Hitomi Konno finally reached the school early the following morning. It was March 13, 2011, the Sunday.
In a different time, the walk from Irikamaya would have taken twenty minutes, but Hitomi spent more than an hour picking her way along the road beneath the hill, over an obstacle course of water and debris. The rubble included large sections of houses that had been picked up and then dropped by the wave, cars and vans, upended and crushed, and the smallest household items: shoes, sodden garments, cooking pots, teapots, spoons. Broken pine trees made up an inexplicably large volume of the mess; their resinous scent competed with the corrupt stink of the black mud, which coated everything that was not submerged in water. Of the houses that had once been here, not one in twenty survived even as a ruin.
Finally Hitomi reached the point where the inland road met the highway along the river, beside the New Kitakami Great Bridge. The northernmost third of the bridge, a span of two hundred yards, had collapsed and disappeared into the water, exposing bare concrete piles. From here, the road had angled down into Kamaya, a typically jumbled Japanese village of low concrete buildings alongside traditional wooden houses with tiled roofs. Until two days ago, all but the top of Okawa Elementary School had been obscured by them, and by the cherry trees planted around it.
Today, though, the school was the first thing Hitomi saw, or its outline. It was cocooned in a spiky, angular mesh of interlocking fragments, large and small—tree trunks, the joists of houses, boats, beds, bicycles, sheds, and refrigerators. A buckled car protruded from the window of one of the upper classrooms. A hundred yards beyond, a single concrete structure—the village clinic—was still standing, and in the middle distance a filament-thin steel communications mast. But the buildings in the main street of houses, the lanes that led off it and the houses and shops arrayed along them—all had ceased to exist.
Beyond Kamaya had been a succession of hamlets, and beyond them fields, low hills, the swaying curve of the river, and finally the Pacific Ocean. At the river’s distant mouth there was a beach, popular with surfers and swimmers, and a dense forest of pines, which had been planted as a windbreak and a place of recreation. It was those pine trunks, twenty thousand of them, that had been ripped out and transported three miles inland, distributing their distinctive smell. The village, the hamlets, the fields, and everything else between here and the sea had gone.
No photograph could describe the spectacle. Even television images failed to encompass the panoramic quality of the disaster, the sense within the plane of destruction of being surrounded by it on all sides, sometimes as far as the eye could see. “It was hell,” Hitomi said. “Everything had disappeared. It was as if an atomic bomb had fallen.” This comparison, for which many people reached, was not an exaggeration. Only two forces can inflict greater damage than a tsunami: collision with an asteroid or nuclear explosion. The scenes along four hundred miles of coast that morning resembled those of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, but with water substituted for fire, mud for ash, the stink of fish and ooze for scorched wood and smoke.
Even the most intense aerial bombing leaves the walls and foundations of burned-out buildings, as well as parks and woods, roads and tracks, fields and cemeteries. The tsunami spared nothing, and achieved feats of surreal juxtaposition that no explosion could match. It plucked forests up by their roots and scattered them miles inland. It peeled the macadam off the roads, and cast it hither and thither in buckled ribbons. It stripped houses to their foundations, and lifted cars, lorries, ships, and corpses onto the tops of tall buildings.
* * *
A man named Ryosuke Abe reached Kamaya at about the same time as Hitomi. His house, his wife, his daughter, his son-in-law, and his two grandchildren had been in the village at the time of the tsunami. Abe himself worked on a building site in the city, and his way home had been blocked by the flooded road and broken bridge. By the time he got to the village, two policemen had taken up positions in front of it. To his amazement and indignation, they diffidently tried to bar his way. He began to argue, then gave up and simply walked straight past them.
Abe, Hitomi, and everyone describing the scene in the first days after the tsunami used the same word. Jigoku: hell. The image they had in mind was not the conventional landscape of lurid demons and extravagant, fiery tortures. There are other hells in Japanese iconography—hells of ice and water, mud and excrement, in which naked figures, stripped of all dignity, lie scattered across a broken plain.
“What stays in my memory,” Abe said, “is pine trees, and the legs and arms of children sticking out from under the mud and the rubbish.”
Abe was a village leader, a construction boss, an active, practical-minded man in his early sixties. He began to pull bodies out and to lay them on the roadside. At first he used his bare hands. Then he waded back to his car and returned with his tools. In some places a shovel was useless, because the bodies of the children were so thickly heaped on top of one another, where they had been laid by the retreating wave.
By the afternoon, a handful of people had gathered to join the effort. It was dangerous, precarious work, because there was so little solid ground. Even where the waters had receded, they had left layered decks of rubble that slid or collapsed underfoot, all of it broken, much of it razor-sharp and covered with foul, squelching mud. Stepping uncertainly among the jutting spines and raw edges, the men in the group hauled up tree trunks and broken spars of wood, bent back sheets of corrugated aluminum, and pried open the doors of crushed cars. When they found bodies, they carried them to a traffic island opposite the bridge where the women, among them Hitomi Konno, laid them out and washed them in murky water hauled by bucket from the river. “Of course there was nothing to cover the bodies with,” Hitomi said. “We pulled mattresses out of the rubble and laid them out on those, and covered them up with sheets, clothes, anything we could find.” Almost as carefully as the bodies, they retrieved and set aside the distinctive square rucksacks, carefully labeled with name and class, that all Japanese elementary schoolchildren carry.
There was no panic, or even much sense of urgency. Without anyone saying as much, it was understood that there was no question of finding anyone alive. “No one was just looking for his own friends or grandchildren,” Mr. Abe said. “We were pulling everyone out, whoever they were. Every man was weeping as he worked.”
Friends, rivals, neighbors, schoolmates, nodding acquaintances, blood relatives, old sweethearts—all came out of the undiscriminating muck.
By the end of the first day, Abe had dug out ten children. Most of them had lost their clothes and their name badges. But he recognized many of the faces.
That afternoon, someone told Abe that they had seen his wife, Fumiko. He hurried to Irikamaya and there she was, with his daughter, both of them uninjured. “It was more than a matter of being relieved,” he said. “I couldn’t believe that they were alive.” But his son-in-law and two granddaughters were still missing.
He would spend three months in the village, picking through mud in the search for bodies. One day, the women called him over to the place where the bodies were laid out for washing. Among them was his own ten-year-old granddaughter, Nao. Abe had lifted her out himself. She had been so covered with mud that he had not recognized her.
Nao’s nine-year-old sister, Mai, was found a week later, and their father a week after that. “The older girl was just the way she had always been,” Abe told me. “She was perfect. It was just as if she was asleep. But a week later—well, seven days in those conditions makes a big difference.” And he wept.
* * *
Nine miles inland, beyond the reach of the wave, was an indoor sports center, which had become a center for emergency relief. Entire families were sleeping on the basketball court on borrowed blankets and squares of folded cardboard. Sayomi Shito’s eldest sister, Takami, a brisk and formidable woman whose own family lived safely inland, took upon herself the job of going there to find her niece and bring her home. The confusion caused by the disaster was extreme, but people did not simply disappear. How difficult could it be?
Okawa Elementary School.
Fifth Grade.
Chisato Shito.
But after joining the throng inside the sports center, Takami felt her confidence fall away. She found herself one among hundreds, moving anxiously from one desk and dormitory and notice board to another.
After several fruitless hours, someone suggested a different kind of place where such a girl might be. Takami’s heart quailed at the thought; she didn’t have the strength to go alone. She picked up her other sister and drove with her to the place, where they consulted a much shorter list of names. But only immediate family members were allowed inside.
She went to Chisato’s father, Takahiro, and told him what she had found.
Soon after, Takahiro came to Sayomi. She was in the kitchen again, preparing the latest batch of rice balls. Takahiro said, “Mother, it’s time to prepare yourself. We’ve found Chisato.”
Sayomi told me, “When I heard that, I started to leave at once. But then I realized that I’d need food for her to eat, and clothes for her to wear, and all kinds of things, so I went about getting them all together.”
Takahiro said, “You don’t need any of that. Just come.”
It was two years later when Sayomi told me the story. As she remembered it, she got into the car without knowing where she was being taken, but in the calm belief that she was about to be reunited with her daughter.
To Sayomi’s surprise, they drove past the sports center where the refugees were sheltering and up the hill to a place she knew intimately—the high school where Sayomi and her sisters had all been pupils, and where Chisato would eventually go. “There was a kind of reception desk that they’d set up there,” she said. “Takahiro and my brother-in-law stood by it, going through some sort of documents. They told me to stay in the car.”
Sayomi slipped out and ran into the school. She found herself inside its gymnasium.
“It was the first time I’d been there in thirty years,” she said. “There were tables and chairs. They’d divided off part of the gym with plastic sheets. So I looked in, and there were blue tarpaulins on the floor and shapes laid out on them, covered with blankets.”
A man was approaching Sayomi, holding out a pair of shoes. “He was saying, ‘Is there any mistake?’ There wasn’t a mistake. They were Chisato’s shoes. I saw her name inside them, in my handwriting.”
Now Takahiro was in the gymnasium. He was gathering one of the shapes up in his arms and lifting the blanket.
“Don’t come yet,” he said to Sayomi.
“But I could see,” she told me.
She went on: “He lifted up one of the blankets. And then he was nodding, and saying something to the man who was in charge there. When I saw that, I thought, ‘What are you nodding for? Don’t nod. Don’t nod.’ They were telling me not to come in, but I rushed in. Chisato was there. She was covered in mud. She was naked. She looked very calm, just as if she was asleep. I held her and lifted her up, and called her name over and over, but she didn’t answer. I tried to massage her, to restore her breathing. But it had no effect. I rubbed the mud from her cheeks, and wiped it out of her mouth. It was in her nose too, and it was in her ears. But we had only two small towels. I wiped and wiped the mud, and soon the towels were black. I had nothing else, so I used my clothes to wipe off the mud. Her eyes were half-open—and that was the way she used to sleep, the way she was when she was in a very deep sleep. But there was muck in her eyes, and there were no towels and no water, and so I licked Chisato’s eyes with my tongue to wash off the muck, but I couldn’t get them clean, and the muck kept coming out.”
* * *
Hitomi Konno and her husband, Hiroyuki, found each other the following week. It was at that moment that she gave up hope. She had been spending mornings at the school, where she washed and identified bodies, and the afternoons in Irikamaya village hall, where she cooked and cleaned for her fellow refugees. It was difficult to know what else to do, for she was still looking for her children, Mari, Rika, and Daisuke, and her mother- and father-in-law. Hitomi had no illusions about what had happened; she understood what the worst was, for it was all around her. But she was sustained, like many in her situation, by the simple instinct that, whatever was happening to other people, it was impossible—in fact, it would be ridiculous—for her own family to be extinct. Insupportable, soul-crushing, unfathomable—but also just silly. We’re all fine. Don’t worry, Mari had written in those first moments after the earthquake. “I thought, ‘They must be alive. They must be alive,’” Hitomi said. “I couldn’t give up. When the phones came back on, I sent text messages, I tried calling over and over again.”
Hitomi took a boat to the big sports center, and found Hiroyuki there.
It is conventional to picture such reunions as joyful moments of emotional release. But the emotions are too big and too mixed with despair. Over the past few days, Hiroyuki had arrived at the belief that he had lost his parents, two daughters, son, and wife. When he saw Hitomi, he adjusted his understanding: as it turned out, he had lost his mother, father, and three children. “Of course we were glad to see each other,” Hitomi said. “But we were so preoccupied with thoughts of the children. Until I found them, I couldn’t feel any relief.”
Hitomi’s head-shaking refusal to take death seriously was not shared by her husband. Hiroyuki joined the search for bodies, in Kamaya, and in the area of the Fuji lake, where many of the component parts of their home village, Magaki, had fetched up. One day they found the top part of their house—the upper floor and roof, virtually intact, tossed by the wave onto a shore of the lake. A team was grimly assembled to break through the tiles. The Konnos expected the fulfillment of all their fears, the trapped corpses of their family. Inside, the tatami mats were still in place, but there was little else there. They found Rika’s pink Hello Kitty purse and what came to be very precious: an old album filled with photographs of the children when they were small.
Daisuke was the first to be recovered, a week after the wave, followed by Hiroyuki’s father. Rika, who had died four days before her seventeenth birthday, was found at the end of the month. Old Mrs. Konno and eighteen-year-old Mari were found in early April.
Daisuke was at the bottom of the hill behind the school, not far from the traffic island, in one of several small heaps of children. The girls and their grandparents lay in different places, but there were clues that suggested what had happened to them. Old Mr. Konno had his car keys in his pocket. His wife was carrying bags of clothes, and the girls had snacks and charger cables for their mobile phones. They were preparing a departure; they might have been about to get into the car when the tsunami struck. Perhaps they were worried about Daisuke, or about Hitomi. Perhaps they were waiting for one or both of them to return before making their escape.
Hitomi went to see Daisuke at the high-school gymnasium, and found him uninjured. “He looked as if he was sleeping,” she said. “He looked as if he would wake up if I called his name. I still remember his face as it was then.” But when she came back the next day, a jolting change had taken place. Drops of blood had issued from Daisuke’s eyes, like tears. She wiped them away, but overnight, and every night after that, Daisuke shed more tears of blood. Hitomi understood that this was because of changes that were taking place inside the container of her son’s body. But she couldn’t help also seeing it as a symbol of the pain of his hovering spirit, and of how desperately he had wanted to live.
It had been difficult even to find coffins. Every crematorium within reach of the coast was backed up for several days. People were driving for hundreds of miles to hold a funeral. What Hitomi and Hiroyuki most urgently needed now was a supply of dry ice, first for one, then for two, and eventually for five sets of remains. An undertaker explained that each body needed four pieces of ice—two to go under the arms and two under the legs. As the spring warmth came on, each piece lasted only a few days. Hiroyuki would drive around for hours and finally locate ice in a neighboring town—but the next time he went there, its supply would be gone. In the month it took for all five bodies to be recovered and cremated, Hitomi’s and Hiroyuki’s lives were dominated by the daily struggle to protect their children and parents from decay.
* * *
Apart from their family, the Konnos had also lost their home and everything in it. While they were organizing ice and funerals, Hitomi and Hiroyuki stayed first with his elderly grandmother, and then moved to a vacant house owned by an aunt and uncle. For them, as for many of the parents from the school, those early weeks were a time of numb frenzy rather than supine grief, a losing struggle to remain on top of a hundred pressing practical matters.
It was about a month after the disaster that Hitomi had a phone call from Kazutaka Sato, a man she knew as Yuki’s dad.
Yuki Sato was Daisuke’s best friend and confrere in mischief. The two boys walked to school together, practiced judo together, and fished together in the Kitakami River. Yuki had also died on March 11.
By this stage, the scale of the tragedy at Okawa Elementary School had become clear. The school had 108 children. Of the seventy-eight who were there at the moment of the tsunami, seventy-four, and ten out of eleven teachers, had died. But a handful of parents had gone to the school after the earthquake, picked up their children, and taken them to safety. One of the girls who had been saved in this way, Amane Ukitsu, had been in the sixth-grade class with Daisuke and Yuki. Mr. Sato had recently talked to Amane, and now he was telephoning, full of emotion, to share with Hitomi the story that he had heard from their sons’ surviving classmate.
Sato had asked Amane about the moments before her mother took her away from the school, the period after the earthquake and before the tsunami. His beloved son had died at the age of twelve; now he wanted to know everything that it was possible to know about Yuki in the last minutes of his life. How had he appeared? What had he spoken of? Had he been afraid?
Amane described how the building shook violently, but suffered no serious damage, and how the children and teachers evacuated the building, just as they had for the lesser tremor two days earlier. The pupils had lined up by class. Amane stood with Yuki, Daisuke, and the rest of the sixth grade.
The names were quickly checked off, and the children were told to remain where they stood. Soon sirens and announcements could be heard, urging evacuation to higher ground. It was cold in the playground. But there was no move to go back inside, or anywhere else. Chilled by the wind, the children became restless. And now there was a loudspeaker van driving around, warning of a “super-tsunami” coming in from the sea.
Amane recounted how Daisuke, the class captain, and Yuki, his sidekick, addressed their class teacher, a man named Takashi Sasaki.
Sir, let’s go up the hill.
We should climb the hill, sir.
If we stay here, the ground might split open and swallow us up.
We’ll die if we stay here!
The teacher shushed them and told them to remain where they were.
Soon after, Amane’s mother arrived and hurriedly drove her away. The family lost their house, but she was one of only five children left alive from the sixth-grade class.
Mr. Sato’s telephone call left Hitomi trembling. She had had no time or energy left over to contemplate them before—but this story lit up like a floodlight questions that had been flickering dimly in her grief-darkened mind. What, after all, had been going on at the school in the period between the earthquake and the wave? Why had everyone not evacuated to the hill behind it, as her own son had apparently suggested? If he had been able to see the sense of this, why had not his teachers? Why had they, and Daisuke, and everyone else, had to die?