Catfish Rolling
Written by Clara Kumagai
Amulet Books, 2023, 415 pp
ISBN: 978-1419768514
There’s a catfish under the islands of Japan. That’s what shakes everything up: the catfish twisting and turning in the mud beneath us. It rolls and the ground trembles, water crashes, time cracks and breaks. I hate that . . . catfish (p. 1).
Grieving and unmoored, Sora has just graduated from high school. Six years before, on what was supposed to be a visit to her maternal grandfather in Japan from her home in Vancouver, Sora lost both her mother and grandfather in a terrible earthquake. This disaster also interrupted time as we know it. Some of the areas affected are zones where time is slower, and some zones have time that is faster. The Japanese government has made most of these zones off limits as their health effects are unknown.
Sora and her scientist father have been searching these zones for the past six years, alone and together, trying to make sense of what has happened. As her father becomes more and more ill, Sora must venture further into the unknown to save her father.
Catfish Rolling, an award-winning young adult science fiction novel, exploring themes of time, space and identity. As a person who is half Japanese, Sora doesn’t feel like she belongs in Japan. Her Japanese mother is gone and her Canadian father is almost as lost as her mother. Sora’s only friend, Koki, has also disappeared into a new life in Tokyo at university. Sora’s world is as fractured as the landscape. Sora’s quest to help her father is also a quest to start to figure out who she is and where she belongs. Sora searches these liminal spaces for her past and learns how to move forward in the present.
Catfish Rolling combines Japanese mythology about the origin of earthquakes with the reality of the devastating earthquakes that have struck the island nation in the last two decades including the strongest recorded earthquake in Japan in 2011. The 9.1 magnitude quake precipitated a tsunami that in turn caused three nuclear reactors to melt down at the Fukushima nuclear power plant and the discharge of radioactive water–an example of nature impacting modern technology.
Other texts that deal with the aftermath of earthquakes include The House of the Lost on the Cape (Sachiko Kashiwaba & Yukiko Saito, 2023) in which mythology is combined with reality. Up From the Sea (Leza Lowitz, 2016), Tsunami Girl (Julian Sedgwick & Chie Kutsuwada, 2021) and The Phone Booth in Mr. Hirota’s Garden (Heather Smith & Rachel Wada, 2021) portray the emotional aftermath of the resulting tsunami. Other possible pairings include themes of figuring out how to live in the context of a disaster, such as How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff (2004) or The Blue Book of Nebo by Manon Steffon Ross (2021). Catfish Rolling could also be read with texts that explore identity such as The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian by Sherman Alexie (2007) or American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang (2006).
Clara Kumagai is a Japanese/Irish/Canadian author who, while growing up in Ireland, rarely saw multiracial kids like herself in young adult literature. This absence spurred her to write a book that she wished she could have read as a teenager, one that reflected her and her family’s lives. She was also inspired to tell this particular story by the 2011 Japanese earthquake that resulted in the Fukushima nuclear disaster. This disaster displaced many residents who may not be able to ever return home. Its strength also caused the earth to shift on its axis, which resulted in the year becoming almost imperceptibly shorter.
Melissa Wilson, Cardiff, Wales
Editors’ note: Junko Sakai and Yoo Kyung Sung wrote a 3-part blog in WOW Currents about the trauma and recovery process following the 2011 earthquake.
Part 1: Natural Disasters: What Should Children Learn?
Part 3: Community Outreach Literacy Practices After the March 2011 Earthquake
© 2024 by Melissa Wilson
WOW Review, Volume XVI, Issue 4 by Worlds of Words is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Based on work by Melissa Wilson at https://wowlit.org/on-line-publications/review/xvi-4/5/
WOW review: reading across cultures
ISSN 2577-0527