Horses, Horses, in the End the Light Remains Pure

by Hideo Furukawa

  But they were on land.

  The ships had not moved. That did seem odd.

  Really, can this be possible, to move them to land, and leave them there, is that really OK?

  The awareness drums itself into my head in staccato. Similarly the name of the building, Iwaki la la myuu, which carries in its name this staccato. We turn the corner at the head of the pier to find the terminal for the tourist boats. The main doors are closed off with a number of sheets of plywood. I look and register three facts: (1) it is completely closed off; (2) no one is going to depart from here by ship; (3) no tourist boats are going to arrive. What has arrived here is the March 11 tsunami. Only that massive wave of water; after that, nothing.

  The tsunami wave swallowed up this area. The thought did not have to form, I could see it. And the devastating damage it wrought. Piles of cracked asphalt. Cracked? Ripped up? Here and there empty spaces, hollowed-out spaces. What used to be here were the fisheries facilities, or what look to be stands for the market. The “myuu” of “la la myuu” probably refers to the “myuu” of museum, but there is no sense that this museum dedicated to water and ocean, to fishing and shipping, even exists or is open. We returned to the warehouse area. Y found a water faucet and twisted the spigot open, but no water. Of course not.

  Maybe it was just emptiness pouring out.

  On the ground of the entrance to one of the storehouses (an area of poured concrete) fat spikes were sticking out about ten centimeters in a line, suspended as though trying to extricate themselves. Was this the work of the earthquake? Or perhaps of the liquefaction of the earth? Maybe just the sport of the tsunami, throwing its power around. At any rate, I was looking out onto a scene that should not be possible, a situation that should not be. In the area around Docks Number 1 and 2, and in the deck area between them and the warehouse area were crows, only crows. These are not birds (鳥) I am talking about, but crows (烏). Just like we saw in Shinchimachi and Minami Sōma, the carrion crows that gathered here; no other varieties of birds were to be seen. Compared to the large-billed crows I am used to seeing in Tokyo, these—not just the bills—are thin of body, and their movements also seem thinner. We got back into our Kashiwa car and moved less than a kilometer. Off to the pier at Onahama, to the area where we expected to find the fish market and fisheries cooperative. We were assaulted by a sense that there could be no time more suitable than now for the phrase “what should not be,” the impossible. Up on the dock, here, in the exact opposite of orderliness, the fishing boats, many, many ships, big and small, were jumbled and leaning against one another. Of course, they had been pushed up by the tsunami. “Stacked in a pile” was the first impression. But who, what hand, is able to stack ships in this way? Further, they were arranged, slanted in all sorts of directions. No, they had arranged themselves. I looked. Up on the land, the bow and stern, the rudders and screw propellers.

  Wondering if it is appropriate to go in for a closer look.

  And stand next to them?

  But it was impossible.

  In such a completely unnatural situation I could not grasp the overwhelming power of the steel. Even though I might be crushed by it at any moment. By the entire twisted mass. Y was taking pictures. Young S was around somewhere. And Ms. S? It had progressed to the point where even the communal sense of the experience shared among us (shared in this space) was impossible. There was no way, we lacked the means, the know-how. But we watched. Four people’s eyes, eight retinas. I found a phone booth, I stepped into the glass box. The phone was silver but streaked with mud. The phone number, which I assume was a special kind of phone number, was Onahama 000260. I picked up the receiver, felt its weight. But I couldn’t bring it to my ear. One of my eardrums does not function.

  We went back to highway 6. After a late lunch, we decided to continue north. We resolved to get as close as possible to the thirty-kilometer exclusion zone around the Fukushima Daiichi Plant. We headed toward the Yotsukura section of Iwaki City. Farther up the road are Hironomachi, Narahamachi, Tomiokamachi, Ōkumamachi. We know that they are there, but we won’t go that far. Even so, we proceed about ten or fifteen kilometers out of Onahama. The four of us in our little rental car are running along the Pacific coast. Who is it that calls this “Fukushima’s East Coast?” Tourist guidebooks would. Guidebooks from before these horrifying three-layered natural/human disasters. We had easily made it about twenty kilometers out of Onahama, but we couldn’t go thirty. We may not even have left Onahama. We were trying to get as far as the arc demarcating the thirty-kilometer perimeter, but we found ourselves stuck at that point where Route 6 meets Prefectural Route 41, what is known locally as the Ono Yotsukura Highway. The police had it blockaded. This was because the earthquake or the tsunami had rendered the highways “impassable,” not, apparently, on account of the meltdown or the evacuation zone. At any rate, we couldn’t proceed. We turned toward the coastline. This was not Yotsukura Port. This was the entrance to Yotsukura beach. The Yotsukura Port rest stop was just ahead; I was thinking to myself how the Hattachi shoreline was just another three or four kilometers farther on (all along here Route 6 ran in parallel to the JR Jōban train line, each coming close to touching the other before plunging forward together into the thirty-kilometer arc), but I could not hope for what cannot be. We got out of the car and started walking between the fishing port and the beach area. We began to hear the sounds of waves and headed toward the beach. A line of concrete tetrapod breakwater structures was visible on the nonbeach side. Perfectly white. I saw them, a “flock” of tetrapods. The seabirds were crying. I could see on the beach palms that had clearly been transplanted, sparsely arranged. I searched the horizon for the seabirds, but all that was visible in the landscape, near and far, were the carrion crows loitering on the embankments. Young S was off in the distance, smoking a cigarette. Y, who until a moment ago was right next to me, was also off in some other section, doing something. I was walking with Ms. S. Her shadow fell on the sand. Far, far at the distant water’s edge, literally off in the distance, I realized, “There are the seagulls.” Seagulls? We walked farther. That walk certainly felt like a “forward progression.” It was an unusual shallow area of wide shoals. As we walked along, the farther we walked, the more clearly we could recognize how large a group of seabirds was out there. I am not talking about a hundred birds. Must have been two hundred, three hundred. It would probably have taken an experienced birdwatcher to accurately estimate the number; it was an unusually large gathering. The smell of the sea was getting stronger and more oppressive; I licked my finger as a test. Salty. Sticking to the skin, the salt breeze. I pulled out my camera and removed the lens cap. Intent on being as quick as possible in order to not expose the lens to the salt breeze, I raised the camera. The group of birds. Pointed it toward the massive gathering of birds. That’s when Ms. S said, “Those gulls are called sea cats, aren’t they?”

  Ten of them took off into flight.

  Followed by ten more.

  Circling in the air.

  A flash of recognition. Someone said, “Come over here!” I heard the voice in my head. There was a simple overlap of that commanding voice and a song melody. A song that took me back. A song that felt very close to me, and to someone other than me as well, close to those brothers as well. A Beatles song. One that contains the musical effect that sounds like a seagull cry. I thought to myself, heard myself ask, “The song with the seagull cry, which song was that, brother, do you know?”

  “Come over here.”

  “Listen, you hear the Beatles’ ‘Tomorrow Never Knows,’ don’t you?”

  “Do you know who I am? This is Inuzuka Gyūichirō. Listen, I am talking to you now. You need a story, right?”

  “The continuation of the story that I interrupted awhile ago.”

  “Yes. My brother disappeared, but I am still here.”

  What I heard from him ends there. The rest I will write myself. I write of the Gyūichirō after the disappearance of his brother, the
Gyūichirō of The Holy Family, the eternal elder brother Inuzuka Gyūichirō. What is possible for people like him, people who exist in a dimension outside time? It was as though he could see into a deep pool, the depths of history. It was as though he could see it in concentrated form, all of existence submerged under the surface of that water. Then he would dive in. He could swim in deep water. Even so, he was not some sort of time traveler in a science-fiction novel. That sort of notion did not exist within him. He was simply a migrant with a physical voice, bearing the burden of blood, lamentations, and a murderous past. And deformed fists. The place where he “was” is a place that actually “is.” For example, he is within the precincts of a Shinto shrine—could be any shrine, although it is one of the ones in the Sōma region. But what divides the inner precincts, and what falls outside the shrine grounds (the outer world)? Torii, that’s what. The gate known as torii. A symbol unique to Japan, of “Shinto,” the religion and common belief system.

  One enters through the torii, one leaves through the torii; no different than customs and immigration checkpoints.

  One crosses into the domain of the gods, one leaves again; exactly like the activities that require passports, immigration and customs clearances, and security checks. But here the recognized passport is engraved on one’s spirit. Thus, no matter where he is in history, every time he is on the grounds of a shrine and he passes under a torii, his spirit is examined. A positive match of spirit and individual: “We can see that you are who you say you are.” And at the same time his murderous past is deemed a match to the murderous past of the “nation.” (I beg the reader’s indulgence for my dramatic turn of phrase.) A verdict is handed down. So he moves on to the next place. He is essentially expelled, from one space to another. The phenomenon works like this: from the shrine precincts where he “is,” he passes through the torii, to subsequently appear on the grounds of another shrine. He passes through the torii and ends up “there.”

  This is the movement between spaces. However, if the destination shrine happens to be in a different “point in time,” there is also a change in the temporal dimension. There were shrines in the Kamakura period; there were shrines in the Sengoku period before the Edo period (which also includes the Azuchi Momoyama period); there were also shrines at the beginning, middle, and end of the Edo period. So it goes without saying that the numerous, nearly infinite torii of the shrines of the Sōma fief serve as gates at the border separating these dimensions.

  I will stop here with the theorizing. Same with my efforts to shore up the logic. I just want to write. I want to write what I have seen. I want to describe the scene that “exists” in my head, capturing it with all the internal urgency I feel. In this endeavor my imagination becomes the driving force. But is such imagination a good thing?

  I write, “He is here.”

  Doesn’t matter which shrine, as long as it is in the Sōma region, and one of the more prestigious ones. Not a contemporary shrine. Not the grounds of a present-day shrine, in 2011, in Heisei 23; Well, what era then? It would be the Sengoku period. There is a horse pasture on the precincts, surrounded by a fence. A number of horses. He is talking to one of them. He, Gyūichirō, asks, “So, are you a mare?”

  “Yesss”—is not exactly an answer the horse can provide, but in fact it is a mare.

  “Have you returned from the battlefield? From a little joust with the sworn enemy, the Date clan?”

  “Yesss”—is not an answer the horse can give, but that is accurate. This horse did not lose her life on the battlefield and she has now been returned to the Sōma holdings. However, her “rider” was not so lucky. The samurai on her back was first struck by arrows then beheaded with helmet still intact, and remained in the saddle, but now as a corpse, for miles and miles, for untold hours. He was able to discern all this and proceeded to question the horse with a sympathetic tone.

  “Making your way through the engagement with the enemy armies with a dead man strapped to your back, was no doubt very difficult. Was it difficult for you?”

  “Yesss, yes, yes,” the horse was able to answer through a whinny. He heard the answer quite clearly. He was stroking her neck, and he continued speaking: “But you came back alive. And before long you will become pregnant, give birth, and all will take its turns within the fullness of time. I see that this will come to pass, and I celebrate with you.”

  And with that, this Inuzuka Gyūichirō turned to the path leading through the shrine and passed under the torii. And with that he appeared at a different shrine, on the path under a different torii. This shrine could also be said to exist in the Sengoku world but was already in the Azuchi Momoyama period. Further, it was immediately after the siege of Odawara Castle. When Toyotomi Hideyoshi had forced the Hōjō clan to capitulate, which was in Tenshō 18 (1590). The horse he had met in the pasture had returned from this battle. A female. He continued with his questioning. He was still stroking her. “In this battle you had to carry the dead soldiers, didn’t you, the warriors. But this will be healed,” he proclaimed. He promised that he would keep an eye on her on into the future. With that he passed again through the torii. And he appeared on shrine grounds in another time period and encountered there a horse of the Sōma domain in the throes of the famine of the Hōreki years. That despair and fear—the fear of starvation—he listened to and he assuaged. The next torii he passed through took him into the Tenmyō years. Despite an even more severe famine, the horses were being kept alive because they had to participate in the Sōma clan Nomaoi festival. He met with a group of mares that somehow had managed to live through this. “You,” he began, “you will be outlived by offspring, to fill this side of time, I will see to it.”

  He promised. He moved on.

  At the end of the Tokugawa period, the horses had no worries. The horses lived through the span of the Meiji period. And the Taishō period as well. There was one crisis in the Shōwa period; this relates to the war that is connected to world history (the Second World War), but they were living. Then comes the end of the Shōwa period. The reign name changes to Heisei. In the twenty-third year of that era, he appeared on the grounds of a shrine that exists now, in the present.

  This was in the Sōma area, deep in the southern part.

  There are no people. It has become deserted. Everyone has been ordered to evacuate. “Leave.” “You must depart this ground.” “But this only applies to you humans.” These the words from the government of this nation, “Japan.”

  One white horse was there. The horse was emaciated. Its ribcage was visible. It was near starvation. Food was clearly insufficient. Still in the pasture, it had not been freed. He walked up to it. He called out to it. He said, “You are the offspring of all those horses,” he said this with tears streaming down his cheeks. Tears dropping, dropping, one after the other. And then he did what he could.

  He threw open all the gates.

  At which point he disappears from the story. What remains now is the tale of the horse. One male horse, a starving white horse. A white horse that is on the loose. Searching for grass, walking free. Grass, he found. If one must decide whether he is a Western breed or a Japanese breed, in the stomach of this horse that has been “Westernized” such grasses and plants are hard to digest, but he ate nonetheless. The world is devoid of people; walking is now the only thing that the white horse can do. In the morning, a beautiful sky. And at noon, a clear blue sky. At night, dark and cold. For the first two or three days, no rain falls. The horse has no idea that the rain, even should it fall, would be mixed with radioactive material. It simply registers its dislike of the cold. But the weather has its cycles, and a clear-skied morning returns again. A beautiful light, clear and transparent, that makes one feel the height of the heavens. At the edge of the field of vision run a number of cattle. A group of five or six. They too have been let loose, allowed to run free. But since, in fact, they are no longer being cared for, this is more like being “abandoned to” the range.

  And at an
even farther remove, people.

  The humans are white. They are wearing white protective clothing to ward off radioactivity, covered in white cloth from the tops of their heads. The white horse unconsciously runs the other way. People who look like that are frightening. They may in fact be Fukushima prefectural police enacting the protection and care of those in the area (including reporting on the “stray” horses), but to the eye they are completely white, plus they have Geiger counters at their sides. They are frightening.

  The horse did not meet any dogs. Dogs that used to be pets are now wild.

  There were a number of crushed cars. In places, the fragrance of incense. Someone’s death being commemorated. Perhaps this was right after the Self-Defense Forces broadscale search for bodies throughout the “evacuation zone.” But these were not the thoughts of the white horse. The tractors that were turned upside-down on the asphalt struck him as unnatural, however. But the white horse walked on, continued forward. He came upon an elementary school, entered the grounds, but no sounds of children were to be heard, and the gymnasium was also vacant, and he understood that all of this had been abandoned. The white horse walked as far as the first-floor entrance to the school buildings. He saw the wall clock hanging there. The hands were still.