The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, recalled alongside the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami, marks both a personal rupture in Yasuyo Miyamoto’s life and a structural break in the investigation. It closes her businesses and transforms the conditions under which the police try to reconstruct the past: smaller contractors leave the nuclear industry, employment histories are difficult to recover, and identities used by itinerant workers remain uncertain.

Disaster and local aftermath

More than a decade after Kyoichiro Kaga’s visit, Yasuyo remembers the Great East Japan Earthquake and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster as the period’s most consequential events. The earthquake devastated her neighborhood, while many relatives living on the coast were killed in the tsunami. When Yasuyo later went to lay commemorative wreaths, the scale of destruction made the loss difficult to comprehend. Her recollection connects the disaster’s local consequences with the enduring work of mourning.

The disruption changed Yasuyo’s working life. In the aftermath of the earthquake, she closed both of her establishments: electricity, gas, and water had been cut off, making operation impossible, and she expected that customers would not return for some time even if she reopened. Now over seventy, she regarded the closure as an occasion to change course. Savings from the boom years and her state pension gave her enough financial security to meet old friends, travel occasionally, and consider herself fortunate to have made it through the disaster.

Effects on the investigation

The disaster also altered the investigative landscape. The task force’s effort to identify Shunichi Watabe and Mutsuo Koshikawa ran into the fragmented organization of nuclear-plant labor: workers were hired through long chains of contractors and subcontractors, many of them small firms. The companies directly employing workers might be far down that chain, complicating efforts to determine who had employed whom. After the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, many smaller firms withdrew from the business altogether, further narrowing the possibilities for tracing old employment.

The loss or absence of employment records compounds that problem. Investigators were told that companies had to retain employee documents for three years only for full-time staff, not short-term workers. In an industry where labor was routinely subcontracted, short-term workers could be hired under false names, making a supposed employment history particularly difficult to verify. The disaster therefore functions in the inquiry not as a complete explanation for missing evidence, but as a historical rupture that compounds pre-existing gaps in documentation and accountability.

Nuclear labor and unstable identities

The novel’s account of nuclear work gives these investigative obstacles a human dimension. A former worker describes a life organized around mobility: subcontractors supplied dormitories at each destination, workers stayed for a few months, and then moved on to another power plant. He had spent four years moving in this way and described himself as someone without a settled home. Such work arrangements help explain how a person could pass through the industry while leaving a sparse or misleading paper trail.

The work itself is presented as maintenance under radiation-control conditions. The worker describes inspections and maintenance as a continuing effort to deal with radiation and says that his task involved scrubbing contaminated areas with cloths and brushes. His account places manual labor, radiation exposure, and layered subcontracting in the same system: the people doing the work move from site to site, while the organizational chain makes responsibility and identity difficult to follow. This context does not establish the disaster as the cause of any individual’s deception; it shows how the industry’s employment structure made concealment and retrospective identification harder.

Narrative significance

The disaster binds intimate loss to institutional memory without reducing one to the other. For Yasuyo, it brings the closure of businesses and the deaths of relatives; for the investigators, its aftermath helps explain why some firms and employment records can no longer be reached. The novel places these consequences beside the longer history of precarious nuclear labor, where workers’ names and employers may be uncertain even before disaster further disrupts the industry.

In this way, the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster form a dividing line in both the community’s life and the investigation’s access to evidence. The past cannot be recovered simply by asking who worked where: the labor system dispersed responsibility, records were limited, and the disaster prompted some small companies to disappear from the business. What remains is a chain of recollections and partial traces that investigators must assemble against the loss of ordinary documentary certainty.