Horses, Horses, in the End the Light Remains Pure

by Hideo Furukawa

  If one starts talking about the center of a nuclear reactor, one is talking about the nucleus, about the core.

  I start thinking about fiction. I remembered something I had read about Miyazawa Kenji that the philosopher Umehara Takeshi had touched on in his book The Japanese Depths. To trace the chain of associations that brought me to his book: The philosopher Umehara had been appointed to the government Reconstruction Planning Commission (Fukkō Kōsō Kaigi) and designated as a special advisor; almost immediately after assuming the position he voiced strong criticisms against the government proposals because their reconstruction plans left out radiation-related issues. Which prompted me to go back through his book again. But that train of associations is too complicated. The point is that I was thinking about fiction. And Umehara had written the following about that Kenji, the writer from the Tohoku region.

  He wrote many tales (dōwa) and poems, but he never wrote a novel. This is directly related to his understanding of the world. Novels are stories with humans at their center. Kenji did not accept that humans alone had any special rights in this world. Kenji took it as a given that birds and trees and grasses, wild animals and mountains and rivers, everything, had eternal life, same as humans. The world that Kenji describes in his poetry and tells of in his tales is one in which humans, even while endowed with eternal life, are fated to battle one another, but that also describes how to overcome that fate. I always considered that world view to be a Buddhist one, but it is probably a world view that already existed in Japan before the influx of Buddhism.

  “But wait,” I thought to myself. I have written novels with animals in them. With dogs, cats, birds, all sorts of animals taking main stage. Plus, some of the humans have animal names, the “dogs” of inu and the “cows” of ushi.

  But that’s not it either. There’s a different issue. The current problem is that I am not writing any novels. I can’t write.

  April 17. Early in the morning I received an e-mail message from Y with a link to an online video. In his message he pointed out that the video had been shot close to the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant and that we were quite likely in the very place. The uploaded video was titled “Special Report: Dogs and Cows in the Lawless Area of the Nuclear Evacuation Zone.”

  I hit play.

  Inu and ushi; dogs and cows. They were there. Now what?

  Had they had been let loose? Abandoned? Had they had banded together on the edge of survival, after all the humans had evacuated to other places? The humans having fled?

  Even so, it is dogs and cows. Doesn’t that comprise the name of the oldest brother?

  Time to go back home. I can write only if I go back. The four of us got in the car, left Baryō Park again, putting distance between us and the horses in the pastures and stables. Another look at the streets of Sōma city. A makeshift camp for the Self-Defense Forces had been constructed. There were still scars from the earthquake. Maybe from the original quake, maybe from aftershocks. I wanted to go to a supermarket. Not some convenience store, but the supermarket that I think was the biggest in Sōma. I had heard that this chain, with many stores throughout Fukushima Prefecture, and with stores in Miyagi, Yamagata, Tochigi, and Ibaraki Prefectures as well, had been started with financing from some of the major national corporations. More to the point, the stores had started in my city, in Kōriyama. So whenever we talked about supermarkets, that was the one we meant. We parked our car with its Kashiwa license plates on the rooftop parking garage and headed into the store. First, down the stairs—the elevators weren’t running. We passed a family on the stairs, headed the opposite direction; the kids were wearing surgical masks. I guess for kids it’s like spring break. Actually, if schools had been open like in a normal year, this would have actually been spring break, but who knows. So even though it was lunchtime on a weekday, the store was pretty busy; it was not “packed” or anything, but neither did it feel like the middle of a crisis. Nothing to make one feel that way. We were looking to see how well the different shelves were stocked, checking the different sections, and while we were in no position to judge whether it was appropriate to call it well stocked or not, the shelves certainly didn’t seem empty either. Yet there were definite holes: like the cases for local produce. Pictures of local farmers were proudly displayed, and the signs with write-ups about them were in abundance, but there was no product, none of their vegetables, zero, nada, not a stalk, not a bulb. The farms’ addresses were almost all from Minami Sōma: still within that largest of concentric circles but still outside the twenty-kilometers radius. Minami Sōma is definitely outside that circle, right? The area that used to be Haramachi? There were other sections, here and there, empty of items. And while it seemed totally strange and unnatural, it didn’t exactly take the “super” out of the “market,” either. Nor did it seem to disrupt the equilibrium of the customers. But still, more than half of them were wearing masks, adults included, which was hard to miss, all the more because it now seemed to be a totally normal thing, yet, still, with all those things that were missing from the shelves, this thing just seemed so obvious. I may be overreacting. Maybe the masks are only for all the pollen that is in the air every spring. Possible, I guess, maybe.

  But was Sōma always like this?

  Not likely.

  It seemed so calm. I turned to Ms. S: “It feels so calm around here.”

  “I know, like everyone is just taking things in stride,” she said.

  Surprise. Exactly right, I thought. “Calm” is not what this is. Something different from that. It is “taking it in stride.” All one could do was be ready and waiting. If there is nothing else to be done, what does one do?

  Then there was us. If the people who lived here were carrying on like normal, what choice did we have? We had planned on eating stuff we brought with us, in the car, but we changed that plan. Some of the restaurants and shops were open. In that case, let’s support the local businesses. Leave our cash in the neighborhood. So we decided to eat food that they are famous for in Sōma, near the ocean, a dish of rice and clams. The Sakhalin surf clams used in it are harvested up north in Hokkaido; we overheard this from one of the clerks explaining it to a local couple. They had asked where the clams had come from. We were at a place, a drive-in, really, out along Route 6. Tasted great, for sure. But we had headed about two kilometers south of Sōma city center, and that also felt different somehow. The atmosphere was different, just slightly. We were getting ever closer to the border. Three more kilometers is all.

  I don’t think that had anything to do with the concentric circles.

  It is just crossing the city limits.

  We set out again, and crossed over an invisible boundary. Heading south to Minami Sōma (that’s what it means after all: “South Sōma”), a town that came into being in 2006 with rezoning. 2006 is Heisei 18. Which makes 2011…I can never remember what year that is in Heisei, the imperial accounting. I have this deep resistance, a sense of opposition, to these imperial-reign names anyway. I had assumed that, driving down Route 6, we would run into a police checkpoint somewhere. We heard that there were none, but I had also heard that the prefectural police had been dispatched to enforce the twenty-kilometer blockade. Fukushima police; a blockade of roads. But surely that would only apply to the main arterial roads. Actually, we had just discussed among ourselves whether to cross into the thirty-kilometer area; we had given it careful consideration. I thought we should go as far as we could. It seemed like that might work. We gathered information. There were opposing opinions. Someone asked, “You sure we aren’t getting desensitized?” in relation to what might happen, that is; I could see the point. Even so, I wasn’t convinced. But I did think about it again later.

  I mean, in the end, a “fly-by” is not enough.

  This was not about it being difficult. Need to be vigilant. Time for facts: we had to check it out, go see it ourselves.

  We only traveled south through Minami Sōma, through the Kashima ward, which used to be Kashi
ma Town. We did some lateral east-west driving through the area. We wore masks the entire time we were in the car. We had each decided that we would put them on. Traffic on Route 6 was reported as being “heavy,” in all the lanes heading south toward the meltdown as well as the lanes going in the opposite, northerly, direction. In that moment I found this surprising but shouldn’t have: people from Minami Sōma would be on the roads in order to buy supplies, etc. Because, if you get to Sōma City, the stores would have stuff on the shelves. Nearly all of the drivers wore masks. You could tell that by looking. We then exited Route 6 and turned on to Prefectural Route 120. After about thirty kilometers, we were on the old Rikuzen Beach Highway, according to the map, that is. If we kept following Route 120 we would have ended up in Hibarigahara. That’s the festival grounds where they stage the Sōma Nomaoi horse festival. The big stage for the sacred horse events, that is. This is clearly something very much on my mind.

  We crossed the Mano River. Follow that ten kilometers to the west and you find yourself at Hayama Lake, stopped up by a dam, where you come into the town of Iitate. Three kilometers farther to the east and you find the Pacific Ocean, at a place called Karasuzaki Beach. I should note: you could tell where the beach used to be from what remained of the coast. The area around the Mano River contained many old kōfun burial mounds; it just had the feel of that sort of a place. More on that later.

  We had now peeled off from the second of the prefectural highways. This was an area of rice paddies. All the fields were still in fallow winter state as far as the eye could see, dry and brown, but worst of all was the forecast that “depending on levels of radiation in the soil, planting may prove impossible” for all the fields within Fukushima Prefecture. What they call a “forecast,” had already been pronounced, though. This from the government, no less.

  The area was marshy. I assumed reservoirs for irrigation, but “marsh” seemed more precise than “holding pond.” This because of how the surface of the water looked. The water, placid; the water, lit with an artificial green. Algae. No water birds.

  Many water channels.

  No hint of people. None. Zero. We got closer to the golf course that bore the name of that area; we may actually have been there already. We might have already come to the outer circumference of the concentric circles, we might be touching that thirty-kilometer arc, we might even be inside it. We got out of the car. Y and I got out of the car. Ms. S and young S were in the driver’s seat and the passenger seat trying to figure out our exact location. There were all the water channels, and there was water running in some of them, of course, but for whatever reason our ears couldn’t pick up the sound of the water. Cloudy skies. When had it gotten cloudy? We stepped down from the highway close to the farm road, stepped into the withered dry fields of stubble (dry because they had not been flooded with water from the channels). Fields upon fields. We walked. The crunch crunch of our boots. Y, being Y, set off in another direction. The springtime fuki plants were up. They looked good. By “looked good” I mean they were ready to be picked, ready to be eaten. And lots of them. I was trying to take pictures. But they wouldn’t come into focus. Changed it over to macro-mode, still, nothing. Doing everything right, but useless.

  I was sensing something; I let it go.

  Eventually I knew what it was: not a single bird cry could be heard.

  We had not seen any ghost towns, but we were looking at a ghost nature. We were in a soundless land; we were there.

  I had experienced this feeling many years before. Up in the six prefectures of Tohoku, deep in that country. That, too, was a land with traces of ancient civilizations.

  But there was more to it than that, here. Because an invisible light was falling here.

  It was coming down. I did not remove my mask.

  We needed to reset our senses to normal. We went back to the highway, went back to Prefectural Highway 120 (the old Rikuzen Beach Highway), and quickly got back on Route 6. We were back on the national highway, back to a convenience store. A convenience store in Minami Sōma. We parked our car with the Kashiwa license plates in the parking lot.

  It was not silent but it felt like a silent space. There were buildings. In the convenience store not a single magazine was available for sale. None on the shelves. There were hardly any bento lunches, hardly any rice balls. Stock was sparse. Instant ramen included. Empty spaces on the shelves. Even though this was not within the thirty-kilometer radius “internal evacuation zone.” Just because it was in Minami Sōma. Then there was the totally needless stuff. Given the dates and times, stuff rendered needless. Candy left over from White Day. A section that looked as though it had not been touched. Stuff that had been set out before March 11. On March 14—White Day, one month after Valentine’s Day—all that stuff was rendered useless. Made needless by the date. No calendar dates here. Just like before.

  The silence was palpable. It was heavy.

  There was a community information board attached to the outside window, facing outward. A temporary thing.

  The building seemed to be peace and tranquility itself. A convenience store. In Minami Sōma, in Kashima Ward.

  I was standing there by the side of National Highway 6. At the intersection.

  The sun was out again.

  We headed for the ocean. The car was headed east. I thought it would be another two, maybe three kilometers, but appearing two kilometers before that was that landscape. The entire Atlantic coastline had been ravaged by the huge tsunami. But the southern expanse visible through the right-hand side window presaged the extreme violence we were to encounter if we kept going. Trucks from the Self Defense Forces: one parked here, then another. Self Defense Force troops: one here, then another. The wide plain just seemed dusty. But this flat plain, how did that come to be? How could it be this flat, I thought to myself; I amended the thought, for it was not simply flat. In my field of vision were markers that warped the apparent two-dimensional flatness. There was the string of telephone poles alongside the highway, standing straight and vertical, standing vertical, yes, standing vertical and straight, and then slightly aslant, and then farther aslant, and then leaning so far they faced the opposite direction. A section of electric line remained, but twisted. That’s where the birds were gathered. Black. Carrion crows. An unusual number. Dozens of them; must be hundreds. They were everywhere. They went on forever. Another kilometer on, another hundred meters, not a single white seabird in sight. I checked the map again. There should be a shrine here, facing the sea. A Shinto shrine should be here, so there should also be a torii gate. Piles of debris had gathered to ward us off; the car could not go farther, so we four tumbled out of the car and started walking. Right before we had gotten out of the car we had seen a big, old, two-story traditional Japanese-style house. Apparently, even in this area right at the water’s edge, things were intact, no need to worry about danger from the water. But when we turned away from the car to check it out, we found more than half of the first floor, save for some pillars and floor, was just gone. Like a slap to the face. The front side, which had taken on the full-force brunt of the tsunami, had been swallowed up by the wave, the wave that had been hungry for it. I felt a paucity of vocabulary; “tragedy” was the sole word that registered for me.

  And what of the shrine?

  Across the entire expanse, none visible.

  Not a single torii. Not a single right pillar, not a left one. No standing structures. Nothing to be discovered within the field of vision. Maybe I had hoped to find the beautiful expanse of a shrine like Itsukushima Shrine, in the western part of the country. Despicable, such imaginings; this damned imagination of mine, that’s what went through my mind. So, without surveying the expanse, I concentrated on what I could see nearby. I looked down. The sheer amount of debris, or maybe the way that it was just there, constricted my thinking. It was coming again, that shutting down of thought processes that I had felt before the brain overload. The way everything had been destroyed, the scars in all the various
places, each one different at each point. So many accumulations along the Pacific coast of eastern Japan, all the way from Aomori to Chiba, and each different from the others; it came to me while talking to Y, while my words were tumbling out awkwardly. Finally, I understood it, however late in the game. But beyond that, what with the brain overload, things I may or may not have fully acknowledged within the memory: photo-like impressions and smells. Stench. Vinyl records were scattered across the surface of the ground here, too. Shattered. No two of them were the same, and each and every one had been damaged; that message was soundlessly conveyed. Private vehicles overturned, smashed; the accumulated violence conveyed differently in each one. Buildings reduced to steel skeletons; they remain, yet each one is clearly “not there.” Motorcycles, crumpled like foil. It can only be described by using odd onomatopoeia—gujari. Caught in the debris was a large koinobori fish streamer; it was much too colorful. A farm tractor was crushed, upended, its paint also much too colorful. Its beauty, the brilliance, cruel. A large calculator. Hundreds of pages of documents. Some office exposed, turned inside-out. A round propane gas tank somehow standing at attention. Painted on the gray of the tank’s surface was a cheerful character, the gas company’s mascot. A typewriter. Also destroyed. No surprise in that. Someone had typed, pounded on this, but now, with this, no more typing, no more pounding, I thought. Even in the midst of this brain freeze I substitute words for the reality. With words. By words. I am a writer. And here we are, as writers, as editors, walking through the scene of the disaster, on the earth’s surface, in the sand, we leave footprints. And that—as soon as we do, there is no way but to feel that that is a violation; no way but to feel that we are sullying things.