Beppu was just coming out of the school gym.
I held my hand up to get his attention. He saw me and walked right over.
Izawa called to tell me that, while Beppu had lost his home in the tsunami, he and his family were safe at the local primary-school gym, which had been converted into a shelter for evacuees. Izawa said on the phone that, when he and Beppu met, they hugged each other and cried. But when I saw Beppu outside the gym, we were calm – maybe because the reporter who gave me the ride to the shelter in his emergency vehicle was standing next to me. It was almost evening, and the air was filled with the smell of pork soup being cooked by Self-Defence Force troops in their camouflage fatigues.
A big fan of Yazawa Eikichi and Tom Waits, Beppu always dressed with a kind of rock-star flair, but his clothes that day were nondescript: he was wearing a grey-and-black-checked work shirt and jeans. His hair, typically slicked back with pomade, was greaseless. His chin was flecked with salt-and-pepper stubble. Still, I was relieved to find him looking better than I expected. It had been a week since the earthquake and tsunami on 11 March.
‘They’re all donations, these clothes,’ Beppu said, as if he felt he had to explain. When I caught a glimpse of the red T-shirt under his overshirt, I couldn’t help smiling.
‘I’m just glad your family is safe,’ I said. ‘I was worried when I heard your house was hit in the tsunami. Izawa said he saw your name here by chance when he was volunteering with meals.’
‘Yeah, I know. He was convinced I didn’t make it. The second he saw me here, he started bawling – got me going, too …’
‘Come on in,’ Beppu said, as if he were trying to change the subject to something less embarrassing. He made it sound as though he were inviting me into his own home.
I didn’t want to bother the other evacuees, so I hesitated a little. Beppu continued, ‘Come on, Shigezaki-san – your reporter friend can come, too.’ He walked on ahead of us.
‘Weren’t you heading out?’
‘Just, you know,’ Beppu said, holding up two fingers as if smoking a cigarette.
We took off our shoes and carried them into the gym. The whole place was covered with blankets and packed with people. The reporter asked, ‘How many are staying here?’ Beppu answered, ‘Maybe three hundred.’ The walls of the gym, the school building and the corridors connecting them were covered in missing-person notices.
It was freezing inside. Supplies had been cut off since the quake and kerosene was running short. I saw the elderly evacuees, wrapped in blankets to fight against the cold, and remembered the hypothermia warnings I’d seen on TV.
Beppu motioned towards a set of blankets in the middle of a row near the stage. ‘This is my home now,’ he said.
A gridded walkway ran between the blankets, drawn on the floor to help people navigate the gym. I looked down at the lines, impressed. ‘Weird, isn’t it?’ Beppu said with a wry smile. ‘Even in a place like this, it didn’t take long to set up proper roads and zones. I guess this spot makes my address District One, Block Three? There’s always someone who takes charge.’
Beppu’s ‘home’ was a few blankets spread over an area of six tatami mats. He had six people in his family, which made me wonder if they’d been given one mat’s space per person. I recognized Beppu’s youngest boy, in his first year at school, sprawled out on the floor, playing with his Pokémon cards. The others didn’t seem to be around.
‘Make yourself comfortable,’ Beppu said as we sat near the corner of a camel-coloured blanket.
‘Now then, where’s the tea … Would coffee be okay?’ he asked, still half standing.
I shook my head in protest and waved him off. ‘Don’t bother, there’s no need for that.’
‘Come on. You’re visiting my home. The least I can do is get you a cup of tea,’ he pronounced theatrically, making his way towards the stage. Below the stage was a row of benches, on which sat cardboard boxes with emergency food supplies and Thermos flasks of hot water.
As I took a sip from the half-full mug of instant coffee, I noticed a copy of Selected Tang Poetry resting on one of the blankets. Beppu was a literature lover – he had turned his home into a cram school, where he taught primary- and middle-school students.
I had been living in the Tokyo area for years, working as an electrician and a writer, but had to move home to Sendai due to asbestos exposure. That was fifteen years ago. As soon as I came back, I started my own writing course; Beppu and Izawa were two of my students. When the class ended, the three of us became drinking companions.
‘I thought it would help me calm down if I could read this. I had someone I know bring it over,’ he said.
I recited the only line of Du Fu I knew by heart: The realm is ruined, but the mountains and rivers remain – right? Then I sighed and corrected myself: The realm is ruined, and so are the mountains and rivers. I had seen it on the drive over, when the reporter and I passed through the harbour town where Beppu’s home had been; the Self-Defence Forces and the police were still searching for bodies there, and only emergency vehicles were allowed in.
Beppu nodded silently.
The reporter got up and started walking around the shelter with his SLR camera slung around his neck.
It’s a miracle I’m still alive. Sometimes I find it hard to believe. Like, I wake up in the morning, asking myself if I’m dead – but I’m not. I’m still here.
Not that I really feel alive, though. More like I’m just pretending.
When the earthquake hit, I was home alone. The kids were at school and my wife was at the community centre, at a thank-you party with my eldest daughter’s teacher. She finished middle school this spring.
Anyway, I’ve never felt anything like this earthquake before. The one off the coast of Miyagi Prefecture a couple of years ago was nothing compared to this. And this one just kept going. Seriously, I thought the house was about to fall on top of me.
When the shaking finally stopped, I started cleaning up. The dressers and bookshelves had all been tipped over. The cupboards were thrown wide open and our dishes were smashed to pieces. The powerful aftershocks kept coming, but I didn’t stop. I just wanted to get rid of all the jagged pieces before the kids got home.
I was still cleaning when the sushi chef from next door came over. ‘Beppu? You’re still here? Why aren’t you going to the shelter?’
‘Shelter?’ I asked.
‘You never know. There could be a tsunami on the way,’ he said.
‘What, like last year? That was a total waste of time,’ I said. You remember that? It was a Sunday, late last February. You and I had plans to go drinking, but I backed out at the last minute because Chile had a giant earthquake and everyone thought we were going to get hit with a tsunami here. Well, I thought it would be the same thing this time. I’d go to the shelter at the community centre, hole up there for a few hours while nothing happened, then head back home. I told the chef I was going to pass – I’d rather stick around and clean up. My wife had the car anyway, so I couldn’t drive, and I hadn’t heard any tsunami sirens, either. Now that I think about it, though, the power was out and the whole system was probably down.
Anyway, the chef was insistent, which wasn’t like him. He said he’d drive me to the shelter. Then I remembered that my wife had called before the quake – she left her mobile phone at home and wanted me to bring it to her at the community centre when I had the chance. Okay, I thought, I might as well take the ride.
You know how across the road from my house and the sushi place there’s that fish market – and the ocean’s behind the market, right? I could see the ocean from there, and it didn’t look the least bit different. We got in the car and everything was fine at first, but then we hit heavy traffic and came to a complete stop. ‘We’ll have to walk from here,’ I said. When I got out, I turned back to look the way we came, for no particular reason. At the far end of the road, I saw an unbelievably tall, dark wave hurtling towards us. No way, I thought – a tsunami. I panicked and told the chef to leave the car behind. We ran with everything we had – but not to the community centre. We headed for another designated shelter, the middle school, to get a little further away from the tsunami.
I was just about to reach the school gate when I tripped and fell flat on my face. The tsunami was right behind me. I really thought I was done for.
Beppu suddenly stopped and laughed a little, drawing a chuckle from me in spite of myself.
‘But you played football throughout high school. I bet you’re a good runner.’
‘Not any more. And I was sprinting for more than five hundred metres. I swear, my heart was bursting and my legs were shaking.’
Then Beppu said, ‘You probably think a tsunami comes at you from above – right?’ I nodded, half remembering a surfing movie I’d seen once, where the crest of a giant wave rose up over a man like a shark baring its teeth.
‘That’s not what happens, though. It comes at you from behind, like it’s taunting you. First it sweeps you off your feet, then as soon as you fall over backwards, the next surge comes to get you.’
Beppu went silent, as if the scene were coming back to him. I had my own rush of memories.
It was the morning of 13 March – two days after the giant, magnitude-9.0 earthquake.
I walked over to my living-room window, as I always do when I get up, to look at the ocean in the distance. For thirteen years, I had been living on the ground floor of an apartment block on the top of a hill that stood a hundred metres above sea level, but I couldn’t believe what I was seeing out of my window that morning. The red-and-white-banded chimney of the waste-incineration plant rose in the foreground off to the left, the same as ever. The smoke that always billowed out – except for New Year’s holidays – had been absent since the quake, but that wasn’t what I found hard to believe.
When the dust clouds cleared and my vision finally came into focus, I saw the band of pines planted as a barrier along the coast – or what was left of it. I could count on my fingers the trees still standing. It was like one of those images of the African savanna that you see on TV or in magazines.
I had never really given much thought to those trees before, but as I stood there that morning, they came to me almost as a distant memory: a cluster of lush green pines clinging to the coastline, with the ocean shimmering over them. The beach was now as bare as a comb missing most of its teeth. With a pang, it occurred to me – there are some things you don’t notice until they’re gone.
The swollen sea, viewed through the remaining pines, appeared bigger and closer than before. Around the mouth of the river that ran between my town and the next were patches of boggy ground, reflecting the dull light of the sun.
Suddenly it hit me, that place … had been a village! In my mind, I could see the faces of friends and neighbours who had lived there.
I hurried to the bedroom to wake my wife.
We hadn’t had power since the earthquake, so there was no TV. We learned everything we knew about the disaster from a hand-cranked emergency radio. Until that day, we were so busy getting the house in order and going out for water that we had no time to look out of the window.
I heard on the radio that a giant tsunami had ravaged the coast, that hundreds of bodies had washed ashore – but part of me didn’t believe it. Looking out of the window that morning, I saw the first undeniable evidence that this had really happened.
A shiver ran down my back.
Three days later, the power came on. Watching images of the tsunami on TV, repeated over and over, I was finally able to grasp what the tsunami had actually been like, and I knew that if I had seen this footage right after the disaster – homes and cars being swallowed up and swept away by merciless waves – there was no way I could have handled it.
Then, when they started showing video footage of the nuclear reactors exploding in Fukushima, the next prefecture along, I grew even more anxious. Outside my window, Self-Defence Force helicopters flew back and forth, and the distant sirens of fire engines and ambulances wailed constantly.
‘Look, sweetheart – you can get a good view of it from over here,’ Beppu said to his eldest daughter, who wore a navy-blue school uniform and had her hair cut short. He pointed towards the coast. ‘See the big bridge by the water? Just to the right of that.’
‘Over there? Everything’s gone,’ the girl murmured.
Beppu had called me that afternoon, five days after we met at the shelter. ‘I’m in the area – I came to check my daughter’s exam results. Is it okay if I come by?’ ‘Of course,’ I told him. Not ten minutes later, he was outside, in a car driven by one of his younger friends. He said that his daughter had taken the entrance exam for the high school at the bottom of my hill. I asked how she did, but he just walked over to the window without answering.
With his back to me, I couldn’t tell if he was building up to announce that, happily, she had passed, or if he was steeling himself to reveal that, unfortunately, she had not.
We had electricity again, but no water or gas. On the living-room floor, we had lined up fifteen plastic bottles of drinking water and a couple of twenty-litre plastic tanks for cooking that we’d filled at the water-rationing station. There were also a couple of cardboard boxes loaded with emergency rations: pre-cooked rice in plastic packs, dried bread, canned goods, meals in sealed pouches – disaster supplies we had stocked up on before the earthquake because there had been warnings that there was a 99 per cent chance a major earthquake would hit the area in the next thirty years.
We were still getting powerful aftershocks, so we had laid our speakers and floor lamps on their sides, wrapped in blankets. On the living-room table, we were boiling water on a portable gas stove.
My wife made tea while we seated ourselves around the little kotatsu.
‘Come on, Beppu! Don’t keep us waiting,’ my wife demanded. She was six years younger than me – the same age as Beppu – and they spoke to each other casually.
‘You tell them, sweetheart,’ Beppu said to his daughter, who blushed and made a small V-sign just over the surface of the kotatsu, breaking into a bashful smile.
‘That’s great!’ my wife said warmly.
‘She was the only one from her school to get in here,’ Beppu said with a touch of pride. They lived in the next city from us, and most of her classmates were probably going to go to high school there.
‘Congratulations,’ I added belatedly. ‘I’m sorry – I forgot your name.’
Beppu had brought her over a few times when she was little. She always seemed like a daddy’s girl.
‘It’s Nozomi, written with the characters for hope and ocean.’
‘Right, right,’ I said. ‘Nozomi … You came up with the name, didn’t you, Beppu?’
‘Sure did,’ he said, with a proud thrust of his chin.
‘Hold on,’ said my wife, as if something had just occurred to her. She went to the kitchen and came back with milk tea and pound cake.
‘It’s just something a friend from Tokyo sent me in the emergency,’ she said. ‘But we should celebrate!’
Nozomi brushed aside her fringe and happily devoured her slice of cake.
‘Here, have mine,’ Beppu said as he handed his plate to his daughter.
I was with Nozomi the night of the tsunami.
By the time I made it to her school, the place was packed with evacuees. I tried going up the main stairs, but couldn’t get past the people in wheelchairs from the local nursing home. When the water started to rush through the entrance, I remembered that there was an emergency stairwell in a corner of the building and ran there as fast as I could. I made it upstairs just in the nick of time. Good thing it was my old school and I knew the building so well.
I stayed on that floor for a while, but the water kept rising, so I went up another flight of stairs, before finally ending up on the landing to the roof, where I spent the night. It was so cold that day, it had snowed lightly. All the windows were shattered and everyone was soaking wet, shivering like mad. Once the water started to go down a little, I went around collecting curtains from the classrooms and shirts from the football club to help everyone stave off the cold.
At some point, Nozomi was there with me.
That night, our family was all over the place. My three other kids were at the primary school and my wife was at the community centre. I was worried sick, wondering if they were okay. I just sat there, unable to say anything, staring blankly at the dark floor. Then, in the middle of the night, Nozomi turned to me and said, ‘Dad, look at how pretty the stars are.’ Honestly, all I could think was: who cares about stars at a time like this? But I looked up and the sky was bright with them. Everything else around was pitch-black; the stars were all we could see. The earth had become this hell, but the stars were the same as ever …
‘They really were beautiful,’ my wife and I said, nodding.
I will never forget the beauty of the stars that night, when the whole city was blacked out. Those stars and the waxing moon were all we had.
One afternoon a little more than a month after the disaster, Beppu drove over to pick me up. Miraculously, they had discovered some raw sake, bottled just three days before the disaster, buried among the rubble of the local brewery, which was swept away in the tsunami. Alcohol wasn’t allowed at the shelter, so Beppu wanted me to go for a drink with him.
‘The head brewer’s a former student of mine. He came all the way to the shelter to tell me about the find,’ Beppu said. Under his unbuttoned light blue shirt, he was wearing a T-shirt with the face of Japan’s King of Rock, Imawano Kiyoshirō.
‘Where’d you get the car?’
‘A friend from high school who transferred to Tokyo this spring. He said I could hold on to it while he’s away.’
Beppu had always been quick to open up with people, so he had a lot of friends.
Beppu’s own small car had been washed away in the tsunami. This was a seven-seat estate, which is probably why he had such a hard time steering it down the winding road where I lived. The cement-block walls lining the road had collapsed in places and the shoulder had been pushed up in the quake. The old inn on the opposite side had been obliterated in the earthquake, and the road running past it was still blocked to traffic.
‘Were you okay the other night?’ Beppu asked as we drove on to the highway. The road looked flat enough, but the quakes had opened hard-to-see gaps in the surface. The car bucked every time we hit one.
‘The big aftershock? Yeah, that was intense,’ I said as I grabbed the handle over the window to my left.
When it looked as though the aftershocks had started to die down, we put the furniture and bookshelves back and restored their contents. Then there was another big one: intensity six, magnitude 7.4; 11 March all over again. I felt as if somebody had pulled a ladder out from under me.
Many of the buildings that had survived the first quake were partially or completely destroyed by this one. The ground beneath my apartment building had sunk fifteen centimetres the first time, then dropped another ten with this one, exposing underground pipes and opening large cracks beneath the foundation, where moles had started to burrow.
The only good thing about this quake was that there was no tsunami.
‘In the shelter, every time we get an aftershock, the basketball hoops overhead start to rattle like mad.’
‘That’s right,’ I nodded as I remembered the gym. ‘It has those backboards that hang down from the ceiling, right?’
Yeah, and we have one of those damn things right over us, where we sleep.
Every time it rattles, I hold the kids tight to keep them from getting scared. Really, it’s happened so many times I’ve lost count.
But that night, it wasn’t just rattling. It was banging around like it was going to come crashing down at any second. To make matters worse, the power was out and the gym was completely dark. I half stood up to shield the kids with my body, in case it came down on us.
I heard a man shouting – ‘It’s a big one!’ – and a woman screaming in terror.
Then the generator kicked in and we got the lights back – also right over my damn head.
The gym was hot that night. Everybody was running their portable heaters full blast, so I went to bed in just my underpants. There I was, under this spotlight, in front of everybody, in nothing but my underpants. You wouldn’t believe the looks they were giving me, I swear.
‘Check this out. It’s like they haven’t even touched the place.’
‘Seriously.’
On the way to where the brewery had been, we went through the village across the river from the site of Beppu’s house. We were close to the shore I had seen from my living-room window two mornings after the disaster – the coastline that had been picked clean of its pines.
I knew a few people who had lived around here. Someone told me about a woman who saw her husband swept away by the tsunami while he was parking the car near the shelter. I came by here with the reporter the day we went to the shelter to meet Beppu. The water had gone down somewhat, but the whole area looked pretty much the same as it had then.
It was a vast bog flooded by the tide. Some of the cars were twisted like origami. The ones that retained their original shape were marked by rescue squads: a white X meant that the passengers were alive, or the car was empty; a red X meant that the passengers were confirmed dead. I saw a decorative golden spoon on the ground; pines from the protective band that had been torn up by their roots; adult videos; an agricultural reference book; a framed photograph from a family altar; a box of onions with overgrown green sprouts; floor cushions; bedding; and a chair propped up in the middle of a paddy field, as if someone had been sitting in it a moment ago …
I felt as though daily life had been washed away.
‘Not the best year for enjoying the cherry blossoms, was it?’ Beppu said as he looked at the blossoms on a cherry tree branch that had been mowed down with the pines.
Here we are. The chef’s place was over there and my house was right here. You remember coming to the chef’s place with me, right? Must have been something like thirteen years ago. There was a kid on the tatami in the back, begging us to play with him and his toy trains, remember? He’s at college now. Really bright, too. He got into the maths department at a national university last year. The chef told everyone at the shelter that he’s determined to reopen the restaurant here, but I wonder. I hear the city isn’t going to let anyone build this close to the water.
Me? My wife and kids are saying that they’d hate to come back to this place. But I honestly don’t know what to do.
Just look at this – it’s all gone, everything but the foundation. The entryway was right over here. You’d go inside and my classroom was right there. I had my blackboard set up over here and the kids’ desks were over there. We lived in the back. My room was upstairs.
The only thing we found around here was one big platter – the kind you use for serving sashimi. I’ve got to say, though, part of me is relieved it’s all gone. I’ve just been stuck in a rut for a while now.
I was stunned by the last thing Beppu said. I looked him in the eye, trying to figure out what he meant by that.
‘Want to climb the hiyoriyama?’ he suddenly asked.
Behind us, two hundred metres from the shore, was a small, man-made hill once used for weather-watching – a hiyoriyama. All the houses in the area were washed away in the tsunami, and now that hill was the only thing left.
Beppu coughed a few times on the way to the hill.
I looked around and muttered, ‘There’s a lot of asbestos in the air.’
Right after the tsunami, when everything was wet with seawater, the air was damp and relatively free of asbestos. Now that it was dry, the air appeared to be full of dust.
The bulldozers roared as they made mountains out of the rubble. The clean-up effort had been moving rapidly and what I saw now looked like an expanse of vacant lots. In a little more than a month, they had managed to clear away most of the debris – ‘debris’ that had only recently been a part of our lives. No matter how many times I saw it, I found it hard to watch those things being handled as if they were garbage.
‘You know, I never dream about the time before the earthquake,’ Beppu said. ‘Not that I have nightmares about the tsunami or anything. Only what came after …’
‘Same here, actually,’ I said.
‘Really, you too? It feels like everything is happening so fast, and I can’t do anything about it. There’s no time to stop and think clearly about things. I just wish I could make time stop flowing,’ Beppu muttered.
When we reached the hiyoriyama, a large solitary pine was rising up from the back of the six-metre hill. There had been a small shrine at the top of the hill, about a metre square, with a few cherry trees around it, but they were all scraped away by the tsunami. Just this one tree remained stubbornly rooted to the soil.
‘Someone who got caught in the tsunami and lived through it said the tsunami came clear over the top of this pine.’
I looked up as Beppu spoke. I figured the topmost branches had to be around ten metres high.
Beppu and I had actually come to this place before, thirteen years ago, when I was writing a travel piece for a magazine. According to what I found out then, Japan has more than eighty hiyoriyama. Each stands near a harbour that opens to the sea, and the highest of them tops out at around a hundred metres. In the old days, weather-watching experts would climb those hills to watch the movement of the clouds and changes in wind direction, then predict the weather. They probably followed the tides and flight patterns of birds, too. In times of disaster, they must have been the first ones to see the signs of a tsunami stirring at sea …
I thought I remembered seeing a stone memorial near the foot of the hill the first time we came here, with an inscription about a tsunami. I went looking for it, and found it on the other side of the hill, toppled over.
Beppu and I looked down at the words etched into the massive two-and-a-half-metre stone and read them out loud:
IN MEMORY OF THE 1933 SANRIKU DISASTER: BEWARE TSUNAMI FOLLOWING EARTHQUAKES
At 2.30 a.m. on 3 March 1933, a powerful earthquake suddenly struck. About forty minutes after it had settled down, there came a booming roar from the sea and the coast was hit with furious waves. A wall of water ten feet high surged up the Natori River. To the west, the water ran as far as the Enkō area; to the south, the stretch of land from Teizanbori to the Hiroura Inlet was flooded. More than twenty homes were inundated. Several thirty-ton motorized fishing boats moored outside the town, on the banks of the Natori River, were swept into the fields of the Yanagihara area. Many smaller vessels were also smashed to pieces. Fortunately, there was no loss of human or animal life. Damage to the region was minimal compared with the havoc wrought to the inland counties of Monō, Oshika and Motoyoshi, as well as parts of Iwate and Aomori prefectures. The epicentre of the earthquake was offshore, approximately 150 leagues east-northeast of Mount Kinka, sparing us from the full brunt of the tsunami, which was blocked by the Oshika Peninsula. What struck our shore were no more than secondary waves …
When we read the words ‘Fortunately, there was no loss of human or animal life’, Beppu moaned. ‘They wrote it down. No one died and they still built this monument.’
From the top of the hill, we had a 360-degree view – a painful panorama.
The first time Beppu and I came here, the hill was surrounded by homes and we couldn’t see the ocean at all. Now we saw white waves lapping against a shallow beach that seemed to run on forever. To the south, while Fukushima’s nuclear power plant was out of view, I could see the chimneys of the thermal power plant just this side of it; to the north, I could make out the blurred shapes of the petrochemical complex on the industrial port and the peninsula behind it.
I doubt the view would have been that clear if the protective pine forest on the coast hadn’t been mostly wiped out.
‘Look,’ Beppu said, pointing me in the opposite direction. I turned around and saw three television towers at the top of the hill where I lived. Every year from my place, we could see the summer fireworks going up at the beach here. I always looked forward to that.
Then it occurred to me, maybe my hill was a hiyoriyama in its own right.
At the top of the hiyoriyama, we saw a lot of handmade memorials, scraps of wood with messages written on them, nailed to posts that were painted white, and an elderly woman whose hands were clasped in prayer for the victims of the tsunami.
‘Come on,’ Beppu said. ‘Let’s head over to where the brewery was. Izawa should be there. He volunteered to wash the bottles.’
We started walking back to where we parked the car, where Beppu’s house had been.
‘At the shelter, Wataru heard some of us adults talking about “this world” and “that world”, and …’
‘Wataru – he’s your youngest, right?’ I asked as I remembered the boy playing with his cards on the floor of the shelter.
‘Yeah, that’s him. He was like, “Hey, Dad, what world are we in? Is it some world in between?” ’
I didn’t know what to say.
‘He doesn’t talk about it, but I know he saw a lot of people get washed away in the tsunami.’
I repeated the boy’s words in my mind: Some world in between …