Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey (14 page)

People came and went. Cups were refilled with coffee or tea and redistributed. We ran out of cups. Children came home from school and playfully tackled the priests. Late in the day, Kaneta motioned to me and to the young Pure Land priest, Tokita, to follow him to visit a woman, whom I will call Maruyama. She had spent the better part of two hours speaking to Tokita, and she now wanted Kaneta’s help too.

We followed Maruyama out of the community building to the door of her home. She was a plump lady with a full, fleshy face and short hair. Her voice was soft and high. One hand was in a cast. She had asked for Kaneta’s help because she saw her deceased mother night after night and was tormented by nightmares.

Maruyama’s home was less of a home and more of an enlarged closet into which she had desperately stuffed mementos from a former life. Mashed into the space were a bicycle, an actual Western-style metal bedframe (most people use futon mattresses, which can
be folded up during the day and put away to create more space), a portrait of her mother dressed as a beauty queen, numerous cardboard boxes, a shrine to her mother, photographs, cards, medication, jewelry, and other small items Maruyama had managed to rescue from the ruins of her home.

There was something almost adolescent about Maruyama, and I was shocked to learn that she was fifty-six years old. In a childlike voice, she helplessly gave herself over to the story of the tsunami. She had lived with her mother in Ishinomaki, where the two of them ran a restaurant. Both had been home during the earthquake. Then the tsunami alarm had sounded.

As Maruyama spoke, I found myself struggling to follow her narrative. At first I thought this was because of my imperfect Japanese. Later, others told me that they had also struggled to follow her story in a linear fashion. One moment she was remembering the earthquake, and in the next she said that her mother promised to evacuate the home after she went to the bathroom. They agreed to meet each other at the local funeral parlor. Maruyama watched the bathroom door close, and then she left the house, got into her car, and drove off.

From here, the story leapt to Maruyama stuck in traffic. She said she looked around and saw that everyone else driving a car was frantically circling their arms. “Like this,” she said, turning her arm around and around, as one does when manually opening a car window. Or, perhaps, to signal to someone else that they must hurry. From here the story leapt forward in time again. Maruyama said that she was in the water, and that she was drowning. A boat came by, and people screamed at her as they lowered a pole—the kind used to hang laundry—and told her to grab it. “Whatever you do, don’t let go,” they yelled. “We will never let go. Your job is to hang on.” So she hung on to the pole, on the side of the boat.

The water rushed in all around. It was filthy and dark and cold,
and at points only her face and hands were out of the water; the rest of her body struggled against the current. She thought to herself that she could not hang on, even as the people on the boat continued to scream at her not to let go. She was certain she would die. All of a sudden, she said, the specter of her mother came rushing at her with the water. It came straight toward her and then passed through her, and she knew that her mother had died.

She wasn’t sure how long she held on, or even how she ultimately recovered from the water. At some point, though, she found herself in a temporary shelter, searching for the remains of her mother. She went back to her home and found that it was only partially damaged. She wanted to remove a silk kimono from one of the closets so she would be able to bury her mother in the finest outfit they had owned, but thieves had ransacked the house and taken anything of value.

I gasped at this. The stories we were told in the West were only of how unselfish and cooperative the Japanese had been.

Here Maruyama broke from the earnest, trance-like persona she had adopted to say to me, in a slightly lower and more adult voice, “Yes. Really. This is Japan today. This is how we now are.” Around me, everyone, including Kaneta, nodded. Then, like a medium, Maruyama resumed her story in her girlish, childlike voice. Workers had not found her mother’s body right away; it had taken ten days or more. When Maruyama saw the body in a makeshift hospital, it was completely naked.

She had then tried to get her mother’s remains cremated, but the local crematorium was inundated with bodies. There was a wait of two weeks. The body was beginning to decompose. There was not enough electricity or dry ice to keep all the bodies preserved. In desperation, she arranged to have the remains driven to Kurihara.

“You came to Kurihara?” Kaneta brightened.

“Yes. That’s where we were finally able to cremate her.”

“Oh, well. Then I was at your mother’s funeral,” he beamed. “I thought you looked familiar. I did almost all the cremations there. Night and day,” he said. Then he shook his head and put his hand to his forehead. “Oh. That was such an awful time.
Taihen deshita
. Wasn’t that just awful!” he exclaimed and laughed again, in his patented way of mocking absurdity. He shook his head and tut-tutted.

Maruyama continued. Now her mother came to see her at night. Here the narrative became fractured again. Maruyama thought she should have saved her mother, but her mother had wanted to use the toilet. At night, Maruyama had nightmares. She saw people waving their arms in circles. “Look,” she said, “I hurt myself in the middle of the night.” She pulled out her cell phone and showed us pictures of her arm before it had been put in a cast. “Look how swollen my arm is,” she said with wonder. But there were nice things. She received emails, for example, from someone in Canada. This was a nice thing. But there were so many bad things. There were levels of disparity in the temporary housing. Anyone with any money or any family had left. One by one, people were leaving. And then there were people like her who were left behind. She wanted the world to know that there were still hundreds of people like her who were left behind.

While Maruyama was speaking, I found myself trying to do my very best imitation of Morita. I was listening with all the empathy that I could. And yet the story did not stop. I was not able to get more than a word in edgewise. I thought to myself that this was how madness must be. A whirlpool. How would any of us ever manage to get out of the house? Then—how selfish was I for wanting to escape?

“Do you know,” Maruyama pressed, “what you hear when a tsunami comes? You hear car horns. I still hear the car horns. I thought that it was car horns because people were honking at me to get out of their way, and I was so irritated because I couldn’t get my car
to move. But they weren’t honking. The cars were flooded. That is the last sound you hear when a car is flooded with water. The pressure of the water hits the horn, and it honks and honks until finally the car is so damaged it cannot make a sound.”

“All right!” Kaneta said abruptly. Very quickly he put his priest’s over-apron on and pulled a rosary out of his pocket. The effect was of Moses parting the Red Sea, of a wizard holding up his hands to stop the mischievous machinations of a growing swarm of unruly spirits. Just like that, Maruyama stopped speaking.

Kaneta strode over to the shrine and, peering over the top of his glasses, inspected the portrait of Maruyama’s mother. “Yes, I think I remember her.” He shook his head. “It was a very hard time for me too, you know. What a total pain this tsunami has been.” He nodded at Tokita, the young priest who was with us, and asked him which sutras he knew. Tokita, who had also been cast under Maruyama’s spell, shook his head and snapped to attention. They entered the safe haven of priest-speak, settled on a sutra, and began to chant aloud.

When it was over, Kaneta promised Maruyama that he would return to check on her, then ushered me out of the building.

“So. Kind of intense, wasn’t it, Marie? You okay?”

I nodded.

“And you, Tokita, good job, but next time limit yourself to one hour. One hour! That’s all the time you should ever give anyone. More than that and you yourself start to go crazy.”

“Yes. Okay.” Tokita looked exhausted.

“Her problems are not unusual.” Kaneta shook his head. “What a god-damned mess.”

“I was thinking,” I said, “she probably had some problems before the tsunami.”

“Undoubtedly. Yes, yes,” he nodded. “She comes from a very
good family. But now . . . there is no one.” I had felt Maruyama’s panic in the tiny, claustrophobic temporary house, and now as I tried to breathe deeply, I also recognized something in her madness: I saw my own grief and the way it had pervaded and unsettled my life for the past three years.

“Do you think maybe a counselor would help . . . ?”

“Everyone would benefit from counseling,” Kaneta said, stopping suddenly. He wasn’t smiling now. He looked somber. Sorrowful. I worried for a moment that he might cry. His voice dipped in pitch and sounded almost angry. “The best help would be psychological care, plus the kind of activities that I provide. All across Japan people have been suffering for a long time. A long time. And the tsunami has revealed our modern problems, and the limitations of how we now care for each other. This is what has happened to our country.”

K
ANETA PRESSED ON
the rest of the afternoon. He seemed to be everywhere all at once; I saw him in a corner with a widow, holding her around the shoulders and gripping her hand, then again with a group of men guffawing in Japanese-man style, and then instructing a group of children to behave and not to cause their mothers any trouble. He told me later that this was his first visit to this particular temporary housing community, and that the number of people who had come to see him had overwhelmed him. He also confided that after visits like the one today, he would be exhausted. He considered his work to be a kind of showmanship. He would not demonstrate anything but strength to the tsunami survivors. But at home, he said, he would sleep and sleep.

I will never forget one of the final things he said to me that day. “You know,” he said, “the people who have it the worst are
the people who aren’t here in the temporary housing. The people I worry about most are the people who are far away, and who saw the tsunami on TV and feel scared, but aren’t actually living among survivors. That is who is most afraid. And that is who is hardest to reach.”

FOUR

W
INTER
D
EMONS

T
HE TSUNAMI HIT AT
the end of winter, the season that brings the great unknown. The Japanese learned from Chinese cosmologists to associate winter with death, the north, the color black, and the element of water.

You will be hard-pressed to find any hotel in Japan in which the head of the bed faces north. If you stay in a traditional hotel, called a
ryokan
, a maid will spread out your futon, but she will make sure your pillow does not point north. Only the dead are laid out with their heads to the north because this is the direction souls go when they die. There are exceptions, as there always are in Japan. My Japanese grandfather, a colorful but often very difficult character, liked to sleep with his head pointing to the north. He said it calmed him.

The Great East Japan Earthquake struck T
hoku at 2:46 p.m. on March 11, 2011. At 3:12 p.m., twenty-two-foot-high waves hit the city of Kamaishi, killing over twelve hundred people. Monstrous waves barreled farther down the T
hoku coast, killing nearly two thousand people in Rikuzentakata and over three thousand in Ishinomaki. The waves were black and composed of what the Japanese call the
hedoro
, the dark, smelly, dirty underbelly of the sea that normally lies dormant on the ocean floor. The last officially documented wave was fourteen feet high, and it struck
arai, about
eighty-one miles northeast of T
ky
, at 4:42 p.m. Here, only one person was killed. That evening, the sun set at 5:45, and the temperature in T
hoku dropped below freezing over night. All told, more than eighteen thousand people died that afternoon and evening, most by drowning. Five days later, with much of T
hoku still cut off from power, and numerous roads damaged, it snowed, further hampering rescue and recovery efforts.