Facing the Wave (12 page)

A man in an out-of-town car drives down to the inlet and heaves a plastic bag of garbage into the sea, then drives away. A hawk
dives, pecks open the bag, and eats the flotsam, followed by a huge flock of seagulls.

We walk back to the
minshuku
to say good-bye. The little girl greets us, still pulling her pink suitcase as if ready to evacuate. That’s one of the new words she’s just learned, along with three others. Her mother asks her to recite them. The girl lifts her face, smiles, and enunciates slowly (in Japanese): “Tsunami, refugee, rebuilding.”

We twist down out of Oshika Honto’s high mountains at sunset past villages that have been destroyed, though their hillside graveyards are still standing. “Only the dead survived,” I say. A Japanese bush warbler flies in front of the van so close to the windshield, we almost hit it. There are shrines all over Japan where you can ask forgiveness for the inadvertent deaths you have caused: stepping on a bug or hitting a bird with a car. Who will do penance for the subduction zone, for the earth’s crust, for the Wave?

More warblers zoom by. On the other side of the road, a woman plucks rice seedlings out of a basket on her back and punches them into a flooded field. As we come into the ruined town of Ishinomaki, there’s an acrid smell. “Put the windows up quickly,” Abyss-san says. We are passing a crematorium, and the ash of burning bodies is sifting in.

On the way north we stop to see Satoshi-san, the geisha’s architect-nephew. Fiftyish, strong-jawed, and handsome, he lives with his Aunt Ito-san, because he is unmarried. He was at work when the earthquake hit. “We were making a final check on an apartment building that had just been completed. I saw a debris pile coming in our direction and smoke, and wooden houses being crushed, so I told the workers to go to a safe area. The toll road nearby was stopped with traffic, and I had to go around the long way.

“By the time I got to an evacuation center, the water hadn’t receded, so I stayed there. I didn’t know if Ito-san had survived or what had happened to our town. There were no blankets. One
propane stove was on and we all put our feet toward it. They gave us newspapers to put over our shoulders. In the night more people came. They were from the town of Kirikiri. Everyone began exchanging stories. We heard that downtown Kamaishi was gone and the whole town of Otsuchi was on fire.”

The next morning it took Satoshi-san more than an hour to walk to his aunt’s house. When he saw that it had been destroyed, he walked to a nearby school to get something to eat. “That’s when I found her, and I’ve been here ever since,” he said.

After applying to the lottery for a temporary housing unit, Satoshi-san recently found out that he and Ito-san can soon move in. “There are two bedrooms, a kitchen, and a bathroom,” he says. “We may be in temporary housing for two or three years.”

The week before the tsunami he had handed in his resignation at his construction company. They’d asked him to stay on for another month, which he did; then the whole office washed away in the tsunami. He says he isn’t going back. “I’m thinking of setting up a small office of my own somewhere. I’d like to help people who want to rebuild. Every person is different, with different-shaped bodies, and every house should be shaped differently. But in the meantime, the government will have to build more houses. This takes time and the longer it takes, the more people will leave and move far away, and our town will die.

“We’ll make do for now. There have been many sorrows. We had a mutual friend who was lost in the waves. My aunt was heartbroken. Three days before the
jishin
, she came to visit and brought sweet sake. They didn’t know it then, but they were having a drink together for the last time.”

In the morning I’m “handed back” to Masumi and her family in Sendai.

* * *

* * *

In the seventeenth century a twelve-panel folding screen called “The Waves at Matsushima,” painted in ink, powdered color, gold, and silver on thick paper by Tawaraya Sotatsu, shows rows of combers rolling toward shore in seeming unison, parting for each pine-studded island. Under the panel, I read this poem:

Masumi and I are on the morning ferry from Shiogama to Katsura Island plowing through floating debris and blue sparkle. Ahead are islands and islets of red pine and rock, with tiny coves and narrow beaches, as if they had been torn from the mainland, and are now the last remnants of earlier tsunamis.

Looking back, I can see the towns of Shichigahama, Shiogama, Higashi-Matsushima, Nobiru, and Ishinomaki that once lit this sensuous arc of land and are now, for the most part, razed.

We slide by half-ruined shipbuilding factories. A Japanese Navy ship that was used in rescue operations after the tsunami is tied up at a pier. A man explains that the outer islands helped block the inner ones from the Wave. The tiny islets we pass in
the middle of the channel are green dots with huge scars where half their mass was removed by roaring water.

Gulls follow the boat and snatch shrimp snacks from children’s hands. Fishermen are cleaning debris from the ocean’s surface and hauling it in small barges behind their trawlers. One island was home to the lighthouse that showed sailors the way into port. The Wave washed over it and its light no longer shines.

When Matsuo Bashō came to explore Matsushima, he was astonished by its beauty. In
Oku No Hosomichi
, he wrote: “I would like to say that here is the most beautiful spot in the whole country of Japan … Tall islands point to the sky and level ones prostrate themselves before surges of water. Islands are piled above islands, and islands are joined to islands …”

I snap a picture from the ferry railing. The wind picks up and current lines divide the sea surface into pale blue and ink blue crenulations. Towns recede—they are dark—and the islands ahead are wave-drenched. The farther out we go the more wind-bent the trees. The ferry slows to avoid floating debris; a fishing boat rescues an upside-down skiff with a hole in its hull.

Bashō had a keen eye for unexpected beauty at the moment of destruction. If he’d been here he would have seen islands breaking, fires lighting harbors, snow flying past red pines, humans and houses vanishing in a wave-riddled sea. We turn north and the channel narrows. Ahead, in bright sun, the flower-lined paths of Katsura Island come into view.

The island is shaped like the leg of a chicken, narrowing from thigh to toe. Near the dock fishermen mend oyster beds with long bamboo poles. We disembark. A hand-painted sign shows Bashō’s trail. Near the top of a steep hill ravens call out and mosquitoes swarm and bite. We enter a hilltop
jinja
built in 1627 surrounded by a dark cedar forest, and continue on, following the path down the other side. We end up marching right into the middle of someone’s garden.

“
Sumimasen
, we are lost,” we say to a spry older woman picking vegetables. She waves her hand and says we are welcome to come through. “The tsunami stopped just below our house,” she says, resting her hands on the handle of her hoe.

“
Tsunami-wa
. It was taller than that big pine tree,” she says, pointing. “The tree next to it was swept toward our house … It was snowing that day, and it was hard to see, but I heard a deep rushing noise. The ocean was dirty and kept getting higher.”

She accompanies us down the narrow lane. “The water came to here,” she says, pointing to a terraced garden just below her house. There’s a line of rosebushes in bloom. I ask how this is possible. She says, “The water came in over the beach, and over these flowers, and went out very fast. Not enough time to kill them.”

Below this point every house is in ruins. A man walks across the inundated rice field from another hilltop shrine, wiping his eyes. The woman looks at him. “A few people died here, but most survived. We are isolated so we always have food, and there’s a spring with a tap, so after the tsunami we could get water.” But the seaweed factory over the hill where she’d worked all her life is in ruins. “I’d just retired. I’m seventy, so now we just grow our food and live.”

A bird cries. She looks up: “That’s a
kiji
, a pheasant. They let us know when an earthquake is coming. They crouch down and press their chests and stomachs to the ground; they can feel it coming. If we see them do this, we know.”

At the island school, now an evacuation center for those who lost their houses, we’re met by a young Japanese man wearing a Yankees jersey, number 55, Hideki Matsui’s number. He comes forward with his hand extended and says hi in Brooklyn-accented English. “I’m Japanese but I went to boarding school in Connecticut, and lived in New York. I produce hip-hop.”

He has gathered a motley crew of Japanese musicians from
all over Japan to volunteer in Tohoku. A hefty guy with a long ponytail sits splay-legged under an umbrella and smokes one cigarette after another. He says he’s a singer from Kyoto. Two others, barefoot and wearing bright headbands, practice aikido on the lawn.

“We’re just musicians who decided to help. This is our statement to the world,” the producer says. “Natural disasters can’t be stopped, but radiation can. We can say NO to nuclear power. I hope people in this civilization will think harder about where they’re going. We are dying from this. We’re gathering data about the children of Fukushima, creating a data bank for the future.”

A musician from Fukushima City who volunteered to be the cook throws a bowl of yakisoba on the outdoor grill, adds shoyu and cabbage, and bends an ear to listen to it sizzle.

“I believe in the power of music,” the young producer says. “We all share the world through it, we all have music inside us. Humans can be a loving animal. This is what the whole world should do—get together and help each other in times like this. We need to face the way of our living, how it has separated us, how it has destroyed the world.

“We’ve gotten money mostly from America,” the producer says. “The Americans always help. Not the Japanese. We organized medical supplies from Direct Relief in Santa Barbara, California, and money from SoftBank in Taiwan.” When his cell phone rings, he excuses himself with the aplomb of a strangely dressed CEO.

The singer whispers: “His label is called ‘Future Shock.’ Pretty cool, huh? Perfect name for all this!” he says, gesturing to the razed coast behind the hill.

Utsumi Kumezo hangs his head out the window of the school and asks if we want a beer. A handsome man in his seventies, he’s serious and playful at once. The sun is very hot, almost
100 degrees Fahrenheit, so we gladly go inside. He’s chatty and gregarious, at home in his island world, a widower who lost his wife thirty years ago.

“On March 11 I felt something different. I’ve never felt an earthquake that strong. I knew immediately that the tsunami was coming. So I got the island’s fire truck and drove it around to warn everyone. The fishermen went behind me in small trucks, picking people up to take them up the hill. We evacuated everyone to the top of the island. We spent one night up there. The snow made it hard to see the wave. But the next day—it was beyond our understanding. The wave came from the same direction three times. Each time it was higher. It was more than fifteen meters high.”

I ask him why he thinks this happened. He tells me that the
kamisama
didn’t do this. “It’s just the natural way of things. So we can’t get angry at anyone. It’s just
shizen
—nature. We can’t go against nature because we won’t win. We must accept what is and just follow it. Nature flows wherever it wants to go.

“I don’t have much time left, so I want to do something right now for this island. I thought we needed to do something good, so we’re planting cherry trees at people’s houses and sunflowers along the lanes. This island is a beautiful place. We all know each other. The flowers are the first step in rebuilding our lives. The flowers are important: a small gesture, but a symbol of being alive.”

Sodden skies and a slight chop on the water of Matsushima Bay. Today the ferry is taking Masumi and me to a small outer island. One islet is a house-sized boulder with a red pine growing out of a crack. We pass small fishing boats heaped with debris rather than fish. Because most ice factories are still inoperable, the government is paying fishermen to clean up the seas.

After several stops we arrive. Except for three women mending fishing nets, the island is deserted. I ask a man with a small boat if he’ll take us around. His name is Mori. A brightly polished brass key hung around his neck falls forward as he leans down to start the engine. I ask what it’s for, and he says, “My new temporary house.”

Mori is shy, sixtyish. An orphan, he was adopted by an islander here. “It’s funny. Now I have a home and I’m ferrying orphans and refugees. That makes us all the same,” he says with a faint smile.

When the earthquake hit his boat swung back and forth, from side to side in the water. “I couldn’t drive it at all!” he tells us. “Finally I came back here, tied up, and ran up the hill just as the tsunami came.”

Mori was lucky. Tucked in behind a hill, his twenty-five-foot fishing boat was protected from the Wave. “All the boats parked on the far side of the island were safe. The island cut the tsunami wave in half. Most of it went to the other side of the anchorage.”

He looks toward the open ocean: “I heard the noise. Like something breaking. A horrible sound. I saw boards, whole
houses, and boats being smashed and washed around. I can still hear it, and see the snow and the broken houses washed together with the ones coming in from other islands. It was awful …” But he smiles.