In this novel, two strangers meet in the wake of a major earthquake in California.
Daisetsu Hiro, one of the main characters in Seiler’s tightly constructed tale, is a renowned Japanese architect scheduled to be the keynote speaker at the International Architectural Conference in San Francisco. But Hiro receives a late-night phone call telling him the conference has been canceled due to a massive earthquake that struck the Bay Area. Hiro, a passionate student of earthquakes, decides to fly to California anyway. He is following in the metaphorical footsteps of a group of Japanese architects who traveled to San Francisco in the wake of the 1906 quake that devastated the city. Hiro arrives in a Bay Area still reeling from the disaster and the social unrest that followed. He impulsively saves a woman named Alice Eames from police brutality, and the two become friends while Hiro is in town to help the Federal Emergency Management Agency assess the damage to local buildings, including Alcatraz. This strand of the narrative is interwoven with the story of Jack London Black, a charismatic street musician who makes uncanny personal connections with his listeners (including, in a wonderfully rendered scene, with Alice herself). Black is shot and killed by police the morning after the quake. While Black’s story, told in part as a novel within a novel, is intriguing, Hiro is the book’s most thoughtfully crafted character. Hiro is someone who can inwardly criticize American provincialism (“He wondered if she knew about the Tohoku Tsunami,” he thinks at one point. “It always amazed him how people around the world knew 9/11, but Americans didn’t know 3/11”) but also sound convincing making sweeping pronouncements. “Nature is ever-changing, constantly on the move,” he tells an interviewer. “It is inevitable that a fixed position will be overtaken.” He strongly anchors this lean and intelligent story.
A compellingly orchestrated tale about two people finding each other after a disaster.