Battleship Island
James shows me a page that reads, in stark white on grey background:
I was twenty-two when I first visited the island I had dreamed about ever since childhood. Much like a fortress built upon the sea, surrounded by high walls,the island possessed an air of a small kingdom, where its denizens boasted "There is nothing we don't have here." They were right. They did have everything within their miniature kingdom - except a cemetery. ....
[When the mine gave out] in 1974 the world's once most densely populated island become totally deserted. The island, after all its inhabitants departed leaving behind their belongings, became an empty shell of a city where all its people disappeared overnight, as if by some mysterious act of God.
Ten years later, I returned to the island, equipped with food and drinking water. The smell of people gone. Inside the buildings, however, evidence of people's lives remained strongly. The strange atmosphere led me to wonder if island had remained in sleep forever.
I thought it might be a fiction -- it reads as if by Borges or Calvino. But then I saw the photographs.
