Volume Two of the The 3-11 Trilogy,

Escape from Sonoyo personifies the calamity of Japan's triple disaster through the struggles of one family. In so doing, it addresses themes of loyalty, honor, courage, shame, love, adaptability, resilience, spirituality and redemption.

Taut and tender, multi-layered, poetic, allegorical, philosophical, and ultimately uplifting, Escape from Sonoyo is a paean to the human spirit.

Not simply a depiction of one critical historical moment in a single nation's history, it is a transcendent book for the ages.

The story centers on Ohishi, a man of principle, banished from his academic post for loyalty to a disgraced mentor. An unstable narrator, whose voice oscillates between third and first person, Ohishi lives in suspension between the worlds here (konoyo) and there (anoyo); a dweller of the space in-between (sonoyo). Off-kilter, he is distanced from himself; seeking to reconnect with life—to return to konoyo.

As the novel opens—the precise moment of the mega-quake—Ohishi is living a vagabond existence—in exile, traversing Japan in a camper, photographing tunnels with a defective camera; meditating on life's fickle twists and turns. Spying the horrific images of a tsunami engulfing his estranged wife's fishing village, Ohishi speeds north from Tokyo. Unknowingly, he begins an odyssey back to reclaiming himself. In the process he rescues a young girl separated from her parents, then a dog whose owner has perished, before happening upon the corpses of his dead in-laws and reuniting with his distraught wife, futilely searching for their lost son. Together the survivors work to put the restless spirits of their loved ones to rest and, in so doing, form a post-apocalyptic family—one built on exigency, endurance, courage, enterprise, hope, forgiveness and trust.

At once intimate and vast, psychological and sociological, contemporary and historical, mystical and mundane, Escape from Sonoyo succeeds in personalizing human calamity and serving as witness to the universal struggle for closure and culmination.