Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Title Page
Foreword
John Burnham Schwartz
Introduction
Elmer Luke and David Karashima
Epigraph
THE ISLAND OF ETERNAL LIFE
Yoko Tawada
THE CHARM
Kiyoshi Shigematsu
NIGHTCAP
Yoko Ogawa
GOD BLESS YOU, 2011
Hiromi Kawakami
MARCH YARN
Mieko Kawakami
LULU
Shinji Ishii
ONE YEAR LATER
J. D. McClatchy
GRANDMA’S BIBLE
Natsuki Ikezawa
PIECES
Mitsuyo Kakuta
SIXTEEN YEARS LATER, IN THE SAME PLACE
Hideo Furukawa
THE CROWS AND THE GIRL
Brother & Sister Nishioka
BOX STORY
Tetsuya Akikawa
DREAM FROM A FISHERMAN’S BOAT
Barry Yourgrau
HIYORIYAMA
Kazumi Saeki
RIDE ON TIME
Kazushige Abe
LITTLE EUCALYPTUS LEAVES
Ryu Murakami
AFTER THE DISASTER, BEFORE THE DISASTER
David Peace
Authors
Translators
Copyright
11th March 2011. An earthquake occurring off the north-eastern coast of Japan – magnitude 9.0, duration six minutes – unleashed a 50-foot tsunami that within fifteen minutes had slammed its way ashore, rushing inland six miles, crushing all in its path – roads, airports, villages, trains, and buses – and triggering the slow, inexorable leak of radiation from five nuclear plants.
This was just the beginning. The waves did not stop; nor did the aftershocks, which were themselves rolling earthquakes of terrifying magnitude. Nor did the danger from radiation, which was controlled incrementally, until the meltdown began. One year on, the overwhelming sense of loss endures. Life goes on, but life is not the same.
The writers in this collection seek to explore the impact of this catastrophe through a variety of different means. The pieces – fiction and non-fiction, poetry and manga – reconceive the events of that day, imagine a future and a past, interpret dreams, impel purpose, pray for hope. Specific in reference, universal in scope, these singular, heartfelt contributions – by Yoko Ogawa, Ryu Murakami, Yoko Tawada, Kazumi Saeki and David Peace, among others – comprise an artistic record of a disaster which raises questions for all of us who live in the modern world.
David Karashima and Elmer Luke are both acclaimed translators. Their work for the Nippon Foundation’s Read Japan programme aims to make a wide variety of books from Japan available to foreign audiences by working in partnership with libraries, publishers, authors and translators.
Losing everything
We even lost our words
But words did not break
Were not washed from the depths
Of our individual hearts
Words put forth buds
From the earth beneath the rubble
With accents like old times
With cursive script
With halting meanings
Words grown old from overuse
Come alive again with our pain
Grow deep with our sadness
As if backed by silence
They grow toward new meanings
Shuntaro Tanikawa
Translated by Jeffrey Angles
IMAGINE, FOR A moment, that you know nothing of what is happening here, or what is to come. Imagine that this is all still in the yet-to-be, or never-was, and that this is all you have to go by: this random clip on YouTube—digital, of course, and hauntingly crude. A “home movie,” it used to be called, back in those touching, innocent days when there were homes.
The title heading on the clip tells you that what you are watching is a scene at Sendai Airport. A “live feed,” as it were. The original title, in Japanese, is there too, palimpsest kanji. The date attached to the footage is March 11, 2011.
Someone is holding the camcorder, or phone; you will never know who. Maybe it doesn’t matter. For a good minute or so, the public scene is so calm, so indifferently banal—the wide-open, expansive mouth of the Sendai terminal, with its huge wall of glass designed to beckon the natural world in, populated by people standing and walking, apparently without urgency—that you think there must be some mistake: what you are watching is … nothing.
The view is fixed, passive. As if the camera itself, to begin with, has no idea that any possible subject, or object of interest, is even in the vicinity.
It is a sound first, a low and faint rumbling that has you fiddling with the volume control on your laptop, trying to adjust away what you assume to be artificial white noise, because, whatever its source, the sound is not particular or recognizable in a human sense.
The people visible on screen—travelers, commuters, the odd uniformed transportation worker—produce their own noise too, an absentminded hum. It takes a while for these two noises to meet, and then separate. The first distinguishing moment arrives when one person—then two, then five—turns his head as if to listen to some song he thinks he might remember, but otherwise didn’t catch.
What song? We can only try to imagine.
The sound becomes a gathering roar. The roar grows louder and more imminent, pressing invisibly on the scene we’re witnessing. And now the first small cries of alarm can be heard inside the great space. A woman wheeling a carry-on whirls around to face the huge window. Then others do the same, staring out at the cold white glare of the tarmac that, in the construction of all this, has been poured over every inch of green. In the upper corner of the screen, a father picks up his small child. A few people begin to run, disappearing out of frame. The camera moves to catch them; then, perhaps sensing something, it scurries back to the great glass wall, and freezes there in terror.
A wall of water is surging past the terminal. It is a meter high—then, very quickly, two—washing baggage carts, a boarding ladder, a yellow car along its path.
Inside the terminal, screams can be heard now, above nature’s roar of destruction. People are running, though there is no place to go.
The footage does not so much end as stop.
The stories begin.
—John Burnham Schwartz
Brooklyn, New York
MARCH 11, 2011. An earthquake off the northeastern coast of Japan—magnitude 9.0, duration six minutes, type megathrust—unleashes a fifty-foot tsunami that within fifteen minutes slams its way ashore, surging inland six miles, crushing all in its path, and triggering the slow, relentless leak of radiation from first two, then three, then five nuclear power plants. In one’s wildest imagination, this is beyond conceivable.
But this is just the beginning. The waves do not stop; they recede and rush back in without ceasing. Nor do the aftershocks, which are themselves rolling earthquakes of terrifying magnitude. Nor does the death toll, or the number of missing, or the danger from radiation, which seems to be controlled incrementally, until the meltdown begins. Nor does the overwhelming sense of loss and despair.
Life goes on, indifferently and pitilessly, but life is not the same, and life will have been reconsidered. Here, a wide-ranging selection of writers offer their response to this uncharted moment—significant for the double blow we have sustained from both nature and man—a portentous marker in modern human history. The pieces—nonfiction, fiction, including a manga, and poetry—with perspectives near and distant, reconceive the catastrophe, imagine a future and a past, interpret dreams, impel purpose, point blame, pray for hope. Specific in reference, universal in scope, these singular heartfelt contributions comprise an artistic record of this time.
Some of the pieces were written for this anthology, some were first published in literary magazines in Japan, all amid the initial horror and uncertainty immediately following the disaster when lives, seemingly secure and in forward motion, were in a matter of minutes altered, thrown off course, beyond repair. This theme is most evident for writers from Tohoku, in northeastern Japan, which bore the physical (let alone emotional) brunt of the disaster. But no writer from Tokyo—the uncomfortable middle ground—or, for that matter, elsewhere distant (and safe) went unaffected or untouched. Life might have seemed to go on, but not without evacuation packs, aftershocks, brown-outs, unwashed clothes, empty store shelves, worry about contamination, worry for young ones—and elder ones, and our future—as well as nightmares, depression, worst memories, and prayers.
In this anthology, Tohoku natives Hideo Furukawa and Kazumi Saeki draw upon the immediacy of family and locality, where history provides a sense of continuity, however tenuous it may be under the circumstances; while Natsuki Ikezawa, who himself spent weeks delivering emergency supplies in stricken areas, focuses on the unexpected scope of emotions of those who give care.
From Tokyo, Mieko Kawakami depicts poignantly, if painfully—in the story from which the title of this collection was taken—how an earthquake far away can change the terms of something as “simple” as pregnancy. Similarly, with Mitsuyo Kakuta, for whom the entire notions of intimacy and dependency are called into question.
Hiromi Kawakami, whose work represented here was the first literary piece to emerge in Japan from the stunned silence after March 11, revisits the story that launched her career eighteen years before—with a landscape physically and emotionally changed. Her “updated” story is accompanied with a postscript and the original story that the new work was adapted from.
Kazushige Abe takes us to a place where we are perhaps most reluctant to go—into the ocean and beneath the waves—in an ironically positive tale about the irrational obsession to prevail. And Tetsuya Akikawa, in a tale lined with bureaucratic obsession, suggests redemption where we least expect it.
From the greater distance of western Japan, Yoko Ogawa writes of repose—and our need for it. David Peace, who has returned to Tokyo after several years in England, inhabits the world of Ryūnosuke Akutagawa as he experiences the social trauma of the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923. Barry Yourgrau, sitting at his desk in New York, connects fragments of the Japan of his imagination to create a dreamlike narrative of post–March 11 life. Meanwhile, Ryu Murakami seeks meaning—and hope—in the twigs from a felled eucalyptus tree that he has stuck into dirt.
In Yoko Tawada’s “The Island of Eternal Life,” a group of doctors gathers fireflies to harness for evening light as they seek a cure of radiation sickness, while in Shinji Ishii’s “Lulu,” translucent women descend each night to comfort children orphaned by the disaster.
Then, in a change of pace, the Brother & Sister Nishioka team have drawn a cautionary manga for the day, and the poets Shuntaro Tanikawa and J. D. McClatchy remind us, in the depth and breadth of their response, of the value of words, simply written, gently spoken.
The idea for this project took gradual shape as we traveled among Tokyo, Tohoku, London, and New York, watching from near and far as March 11 and its aftermath unfolded. A thought became a shared idea that was developed further as we shoveled debris into the back of trucks in Tohoku, as riots racked London, as storms struck the East Coast of the United States, as a heat wave hit Tokyo, as floods raged through Bangkok, even as the cleanup in northeastern Japan proceeded but radiation continued to leak. It has been that kind of year.
We wish to thank the writers who have seen through the thick haze of the moment to clarity to offer us these pieces. We thank the translators who responded with care and generosity to their tasks. We acknowledge our excellent editors—Lexy Bloom, at Vintage; Liz Foley, at Harvill Secker; and Kazuto Yamaguchi, at Kodansha—for their patronage, encouragement, and advocacy of this project on three continents. We wish to acknowledge the Read Japan program of The Nippon Foundation for its support of the publication of this anthology. Proceeds from the book will go to support charities that have been sparing no effort in helping to rebuild towns, homes, and individual lives in Tohoku .
—Elmer Luke, New York
David Karashima, Tokyo
THE HAND THAT reached out to take my passport froze in midair. The young blonde inspector’s face hardened into a frown, her lips quivering slightly as if she were searching for something to say. I spoke first. “I know this is a Japanese passport, but I’ve been living in Germany for the past thirty years, and I’ve just come back from America. I haven’t been to Japan since then.” I wanted to add, “My passport couldn’t possibly be radioactive. So stop treating me as if I were contaminated,” but thought better of it. When I opened the passport to show her the page with my permanent residence permit stamp, she finally took it with nervous fingers.
I felt ashamed of trying to prove my innocence by insisting I hadn’t been to Japan since that had happened. Back in 2011 the word Japan elicited sympathy, but since 2017 sympathy had changed to prejudice. If I got an EU passport I wouldn’t need to think about Japan every time I crossed a national border, but somehow I couldn’t bring myself to apply for one. It seemed strange even to me the way I hung on to my old passport just when having one had become such a bother.
I stared angrily at the sixteen-petal golden chrysanthemum on its red cover. For a slightly disturbing moment, I thought I saw seventeen petals, though the idea that it could be genetically deformed was obviously absurd.
The suitcase I’d checked in New York did not arrive in Berlin. I went to the Lost and Found, and while I was writing down the color and shape of the suitcase, together with my address in Berlin and other necessary information, something awful occurred to me. In downtown Manhattan I’d loaded up with Japanese food that wasn’t available in Berlin, such as soba noodles made from mountain potato, fermented soybeans, seaweed in vinegar, and spicy fish roe, all of which I’d packed in my suitcase. If it was opened, those packages, covered with words in Japanese, would surely be confiscated as dangerous material and sent to a Radioactive Waste Management Facility. The fermented soybeans might even be mistaken for peanuts that had undergone some rapid mutation due to radiation.
Since 2015, when direct information from Japan was cut off, rumors and myths had been multiplying like maggots, which had hatched into flies now winging their way across the world. Because planes no longer flew to Japan, it was impossible to go there and see what was actually happening. I’d heard that one Chinese airline was planning to start flying into Okinawa, but I didn’t know yet if this was actually true.
They should have closed down all the nuclear power plants the year of the disaster in Fukushima. Why were they so slow to act, when they knew another big earthquake was inevitable? Early in the spring of 2013, when the mass media had started announcing, “The horrors of Fukushima are now over,” I spent a week in Kyoto. As a live broadcast from the emperor was scheduled for March 11—the third anniversary of the Fukushima Earthquake—both the hotel staff and all the guests were gathered in the lounge, waiting anxiously for it to begin. Naturally the guest rooms had televisions in them as well, but apparently I wasn’t the only one who didn’t want to watch this program on their own. Just as a seemingly endless commercial for gargle was beginning to get on my nerves, the screen suddenly went white, then changed to a close-up of a cotton Rising Sun flag blowing in the wind. What came on next was not the face we had been expecting, but a man with a black gauze hood over his face. The entire screen shook. The cameraman must have been trembling. Sticking his neck out toward the microphone like a turtle, the masked man said, “The emperor’s wish is that all nuclear plants should be shut down immediately.” Everyone in the hotel lounge froze. He went on reassuringly, “There is no need for concern. This is not a kidnapping. I am very closely related to the person who was to have spoken here today,” then added, “And we are all in agreement with him.” The smooth line from cheek to chin that could be detected through the mask did indeed resemble the face of the emperor doll one sees in displays on Girls’ Day.
I hurriedly left the hotel and tried to call my brother, who worked at one of the broadcasting stations, but his cell phone was turned off. Though I tried again several times during the day, I wasn’t even able to leave a message. The next day, he finally called to say that he and his family had escaped to their summer cottage in Hyogo Prefecture. As there was a possibility that right-wing terrorists would attack the station on account of the hijacked broadcast, the management had all left Tokyo with their families.
In the end, the station was not attacked. That year, the entire imperial family moved to the palace in Kyoto—as a precaution against the next big earthquake, was the official explanation. It was rumored that they were being held hostage. Unfortunately, there had been no imperial announcements since then.
What happened next was astonishing. The prime minister appeared on the NHK program Everybody Sing, and while everyone was wondering what he would perform, he loudly declared, “Next month, all nuclear power plants will be closed down. For good!” This abrupt about-face, coming from someone said to be the most hawkish of hawks, left both hawks and doves with their beaks hanging open. And he stuck to his antinuclear stance as if possessed, despite the efforts of his fellow politicians to make him change his mind: ill-prepared blowfish, home visits from heavily tattooed men, even a laser beam that made the ghost of his father appear in his bedroom to lecture him.
In time, the prime minister disappeared altogether. In more normal circumstances newscasters would have used the word assassination, but for some reason they spoke only of “kidnapping.” Yet who could have done it? Back when there was still a country called North Korea, the word kidnapping was often used, but in 2013, a militant antinuclear movement suddenly emerged in North Korea, providing the impetus for reunification with South Korea.
After a period of unrest following the prime minister’s disappearance, in 2015 the Japanese government was privatized; an organization calling itself the Z Group became the major government shareholder and began running the thing as a corporation. Television stations were taken over, and compulsory education was abolished. In Berlin, where I live, I was able for a while to learn about these goings-on in detail from news on the Internet and e-mail from friends, but eventually it became impossible to use the Internet in Japan. Not only could one no longer contact people there in this way, but Japanese websites were not updated. One couldn’t call anyone there, either, and letters came back with a post office stamp saying, “No further mail delivery to Japan.” In addition, since a German nuclear physicist published a study showing that planes landing in Japan became contaminated by nuclear fallout, there have been no more flights to the country. Although we know about the Great Pacific Earthquake that occurred in 2017, the extent of the damage can only be guessed at from the terrifying images captured by satellite cameras. The tsunami appears to have made a clean sweep from the capital down to the Izu Peninsula. Even now, six years later, the full details are not known. Fortunately, my brother’s family had already moved to Hyogo Prefecture. Though I can’t contact them directly, my instinct tells me they’re all right.
I heard a rumor that you could still fly to Japan from the United States. There was supposed to be a tiny travel company that operated out of the back room of a vegetable shop in Manhattan’s Chinatown, where you could buy a ticket to Osaka, but it didn’t have a website. Apparently, you had to go there in person, and pay for your ticket in dollars. But after flying all the way to America and following the directions to where the place was supposed to be, I found that the travel agency no longer existed. The people working in the shop told me there actually had been a travel agency operating out of their back room for a while, but one night it suddenly disappeared. Several days of wandering around the area asking people about it failed to turn up even the slightest clue. So, as there was nothing more I could do, I bought some Japanese food that had been flown in from California and went back to Germany. The suitcase I traveled with seems to have disappeared forever.
The summer I went to America, a Portuguese writer who had supposedly sneaked into Japan published a book that was eventually translated into all the European languages, and made quite a splash in the European media. I immediately bought a copy of The Strange Journey of the Grandson of Fernão Mendes Pinto, but it was like reading Gulliver’s Travels. For one thing, since Fernão Mendes Pinto lived in the sixteenth century, the author couldn’t possibly be his grandson. Also, in the introduction he said, “As a priest, I went to Japan to save the souls of people who live their lives in the face of death,” but according to one newspaper account, he entered the priesthood only immediately before setting off for Japan, having been some sort of adventurer until then. Lying is perhaps a skill that writer-adventurers have to cultivate.
This is the situation as he describes it. All those who were over a hundred years old at the time of the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe in 2011 are still alive; miraculously, not one has died. This is true not only of Fukushima, but of all the twenty-two locations in the central Kanto area that were designated as hot spots in the following years. The oldest woman, who was 120 years of age back then and is much older now, is still very much alive. When Pinto, through an interpreter, complimented her on how well she looked, she replied, “I can’t die.” It isn’t that she has somehow been rejuvenated; it seems, rather, that the radioactive material in the air has robbed her of the ability to die. Unable to sleep at night, she wakes up every morning feeling exhausted, but still has to get up and work. People who were children in 2011, however, are now falling ill one after another, and are not only unable to work, but need constant care. For even if the particles of radiation one is exposed to every day are very small, once they get into your cells and start multiplying, there are soon hundreds of times as many as before. So the younger you are, the greater the damage. But though this was well known in 2011, only a few people immediately fled with their children to southwestern Japan. Several years later, more families finally began to move to places like Okinawa or Hyogo Prefecture. Hyogo made it a policy to favor small businesses that moved in from Tokyo, and there were even some areas where people planning to build houses were given land for free. These new houses were equipped with solar energy, so blackouts were never a problem. The local mountain water was cold and pure, with no radioactive substances detected in it yet. And being close to Kyoto was another benefit: temple delicacies were served as part of the school lunch program; fine ceramics, clothing, and cushions could still be bought. The people who had moved to Hyogo by 2017 were lucky.
For the young, however, “youth” has lost its bloom. Being young now means being too feeble to walk or even stand up, with eyes that can barely see, and mouths that can barely swallow or speak. In the previous century, no one could have predicted that youth could be so painful. What with having to nurse the young and procure food for their families, the old have no energy to spare for anger or grief. In elderly hearts the pain just accumulates, taking no outward form. There are no bodies consumed by flames or rivers of blood, as shown in the hell of Buddhist scrolls with which the situation is now often compared. Patients merely slip from their grasp, however devoted their care, and the youngest die first. And before there’s time to think of the future, the next big earthquake comes along. The government assures them that there is no radiation leaking from the four newly destroyed nuclear reactors, but the government is now a private corporation, so no one knows whether or not to believe these announcements.
Pinto came to central Japan during the hottest part of August, when all the doors and windows were left wide open. Words like robber, burglar, and thief were now obsolete. Both men and women wore straw sandals on their bare feet, and commuted to work or school with bare arms and legs. At home, they wore nothing at all. Their nakedness might have made them appear uncivilized to the outside world, their land ripe for colonization, had foreign ships still been coming to Japan. Yet neither black nor white ships appeared in Japanese ports. The sea off Yokohama was dead quiet since no one ate fish or other seafood, or went swimming any longer. Having lost all contact with human beings, the water lay dark and silent. If the gifts from the sea were too dangerous for consumption, so were those from the mountains, like wild mushrooms and other mountain vegetables. In Tokyo they planted string beans and tomatoes in pots filled with cotton instead of earth, which were placed on the roofs of buildings or on verandas.
Pinto reports that there are still some forms of amusement. Every morning people line up in front of rental bookshops and, since there is no electricity to print newspapers, woodblock-printed newssheets are sold in the streets. People perch on the stoops of their houses, playing go or chess. With no television, there is nothing to do during the long evenings but read, yet as the lights go out at sundown, storytellers have appeared to recite the stories of old comic books or animated films to the accompaniment of guitars or lutes. Still, not everyone is satisfied with this weird return to life in the Edo period. Doctors determined to save the lives of victims of radiation gather swarms of fireflies and by this insect light continue after dark to pore over scientific studies and perform experiments, searching for an answer.
Although there are no more computers, pocket games that run on solar batteries are still available. The batteries are so weak, however, that the images move as slowly as actors in a Noh drama. With contests of speed and war games having naturally lost their appeal, something called the Dream Noh Game has cornered the market. The object of this game is to sort out a puzzle of spectral messages from people who died leaving things unsaid or unfulfilled, and to make a story out of them. Players then choose a suitable sutra which, on recitation, will allow the ghost entry to Nirvana. Yet as soon as one ghost disappears, another is there to take its place. The contestant who manages to keep on playing without collapsing out is the winner … although hardly anyone remembers what the word winner means anymore.
THE TOWN THAT Machiko spent part of her girlhood in was devoured by the ocean.
It was Friday afternoon. Just as she was putting the Girls’ Day dolls—which she had lazily left out for a week after the holiday—back into their wooden boxes until it was time to display them again next year, she felt a tremendous shaking, more powerful than any she’d ever experienced.
Later she learned that it had been magnitude 9.0. It was certainly frightening, with the entire apartment building swaying from side to side, but the moment she switched on the television, her concerns about possible damage in Tokyo disappeared.
A map of Japan was on the screen. It showed numbers indicating the quake’s magnitude, clustered around the Tohoku area, and moments later, reports on tsunamis appeared. The coastal areas where a “Giant Tsunami Warning” was in effect were outlined in red. The red covered the entire Pacific coastline, from Kanto through Tohoku and up to Hokkaido. The announcer said that some areas were expected to be hit by tsunamis more than three meters high. Of course she had seen “Tsunami Alert” and “Tsunami Warning,” but in her nearly fifty years, this was her first “Giant Tsunami Warning.”
The predicted height of the tsunami honestly didn’t register with her, but her gaze as she watched the TV was drawn to a single point on the map.
The town she’d lived in was in the red zone. She had spent her fourth grade—from April of one year to March of the next—in a town by the seashore, where her father’s company had transferred him. The town had a large harbor, filled with fishing boats, and you could hear the cries of seagulls throughout the town, from morning to night.
Please don’t let a tsunami hit. These tsunami warnings were usually just a matter of form, really, and later you’d laugh and say, “Well, that was a lot of fuss over nothing, wasn’t it?” The warning would be called off, the map of Japan would disappear from the TV screen, the program that had been interrupted would pick up where it had left off, and life would go on as usual. She prayed that would be the case again this time.
But the tsunami did hit the town, just as had been warned. Unlike the warning, however, it was not three meters in height. A wall of water over ten meters tall swept over the town, washing several kilometers inland.
The actual event was shown on TV several days later. It had been shot from the roof of the building housing the local fishermen’s association. A large fishing boat moored in the harbor had ridden the wave as it swept over the seawall and sped down a street alongside the building. Cars were carried away. The roofs and pillars and walls of homes crushed by the wave were thrown inland with unimaginable force, and then pulled out to sea as the wave withdrew. The video didn’t show it, but hundreds of people were also engulfed in the wave.