Authors: Gretel Ehrlich
The euphoria of survival evident in June is now tinged with despair. A futureless future looms. The exact way to live with grief and resurrect one’s life and livelihood is in no way clear. No one who lost a house is being allowed to rebuild in the tsunami zone. Instead, they live in temporary housing and plant winter vegetable crops; a few try to remake their homes out of rubble. The ruined coast spins out black haze. Crematoriums
have been rebuilt and the dead are sent to the fires, their ashes set under polished granite gravestones, as if something of them might stay.
Sputtering rain and
shuushi
—a word whose two characters represent “fall” and “thought,” meaning the lonely feeling of autumn—that’s what it’s like today. My September Hana Fuda card features
kiku
—chrysanthemum—a flower used for funerals. Outside the Sendai grocery store where we stop to buy peanuts and beer, a pony stands in a small enclosure munching hay. A lone child steps forward, extends his hand toward the soft muzzle. To touch the living; to ingest the smell of horse and hay.
Oceans are depicted in ancient paintings in mesmerizing continuums of moving water, and it’s no wonder why. Major earthquakes and tsunamis have occurred in Tohoku for so long, its ground-shakes and waves are a kind of geo-religious ritual. There was the huge tsunami of 1869, one in 1933 that destroyed Kamaishi Bay, and quakes in 1968, 1978, 2005, and 2008. I’m trying to see the lonely beauty in this wreckage, the frozen moment of its undulating rubble, itself a kind of wave.
The unshackled, the undecorated, the rusting, the collapsed, the disentangled, and the bent—it’s all here—an alphabet to make a double soup: one, a dark broth of the dead, and the other, swirled on top, a foamy stream of space and beauty.
Today the ocean sparkles, its waves coming in small lopsided loops, and the Kitakami River, where so many died, is dotted with white egrets hunting for fish in the reeds.
Far from this coast a massive mat of Tohoku debris is crossing the Pacific Ocean, replete with secret tsunami stowaways: Pallas’s rosefinch,
Carpodacus rosen
, native to China, Japan, and the Korean peninsula. They are using the flotilla to migrate to other islands. It’s thought that the precursors of the Hawaiian I’iwi, the scarlet honeycreeper, arrived on Maui and Nihau this
way some 5.7 million years ago, and diverged into more new species once Oahu emerged from the sea.
The debris island was discovered by a Russian sailing ship, the
STS Pallada
, whose captain reported that it took seven days to sail through the streaming wreckage, reckoned to weigh between five and twenty million tons. At this writing, Midway Island and Hawaii are behind it, and Alaska, British Columbia, and Washington are ahead. Of the two hundred thousand buildings that were destroyed in northeastern Japan, some remnants, including furniture, house beams, a television, and oyster buoys, a whole house, several pairs of severed feet still encased in running shoes, and a fishing boat with the name “Fukushima” written on the bow, are drifting, seeking a new home.
Masumi and I drive north to Ishinomaki. We’re on our way back to Shounji to visit the abbot and Fukan-san. Inland from the coast, rice harvest has begun, late because fields had to be tested for radiation. If left husked, rice stays fresh longer, so villagers buy it that way, and take small bundles as needed to the local farm store to get it hulled for 100 yen, a little more than a dollar.
The road parallels the Naruse River near where Masumi’s other uncle lives. “As soon as the earthquake came he and his wife packed the car and drove to the top of the nearest hill,” she says. “It was snowing and they couldn’t see the wave. He simply told his wife to keep checking the snow as they were driving, that if it turned black, it meant that the water had reached them, that there was water under the wheels. They made it to a high spot and wrapped themselves in blankets in the car. There was a knock on the window. The people who lived at the very top saw them and took my uncle and aunt into their house.”
Masumi recalls that when she entered an evacuation center looking for them, it was in chaos: “Women were screaming and crying. They had just found their loved ones, or had just lost them. I asked where we might find my uncle—he works in the medical clinic and people know him. One old woman said, ‘Please, you mustn’t have hope for him.’ As I walked out of the center, I heard a woman crying, ‘I tried and tried, but I couldn’t hold his hand any longer and he disappeared.’ ”
Masumi found her uncle’s name on the survivors’ list but still couldn’t locate him. “I went back several times. For one week
there was no contact between us. He didn’t even know that the family house where he grew up had washed away.”
We pass the huge Red Cross Hospital. “The smaller clinics and hospitals close to the coast were destroyed, so everyone was moved here. Very quickly they ran out of clean sheets and medicines. I found my uncle there. His own clinic had been ruined, so right away he came to this hospital to help.”
We roll past rice farms, uncut blond stalks bending in the wind, and follow a long river from its mountain fastness to the water-gutted houses that are still standing, and to the ones that are not. Where the corner of a bed juts out an empty window, two crows sit on the sill.
A rumor is floating around Japan that another earthquake will come soon. A journalist in Tokyo told me he’d heard it too, but can’t find the source. “It comes from the Internet,” Masumi says. “A woman from Iwate Prefecture writes a blog. She’s a
kamisama
. You know, an
uranaishi
—a fortune-teller. I check her blog every day. There’s a big
jishin
predicted for September 26. As big or bigger than the 9.0.” She looks at me with an odd grin: “You’ll still be here for it,” she says. Laughter.
Typhoon clouds amass in the south like a black hedge, but here, it’s achingly hot and humid, as if the blanket of heat was trying to suppress oxygen. Near the coast a sour wind bends tall grass until its feathery tops flatten on the ground. The shore is marked by jackknifed pines.
“Earthquakes happen when Mars is on the move,” Masumi says. “Two weeks ago there was a 6.8 at 2:43 p.m.—almost exact same time as the big one.” Not far from Shounji Temple, the river appears and turns, and we follow its blue trail. Seagulls bob, two men stand on the high levee fishing. “Fishing!” Masumi screeches. She’s incensed. “How could they? The river is full of the dead!”
We look for the young woman the abbot told us about: the one who digs for her lost child with a backhoe and searches tirelessly
for the missing children from Ookawa Elementary School. We scan the river but see no one. On the other side of the road farmers stake their flowers and vegetables, bracing for the oncoming storm.
At the fork that leads to the temple, I ask Masumi to stop the car so we can climb the levee. I want to see this river where the dead were pulled by grieving relatives out of the mud. She looks agitated, but says nothing. I climb the steep bank and she follows me. The sun is hot, the river is wide, the water is aquamarine. Great white egrets land in trees and preen; ducks swim in and out of reeds. A lone fisherman walks upstream carrying his pole.
On the far shore, dredges are anchored near a road. Naomi, the backhoe woman, is nowhere to be seen. It’s an earthen levee, flat on top. Instead of the ash of a charnel ground that I’d expected to find, there’s only green grass waving.
The past situation has just occurred and the future situation has not manifested itself. In the gap between the two, the river flows. It passes through, continuously moving. The river is both time and space. I look upstream and down. Today there’s a slight chop on the water. The river is where breathing and dying do their jig.
Something startles me: Masumi is running down the steep bank to her car, swatting at her left shoulder. She opens the door and reaches in for something. I see salt flying, salt being broadcast from an upturned palm, flicked by the thumb into the air. With it she quickly anoints her head, shoulders, and back, dabbing an extra pinch onto her tongue. She gasps audibly. I run to her: “I felt something on my back,” she yowls. “I have a ghost. There’s a ghost on me now!”
I try to calm her but she becomes more fitful, holding her head and yelling: “I don’t want to be in these places. I don’t want to do this work for you!” We are early for our visit with Fukan-san,
so I suggest we roll up our windows, turn the AC on, and drive inland from the river.
Clouds swirl as the predicted typhoon begins its long journey from the Pacific Ocean northward. Here, it’s quiet. We follow a narrow valley to a pond called Fujinuma with a tucked-away village on the far eastern shore. Rice fields are still inundated from the tsunami waters, and farmhouses are swamped. We see where the Wave erased boundaries, where ponds turned into bodies of water that moved, and roads disappeared. Houses filled and floated like boats; boats were tossed into forests and hung from trees, and freshwater fish were taken out to sea.
I tell Masumi I want to see Kannonji, the temple behind Ookawa Elementary School that was washed away. She says she can’t do it and I ask her to be brave and please drive. She goes fast on the dirt expanse, not looking. We race past the open-air shrine to the lost children, past the school’s twisted ramp that leads to hollowed-out interiors, and beyond to where the forest comes down to ribbed bulldozer tracks that lead to the temple’s foundation: all that remains of Kannonji. Stay here, I’ll be back, I say to her. She locks the doors after I get out. For a moment I wonder if she’ll be there when I return.
I walk through the temple’s nonexistence, its incensed air, its secret font, its shadowed recess, to the ancient cemetery with its seven or eight headstones—those of earlier temple priests—high enough on the hill so no floodwaters have ever reached them. I walk through nothingness; no boundaries exist. I give the ghosts a pair of legs to walk on.
When I return Masumi is there, but her voice is high and hoarse. I get in the passenger seat. “If I have a ghost with me, my left eye gets smaller and the scar on the top of my eyebrow gets bigger … Can you see it?” she asks and turns to me. “Look at my eyes. Can you see that my face is different?” I tell her
I can’t really see anything. Do ghosts need to be scary? I ask. Shouldn’t we, instead, try to make them feel at home? I tell her about the ghost at the Wyoming ranch where I once lived, the sound of clomping up and down stairs at night, the shot glass of whiskey I left at the landing, and fruit and flowers. Nothing works. It’s time to go to Shounji.
* * *
Fukan-san makes tea in the corner of the temple. We sit on tatami. She says that when she arrived in early April, “there were coffins everywhere. So many of them, I couldn’t count, but maybe a hundred dead people outside, around the big tree. Some coffins didn’t have lids. It looked like a courtyard full of zombies … I’m sorry, I shouldn’t say things like that … but I was so scared. The bodies had been taken from the river and their wet clothes were in plastic bags. When I saw all this I began shaking. The situation was too awful. Some people saw neighbors’ kids hanging in trees. Other children were discovered buried in the mud, just a hand showing. People saw many things and it’s hard to erase those terrible sights from the mind.
“My uncle, the abbot, looked exhausted. He was writing the names of the dead on the sacred sticks. His room was full of them. There had been people living here at the temple in the early weeks after the tsunami, but they were gone. From then on, it was just funeral after funeral.
“After I put my things away, I thought I better go out and see what had happened to the villages. I went by bicycle. The houses I had known when I visited as a child were either washed away or broken. I saw upside-down cars in a rice field and huge trees knocked down, and a greenhouse broken to bits. People were getting whatever they could of their personal belongings, and volunteers were shoveling mud. I had only sandals on and it was hard to make my way. The asphalt was broken apart and deep
mud covered everything. Finally my bicycle came to a halt. I rode back here and soon, I was conducting funerals.”
Young and robust, Fukan-san is slated to take over the duties of the abbot, who is in bad health, when he can no longer serve the
sangha
. She leans in close and whispers: “My mother wanted me to be a hairdresser. I have a beautician’s license!” she says, grinning. “I know how to cut hair.” I look at her shaved head and break out laughing. “That life wasn’t for me, so I became a nun.” More laughter. Was that your only other choice? I ask. Laughter again.
There’s a long silence. Candlelight flickers across the photographed faces of tsunami victims. I ask how many funerals she has conducted. She says she can’t remember, there have been so many. “Hundreds died in the farming communities around here, and now we’ve merged with the Kannonji community, and we have the ashes of a hundred more.”
All afternoon mourners file past. Two young mothers bring photographs of their dead children to place on the altar. They are very matter-of-fact about it: “We finally got them framed,” they say, smiling. We look at the faces of the children and nod. The women put the photographs on the altar under the urns of ash. We light sticks of incense. They bow to Fukan-san and leave.
A family group comes in talking and laughing. Paying one’s respect to the departed is now routine. Another family, more solemn, approaches Fukan-san—the father, mother, and two children—and they prostrate before her. She remains expressionless, waits for them to rise, and returns the bow.
Others come and go while we sip tea. A few are crying. They hold hands tightly and smile. A lone woman lays a bouquet of sunflowers wrapped in newspaper near the front doors, with the blossoms facing us.
I’d thought earlier that I would want to talk to these people,
but what would the conversation be? The steady procession says it all. They are grieving; Fukan-san shares in their pain.
Fukan-san continues: “There’s a gap between the people who lost family and those who didn’t. The police kept saying don’t touch the dead, but the families knew to just act directly. The woman with the backhoe is still digging for her daughter. You can go look for her near Ookawa School, or on the river. She might be there today.