Stephen Phelan

STANDING over Pablo Neruda’s grave, a young attendant named Lorena said she wasn’t sure about any of this. The exhumation had not yet begun, and the flowerbed looked undisturbed above the poet’s burial mound at Isla Negra, just outside his former home on the rocky black volcanic coast of Chile. But court-appointed investigators had already been out to survey the site and measure the depth of the remains. Asked for her opinion on Neruda’s cause of death, Lorena told me that she didn’t know what to believe. “There’s a lot of stories, but no proof,” she said.

THE late Ray Bradbury once wrote a story called All Summer In A Day. It was set in a primary school on the planet Venus, where it’s been raining non-stop for seven years. The children are too young to remember the sun, except for one girl who has recently arrived from Earth, and feels its absence more acutely than they do. On the day it is due to come out again, if only for a couple of hours, the girl stands apart from the others, waiting for the sun and wanting to go home. The rest of the class hate her for that apartness. They lock her in a cupboard just before the clouds break, and then they all go out to play. Junot Diaz first read that story when he was about the same age as the kids in it.

THE whale was never just a whale. After 160 years, there is still no end to the meanings read into Moby-Dick, and the titular monster prevails as symbol for anything and everything that we doubt or dread, including existence itself, and whatever something or nothing that might lie beyond. From Matt Kish’s point of view as an illustrator, this made Herman Melville’s “damned whale” extremely tricky to draw.

George Orwell did not believe in ghosts. Any reader who respects his work could not possibly think that Orwell’s shade now haunts the remote farmhouse on the Isle of Jura where he wrote his final novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, and spent his last days of relative health and happiness. (He died of tuberculosis in 1950, and was buried elsewhere, in an English churchyard, under his real name, Eric Blair.) Even so, I’m jittery.

MOST writers spend the better part of their days sitting alone in chairs, slouched over desks, occasionally staring out of windows. In his lifetime, even a beloved crowd-pleaser like Charles Dickens would probably have bored his fans to fits of Victorian weeping if they had to watch him work for more than five minutes. But after a great author dies, his or her property begins to take on a kind of mystic fascination. Over decades, or centuries, their chairs become artefacts, their rooms become museums, and their houses become holy to those readers and travellers who consider themselves “literary pilgrims”.

WE crossed from Argentina into Chile over the Andes. The bus was angled upward like a plane taking off, the narrow road rising to an altitude of almost 12,000 feet at the border checkpoint, in a high pass called Los Libertadores. The peaks loomed above us on all sides, with Acongagua in the distance – the tallest mountain outside of Asia, a factory for generating clouds. It was literally dizzying. My nose bled, and my girlfriend fainted in the long queue at the immigration desk.

BY Japanese standards, Onagawa was a young town. Or, at least, a relatively new port, formally founded in 1926 but incorporating much older fishing hamlets. It was located near the north-east limit of Japan’s main island, Honshu – on the Sanriku coast of the Tohoku region – where thickly forested mountains drop into the Pacific, and submerged river valleys form a fjord-like landscape of deep bays and narrow inlets. Human settlers have been living in those margins for centuries, feeding off two fertile ocean currents that converge just offshore, carrying saury and silver salmon practically into their mouths. Less than 50 miles out, there is also a volatile tectonic fault plane, in the trench between the Japan and Okhotsk plates.

ONAGAWA was not destroyed, they kept saying. The survivors were insistent on that point when I first visited last April, less than one month after the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami of March 11, 2011, which had effectively wiped this small port town off the map. “We are still here,” said local teacher Ikuo Fujinaka, standing in the ruin of his house. “Onagawa still exists.” More in memory than reality, I thought. In percentage terms, it had suffered greater losses than anywhere else along the Tohoku coast – over 80% of its buildings, more than 50% of its homes, and almost 10% of the population, leaving Onagawa literally decimated.

My girlfriend and I moved to Japan in the autumn of 2008. We had our reasons, and they boiled down to boredom. I’m Irish, she’s Scottish, we were both sick of living in the UK – the sort of middle-class Westerners who suppose that their lives might be more meaningful as foreigners in some faraway place. Japan seemed so distant and different as to make us look brave, but also secretly appealed to us as one of the safest, cleanest nations on Earth.

RONALDO Quinn was 21 when he was sent to liberate the Malvinas Islands. Thirty years ago tomorrow, on April 2, 1982, Argentina’s ruling military junta dispatched a small force to reclaim those tiny, distant South Atlantic islands from the British who called them the Falklands. Though already two months over his mandatory year of national service, Quinn was “invited to participate”, as he puts it today. “I was just a conscript in the army,” he says, “and probably one of the worst. My performance was always poor. I used to oversleep. I was not made to be a soldier at all. Then suddenly I was a part of Argentina’s history.”