Into the Forbidden Zone (5 page)

HOW MANY SUCH STORIES would you care to hear? I collected a number; they are much the same in the one quality that causes journalists to seek them out, just as are the grimacing, often swollen, frequently forehead-bruised corpses whose images face us on the fluttering blue tarp-wall of that temporary morgue at Ishinomaki; their expression much depends on the angle of the head. The survivors who view them keep calm, in the best Japanese manner, gesturing each other forward with a polite
“hai, domo!”,
offering one another the best views of those horrid faces, whose eyes are usually closed.

One woman was explaining to another: “I came here to look for my mother-in-law, but since the faces are swollen it’s difficult, and the number I specified was wrong; that’s why I couldn’t identify her right away. . .”

On the other side of the long rectangle of sunlight, a priest was ringing a bell, and a photograph gazed down upon a bed of donated flowers. Relatives bowed over the ritual bowl; candles flickered. The priest bowed. My throat ached with dust.

Thinking to learn more, I asked a policeman for information, so he referred me to his chief, who could do nothing without the big boss, who when I asked him how many people had died in Ishinomaki rewarded me with a perfect answer: “Our policy is not to answer regarding the individual numbers.” Bowing and thanking him, I said that in that case I had no further questions; reddening, he bowed deeply and apologized for keeping me waiting.

So let us at least momentarily leave the narratives of loss at rest with their eyes closed (the bulldozers clearing more long narrow corpse-trenches in the dirt, twenty bodies per line, three temporary cemeteries in Ishinomaki, and a long green line of Self-Defense Forces dividing into two detachments to break open buildings in search of bodies), while we consider what
meaning,
if any, we can find in them. In this context let me now reintroduce you to Takehiro’s mother, Mrs. Utsumi Yoshie.

“What lesson if any do you see in this event?” I asked her.

“Since March 11, something is finished. I feel that something different has begun. We have never had the experience of losing everything to this extreme. The good lesson,” she laughed, “is to keep valuable things on the second floor!”

“Will your lives be worse?”

“Of course I believe they’re going to be better,” she replied, sitting with me in the dirty wreckage inside her house, with smashed things everywhere.

“Why?”

“Well, I don’t know why. The passage
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of daily life will create another sense of value. Unless you think that way, you cannot advance.”

I told her how brave I considered her and all of them to be, at which she remarked that for some time she had been taking lessons in playing the koto
,
a traditional stringed instrument the notes of which I have sometimes been graced to hear in Kyoto’s and Kanazawa’s secluded teahouses: slow, quiet, and (to me) melancholy notes reassembling some blurred ghost face out of the melodies of olden times. I hope never to forget how it was for me in that small chamber in Gion when the lovely old geisha Kofumi-san danced the “Black Hair Song,” to which Kawabata and Tanizaki allude in their greatest novels.
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It pleased me that Mrs. Utsumi also knew and indeed had mastered this tune, whose simple mention made her faintly smile. For a fluttering instant the two of us lived again in the Japan of March 10, 2011—the day before Ishinomaki became newsworthy.

I wondered whether she had time to play for me on her koto
,
but the instrument had been submerged in the filthy wave. Right now it was under repair. Very softly she said: “A koto is like a living thing to me, so I was very sad. We lost our dog, but when I saw the koto so dirty with mud I felt so sad. . .”

I asked her sons which possessions they themselves had been the most distressed to lose. “All!” they laughed cheerfully. Since not enough chairs remained, they stood around us inside that dark and chilly ruin with its bitter stench of dust.

And what did they all think about the reactor accident?

“I think the fact that it occurred cannot be helped,” the mother said. “I want Tepco to work hard and the vegetables to be grown again. I would like to buy the vegetables from Fukushima, but. . .”

“Do you think it will become contaminated here?”

“Yes,” she said.

“What will you do?”

“We have nowhere else to go.”

“Have you suffered any nightmares?” I asked her.

“In my case, I didn’t see the tsunami with my own eyes. I wasn’t able to return home for two days, so I didn’t experience that, but the fire, well, we could see it so vividly from our hill
²⁴
that I was almost afraid it might come to us; at three in the morning there was an announcement that the flame might come to us, so we evacuated.”

“But no nightmares?”

“No. The fire burned two days. . .”

“I cannot live in our home,” Mrs. Utsumi said later. “It’s too scary. I cannot live there again, even if we have to build a new house. . .”

Not knowing what else to say, I repeated that she was brave, and she said, “I think that if we live decently, that will give my mother-in-law peace of mind. She would not have wanted an expensive coffin for her temporary burial; she would have preferred to have the money go to her grandchildren.”

I nodded. The dust ached in my chest.

“To console my dead mother-in-law, I would like my two sons to work hard to rebuild this city.”

One saw small germinations of this stoically and at times quixotically resurgent impulse here and there in Ishinomaki; I remember a gang of workmen with white rags around their foreheads, dragging soaked tatamis out of a warehouse, needing a wheelbarrow and a man on each end, such was the water weight; and then the car rolled down past a wide hill of garbage, many men in rubber boots standing in a puddled courtyard, waiting for I know not what; but less than a month had passed since the tidal wave, so that more conspicuous than these were the antediluvian survivals: for example, the age- or diesel-blackened torus of a small shrine standing alone in the mud struck me with déjà vu, and later I remembered an image made by the great photographer Yamahata Yosuke in Nagasaki, 1945: not dissimilar to Ishinomaki, 2011, except that in the former case the wreckage around the torus appeared to be almost exclusively wooden. Moreover, a certain wheeled fragment, evidently deriving from a cart, seemed more slender than any modern counterpart, and the backdrop was all white-veined gray smoke.
²⁵

Before we returned to Sendai’s stopped Ferris wheel and rectangular dirt fields speckled with pale trash, the elder of the two boys, whose name was Yuya, said to me: “I would like to eat food from this area to help the farmers.”

“You mean, you wish to eat produce grown near the nuclear plant?”

He nodded with a calm smile.

Professor Morimoto having already gone home, they drove us to the bus station. I told them that there was no reason for them to wait for us to board our bus, but Mrs. Utsumi assured me that they had nothing better to do.

IN THE NIGHT there was a tremor at the hot spring, which became a moderate quake, and there came a swaying and a shaking as I lay on my tatami. I knew that I could do nothing but relax, being on the fifth floor. Fortunately, the room contained hardly any furniture (people sometimes told me how televisions and books could literally fly off the wall).

As the blue-white dawn glanced through the rush blinds, the dosimeter still pleasantly lodged at 2.0, the new taxi driver called to report that the road had been “broken,” so an early start would be best. The power was out again in Sendai, it seemed, and when we stopped to pick up Professor Morimoto, now on another mercy errand to a student of hers on Oshima Island, we found her shaken and discouraged. The elevator was dead, of course, so the driver and I carried her suitcases of batteries and other provisions down six flights of stairs, then we sped down the crisp road.

By now the dosimeter read 2.1. Laughing, the driver, a strong man in late middle age, remarked that he and his wife had just finished clearing up the earthquake damage from their home, and now, after the most recent tremors, their crockery lay smashed on the floor again! The railroad station at Sendai was leaking through the roof, he remarked, so it might have become unusable. Meanwhile the interpreter looked up from the newspaper to report that restrictions on the fisheries in Miyagi Prefecture might be put into place for two months, which I imagined could possibly turn into twenty or fifty years. Early plum blossoms and very occasional palm trees kept us company as we passed the straw-colored rice fields; a seagull overflew us. The radio announced that 916 households had been “powered down” by last night’s event. Here came another hour-long traffic jam, since the trains were stopped.

In time we entered the diesel-flavored ugliness of Furukawa, which the creeping of all vehicles allowed us to inspect to our hearts’ content: small banks, billboards, automobile carriers, undistinguished houses behind hedges,
pachinko
parlors surrounded by empty parking lots, car washes, a tombstone shop laid out on blacktop overlooking a dirty concrete-lined canal. We stopped at a dark convenience store so that the two women could relieve themselves but the washroom was out of order. Half an hour later, their experience repeated itself in an establishment whose dim shelves were partially bare. A single clerk received a long line of customers who appeared to be buying mostly bottled liquids. His cash register was asleep, of course. Everybody was patient. Back on the road we began to see the long crack in the asphalt, running parallel to the white line; sometimes there were fragments of pavement sticking up like bedraggled roosters’ combs. At one place, two yellow-uniformed road workers shared a long gauging-pole between them, inserting it into a fissure in the highway as if they were fascinated.

The cracks gradually grew more impressive. They were at their worst as the road slipped on and off bridges. The driver sighed and shook his head; the two women were silent. Then the highway improved again.

After a longish time we came down into Kesennuma, 172 kilometers from Fukushima Plant Number One, meeting ever larger heaps of broken lumber, then ruined buildings, mounds of metal and masonry, upturned cars. The driver groaned,
“Awh! Ehh!”

I never knew how Kesennuma used to look; all I know of the place is street after street of rainy trash, wrecked cars, burned cars, trash in puddles, trash-hills with sludgy pools between them, a bad-tasting rain (and for all I know, the most dangerous thing I did on that entire trip was to hold the interpreter’s dripping umbrella for her while she went to the washroom). Sometimes filth-darkened fibers, cables, and splinters hung down in doorways like teeth in a monster’s maw. The dirt roads had on occasion come to resemble dikes between rectangular ruin-fields
²⁶
heaped with garbage and filled to the brim with stinking water. Many houses resembled auto wrecking yards. On higher ground, where it was less watery, former neighborhoods simply looked like vandalized construction sites. And in one puddly, muddly stretch, another vermilion shrine-torus stood alone above junk and filth, just as at Ishinomaki.

Kesennuma
, they say, derives from an Ainu word meaning “bay.” Across the street from the harbor whose street sign was buckled and torn and whose power wires were having a bad hair day, the flooded parking garage smelled like the sea and rain spanked down onto the sidewalk. A gaunt cyclist in grubby gray pedaled past, his dust mask down around his neck. The milky-green-gray sea did not seem foul. The rain made the air less dusty, although possibly more radioactive; I never forgot that the dosimeter couldn’t tell the difference. After hauling Professor Morimoto’s boxes of batteries over to the ferry landing I stood gazing uphill across the concrete chunks and through the rebar, over the matchbox-crushed houses, chairs, futons; here was a house whose upper story looked virginal but whose first floor had entirely disappeared except for one wall. The rubble led my gaze up to two red roofs and somebody’s pine tree, which had been manicured into cloudlike lobes of green in traditional Japanese style.

The unevenly humming ferry bore crates of apple juice and other supplies. A long-haired adolescent boy whose shirt said HAVE A NICE YEAR 2009 was one of the many who wore dust masks; the dosimeter was steady at 2.1. A tiny girl in a pink windbreaker sat in her mother’s lap, playing with a toy pistol, laughing gleefully, reaching out uncomprehendingly at a horizon of broken ships. Lumber floated here and there, and another boat lay sunk as if by enemy aircraft. Fingers and claws of wreckage protruded from the chilly sea. After half an hour of filthy slicks, scraps of foam rubber and Styrofoam, a row of multicolored garbage-flecks, a seagull flying very low, a lost bamboo pole, and the orange prow of a ship sticking out of the water upside down like the bill of a dead porpoise, we landed at Oshima Island (165 kilometers from the reactor; population about three thousand), where Professor Morimoto’s student Murakami Takuto awaited us.

The Murakami family’s is the last tsunami story I will tell. They were of old stock, their ancestors marine soldiers who fought on the side of the Heike in that famous twelfth-century civil war, about which so much great literature has been written.
The Tale of the Heike
opens in a way not devoid of reference to the events of this essay: “The bell of the Gion Temple tolls into every man’s house to warn him that all is vanity and evanescence. The faded flowers of the sala trees by the Buddha’s deathbed bear witness to the truth that all who flourish are destined to decay.”
²⁷