He shakes out a bag of peanuts onto the low table between us, opens four cans of beer, and watches me drink. We sit on the floor and sweat in the midsummer night’s heat. The cold stream of liquid feels good going down. We’re at Kazuyoshi’s house. Masumi’s uncle. A farmer, his face is sun-roughened and there’s dirt in the deep grooves of his palms. Before the March 11 earthquake hit Kazuyoshi was planting his fields in rice and flowers. He smiles: “I lost everything. Now I feel better.”
He grins, drinks, pours two beers and empties more peanuts onto the table between us. Masumi, her mother, and I are in his ground-floor apartment donated by the German company BASF. In the tiny garden space outside he’s already planted tomatoes, onions, greens, lettuce, and flowers. He shows me an especially rare kind of Gerber daisy, a spiky miniature red bloom. “I grew these when courting my wife,” he tells me. “I delivered buckets-full three times a week until she consented to marry me.”
Kazuyoshi squints. Because of a car accident when he was young, he’s slightly blind in one eye. In a deep, hoarse voice he says: “Springtime, I used to get in a bad mood. No more. I don’t want to be a bother to anyone; I don’t want to be a big farmer. Just treat plants and flowers very nicely so my wife and I can survive. If others are happy eating what I grow, then I’m happy.” He finishes off a third beer.
The ground begins to shake. Kazuyoshi grabs the edge of the table but doesn’t move. Masumi and I jump to our feet. The tsunami siren sounds. We’re only a mile from the ocean. Masumi fishes for her car keys, and I gather my notebooks. We stand, all except her uncle. He’s scared but calm, or else frozen in place. The shaking subsides.
We sit again. The mood has changed, as well as our heart rates. Kazuyoshi turns serious. He leans forward: “Do you want to hear my story?” Without waiting for an answer, he begins: “On March 11 I was making compost when the jishin came. I couldn’t stand up, so I sat down on the ground and waited until it stopped.”
He drove his tractor to the house and found that the stone lanterns in the garden had fallen, and inside, all the dishes and furniture had broken. He rummaged around and found his money, but when he went outside he saw cars and trucks speeding away. “It must be bad,” he thought, and grabbed his wife’s hand. They ran for the elementary school, the designated evacuation spot.
“It took a while for the tsunami to arrive. It was about 3:30 or 3:35 when it came. I saw a white splash of water, then something black. Someone screamed, ‘Tsunami!’ People were struggling to get up the stairs to the third floor. There were maybe two to three hundred people. My wife and I were the last ones there, a little late because I hadn’t really thought it would come, and sometimes she’s a little slow. Sometimes we both are …”
The water charged at them. It was moving about twenty kilometers per hour. They held hands and made it as far as the second floor, but the water flooded in and engulfed them. They were lifted up. Water came up their legs, their arms, their shoulders and necks. Water rose almost to the ceiling.
Chin, cheeks, mouth, nostrils: underwater. Kazuyoshi and his wife had to tilt their heads back just to breathe. “At times we were completely underwater, inhaling filth and getting cold very quickly. We tried everything—paddling fast and feeling for something to put our feet on. We had to concentrate hard. We had to survive.”
Four inches of air space kept them alive. Water was lapping their ears. Their heads were back, they were holding hands and treading water; they were waiting to drown. Another wave came. “This is the end of our lives,” he told his wife. “It was like being on the Titanic,” he says, laughing now. “But it wasn’t a movie. It was way worse. Real dying! That’s what it was!”
He pours another beer and sucks in a deep, vocalized breath as if to assure himself that there is sufficient oxygen in the room. “The wave receded and the next one didn’t come close. The water went down and we could see. The staircase to the next floor appeared, as if inviting us! We ran up to the third floor. We had survived, but when I looked out I saw that water covered everything. I saw cars, and bodies, and pine trees floating, I saw that my rice fields were gone, and the family house. The school we were in was the only place left standing. It was an island out at sea.”
Another beer and it’s time to leave. As we stand, Kazuyoshi hands us four fresh tomatoes, just picked from his tiny garden. He shows us a single head of lettuce: the one that Masumi and I saw near the entrance to her grandmother’s house. Kazuko takes an outer leaf and lays it on her tongue—a green wafer emblematic of a lost life. She chews and swallows—it’s all that’s left of the farm where she grew up.
“Everything needs rescuing,” Kazuyoshi says, laughing. There is no mention of the radiation wafting up the coast from Fukushima Daiichi. Reluctantly, Kazuko accepts one of the tomatoes. “This is absurd. You have nothing and you’re giving us food,” she says. He stares hard at her: “The less I have, the happier I am.”