earthquakes and the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster, “Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories,” answers this question. Great disaster fiction doesn’t deal with the horror and the thrill. It deals with the aftershocks: the myriad, impossible-to-explain ways in which an earthquake and everything it entails transforms human lives and hearts.