Book Awards

Catfish Rolling

Clara Kumagai
(Amulet Books)
  • Fiction
  • Set in Japan

Key words: Contemporary, fantasy, romance, grief

There’s a catfish under Japan, and when it rolls the land rises and falls. At least that’s what Sora was told after she lost her mother to an earthquake so powerful that it cracked time itself. Sora and her father are some of the few who still live near one of these “zones”—the places where time has been irrevocably sped up or slowed down.

Sora’s father leads a research team studying the zones, and even as his colleagues begin to fall ill, he refuses to stop entering the zones himself. Sora finds herself stuck and increasingly alone as her father starts behaving strangely—he’s disoriented and his memory seems to be deteriorating. Sora, meanwhile, has been secretly conducting her own research on the zones, tracking down a time expert in Tokyo and surprising herself with a crush on a strikingly confident girl named Maya, another hafu girl with whom she forms an instant bond.

But when Sora’s father disappears, she has no choice but to return home, with Maya in tow, and venture deep into the abandoned time zones to find him and perhaps the catfish itself . . .

Culture Notes PDF

For centuries, large catfish were associated with earthquakes in Japan. There was a common belief that catfish caused earthquakes as they swam through underwater rivers and seas, thrashing their tails. A Shinto deity, Kashima Daimyōjin, was believed to be able to calm earthquakes by riding catfish and controlling them by pressing on their heads. Thus, the catfish became a symbol of earthquakes in Japan.

Kashima Daimyōjin controlling a catfish, woodblock print, 1855 (artist unknown; International Research Center for Japanese Studies)

Japan lies along four tectonic plates with over two thousand active faults, exposing the islands to frequent earthquakes. According to a 2013 white paper, around 20% of global earthquakes that measure magnitude 6 or over occur in or around Japan (University of Tokyo website; see URL below). Earthquakes are so common in Japan that you might experience a mild one even during a short visit of several weeks, and major earthquakes have occurred throughout Japanese history. The Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, a 7.9 magnitude quake, destroyed much of Tokyo and all of Yokohama, leaving more than 110,000 people dead. The Hanshin Earthquake of 1995 leveled much of Kobe; it struck early in the morning, trapping people alive in areas of town that had traditional buildings with heavy tile roofs. The March 2011 Tōhoku (pronounced: TOE-HO-koo) earthquake (9.1 magnitude) and tsunami that hit the northeastern part of the main island of Honshu (pronounced: HONE-shoe) left over 18,000 people dead (the true number is unknown); the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant was crippled beyond repair, with the area around it rendered unlivable from radioactive pollution.

A nineteenth-century example pertains most closely to Catfish Rolling. In 1855, a devastating 7.0 magnitude event known as the Ansei-Edo Earthquake struck the city of Edo (now Tokyo), killing an estimated eight to ten thousand people. Out of this disaster came a new type of woodblock print, called namazu-e (“catfish prints”), after the Japanese word for catfish (namazu). Designed by the writer Kanagaki Robun (1829–1894) and painter/print designer Kawanabe Kyōsai (1831–1889), these early catfish prints are thought to be subtly critical of the Tokugawa government.

A popular belief held that the chaos that followed an earthquake disaster might allow a new order in which wealth would be redistributed to the poor and class roles reversed. Namazu-e became hugely popular and new editions, often not finely printed or signed, proliferated during this period. Owing to the underlying subversive messages in the prints, the government soon put a stop to their production.

In recent years, research in Japan on the relationship between catfish and earthquakes has suggested that catfish may be able to sense earthquakes before they happen. Images of catfish appear in some of the materials on earthquake preparedness in Japan, including the Japan Meteorological Agency’s earthquake early warning logo and the Yurekuru Call mobile app.

Resources

Bates, Alex. “Catfish, Super Frog, and the End of the World: Earthquakes and Natural Disasters in the Japanese Cultural Imagination.” In Education About Asia issue on Natural Disasters in Asia: Geography and Environment 12.2 (Fall 2007): 13–19.

International Research Center for Japanese Studies. “Namazu-e – Kashima controls Namazu with his sword,” 1855. Japanese woodblock print. Public domain. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Namazu-e_-_Kashima_controls_namazu.jpg

Jordan, Brenda G. Strange Fancies and Fresh Conceptions: Kyōsai in an Age of Conflict. University of Kansas (Ph.D. dissertation, 1993), 55–57.

Pacchioli, David. “Researcher examines the history and impacts of earthquakes in Japan.” PennState (19 March 2014),

Schencking, Charles. “The Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923 and the Japanese Nation.” In Education About Asia issue on Natural Disasters in Asia: Geography and Environment 12.2 (Fall 2007): 20–25.

Smits, Gregory and R. Ludwin. “Evolution of the Catfish (namazu) as an earthquake symbol in Japan.” Seismological Society of America, 2006. https://library.wisn.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/130069-SmitsLudwin2006_Poster_SSA.pdf

Smits, Gregory. “The Ansei Edo Earthquake and Catfish Prints.” British Columbia/Yukon Pressbooks. n.d. https://pressbooks.bccampus.ca/meijiat150/chapter/the-ansei-edo-earthquake-and-catfish-prints/

University of Tokyo. “The World’s Most Active Earthquake Zone Is the Closest Place on Earth to Unraveling World-shaking Geophysical Mysteries.” n.d. https://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/en/whyutokyo/wj_001.html

Author: Brenda G. Jordan, Director of the University of Pittsburgh NCTA site, Japanese art historian

2024

Curriculum Connections PDF

Catfish Rolling is a thought-provoking coming-of-age novel that deals with themes of memory, grief, cultural identity, family relationships, love, and friendship. Set in contemporary Japan, it was written in 2023 by Clara Kumagai, an author of Japanese, Irish, and Canadian descent. The book raises questions about time, science, ecology, and philosophy via a strong plotline and the authentic voice of a complex protagonist.

As a philosophical novel, Catfish Rolling could be paired with another time-related novel for classroom study, such as Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Octavia Butler’s Kindred, Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility, or even F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Catfish Rolling would also be an excellent option in a unit on cli-fi (climate fiction), environmental literature, or an interdisciplinary science course.

Literary Notes

The novel is written in first person and narrated mostly in the present tense. It begins in a flashback, with a twelve-year-old Sora Campbell buying mochi at a supermarket when the earthquake strikes. The novel shifts between realistic descriptions of current-day Japan, discussions of time science, and surreal adventures in nonlinear time zones. Chapters move mostly chronologically, and chapter titles are taken from both a traditional lunar calendar and Japanese micro-seasons, a poetic and logical choice for a novel that asks how we measure time. Students should enjoy the good humor in the novel, particularly the banter among characters and the deep emotional conversations. Some will appreciate the philosophical interludes while others may get impatient with them.

Coming-of-Age Novel

Catfish Rolling explores the psychological development of eighteen-year-old Sora Campbell, half Canadian, half Japanese, living in modern-day Japan. She is unsure of her relationships, her future as a student, her father’s health, and her multi-ethnic identity. As she contemplates life after graduation, she sees her family and future unraveling. At the age of twelve, Sora lost her mother in a massive earthquake; Sora’s father is a scientist in the new field of time science, researching the fractured time zones caused by the earthquake. Sora secretly gives tours of the off-limit time zones, still hoping to find her mother. During a visit to Tokyo, Sora connects with Kyra, a Japanese and African American graduate student who helps Sora with her academic research into time zones along with her personal search for meaning. The novel examines how Sora faces the future and heals from her traumatic loss.

Speculative Fiction

 Kumagai’s speculative fiction was inspired by the March 2011 Tōhoku earthquake. Her novel asks, “What if?” What if the force of the 3/11 earthquake fractured time just as it upended bridges, buildings, and cities? What if time moved at different speeds in certain zones, where people could be disoriented or lost? 

 Kumagai’s premise that time can shift during an earthquake is based on actual NASA calculations that the 3/11 magnitude 9.0 earthquake in Fukuoka changed the Earth’s axis and shortened the length of an Earth day—however minutely. NASA’s preliminary theoretical calculation indicates that the distribution of Earth’s mass during the Tōhoku earthquake caused the Earth to rotate a bit faster, shortening the length of the day by about 1.8 microseconds (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory).

In a 2023 interview, Kumagai said, “I learned that the 2011 earthquake was so big that it shifted the earth on its axis so that it spins faster—and as a result, our day is a tiny bit shorter. It also caused Honshu [the main island of Japan] to actually move more than 6 feet east, closer to the North American continent. That actually seems like science fiction to me, even though it’s real. So my idea of time breaking came from there, and on a bigger level it also fit in with being caught in the past or painful events that Sora can’t help but relive. Using magical realism allowed those memories and traumas to become a physical place, which I think made it more tangible and real.”

In the novel, Sora theorizes that “The Shake had moved time as if it were tectonic plates, and cracks must have opened in between. What if you’d been standing on one when they moved? Would you fall between times? Could you disappear?

Or: If you had been in one of the slow or fast zones, perhaps you’d been flung far into the past or the future, and had become old and died, or become so young that you ceased to exist, that you became a random little bundle of cells once more.” (p. 122-123)

 Japanese Mythology and Cultural Imagination

One of the novel’s great pleasures is the many references to Japanese mythology, which Kumagai deftly weaves into the story alongside science. The Edo-period story of namazu, a giant catfish that thrashes in the center of the earth, causing tremors and shakes, is central to the novel. (See Culture Notes for this book by Brenda Jordan.) Kumagai also incorporates Shintō and other aspects of traditional Japanese culture: Sora and her father place hourglasses at an Inari shrine to track the three time zones and discover that the middle hourglass is frozen in time (p. 133). She realizes the stone statues she finds of Jizō, or Jizō Bosatsu (Bosatsu = bodhisattva), the guardian deity of children and travelers, are dedicated to children who died in the earthquake (p. 94). She learns about tsukumogami, objects animated by a Shintō spirit or kami (p. 94). Maya tells Sora about Kijimuna spirits—red-haired elf-like creatures who live in the banyan trees, according to Okinawan mythology.

Japanese Calendars: Lunar and Micro-Season

The author explains in the Glossary that the chapter names refer to two Japanese calendars: the lunar calendar (sekki) and the seventy-two micro-seasons (kō). Each micro-season is connected to an event in the natural cycle of plants and animals, such as “swallows return,” “frogs start singing,” and “worms surface.” As climate change worsens, Kumagai notes: “These markers are becoming increasingly confused and disrupted—there are fewer swallows every year” (p. 419). In an interview, Kumagai adds: “A lot of the time in the book (particularly in the different time zones) is measured or marked by natural events or seasonal changes, just like the sekki and kō calendars, because clocks aren’t reliable, and are in fact sort of arbitrary. So I guess thematically this fits in with Sora’s journey—she’s not ready for the next step in her life just because school ended; she has to change and grow at her own pace.”

For more details on Japanese micro-seasons, see Mark Hovane, “The 72 Japanese micro-seasons,” Kyoto Journal, 25 April 2023, https://kyotojournal.org/uncategorized/the-72-japanese-micro-seasons/

Or visit: https://www.nippon.com/en/features/h00124/

The Japanese Concept of Ma

This is an interesting lens through which to examine the novel. The kanji for ma combines 門 (“door”) and 日(“sun”) to depict a door that allows light to enter: 間. The literal translation is “space between,” but as Kiyoshi Matsumoto defines it, “Ma is a Japanese boundary, but it isn’t a line. It is a void, an expanse … Rather than a static gap, it is the distance that exists between objects as well as between time. It is the silent pause between musical notes, the shadows between the light streaming through blinds, even the interaction between people, whether they are loved or despised. (“The Japanese Concept of Time and Space,” Medium, 24 April 24 2020, https://medium.com/@kiyoshimatsumoto/ma-the-japanese-concept-of-space-and-time-3330c83ded4c)

Books on Japanese Mythology

 Clara Kumagai recommends the following books for teenagers:

  • A Thousand Steps into the Night by Traci Chee
  • Across the Nightingale Floor by Lian Hearn
  • The Beast Player by Nahoko Uehashi
  • A Thousand Beginnings and Endings, edited by Ellen Oh and Elise Chapman (an anthology of stories inspired by Asian folk tales, not just Japanese)
  • Shigeru Mizuki’s manga (also adapted to anime) about yōkai

She also mentions: “One of my favorite legends is a story told in both Japan—where it’s called Urashima Tarō—and Ireland as Oisin in TínanÓg. Both versions center on a man who visits another land, and finds that hundreds of years have passed in the real world.”

(See READER Q&A WITH Clara Kumagai AUTHOR OF CATFISH ROLLING, May 25, 2023, https://toppsta.com/blog/view/reader-qanda-with-clara-kumagai-author-of-catfish-rolling)

3/11 Connections

The triple disaster of March 11, 2011 (earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown) has inspired so many literary accounts that there is now a sizable body of post-3/11 literature. For an overview of the connections between fiction writing and the March 2011 earthquake, see Koichi Haga, The Earth Writes: The Great Earthquake and the Novel in Post-3/11 Japan (Lexington Books, 2019).

Catfish Rolling could be paired with one of the numerous memoirs, graphic novels, and short stories inspired by 3/11. The anthology March Was Made of Yarn: Reflections on the Japanese Earthquake, Tsunami, and Nuclear Meltdown, by Elmer Luke and David Karashima (Vintage 2012), is a selection of poetry, manga, memoir, and fiction from outstanding Japanese writers, including Hideo Furukawa, Yoko Ogawa, and Yoko Tawada.

The true story of Kaze no Denwa (Wind Phone) is an example of healing from the trauma of 3/11. The phone booth was created by Itaru Sasaki in 2010 in Ōtsuchi, a town in the Tōhoku region. Thousands of people have visited the phone booth to speak on the disconnected rotary phone to loved ones they’ve lost.

  • Students could listen to the segment “Really Long Distance” in episode 597 of This American Life, titled “One Last Thing Before I Go” and produced by Miki Meek.
  • A fictionalized picture book, The Phone Booth in Mr. Hirota’s Garden by Heather Smith, with illustrations by Rachel Wada (Orca, 2019), tells the story of the phone booth’s origin with illustrations influenced by woodblock printing and sumi-e. This Freeman Book Award winner has Culture Notes and Curriculum Connections: https://www.nctasia.org/award/the-phone-booth-in-mr-hirotas-garden/

Kumagai cites Studio Ghibli and Hayao Miyazaki as inspirations for her novel, so Catfish Rolling could also pair with one of their films, such as Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea or Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, to compare their respective attitudes toward the relationship between humans and nature. Worth discussing is Miyazaki’s 2008 comment about the tsunami in Ponyo: “There are many typhoons and earthquakes in Japan, and there is no point in portraying these natural disasters as evil events. They are one of the givens in the world in which we live.” (Thomas Sotinel, “Japan’s fantasy films act as a buffer against the reality of the natural world,” Guardian, 29 March 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/mar/29/japan-animation-natural-disaster-sotinel)

 Ethical Issues in Scientific Research

The author raises questions about the ethics of risky research, especially if profit is a motive. The novel’s protagonist is a researcher, and her father is a physicist who shifts to research on time after his wife dies in the earthquake. Sora joins her father in his investigation of time zones and independently devises her own methods for measuring time. The lab where Sora’s father works loses funding because of the dangers of the project: those who stay too long in one zone, or who move too often between zones, experience symptoms of time sickness, including dizziness, memory loss, and hallucinations. The company also studies the use of soil from a fast zone for increased food production. In Tokyo, time has been monetized: the designated fast zones in Tokyo are filled with cram schools (more time to study), beauty parlors (rejuvenation), and hotels (more rest). The phrase “money buys time” is literally true.

Philosophy of Time

The novel includes several discussions of time and its meaning, including one between Sora and her father (p. 108), which offers Aristotle’s definition of time “as a measure of motion,” and a conversation with Sora’s friend Maya, who introduces Heidegger’s theory of time (p. 246). Hisakawa, priest at the Inari shrine, mentions the Buddhist belief that time is an illusion (p. 133). Students could research the history of the concept of time.

Bibliography/Works Cited

Kumagai, Clara. Catfish Rolling. Amulet Books, 2003.

Kumagai, Clara, “Clara Kumagai presents new YA novel Catfish Rolling,” Bibliovideo, Canada, Mar 14, 2024, 2 min., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hghik2GSiRs

Buis, Alan. “Japan Quake May Have Shortened Earth Days, Moved Axis.” NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. March 4, 2011. https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/japan-quake-may-have-shortened-earth-days-moved-axis/

U.S. Geological Survey. “M 9.1 – 2011 Great Tohoku Earthquake, Japan.” March 11, 2011.https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/official20110311054624120_30/executive

Hovane, Mark. “The 72 Japanese micro-seasons.” Kyoto Journal. April 25, 2023. https://kyotojournal.org/uncategorized/the-72-japanese-micro-seasons/

Matsumoto, Kiyoshi. “MA–The Japanese Concept of Time and Space.” Medium. April 24, 2020. https://medium.com/@kiyoshimatsumoto/ma-the-japanese-concept-of-space-and-time-3330c83ded4c

Koichi Haga. The Earth Writes, The Great Earthquake and the Novel in Post 3/11 Japan. Lexington Books, 2019.

Luke, Elmer, and David Karashima. March Was Made of Yarn: Reflections on the Japanese Earthquake, Tsunami, and Nuclear Meltdown. Vintage, 2012.

RESOURCES:

Children’s Books Ireland Teacher study questions and activities

Reviews of Catfish Rolling

Guardian

Kirkus Reviews

Japan Times: “Genre-defying novel ‘Catfish Rolling’ navigates grief in a fractured land”

Young Adulting

Interviews with Author

Five questions for Clara Kumagai

Reader Q&A with Clara Kumagai 

Author Website

http://clarakumagai.com/

Author: Anne Gerbner, literature teacher, Philadelphia, PA

2025