We twist down out of Oshika Honto’s high mountains at sunset past villages that have been destroyed, though their hillside graveyards are still standing. “Only the dead survived,” I say. A Japanese bush warbler flies in front of the van so close to the windshield, we almost hit it. There are shrines all over Japan where you can ask forgiveness for the inadvertent deaths you have caused: stepping on a bug or hitting a bird with a car. Who will do penance for the subduction zone, for the earth’s crust, for the Wave?
More warblers zoom by. On the other side of the road, a woman plucks rice seedlings out of a basket on her back and punches them into a flooded field. As we come into the ruined town of Ishinomaki, there’s an acrid smell. “Put the windows up quickly,” Abyss-san says. We are passing a crematorium, and the ash of burning bodies is sifting in.
On the way north we stop to see Satoshi-san, the geisha’s architect-nephew. Fiftyish, strong-jawed, and handsome, he lives with his Aunt Ito-san, because he is unmarried. He was at work when the earthquake hit. “We were making a final check on an apartment building that had just been completed. I saw a debris pile coming in our direction and smoke, and wooden houses being crushed, so I told the workers to go to a safe area. The toll road nearby was stopped with traffic, and I had to go around the long way.
“By the time I got to an evacuation center, the water hadn’t receded, so I stayed there. I didn’t know if Ito-san had survived or what had happened to our town. There were no blankets. One propane stove was on and we all put our feet toward it. They gave us newspapers to put over our shoulders. In the night more people came. They were from the town of Kirikiri. Everyone began exchanging stories. We heard that downtown Kamaishi was gone and the whole town of Otsuchi was on fire.”
The next morning it took Satoshi-san more than an hour to walk to his aunt’s house. When he saw that it had been destroyed, he walked to a nearby school to get something to eat. “That’s when I found her, and I’ve been here ever since,” he said.
After applying to the lottery for a temporary housing unit, Satoshi-san recently found out that he and Ito-san can soon move in. “There are two bedrooms, a kitchen, and a bathroom,” he says. “We may be in temporary housing for two or three years.”
The week before the tsunami he had handed in his resignation at his construction company. They’d asked him to stay on for another month, which he did; then the whole office washed away in the tsunami. He says he isn’t going back. “I’m thinking of setting up a small office of my own somewhere. I’d like to help people who want to rebuild. Every person is different, with different-shaped bodies, and every house should be shaped differently. But in the meantime, the government will have to build more houses. This takes time and the longer it takes, the more people will leave and move far away, and our town will die.
“We’ll make do for now. There have been many sorrows. We had a mutual friend who was lost in the waves. My aunt was heartbroken. Three days before the jishin, she came to visit and brought sweet sake. They didn’t know it then, but they were having a drink together for the last time.”
In the morning I’m “handed back” to Masumi and her family in Sendai.
* * *
The flow of the river is ceaseless and its water is never the same. The bubbles that float in the pools, now vanishing, now forming are not of long duration: so in the world are man and his dwellings.
—KAMO NO CHOMEI
* * *
The dead know the moment of construction as, also, a moment of collapse. Having lived, the dead can never be inert.
—JOHN BERGER