Facing the Wave (3 page)

Masumi described her search: “I went first to find my grandmother and my uncle, Kazuyoshi, and his wife. They lived together in my grandmother’s house. I drove as far as I could to the coast, but there was so much flooding, I had to get out of the car and run. The water was knee-deep. People had gone to hillside shrines, Buddhist temples, hospitals, government buildings, and schools for safety. Some were saved, some were caught on the roads, some buildings were overtaken by the Wave. Near the Natori River, to be on the second floor wasn’t high enough. In other places you had to be on the fourth floor, if there was one. We were all looking for loved ones. People were crying, some were screaming. I kept asking for my grandmother at shelters. Sometimes, people were so grief-stricken, they couldn’t talk at all.”

Masumi made many stops. At designated evacuation centers photographs of survivors were posted on the walls. That’s how she finally found her grandmother—she saw the woman’s picture. “She was alone, without family, in an evacuation center. The earthquake knocked her wheelchair over and threw her under a heavy table. That’s what saved her, but many others around her died.”

It’s been one hundred days since the disaster and special prayers are being said for the missing and dead. Even after Buddhism merged with Shinto, old Shinto beliefs prevail in Tohoku to this day: death is an unseemly corruption; ghosts are ubiquitous and to be feared. In ancient times, houses where a death had occurred
were abandoned. But the
moya
, the “mourning house,” was miniaturized into a replica of a Shinto temple that is kept on a high ledge. Inside were small “spirit-sticks” with the names of the dead engraved on them. Earlier Masumi’s mother showed me their two shrines—the one outside in the garden, and the one on top of a closet in her bedroom.

On the way to the rice fields we drive by the Sendai Port. It is a scene of devastation. Big-name factories—Sony, Toyota, Kirin, and Shiseido—are nothing but bent frames with the insides pushed out and scattered. “The press said the Japanese weren’t looting, but they were, a little bit,” Masumi says. “We just call it gathering up what has been left behind! There were photographs of women running around the Shiseido factory grabbing expensive cosmetics—tanning cream and moisturizers, and sunblock. They were very happy to have those things. And Kirin beer … people just helped themselves. After the tsunami, everyone needed a beer!”

Parking lots jammed with workers’ cars were crushed in place; acres and acres of cars were lost. “Very Japanese,” Masumi says, looking at one such parking lot with a thousand or so ruined cars. “All so neat.” But unfixable. “We are all driving very carefully now because there are no Toyota parts.”

Slowly, through city traffic, we finally approach the coast, the woman’s voice on the GPS instructing:
“Hidari-desu … hidaridesu.”
Left. Left. Then after we’ve been driving for two hours, the GPS voice says we should stop and rest, a suggestion we ignore.

Bits of rubbish appear, flung against houses and fences. Rice fields are muddied over with standing water. Around a corner we pass schoolchildren in tidy navy blue uniforms walking home. Men and women ride bicycles, their only form of transportation. In a vacant lot, three uniformed officials are poking sticks into the mud. They no longer look for the living, only for the dead.

Traffic police stop us. They wave their batons so gracefully they might be conducting a symphony. The road ahead is twisted and a bridge in the distance is out—the entire middle section gone. On the side of the road there’s more debris: a coat, a tree branch, five metal light poles bent completely in half, the sixth one standing. The arm of an orange crane moves, piling up a stack of crushed cars. We’re motioned ahead, and as we creep along on a temporary gravel track, civilization stops. We enter a wild place of total devastation.

Don’t breathe. Don’t swallow. Stay covered. Knee boots, gloves, face masks on. I thought it would be black, this tsunami-devastated coast, with a Hokusai wave frozen in place, always arriving, always threatening. But on this June day the Pacific Ocean is flat and blue, the ruined coast is gray dust thick with crematorium ash, and there is no wave.

Yet I see aqueous corruption: the ruined, broken, bloated; the sickening to-and-fro of corpse-thickened water, and ghost-thickened air. An odd smell pervades—one that is hard to pin down. It is decomposing plants, fish, and flesh, and the mineral smell of bodies being burned; but the radiation that moves through flesh has no scent at all.

For three or four hundred years Masumi’s family has grown rice and lived in abundance and wealth, just north of where the Natori River empties into the Pacific Ocean. Once there were rice, flower, and vegetable fields here; now three feet of mud, left behind by the tsunami, is a thick skin that seals the rough corners of these fields, smoothing them, and carrying the vague shine of a midday moon.

We drive on a temporary raised roadbed toward the barren ground where Masumi’s grandmother’s capacious house once stood. When I open the car window, the noise of heavy equipment fills my ear. Mountain-building is ongoing: the flat horizon is being lifted into hills of stacked debris, a word that has come
to be a euphemism for the dead, the rotting, the wrecked, and the broken bones of what once stood.

“The Wave came over the seawall there,” Masumi says, pointing east. “The wall was useless. The Wave crossed the river and many people were swept away.” We pass a small airplane, its battered wing stuck in the mud. Boats ride waves of rice straw. An entire Shinto temple lies crushed under its own heavy roof. We pass a crematorium and stop to read a hastily hand-drawn sign instructing people to carry the bodies through the back door. “One at a time, please, because there are only two stoves working.” The wave even washed through the dead, I say to Masumi. A priest is standing where a body has just been wheeled in. He puts his palms together and bows. “They say he comes here every day to pray,” she tells me.

In the distance pine trees at the beach are jack-knifed. Some are down and broken into bits. Pieces of seawall are strewn between dead trees. Down a dirt track in what was once a neighborhood of cultivated fields and farmhouses, Masumi stops, clutching the steering wheel. Her head drops. “It’s been difficult for me to come here. I feel ghosts all around me,” she whispers.

We get out of the car. The foundation of Grandmother’s house is all that remains, but curiously, the rock garden that graces the entrance is intact. Orange and pink flowers bloom in the clefts. Toward the ocean her uncle’s rice fields are thick with mud and debris, but a single head of lettuce remains—all that’s left of the kitchen garden. I kneel down to look: the lettuce is a tiny ball of green, a miniature globe of a lost world.

Objects retrieved from the house have been carefully placed in boxes by the heavy-equipment operators—a tea cup, a rice bowl, and two bags of broken glasses. I ask Masumi why she doesn’t take these things home. “No,” she says. “I’m not next in line. That’s for my uncle or my mother to do.”

We adjust our white face masks and walk back to the car. A
small river runs in back of the house. On the other side is the damaged but standing home of her great-aunt and -uncle. “My grandmother always had a view of water, and of her brother.” Masumi says. “Now water has taken everything from her.”

We go to what’s left of a shrine on a tiny hill—a strange bump on the Sendai Plain. Water washed over it and left only two trees. One is a pine, its massive trunk broken in half; the other is smaller and more fragile, a cherry tree. The shrine is gone.

Farmers’ and fishermen’s families from this neighborhood come here every year in May to pray for their ancestors whose souls are said to live in the
ihai
—long, narrow cedar-wood sticks that bear the names of the dead written in white ink. “The
ihai
are very important to us,” Masumi says. “All the ones from here were washed away, including my grandfather’s and the ones before his—all five generations. Their
ihai
are gone.”

I turn on my heel and look the other way. Far off, a dust cloud blooms and falters. If a large earthquake came now, we’d be in trouble, but there’s only the sound of bulldozers reshaping rubble and the blowing banners of dust. The ocean’s whitecaps blink and stretch. Then a few rain squalls bump across serrated water until the wind-knife slices pink swells into corrugated fiefdoms.

“The wave washed over this hill,” Masumi tells me, “and took the shrine, took everything except this cherry tree. A month after the tsunami—in April—it started blooming. Why did it survive when nothing else did?” Cherry blossoms and death. Strange companions.

We speed away from the devastated plain to visit Masumi’s grandmother in the hospital. “When I told her how I’d found her after the earthquake, she thought she had become famous because her picture was on the wall,” Masumi says. “That’s just like her. She’s loud and talks too much and she always survives.”

The hospital is modern, bright, and clean, with wide windows, as if the traditional Japanese house had been turned inside out—everything exposed now to sun, wind, rain, and radiation. When we walk into her room she appears to be delirious. Her eyes are shut, her breathing heavy. Masumi warned me that her grandmother is sly; that sometimes she pretends to be worse off than she is.

She leans down and whispers into the old woman’s ear. “It’s me, Masumi.” Grandmother opens her eyes and doesn’t appear to comprehend. Half an hour later she says, “Who’s that
gaijin
with you?”

It’s hot in the room so I go to her, unfold my blue, made-in-China fan, and push cool air across her face. She rolls her head from side to side in the breeze. She asks: “Where are we living now? Is my house still standing?”

“No,” Masumi whispers in a broken voice. “It’s gone.”

* * *

He shakes out a bag of peanuts onto the low table between us, opens four cans of beer, and watches me drink. We sit on the floor and sweat in the midsummer night’s heat. The cold stream of liquid feels good going down. We’re at Kazuyoshi’s house. Masumi’s uncle. A farmer, his face is sun-roughened and there’s dirt in the deep grooves of his palms. Before the March 11 earthquake hit Kazuyoshi was planting his fields in rice and flowers. He smiles: “I lost everything. Now I feel better.”

He grins, drinks, pours two beers and empties more peanuts onto the table between us. Masumi, her mother, and I are in his ground-floor apartment donated by the German company BASF. In the tiny garden space outside he’s already planted tomatoes, onions, greens, lettuce, and flowers. He shows me an especially rare kind of Gerber daisy, a spiky miniature red bloom. “I grew these when courting my wife,” he tells me. “I delivered buckets-full three times a week until she consented to marry me.”

Kazuyoshi squints. Because of a car accident when he was young, he’s slightly blind in one eye. In a deep, hoarse voice he says: “Springtime, I used to get in a bad mood. No more. I don’t want to be a bother to anyone; I don’t want to be a big farmer. Just treat plants and flowers very nicely so my wife and I can survive. If others are happy eating what I grow, then I’m happy.” He finishes off a third beer.

The ground begins to shake. Kazuyoshi grabs the edge of the table but doesn’t move. Masumi and I jump to our feet. The tsunami
siren sounds. We’re only a mile from the ocean. Masumi fishes for her car keys, and I gather my notebooks. We stand, all except her uncle. He’s scared but calm, or else frozen in place. The shaking subsides.

We sit again. The mood has changed, as well as our heart rates. Kazuyoshi turns serious. He leans forward: “Do you want to hear my story?” Without waiting for an answer, he begins: “On March 11 I was making compost when the
jishin
came. I couldn’t stand up, so I sat down on the ground and waited until it stopped.”

He drove his tractor to the house and found that the stone lanterns in the garden had fallen, and inside, all the dishes and furniture had broken. He rummaged around and found his money, but when he went outside he saw cars and trucks speeding away. “It must be bad,” he thought, and grabbed his wife’s hand. They ran for the elementary school, the designated evacuation spot.

“It took a while for the tsunami to arrive. It was about 3:30 or 3:35 when it came. I saw a white splash of water, then something black. Someone screamed, ‘Tsunami!’ People were struggling to get up the stairs to the third floor. There were maybe two to three hundred people. My wife and I were the last ones there, a little late because I hadn’t really thought it would come, and sometimes she’s a little slow. Sometimes we both are …”

The water charged at them. It was moving about twenty kilometers per hour. They held hands and made it as far as the second floor, but the water flooded in and engulfed them. They were lifted up. Water came up their legs, their arms, their shoulders and necks. Water rose almost to the ceiling.

Chin, cheeks, mouth, nostrils: underwater. Kazuyoshi and his wife had to tilt their heads back just to breathe. “At times we were completely underwater, inhaling filth and getting cold very quickly. We tried everything—paddling fast and feeling for something to put our feet on. We had to concentrate hard. We had to survive.”

Four inches of air space kept them alive. Water was lapping their ears. Their heads were back, they were holding hands and treading water; they were waiting to drown. Another wave came. “This is the end of our lives,” he told his wife. “It was like being on the
Titanic
,” he says, laughing now. “But it wasn’t a movie. It was way worse. Real dying! That’s what it was!”

He pours another beer and sucks in a deep, vocalized breath as if to assure himself that there is sufficient oxygen in the room. “The wave receded and the next one didn’t come close. The water went down and we could see. The staircase to the next floor appeared, as if inviting us! We ran up to the third floor. We had survived, but when I looked out I saw that water covered everything. I saw cars, and bodies, and pine trees floating, I saw that my rice fields were gone, and the family house. The school we were in was the only place left standing. It was an island out at sea.”