by Ruth Ozeki
But old Jiko wasn’t paying any attention. She was concentrating on selecting the flavors of our rice balls, and eventually she decided on sour plums, flavored seaweed, and spicy cod roe. She wanted me to choose a chocolate treat, either Pocky or Melty Kisses or both, but how could I focus on something so unimportant? I had to protect us from our enemies outside the door, even if she was too old and blind to comprehend the danger we were in, and I was trying to calculate my chances of fighting off a dozen yanki bitches with serious sticks, when all I had was my pathetic little supapawa!
It took forever for Jiko to pay the cashier—you know how it is with old people and their coin purses—but I didn’t mind, or offer to help. I was kind of hoping that maybe she would take all day, and by the time we’d finished, the gang would have gone, but no such luck. They were still there, squatting on the pavement, and the minute we walked out of the store, they kind of locked on to us, spitting and sizing us up. I tried to hurry Jiko past them, but you know old Jiko. She always takes her time.
The girls started calling out, and as we got closer their cries grew louder and more screechy, and a couple of the squatting ones got to their feet. I moved in front, but when we were even with them, suddenly old Jiko stopped. She turned to face them, peering as if she was noticing them for the first time, and then she tugged on my hand and started shuffling in their direction.
I held back, whispering, “Dame da yo, Obaachama! Iko yo!”117 but she didn’t listen. She went up and stood right in front of them and gave them a long look, which is how she looks at everything. Long and steady, probably on account of the time it takes for an image to form through the milky lenses of her cataracts. The girls, in their neon-colored pants and blue and orange and red mechanical coats with the big black kanji, must just have been a confusion of lines and bright colors to her eyes.
No one said anything. The girls were jutting out their chins and hips and shifting restlessly from side to side. Finally, I guess old Jiko understood what she was looking at. She dropped my hand and I held my breath. And then she bowed.
I couldn’t believe it. It wasn’t a little bow, either. It was a deep bow. The girls were, like, what the fuck? One of them, a fat girl squatting in front, kind of nodded back—not quite a bow, not completely respectful, but not a punch in the face either. But then the tall one in the middle, who was clearly the girl boss, reached over and gave the fat one a swift punch in the head.
“Nameten no ka!” she snarled. “Chutohampa nan da yo. Chanto ojigi mo dekinei no ka?!”118
She smacked the fat girl once more, and then she stood up straight, put her palms together, and bowed deeply from the waist. The rest of her crew jumped up and did the same. Jiko bowed to them again, and nudged me, so I bowed, too, but I did it half-assed, so she made me do it again, which made things even because now it was like old Jiko was the girl boss of our gang, and I was the fat screwup who couldn’t bow properly. I didn’t think this was so funny, but the gangbangers thought it was hilarious, and Jiko smiled, too, and then she took my hand and we walked on. When the bus came, Jiko sat by the window and looked back out at the parking lot.
“I wonder what omatsuri119 it is today?” she said.
“Omatsuri?”
“Yes,” she said. “Those pretty young people, dressed up in their matsuri clothes. They look so gay. I wonder what the occasion is. Muji remembers these things for me . . .”
“It’s not a matsuri! Those were gangbangers, Granny. Biker chicks. Yanki girls.”
“They were girls?”
“Bad girls. Juvenile delinquents. They were saying stuff. I thought they were going to beat us up.”
“Oh no,” Jiko said, shaking her head. “They were all dressed so nicely. Such cheerful colors.”
2.
“Have you ever bullied a wave?” Jiko asked me at the beach.
We had eaten rice balls and chocolate and were hanging out. Jiko was sitting on a small wooden bench, and I was lying on the sand at her feet. The sun was beating down. Jiko had tied a damp white hand towel around her bald head and seemed as cool as a cucumber in her grey pajamas. I was hot and sweaty and feeling restless, but I hadn’t brought a bathing suit and didn’t really want to go for a swim. But that’s not what she was asking.
“Bullied a wave?” I repeated. “No. Of course not.”
“Try it. Go to the water and wait for the biggest wave and give it a punch. Give it a good kick. Hit it with a stick. Go on. I will watch.” She handed me her walking stick.
There was no one around, except for a couple of surfers way down the beach. I took old Jiko’s stick in my hand and walked and then ran to the edge of the ocean, waving it above my head like a kendo sword. The waves were big, breaking on the beach, and I ran into the first one that came at me, yelling kiayeeeee! like a samurai going into battle. I smacked the wave with the stick, cutting through it, but the water kept coming. I ran back up the beach and escaped, but the next one knocked me over. I got to my feet and attacked again and again, and each time the water crashed down on top of me, grinding me against the rocks and covering me with foam and sand. I didn’t mind. The sharp cold felt good, and the violence of the waves felt powerful and real, and the bitterness of salt in my nose tasted harshly delicious.
Over and over, I ran at the sea, beating it until I was so tired I could barely stand. And then the next time I fell down, I just lay there and let the waves wash over me, and I wondered what would happen if I stopped trying to get back up. Just let my body go. Would I be washed out to sea? The sharks would eat my limbs and organs. Little fish would feed on my fingertips. My beautiful white bones would fall to the bottom of the ocean, where anemones would grow upon them like flowers. Pearls would rest in my eye sockets. I stood up and walked back to where old Jiko was sitting. She took the small towel from her head and handed it to me.
“Maketa,” I said, throwing myself down in the sand. “I lost. The ocean won.”
She smiled. “Was it a good feeling?”
“Mm,” I said.
“That’s good,” she said. “Have another rice ball?”
3.
We sat there for a while longer, waiting for my shorts and T-shirt to dry. Down the beach, in the distance, the surfers kept falling into the water and disappearing.
“The waves keep beating them up, too,” I said, pointing.
Jiko squinted, but she couldn’t see them through her flowers of emptiness.
“There,” I said. “See that one? He’s just standing up . . . he’s up . . . he’s up . . . oh, he’s down.” I laughed. It was funny to watch.
Jiko nodded, like she was agreeing with me. “Up, down, same thing,” she said.
It’s a typical Jiko comment, all about pointing to what she calls the not-two120 nature of existence when I’m just trying to watch some cute guys surfing. I know better than to argue with her, because she always wins, but it’s like a knock-knock joke, where you have to say “Who’s there?” so the other person can tell you the punch line. So I said, “No, it’s not the same thing. Not for a surfer.”
“Yes,” she said. “You are right. Not same.” She adjusted her glasses. “Not different, either.”
See what I mean?
“It is different, Granny. The whole point of surfing is to stand on top of the wave, not underneath it.”
“Surfer, wave, same thing.”
I don’t know why I bother. “That’s just stupid,” I said. “A surfer’s a person. A wave is a wave. How can they be the same?”
Jiko looked out across the ocean to where the water met the sky. “A wave is born from deep conditions of the ocean,” she said. “A person is born from deep conditions of the world. A person pokes up from the world and rolls along like a wave, until it is time to sink down again. Up, down. Person, wave.”
She pointed to the steep cliffs along the shoreline. “Jiko, mountain, same thing. The mountain is tall and will live a long time. Jiko is small and will not live much longer. That’s all.”
It was time to go back to the temple. My shorts and T-shirt had dried out and my skin was superitchy from the salt. I helped Jiko to her feet and we walked back to the bus stop together, holding hands again. I was still thinking about what she said about waves, and it made me sad because I knew that her little wave was not going to last and soon she would join the sea again, and even though I know you can’t hold on to water, still I gripped her fingers a little more tightly to keep her from leaking away.
Ruth
1.
You can’t hold on to water or keep it from leaking away. This was a lesson that Tepco learned in the weeks following the tsunami, when they pumped thousands of tons of seawater into the reactor vessels at the Fukushima nuclear plant in an attempt to cool the fuel rods and prevent the reactor meltdowns that in fact had already happened. They called it the “feed and bleed” strategy, and it created about 500 tons of highly radioactive water each day—water that needed to be contained and kept from leaking.
On the opposite side of the Pacific, Ruth pored over reports of the disaster. The International Atomic Energy Agency, which was monitoring the situation, published the daily 2011 Fukushima Nuclear Accident Update Log, describing the details of the desperate efforts to stabilize the reactors. Here’s a very short excerpt from the April 3 log:
On 2 April, transferring of water from the Unit 1 condenser storage tank to the surge tank of the suppression pool was completed in preparation for transferring water in the basement of the Unit 1 turbine building to the condenser.
Also on 2 April, transferring of water from the Unit 2 condenser to the condenser storage tank was started in preparation for transferring water in the basement of the Unit 1 turbine building to the condenser.
Paragraph after paragraph, page after page, the log detailed the intricate system of pumps and drains, surge tanks and feed-water lines, intakes and injection lines, suppression pools and pits, flow rates and leakage paths, trenches and tunnels and flooded basements, that were being used to hold on to the water.
This Update Log of April 3 was the first to mention a crack, discovered in the side wall of a containment pit below Reactor #2, next to the seawater inlet point. High concentrations of radioactive iodine-131 and cesium-137 were found in samples of seawater as far away as thirty kilometers from the reactors, with levels measuring tens of thousands of times higher than before the accident. The containment pit was leaking what The New York Times later reported to be rivers of highly radioactive water, which flowed directly into the sea.
On April 4, the Update Log reported that Tepco received permission from the Japanese government to release 11,500 tons of contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean. That much water is roughly equivalent to the contents of five Olympic swimming pools.
On April 5, the Update Log noted that the dumping had begun. It lasted for five days.
The radioactive levels of the contaminated water were about a hundred times over the legal limits, but the Pacific Ocean is vast and wide, and Tepco didn’t foresee a problem. According to the Update Log, the company estimated that a member of the public, eating seaweed and seafood harvested from nearby the nuclear plant every day for a year, would receive an additional annual radiation dose of 0.6 millisieverts, well below the level that would be dangerous to human health. The company didn’t estimate the consequences to the fish.
Information is a lot like water; it’s hard to hold on to, and hard to keep from leaking away. Tepco and the Japanese government tried to contain the news of the reactor meltdown, and for a while they were successful in covering up crucial data about dangerous radiation levels in the region surrounding the crippled plant, but eventually the information began to leak. Japanese people pride themselves on being stoic and slow to anger, but the ongoing disclosures of mismanagement, lies, and cover-up touched a deep core of rage.
2.
In medieval Japan, people used to believe that earthquakes were caused by an angry catfish who lived under the islands.
In the earliest legends, the mono-iu sakana, or “Saying-things Fish,” ruled the lakes and rivers. This supernatural fish could shapeshift into human form and speak in human tongues, and if any humans trespassed against his watery realm, he would appear to them and deliver a warning. If the offenders failed to heed this warning, the enraged mono-iu sakana would punish them by sending a flood or some other natural disaster.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, the mono-iu sakana had morphed into the jishin namazu, or Earthquake Catfish, an enormous whalelike creature who caused the earth to shake and tremble by his furious thrashing. The only thing holding him in check was a large stone wielded by the Kashima Deity, who lives at the Kashima Shrine.
This stone is called the kaname-ishi, an untranslatable Japanese term that means something like “keystone” or “rivet stone” or “lodestone.” The Kashima Deity uses the kaname-ishi to immobilize the catfish by pinning its head to the ground. If the Kashima Deity dozes off or gets distracted, or is called away on business, the pressure on the catfish’s head is released, allowing it to wiggle and thrash. The result is an earthquake.
If you go to the Kashima Shrine, you won’t see much, since most of the stone is buried underground. A small roofed enclosure shelters a bare patch of earth, from which a small, round stone, about twelve inches in diameter, emerges from the earth like the crowning skull of an infant, trying to be born. It’s impossible to know how big the stone might be underneath the earth. How amazing to think that the fate of the Japanese islands rests on the assumption that the buried and largely invisible crowning keystone is large and hefty enough to subdue an angry earthquake catfish!
3.
The Earthquake Catfish is not solely a malevolent fish, despite the havoc and calamity it can wreak. It has benevolent aspects as well. A subspecies of the Earthquake Catfish is the yonaoshi namazu or World-Rectifying Catfish, which is able to heal the political and economic corruption in society by shaking things up.
Belief in the World-Rectifying Catfish was especially prevalent during the early nineteenth century, a period characterized by a weak, ineffective government and a powerful business class, as well as extreme and anomalous weather patterns, crop failures, famine, hoarding, urban riots, and mass religious pilgrimages, which often ended in mob violence.
The World-Rectifying Catfish targeted the business class, the 1 percent, whose rampant practices of price-fixing, hoarding, and graft had led to economic stagnation and political corruption. The angry catfish would cause an earthquake, wreaking havoc and destruction, and in order to rebuild, the wealthy would have to let go of their assets, which would create jobs in salvage, rubble-clearing, and construction for the working classes. The redistribution of wealth is illustrated in satirical drawings of the time, which depict the World-Rectifying Catfish forcing wealthy merchants and CEOs to vomit and shit out gold coins, which are being pocketed by laborers.
But sadly, earthquakes result in collateral damage, and often the catfish is filled with remorse. In one poignant drawing, seppuku namazu, the Suicide Catfish, slices open his stomach to atone for all the deaths he’s caused. Gold coins pour from the wide slit in his belly. In one hand, he’s gripping the ritual disemboweling knife that he has thrust into his stomach. In the other, he’s holding a gold bar and offering it up to a group of humans, while overhead, the Kashima Deity and the spirits of the dead look on.
4.
The association between catfish and earthquakes has persisted into modern times. The Yure Kuru mobile phone app warns users of a coming earthquake, providing information about the location of its epicenter, the arrival time, and the seismic intensity. Yure Kuru means “Shaking Coming,” and the app’s logo is a cartoon catfish with a goofy smile and two lightning bolts coming out of his head.
“That’s cute,” Oliver said, reaching for his iPhone. “We should have that. We’re due for a big one here. I wonder if it’ll work in Whaletown.”
They were sitting in front of the fire in the living room after a dinner of clam-and-oyster chowder, fresh-baked rosemary bread, and a salad of tender young kale and spicy mustard greens from the greenhouse. It was still only February, but Oliver was managing to keep them supplied with fresh greens even during the winter months.
“In Stuttgart, where my parents grew up, they had gigantic catfish that lived at the bottom of the river Neckar. Nobody ever saw them except right before an earthquake, when the catfish would rise to the surface. Huge, whiskery things, weighing up to two hundred pounds.”
“Were they really that big?”
“That’s what my dad said, but they’re pretty much all fished out now. You don’t see catfish that big anymore, except in Chernobyl. There’s a bunch of them that live in the channel that used to bring cooling water to the condensers in the reactor. They hang out under the railway bridge. Nobody fishes there anymore, so the catfish thrive. They’ve gotten really enormous, some even twelve or thirteen feet long. They’re bottom-feeders, and apparently the mud still contains a lot of radioactive particles, but the catfish don’t seem to mind.”
Ruth thought once again about the clams. She had been purging them on the porch for twenty-four hours to get them to expel the mud and sand. She had a technique, which entailed soaking them in buckets of seawater, to which she’d add a handful of cornmeal and a rusty nail. She’d agitate the water several times a day, and change the water after twelve hours.
She’d read about this method in a novel, but she’d forgotten which one. She seemed to recall it was a story about a family with a summer house in Maine or Massachusetts or possibly Rhode Island. An East Coast enclave of beautiful summer people, with lanky golden children and a comfortable lifestyle, and a mother who knew how to make bivalves spit. The clams that this beautiful New England family ate would have no unpleasant grit to grind between their strong, white teeth. Maybe it was the Hamptons. Memory is a funny thing. The mother’s technique to achieve this grit-free end had stayed with Ruth, even though she had forgotten the plot of the novel, or why the technique was effective.