Japan, 1 September 1923

The force of the earthquake then measured 7.9 on the Richter scale - ostensibly less major than our current overwhelming catastrophe. Yet as the epicentre was closer to Tokyo and Yokohama, and construction then wasn't what it is now, at least 100,000 people died (probably 142,000, but many were never accounted for).

On 8 September 1923 Sergey Prokofiev wrote to the two Japanese musical enthusiasts who had done the most for him during his stay there in 1918 ('are they alive?' he wondered in his diary entry for that day. They were, and soon wrote back to reassure him). Here's a variant below of the photo taken back then, which shows SSP so dapper in his white suit; see the earlier blog entry for further observations.


I saw copies of the letters kept in the Prokofiev Archive when I was working on Vol. 1, noting how Prokofiev had expressed concern for the survival of Yorisada Tokugawa's concert hall and Motoo Ohtaguro's home and music library. But I'm grateful to Shin-ichi Numabe, who reminded me of the exact phrasing Prokofiev used in his letter to Tokugawa, written in his neat English: 'I was deeply moved by the horrible disaster which has befallen Japan. I trust that you and your family succeeded in safely escaping it...Please accept my profound sympathy and my hope that your country will soon recover from this cruel calamity'. My sentiments exactly to Shin-ichi and Yumiko, who've simultaneously reassured me that they and theirs are all safe, at least up to a point.


The September 1923 aftermath was indeed terrible: fires everywhere, and attacks on about 6000 Koreans who had been made scapegoats for some of the destruction and the poisoned water supplies. Of course we now have a problem to grapple with undreamt of then - nuclear fallout from the power stations which were so unbelievably built in the earthquake zone, and which provide so much heat and light for the conurbations. My blood ran cold when I heard that the city 30km from Tokyo where Shin-ichi and Yumiko both live has ten times the usual levels of radiation.

In a way, hearing these two's different experiences humanises the horror and helps us to realise that people are doing their best to go about their usual business - which is obvious, but it does seem so amorphous and overwhelming otherwise. Yumiko had to spend the night of the quake in a Tokyo bar and got home the next day to find she couldn't get into her room, because all her book and CD shelving had collapsed. She finds it hard to sleep for fear of the aftershocks (the psychological results must be incalculable). Shin-ichi spent the night in terror on the floor of a railway station. Both have been sceptical about their government's record on telling the truth about nuclear accidents. But now, at least, it seems to be honesty time. My thoughts are often with them.

A final reflection from John Stuart Mill, quoted in the revelatory, if concise, biography of Darwin I'm reading by his great-great grandson Randall Keynes: 'Next to the greatness of these cosmic forces, the quality which most forcibly strikes every one who does not avert his eyes from it, is their perfect and absolute recklessness...Nearly all the things which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another, are nature's everyday performances'. Keynes continues, quoting Mill further: 'She never turns "one step from her path to avoid trampling us into destruction"; such are "her dealings with life" '.

24/3 Further to Naomi's plea below, I take the following details from last night's LSO concert programme. You can support the British Red Cross Japan Tsunami appeal in one of the following ways:

Donate online (link provided): www.redcross.org.uk/japantsunami

or by phone: 08450 53 53 53

or send cheques payable to 'British Red Cross' to:
Japan Tsunami Appeal
British Red Cross
44 Moorfields
London EC2Y 9AL

Berlin 1923, Dostoyevsky-style

When did I last read a novelist who left me breathless across an epic span to know what was going to happen next, as I've just found with Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin (Every Man Dies Alone) and now his Wolf Among Wolves? Probably when I was in my late teens, and devoured Dostoyevsky with such obsessiveness that my main studies at university were in danger of falling by the wayside (praise be to Russian Studies 1 and above all to Yelena Voznesenskaya, the only tutor who inspired me during those four years). I don't suppose the parallel had really occurred to me when I read Alone in Berlin, so singular and unrepeatable are the circumstances of its creation and the abysmal time it describes. Whereas Wolf Among Wolves brings us closer to the often fruitful vortices of restless 19th century Russia. The hero, Wolfgang Pagel, is a loveable but spineless young man who discovers his backbone once he leaves a chaotic inflation-ridden Berlin for a country estate which turns out to be no less full of different pitfalls. The roulette scenes in the city inevitably recalled the feverishness of Dostoyevsky's The Gambler (they're central to a first part which takes 370 densely-packed pages to describe an eventful 24 hours in Berlin). But I'd guess that the unease which spreads across the next couple of hundred pages out at Neulohe, leading up to the failed putsch - pictured below in archive footage of 1923's secret army - is a far more personal homage to the threat of something terrible in the ridiculous provincial society milieu of The Possessed. How can both Fallada and Dostoyevsky manage to be so gripping at times when, on the surface at least, not much is happening? The answer probably lies in the speed with which they wrote their tumbling prose, though Dostoyevsky's is often far less clear and makes him extremely difficult to read in Russian. Fallada knew he was risking his neck in the Berlin of 1936-7 for a novel which it was extremely risky to publish, pouring forth 123 pages a week. There is, of course, a magnificent tension both between the moral stature Pagel acquires by experience and the up-down trajectory of Fallada's fascinatingly tragic existence (I must read his biography), and in the contrast of the contented optimism at the novel's end with what we know would have been just around the corner for Pagel, his wife and their child. But this is, in any case, a book which lives in the moment, occasionally stopping to analyse and embroider. It is, above all, Fallada's incredible gift for storytelling which keeps the reader spellbound. And there is material enough here for 100 short stories: I loved the divertissement of the mad Baron who holds to hostage the staff of a Berlin hotel, and the oddly reassuring tale of the servant Elias who has started gathering high-mark notes together in the hope that they'll eventually be worth something again but ends up collecting them for their own sake, since money has lost all its value. Anyway, these books are not only astonishingly faithful testimonies to the times in which they were written, but masterpieces in their own right, no doubt at all about that. On now to Little Man, What Now? and The Drinker.