Summary

“In the Web” is constituted of personal musings on the part of the author about the country of Japan and the city of Tokyo. He discusses the nonchalance with which Japanese people confront the pervading danger of their geography – an earthquake could strike at any moment, but life goes on without being too heavily affected by this thought. While often, such disasters result in people coming together in Japan, Parry writes that the 2011 tsunami also harmed human relationships: Sayomi Shito and Naomi Hiratsuka, for example, grew to resent one another. Hierarchies of a sort existed: parents with surviving children were at the top, parents who had found the dead bodies of their children came next, and then parents who could not recover their children’s corpses fell at the bottom according to this implicit way...