内容摘要：“Every time we can release a turtle back into the wild is special and not just for us but for all the interns and volunteers and everyone that puts an effort to getting these turtles back out there. It’s always a really special day,” said Marika Weber, a veterinary technician at the center.

“Every time we can release a turtle back into the wild is special and not just for us but for all the interns and volunteers and everyone that puts an effort to getting these turtles back out there. It’s always a really special day,” said Marika Weber, a veterinary technician at the center.

Tanimoto, a farmer, is the youngest of only four men who can recite Orasho in his community. As a child, he regularly saw men performing Orasho on tatami mats before an altar when neighbors gathered for funerals and memorials.Masatsugu Tanimoto, a farmer and a community leader who is one of only hundreds of so-called “hidden” Christians on the island of Ikitsuki, shows a notebook of handwritten “orasho” prayers passed down orally for generations at his home in Ikitsuki Island in Hirado, southern Japan, Sunday, April 27, 2025. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)

Masatsugu Tanimoto, a farmer and a community leader who is one of only hundreds of so-called “hidden” Christians on the island of Ikitsuki, shows a notebook of handwritten “orasho” prayers passed down orally for generations at his home in Ikitsuki Island in Hirado, southern Japan, Sunday, April 27, 2025. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)About 40 years ago, in his mid-20s, he took Orasho lessons from his uncle so he could pray to the Closet God that his family has kept for generations.Tanimoto recently showed the AP a weathered copy of a prayer his grandfather wrote with a brush and ink, like the ones his ancestors had diligently copied from older generations.

As he carefully turned the pages of the Orasho book, Tanimoto said he mostly understands the Japanese but not the Latin. It’s difficult, he said, but “we just memorize the whole thing.”Today, because funerals are no longer held at homes and younger people are leaving the island, Orasho is only performed two or three times a year.

There are few studies of Hidden Christians so it’s not clear how many still exist.

There were an estimated 30,000 in Nagasaki, including about 10,000 in Ikitsuki, in the 1940s, according to government figures. But the last confirmed baptism ritual was in 1994, and some estimates say there are less than 100 Hidden Christians left on Ikitsuki.This image released by Neon shows Chiwetel Ejiofor, left, and Karen Gillan in a scene from “The Life of Chuck.” (Neon via AP)

This image released by Neon shows Chiwetel Ejiofor, left, and Karen Gillan in a scene from “The Life of Chuck.” (Neon via AP)And yet in this doomsday tale, King is at his most sincere. “The Life of Chuck,” the book and the movie, is about what matters in life when everything else is lost. There is dancing, Walt Whitman and joy.

“In ‘The Life of Chuck,’ we understand that this guy’s life is cut short, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t experience joy,” says King. “Existential dread and grief and things are part of the human experience, but so is joy.”It’s telling that when King, our preeminent purveyor of horror, writes about doom times, he ends up scaling it down to a single life. While darkness and doom have, and probably always will, mark his work, King — a more playful, instinctual, genre-skipping writer than he’s often credited as — “The Life of Chuck” is a prime example of King, the humanist.