The Reverend Taio Kaneta, priest and exorcist, described to me the night after the tsunami, a moment remembered with intense clarity by people all over northern Japan. His inland temple had been untouched by the water, but the earthquake had knocked out power and light across Tohoku. For the first time in a century of human development, the land was in a state of historic, virgin darkness. No illuminated windows blazed upwards to obscure the patterning of the night sky; without traffic lights, drivers stayed off the unlit streets. The stars in their constellations and the blue river of the Milky Way were vivid in a way that few inhabitants of the developed world ever see. “Before nightfall, snow fell,” Kaneta said. “All the dust of modern life was washed by it to the ground. It was sheer darkness. And it was intensely silent, because there were no cars. It was the true night sky that we hardly ever see, the sky filled with stars. Everyone who saw it talks about that sky.”
Kaneta was personally safe, and isolated by the power failure from a full understanding of what had happened. But he recognized that the world had changed. He had learned enough about the unprecedented magnitude and submarine epicenter of the earthquake to know that a tsunami must have followed. The closest stretch of coast to his temple was Shizugawa Bay, thirty miles away. His mind was filled with an image of the waters of the bay, awash with bodies. “A magnitude 9.2 earthquake,” he said. “When something that powerful occurs, the Earth moves on its axis. So many people, all over Tohoku, were looking up at the sky on that night, filled with intense feelings. And looking at the stars, I became aware of the universe, the infinite space all around and above us. I felt as if I was looking into the universe, and I was conscious of the earthquake as something that had taken place within that vast expanse of empty space. And I began to understand that this was all part of a whole. Something enormous had happened. But whatever it was, it was entirely natural; it had happened as one of the mechanisms of the universe.
“It’s engraved in my mind: the pitiless snow, and the beautiful shining, starry sky, and all those countless dead bodies drifting onto the beach. Perhaps this sounds pretentious, but I realized that when I began my work, giving support to people whose lives had been destroyed, I had to attend to the hearts of human beings and their suffering and anguish. But I also had to understand those sorrows from the cosmic perspective.”
He experienced at that time a sensation of dissolution, of boundaries disappearing. It was the enactment of a Buddhist concept: jita funi, literally “self and other: undivided”—the unity of being apprehended in different times and places by mystics of all religions. “The universe wraps everything up inside it, in the end,” Kaneta said. “Life, death, grief, anger, sorrow, joy. There was no boundary, then, between the living and the dead. There was no boundary between the selves of the living. The thoughts and feelings of everyone who was there at that moment melted into one. That was the understanding I achieved at that time, and it was what made compassion possible, and love, in something like the Christian sense.”
It was a unique, unrecoverable moment. A catastrophe had occurred. But because it was so new, was still unfolding in fact, no one could reckon its breadth and its height. In the Kitakami River, Teruo Konno was clinging to his raft. The mothers of Okawa Elementary School were listening to the reassuring broadcast on the radio, confident that they would see their children the next day. Standing beneath the stars, Kaneta glimpsed the scale and horror of what had happened, but he did so imaginatively, and in his imagination the disaster took on the lineaments of a profound spiritual truth. It would be a long time before he possessed such clarity again.
* * *
Of all the people I encountered in Tohoku, none made a stronger impression than Taio Kaneta. It was not his Buddhism that interested me the most—the fact of his being a priest often seemed incidental to who he was, no more than an interesting detail of personality. He was a natural teller of stories, a man of learning and intellectual honesty, and of rich empathy. And he had that gift of imagination that I had been seeking for myself—the paradoxical capacity to feel the tragedy on the surface of the skin, in all its cruelty and dread, but also to understand it, to observe from a position of detachment, with calm and penetration. Kaneta did not jump back from the disaster, as I always did—back on the bullet train, back to Tokyo, back to my desk on the tenth floor. He was immersed in the necessity of dealing with the corpses of the dead, although he had lost none of his own loved ones. He allowed the catastrophe to change his life, but he did not become its victim. He was strong enough to admit doubt, and confusion, and his own physical and mental weakness. It was these qualities that enabled him to console the living, and to communicate with and command the dead. But there was a mental cost for those who straddled the boundary between the two worlds. In Kaneta’s case, it would almost break him.
When the funerals were done, and after the possessing spirits had been driven out of Ono, Kaneta turned to face what the tsunami had left behind and looked for ways of making himself useful. In Buddhism, the forty-ninth day after death marks the moment when the departed soul enters the afterlife. He gathered a group of fellow priests, Shinto and Buddhist, as well as a Protestant pastor, to perform a ritual march to the town of Shizugawa, a town almost completely obliterated.
They set out in the morning from a temple inland. The Shinto priests wore their extravagant black lacquered hats; the Buddhists were red-robed and shaven-headed; the pastor had his dog collar and silver cross. The landscape through which they walked was broken and corrupt with decay. Bulldozers had cleared ways through the rubble, and piled it into looming mounds of concrete, metal, wood, and tile. The heaps had been incompletely searched; cadavers were folded inside them, unrecovered and invisible, but obvious to everyone who passed. “There were strange smells,” said Kaneta, “of dead bodies and of mud. There was so much rubble, and mementos of people’s lives still lying around on the ground. We had to take care where we stepped to avoid trampling on photographs.”
The procession of vividly dressed men moved through the ruins, holding aloft a placard bearing characters meaning “Consolation for the Spirits.” They walked for four hours. Machines were pawing at the rubble as they passed. Workers in hard hats picked at the debris and waved them gruffly away from the caterpillar tracks. The men of religion began to feel self-conscious. They began to suspect that, rather than helping, they were an unwelcome obstruction to the clean-up operation. But there were ordinary people here too, standing about with a dazed air, or picking at the rubble of their former homes. “They were looking for the bodies of their loved ones,” said Kaneta. “When they saw us marching past, they turned and bowed their heads. They were praying desperately to find their loved ones. Our hearts were so full when that happened. I had rarely been more conscious of suffering.”
As they marched, Kaneta and his group had intended to chant sutras and sing hymns. But here, among the mess and stench, their voices failed them. “The Christian pastor was trying to sing hymns,” said Kaneta. “But none of the hymns in his book seemed right. I couldn’t even say the sutra—it came out in screams and shouts.” The priests lurched uselessly through the rubble in their rich robes, croaking the scriptures, getting in the way. “And when we got to the sea,” said Kaneta, “when we saw the sea—we couldn’t face it. It was as if we couldn’t interpret what we were seeing.”
He said, “We realized that, for all that we had learned about religious ritual and language, none of it was effective in facing what we saw all around us. This destruction that we were living inside—it couldn’t be framed by the principles and theories of religion. Even as priests, we were close to the fear that people express when they say, ‘We see no God, we see no Buddha here.’ I realized then that religious language was an armor that we wore to protect ourselves, and that the only way forward was to take it off.”
* * *
Monku stood for the Japanese word “complaint” and the English word “monk,” but there was a third allusion in the name of Café de Monku, the mobile event that Kaneta organized for survivors of the wave, to offer refreshment, companionship, and counseling by stealth. “I love jazz,” he said, “and above all I love Thelonious Monk. Bebop—such brilliant, peculiar music. Loose phrasing, those dissonant sounds. It seemed to me that it reflected what people’s minds were like after the disaster—the tempo of people’s minds and hearts. It was the perfect music for the occasion.” At Café de Monku, Kaneta took off his priest’s robes—in the struggle to help the survivors of the disaster, a jazz fan was as much use as a Buddhist.
The “temporary residences” were laid out in rows on vacant land on the margins of the inland towns. Kaneta would arrive with a group of priests and helpers and set up in the community meeting room. They would brew tea and coffee, set out cakes and biscuits. The inhabitants of the metal huts would begin to arrive, most of them elderly. Kaneta would stand up and address the room, a tall, smiling, bespectacled figure, dressed in a simple indigo tunic. He would welcome everyone, introduce his helpers, and make teasing jokes. “Mr. Suzuki is here to give you a massage around the shoulders, if you want one,” he said. “Ah, what a massage! You should try it. His massage is so relaxing that you may actually find yourself slipping into the next world. But you needn’t worry if that happens—we have lots of priests on hand.”
Hot drinks would be poured, and plates of food passed around. Trays were set out with lengths of colored cord and beads of glass; the old people would sit on the floor at the low tables and string Buddhist rosaries. The priests inscribed and blessed ihai memorial tablets, for those who had lost them. There were more jokes and chuckling; but often Kaneta was to be seen sitting apart with one person or another, engaged in a private and visibly tearful conversation. Thelonious Monk would be playing.
Everyone in Japan was looking for consolation. The more time passed, the harder it became to find. After the immediate struggle for survival and the arduous weeks in the evacuation centers, the homeless were dispersed across the country in the homes of relatives, in rented accommodations, and in the grim temporary residences. But the period of acute crisis, in some ways, had been the easy part. When survivors moved out of the cramped but cheerful communal shelters to the relative privacy of the metal containers, grief and loss rose up like a second wave.
“Immediately after the tsunami, people were worried about surviving for the next hour,” said Naoya Kawakami, a Protestant pastor whom I met at Café de Monku. “Then they got to the shelters and worried about getting through the day. Things settled down, they were provided with food and something to sleep on, and they were anxious about the next fortnight. Then they were given temporary homes and their lives were secure, in a sense. They were not going to starve or freeze. But after the practical problems were resolved, the anxiety they felt was as strong as ever. It stretched ahead indefinitely into the future. It could no longer be soothed by just giving them things. The things will never be enough.”
The metal boxes were lonely and sterile after the companionable crowding of the evacuation centers, but as the years passed, they were made cozy. Flowers and ornamental cauliflowers were planted; neighbors became friends. But then permanent homes became available, and the new communities began to shrink and break up. The homes were awarded by lottery—those who won moved to new purpose-built apartments; those who lost were left behind, at least until the next allocation. “Some people lose, and keep on losing,” one of the priests told me. “They have an acute sense of abandonment. Sometimes they wake up and find that their neighbors, the winners, have disappeared without saying a word. They’re too embarrassed to go and say their goodbyes.”
Pastor Kawakami said, “In the beginning, they could talk about their anxieties, and how they could be resolved. ‘I need a rice ball for my child.’ ‘I need a cardboard box to put my possessions in.’ People have those now. But they still have their anxiety, and the anxiety that remains is too big to speak of. It comes out in anger, in the breakdown of relationships, between individuals and between groups. There is resentment, disharmony, a failure of understanding. These are people of goodwill, but they are becoming stubborn. So many people are seeing ghosts these days, and it’s because of trauma. People talk of seeing ghosts, but what they’re talking about are troubles back home.”
* * *
Japanese had been dying in tsunamis as long as the Japanese islands had existed. And every tsunami had brought forth ghosts. One of them was recorded in a famous old book of Tohoku folklore called The Tales of Tono. It told the story of a man named Fukuji who survived the Sanriku tsunami of 1896, and who lived with his two surviving children in a shack on the site of the family house. One moonlit summer night, he got up to relieve himself on the beach. “This night, the fog hovered low,” the book records, “and he saw two people, a man and a woman, approaching him through the fog.” The woman was his wife. The man was another villager, who had been in love with her, until the woman’s family had chosen Fukuji as her husband.
As if in a dream, Fukuji followed the couple and called out his wife’s name. She turned to him, smiling, and said, “I am married to this man now.” Fukuji, half- or fully asleep, struggled to understand. “But don’t you love your children?” he said. The woman’s pale face became paler, and she began to weep. Fukuji, uncomprehending, looked miserably at his feet. His wife and her lover moved soundlessly out of sight. He started to follow them, and then remembered that both his wife and the man had died in the tsunami. “He stood on the road thinking until daybreak and went home in the morning,” the story ends. “It is said that he was sick for a long time after this.”
No one knew the literature and folklore of Tohoku better than Masashi Hijikata, and he understood immediately that after the disaster, hauntings would follow. “We remembered the story of Fukuji,” he said, “and we told one another that there would be many new stories like that. Personally, I don’t believe in the existence of spirits, but that’s not the point. If people say they see ghosts, then that’s fine—we can leave it at that.”
Hijikata was born in Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island, but he had come to Sendai as a university student, and had the passion of the successful immigrant for his adopted home. He ran a small publishing company whose books and journals were exclusively on Tohoku subjects. It was Hijikata who explained to me the politics of ghosts, and the opportunity, as well as the risk, they represented for the people of Tohoku.
“We realized that so many people were having experiences like this,” he said. “But there were people taking advantage of them. Trying to sell them this and that, telling them, ‘This will give you relief.’” He met a woman who had lost her son in the disaster, and who was troubled by the sense of being haunted. She went to the hospital: the doctor gave her antidepressants. She went to the temple: the priest sold her an amulet and told her to read the sutras. “But all she wanted,” Hijikata said, “was to see her son again. There are so many like her. They don’t care if they are ghosts—they want to encounter ghosts.
“Given all that, we thought we had to do something. Of course, there are some people who are experiencing trauma, and if your mental health is suffering, then you need medical treatment. Other people will rely on the power of religion, and that is their choice. What we do is to create a place where people can accept the fact that they are witnessing the supernatural. We provide an alternative for helping people through the power of literature.”
Ghosts were not only inevitable, they were something to celebrate, part of the rich culture of Tohoku. Hijikata revived a literary form that had flourished in the feudal era: the kaidan, or “weird tale.” Kaidan-kai, or “weird-tale parties,” had been a popular summer pastime, when the delicious chill imparted by ghost stories served as a form of preindustrial air-conditioning. Hijikata’s kaidan-kai were held in modern community centers and public halls. They would begin with a reading by one of his authors. Then members of the audience would share experiences of their own—students, housewives, working people, retirees. He organized kaidan-writing competitions, and published the best of them in an anthology. Among the winners was Ayane Suto, whom I met one afternoon at Hijikata’s office.
She was a calm, neat young woman, with heavy black glasses and a drooping fringe, who worked in Sendai at a care home for the disabled. The fishing port of Kesennuma, where she grew up, had been one of the towns worst hit by the tsunami. Ayane’s family home was beyond the reach of the wave, and her mother, sister, and grandparents were untouched by it. But her father, a maritime engineer, worked in an office on the town’s harbor front, and that evening he didn’t come home.
“I thought about him all the time,” Ayane said. “It was obvious something had happened. But I said to myself that he might just be injured—he might be lying in a hospital somewhere. I knew that I should prepare for the worst. But I wasn’t prepared at all.”
Ayane passed painful days in Sendai, clearing up the mess caused in her flat by the earthquake, thinking constantly about her father. Two weeks after the disaster, his body was found.
She arrived back at her family home just before his coffin was carried in. Friends and extended family had gathered, most of them casually dressed—everything black, everything formal, had been washed away. “He hadn’t drowned, as most people did,” Ayane said. “He died of a blow to the chest from some big piece of rubble. In the coffin you could only see his face through a glass window. It had been a fortnight, and I was afraid that his body might have decayed. I looked through the window. I could see that he had a few cuts, and he was pale. But it was still the face of my father.”
She wanted to touch his face for the last time. But the casket and its window had been sealed shut. On it lay a white flower, a single cut stem placed on the coffin’s wood by the undertaker. There was nothing unusual about it. But to Ayane it was extraordinary.
Ten days earlier, at the peak of her hope and despair, she had gone to a big public bathhouse to soak in the hot spring water. When she came out, she retrieved her boots from the locker, and felt an obstruction in the toe as she pulled them on. “It was a cold feeling,” she remembered. “I could feel how cold it was, even through my socks. And it felt soft, fluffy.” She reached in and removed a white flower, as fresh and flawless as if it had just been cut.
A minor mystery: How could such an object have found its way into a boot inside a locked container? It faded from her mind until that moment in front of her father’s coffin, when the same flower presented itself again. “The first time, I’d had the feeling that this might be a premonition of bad news,” Ayane said. “Dad might not be alive anymore, and this might be a sign of his death. But then I thought about it later, about the coolness of the flower, and the whiteness of the flower, and that feeling of softness against my toe. And I thought of that as the touch of my father, which I couldn’t experience when he was in his coffin.”
Ayane knew that the flower was just a flower. She didn’t believe in ghosts, or that her dead father had sent it to her as a sign—if such communication was possible, why would a loving parent express it in such obscure terms? “I think it was a coincidence,” she said, “and that I made something good of it. When people see ghosts, they are telling a story, a story that had been broken off. They dream of ghosts because then the story carries on, or comes to a conclusion. And if that brings them comfort, that’s a good thing.”
Committed to print as a kaidan, published in Hijikata’s magazine, it took on ever greater significance. “There were thousands of deaths, each of them different,” Ayane said. “Most of them have never been told. My father’s name was Tsutomu Suto. By writing about him, I share his death with others. Perhaps I save him in some way, and perhaps I save myself.”
* * *
Once the tsunami’s victims had been treated, fed, and sheltered, the struggle began to prevent an invisible secondary disaster of anxiety, depression, and suicide. A survey carried out a year after the disaster revealed that four out of ten survivors complained of sleeplessness, and one in five suffered from depression. There was a surge in alcoholism, and in stress-related conditions such as high blood pressure. It was a struggle to measure the crisis because of the difficulty in compiling accurate data—in the town of Rikuzen-Takata, for example, most of the social workers who would have carried out the surveys had drowned.
Café de Monku, so simple in form, came to seem an essential emergency measure. The good it did to the tsunami refugees was obvious from their faces. Requests were coming in from all over Tohoku; Kaneta and his priests were setting out their tea and biscuits once a week or more. But he also had a busy temple to run, and all the routine obligations of a town priest—funerals, memorial ceremonies, visits to the sick and lonely, mundane tasks of administration. To everyone who knew him, it was obvious that he was taking on too much; hesitantly, and then with greater urgency, friends and family cautioned him to rest. But his presence, as comforter, organizer, and leader, had become indispensable to so many people; there seemed to be no way to extricate himself from their need. The physical collapse that came at the end of 2013 was inevitable and overwhelming.
Painful blisters erupted on his skin. He was so exhausted that he could hardly get out of bed. For weeks he did nothing except sit in front of the television and strum on his guitar. “I don’t remember what I watched,” Kaneta said. “I watched in a stupor. I didn’t even listen to jazz. I would just play a chord on my guitar, something I liked the sound of, and then another one, and while I was doing that I would fall asleep. I was a step away from depression. I had to stop doing everything, or else.”
It was the culmination of three years of physical, psychological, and spiritual crisis, but two things served as immediate triggers. One was a series of speeches that Kaneta gave in different parts of the country about the experience of the disaster. Like Sayomi Shito’s husband, Takahiro, he traveled outside the zone of disaster in the hope of communicating to the outside world the pain and complexity of the situation there. Like Takahiro, he came away with the crushing sense of having failed to express himself or to have been understood.
The second experience was set in motion by a young woman whom I will call Rumiko Takahashi. She had telephoned Kaneta one evening in a state of incoherent distress. She talked of killing herself; she was shouting about things entering her. She too had become possessed by the spirits of the dead; she begged the priest to help her.