Authors: Gretel Ehrlich
Dark comes at a little past four in the afternoon. The air is crisp. They close up their shed to go home for dinner. His hands finally at rest, the father turns to me:
“In the end, it’s important to have the mental will and physical strength to keep going. There’s still so much to clean up, so much debris in the ocean that gets caught in our nets. One fisherman trolled up a bag with 10 million yen inside. He donated it to aid relief.”
I ask him if he still believes in hope. “Hope?” he says, then grins. There’s a long silence. He straightens up and looks at the sky as if making a wish. “My one hope is to build a house on a hill, on high ground.”
A gray cloud in the shape of an eyebrow cuts the gibbous moon’s oblong top. No sign of last week’s eclipse. Now I wonder if the burnt part, the first part of the moon to go black, hasn’t been lopped off and flung somewhere. The van chugs up the mountain. We pass a car-killed deer dragged to the side of the road, being eaten by hawks, then the stone gate that leads to a hidden shrine an hour’s walk up the hill. The steps are green moss; the air at −5°C is chilly; the hydrangeas by the side of the road have lost their blue.
Even unseen, the Pacific Ocean is present. It’s a double-jointed shoulder that keeps lunging at this coast, bigger, at 64.1 million square miles, than any landmass. I think of those who drowned, the horizon vanishing, the mind no longer able to track the grand and small movements of life. In their last look, what did they see? Perhaps sky was all that was left, the slate on which transience is written: cloud, rain, snow, wind, sun
… kumo, ame, yuki, kaze, taiyo
. In Japan, the words for rain change according to season and location.
“I keep working to pay my respects to those who lost their lives,” Abyss-san says again.
* * *
From the
OED: Abyss
, “the primal chaos, bowels of the earth, lower world,” from the Greek
abussos
, “bottomless.” Deep
waves in abyssal life that ripple down the sides of underwater mountains, then crest and curl in events of chaotic turbulence.
Abyss-san insists, despite his mounting pessimism about life in Japan, that his name comes from Ebisu, the God of Happiness.
They sleep in bunk beds in a tiny room—the “last geisha of Kamaishi” and her middle-aged architect nephew, Satoshisan—because there is no room for two futons on the floor. It’s a two-room “apartment,” about 550 square feet, one of hundreds grouped in barrack-like rows.
The evacuation centers, found usually in school gyms such as the one where Ito-san and Satoshi-san lived after the disaster, are now closed, and those whose houses were washed away have no choice but to move into these cramped quarters.
I bang on the outer door and call to her: “
Gomen kudasai
, Ito-san …?” No answer. I walk to the back of the apartment-barrack, but there are no doors. At the front again, I step through to the outer sliding door, remove shoes, enter the tiny space that serves as bathroom, laundry room and kitchen: “Ito-san!”
The television is on. Maybe she can’t hear me. A few feet more, and another sliding door opens. I burst in, startling her, then hold out my arms to give her a hug.
When one comes into eighty-four-year-old Tsuyako Ito’s presence, the world smooths out and gains an elegance missing elsewhere. Her lipstick is fresh and bright, her gray hair pulled back tight. Her high cheekbones are like arrows pointing toward the future. From the corner of the flat-screen TV (provided by the government in every temporary housing unit) a photograph of the empress sticks out from one side. “I share a birthday with the empress,” Ito-san says. “It’s December 23, though I’m eight years older than she is.”
The day is cold and we sit on the floor at the
kotatsu
, a low table with a heated blanket over our crossed legs. “I lost many things, but I still have the words to the song,” she says, eyes twinkling.
High up on the wall are framed photographs salvaged from her ruined house: of Satoshi-san, her nephew, who she says is down in Kyushu getting a bit of sun before starting his own architectural firm in the coming week. Another photograph is of friends at the Kamaishi restaurant where she performs, including a priest from Otsuchi who was washed away in the tsunami. There is a photograph of her performing in Tokyo, at thirty years old, with long black hair and an elaborately embroidered kimono. “I gave my good kimono away. Now I wish I still had it,” she says a bit ruefully.
“I can’t pay $5,000 for a kimono I won’t wear very much longer,” she says. “But the most important thing is to pass on the Kamaishi Hamauta before it is lost.” She looks straight at me, takes my hand, and smiles: “I’ve found someone!” she says excitedly. “I’ve given the song to her.” She hands me another photograph taken in the evacuation center where I first met her. “That’s Megumi Kimura, a geisha from Tokyo. In July, she came here and I taught her the Hamauta, the Bay Song.”
It’s unusual for geishas to stray from their local towns. Each region of Japan holds on to its own traditional acts, and they are never passed from one region to another, much less from one province to another. But the March disaster changed protocol and erased territorial boundaries. Even the emperor and empress made their way north to Kamaishi, and Megumi-san did the same. Upon reading in a newspaper that Ito-san had lost everything, the forty-nine-year-old geisha came to Kamaishi bearing a gift: a new shamisen.
Ito-san unwrapped the instrument, tuned it, and immediately played the old song for the visiting geisha. She asked Megumi-san if she would learn it and pass it on. “We had the first lesson here
in the shelter,” Ito-san said. “The people at the gym got to see a real geisha rehearsal.”
When Megumi-san returned to Tokyo she taught the Hamauta to her four apprentices. “Even though the girls aren’t from here, at least the song will be carried on,” Ito-san says. “And maybe they could come up here sometime and perform for the people here. As long as someone owns it, it can’t be stolen, or forgotten. I’m so grateful,” she says.
First the shamisen, then a kimono. “I don’t need anything else now,” she says. In August, and again in October, Ito-san took the Shinkansen to Tokyo, where she and Megumi-san performed the Hamauta together. “Not only was the white geisha there, the one you met here from Australia, but also, a geisha from Shinagawa who was actually a man!
“I hadn’t been onstage for a long time, since before the tsunami, but I wasn’t nervous,” she said, her eyes twinkling. “I just pulled on my kimono and went out there and sang.”
Last week, the owners of Saiwairou, the Kamaishi restaurant, asked her to return. They are through hosting funeral dinners. “Many of my friends were there. Almost like old times, except for those who were taken by the Wave.”
There’s a long silence, then: “Everything has to come to an end sometime,” she says. A geisha’s sense of beauty also stands for self-discipline and endurance. “I’ll keep performing the song until I’m at ‘the rice age’—eighty-eight, the last celebrated year before I reach one hundred,” she explains. “When I turn eighty-eight, I’ll step off the stage. I hope to end my life then. That gives me three more years. It’s a personal wish. There are no more geishas left in Kamaishi. In this town, the geisha tradition will end with me.”
Reiko-san lives in a village on the far side of the port, so that most of the town of Ofunato is obscured from view. She’s a friend of the American Buddhist nun Tenku Ruff, who asked that I pay a visit. As we drive the loop road it’s easy to see how the Wave entered the harbor, then pushed out, claw-like, in all directions, lapping up villages in a wide swath, almost a full circle.
Reiko-san is in temporary housing, though she can barely manage to care for herself. She is so bent over with osteoporosis, she appears to have no torso at all. When we find her, she’s perched on a bed—merely a head and legs. But her wide, sun-creased face is welcoming. She says that in eighty-six years, she’s never once left her village.
“I didn’t know my house had been washed away. They didn’t tell me. They took me to the evacuation center, making sure they didn’t pass my house so I wouldn’t see. By the time they told me, it had been torn down. I didn’t have a chance to get anything out of it. All I had was my handbag. My husband is in hospital. He’s not well, not remembering me, so there was no one to help. All I could do was put my palms together,” she says. She’s a member of the local Buddhist temple, and a monk named Yuji, from a town in the mountains, visits three times a week and helps care for her.
“I was lured here by my husband fifty years ago, after the war. We were the first generation to live in Ofunato. We had a
big house and I raised our children there. Now, they are in their sixties and their houses were washed away too.
“I never imagined it would happen in my lifetime. I’m eighty-three. Or is it eighty-six? I can’t remember. There are signs in the village that show how high the water went in the previous tsunami. I remember it came in very slowly, but this time, the water came fast. It was a huge wave facing us. Some fishermen won’t go back out to the ocean. They get seasick; they’re too scared.
“The city provides lunch for me every day. My son is wealthy. He had a big statue of the Buddha. His house was at the highest point, way up on the hill, and even that was washed away! He tells my husband that our house is gone too, but he forgets and says, ‘I want to go home.’
“I don’t want to die before my husband but it’s hard, not being able to walk. My only wish is for him to die in peace; then I can go as well.” She begins crying. I take her hand in mine; Nikki takes the other. She wipes her tears, smiles a broad smile, and passes a box of
manju
—Japanese sweets.
“He was a hard worker. He harvested scallops and cared for us. He built our home. The hardest thing is to be separated from someone who is still here. Now we are poor. We have nothing. I really don’t want to live anymore. Really, the truth is, I would like to put an end to my life soon.”
Evening. Because Abyss-san’s house has no hot water, we stop at a workman’s hotel up the hill from the devastated town of Rikuzentakata to use the public bath. In the steam, a naked middle-aged woman, one of the local workers, greets me in a loud, hoarse voice and shows me where to stow my clothes. Nikki and I sit on pink plastic stools, wash ourselves, then slide into hot water.
“The river is within us, the sea is all about us,” a line from T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Dry Salvages” begins. Radioactive water is absorbed by living tissue. We scrub dirt off, as radioactive iodine and cesium-137 soak in.
Fresh water pours from a pipe over Nikki’s shoulder.
We cannot think of a time that is oceanless
Or of an ocean not littered with wastage
Or of a future that is not liable
Like the past, to have no destination …
Ten naked women’s bodies stir around, old and young, the unbeautiful and the lithe, hands, wrists, breasts floating, minds unraveling, letting loose scraps of dreams and knife-sharp scenes of a water-flattened town. Seismic rumblings cause waves to travel across the bathwater. They bump into us, into our shoulders and cheeks like the abyssal waves that peel off underwater mountains, causing gentle crests to curl.
We drift. When the heat gets to be too much, we rise up, displacing water, as if our bodies had the kind of seismic power that could tear Earth apart. We sit on the edge cooling ourselves while Nikki tells how, when translating for London journalists from the
Telegraph
nine days after the disaster, they talked to a young boy, aged ten, who had been looking for his mother in the rubble of Rikuzentakata.
“The boy finally accepted that his mother was dead after three days, then went looking for her body at the temporary morgues, but never found her,” she tells me. “His father turned out to be the town’s mayor. When the tsunami came, Toba-san, the mayor, clung onto the roof of city hall as the third floor of the building, where the American schoolteacher, Monty Dickson, among others, thought he would be safe, was ravaged by a thirty-three-foot-high wave.
“Toba-san watched his own house torn apart by the Wave, knowing his wife was inside. But duty to the town came first, he explained: ‘I’m a human being and a father … but I had to stay at the office … a lot of my staff have been lost or have lost their families too …’ ”
Nikki tells me how the young boy’s friend ran when he saw the water coming, leaving behind his own mother, who had gone back into the house for something; how other classmates were picked up by their mothers and never seen again.
We climb out of the bath, dry ourselves with tiny towels, and put on our dirty clothes again. Abyss-san emerges from the men’s side and we rumble through the outskirts of this nonexistent town with the ghosts of its 12,449 dead, including the sixty-eight city officials, wandering legless around the moving van.
In June the survivors organized a traditional dance to commemorate those who died, held at one of the few remaining buildings, Kanogoji Temple, perched high on the hillside overlooking
the ruins. Now, debris piles exhale smoke, and the single remaining pine out of thousands of trees has gained government protection as a symbol for the destruction here, and for survival.
Nine months earlier when I first saw this town, I was stunned by the extent of destruction. Now, passing through morning and evening, stopping for gas, groceries, and a dip in the public baths, the sight is almost commonplace. Is it possible to become inured to near-total destruction?
We no longer brood over the memory of the 284 firefighters who drowned while trying to close the water gates, or the deaths at city hall, or the lack of standing buildings, or the foaming ocean with its whitecaps’ glinting brevity—not because we’ve become hardhearted, but perhaps the opposite: we’ve begun living the reality, dipping our own bodies into its toxic waters, no longer just voyeurs.
Up-mountain. The effect of the bath pushes me somewhere new. I can’t think; the apparatus of logic fails me. My mind free-falls like a building uprooted, collapsing, floating … Once we make it to Abyss-san’s house, I go to bed with all my clothes on, including hat and parka, intending to take just a short nap before dinner, and sleep until dawn.