Naomi lived in a big house in the village of Yokogawa, with four generations of her husband’s family. Its oldest occupant, his grandmother, was in her late nineties; Naomi’s younger daughter, Sae, was two and a half. Naomi had been in her bedroom at the moment of the earthquake, lulling the small girl to sleep. The fast, vertical motion was “like being inside a cocktail shaker.” By the time the shocks had dissipated, the house was an obstacle course of books, furniture, and broken glass. Her six-year-old son Toma was trapped in another room, its door blocked by fallen objects. It took Naomi half an hour to free him, as the walls and floor flexed and wobbled in the aftershocks.
Nobody in the family had been physically hurt, but downstairs the house was in even greater disarray. Naomi’s mother-in-law was tending to the distraught great-grandmother; her father-in-law, who held high office in the local neighborhood association, was taking stock of the situation outside.
He was an uncommunicative man; “traditional” would have been the polite way of describing his conception of family and the appropriate behavior of its members. When he returned from his reconnoitering, Naomi was preparing to go to Okawa Elementary School to collect her twelve-year-old daughter, Koharu. “I had no doubt that the school was okay,” she said. “But it had been such a strong quake, I thought I ought to pick her up.” Mr. Hiratsuka Senior resisted this idea, for reasons that were obscure. “He said, ‘This is not the moment.’ I didn’t know exactly what he meant.” The old man had walked around the village; Naomi realized later that he must have looked over the bank and observed the condition of the river. But he was a man who rarely felt the need to explain his decisions, certainly not to a daughter-in-law. “I think that he himself was in a panic, although he didn’t show it,” she said. “We didn’t have much conversation. He’s the kind who keeps his thoughts to himself.”
Naomi had sent a text message to her husband, but received no reply before the network went down. There was no electricity and therefore no television. Even the municipal loudspeakers, which broadcast information in times of emergency, were silent; and it was snowing. “I remember thinking about Koharu stuck at the school, and I thought that it must be so cold there,” Naomi said. “I was glad that I’d told her to put on an extra layer of underwear. I thought that as long as they wrapped up well, they’d be okay.” In the absence of any news—good or bad—about the state of the wider world, all she could think of was to stay inside and tend to those members of the family who were safe at home.
This course of action coincided exactly with her father-in-law’s view of the role and duties of a young woman and mother.
Shortly before dusk, old Mr. Hiratsuka announced that he was going out again. His intention was to walk downriver and retrieve a radio from the hut at his nearby allotment. It was still light when he left. He returned in darkness an hour later, gasping and reeling, drenched in water, plastered with mud and leaves, and lucky to be alive.
Physically, Yokogawa was untouched by the disaster that was taking place. The high embankment and the bend in the river had shielded it from the water, to the extent that Naomi still had no idea there had been a tsunami. But on the far side of the jutting hill, five and a half miles from the sea, Mr. Hiratsuka found himself on a road rinsed by the ocean. As he walked along it, a new surge broke the river’s edge and quickly covered the asphalt. It tugged at his feet, and then at his ankles and knees, and before he understood what was happening, he had lost his footing and was flailing in currents of black water. They were dragging him back towards the river, where he would certainly have drowned, when he became painfully but securely entangled in a tree, which held him fast while the water drained away.
He staggered back home past the bend in the river, without his radio. “He said later that he nearly died,” Naomi remembered. “He was upset. He didn’t say so, but perhaps that was the moment when he understood what had happened.”
* * *
The following morning, Naomi persuaded her father-in-law to make an effort at reaching the school. Immediately beyond Yokogawa the water had receded, and they were able to drive to the point where the road disappeared into the water. A group of people had gathered there; some of them seemed to be crying. Mr. Hiratsuka told Naomi to stay in the car, and strode over to investigate. He came back a few minutes later; the terseness of his replies suggested that he hadn’t found out very much. Naomi was not especially worried. Like everyone else, she had heard the report that two hundred children and local people were cut off by water at Okawa Elementary School, awaiting rescue. Like the other mothers, she had turned up that morning to meet the helicopter that never came. But mostly she was preoccupied with the burden of feeding and cleaning a household in which she was expected to be the source of nurture for both young and old. “The children were scared by the aftershocks,” she said. “And the old people were all in a dither. I was on maternity leave—I was supposed to be looking after my child. But for the next few days, all I can remember was cooking. When the time came to go out and find food, my mother- and father-in-law did that. I was at home taking care of the children, and cooking and cooking again, morning, noon, and night.”
On Sunday morning, two of Naomi’s friends, the mother and father of two children at Okawa Elementary School, came by to say that they were going to make another attempt at getting through. Would Naomi like to come? She badly wanted to go with them—but who would look after the other two children in her absence? Her father-in-law had a solution: she would stay at home, and he would go instead.
He returned at lunchtime.
“What happened?” asked Naomi.
“We got to the school,” he said.
“How was it?” asked Naomi.
“I saw Arika’s body there.” Arika was a twelve-year-old classmate of Koharu’s. “There were several other bodies of children there. But not Koharu. I could not find Koharu. I heard that a few of the children survived and went to Irikamaya. But Koharu was not there. So I think it is hopeless. You need to give up.”
Naomi found herself unable to speak. “I wanted to ask so much more, I wanted to know the details,” she said. “But there was something about the way he said, ‘Give up.’”
Then Mr. Hiratsuka said, “We have to accept this. You need to give up hope. The important thing now is to look after the children who are still alive.” With that, the conversation was over.
Naomi told me: “He had said it—and so I realized there really was no hope. That was the moment when I knew that Koharu was not alive. But I couldn’t show my grief. Mr. Hiratsuka is … Mr. Hiratsuka is a very strict, controlled person. He is not the kind of man who allows his natural feelings to show. He had lost his granddaughter. I know that he may have felt very sad, but he contains his feelings. Nonetheless, if he found me in a state of sadness, he should have refrained from saying words that would hurt me. But he did not refrain.”
Naomi’s mother-in-law had heard the exchange and stood nearby, weeping. Mr. Hiratsuka spoke scoldingly to his wife and ordered her to quell her tears.
* * *
Naomi’s husband, Shinichiro, reached home the following day. Like his wife, before she took her maternity leave, he was a teacher, at a high school in Ishinomaki, which had become a refuge for a thousand people made homeless by the tsunami. His presence diluted the authority of his father and made acceptable Naomi’s absence from the house. With Shinichiro, she drove down the road as far as the waters allowed. There she met the mother of another girl from Okawa Elementary School, who told them that she had just identified her own daughter at the school gymnasium upriver. She thought she might have seen Koharu’s body there too.
The Hiratsukas drove inland to the gymnasium mortuary. More and more bodies were coming in, and the place was in the grip of bureaucratic confusion. There were papers to be filed, and incoming bodies had to be examined by a doctor and formally logged, a process that sometimes took days. Naomi and Shinichiro had young children and needy old people back at home; they couldn’t wait. They filled out the necessary documents and left.
The following day, Shinichiro left his family and went back to his school in the city to help with the care of the refugees there. His wife did not question the decision; no one in his family regarded it as bizarre or remarkable, any more than it was bizarre to expect a mother newly grieving for her young daughter to cook, wash, and clean. None of his colleagues would have reproached Shinichiro if he had walked away from his school to look for his child’s body. But no self-respecting Japanese teacher could have done so with an easy conscience. It was just one example of the kind of dutifulness routinely expected of a public servant.
Shinichiro came home whenever he felt able. When he did, he and Naomi went to the school gymnasium. There were two hundred bodies there by the end of the week. “They were laid out on blue tarpaulins,” she said. “A lot of them were people I knew. There were parents of pupils of mine. There were classmates of Koharu’s. I was able to say, ‘I know him, and I know him, and I know her.’ But none of them was Koharu.”
After ten days, they decided to go to Okawa Elementary School to see what was happening there. The water had receded to the point where they could drive and wade to Kamaya. Rough paths had been cleared by the volunteer firemen, who were using a digger to part the debris. But rubble still overwhelmed the school buildings, and on top of the clagging mud was a thin layer of snow. Next to the traffic island at the entrance to the village there were blue vinyl sheets, on which bodies were laid out to be washed before being taken to the mortuary. Half a dozen mothers lingered there, waiting for their children to be lifted out.
Naomi looked at the faces of the people on the blue sheets, hoping all the time to recognize Koharu. She was a tall girl with unruly, shoulder-length hair and a plump, humorous face. Naomi thought about the last moments they had spent together. As her mother tended to Koharu’s little brother and sister, as her septuagenarian grandfather prepared breakfast for her grandmother, and the grandmother fussed over her near-centenarian great-grandmother, Koharu had quietly dressed, eaten, and left for the school bus. She was about to enter her last week of elementary school; she and Naomi had discussed what she would wear for the graduation ceremony. Most of the other girls favored jackets and tartan skirts, in emulation of the starlets of a toothsome pop band. But Koharu had chosen a hakama, an elegantly formal traditional skirt of high pleats worn over a kimono. The skirt had been Naomi’s, but Koharu was already almost as tall as her mother, and it required little alteration.
Naomi came back to the school whenever she could. Time, as she experienced it, was passing in an unfamiliar way. There was so much to do for the family at home, and doing it was such an effort. She would spend hours waiting on line for gasoline and food, drive home, drop off her supplies, and then drive to the mortuary, or wade through black water to the school to scrutinize the dead. One day she found one of Koharu’s shoes, and later her school backpack. These finds were heartbreaking and consoling at the same time. Naomi harbored no false hopes. Bodies were still coming out of the debris at the rate of several a day. She knew it was only a matter of time before her daughter’s came out too.
* * *
At the beginning of April, the nurseries and kindergartens reopened. With the two youngest children off her hands during the day, Naomi was able to devote herself to the search for Koharu.
She found herself one of a dwindling group of parents, loitering by the traffic island at the entrance to Kamaya. There was a shy, quiet man named Masaru Naganuma who was looking for his seven-year-old son, Koto; as a qualified heavy-vehicle operator, Masaru sometimes drove the digger that scooped and divided the mud. Naomi became very close to a woman named Miho Suzuki, who had buried her twelve-year-old son, Kento, but was still searching for her nine-year-old daughter, Hana.
Masaru, in particular, was unswerving in his determination to find his son. Each morning Naomi would come to the school and watch him out in the black mud, turning it over and over with the arm of the yellow digger. As spring came on, rich color returned to the hills and the river—the dark green of the pines, the lighter shades of the deciduous trees, and the fluffy yellow of bamboo. But at the heart of the landscape of leaf and water was darkness: this pit of mud, which had sucked down everything precious and refused to give it up. How deep was that mud? It seemed bottomless. It stuck to Naomi’s clothes and boots, and followed her home in her car. Liquid mud dripped off the caterpillar tracks on Masaru’s digger as he rode it out every morning to look for his little boy. “Just look around this place,” Naomi said. “What parent could rest, having left the body of their child under this earth and rubble, or floating out there in the sea?”
* * *
Naomi was a teacher of English. She spoke it well, when she tried, with a clear American accent. But she lacked all confidence, and in our conversations she used Japanese. Describing the events following the disaster, she talked fast and fluently, with sharp, emphatic gestures. But when I asked her about herself, she became hesitant and ill at ease.
She had grown up in Sendai, but studied at a university in Okinawa, the chain of beautiful, subtropical islands far south of the Japanese mainland, where her father had been born. She had gone there filled with excitement and aspiration, but came away disappointed. “I have Okinawan blood, but I had never lived there,” she said. “I wanted to study the old Okinawan language and learn Okinawan dance. But I accomplished less than half of what I wanted.” After graduation, she left the sunny south and returned to the cold northern territory of her birth.
Of all the Okawa mothers I met, Naomi was the clearest-sighted, even in the intensity of grief. For many of those who experienced it, the tragedy of the tsunami was formless, black, and ineffable, an immense and overwhelming monster that blocked out the sun. But to Naomi, no less stricken than the others, it was glittering and sharp and appallingly bright. This harshly illuminated clarity was the opposite of consoling. It pierced, rather than smothered, and left nowhere to hide.
In all the time I spent with Naomi, I never went to her home. Her father-in-law did not care for journalists, and she didn’t want to upset him unnecessarily. We would meet at the school and drive back up the road towards Ishinomaki to talk in a roadside restaurant. At the beginning, she told me, the search for the missing children had been performed by local people, who cleared away what rubble they could, and by the police, who supervised the processing of the dead. Then came soldiers of the Japan Self-Defense Forces. At first this had been a cause for optimism, as the mesh of rubble encasing the school was removed piece by piece. But the longer the search for the children went on, the more the scale of the task was exposed.
In the early days, children had been found all around, thrown up against the hollows of the hill—thirty-four of them in one soft heap. Then they began to come out in smaller groups of one or two; and then the flow diminished to a trickle. By late March, some thirty of the seventy-four missing children had still not been found; a fortnight later, there were just ten missing. At the end of April, four children were recovered in quick succession from a pond that had supplied water to the rice fields of Kamaya. Some of them were five feet below the water and mud, beyond the reach of even a bamboo pole. It had become obvious that to search it fully, the whole area would first have to be drained. So mechanical pumps were acquired, and a generator that had to be fueled around the clock. Then bodies began to turn up in the Fuji lake, two miles away, on the far side of the hill.
Rather than comprising a single wave, the tsunami had consisted of repeated pulses of water, washing in and washing out again, weaving over, under, and across one another. Some of the objects that fell into its embrace had been lifted and deposited close to their point of origin; but many had been sucked under and thrown up, pulled back and dashed forward again, in an irretrievably complex operation of internal currents and eddies. The obvious places had all been searched; nowadays, new sets of remains were being found far from the school; and whenever this happened, the potential area of search expanded once again.
In May, a doctor took swabs from the mouths of Naomi, Shinichiro, and their children, in order to isolate Koharu’s DNA. At the end of that month, parts of a small body washed up in Naburi, a fishing village on the Pacific coast, four miles from the school, across lagoon and mountains. The condition of the remains made it impossible to identify them by sight; it took three months for the laboratory to establish that they belonged not to Koharu, but to another missing girl.
* * *
The soldiers extended their search upriver to Magaki and towards the Fuji lake, and downriver to the villages around the Nagatsuura lagoon. New units rotated in and out from all over the country; Naomi met so many different commanders that, with their identical uniforms and short hair, she found it hard to tell them apart. Then, three months after the tsunami, the Self-Defense Forces withdrew.
The search operation, which formerly consisted of ten earth-movers and hundreds of men, shrank to a single team of policemen, and Masaru Naganuma in his digger. Naomi and Miho still came to the school every day. By this stage, there wasn’t much they could usefully do. When Masaru’s steel arm uncovered something, they would wade out and examine it. They found mattresses and motorcycles and wardrobes, but no more remains. They tidied the shrine in front of the school and threw away the dead flowers. Sometimes a second digger would work in tandem with the first one. As they moved side by side, their long yellow limbs waving and plunging, it was almost as if they were dancing.
An idea was taking form in Naomi’s mind. She consulted Masaru about it. “Why not try?” he said. In late June, she participated in a weeklong course at a training center near Sendai. All the other participants were men. They showed no curiosity about Naomi, and she felt no urge to explain herself. At the end of the week, she came away with a license to operate earthmoving equipment, one of the few women in Japan to possess such a qualification. She went immediately to work, borrowing a digger of her own and sifting the mud in search of Koharu.
Her father-in-law strongly opposed this development. He argued that operating heavy machinery was dangerous for a woman, and that her place was at home, looking after her children, husband, and in-laws. Naomi listened patiently to what he had to say and paid it no attention.