Daisuke Konno was a stalwart of the judo team and captain of the sixth-grade class, but he was a gentle, softhearted boy and that day he didn’t want to go to school, either. There was barely a week to go until graduation; his mother, Hitomi, pushed him out of the door. It was a cold morning in the unreliable period between winter and spring. But there was nothing ominous about it, and neither mother nor son was the kind to be troubled by supernatural intimations of disaster. Photographs of Daisuke show a cheery round face with a self-deprecating smile. “He loved judo,” Hitomi said. “And to his friends he put on a tough face. But to me, back at home, he used to complain about the pain of being thrown. And at school it seems that a group of the boys had been told off by the teacher. That was the only reason he didn’t want to go.”
—Itte kimasu, said the reluctant Daisuke.
—Itte rasshai, Hitomi responded.
The Konno family lived in the village of Magaki, three miles downstream of Sayomi’s home in Fukuji. The bus passed through here, but Okawa Elementary School was close enough that the children of Magaki made the journey by foot. Daisuke (his name was pronounced “Dice-keh”) walked along the river’s edge with a slouching gang of classmates. The riverbank at this point was hardly elevated at all; the breadth of the road was all that separated the houses from the lapping water.
Hitomi’s husband had already gone to work. She followed soon after her son, leaving behind her parents-in-law and two teenage daughters. She drove south, away from the river and up a road that ascended into the hills through hairpin bends and entered a mile-long tunnel, to emerge above the fishing port of Ogatsu. By eight o’clock, she was seated at her keyboard in the small doctor’s surgery where she worked as a receptionist, awaiting the arrival of the first patient of the day.
It was an unexceptional morning. Hitomi ate a packed lunch at her desk. She was a warm, calm woman of forty, with a core of firm-minded common sense beneath an exterior of kindly humility, well suited to dealing with the clinic’s mostly elderly, and frequently confused, patients. Apart from handling appointments, processing payments, and keeping the accounts, she supervised the operation of an elaborate apparatus that used an electrical current to massage the muscles. She had just plugged two old ladies into the current when the earthquake began its violent shaking.
She tried to rise, but couldn’t. The patients in the waiting room were crying out in alarm. Behind Hitomi were tall flasks in which metal instruments were being sterilized. The boiling water inside them was slopping noisily over the sides, to form steaming pools on the floor.
When the motion had subsided, Hitomi removed the electrodes from the old ladies and handed back the insurance cards as the patients hurried out.
She sent a text message to her oldest daughter, Mari, who was at home in Magaki. The reply quickly came back: We’re all fine. Don’t worry.
Hitomi mopped up the water from the sterilizing flasks and discussed with the doctor what to do. Ogatsu was on the sea, at the head of a narrow bay. After the strong, but lesser, earthquake two days ago, many people had evacuated the town; but no tsunami had come. As they were recalling this, a man entered the clinic, a sales rep for a pharmaceutical company, with the news that an evacuation warning had been issued and that everyone should retreat to higher ground. Hitomi picked up her jacket and bag and walked to her car. “I remember that the whole town was incredibly quiet,” she said. “I could hear a tap dripping at the back of the clinic, the kind of sound that you would never normally notice.” Later, she realized this was that ghostly moment in the advent of a tsunami when the water withdraws, exposing seabed and harbor floor, before surging back in with full force. It was the absence of the familiar shush and slap of the sea that made tiny, domestic noises unnaturally noticeable.
She drove back up the hill; even inside the moving car, she could feel the aftershocks. Without thinking, she entered the tunnel, and then immediately began to worry about the solidity of its ceiling, and the unimaginable volumes of stone and earth above it. On the far side, she pulled into a rest stop where other evacuees were waiting, and sat for a while, considering what to do next. She started off down the road again and passed a local man she knew, who waved her to a stop.
“I wouldn’t go down there, if I were you,” the man said, pointing in the direction of Hitomi’s home in Magaki.
“Why not?” Hitomi asked. But the man just mumbled something she couldn’t hear.
It had begun snowing. “It wasn’t late, still not yet four o’clock,” Hitomi remembered. “I was sending text messages and trying to phone home, but now nothing connected. It was very dark, unusually dark overhead. I started driving down again, but someone else I knew stopped me and said, ‘Don’t go on.’”
A few hundred yards down the road was a vantage point from which Magaki and the country around it could be seen clearly. The man gave no explanation for his warning, and Hitomi did not press him for one. Instead, she retreated to the rest stop and spent a cold and uncomfortable night in the car.
She drove down the road again as it started to become light, and soon reached the point where the hills fell away on the left, revealing the broad Kitakami River valley below, the view Hitomi saw every afternoon when she drove back from work. On both of its banks, a wide margin of level fields rose suddenly into forested hills. On the near side was Hitomi’s home village of Magaki, and then an expanse of paddies stretching to the Fuji lake; the polished blue and red roofs of other hamlets glittered at the edges of the hills. It was an archetypal view of the Japanese countryside: abundant nature, tamed and cultivated by man. But now she struggled to make sense of what she saw.
Everything up to and in between the hills was water. There was only water: buildings and fields had gone. The water was black in the early light; floating on it were continents and trailing archipelagos of dark scummy rubble, brown in color and composed of broken tree trunks. Every patch of land that was not elevated had been absorbed by the river, which had been annexed in turn by the sea. In this new geography, the Fuji lake was no longer a lake, but the inner reach of an openmouthed bay; the river was not a river, but a wide maritime inlet. Okawa Elementary School was invisible, hidden from view by the great shoulder of hills from which Hitomi looked down. But the road, the houses, and Magaki, where Hitomi’s home and family had been, were washed from the earth.
* * *
Upstream in Fukuji, the news about the helicopter set off a clatter of collective activity. Sayomi’s husband, Takahiro, spent the early morning helping to mark off a space where the rescued children could land safely. Sayomi and the other mothers made heaps of rice balls and brought them to the local community center, where the evacuees were to be taken to recover from their ordeal. She kept two of the rice balls back and put them in her pocket so that, even if she was one of the last to arrive, Chisato would not go hungry.
The helicopter was expected at 11:00 a.m. Families converged on Fukuji from along the river: brothers, sisters, parents, and grandparents, dressed against the cold in fleeces and puffer jackets, and carrying bags and rucksacks with hot drinks and bars of chocolate, and more warm clothes for their returning sons and daughters.
They stood looking up at the sky. There was almost no conversation among them. Helicopters came and went all morning. The blue ones were from the police. One or two might have been military aircraft of the Japan Self-Defense Forces. None of them landed at Fukuji.
“We waited for four hours,” Sayomi said. “There weren’t just a few helicopters, there were a lot. We waited and waited. None of them even came close to us. A very desperate feeling was growing in me.”
The men of the village conferred once again, and decided to send a team downriver to go to the school and find out for themselves what was going on.
They drove past the spilled planks from the timber yard and through the village of Yokogawa, where everything appeared normal: a Shinto shrine, a Buddhist temple, and two rows of houses facing one another across the road, none of them visibly damaged. Then they reached the rise that jutted out and concealed the view of the last stretch of the great river. It became obvious only as they crossed it that this unremarkable barrier marked the threshold dividing life from death.
Physically, Yokogawa had been untouched by the disaster. A high embankment and the bend in the river had shielded it from the water. But beyond the hill, the tsunami had surged upstream, overwhelmed the embankment, and risen with deadly force. The men looked out to see what Hitomi, from her opposite vantage point, also saw: the highway and embankment overwhelmed, the bridge broken, and the land turned to sea.
* * *
Hitomi drove down in the dawn light, through perfect stillness and hush. Hers was the only car on the road; it was as if the world was newly formed and she was the first to enter it. The surface of the great expanse of water flashed black and silver with the changing angle of the sun. But at the foot of the hill, Hitomi discovered that not all of the land had been overwhelmed.
In the innermost reaches of the valley, a hamlet called Irikamaya had been spared. The village hall had become a refugee center. Hitomi could see human figures milling around it. The roofs were covered in snow. The people were wrapped in coats and fleeces against the morning chill. She stumbled out of her car, calling out her children’s names and reeling from face to face in search of one that she knew. But everyone seemed to be looking for somebody, and none was from Magaki. Then, with a jolt of recognition and relief, she saw a boy whom she knew from Okawa Elementary School—Tetsuya Tadano, a younger member of Daisuke’s judo team. His clothes were filthy. His right eye was bruised and swollen shut.
“Tetsuya! Oh, Tetsuya, are you okay? What happened, Tetsuya? What happened to Daisuke?”
“We were running away,” said Tetsuya. “When we were running, Dai fell over. I tried to pull him up by his collar, but he couldn’t get up.”
“So what happened to him? What happened to him, Tetsuya?”
The boy shook his head.
Then Hitomi noticed another fifth-grade boy, Kohei Takahashi, similarly ragged and begrimed.
“Kohei, where’s Daisuke?”
“Dai was with me,” he said. “He was behind me, running. We were in the water together. He was just behind me.”
“So what happened to him, Kohei?”
“He was floating.”
Outside she found a third face from the elementary school: a teacher named Junji Endo, a man who surely could provide some answers.
“Mr. Endo! Mr. Endo, it’s Hitomi Konno, Daisuke’s mother. What happened? What happened at the school?”
The teacher was sitting alone, hugging his knees with both hands. Hitomi leaned down to him and repeated herself. He hardly looked up.
“Mr. Endo? What happened at the school, Mr. Endo?”
He appeared to be in a state of deep abstraction. To Hitomi, it was as if his emotions had drained out of him.
“No idea,” he mumbled eventually. “No idea what’s going on.”
Hitomi struggled to assemble these fragments of information. The elementary school was on the other side of the hill from where she now stood. The two boys must have climbed up and over it in just the last few hours. If they had escaped, then others, including Daisuke, must have done the same; he might be up there still, on that hill. Hitomi walked away from the community center and back down the road, wading in places, and began to climb the hill herself, calling her son’s name.
“Dai! Daisuke! Has anyone seen Daisuke Konno?”
But there was no one there. The area was so large, and paths branched in all directions, separated from one another by a density of pines. She descended the hill and stopped. Then she turned towards the river and waded farther up the road to the place where her home had been.
“It was just a lake,” Hitomi remembered. “I couldn’t even see the foundations of the houses. I was walking all around and getting very wet, calling the names of each member of my family. I wasn’t really conscious of what I was doing. I thought that if I kept calling their names, someone would reply. People tried to stop me. They were looking at me as if I was mad. But I couldn’t think what else to do.”
* * *
Sayomi’s husband, Takahiro, did not accompany his neighbors on their mission downriver. For reasons that were not discussed, it had been decided that men with children at Okawa Elementary School should be excluded from the party. But Takahiro heard from them on their return. They had eventually got a lift by boat to a spot on the embankment close to Magaki. One group of men had gone to Irikamaya. The rest had picked their way through the rubble to the school itself.
Going about the village, Sayomi crossed paths with the wife of one of the men in the party. “The woman was weeping,” she remembered. “She refused to look me in the eye.” But Sayomi insisted that she didn’t feel hopeless. She said, “I strongly believed that, although they might not be coming back by helicopter, the children were fine. There were no phones or electricity. They might have been taken to the big sports center in town, and just not been able to get in touch with us.”
She was at home when Takahiro came back from the briefing by the search party. Japanese parents address one another as otō-san and okaa-san—Father and Mother—particularly when family matters are being discussed, and this was how Takahiro began.
“He came in and called to me, ‘Mother…’” Sayomi remembered. “And I thought it might be good news.”
“Mother, there’s no hope,” Takahiro said. “There’s no hope.”
“What?” said Sayomi. “No hope for what?”
“The school is done for,” he said. “There is no hope.”
“I just seized his shirt,” Sayomi told me. “I grabbed his chest. ‘I don’t understand,’ I said. Then I couldn’t stand up anymore.”
Takahiro recounted what he had been told: that the bodies of two children from the school had been recovered so far, with many more certain to be found, and that only a handful had survived, including two pupils from the fifth grade.
“One of them must be Chisato,” Sayomi said.
“They are both boys,” said Takahiro.
“Who?”
“One of them is Kohei.”
To Sayomi, leaning backward over the brink, this name was like a harness buckled around her waist; a smile came to her mouth as she recalled the moment. For in the fifth-grade class Chisato and Kohei were the keenest rivals, and had been since they were small. “After sports day, Chisato would say, ‘I was faster than Kohei’ or ‘I easily beat Kohei,’” Sayomi told me. If Kohei had survived, then it was impossible that Chisato was not alive too.