Michiyo Miyake’s Green Metal: Life in Tokyo during the Nuclear Catastrophe is a semi-autobiographical fiction exploring life in Tokyo during the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Accident.
Written from the perspective of a bilingual writer who later moved to Sydney, this docufiction novel reconstructs the social atmosphere of Japan during the crisis through diary entries, emails, personal notes, and news bulletins. Blending fiction, memoir, and documentary-style writing, Green Metal examines how individuals respond when public information, trust, and everyday life are disrupted.
At the centre of the story is protagonist M, a writer who documents her experiences following the nuclear accident while questioning official narratives and social expectations. Through a female perspective, the novel explores themes of language, identity, motherhood, feminism, migration, and the experience of living between Japan and Australia.
Green Metal offers a personal account of the Fukushima era often absent from mainstream narratives, reflecting on memory, journalism, and the responsibility of recording history. The second edition includes a new preface written for the fifteenth anniversary of the 2011 nuclear power plant disaster, in which Michiyo Miyake reflects on the origins of the book and her decision to write the story in English.
Michiyo Miyake is a Japanese-born writer and translator based in Australia. She co-hosts the translation duo UGUISU with Nicholas Marshall and publishes through UGUISU BOOKS.
