Facing the Wave (5 page)

Everything is black. Black water rising, dirt roads drinking it in. Row after row of narrow fishermen’s houses are bent, crushed, and battered by what must have been water-hurled fishing boats and debris. We move through murk and ink. In the spring of 1689, when the wandering poet Matsuo Bashō set off to search the far north as well as the inner regions of his mind, he lost his way and emerged from the forest at Ishinomaki. Even then, it was a thriving seaport not much to his liking. He wrote: “Hundreds of merchant ships were gathered in the bay. In the town, houses fought for space, and smoke rose continuously from the salt-kilns. I thought to myself, I never intended to come anywhere like this … We looked for lodgings for the night but were refused by everyone.” What would Bashō write now on this page of destruction?

* * *

An aftershock rattles the car windows. Though the road has been made two feet higher, it isn’t enough. At high tide water splashes against the car tires. This part of Ishinomaki moved southeast seventeen feet, and down more than two feet. All over the port, water enters and re-enters every wrecked boat, house, and living room.

Slack tide. Road becomes water. The sideways tilt of the houses tells of the Wave’s velocity. The ruins are wet; black rain squalls across the open sea. A wind-knife cuts holes. A fisherman, his back to us, pees through a broken door. A dead fish floats by.

When the tide recedes water drains from the new road as if through a boat’s scuppers. A single line of cars and trucks bumps over a rickety bridge. Next to it is the collapsed concrete bridge where the Wave drove through.

The seawall that was to protect the town is completely submerged. A tidal ripple crests the top. One young man was trapped on the roof of his house for four days. From there, he could see his mother’s dead body floating in the water below.

Rubbish—a two-hundred-foot-high wall of it—lines one side of the road, and on the other side, smashed cars are stacked three high. A paper factory is in ruins, its sawdust piles blowing. A small river is obstructed by a ship turned sideways. Water eddies across its bow and stern.

Trying to get back to the highway, we drive on a potholed road so narrow, we almost go through the front room of another ravaged house. A Buddhist priest walks knee-deep in slush among buildings that have been uprooted like trees. He bows toward a submerged shrine.

This floating world.

The Ookawa Elementary School was built in the wrong place, set in a narrow floodplain between a wide river held by a levee and an almost vertical forested hill. It’s said that after the quake the teachers stood in the playground for twenty minutes and argued about where to take the children. With less than five minutes to spare they made the wrong choice. Seventy-four children and ten of eleven teachers drowned as tsunami waters roared up the Kitakami River and flooded the valley floor. Lives could have been saved if they’d climbed the steep hill directly behind the school, if they had acted quickly. A few did and survived.

Saburo says: “When we were kids, we were self-reliant. The war made us so and the food shortages after. We thought only of how to make our own way and not have to depend on our elders. Now we pamper our children too much. They don’t know how to live without being mapped by someone else. That’s how it was for these poor schoolkids. Except for a few, they didn’t know what to do.”

At the bottom of the hill we lay flowers on the makeshift outdoor altar where a black-robed priest bows and prays. On April 28, forty-nine days after the disaster, a ceremony was held for the school’s dead and missing. One parent lost her husband and two children. A local fireman lost his daughter and son. A couple attending the ceremony was told that the remains of their child had just been found. They ran from the temple to identify her.

We stare at messages on the altar penned by parents to their missing children: “We are looking for you. We miss you all the time. Please come home.”

The levee was meant to protect the school from the river. No one expected the tsunami waves to intrude this far. The narrower the inlet, the more pressure is exerted on incoming water: this wave sped fast upriver and swept away many lives.

The school is windowless, derelict, its floors twisted, the playground deep in mud. Backhoes, front-end loaders, and cranes in the playground stack and remove debris as if to cover the tragedy that occurred here. Palms together, I take a moment to think of the young who died, their teachers, all unsuspecting that this would be their last day of life. I try to comprehend the enormity of this loss, but find I’m only angry. Why would anyone build a school in such a place? Why wouldn’t the teachers disobey the evacuation rules and take the children up the steep forested slope in back of the school? The teacher who did climb the hill and survived, later committed suicide.

We pause at the place at the top of the driveway where everyone drowned. It’s a mere bump, not even a hill, marked by a single tree. Children clutched the thick trunk but the rushing water was too strong for them.

Kazuko, ever-practical in her superstitions, had refused to go down to the playground and the temporary shrine, and watched from above. She’s from rice farmer stock, and like rural people in Miyagi and Iwate prefectures, she believes in ghosts and the divine intervention of the
kamisama
, the gods.

At the car, she pours salt into our hands. “Put it on your shoulders and head,” she commands. “To keep the ghosts away. Ghosts don’t like salt.”

In two months it will be O-Bon, when fires are kindled on mountaintops to welcome the dead. I ask where the dead children are now. “It’s a bad thing for children to die before their
parents. It’s difficult for them now. They are wandering around, waiting.”

Water bullies its way into the hearts of things. Its knife cuts loose the coiled lines we use to tie ourselves to what we know. Our familial and spiritual alignments are severed in this “no-stick,” unsecured world.

Lost. The river has no shores.

* * *

Kirisame
. Soft rain. We’re driving west, trying to settle ourselves. We are driving and stopping and walking. Up the emerald green Naruko Gorge we climb, where mountain mist, falling water, and hot-spring steam rises on either side of the car. The sights are balm to our desolation. It’s good to be away from the ocean.

Saburo wants to show me a mountain that moved during an earlier earthquake, how it skittered along a fault and toppled. We try to drive to it, but, swallowed by fog, the road to it is closed. Instead, we stop at his aunt’s farm. When we slide the outer door open, she’s so astonished to see us, she prostrates herself, pressing her head to the floor in greeting, then, sprite-like, pulls out her electric koto to play us a tune.

Those plucked notes from ancient songs stay in my head as we enter a green valley with a river tumbling through. Kazuko hums ancient
jinku
songs as waterfalls cascade down steep cliffs and steam rises. The aesthetic ideal in old Japan was perishability and desolation—
sabireru
. Simplicity led to a sense of beauty measured out in transience and absences, not a machined regularity. To zigzag or make obscure the human passage through gardens was prized; its purpose and essence, however meager,
was to suggest, rather than declare. Impermanence ruled aesthetic choices and became an indelible sensibility. On his long walking journeys, though accompanied by friends, Bashō entered loneliness and thrived there.

Below, at the coast, there is no point of view, only town after town scythed by the comings and goings of harbor waves. Up here, the road narrows, and we find Bashō’s trail and the obscure paths he trod as a homeless wanderer.

Bashō and his companion, Sora, took a small rice barge downriver; we take a modern road to the town near Mogami and the house where Bashō stayed during a storm. He wrote: “By the time we climbed the big mountain, the sun had already set. Discovering a guard’s house, we asked for a place to sleep. For three days a terrible storm raged, and we had no choice but to remain in the mountains.” They slept by the horse stalls. His poem:

It’s a big-timbered house, low, wide, and dark with twelve-mat and fifteen-mat rooms divided by sliding walls and fading gold-hued murals. The beams are thick and black with age and smoke, but the tatami and thatch are fresh.

The earthen-floor entry has two horse stalls. “I guess he didn’t like it here,” Saburo says, laughing, referring to the poem. Shoes off, we step up onto tatami. “I like to think he didn’t sleep by the horses, that my family was more hospitable to him.”

The curator greets us warmly—Saburo is still known here—and stokes the fire in the traditional open pit. He fills a black iron pot with water. After 350 years in Saburo’s family, the house was recently donated to the town as a museum. His cousin lives next door.

Tea is served by the curator. Saburo shows me a large round basket where babies are kept, called an
izume
. “I slept in this one when I was a baby and my family came to visit,” he says. Smoke from the tea-fire scares insects away. “We always had a fire, even on very hot days,” he adds. Lice, fleas, mosquitoes—Bashō mentions them often in his book of travels; I imagine the wonderful sound of horses stomping and eating hay a few feet away.

When the storm subsided that day, Bashō began walking again, first north to Hiraizumi, then southwest into the sacred Dewa Sanzen mountains where
yamabushi
(mountain ascetics), ascetic practitioners, climb ladders of swords, stand naked under freezing waterfalls, and announce the presence of the
kamisama
by blowing on enormous conch shells.

On the way there, Bashō followed a narrow cart track overhung with drooping trees, and stopped to ask a farmer the name of the
michi
on which they were traveling. The old farmer replied: “It has no name. It’s just an
oku no hosomichi
—a narrow road to the deep north.”

* * *

Sendai again. Exhausted, we eat a quick dinner at a Chinese restaurant—fried tofu with hot sauce, roast pork, spicy chicken, tea and beer—then drive home. Saburo changes his clothes, Kazuko lies on the floor, and Masumi and I take turns in the Japanese-style bath. It’s important to scrub our skin and wash our hair to rid ourselves of airborne radiation, though we are told that radiation “passes through” the skin.

Later, Saburo roams the small house in his neatly pressed pajamas. He’s lanky and good-natured, and looks healthy enough, but he’s been sick since going to a funeral in Kamaishi. The doctors say maybe it’s hepatitis A, maybe not, but they’ve ordered him to stay home and rest, an order he declines to follow.

This house is my temporary home and these three people are
my “family” in a part of Japan where little can be expected in the way of a future, where refugees may be living in temporary housing for a long time, perhaps the rest of their lives. Ephemeral as life may be, we are bound by alternating jolts of unspoken grief and fear of another nuclear explosion. As for the stabbing pain of loss all around us—I can only imagine. Yet from those emotional fissures, from rubbing one’s nose in death, a feeling of elation erupts simultaneously.

Mornings and evenings the television is on. We watch the NHK half-hour series about a family, set during World War II. After, the weather news explains each recent earthquake in detail, and since there’s a tremor almost every day, there’s lots to tell: location of the epicenter, quake depth, duration, crustal deformations, and live scenes filmed from the NHK window in Tokyo as the city rocks and rolls.

Kazuko squeezes into a ball on the floor. She’s small, with narrow shoulders and short hair, a rice farmer’s thick hands, and a quick sense of humor and delight. Out of the blue, she sits up and says: “Remember Pearl Harbor?” then giggles with her hand over her mouth. Yes indeed, I do, I say, laughing. Why?

Saburo frowns at her. “That’s impolite,” he quips, but she pays no attention.

“December 7 is my birthday!” she says, exploding in laughter, both hands covering her face.

On the television news we see legions of men in orange, red, or blue uniforms as they continue to search for the missing in Tohoku. Over 28,700 died, and there are still 4,000 whose bodies have not been found.

Early to bed. I lie on my futon with only a sheet over my thighs. It’s still so very hot and the air-conditioning has been turned off to save Japan’s diminished electricity. I’m rereading a bilingual edition of Bashō’s
Narrow Road to the Oku. Oku
means “a depth,” the deep interior of the mountains, the inward, wild part
of the mind; it is something in one’s heart that no one can touch, something well-hidden there.

Saburo told me earlier that people who harbor deep feelings are described as
oku-bukai. Oku
also alludes to the word
oku-san
—Japanese for “wife”—because during the time of the samurai, shoguns kept their wives in the back annexes, connected by covered walkways to be sure they were safe. That place was called the
okunoin
.

No matter where we are in the deepest recesses of this house, no one is safe: Fukushima is still leaking radiation.

An aftershock comes in the night, a hard, deep jolt accompanied by the almost inaudible noise of subsidence and mineral grind, as the lesser of the two tectonic plates drives under the other. Masumi cries out, then sleeps again, hypervigilant and exhausted. The quake ebbs and no tsunami siren sounds.