The Imagination Station 20 – Inferno in Tokyo

Marianne Hering's The Imagination Station 20 - Inferno in Tokyo is a time-travel adventure for 7 year olds that drops two cousins into the real Tokyo earthquake of 1923.

What happens

Patrick and Beth's machine is broken. It drops them into the wrong adventures and hands over gifts meant for somebody else, and this time it leaves them bobbing on Tokyo Bay with the doors locked.

Then they watch the coast lift, crack and slide into the water with the people still on it. Part of the city is gone in under forty seconds.

The tsunami flips the machine over, rolls it inland and takes it back out again. A man in round glasses pulls their door open and shouts at them to run.

The fires start because the earthquake hit just before noon, every family was home for lunch, and every cookstove and kerosene heater went over at once.

What follows is a proper adventure with a real map under it. A packed bridge collapses under them. Patrick catches a pink bundle sliding past and finds a baby in it. An elephant wades into the river and lifts him out by the waist. A Shinto priest refuses to open the temple gates to refugees, and the man in the glasses argues him round. At the Imperial Hotel, Patrick is handed an apron and told they need ten thousand rice balls.

Two things to know before you hand it over.

The first is that this is a Christian series and it doesn't hide it. Their rescuer belongs to the Friends of Jesus, Beth tells him "God helped us through you", Patrick prays while he's hanging off a broken bridge, and there's a conversation about preaching to people who come for food. If that's what you're after, it's here and it's plain. If it isn't, it's not something you can skim past.

The second is that the disaster is real and the book doesn't soften it. People drown. A woman explains that her baby died in a fire. A zookeeper says every animal but the elephant burned. Nobody is gruesome about any of it, and the deaths sit on the page rather than off it.

It's also the twentieth, and it starts mid-cliffhanger with someone still locked in an American jail cell in 1874. The Tokyo half stands up on its own. The frame around it won't make much sense.

What to read next

For another pair of children landed in real history by magic, Stallion by Starlight sends Jack and Annie back to meet Alexander the Great, who turns out to be nothing like the greatness they were sent for.