Shōji felt heat rising behind his eyeballs; this attack had snuck up on him. Kakujirō, meanwhile, grabbed another mouthful of salted squid with his chopsticks and asked, “Have you asked your dad about this?”
“Eh? About what?”
“About Isa, obviously.”
“That? No way. Not yet.”
“You really should. It’d be better. He is his older brother after all.”
It’s not that he had never considered it, but he really didn’t want to ask his father. It had been some time since he had really talked to his father. Even though Shōji was the eldest son he had taken off and let everything fall on his younger brother to take care of, the reason being that he worried that if he continued living under the same roof things would go quite sour. He was pretty sure that Kakujirō knew all about this. “Yes, maybe, prob’ly should” was all he said with a pained expression.
“We could go over there right now …”
“Whaddya mean?”
“I haven’t seen Yūsaku in a long time. And I bet you haven’t stopped by on this trip either, right? So, it’s perfect. We should go.”
He felt uncharacteristically excited as he walked toward his parents’ house with Kakujirō. The street was pitch-black as there were no streetlights. Houses lined both sides and he knew everyone who lived in each one. To get to his house one turned right at the T at the end of the road. A number of sparkling and distinct stars floated in the sky above, although rather more faintly than during the winter months. The stars were easily visible because there were so few buildings in this town so far from the bright lights of the city, and now, same as when he was a child, Shōji quietly noted that some things never change.
“You know, I used to always push on over to Yūsaku’s apartment. This even when we were living in Tokyo.” Kakujirō sounded upbeat.
“Was that when my father was working at the liquor store?”
“Yep. I was a day laborer at the time. If the next day was a day off I would often hit the bars with Yūsaku.”
“Really? I’ve never heard that before.”
“Looking for girls. So we’d head off to those kinds of places. First floor would be for drinking. Second floor would be rooms for being with women. At that time places like that could be found here and there.”
“Really? And my father went too?”
“Of course. He’d be the silent dangerous type. We’d be gettin’ ready to go and Yūsaku would be all excited. But then wouldn’t want anyone to recognize him so he’d cover his face with a scarf and even wear sunglasses and slink in the dark corners of the street.”
Shōji snorted a laugh. Yūsaku’d always been like that, overly conscious about what others thought of him. It was pathetic.
“Yūsaku’d be upstairs and I’d be downstairs thinking, ‘Hurry it up already.’ Man, it would go on, he was like to never come back down. Those were some good times, in those days. But not a word of this to your mother, okay?”
“Not a word. I mean, as if I could tell her about something like this.”
“The owner of the store seemed to take a shine to him too, you know, and I think Yūsaku would really, all things considered, have rather been in Tokyo.”
“Well, then, why did he ever come back?”
“’Cause he was summoned, that’s why. His parents called him back because of Isa.”
Shōji had no response. They found the entrance light turned on. He had called his mother to say he was coming with Kakujirō. He assumed she had turned on the light in anticipation.
Shōji reached out to slide open the door when he looked down and noticed a line on the wall adjacent to the door, about fifty centimeters above the ground, a dark horizontal line. “Is that what I think it is?” he asked, pointing with his finger.
“Yep,” replied Kakujirō with a nod, “the water line from the tsunami.”
The house had a garden plot in front, beyond that was another neighbor’s field, so no more than a few hundred meters separated them from the creek that had flooded with seawater and reached this height. Confronted like this and seeing with his own eyes the high-water mark on his boyhood home, the house he knew so well, swayed his confidence in what he had been telling himself about this, that because the damage from the tsunami had not risen above the floor line things were not really all that bad. He slowly slid open the door and stuck his head in slightly: “It’s me! I’m home!”
“Whaat?! It’s you?! You’re back in town, are you? You’d think you could let us know ahead of time at least. And Kakujirō too: good to see you!” His mother, Harumi, came down the hall from the kitchen area in the back of the house to greet them, laughing, if a bit surprised. Kakujirō appeared very much at ease: “Good to see you! So sorry to come barging in on you like this. And look at you, pretty as usual!”
“There you go again with that sort of talk; such a nuisance you are. What are we going to do with you?!”
Such merriment in her voice; Shōji felt it was the first time he had heard such a thing. His father, Yūsaku, made his way out as well. “Heyy Kaku, what’s up with you?” he said with a laugh, showing no sign of annoyance. This also struck Shōji as out of character; the Yūsaku he knew was always sullen. His brother’s wife, Yuriko, came from behind, with Ichirō, her son, who had just turned two, in her arms. She gave a quick bow in greeting when she caught Shōji’s eye.
“Well, well. Come in everybody. I’ve got nothing to offer, however …,” said Harumi.
To which Kakujirō responded, “No worries, no worries, as long as your smiling face is here, nothing else is needed.”
Shōji was beginning to wonder how much more of this cheap flattery was going to come from Kakujirō, although he was also slightly impressed.
At the same time, thanks to Kakujirō, the resistance he had been feeling about going back home seemed to have dissipated some. Entering the kitchen he found, to belie his mother’s words about “nothing to offer,” fried tofu in dashi broth and a stew of shredded kombu seaweed as well. Right after the disasters they had been without electricity for a few days, and being unable to purchase gasoline meant they had also been unable to buy groceries, but everything looked back to normal now.
He sat next to Kakujirō at the table. Harumi opened the bottle of shōchū that Kakujirō had brought with him and reached across the table to fill his glass. The shōchū was coming fast, right up to the brim of the ice-filled glass.
“Careful, careful, too much—looks like you might be leakin’ there,” Kakujirō let out in a strange voice, to which Harumi covered her mouth with her hand and laughed loudly. Yūsaku smirked, “Damn fool, actin’ like this is a tavern somewhere, jeez.” To Shōji such carefree laughter in this house sounded strange to him.
His younger brother Teruhiko was working night shift at the paper factory so wouldn’t be back for the night. With her long brownish hair tied back in a ponytail, Yuriko had said she needed to put the child to bed, so headed up the stairs to the second-floor bedroom. It was while watching the soft-looking flesh of her thighs that Shōji sighed softly. Given that this still-youthful Yuriko was in the house meant he had to be a little more reserved and constrained: this was now Teruhiko’s house, not his, and he could not simply show up whenever he felt like it.
Shōji realized he was hungry and started packing in the food that was arranged on the table. Kakujirō and the others were exchanging news of the earthquake damage and its aftermath. All the trees and flowers in the garden had withered from saltwater damage. The vinyl greenhouses that Masahiro had erected up at the main house had been ravaged by the tsunami, so they had had to stop their strawberry production. And they had not yet figured out any way to bring in income during the upcoming year.
“Don’t know what they’re gonna do,” said Harumi with a sigh.
“Masahiro had been grumbling about it: ‘They say farmers who decide to rebuild during the upcoming year could get half the costs for materials from Tokyo, or the prefecture, but you think I h
ave the other half? That’s all fine for folks with money, but what about the farmers who scratch out a living every year? What are they gonna do?’ ”
When Kakujirō said, “They talk about providing compensation, but it’s just the barest minimum, just enough to keep us from dyin’ on them. If you’ve got fields and paddies that can no longer be used, for farmers it’s as good as taking away their workplaces,” Yūsaku responded with an echo, “Yeah, for the farmers …” and stopped talking. The creases were now deep between his eyebrows as he continued drinking his shōchū. It was a face that resembled that of Hitoshi’s father that he had seen in the photo album, chiseled and foreign looking. In the silence it came to Shōji that his father had also been born and raised as a farmer. But this Yūsaku had never become a farmer. He came back from Tokyo and worked for a coal-mining company all the way into retirement.
“Same thing for the fishermen,” Kakujirō continued. “The tsunami smashed and wrecked all the fishing boats. You could build new boats. A large portion of the cost would be covered by Tokyo or the prefecture or the city. Big help, that. I know a guy, the head of the fishermen’s union, who had a medium-sized squid boat. It had cost him four hundred and fifty million yen and change. Now it would cost closer to six hundred million, what with what the disasters did to the shipbuilders and all. So it means he’d now have to shoulder something like a hundred and thirty million yen of his own money. Wish the damn tsunami had washed away debts with it, but didn’t work that way: he’s still stuck with his loans. So now there aren’t any fish, and then those debts, and on top of that, another hundred thirty million? And then they come around and wants to know, ‘You all really don’ wanna go back out and fish?’ is what the union chief was tellin’ me.”
“With that, I suppose lots of fishermen are giving it up, right?” interjected Harumi.
“Yep. Farmers and fishermen, it’s been tough.”
“It’s true in Hachinohe, it’s true throughout Tohoku, you have to wonder what’s gonna happen in the future. Fewer and fewer farmers and fishermen all the time. We are losing all the people who would grow rice and grow vegetables and get fish; but even if there were people to get the stuff, you start hearing about people who won’t buy it anyway, what with worries about radiation and stuff.”
“So, I dunno what’s gonna happen to Tohoku,” Shōji started speaking through the tofu stuffed in his cheeks, “but I don’t see it makin’ that much difference. ‘Why not just import what you need?’ they say. Lots of people who figure that the poor countries would make the stuff for us cheaply. They make it an excuse to throw open the markets. All these slogans about ‘Ganbare, hang in there’ and ‘We’re behind you’—just words, in the end.”
Back in Tokyo Shōji had found the whole thing odd: right after the disasters every single person seemed virtuous and upright. All of a sudden the first words of every television commercial referred to our solidarity as a nation, as though just waking up to the concept, all the more obvious since up to this point Tohoku had not even registered on their radar; now they’re sending out rallying cries that played on the over-the-top melodramatic image of an impoverished region. “Are you freakin’ serious?” he wanted to shout back at the television. But in such an oppressive atmosphere he could only keep it to himself. Think about it: you can’t go around criticizing virtue and goodness, or solidarity. Which was exactly why he was overcome with a disgust that he just couldn’t swallow.
“That ‘Hang in there’ phrase … that sure is a tricky one,” grumbled Kakujirō. “Doncha wonder who it’s even aimed at? Not like it has brought us anything useful. As if spouting words over and over again is good enough. You can say ‘Hang in there’ all you like, from far away, and maybe it makes everyone feel like they’ve done something, but the people hangin’ in there? That would be us, at the end of the day.”
“You got that right. It’s like they’re just urging us to work all the harder,” interjected Harumi, laughing.
Kakujirō just nodded. “You can’t just urge someone to ‘Hang in there’ or ‘Do your best’ if you don’t know what’s going on with them. These are not phrases to just throw around like that.”
Shōji was nodding too. He was feeling relieved and somewhat vindicated. He assumed Yuriko had made the broth for the fried tofu because it was sickeningly sweet. As he took a swig of beer to wash it down he heard his father’s booming voice, “So, Shōji, what’s up with your job? You on vacation?”
“Um, I quit.”
“You quit? You quit this job too?” He sounded especially disgusted.
“Yes, I did,” Shōji responded with some force.
“So when did you quit?” Harumi asked.
“February.”
“So, before the disasters, then. But I thought you were doing well at this job. So, what happened this time?”
While Shōji was still thinking about whether or not to confess to the truth—that his throat seized up and he had trouble breathing every time he thought about going to the office—Yūsaku continued, ridiculing him with his laugh: “Tokyo, must be some kinda place, no matter how many times you quit a job somethin’ comes together for you before too long!”
All at once he felt his stomach surge. He looked back at Yūsaku, who was sitting on his right, saw his two shrewd eyes. Why is it that this man, and how is it that he has such a natural talent for making another person angry?
“So, in that case, whatcha doin’ now?”
“Nothing.”
Nothing at all?”
“Yup.”
“And here you are, a full-grown adult. And didn’t I send you off to college, let you go on the condition that you would get a government job? Christ.”
Shōji remained silent; his father continued, “So then, why is it that you didn’t come back and help clean up after the earthquake?”
“Whaddya mean ‘why’? I mean the Shinkansen trains weren’t even running until just recently.”
“That’s not the only way to get here, you know.”
“You mean a slow train up the other coast? I guess I could have done the impossible and gotten up here, but I figured that even if I did I’d be imposing on you to feed me and just end up a burden.”
“Listen, things were really tough up here, doncha know? I mean, all the cars were flooded, big logs floating around out in the water. And all the houses by the coast? Covered in waves and sand, all of them battered and dispersed. Have you seen it around here? I mean, we were disaster victims too, but we went over to help those people clean up too. You know that, right?”
Shōji couldn’t help blurting out, “You keep saying how tough it was up here …” He turned to Yūsaku, who had this entire time been poking at his guilty conscience. “But there was just one, you know.”
“Wha—?”
“In Hachinohe, in the end, there was only one single person who died. How many people you think died over in Iwate or in Miyagi? Even so, here you are acting all like the victim. Get over it, already.”
As though some unbelievable object had suddenly landed in front of him, Yūsaku was gaping at Shōji with eyes like saucers. He could see the ripples move across his father’s forehead. This is the point at which they usually started screaming at each other. Shōji was bracing himself for the onslaught when Kakujirō spoke, “About this single person, a seventysomething-year-old fisherman, it was his wife—maybe you heard about it?”
“No,” Shōji trailed off.
“Well, according to what the newspaper said anyway, at the time of the earthquake the two of them were in their work shed near the shore. The earthquake struck, and knowing that a tsunami would soon follow, the man said to his wife, ‘Go, you get out of here.’ He got in the boat to escape into the inlet while she jumped into the car and headed back to their house.”
Shōji had nothing to say as he listened.
“But then, she started to get worried about her husband. The wife, she was making her way back to the bay. She had even called him on
the cell phone, ‘The house is fine,’ she reported. She said she was on her way back to the shed. The husband was in a panic at that and told her to get far away from there as quickly as possible. But it was too late. The tsunami came just like that, and the poor woman, still in her car, was sucked up by the wave.”
Shōji remained still.
“The woman would have been in her late sixties. The impression you get from the article is that the two of them had been partners for many decades, a tight, close couple. It makes me think, you know. For the wife, given that the two of them would always have been together, she figured she’d wait for her husband to return, so headed back to shore to wait for him. That’s what she did and the tsunami sucked her up.… And that, well that’s the ‘sole’ death from around here.”
Harumi had been nodding along as the story was told; she now wiped the corners of her eyes and blew her nose. Kakujirō continued in a dispassionate voice: “So, if you focus only on the numbers, you miss the bigger picture. The husband, according to the paper, just keeps talking about how difficult it was, ‘It’s unbearable.’ He probably saw, clear as day, what his wife had been thinking. Even so, he went on to say, ‘It’s not just me, there are lots of other people in tough spots too.’ But man, all alone now, what’s he gonna do with that? … I have no idea what people like that are going through. You think I’m able to face someone like that and say, ‘Hang in there!’ ‘We’re with you!’ No fuckin’ chance.” Kakujirō took a drink. And he added, almost as an afterthought, “And this stuff about ‘recovery,’ as if there’s any way that can happen.”
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