Tatsuya Ueda, the owner of this operation, gets felled trees from local forestry cooperatives, and from gardeners and maintenance crews. This year, he expects to process enough wood to heat about a dozen homes through the long, wet winter here. The solar panels that shelter the wood could power 15 more for an entire year. Solar is clearly a less carbon-intense alternative to the imported fossil fuels that fulfill the majority of Japan’s energy needs. Under the right circumstances, burning wood or other organic materials may be too.
This tidy system of renewable-energy production isn’t scalable. It cannot replace the need for solar and geothermal power plants, or wind farms. It wouldn’t make sense in exactly the same way elsewhere. But it makes sense here and now.
This alienation from the self is at the hollow, restless heart of Anna and Tom’s lives: constantly yearning, empty of meaning. Latronico’s thought-provoking book is anything but.
By bearing witness to trauma, engaging civic memory, and addressing complex moral and ethical considerations of guilt, responsibility, and suffering in discursive rather than didactic ways, fictional works can play a role in preparing the ground for more formal processes of reckoning.
Interwoven through the feminist meditations are Hero’s thoughts about her current relationship, which she directs to her boyfriend using the second-person voice. Loosely plotted, Hero is a fearless interrogation of female desire, anger and loneliness.