I hadn’t been dreaming about the tsunami-turned-earthquake-turned nuclear trauma Japan has been receiving. Then, Andre sent me the below clip (be forewarned, if you choose to click “play”) of the Sendai Mediatheque, which has been haunting my dreams ever since. It’s not the most horrific video footage out there of the heartbreaking events, but as Andre pointed out, it has a Jacques Tati Play Time quality to it, which is deeply disconcerting juxtaposed with the unemotional reactions of the people. Also unsettling is how long the whole wretched business goes on.

It is partially this aspect that transported me back to the earthquakes of my childhood in Southern California. I vividly remember how awful it was to feel a whole building sway – especially our house in Oxnard during the 1987 Whittier quake, when I was 11 – and how it seemed like it would never end. In truth, that one only lasted about a minute, and by the time my mom and I got into a doorway and held on, it was almost over. But the recent quake in Japan goes on for over three minutes in this clip, and that’s with the camera rolling in mid-action. You can tell from how the building designed by Toyo Ito (which Andre traveled to Sendai to review for werk, bauen + wohnen in their May 2001 issue) holds up that the Japanese death toll owes much to their impeccable building standards. Before the tsunami, radiation and nuclear fallout had their say, buildings like this kept the Japanese people relatively safe through the 8.9 earthquake, as the floors and ceilings seem to sway as independent plates.

It’s still sickening to watch and hear, and I imagine absolutely nauseating to actually experience.

And how to sleep again, now that these sights and sounds are in my head, transporting me back at night to when I was begging my parents to sleep on the floor next to their bed so that I’d feel safe? (They only relented once, and it wasn’t very wise, actually. I slept next to a sliding glass door, which was probably the most dangerous thing to sleep next to when aftershocks could strike.)

Rather than to ignore Japan – something that’s neither moral, as well as damn near impossible – I’m trying to think about it from a different angle. I am reminded of my friend Paula, who once wrote that fiction made her feel better when she wasn’t feeling well, and suggested Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood as the first read of our post college book club. (The club lasted about a year, and consisted of six or seven Asian American Harvard alumni…and me.) I hated Norwegian Wood, but many years later grew to love Murakami as one of my favorite living novelists, alongside John Irving, Philip Roth and Milan Kundera.

In fact, there are very few of Murakami’s books I haven’t read. Maybe the only one left is After the Quake, his book of short stories about life in Japan after the 1995 Kobe earthquake.

So I’m hoping fiction will help me feel — if not better, somehow better oriented in my emotional thinking about this tragedy. I want to feel in some way connected to the Japanese people. For some reason, I think this gifted novelist might help me do so in a way journalism can’t right now. Yes, he’s writing fiction, and yes, he’s writing about a quake that killed over 6,000 people but will be seen after this week as “just” a quake. But as he shows in “UFO in Kushiro,” sometimes an over saturation of flat media can make you feel like you are made of air and have nothing to give, take, or receive.