I started working with the educational arm team at Asymptote this past March, when COVID-19 was just declared a global pandemic. As I read through the spring issue, I also kept an eye on the news, watching the US government lurch from outright denial of the disease to a hodgepodge and feckless response—then I came across Alison Watts’s translation of an excerpt from Durian Sukegawa’s book, Cycling the Road to the Deep North. The essay is a series of vignettes about Sukegawa’s bike tour to Fukushima, in which he tells stories of the lingering destruction from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster, the tsunami and earthquake, and the people carrying on their lives in its wake. Stories of the contaminated soil, of trees with toxic leaves. Stories of burned-out schools and shuddered businesses. And—the story still unfolding—of the Japanese government’s response: its ineptitude and indifference to the wishes of its citizens. The similarities to the current COVID-19 crisis were, at first, depressing, but as I reread Alison’s translation of Sukegawa’s words, I was heartened by them. Because though both crises remain dangerously unresolved, it was evidence that there remain people who are asking the necessary questions, telling the stories we need to hear.

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