Ryo Morimoto, 2023, Nuclear Ghost Atomic Livelihoods in Fukushima’s Gray Zone, 1^st Edition, California Series in Public Anthropology, University of California Press, 356 pp., ISBN: 9780520394117.

Ryo Morimoto’s Nuclear Ghost is a poignant and richly immersive ethnography that probes the interwoven lives, ongoing uncertainties, and contested landscapes of post-disaster Fukushima, over a decade after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown. The book is positioned at an intersection point of anthropology, environmental studies, disaster studies, and science and technology studies (STS), and it engages forcefully with Japanese cultural and philosophical framings on risk, loss, and continuity.

The overarching hypothesis of Nuclear Ghost is that the “Fukushima disaster,” determined by Morimoto as the “TEPCO accident” to emphasize corporate responsibility, cannot be adequately understood by biomedical and technoscientific measures of radiation exposure, but instead by situated, lived experiences of people living in Minamisōma and adjacent regions. These are “gray zones” where visibility, belonging, trauma, resistance, and continuum occur daily. According to Morimoto, radiation is a biophysical agent and a sociocultural construct that affects and is affected by stories of space, history, and ways of livelihood.

At its most essential level, then, Nuclear Ghost is a radical departure from mainstream disaster ethnographies because it refuses radiation-based narratives of nuclear disasters. In contrast to a preoccupation with contamination as a measurable, medicalized danger, Morimoto turns the ethnographic eye toward what he terms “atomic livelihoods,” lived realities, coping strategies, and existential negotiations by people who decided to stay or come back to the areas contaminated by radiation in coastal Fukushima.

The key argument is that knowing about the TEPCO nuclear accident involves decentering technoscientific and state-based narratives regarding radiation in favor of noticing the multi-faceted, embodied, and at times contradictory terms in which people in cities like Minamisōma live in what Morimoto refers to as “the gray zone.” This is not a geographical term but a conceptual zone in which binary oppositions break down “safe-unsafe”, “contaminated-clean”, “victim-resister”. In this zone, the nuclear Ghost is a ghostly figure representing haunting radiation, loss, and uncertainty. It is not metaphorical but an ontological state through which people understand their worlds and futures.

The book is organized thematically into an introduction, nine central chapters, and an epilogue. The chapters are not strictly chronological; Morimoto develops concepts and narratives in ways that connect with and reinforce one another to build a palimpsestic sense of life in the fallout. The organization permits Morimoto to interlace experiences from his fieldwork, oral histories from interlocutors, cultural reference points, particularly to Haruki Murakami’s fiction and cosmologies of Japanese Buddhism, and critical encounters with theories of exposure, precarity, and affect.

Morimoto’s narrative voice seems reflexive and ethically committed, where he repeatedly interposes his mistakes and develops a grasp as a fieldworker, most notably his trans