“Wonderful!” Onodera blurted out, impulsively covering his brother’s hand with his own. “That’s a fine idea. When do you intend to go?”
“They’d like me to start as soon as possible. But there are all sorts of things to be attended to first, and that will probably take a month or two. I think that probably next week I’ll take a trip there.”
“The sooner the better.” Onodera squeezed his brother’s hand hard. “Don’t worry about arrangements and things like that. No matter what your wife says, take the whole family and go.”
“You make it sound so simple. I’m changing jobs at forty, remember.” His brother laughed, a puzzled expression coming over his face. “Why are you so eager to see me go?”
“Well. . . Japan is . . .” Onodera stopped abruptly. He had to keep quiet, even though this was his own brother. He looked down again, but then he averted his eyes from the scene below.
There were many memories. When he was a mere toddler, he had fallen into a ditch, and his brother had pulled him out. Then there had been a shrine festival in the country, and on the way home he had fallen asleep on his brother’s back. That was the time when the thong of his brother’s clog had broken and he had had to walk home barefoot. His brother had caught beetles for him, had taken him fishing and swimming. He had taught him to play games and to build model planes and done all sorts of other things for him. His brother had been already in college when he was in elementary school, and Onodera had gazed with awe on the Western books and the difficult novels that his brother had been reading. ... It was memories such as these that were now coming back to him one after another.
Just a word. A mere word would do it—so wouldn’t it be all right? Get away, Brother . . . Japan is finished. The words stuck like a searing lump in his throat. As he gazed out through the windshield of the helicopter, Onodera coughed repeatedly. Suppose he were now to whisper something . . .
His shocked brother would immediately start preparing to leave, heedless of his wife’s complaints. And she, most likely, would demand an explanation. His patience at an end, his brother would probably say something to her, a secret between husband and wife. Or when he was about to leave Japan, over a farewell drink, when the talk would naturally take a confidential turn, he might let slip a word to a good friend or someone with whom he worked. Thus the “secret” would become some-thing that was traveling from mouth to mouth and would soon spread beyond all limits. Well, what would be wrong with that? thought Onodera, clenching his fists. This would cause people to flee spontaneously, and thus more might be saved. And yet, thought Onodera, gritting his teeth and clenching his fists so hard that his nails were beginning to draw blood, because I am part of Plan D headquarters, I must keep the secrets that come under the jurisdiction of that headquarters. I have to think that that’s the manly thing to do, but at the same time I can’t avoid the thought that it’s a matter of fleeing to organizational logic in the face of an agonizing human problem. Have I become a faithful bureaucrat? he wondered suddenly. But Onodera rejected that thought at once. The true bureaucrat, secure in his virtue, would never agonize in this way. But when he reflected that among the thousand or so men connected with Plan D there must be other distraught men like him who struggled with their emotions as they debated within themselves whether or not to let the secret out, he felt his mouth going dry. Nakata was obviously right when he said that the time was coming when the secret could no longer be kept. Already, probably, any number of them, rather than bearing the emotional burden, had told their families and were making ready to flee.
Avoiding the routes used by the airlines, the helicopter approached the airport from the northeast, steadily decreasing its altitude. Still avoiding his brother’s eyes, Onodera kept looking down. He saw the red, blue, gray roofs of close-packed houses. He saw a procession of grade-school children, wearing yellow caps, their figures wrapped in heavy winter clothes. A group of women, mothers apparently, accompanied them, guiding them across intersections. Since it was a clear, bright afternoon, quilts and washing shone white from open windows. A group of housewives in aprons, kerchiefs wound around their heads, seemed to be doing their shopping. And then, as the helicopter dropped still lower, a young mother pointed up at it, saying something to the infant she was carrying. . . . Such were the scenes that flashed by below him, a panorama flattened by the rush of the helicopter. As he watched, a gathering heaviness clogged his chest. I guess I’ve never really understood the weight of things like family and life, he thought. Now the meaning of those words for his brother, with his wife and two children, began to take form in his imagination with a painful intensity. His spirited wife, beginning to grow plump and gritting her teeth as she did her beauty calisthenics . . . the son in his first year of junior high . . . the daughter in the fourth grade, whom his brother, fond of children anyway, so doted upon that she could do no wrong in his eyes. The girl had finished second in a prefecture-wide talent contest, his brother had told him, and he had bought her a grand piano in place of the upright they had had, though his practical wife had opposed it.... Such was the joyful weight of family, of home that pressed heavily upon his brother’s shoulders.
And so it was that families like this, more than twenty million of them, led their family lives upon these islands threatened with oblivion.
This kind of flesh-and-blood human life with its specific gravity—these 20 million households—this was what had to be saved. The great effort of moving to a strange land where an uncertain future waited—could such a thing be carried out?
“Well, what are you thinking about? Let’s get out,” said his brother, tapping him on the shoulder as he unfastened his safety belt. “It’s still early, but should we get something to eat? Do you like blowfish?”
After dinner, Onodera and his brother went to a bar. His brother wanted him to stay at his home overnight, but Onodera said that he must return to Tokyo. His hotel was at the airport, and he had a reservation for the earliest flight the next day.
“Please forgive me for being unable to be at Mother’s funeral tomorrow,” he said to his brother. “I feel terrible about it. I imagine the relatives will have something to say. . . .”
“Don’t let it bother you. Leave things to me,” said his brother, putting down money for the bill and getting up. “Well then, I don’t suppose you’ll be coming back this way for a while?”
“No,” answered Onodera vaguely, oppressed by the thought of taking up again tomorrow that strange work that seemed to have no limits, “I don’t think so. But I’ll keep you up to date.”
His brother stopped at the door of the bar. He took a long, thin package from his breast pocket and handed it to Onodera: “Well, now is when I should give you this,” he said. “It’s a remembrance of Mother.”
Onodera took it and, instead of putting it in his pocket, stood holding it. Something welled up within him, but the words that came out had to do with something quite different from his thoughts.
“Brother, go to Canada. That’s the best thing,” he said once again, his voice ringing with fervor. “Believe me, it’s the best thing.”
“What an odd fellow you are!” said his brother, grinning broadly. He turned on his heel, and as he was starting to walk away, he said over his shoulder: “Instead of minding other people’s business, how about your own? Isn’t it about time you had a family? Single at thirty—you’re going to get shopworn, you know.”
They parted in front of the tavern, his brother taking Shinchihon Street toward Midosuji and he walking in the other direction, toward Sakurabashi. In the distance, the latest headlines were moving in flashing lights along the side of some building or other, the characters reading: “Fuji Hoei Crater Erupts.”
The freezing chill of the tag end of February gripped the streets, and some snow was falling, but the flourishing night life of Shinchihon Street was as vigorous at eight o’clock that evening as he remembered it from two or three years before. With March, the month all debts had to be
paid, approaching, the street was jammed with the cars of banquet-goers and expense-account spenders. And there was one party on foot, the men drunkenly singing war songs. The young hostesses, bare shoulders showing for all their winter wrappings, gave cries of distress from time to time at the naughty antics of one of the drunks. One man staggered along by himself, bundled up in an expensive overcoat. A waitress, her sleeves showing that she was wearing more than one kimono, broke into a trot as though to warm herself. At one corner a young girl was selling flowers, her hair wrapped in a scarf. Street singers stood with accordions and guitars slung from their necks. Sushi and octopus stalls were set up along the street, and it was to one of these that the hostesses were leading their drunken patrons. Steam from the noodles cooking within poured out through the door curtains of a Chinese restaurant. As Onodera plodded on, he suddenly recalled, for some reason or other, that the Omizutori would soon be enacted at Nigatsu Temple in Nara. A shudder ran through him that had nothing to do with the cold. Were these annual ceremonies to end?
He felt his awareness dimming even as his fears and passion grew stronger. All the sake he had drunk earlier had had no effect at the time, but now he found himself overwhelmed. What had he done? Standing in the midst of that crowd before —had he cried out loudly? He suddenly feared that he might have done so. Crying out to passers-by, robbed of all control by his drunkenness . . . Worst of all, grabbing a man from the crowd, shaking him by the shoulders and bellowing: “Hurry up, get away!” Was this what he had done?
Caught between the shock of drunken release and the fear that, by force of that shock, he might have done something foolish, Onodera felt desolate. He hung his head as he walked. He felt himself bump into somebody. He dodged to one side and this time collided headlong with somebody else. When he tried to disengage himself, something that looked like a purse slipped from the hand of the other person, its clasp coming loose, and its contents spilling over the street.
“Ah . . .” said Onodera, shaking his heavy head, his features swollen. “Excuse me . . . please.”
When he bent over and tried to pick up the compact, handkerchief, lipstick, and the rest, he tottered forward, almost falling on his face, catching himself then, but this time nearly falling on his back. Finally, as he squatted on the street, he suddenly heard a voice call from above.
“Mr. Onodera . . .”
“Huh?”
Onodera made out a pair of shiny black women’s shoes somewhere below his hanging head. Higher up, he saw as he slowly raised his eyes, was a pair of black velvet slacks. And at that moment a hand gently touched his shoulder as he squatted there.
“How I’ve been looking for you!” said the owner of the hand in a voice suddenly filled with emotion. “I want to talk to you.”
Feeling as though his skull were on the verge of splitting, Onodera finally lifted his head and, with great effort, opened his swollen eyelids.
A woman’s strong-featured face was smiling at him. Her skin was dark and her hair was bound in a headband. It was Reiko Abe.
6
“The lateral pressure from the Japan Sea coast is getting awfully strong,” muttered Nakata, peering at the three-dimensional light image of the Japan Archipelago suspended within the block screen and surrounded by a vast variety of colored dots and lines. “It’s more than we bargained for.”
“And on the sea floor the elevation of the Yamato Rise, together with the intensity of its earth heat waves, has increased three times in the past week,” said a young man from the Weather Service in a low voice. “There’ll be eruptions, perhaps.”
“There’s quite a lot of energy stored up in the Noto Peninsula,” said Mashita, a university professor from the Earthquake Research Bureau, as he scanned the block screen with a polarized-light scope. “The portion to the north of the Hakui-Manao line is moving eastward. There might soon be an earthquake.”
“More so than that, how about this energy that’s gathered along the Itoigawa-Shizuoka structural line?” said a man from the National Geological Institute, his voice somewhat hoarse as he pointed to the block screen. “According to our calculations, even though the limit of earth-crust flexibility has already been passed, the build-up of energy is continuing, going well beyond the theoretical limit.”
“What do you think, Mr. Nakata?” asked Mashita. “It seems to me that, whatever else, we have to conclude that some phenomenon previously unknown to us is at work beneath the Japan Archipelago. In effect it’s as though a portion of the downward current of the mantle is passing beneath the Archipelago and is beginning to jut out on the Japan Sea side.”
“Yes, so it seems. Tonight we’ll run a thoroughgoing simulation and see what we can come up with.”
Five men, including Yukinaga, were constantly at work in the Display Room. The Defense Agency computer, which handled the complex calculations, was not available to them during the day, and so yet another sleepless night was in prospect.
The evening was spent in preparation. In the room were seven cathode-ray-tube devices connected to the computer. Yukinaga, besides working one of the CRTs, had the task of running the videotape recorder cameras which photographed the block screen from different views. Finally, some time after two in the morning, Nakata stood in front of the huge plastic block and gave the signal to begin.
No more than two minutes had passed, however, before he gave a startled cry: “Stop! Come here and take a look at this.”
Yukinaga, after manipulating the buttons on the control board to stop the action, came running up to the screen, joined by the others. They all peered into the plastic block. Yukinaga caught his breath. The three-dimensional pattern of the Japan Archipelago, drawn in pale glowing phosphorescent lines, had broken in two at its center and tipped to one side. The sheet of light that indicated energy distribution, varying from orange to red, surrounded the tipped mass of the Archipelago, pulsating in sinister fashion, now weakly, now strongly.
“Has Japan already sunk?” asked Yukinaga, his voice shaking.
“Completely sunk,” muttered Nakata grimly. “Furthermore, before it sinks, it will break in two.”
“Isn’t that a bit fast?” said Mashita, looking at his watch, his face white. “Couldn’t there have been some error in the time scale?”
“No chance of that,” said the young man from the Weather Service, glancing back at his CRT. “The scale was the usual: 3.6 × 104 . . . 36,000 seconds. One second being equivalent to about one hundred hours.”
“Give me a reading on the time up to this point.”
“120.32 seconds,” said the young man. “Therefore, 11,232 hours.”
“11,200 hours,” Yukinaga muttered. “Why, that’s . . .”
“A year and three months, I believe,” said Nakata, rapping the display block with his fingers. “Let’s take a closer look at it, from the very beginning. This time let’s drop the time scale to a quarter of what it was. 0.9 × 104—one second equals twenty-five hours.”
Everyone hurried back to his post. The phosphorescent image in the block faded from sight, and they were back at the beginning.
The needle on the illuminated clock began to revolve, the ping of each second sending a chill through the silent room. Then came the tapping of CRT keys and the noise of electronic printers. Finally, much more deliberately than before, the three-dimensional image began to move. As though in slow motion, unfolding leisurely as scattered red lights, orange lights, yellow lights flashed on and off like will-o’-the-wisps. In the midst of these bright points a pulsating sheet of multicolored light took form. Waving as it came, it fastened itself to the long, arc-shaped light image and began to contract upon it. Its ill-omened beauty was like that of a huge, luminescent devilfish attacking the pale, glowing form of the Japan Archipelago.
The first movements of the light image were almost undiscernible. As the intervals between flashes decreased., the points of lights began to form lines. The yellows and oranges began to decrease, and the reds gradually increase
d, growing ever more intense.
“Stop!” cried Nakata once more.
“How much time up to here?”
“302 seconds, exactly.”
“Yukinaga, from here on, besides the VTR, take photos of each quadrant. . . every two seconds. And let’s halve the time scale.”
“Wouldn’t it be better to drop it to a quarter?” somebody asked.
“If you lower it any more, I don’t think the detail would be clear enough. All right, start it.”
Yukinaga threw the switches, and the second hand of the illuminated clock began to turn again. The tension in the room grew still more acute. The lights blinked slowly, and the waving of the light curtain took on a torpid, dreamlike quality. Only the busy whir of the six camera shutters intruded. The gleam of the red lights grew still stronger, the points growing together. They were like strings of red jewels laid against the coast of the Japan Sea and along both sides of the Izu and the Ogasawara Islands. Along the Pacific coast, following the line of the Japan Trench, a two-layered mass of glowing light took form, the upper green, the lower a vivid scarlet, steadily growing brighter.
“What’s that?” asked the geologist in a whisper. “I didn’t notice it before.”
“The green indicates the deficiency of the mass, an integral calculus with the gravitational irregularity,” said Yukinaga.
“Keep watching,” Nakata said in a low voice.
“Look! Beneath the Archipelago there.”
Two hundred kilometers beneath the surface, the layer of red light under the green seemed to be passing beneath the Archipelago in the form of flowing pink stripes. When these reached the Japan Sea coastline, their brightness grew more intense and they formed specks of light.
“What about those stripes?” asked Mashita in a whisper. “What can they mean? Could energy move that quickly at such a depth—all the way past the Japan Sea coastline?”
Japan Sinks Page 15