Sacred Cesium Ground and Isa's Deluge

by Kimura Yūsuke

  I had been soaked in sweat while working; now that I had stopped, it felt cold. In the meantime a medium-sized dog had crawled up into Yasuda’s lap. She was sitting to the left of Sendō. I realized I had seen this dog before, which was now licking Yasuda’s face. This must be Ginga, the beloved dog that went everywhere she went. I saw that the Matsuos, sitting between us, were also watching this.

  “Yes, speeches. Only five days now until the last speech of the year in Shibuya.” Sendō was pounding his knee with the hand not holding a cigarette.

  “I tell you, this guy, he sure loves to give speeches.” When Sonoda said this, sounding worn out, Yasuda laughed out loud. True to form, it was the high resonant laugh of someone with strong convictions.

  “So, you enjoy giving speeches?” I asked. The time I had gone to hear him give one of his Shibuya speeches he had seemed like a being from another world. I am sure that some people noticed he was there, but I saw no one who actually stopped to listen. He addressed all the passersby even though there was no way to tell whom he was reaching; seeing him single-mindedly roaring at the crowd left me totally choked up. But I never would have thought this was something he “enjoyed.”

  Sonoda chimed in, “You bet he does. Just the other day I asked him, ‘So, if you had to choose between sake and speeches, which would it be?’ ‘Well, speeches, obviously,’ he says.”

  “And with that, you have Sendō-san’s whole reason for living,” Yasuda called out, with Ginga still licking her face. Sendō nodded in agreement and started in, “I mean, think about it, all those student protests that I was part of back at the university—it all serves me well, now. I am now able to perform on the biggest stage!”

  “Stage, is it? …”

  “That’s right, a perfect stage. There at the big Shibuya Scramble, that huge crossing near the Hachikō statue, I can’t tell you the impression I can make on the people going by, can bring people to tears. It moves people to tears, I tell you, right to the edge of emotion. The best agitprop theater there is.”

  “More like a tearjerker enka balladeer,” Sonoda gibed.

  “Enka balladeer—I like that: Sendō Michio, sixty years of age. Rancher. Continues to raise the cattle that the country told him to kill; here he is, straight from the town where people can no longer live; come just for you, to move you to tears, to bring you to bloom. Laa-la-li-laa, la-li-la …”

  Yasuda began laughing even louder. Sonoda just groaned and pushed the burning wood further into the stove, muttering to herself, “Stuff burns well, anyway, this cesium wood.”

  With one day’s work complete, I headed for my car, telling Yasuda that I would be back tomorrow. I assumed that the white minivan I found parked next to my car belonged to the Matsuos. They said they were going to look around the fields for a bit before heading out.

  It was a few minutes before 6:00 P.M. when I arrived back at my hotel along Highway 6, but it was already completely dark. I never drive a car in my Tokyo life. I drive only when visiting relatives in the countryside. I didn’t really know the route, but the car’s GPS got me back safely. Fact is, I was in a bad way: I had no energy for the arms holding the steering wheel, and my eyes were so dried out I could hardly see.

  With the car parked I relaxed a moment; a loud sigh escaped my lips. I was draped over the steering wheel, unable to move any further. If someone had poked me I think all the joints in my body would have dissolved, leaving me to collapse into a clanging heap. At the same time, there was satisfaction in having expended such physical labor; I felt welling up from within me the sense of “Good work, well done.” This was not simply from the farmwork that I was unused to but also from the fact that I had come this far, fleeing my room in Tokyo; that act itself was surprising even to me.

  I took a moment to bask in it; I hadn’t experienced this sense of fulfillment in a long time. My attention then went to the sports bag on the passenger seat next to me, where I had my phone. I hadn’t looked at it, but its existence was weighing on me now. I had had it in the pocket of my windbreaker while working and felt the vibration of incoming calls. I assumed the phone’s buzzing were calls from Kazumasa, my husband, which served only to remind me of the angry words that had poured from him, through the receiver, just last night: “What the hell can you be thinking? God, such an idiot you are. You want to die out there? One thing after the other, you are driving me crazy here. Explain this to me, would you? I’m at my wits’ end with all this.”

  Here in my pocket a very small Kazumasa is screaming at me. I had decided to ignore the calls, but even so a voice pressured me from inside, pricked at me: “Wouldn’t it be better to answer?” I had pretty much forgotten all of this while out working in the pasture, but it was now clear that the reality I had left back in Tokyo wasn’t going to take care of itself.

  I grabbed the sports bag next to me, and then the grocery bag with my uneaten lunch of a bread roll and instant ramen. I got out of the car. The boots, windbreaker, gloves, and other stuff I had on while working all went into a large plastic bag that stayed in the car. I hadn’t noticed it much at the farm, but now that I was away from it I could smell the manure. That was one reason that I didn’t want to carry it into the room, but neither could I pretend that this was not now radioactive material. When I started walking I felt a strange sensation in my hip joints. Not exactly pain, but a strange sensation emanating from my hips. I was sure this was the result of slogging through sloppy manure in strange boots and then stomping around in slippery apple by-product and trying not to fall.

  I picked up my key from the reception desk and headed toward my room. Both sides of the hallway were lined with doors leading to solitary cells, or so it seemed; my room was at the far end. The entire hotel was neat and tidy and well lit, but I couldn’t shake the sense that it was also cheap and prefab. I assume that it was put up here to accommodate the influx of construction workers now being sent to this area. I had found it online, searching for “one room, under 4,000 yen, no meals, no bath.” I entered the small room, no more than seven square meters in size, and turned on the light. At the entrance was a cardboard box stuffed with cups of instant noodles, shelf-stable bread, and bottles of tea. According to the map, there was a convenience store near the hotel, but considering that it might not be open, I had bought these items at the shopping center close to the station prior to picking up the rental car.

  The bag with my uneaten roll and instant noodles went back into the cardboard box. I had been advised more than once to bring my own lunch, but Sonoda had set out an entire lunch: yesterday’s leftovers, she said, of stir-fried beef, broiled fish, salad, rice, even miso soup to complete it. Not that it was anything fancy, but still, since I had no anticipation of eating a normal meal with rice and everything, it had been especially tasty. The house was close to barn number 1; we had all gathered to eat in the dining room.

  It came out that the two-story house, built not quite five years ago, was Sonoda’s house. The living room with the woodstove was open to the second story and faced the backyard, built to capture all the sun’s rays. It had a sofa, a low table, and a television set; it opened into a dining room that led to an open kitchen. Plus three or four cats; I saw a calico, a dark-colored tabby, and a Siamese. Even with me, the new presence, they didn’t run away; Mei-chan, the calico, was especially friendly, looking to be petted. Sonoda-san continued that, in fact, she had built the house with the idea that, somehow or other, her son would take over Sendō’s business in time. But all that future planning had come to a sudden end because the entire area, nearly all the town and its environs, had suddenly became unlivable. So now Sonoda was keeping it together, commuting to the farm from the apartment her son and family were renting in another area. Sendō used to live with her in the house, but he now lives there on his own. There is still electricity, and the water and gas are still connected, so it is not that inconvenient. Even so, since technically people are forbidden to live in this area, getting groceries, for example, meant a
drive of almost thirty minutes out to the outskirts of the town, out here where this hotel is.

  It came back to me just how dark the entire return trip had been from the farm to National Route 6. There were farmhouses here and there along the road, but none of them had any lights on. Mine was the only car on the road; no one was walking. It looked to be a residential area. Even after I had made it to the main highway, it was completely, deeply dark on the right-hand side, covered in darkness and looking like the sea at night. Driving out in the morning it had looked like farm fields, as far as the eye could see, untouched for some time, but it is more likely that the entire area was formerly covered in homes. From far on the other side of this expanse, from the ocean, had come bearing down the tsunami, crushing, pushing, carrying away every last structure.

  I switched on the heater. Doing so brought a prick of conscience because of something that Sendō had said to me at lunch. He had begun by saying, “There is something that I always tell the people who have come up from Tokyo: You know, the electricity in Tokyo is produced here in our prefecture. Even now. You can see the reactor’s smokestacks on the horizon, right? Nothin’ going on over there now, but there are still the fuel-powered electric plants. Producing electricity from fossil fuels, never stopping, keeping at it. Used to be coal, now natural gas, in the plants over there in Hirano, over in Iwaki.”

  I had taken in the entire scene, just as Sendō had suggested I do, standing on the deck looking across the landscape through binoculars. From the deck, where Sendō’s dogs, Roku-chan and Nana-chan, were peacefully napping off to the side, one could take in the entire expanse, as the back garden stretched into another wide pasture. What could be considered the back pasture was encircled by trees that had dropped their leaves; stand of trees upon stand of trees undulated into the distance and became forest or maybe a distant mountain. Off to the left-hand side of this expanse one could make out, with the naked eye, a number of small things poking into the sky. When I looked with the binoculars I could see, exactly as I remembered from seeing so many times on TV, the reactor’s white smokestacks with their scaffolding. It was visible to the bare eye, but still, fourteen kilometers is far away; nonetheless, it is from an area that we know to be located at such a distance that all that radioactive material came, gently wafting its way, in such large amounts, carried by the wind, over to this pasture.

  So, I sat myself down in the public bath, turned the hot water onto my head and shoulders, and once again thought through the events of the day. Even without trying to think about it, scenes floated into my head, one by one.

  For example, I was surprised to learn that the major task of feeding the cattle, work that took all morning, is on weekdays accomplished by Sendō and Yasuda alone because neither volunteers nor Sonoda come. I had assumed, and had been quite sure, that any number of support staff were attached to the farm. I hadn’t given it much thought, assuming that that was who did all the work. But that was not it at all. It was more like “things get done,” mostly, usually, but just barely. The fact is that these cattle—now about three hundred sixty head, down from four hundred earlier—are able to continue living only because of the hard work that Sendō and Yasuda do alone, out of sight of everyone else.

  I know that people are sending in contributions to support what they are doing; even so, their work produces absolutely no income. We all eat every day; there are no days when the cows do not eat; there are no days off. Yet Yasuda commutes two and half hours, one way, from her home in Miyagi Prefecture. So, given that cattle have a life span of about twenty years, this looks to be their lives for another two decades. I was beginning to feel overwhelmed. I mean, how is this even possible? Every day for twenty years, will they be able to gather these contributions to feed the cattle? Sendō had reported earlier, with apparent relief, that he had a number of months’ worth of hay rolls on hand, but even this contaminated hay will surely run out before too long.

  And then, what about the impact of remaining in this place? The impact on the cattle is one thing, but what impact on the physical health of the two of them, Sendō in particular, who is now living here full-time? We hardly understand the effects of radiation, even within normal limits, but no one doubts that the more radiation that one absorbs, the higher the risks.

  Sendō-san had said during the break, “We now have the best stage to perform from.” There is great sadness within him, to be sure, but there was also a sense of calm from having meaningful work to do. Yet there is no way around the fact that he has been placed in a position where he will not be able to continue with a normal kind of life. The great weightiness of all this may explain his self-deprecating black humor. It all seemed to be a continuation of his speechifying. Sonoda had said to him flatly, for example, “That business about your hometown now turned into Chernobyl; don’t you think you might want to keep that thought to yourself?” He had somewhat defensively responded, “Not at all. I have decided to make my fate the same as these cattle. I have decided how I will die. So now I am not bound by anything. I want to die having said whatever I like!”

  It seems now that I had this image in my head of Fortress of Hope being a sort of utopia. But the reality was not so simple. Contradiction piled upon contradiction; this was a space summarily cut loose and left to its own devices.

  Then more memories from feeding the cattle: the hot air, the oppressiveness. And that moment I had stopped to catch my breath after spreading out the vegetable scraps. At one point I had put down the shovel and pulled out my phone to check the time. I heard from behind me an intent rhythmic zatt, zatt, zatt. I thought it was just someone back there sweeping up the floor after us. “I better help out,” I thought. But when I turned to look I found that everyone still had their shovels in hand, no one was sweeping anywhere. I soon realized the sound was coming from the cattle, with their heads sticking through the fencing trying to get at the scraps of food stuck in the feed trough and on the floor of the passageway. The sound told how forcefully their tongues were scraping the concrete.

  I was not washing my hair but I wasn’t turning off the water either, because now I was crying. “The desire to eat”: the least surprising and the most basic of desires; yet I don’t think I had ever given any consideration of what they might be feeling about the act of eating. What was huddled together over there was not, for example, simply masses of meat to be slaughtered, not dull living beings unable to feel pain, not any of these things we had decided was true for “cows.” Rather, I felt that what was there were beings same as me that emit heat, that feel love and also fear and also pain, that were just trying to get on with the business of living. But with what I was seeing today, I could also see for the first time all the other cows out there that had wanted to eat but could not, had not been able to get water, had died still locked in their stalls. I felt it. I had heard of wooden pillars in those barns that had been chewed thin out of desperation; I felt the pain of that.

  I returned to my room from the public bath for a dinner of cup noodles and bread. There was a restaurant in the hotel, and if I went outside a short distance I could find a convenience store, a ramen shop, a beef-bowl restaurant. Now that I was a volunteer running through the savings I had amassed while working at an office job, part of me wanted to be frugal, to be sure, but I was eating disaster rations because I wanted, even a little if I could, to get a taste of living in a disaster. I had never, not even once to this point, volunteered in a disaster area. I mean, I couldn’t even say to Kazumasa that “I want to go.”

  I didn’t turn on the heat, I didn’t remove my socks, I piled on an extra sweater. I turned off the lights and crawled into bed. It was still early, not even 10:00 P.M. Kazumasa would soon be finished with his overtime workload; were I to wait a little longer I would surely get another phone call from him. Kazumasa was the type to use ancient expressions such as “As a man’s point of honor,” so he was not about to sit idly by as the wife he expected to be submissive had left him behind. So, in that case,
even if I were to turn off the phone, the mere thought that “I bet he’s trying to call me now” would be sufficient to prevent me from relaxing. So, I figured I would just go to sleep first.

  I heard the pitter-patter of slippers as someone walked in this direction, down the hotel hallway. They seemed to stop in front of the room two doors down. Then that electronic beep. Then that click of an electronic door opening. The door opens, the door closes, and again the click, and complete silence returns. Not even the sound of a television.

  I lay there asking myself, “How did it get to be like this?” It was so dark I couldn’t discern wall from ceiling. “Just when did it get to be like this?”

  Right after I quit my job and was taking care of the house full-time, before I knew anything about the Fortress of Hope, there were days that I would just sit in the darkness of the apartment. I didn’t know what to do. There were, of course, things that I needed to accomplish: grocery shopping, dinner preparations, housecleaning, scouring the online want ads for job prospects. I knew all of that, in my head, but I had no idea what I should actually do.

  I just sank to the floor in the living room, no TV, no nothing. Then came Kazumasa’s voice: “My God, you can’t do a damned thing. You’re so stupid. It’s always the same food, you can’t even make a decent snack. You’re the kind of person who, even if you get a job, just causes more headaches for the people around you. Am I right? That would explain these job changes. Since you can’t keep a decent job going, it means I can’t quit my damned insurance job. All day long, meeting with these old women bitching and moaning; flatter them, calm them down, finally get a policy for them: and that’s how I keep you in groceries. Am I right? A little thanks maybe? God damn.”

  When did it begin, his talking to me like that? Not like it’s round the clock. Usually he’s just this timid guy, no hobbies to speak of, playing stupid games on his smartphone all the time. It was just the evenings that he came home tired from the overtime office work, late at night actually, when he would start in with his drink and snacks; those times only.