Horses, Horses, in the End the Light Remains Pure

by Hideo Furukawa

  “In this world,” he began the song, “with twisted bodies, we’re gonna keep running,”

  Pelted by radioactive rain

  We’re gonna keep dancing

  To the beat of this rain that does not stop

  To the dance beat that does not stop

  And again

  Crank it up a notch

  He had written this song some years ago now, a song that I was a big fan of from the first time I had heard it and now, standing in this club listening, it brought me to the verge of tears. April 9, around nine-thirty or ten p.m. Perhaps there are tears that don’t fall as tears. I was crying. I was thinking about my next steps. The actual party was scheduled to follow the performance. Someone came up next to me and started talking. It was the rep from the CD company. He began by saying, “You know, this kid K,” referring to my friend by name, “has been worried about whether to sing this song or not for the encore. He’s been talking about it for days, was talking about it right up until performance time. I told him he should. But you know, Furukawa-san, he was so troubled because he knew you were going to be here today. K was worried about playing this song in your presence; he was worried about the appropriateness of singing this with you in the audience.” I was surprised by this; I was surprised but responded anyway: “I am really glad he performed it.” And further, “It was a song that needed to be performed; I’m so glad he did.”

  All my friends know that I am from Fukushima. I talked to K about all this later. I discussed it with the other band members, talked to other friends who were at the performance, had talked to other people I know. I had lots of friends in the audience, all of them young, ten years younger than me, fifteen years younger, some even younger than that. Over the years I have been involved in a wide variety of collaborations across the music, dance, and art fields. It seems to me that the intensity (or the potential—it’s hard to put a name to it) of literature can be elevated by undertaking joint projects with artists who express themselves in different forms. Might simply be a way to expand readership. I want to deliver novels that are fresh. So with all these sorts of activities the number of “colleagues” seems to keep increasing. On that day, after two or three hours of drinking with everyone, I felt the growing presence of a certain truth, a certain reality: was I not, to these younger “colleagues,” to these people I know, something of an older brother?

  Someone came over to talk with me about love, about how to live after the disasters. My answers were sincere. Like always, I am nothing if not sincere. Even if, as is so often the case, that marks me as an idiot.

  There are two main characters in The Holy Family mega-novel, the older brother and the younger brother. It seems to me that I consistently projected myself onto the younger brother. I am the youngest of three brothers, after all. I was aware of this, and with that self-awareness I plowed forward with my writing (at least that was my intent). But maybe I have things mixed up. Do I really have none of the qualities of an older brother? Lucky for me that I am close to my nieces and nephews. They all call me Hideo-anchan—as in “older brother” rather than “uncle.” That should count, right? They are all adults now, all in their twenties, but one of my nephews, back when he was three or four would say to me: “Hideo-anchan, when are you coming back to Kōriyama? Come back soon! Then we can play together again!” “Wow,” I thought to myself, “I’m not just an ‘older brother’ but it’s like I’m the ‘eldest!’ ” It’s like I am the eldest brother in some invisible family.

  The name of the eldest brother who appears in The Holy Family is Gyūichirō, with those characters for “cow” and “first born.” The family name is Inuzuka, with one character for dogs and one for burial mounds. A grave for dogs.

  Another major aftershock; today’s manuscript—a half a day’s writing—goes into the trash. The Earthquake Early Warning system announced: “In the Hamadōri section of Fukushima Prefecture, strongest tremors at six-plus on the seismic intensity scale.” I steeled myself. It was later reported that it was strongest in northern Ibaraki, a weak five on the scale. In Iwaki, four. But what does it mean to feel relieved at a time like that? A weak five is still pretty powerful. Do we really need to grow accustomed to this, and find no threat in anything lower than six? Hard to imagine.

  For the past three days the hypocenter of practically all the tremors has been on the prefectural border of Fukushima and Ibaraki. Deep underground there.

  Now that I’ve remembered, or become newly aware of the dates, if I am going to put them in, I might as well go the whole way. And if that is the case, I’m going to try a rewrite of that manuscript that I threw away. But I’m going to ignore the chronology. I’m going to work backward and work against the flow. I think there was a small event in Kyoto on Sunday, April 10. There was a charity event for the disaster, although no one was saying “for the disaster.” I received information about it on April 1. Somebody had forwarded me the e-mail announcement because the original sender—the owner of a bookstore in Kyoto’s Sakyo ward—didn’t have my address. Three years earlier—that would be fall of 2008—there had been a release party for The Holy Family there. We had had dinner together. A young guy. He said he had read a short piece that I had written and published in a guest column for the local Kyoto Shinbun News. He latched on to one of my phrases and decided to host an event. “Using imagination for good” was the phrase. Some of my comments had appeared in the Kyoto Shinbun News of March 16. The comments had been sent via the press agency. I wrote back directly to the bookshop owner. I wanted to express my thanks.

  Moving back two Sundays before that April 10, to March 27, I participated in an event in Tokyo. The organizer wrote prose. My invitation to participate came from a poet and essayist who writes in a way that gets beyond the limits of “Japanese”; he’s always writing in ways that push those boundaries. The event was scheduled for Tokyo, also in Shibuya, in a small club, the kind they call a “live spot.” I was to read. Since the lineup was clearly organized around the poets, I chose one of my texts that could pass as poetry. I had to read in a voice, and from a text, that might reach the disaster area in Tohoku. But from what I had written in the past, what words would work in this situation? So, it seemed obvious, it could only be a section from The Holy Family (but it took two full days to come to that conclusion). I pulled out a section, something like a monologue, in Tohoku dialect. I thought I’d read it, but like a remix. If I did this, though, there was no way I was going to read an episode including humans. So I chose an episode about horses. It was a tale I pulled from an area without a name in Iwate Prefecture where they used to abandon old horses. I chose the story of a now-dead mare, a horse with no name, from that area. This was Shōwa 21—that’s 1946 in the Western calendar. Of course, 1946 is the year after the defeat in the war. So, a tale about a horse in Tohoku and that Japan—the Japanese nation-state. I was going to read, certainly try to read, of pain that transcended time and space. I was confident I could read in a way that would make it work. I trusted that the horse language was lodged somewhere within me.

  The event had two parts.

  My reading took place in the first half. I was backstage during intermission.

  A girl came to talk to me. She had a copy of my book with her. She looked to me to be in her late teens; I checked with one of the assistants later who confirmed that she was a high-school student. She wanted me to sign her book, which I was happy to do. We exchanged a few words, “I’m from Sōma,” she said. And then I understood: she was a refugee. That made her a refugee from the Pacific coast of Fukushima Prefecture, from the disaster area, from the coastal part, from Hamadōri. And, of course, in Sōma there are horses—the place name holds horses within it: Sō points to a long history, to physiognomy, and ma is the character for horse. There are, in fact, horses there. “I see.” That was all I could get out at first. I tripped over my tongue again, but finally said, “I will go to Sōma.” Which meant, “I want to see it.”

  Her response was i
mmediate, “Please come and see for yourself.”

  This takes us back to two Sundays before March 27. On March 13 I received a writing request from the press agency. Now I was still fully wrapped up within the “spirited-away time,” and even though dates and days had been hijacked, if I go back over it now I can get it in order enough to talk about it. I will lay it out carefully. This is now about forty hours after the monster tremors. And then an invitation came to write something, “a message for the victims” they wanted. I had been following the unfolding of events at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, but I didn’t hesitate in response. I answered reflexively, immediately. “I’ll write,” I said. I had no idea that it would also be sent off to the Kyoto Shinbun newspaper.

  One day before that, Saturday.

  And the day before that, Friday.

  I was in Kyoto. On March 11, 2011, I was in Kyoto; between two and three in the afternoon I was in Shimogyo ward, gathering materials. I had arrived in Kyoto the night before. That was in order to gather material for a novel. I had just published two long stories for the literary journal Shinchō, one called “Winter,” the other called “Howling Wind and Surging Waves.” I was in the process of completing another long work building off of those two pieces. I projected it at 240 pages. I intended to finish it at the beginning of August, perhaps on the fifth. That much had been decided. My plan was to get those three recently published, longish parts to work together and release them as a book. Title to be Dogmother. Its release date was nearly finalized. The setting for the novel was Kyoto, limited to the center of Kyoto. During the last three years I probably had been to Kyoto twenty times to gather materials. And why Kyoto? Because the historical Japanese state is located there. A different Japan, one with capital-city kinds of elements, is located in Tokyo; for (the symbol of) a region that had been pushed out by Japan, as a nation with its own particular history, there is Tohoku. I had written about Tohoku in The Holy Family. I was always writing things about Tokyo. So I had to write about Kyoto in Dogmother. And, of course, the contents touch on the “originary documents” of Japan I mentioned before—the Kojiki. That’s why I wrote the earlier novel Godstar, in which I have the Meiji emperor (or, at least, someone in possession of his memory) appear. Dogmother is therefore related to Godstar, not that that makes it exactly a sequel to it.

  So, Dogmother. I had spent all my energy in 2011 and staked everything on that. So, if I couldn’t produce something I was completely satisfied with, well, then I would have to chuck this novelist business out the window.

  So that’s the state I was in while in Kyoto on March 11. The fact is that this research trip was originally planned for two days later, on March 13. I was going to leave Tokyo late on that Sunday evening. But K, that young friend of mine, and the band that he was front man for, and their CD release party, which eventually ended up being moved to April 9, had been scheduled for the thirteenth—March 13—so I had already changed my plans and moved the trip back. I figured I would get back to Tokyo in time, no problem.

  Even in Kyoto there was quite a bit of shaking.

  Didn’t know they had such long ones here in western Japan, I thought to myself. Which took me back to the great Hanshin earthquake of 1995. Tohoku never entered my mind, of course.

  At five or so I was on the platform of the Kyoto Karasuma subway. I noticed people, then more people, with what looked like a newspaper extra in their hands, the headline leaping out at me. White letters on black background. “Tohoku,” it read. “Deep in the Pacific Ocean. Magnitude 8.8. Numerous Large Tsunami.”

  Panic. I called my parents’ house. Used a public phone. I got through. The next day I wouldn’t have been able to get through. The magnitude was recalibrated at 9.0 two days later. In my hotel room I couldn’t take my eyes from the television news. That’s when that period of steady gazing began. That period relates directly to the “spirited-away time.” Is tied right to it.

  Now here is an odd connection (even though it took weeks for me to recall it): I was hearing tsunami warnings on that day, over and over again, in the live broadcasts streaming across the TV screen, but they were for Wakayama, for the coast near where I was in western Japan, not for Tohoku, yet everything, in those days, had melted into “Tohoku.” Maybe this counts as the spirited-away space, too. And then, in that hotel room, it was the writer Nakagami Kenji that came to mind. Because of his Wakayama connection, on the Kii peninsula. But I had all but forgotten about that thought. Cleanly, completely. When I later started going over my thoughts, I had an “aha!” moment: When I went back to peruse the section on “Wakayama” in Nakagami’s reportage book Kishū (that was just this morning, April 13), I came across the following passage and was rendered speechless. Nakagami was writing about the cholera outbreak that had started in Arida city back in 1977:

  One of the newspapers from Shingu, in the southern part of Wakayama, sent to me here in Tokyo, had an advertisement with the following statement printed in big letters: “No vegetables from within the prefecture used.” At about this time I also heard about cars with Wakayama Prefecture license plates being turned away from drive-ins in neighboring prefectures. If someone was asked, “Where did you come from?” they wouldn’t answer “Wakayama” but would give the name of another, neighboring, prefecture. We laugh at these stories now, but that’s Japan—you never know where such outbreaks of panic will appear.

  This morning, for this Wakayama Prefecture, I inserted a prefectural name that begins with “F.” Most natural thing in the world.

  “This morning” refers to April 13. But the “now” of the Kyoto hotel where I am refers to March 11.

  So, think about a flammable liquid. A tank of liquefied petroleum explodes at an oil refinery and shoots off orange flames. Numerous white-hot pillars of flame. How do you count pillars of flame? One “pillar,” two “pillars”? Or, think about a power outage that extends well beyond the powers of imagination. Reports say seven million homes affected. One can only visualize it as complete blackness. Or, imagine flooded airport runways, or think about bullet trains that have run off their tracks. The bird’s-eye-view images come streaming in one after the other there on the screen. Or, imagine a tsunami that floods water up into all the rivers. Then images from the coasts that are broadcast over and over again. There are muddy brown currents that by their height (and maybe by their sheer speed) swallow up untold vehicles. Moving through there with quick violence. Tail ends of cars being smacked around. Can’t really think of them as swimming. Or think of mudslides and how many people, how many tens of people, are buried alive, not clear how many people. Hundreds of people, no doubt. Thousands of people, washed away. Or think about building roofs and all the people up there looking to be rescued. All this being reported at ten thousand people. So think about night, a power outage at night in the residential neighborhoods and the flames are rising higher, this hellish inferno casts off an orange color different from the flames of the liquid-petroleum refinery. The petroleum refinery in Chiba Prefecture different from the refinery in Miyagi Prefecture. Maybe it is Miyagi. The heavy oil flows from the storage tank and is burning as it flows down the streets. So think of an earthquake that registers 6 on the scale, originating in Nagano Prefecture. Nagano? The news reports that it is not clear if they are aftershocks or not. So, another massive earthquake? I keep hearing this phrase, keeping seeing the phrase “unprecedented domestic something-something,” over and over, on screens. There is a TV in the room. Even though the lights are surely on, it’s dark. It’s now way past midnight, so obviously we have started a new day on the calendar, but I sensed the beginning of the disappearance of dates. I must have been sleeping, but it didn’t feel like it. I only get REM sleep; continual dreams. Even there, my focus is on the TV screen. And then I open my eyelids, and—no surprise—there’s the screen again. It seems to me like the realm of the living. The over there on the television is the living realm, whereas I, I in particular, have passed over, on to the other side of the u
nreal. I am in no position to ask myself questions, but I ask myself anyway: why am I not among the victims? All of those people over there are swallowed by death, touched and caressed by the god of death, but me? How did I get off not dying? Guilt. To overdo the description, guilty conscience. Why is it that all those people over there had to be victims?

  Days have begun disappearing, but it’s morning. The next morning has arrived. The main Tokaidō bullet train has started operations again, back on track. I return to Tokyo. Tokyo had also been shaken. So, if I had been in Tokyo on March 11, at that time, as originally planned, I would be considering myself as one of the disaster victims. Would have been there for the tremors, a disaster victim, one of the affected. But I was in Kyoto. Kept back from over there. Nothing but the information on the television.

  Am I really blameless in this? “State the reason you can live free of care.”

  The voice.

  Then, concentric circles. At first, an order for everyone within a three-kilometer radius of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant to evacuate; then, an order requiring everyone within a ten-kilometer radius to remain indoors. Before long the evacuation order was extended to ten kilometers. An evacuation order was also mandated for everyone within a ten-kilometer radius of Fukushima Daini Nuclear Power Plant; at the same time the evacuation zone was extended to twenty kilometers around Fukushima Daiichi. Two sets of concentric circles. In places they overlap. But, before long, a thirty-kilometer-radius circle was added circling Fukushima Daiichi inside which was required “internal refuge.” This “big circle” looked like the corona around the sun. Around Daini was the “small circle.” Subordinated by that “big circle,” right at the core of the concentric circle, was the Fukushima Daiichi Power Plant, which then looked like the sun. Land of the Sun. The new country of Japan.