Memory, Identity and Nostalgia: Facing Life Loss at the End of Days

We are arguably at the end of times – or at least the way that we imagine our contemporary civilization. The climate is changing erratically, the seas are rising, and we are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction. The latest reports from the IPCC, while leaving a sliver of hope if we act now, more realistically suggest that it is already too late to act meaningfully to preserve the current world order. Novelists, like many artists, have begun to turn from fear to grief, from denial to acceptance - of our role in such cataclysmic changes and the need to face the consequences. <br/>The paper focuses on readings of Sequoia Nagamatsu’s 2022 debut novel How High We Can Go in the Dark. The novel deals with an unseen pandemic, connected to the warming of Russian permafrost, and also the interaction with an extraterrestrial force. The complex novel presents three scenarios which speak to the ritualized responses to the life loss of civilization as we know it: community burials in Japan and its function as memorial the restoration of grounded identity; the mural making and remembrance on board the last chance life vessel seeking a new Earth; and the exploration of the remnants of an ancient civilization which seeded life on Earth. Nagamatsu through series of linked reflective narratives of lives in the aftermath of a viral pandemic presents the challenges of nostalgia, memory, and life loss – staging aspects of grief and allowing, within the diegesis, for acceptance and ways of moving forward without losing sight of lessons learned. His novel provides a means to deal with the dystopian present, and situate the characters better to deal with a fundamentally changed world. <br/>