Facing the Wave (23 page)

As he glances at the scalloped hills, at the smooth notches where the waves burst through and rushed toward the temple, his eyelids flicker as thoughts skitter through. He turns to me. When he smiles his ears move and his teeth shine. He speaks slowly: “The tsunami isn’t important. There was no Wave.”

The ocean holds the streams of stories. The Wave came to carry them, empty them of meaning. The power of the water pulling back, baring the ocean floor, took all the loose ends, the beginnings and endings, and unraveled them, recomposing stories so they had no familiar shapes. Some were all endings with no middles; others were so shapeless there was no way to tell how they had started or if they could end.

The Wave was center and fringe at once, a totality, both destructive and beautiful. Oceans of story were taken up by it. Roof beams and window frames were whittled back into the trees from which they came. The furrowed ocean cleaved land, and knifed the wavering ribbons of each human and animal story.

Masumi writes to tell me that her great-uncle Satoru and great-aunt Satsuko have rebuilt their house and are living there. A winter vegetable and flower garden was planted again. Kazuyoshi and Kayuko have not yet decided where to rebuild, but they are growing vegetables on Grandmother’s land, though they will not be allowed to rebuild her house.

* * *

Dream: I was given a book of the names of the dead so I would be sure to spell them correctly in both Kanji and English. In return I made a book of the living and gave it back to them, of those who faced the Wave and died, of those who learned to live
.

At the end of December snow geese and hawks tumble down and inhabit rice fields. There is still this kind of bounty. My dreams continue: Nikki, Abyss-san, and I circumnavigate a standing dead cedar. We are tethered to the trunk on a loose line and spin round and round, but the harness is not so loose that we can drift away. We are alive and glad of it; we are lively despite being sad. We see how pain and joy are not opposites, but spark off each other. We can see the pain of loss and swing the other way, encountering the unexpected joy of survival.

All human lives are lonely journeys. When the moon shines on “worried water,” what Buddhists call “a sudden path” becomes clear. We don’t think, we just take it, no matter where it leads. We are fearful and fearless at the same time. The body moves, the boat lifts up and over the double wave-front, and lunges down into trough after trough. We keep going, despite the urgent desire to return to those we love, to what we know. Snow comes in fat flakes. We experience hot and cold simultaneously. Time has vanished. We can’t see.

At intervals we are terrified, angry, and bewildered. We wonder if we’ll fall through the hull of the boat or sink to the bottom of the sea. Nothing feels solid. We want to grasp at something, but it’s too late. Our hands are cold. We keep stepping into wild places.

The boat nods, lunges, and rocks from side to side; the body is pushed and pulled. Water pours in orifices, shoots through scuppers, and we know that it’s fruitless to maintain security
because “form is empty,” which means there are no walls. Even underwater our eyes have opened wide: everything is possible: the ways out and the ways in are both open doors.

For two days and two nights we rock and roll in nothingness, in no-man’s-ocean, between sets of waves. Will there be another tsunami? How can anyone know? We wait. Our former sense of time was driven by desire; now we have none, which is freedom. We aren’t even fleeing; we are completely absorbed.

Form is emptiness; emptiness is form. Nothing about those words is nihilistic. Quite the opposite. When there’s talk about emptiness—which is the same thing as form—it means “nothingness” in the sense that there are no preconceptions, no expectations, no versions of this and that, no prejudice, no bias, no denials, no delusions. Seen this way, the void includes everything.

From the boat we can see in all directions. A 360-degree view. The lonely journey is not one of solitude. It’s taken along with everyone else. We are alone but adjacent, linked, cantilevered, part of the riprap. We carry the dead and they carry us. There is solace in that, not fear.

Some fishermen took their boats out; others were totally immersed in the surging and retreating waters of the Wave. All such trips were difficult, and the experience of those hours and days can never be communicated fully. We try and no expression quite gets to the heart of it, so we become lonely all over again.

It’s been almost a year. Now “worried water” has receded and a calm ocean has taken its place. The ocean carries living fish and dead humans in a single embrace. No longer rushing back and surging forward, it jostles in place and makes its tidal rounds as usual. The tectonic plates have grown quieter. The 375-foot-long seismic rip will heal. But geologists remind us that Earth was simply “recycling” its subsiding plate into the crust,
that another massive movement will occur and the jarred seismic zone will displace another mountain of water and send it shoreward. There’s a 70 percent chance that a big one will hit Tokyo.

Along the coast road the brown watermark hits a hundred feet up, staining cedar trees brown, reminding us of what water can do, of its immense and indiscriminate power. Great white egrets flock in the trees that line the Kitakami River; an ocean breeze drives whitecaps curling back toward some azure center.

Buddhists say, “There is no ignorance and no extinction of ignorance.” The moon glides into Earth’s shadow, swims out again. Everything uncertain is striding. Snow fell on the day the disaster occurred; snow falls again today.

Kikuchi, “the Swimmer”—fisherman, Kamaishi

Yajima Masumi—interpreter, guide

Yajima Kazuko—Masumi’s mother

Yajima Saburo—Masumi’s father

Grandmother—Masumi’s grandmother, Kazuko’s mother

Otomo Kazuyoshi—Masumi’s uncle, Kazuko’s brother

Sachiko—driver, friend of Masumi

The abbot—Zenoji Temple

Mrs. Watanabe—the abbot’s wife, Ikoji Temple

Tenku Ruff—American Buddhist nun, friend of Fukan-san

Fukan-san—Buddhist nun, the abott’s niece, Shounji Temple

The abbot—Shounji Temple

Nikki Kininmonth—interpreter, guide, translator

Atsuchi Kanno, “Abyss-san”—driver, guide

Hanaoka Wakao—Greenpeace campaigner, Tokyo

Hirayama—father, fisherman, Miyako

Hirayama Masayuki—son, fisherman, Miyako

Ito Tsuyako, “Ito-san”—geisha, Kamaishi

Satoshi—nephew of Ito-san, architect

Maruki Hiroyuki—sake merchant, Kamaishi

Elizabeth Oliver—founder of ARK, animal rescuer, Sasayama

Henry Tricks—bureau chief,
The Economist
, Tokyo

Narui Mayuko—animal rescuer, Tokyo

Utsumi Kumezo—retired fisherman, Katsura Island

Mori—boatman, Matsushima Bay

Jin—shaman, photographer

Great-Uncle Satoru—Masumi’s great-uncle, Kazuko’s uncle

Great-Aunt Satsuko—Masumi’s great-aunt, Kazuko’s aunt

Otomo Kayuko—Masumi’s aunt

Pico Iyer—writer and friend, Nara

Hiroko—Pico’s wife

Reiko-san—friend of Tenku Ruff’s, Ofunato

Sakai-san—temple carpenter

The abbot—Ikoji Temple, Shichigahama

It is impossible to thank enough those in Japan who participated in the making of this book at a time so difficult and bewildering. I wish to thank Masumi and her entire family: her parents, Kazuko and Saburo; her uncle and aunt, Kazuyoshi and Kayuko; her great-uncle and great-aunt, Satoru and Satsuko; and her grandmother, for inviting me into their homes and lives, and allowing me to hear their stories.

Thanks to those who faced the Wave and all the ongoing hardships: Fukan-san, the Buddhist nun; the Abbot of Ikoji Temple and his wife; Hirayama-san and his father; Kikuchi-san, “the Swimmer”; Ito-san, the geisha, and her nephew, Satoshi-san; the sake merchant who saved her life, Hiroyuki-san. Thanks to the islanders, Kumezo-san, the hip-hop gang, and Mori. Thanks to Jin. Thanks to Reiko-san and Sakai-san, and to the fishermen who wished to remain anonymous.

Special thanks to my guide, interpreter, translator, and pal on the road, Nikki, and to “Abyss-san,” for his hospitality, his curry, his keen eye and ear, and his superb driving.

Deep thanks to the courageous rescuers of animals abandoned during the disaster, especially Elizabeth Oliver, Henry Tricks, Mayu, and everyone at Dogwood and Hisaiba.

Thanks to Shin’ya Hagio and to Sachiko, and others along the way who gave kind help.

My gratitude for dear friends: Pico Iyer and Hiroko; Leila Phillip, with whom thoughts about this book originated; my Wyoming neighbors Rita and Jamie, Thekla and Callum, and Robert Palmquist. Three bows to Buddhist monks and nuns who helped me, especially Michael Wenger and Tenku Ruff. In memory of the
early years living in the household of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, whose teachings on the bardo at the 1971 Allenspark Seminar instruct me still.

Without the love, moral support, and laughter of my companion, Neal Conan, I’d still be wandering in the bardo.

Thanks, finally, to my distinguished editor, Dan Frank, for his wisdom, generosity, and humor, and to my loyal agent, Liz Darhansoff. My writing life with them has endured for almost thirty years.

While traveling from mountain to shore on the northeast coast of Japan, I wrote several poems that appear in this book, and later, undertook my own translations of Matsuo Bashō’s poems. Any mistakes made in those renderings of his fine poems are all mine.

Gretel Ehrlich, one of the preeminent and most admired observers of the natural world, is the author of fifteen books, including
The Solace of Open Spaces, A Match to the Heart
, and
This Cold Heaven
, for which she received the PEN New England, Henry David Thoreau Award for Nature Writing. She is the recipient of an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Guggenheim
Fellowship, among many others. Her work has been widely anthologized, including in
Best Essays of the Century
. Since 1993, she has traveled many times by dogsled with subsistence Inuit hunters on the sea ice of northwestern Greenland. She lives in Wyoming.