announcement to humanity

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by RYOKO SEKIGUCHI

 

Japanese poet and writer Ryoko Sekiguchi began publishing in 1988. She moved to France in 1997 And has been writing in French since 2003. 

Presented here in an excerpt, her journal Ce N’est Pas Un Hasard (Éditions P.O.L., Paris, 2011) was written in the days following the March 11, 2011, tsunami and nuclear disaster, reflecting on themes such as the ephemeral nature of life in Japanese culture.

In her most recent book, L’Appel des Odeurs (The Call of Odors, 2024), the narrator keeps a notebook documenting how smell influences our relations with space and memory. 

 

March 13 

The Japanese poet Tatsuhiko Ishii arrives in Paris. Exhausted.

He’s come to give a few talks and participate in a roundtable discussion on March 15, where I’ll also be present. His flight was confirmed, but since the airport shuttle seemed out of service, we thought until the last minute that he wouldn’t make it.

Ishii teaches me the etymology of the word “disaster,” from the Italian disastro, meaning “under a bad star.”

A French newspaper article wonders how the Japanese can continue living on an island so prone to natural disasters. And I wonder if the journalist would dare say something similar about the inhabitants of regions with challenging climates, such as some African countries or Iran, where earthquakes are also common. 

 

March 14 

Cécile Sakai, a specialist in Japanese literature, and I had prepared a translation of a series of Ishii’s tanka in anticipation of his reading. The selection was made in January, and the translation was completed on March 2.

On March 12, Cécile Sakai messages me, surprised: “I keep thinking about what Mr. Ishii wrote…” I had been thinking the same. He has a triptych on disasters entitled “Announcement to Humanity.” The first section opens with “The day the sea foams and the earth shakes,” followed by a quote from Voltaire on the Lisbon earthquake.

Ishii is concerned about tomorrow. He doesn’t want people to think he chose this text on purpose.

The press speaks of Japanese discipline. Some try to find an explanation in the Japanese concept of “impermanence,” others in our religion. Still others call it resignation. It’s true, I wouldn’t want to experience an earthquake in France. It would be total chaos, although maybe the government would respond faster than ours. In any case, if there is a difference, it’s not a difference in mentality. Rather, it’s a learned habit, a very pragmatic lesson that all Japanese people have internalized. After all, we know  natural disasters happen. It’s not fatalism; it’s a proven fact. We know this well because we’re taught about it in school. We are trained to respond to earthquakes. Every Japanese child knows what to do in a tsunami or an avalanche in mountainous areas. But preparation can’t prevent everything. Every year, there are typhoons, sometimes causing power outages and blowing rooftops or antennas away. That’s just how it is.

True, there isn’t a major earthquake every day, but minor tremors are felt at least once a month. The pedestrian map of Tokyo is a bestseller because it helps people navigate the city if needed, to return home on foot. Every home is equipped with a large flashlight and a radio in the entryway. This is part of our daily life, and no one is spared. That’s why we have the sense that “what was bound to happen has happened,” that “it could have been me,” that one day, “it will be my turn.” Hence the feeling, not of resignation but of always being involved. This, too, perhaps explains the solidarity that prevails with every disaster. Because we know that life will resume, even if we have to start from scratch, and that it’s not the end of everything. Except, of course, for those whose lives have been abruptly cut short. 

 

March 15

Tatsuhiko Ishii gives his reading. Here’s an excerpt:

“How simple it is to decimate men! All it takes is for the Earth to move (just a little bit).

To live humbly and die like a worm — barely enough time to utter a little cry

But you know yourself! It’s humans who are to be most feared (oh yes!)

Has humanity (already) perished? The sea foams. The earth shakes. For a moment…”

Why does such chance occur? And anyway, is it really chance? I don’t mean that poets can predict catastrophes — quite the opposite. There’s no cause-and-effect link. Only that catastrophes, innumerable, natural or human-made, arise in the world, and in this sense, if we’re not coming out of a disaster, then we’re on the verge of another.

As for writers and artists who grapple with this theme, it’s not surprising that their work, their thoughts, might immediately precede or coincide with a catastrophe. 

The crucial point when we ask, “What’s possible after a catastrophe?” — a question often raised worldwide — is to bear in mind that we’re also on the eve of future catastrophes, so we should ask what we can write before or between catastrophes, the permanent state we live in.

Ishii says he couldn’t write a tanka about an earthquake. This makes me understand something: maybe one can write about catastrophes — but only afterward.

Perhaps one can write a poem afterward, but not during. I would be incapable of writing a poem during.

I understand him, too; what I’m writing isn’t literature.

It’s a “report.” I’m drafting a report, as honestly as possible. 

 

March 17

I could never have imagined writing about “our” catastrophe.

I also think of the unique temporality that belongs to narratives of disaster, as a literary convention, that golden rule that dictates they always be described retrospectively.

One cannot arrive the day before.

Yet, when multiple catastrophes overlap as they do today, we find ourselves simultaneously before, after, and even during the disaster. Especially because, as the philosopher Osamu Nishitani says, a nuclear accident, once it occurs, is only the beginning — the beginning of a desolation that itself spawns catastrophe.

So now, in what grammatical tense should one describe this succession of catastrophes? And in what tense should one complete the description? To this difficult question, I still have no answer. By opting for the form of a chronicle, I submit myself to a specific time frame, perhaps valid only in this particular case: the present. There is also the prevailing feeling that we are always “within” the catastrophe, even if it mingles, as I have already written, with retrospective visions and projected anxieties about a future that may or may not come to pass.

For a writer aiming to narrate a catastrophe, what temporality should they choose? And before even arriving at a narration or description, in what tense does one experience the moment?

All discourse on catastrophe is inevitably bound to, even haunted by, the question of time. Since discovering this, the incessant link between time and disaster appears to me in nearly all writings on catastrophes, regardless of the genre.

END