Facing the Wave (7 page)

“Inside the kindergarten he found the freezer lying on its side with the door facing up. It was sleeping,” she says, getting up to pantomime how her husband opened the freezer. “Meanwhile, a friend of his who had studied with him at Daitokuji got through to some firemen and told them that there were fifty children and adults stranded on the mountain here. Incredibly, rescue workers arrived the next day. It was the children they were worried about. The helicopter hovered overhead and we were
hauled up—about ten of us at a time. It took until dark to get us all to safety.”

She sits with a thud and a laugh, drained by her own exuberance. Strips of yellow flypaper hang from the ceilings. She sees me looking at them. “Yes,” she says, “we are Buddhists, but the abbot says it’s okay to kill the flies because, with all the dead around, they could spread disease. We must protect the young from these things.”

Children are leaving for the day, being picked up by their mothers. A line of teachers stands outside in the rain holding umbrellas and waving good-bye to their young charges. They bow as the cars pull away.

SHOUNJI

Where the Naruse flows into the Kitakami River we cross a narrow bridge to the east side and follow the river toward a country temple called Shounji. Here, the river makes a wide, sensuous loop, a U-turn that heads north. Small farms and lumber mills line the narrow road. Great white egrets stalk fish in the shallows. Dredges and search boats ply the water: there are still so many missing.

Less than an hour after the 2:46 p.m. earthquake, the tsunami wave surged six miles up the river. People were standing on the levee watching when the water rushed backward. They were taking pictures, while their children were at the Ookawa Elementary School a few miles away. Farmers were working the fields or driving their produce to market. Almost all died.

“A river does not belong to this shore or that … it’s just a river flowing down,” Trungpa Rinpoche, the Tibetan Buddhist teacher, said. The river is the
bardo. Bar
means “between”;
do
means “tower,” or “island in a river.” Together, the words mean
“the space between,” and refer to every present moment. We could be breathing, or between breaths; we may be treading water between life and death, or tumbling in the dirty surge, gulping salt, to stand on firm ground.

Today the river is wide, flat, blue. The road passes farmhouses with central courtyards, thatched roofs, and large vegetable plots. We stop to ask the way. A tiny, elderly woman emerges from her field with a basket full of green onions and eggplant slung over her arm. She wears the traditional cotton scarf, pantaloons, and rain boots, and her gray hair is pulled back tight. We ask where the temple Shounji might be found. “Up the road,” she answers in a soft, measured voice. “But not as far as the one that washed away.”

We follow the river road north. Earlier on today’s journey, I read a poem by Bashō that used the “cutting word”
ya
, which separates, yet joins, expressions of before and after. It signals something struggling, something coming into being or else leaving what it once was. It is a river word, a word that warns of impending movement, change, and flux, and helps to describe the Buddhist concept of
bardo
.

My friend Tenku Ruff, a Buddhist nun who came to Japan to help survivors, agreed to meet me at Shounji, where another nun, Fukan-san, lives. As we pull up to the temple, Tenku runs down stone steps, black robes flying, to greet me. An American, she speaks Japanese with a soft Florida accent. Her features are sensuous, her face beautiful; her head is shaved. She was ordained in Japan along with Fukan-san, after training at a monastery in Nagoya.

We follow her up the steps to the temple courtyard. An exquisite S-shaped pine tree stands in the center, so old and heavy its bows are supported by vertical sticks—bones braced by crutches. Past the abbot’s living quarters, we ascend another set of stairs to the temple. Fukan-san stands at the entrance and bows.

Flickering candles illuminate framed photographs and the vessels that hold the ashes of the recently dead: they are mothers and fathers, farmers and workers, and many children. We bow, light incense, and breathe in their suffering.

Shoes back on, we cross the courtyard to the abbot’s living quarters. Shoes off, we step up. In another room the television is on: he’s watching the evening news. We’re asked to sit and wait. Finally he emerges.

The abbot’s entry is quiet. Slender and tall, with a kind face, he sits with impeccable posture. “I have three daughters,” he says. “I put them through school, and they haven’t been back since!” Laughter. “Then my niece, Fukan-san, came visiting and said she wanted to become a nun. I thought she was joking, so I told her to shave her head. Right then and there. And she did. That meant she was serious, so I sent her to the monastery in Nagoya.

“It takes five very hard years of practice, study, and training to become a Buddhist nun. Fukan-san graduated three days after the tsunami. I was so sorry that I couldn’t get there. I’m eighty years old and I need someone to take over the temple. I asked her if she would do it and she said, ‘Of course!’ ” He looks at her with an impish smile. “So I’ve adopted her as my daughter.

“One of the founding fathers of Soto Zen came from China and that priest’s ancestors built this temple 530 years ago. I’m the thirty-second abbot. I hope Fukan-san will be the thirty-third.”

The abbot’s wife joins us. Green tea is poured. There’s a long silence, then he speaks: “No one expected the tsunami wave to come up here on the river. People were standing on the levee watching, not realizing they were in danger. They were swept away, along with most of the children from the school up the road at Ookawa. Many years ago, I went to that same school.

“There were two waves. One was two meters high. It receded and came back as a three-meter wave, a big tsunami wave. The bottom of the river showed. This has never happened before.
The temple up the road, Kannonji, was washed away. It lost all the headstones from the graves. Rice fields were swept clean. No one wants to live in that village now.”

He recalls that after the tsunami, it began snowing hard. An eighty-nine-year-old woman showed up at the door. She was soaking wet and shivering. The abbot’s wife warmed her and gave her dry clothes. “Earlier, when the earthquake happened, I was only concerned that the statue of the Buddha would fall. Then I realized the tsunami was serious and our whole world had changed. My temple became an unofficial evacuation center and a morgue.”

He remembers the Ogachi Bridge collapsing. No one could get out. The commuter train stopped on the tracks and hasn’t moved since. “Water came so far in, it was as if the ocean was right here. There was no river, just water stretching across everything,” he says, holding his hand to his heart.

Tenku tells of the priest and his wife who went to the second floor of their temple as water approached. “The whole building lifted off its foundations and started floating. It swung near the mountain. They ran out onto the veranda and when the temple floated close enough, they jumped off onto the steep slope and grabbed onto tree branches. From there they watched their beloved temple collapse.”

The abbot continues: “After the tsunami water came up this river, we had seventy or eighty people staying here. It’s a small country temple and it became too crowded. We had nothing to eat for three days. I sent them to an elderly lady’s farm down the road to get some vegetables, and they did, and came back. On the sixth day volunteers came with food and supplies.

One hundred people died who lived near the temple up the road. It’s only a roof and a frame now. Then the most extraordinary thing happened: survivors began dragging the dead out of the river and bringing them up the road to us. Some were carried over men’s shoulders, others were put in wheelbarrows,
or in the back of small trucks. The dead kept arriving. Corpses filled our temple courtyard. They were lying all the way around the center pine tree.”

The abbot recalls how the faces of the dead were covered with cuts. The Wave had knocked them around. “They were unlucky,” he says. “I felt so sorry for them. Eight adults right here on this little road died, then twelve more were found. Twenty are still missing.”

The abbot and Fukan-san took turns performing funeral ceremonies. At the first one, the young nun said there were forty bodies and forty hastily made coffins because the crematorium had been washed away. Just out of monastery, she wasn’t sure she could do it. “I opened my mouth and a chant came out. I got to the end without faltering.”

When she had to give the dedication and say a few words, she says, “All I could think of to say was, ‘Return to the sea.’ Later, I called my teacher at the monastery and asked her about it. She told me the words didn’t matter as much as the way the heart was speaking.”

The abbot: “We had ceremonies here for the dead, even when there were no bodies. Two families in our
sangha
are missing four family members. Only one has been found. But there are still seven missing. Another neighbor never found his family at all. He read in the newspaper that they had died.”

The police told the residents to leave the bodies as they found them, as if the river was a crime scene, but the survivors ignored the order and kept searching, and digging, and carrying the dead to Shounji. Funeral services continued. A man who once taught at the Ookawa Elementary School returned to help and still walks the river.

“But the most courageous of them all,” the abbot says, “is a young woman who was on pregnancy leave. She had her baby just before the earthquake. But her older daughter, a sixth grader at the Ookawa School, was washed away and hasn’t yet been
found, so Naomi, the mother, got a license to drive a backhoe. Now she digs for the missing every day. Not only for her own daughter, but for the children of other survivors. So far she hasn’t found anyone, but she won’t give up,” the abbot says, holding his hand against his heart.

The abbot looks tired so we stand to leave. I ask about Kannonji, the temple up the road. He says all that’s left of it is the huge bell, the
bonsho
, traditionally hit with a large stick. I suggest they bring it to Shounji and ring it at New Year’s to commemorate the dead and those who survived. He says, “Good idea!” His wife agrees. The mood brightens.

The gentle abbot smiles, then frowns: “But if they rebuild Kannonji, we’ll have to take it back.” I suggest jokingly that they put wheels on it and have the monks push it back and forth. Fukan-san looks at me: “But I’m the only monk!” Laughter. I tell her I’ll come and help push. It’ll be good Buddhist practice, I say.

* * *

* * *

It’s what I call “pure bardo.” Neuroscientists have named it the “wave of death,” referring to a strong wave-shaped signal in the brain that continues after death, after the oxygen supply has been cut off, pressing scientists to ask, When does life end? It represents what Anton Coenen, a science writer, called “the ultimate border between life and death, a massive signature, an eerie shudder of activity that goes beyond the end of breathing.”

Hard rain begins and crustal instabilities cause the ocean bed to keep moving. Sea foam clobbers city’s edge and young waves shoulder Honshu’s fractured spine. Two more shakes before dawn, one with a distant tsunami-warning siren. For the very old it must be reminiscent of the Second World War, when Sendai was obliterated and news came of the mysterious A-bomb, twice dropped. In the
Mainichi News
, a woman tells a reporter that she’s lost houses twice: once in Nagasaki and again after the tsunami.

Before rain stops, what feels like a mask drops off. Not the face masks we’ve been wearing to protect ourselves from toxic dust, or the elegant ones I once watched being carved for the Noh Theatre thirty years ago, but the hardened exterior we present to the world, made with a rough skin.

One small boy said, “I feel one way when people are watching, but I’m another person when I’m alone, without my mother or father.” Another young boy who watched both his parents drown has not spoken a word since the tsunami.

I sit up in the dark. Too often we do not relate directly to
experience. The mask, the scarf around the neck, the tall boots. The mask is brittle. I tear at it and a few pieces fall. Maybe we don’t have to take it all the way off, maybe it’s enough to let rainwater loosen it, to glimpse the possibility of nakedness. The mask slides, sticks, slides again. I cry for only the second time since coming here. Tears roll and the whole carapace crumbles. It’s not so much a question of giving it up; as Trungpa Rinpoche said, “The mask begins to give you up because it has no function for you anymore.”

Lying down, my rib cage floats. It rises to the ceiling and hangs there. From it dangle wrists, knuckles, and knees—the bones as light as toys. Rain comes hard and morning light is washed black as if the tsunami’s shadow-wave had inked the air and gone back to scrape darkness from stone.

The “handover” from Masumi and her family to my new driver and interpreter took place at Sendai Eki, the huge railway station at city center. Nikki is twenty-six, half New Zealander and half Japanese. Worldly and bright, she wears a denim wristband with the words: “I ain’t gonna be your bitch.” The driver, a forty-eight-year-old long-hair from Kesennuma, has the unlikely nickname of “Abyss.” Perfect, I think, and smile, wondering if the nickname refers to the “abyssal plain” of the Japan ocean trench, or just the “abyss” of the tsunami.