Arechi no Kazoku

Arechi no Kazoku (The Family in the Wasteland) follows Yūji Sakai, a forty-year-old gardener. Two years after a disaster that swept away his tools, he lost his wife to illness, and more than ten years on he is still struggling. His local friends are no better off; everyone has lost something and none of them can return to the lives they had. The novel asks what people mean when they say they want to go back to how things were.