Facing the Wave (17 page)

The last time we visited their temporary house, only Masumi’s uncle, Kazuyoshi, was there. Now, only her aunt Kayuko is home. She greets us with a smile. Lines radiate from her eyes like sprays of light. Her hair is cut short and hennaed reddish-brown; her freckled tan looks permanent. She has only one upper tooth. It twists and pushes forward, pointed like a short spear. She apologizes that Kazuyoshi isn’t around. Perhaps we don’t want to bother talking just to her, but I protest: “No, no, we’ve come to talk to
you
!”

The apartment is spacious but almost bare. Just a low table and a few cushions. Grandmother is tucked in an alcove in a hospital bed. “She arrived today,” Kayuko explains. Masumi’s mother and I pay our respects and sit down.

Kayuko fumbles with tea and hot water, eventually serving us only
sayo
—hot water—because, somehow, she is unable to get the tea made. Grandmother appears to be sleeping, but she’s not. As soon as she hears a cookie being unwrapped, she bends her hand into the shape of a horn and bellows out: “I’m hungry!”

Kayuko smiles, and informs us that she has a feeding tube and should be full.

We sip hot water from tea bowls. Kazuko gives Kayuko an apron from Fujisaki—one of Sendai’s fancy department stores. She shakes it out and holds it up high, smiling and thanking her sister-in-law. More hot water is poured: our small cups are full.

“I’m really hungry,” Grandmother calls out again.

Kayuko says: “She does that. She yells all the time. She doesn’t mean to. It’s just how she is.”

The mood changes and Kayuko speaks quietly: “We lost our house and all our machines, and everything was covered in four feet of mud, so we can’t be rice farmers anymore. Now Kazuyoshi works and I grow vegetables. Once a week I deliver them to the grocery store on my bicycle. We tried to plant at the old place, but no matter how deeply we dug in the old rice field, we still found debris. It scares me to think of what we might find. And we are afraid the tsunami will come again.

“I rented a plot from my uncle above the river. I’m growing radishes, eggplant, and arugula. But growing vegetables on someone else’s land isn’t the same. Kazuyoshi and I think of starting fresh, but we don’t know where. Anyway, there’s a rumor that there’s a ghost roaming around Idohama, near Grandma’s washed-away house. In the night you can see it. When we told Grandma about it she said she was scared. Now she says she doesn’t believe in ghosts.

“I grew up near here in a big farmer’s house. I didn’t apply for temporary housing. I want to settle down. That’s why we’re here. I don’t care that the government isn’t paying. We just need to be settled. Sometimes I’m angry at people who are trying to get more than they deserve from the government. So many suffered and need money. If I went to them and said I had six family members, I could get three houses, three televisions, three refrigerators, three air conditioners. Some people are doing that,
but I don’t like it. It’s wrong. I feel my one treasure is to help those who helped me.”

Grandma yells: “What are you eating? I’m so hungry!”

Kayuko: “The tsunami has huge power to take things from people. It’s different between those who don’t have a house and those who do. We will never be the same as they are. To be honest, I don’t know what I want or need. I don’t want to live anymore. I feel hopeless. I’m doing every day the living-things that I have to do … but … it’s not enough. We are talking about building a house. House is garbage. I’ve seen so many things turned to garbage, I don’t want a new house, because the tsunami will happen again.”

Masumi goes to her grandmother’s side. They talk in hoarse whispers. Masumi tells her that she has been fed dinner. Grandmother protests: “I’m still hungry.” Masumi unwraps a tiny piece of chocolate from her purse and puts it on Grandmother’s tongue. “Just let it melt there,” she says. Grandmother smiles and sucks the chocolate down.

Kayuko puts four more cookies by our teacups. “Ideally I’d like to have a small house with a garden plot in front, but I don’t know if that’s possible. Young people don’t understand: I have to do whatever Kazuyoshi decides. He is the head of the family. Maybe I’m too negative, but to pretend to be happy is too hard. I think Kazuyoshi feels the same way. It’s behind his happiness.”

Kayuko’s hands are big-knuckled and she holds them in the air when she’s listening or trying to say something for which she has no words. “It’s hard for me to express myself,” she says, squinting and laughing. “If Kazuyoshi was here he’d talk more—but it is good he’s not. I’ve said things that may be too negative.”

When the door opens and Kazuyoshi bursts in, Kayuko’s beautiful smile freezes. She goes silent. When she lived with the extended family she was treated in a traditional way—as a servant.
She worked the land and did household chores, but was not allowed to eat at the table with the others. Now, husband and wife sit together at the low table. She looks at him expectantly, but there are no jokes tonight, no sharing of peanuts, no opening of beer after beer. He talks of his short-term government job cleaning debris. “It’s hard. The heat goes up and down and wearing a helmet makes it hotter. The tsunami took all the trees; there is no shade.”

His eyes narrow and he rubs his stomach. The work, he says, makes him dizzy and sick to his stomach. The debris is toxic and he’s suffered several times from heat exhaustion. It’s been 90 to 100 degrees. To relax, he goes to the public bathhouse with friends, drinks beer, and eats dinner because Kayuko rarely cooks. She never learned how. She worked the land and her mother cooked the meals.

Tonight, Kazuyoshi says he only wants to sleep. Like all Tohoku survivors, he and Kayuko are internal exiles. Their traditional loyalty to family and place works for them: they know how to make do in a cooperative way, yet they have no land on which to enact their obligations. The geographical constraints of island life can further go against them: it makes it almost impossible to move away. Social and religious traditions here keep families place-bound, as if those ideas about how and where to live had been shaped by the landscape.

We stand to leave. Many bows, smiles, promises of return visits, and questions about Kazuyoshi’s Ping-Pong championship later, we find our shoes and step backwards out the door. At the last moment Kayuko thrusts a bag filled with eggplant, cucumbers, tomatoes, and green onions—vegetables she’s grown on her rented patch of ground—into Kazuko’s hands. As always, giving more than they receive.

Kazuko buys a dozen donuts and we drive to the hated temporary apartment where Great-Uncle Satoru lives. We find him sitting on the floor in a small room with pale green walls and cheap tatami, surrounded by flower catalogues opened to pages of ranunculus, tulips, narcissus, daisies, lilies, peonies, and chrysanthemums. Instead of despairing, he’s smiling. His wife brings tea. Great-Uncle Satoru picks out his favorite cream-filled donut and wipes the sides of his mouth as he eats, his appetite still voracious after months of sparse food.

When the donut is gone he looks up: “Today I was very bored, very angry at the government, so I went through my old mail because it was raining and there was nothing else to do. I opened a letter from city hall. I thought it was an announcement for another meeting about whether we could rebuild our houses or not, and do you know what the letter said?” We shook our heads no. “It said YES, we can fix up our houses and live there!”

Tears of joy flow. Great-Uncle Satoru keeps talking: “We have to understand that the area might have another tsunami, but as long as we understand the danger, the government can’t force us to move. We can stay!”

He tells us he has already called the carpenter to start work on the house, and shows us a handful of nursery catalogues: “I’ve ordered seventy kinds of flowers! Just this morning! I want to plant lots of stuff! I don’t care that flowers don’t make money. I think people coming to the house and seeing all these plants will be a little happier. At least no one will get worse by seeing them.
Maybe they will think that there aren’t so many bad people in the world after all.”

He puts his hand to his bent-in-half back: “I’ve had trouble with my back for a long time. The walking stick that I could make longer or shorter got washed away. It’s hard to walk, but planting flowers is okay because I’m bent over anyway!” he says, laughing.

The last donut is eaten, chocolate and crème dripping down the sides of his mouth while he shows us the ten varieties of tulips he’s picked out: pink fringed, pure white, yellow and black striped, and a purple so dark it’s almost black. Licking the last crumbs from his lips, he straightens up and smiles. “I want to celebrate New Year’s in my own house. The carpenter says he will try to get it rebuilt in time. Once my house is fixed there will be plenty of vegetables and the flowers will already be in bloom. There will be food and you are all welcome! Please come!”

Kazuko’s feet itch—the big toes, the bottoms, and the backs of her heels—which means there’ll be a big earthquake. Every day I’ve been here so far, there has been a tremor. But that’s not at the head of the list of worries. Instead of autumn moon-viewing, we’re ducking an oncoming typhoon.

Something has stopped breathing. There is no wind. Night touches its gray cloud-horns to our shoulders, our thick eyelids. Darkness hovers at the edge of Tohoku, then rears up and descends softly, its black wave unfolding into the hearts of erased towns.

Near morning the earthquake comes. I sleep through the first jolts, then jump, half-awake, and run into the hall. Dry words come into my mouth.
Where have they been stacking the dead?

Downstairs we stare at the morning television news. The earthquake was a magnitude 6.8. More aftershocks come up through the living room floor. The weather map shows a force 7 typhoon approaching. “They usually go around to the west coast,” Masumi says. “But this one is coming straight at us.”

Still out in the Pacific, its probable course is marked by a red line, a red thread that will pull it overland near Nara, then through Tokyo, where it is predicted to veer straight north toward the Sendai Plain.

In advance of the storm, evacuations are taking place: 103,000 from Yokohama, 6,800 from Ishinomaki, 731 from Kesennuma. Outside the approaching storm drives a cool wedge into summer’s furious heat. The sky thickens as if a bolt of gray velvet
had been dropped into the middle of the street. Feeling unwell, I go upstairs. The air currents are braided: hot and wet with cool. A strong southerly pours embalming fluid around me. I lie sweating in solitude.

I have a fever and it’s hard to keep track of what’s moving and what’s not: futon or cloud, storm or dream? My hair is wet, my head is dripping as if I’d been plunged under water; I think of Kikuchi-san who swam in tsunami waters and lived … I think of the streams of his story.

My fever spikes and drops. The heated core of the typhoon’s gyrating center shakes from the Pacific Ocean to the coast of Honshu. Deepening convective bands wrap into a ragged eye. Mist falls into sacred mountains and hides there. By evening, temperatures have dropped thirteen degrees. The eye of the storm is now twelve miles wide; winds have accelerated to 100–120 miles per hour. The stiff-fronted tuxedos of black and white clouds roar north.

Tokyo’s subways are shut down, as are the Shinkansen lines and all local trains and buses. People who can, walk home, but find they don’t know the way on foot. They’ve never seen their neighborhoods from aboveground. A tree falls onto the front seat of a taxi. Narita airport closes; highways are flooded and bridges break in half. A man is found floating on a piece of plywood going out to sea and is rescued. Winds howl through Shinjuku at 102 miles per hour. The lights go out in Shizuoka. The storm is fast-moving, an ocean of wind and rain whirling at us in round waves. Streams of the life-and-death Tohoku stories I’ve heard will get soaked again. Full immersion. On the weather news the typhoon is shown as a red propeller spinning toward Sendai.

It’s been dark for a long time. The mangled edge of the storm advances, its fringed tip like the tulips Great-Uncle Satoru
ordered. Rain started Monday; now it’s Thursday, and rain continues to fall hard. In the afternoon the typhoon hits the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, causing a closed-circuit camera to stop, raising fears that there will be another hydrogen explosion, and that contaminated water will spread. TEPCO says no damage occurred, but who can believe them?

In the mountains landslides crush houses. A nine-year-old boy and his eighty-four-year-old friend, whose hand he was holding, are swept into a river. It’s 7:30 p.m. The typhoon’s center will pass Sendai in a few hours, exactly at high tide. The areas with the most coastal subsidence have been closed to traffic: Higashi-Matsushima, Shiogama, and fourteen areas of Ishinomaki. More residents are evacuated from the temporary houses into which they just moved.

Here on the western outskirts of Sendai, the windows of the house shake. We peer out. There’s nothing to see but a glistening curtain; nothing to hear but a constant roar. Roads have become rivers, and ocean waters inundate land that has not dried since the coastal shelf changed shape, lifted, and dropped. I hear grinding: raucous winds pulverize tsunami debris into even smaller bits. The middle of the typhoon is upon us.

A tremor brings me to the edge of sleep, but it is silence that wakes me. Typhoon 16 has passed north. Behind it, the whole world is blue. A storm is inebriation, and so is a fever. Mind and weather mix. A cyclonic wind spirals inside the throat. Time loses its way. At the coast, surf plunges, collapses, spills, and surges. Foamy crests and smooth tunnels unspool. The evacuation count, including the ruined coast of Tohoku, has reached over 341,000.

I think of the typhoon as an aerial ocean—a single organism that hovers over us as if from a remembered thirst. I drink cold tea and bottled water. The weather channel’s red propeller spins toward Hokkaido.

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