Sacred Cesium Ground and Isa's Deluge

by Kimura Yūsuke

  Shōji found himself speechless. With jumbled thoughts and feelings he lowered his head. Kakujirō was not just not explicitly criticizing Shōji, Kakujirō was also able to convey, and it pierced Shōji deeply to realize it, that he clearly saw that Shōji was looking at what had happened in his own hometown like it was someone else’s problem.

  “And so all those people like you in Tokyo, even if you hear about it, no way you can get what we’re feeling up here.”

  He had heard Yūsaku speak but hadn’t heard; he belatedly asked, “What?”

  “All of ya, it’s the same for all of ya, almost like there was never any disasters. You just go on, rakin’ in your money.”

  “I’m not like them, you know,” Shōji responded, making a show of resistance. “I contributed too, ya know, giving money when it was asked for, me here, with no job or anything.”

  “Ya don’ say.” Yūsaku just snorted. “So you give some money, does that make you feel better? You make your way up here to the disaster zone, spend a single day, stirring things up for the cause, like some singer giving a concert or something, feel satisfied because you contributed somehow? That how it is?”

  God, why does he always have to push me so hard? Where does such spite come from? And then Shōji thought he saw Uncle Isa, appearing for a split second, standing behind his father. In that moment it all became clear, could see why he had no confidence, had no sense that he had any right even to exist, and therefore couldn’t get on well with other people. Maybe that’s why no matter what job he took on he was hyperconscious about what others thought of him, overthought everything, and made lots of mistakes. Shōji let out a long sigh. “I get it. Finally, after all this time, I understand it.”

  “Understand? What is it you now understand? You sure you haven’t just decided to try and understand?”

  A tremor ran through him. Even so, Shōji was feeling calm, a little too calm maybe.

  “Easy, easy,” Kakujirō exclaimed, raising his hands. “Listen, Shōji came back to find out all sorts of things. He’s here on a mission. To find out about the earthquake, to find out about Isa.”

  This took a moment to register. “Isa? You mean Isao?” The color of Yūsaku’s face, which had been smirking up to this point, changed.

  Kakujirō nodded and continued: “He wanted to ask about Isa. That’s why he came over to my place.”

  Yūsaku turned to look at Shōji: “What for? Why would you wanna know about Isa?”

  “He’s my uncle. And he’s your brother. A person wants to know about his family members, what’s so unusual about that?”

  “All the stuff he did to us, all that he put us through, you understand all that, right?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why I came to ask about it.”

  “Every time that bastard showed up at the main house, stuff would happen and they would call me to come up … and then he slashed someone down in Shizuoka, so I had to go down there and appear in court …”

  “Tell me more. I want to hear about this.”

  “This ain’t no joke. It’s an embarrassment on the family. Don’t go digging up this shit.” Yūsaku was pounding the table with his fist. Shōji stared at him calmly, wondering whose gaze Yūsaku was feeling now, he who had always been paralyzed by concern about the norms of society and how people might be thinking about him. Shōji felt he could see straight through him now. That “emptiness” clearly connected him to his father. A slight smile played at the corners of his mouth as he murmured, “Some of that embarrassment, maybe we need some of that.”

  “Whaat?” exploded his father.

  Kakujirō interjected quietly, “Easy, easy, my friend. Let’s calm down.”

  After the lunch that was also breakfast Shōji left his parents’ house and started walking along the bank of the Gonohe River, heading toward where the river met the sea. The sky was cloudy but the day was lazily bright. The river beneath him to his left seemed languid, flowing low in its banks; it was hard to imagine so much water surging through that it came bursting up over the banks. But then, off to the right of the embankment one could see fields of long green onions, every one of them yellowed and shriveled. The entire first floor of the nearby house was encased in blue vinyl tarp; a tilting pillar peeked through a gap.

  No tales were forthcoming from Yūsaku the night before. Kakujirō must have thought it a dead end too. “Let’s go for a nightcap,” he suggested to Yūsaku. The invitation was tentatively extended to Shōji as well, but he took a rain check. “Some other time then,” he said to Shōji, almost in a whisper, before piling into a taxi with Yūsaku.

  He was then alone with his mother, Harumi. She kept watch as he sat sullenly staring at his beer. After a while she began, “I can think of no reason why you would want to know that stuff, but …” Half sighing as she talked, she began to tell him the things that she knew about his uncle. His mother was a year younger than Uncle Isa and had known all about this difficult child, now his uncle, ever since primary school, long before she had married his father, Yūsaku.

  As Shōji walked along the top concrete wall of the riverbank, he thought back on the story his mother had relayed to him, about the whole affair of Chōkichi’s attempted murder. He had heard about that episode from Hitoshi as well, so adding to it what his mother had said, he was now imagining the scene. It had happened in the fall. Uncle Isa had shown up drunk at Chōkichi’s work site, so it must have been close to the end of the day. According to Hitoshi, the event had been written up in the local papers, but neither Hitoshi nor Harumi could remember just what year it had taken place. Harumi did have a vague memory of it being right after the big 1983 earthquake in the Japan Sea off the western coast of Akita. That would have made Chōkichi in his early fifties and Uncle Isa in his early forties.

  Shōji started imagining what this scene might have looked like. Chōkichi would have just come out of the vinyl greenhouse where they were growing strawberries to be shipped during the winter season. Who knows why, or what for, exactly, but he was headed toward the equipment shed to return the shovel he had been using. He hears behind him, “Heyy, you, Chōkichi—” There’d be no mistaking Isa’s voice, starting to make fun of Chōkichi’s name: “Looky there, it’s liddle ’Kichi, liddle, liddle ’Kichi. Looky who I seee! Ha ha ha.”

  He was already quite drunk. One can imagine the heaviness that would have settled in the pit of Chōkichi’s stomach. At that time Isa was, almost as predictably as punching a time clock, showing up at Chōkichi’s house every day—it seemed likely anyway. He was back from his overseas job; he now had money. He wasn’t working and would have started drinking from midday in the bars in town. So when it began to grow dark he would be seething with anger and set off for the main house. He’d arrive and start breaking things, throwing things, smashing windows, terrorize the inhabitants with knife in hand. And then …

  Shōji brought his imagining to an abrupt halt: how was he going to make sense of this? He didn’t actually want to know. The image of an uncle who had fawned over his nephew Hitoshi, who hadn’t tried to stab his father, Yūkichi—that image of him had been shaken by what Harumi had told him.

  Shōji let out another sigh. There was no option but to account for those details. When Chōkichi’s second daughter, Yaeko, had tried to stop her uncle’s violent rampage her uncle had grabbed her by the hair—she was pregnant at the time—and dragged her around in circles. It had come to this: now he had even attacked his niece. Yaeko was taken away in an ambulance; she nearly lost the baby.

  So, assuming the incident with Yaeko had happened some days prior to the encounter with Chōkichi, no one would have been surprised if Chōkichi had already reached his limit. On the day of the incident Isa had further taunted Chōkichi, Chōkichi who appeared to have been born for a life of farmwork, who had no time for fun and games, who was resolutely enveloped in silence as he completed his work; Isa had started in with, “Hoo hoo, look at you, like some insect set up to go digging deep in the ground, a
busy little worker bee, aren’t you! I betcha make your poppa proud, doncha, and you do a fine job of suckin’ up to your parents, doncha! Must be nice to be the oldest son. You get all the good stuff in inheritance, you take all the good women too, having a taste of all the women before picking one to marry.…” That would be his way of ridiculing, of insulting, of listing all the perceived injustices he had suffered at the hands of his family. Chōkichi would remain silent, trying to ignore Isa, who would persist, his voice growing louder and louder.

  Chōkichi would throw open the door with enough force to rattle the planks of the old toolshed and walk inside. Light would stream in from the chinks in the planking. It would be hard to see anything for someone who had just walked in from the outside. On the floor were old wrapped-up vinyl sheets that were used in soil preparation. But perhaps by this point a certain realization had already lodged within Chōkichi’s thin wiry body.

  So Isa comes shuffling into the shed, no letup of his mumbling complaints. When he caught his foot on the doorjamb and began to stumble, the moment was not lost on Chōkichi, who then swung the shovel high, put all the power of a seasoned ditchdigger into it, and brought it down on top of Isa’s head.

  A dry metallic sound, a strong recoil in his hand. Isa makes no sound, sinks to his haunches, and topples. Grabbing the sides of his head, screwing up his face, he showed no sign of understanding what had just happened. Chōkichi immediately hit him again with the shovel. And then yet again. And hit him again, and again. All aimed at the head. When he came back to himself he found Isa covered in blood, an indecipherable expression on his face, only slightly breathing, limp and unmoving.

  Chōkichi, thinking he would end Isa’s violence, and make himself a sacrifice to do so, went to the nearest police station and turned himself in. “I just killed my brother.” Just what path things took from there, neither Hitoshi nor Harumi had a clear recollection, but the impression from all accounts was that he did not get a prison sentence. Even so, from that time forward Chōkichi was bent at the waist like an old man.

  Fortunately, or unfortunately, Uncle Isa did not die. He was taken to the hospital. “And his face,” continued Harumi, “it was awful, all swollen up and round like a basketball. The doctor came and looked at him and said any normal person woulda been dead by then; that he had the insides of a twenty-year-old. All your father’s relatives gathered around, all the relatives, all talking, kinda disappointed, ya know, heads hangin’ low an’ all.”

  Almost killed by one’s own brother: Shōji had no way of imagining how that might have worked on his uncle’s feelings. There were no stories of Chōkichi being stabbed in revenge by a recuperated Isa, but neither did Isa stop visiting the main house after he got out of the hospital. However, once Yaeko’s husband, Masahiro, quit shift work at the paper plant, turned into a farmer, and was always at the main house at night, Isa suddenly took off for Kawasaki. And that was that; he never returned after that.

  After finishing her tale, Harumi had mumbled to him, “But, ya know, I gotta wonder if that guy ever had a day when he said, ‘I am glad to be alive.’ ”

  How could he still be living after all that? How could he have gone on living?

  As he had been listening to this story Shōji also began to feel that, throughout all this, Uncle Isa was really holding himself above reproach, that in his own egocentrism, his frustrations were projected outward: “You bastards are the cause of all my troubles.” That kind of thing. This was very disruptive to everyone in the vicinity and is at odds, of course, with what every adult knows to be true. Even so, wasn’t it possible that he was unable to live any other way? Cut off by his own father, nearly murdered by his own brother, this never-ending internal reproach would have been more than anyone could stand. The business of living, of keeping himself alive: how else but to take all this anger and disappointment and pain and throw it wantonly into the external world?

  “When I die I want to be buried on a hill overlooking the sea.”

  That was the line written in a letter that Masahiro had received from Uncle Isa.

  “ ‘On a hill overlooking the sea’? He was talking about the freakin’ family burial plot! It’s on a hill, and in the far distance the sea is visible. Even in death he intended for us to take care of him. Masahiro had this pained expression on his face when he read it.” Harumi went on to explain that Isa had been a committed letter writer, read lots of magazines, which may explain his vocabulary being richer than most. Shōji laughed at these romantic expressions at the time, but today he was thinking about how his uncle must have felt, to have made such a request, far away from his hometown, not revealing his exact location but asking to be allowed to rest with his own family.

  As he drew closer to the river’s mouth, where the flow of the water collided with the waves of the sea, the cracks in the concrete wall at his feet also became more obvious. The wall built on the slope of the riverbank had been pulverized in places and the earth beneath spilled out.

  Shōji came to a halt. At the base of the embankment on his right was a still-new two-story house. On the surface of the first floor something white was fluttering in the breeze. It seemed odd; he looked more closely and saw white lace curtains. The windows had no glass and the tattered curtains were being buffeted by the wind and swinging outside the house. The rawness of it struck him and he was prickled with gooseflesh.

  Picking his way carefully through the broken tiles and debris scattered across the slope of the bank, he made his way down to the house. Stealing a glance through the open window he found what looked to be the living room. The television had toppled to the floor next to the sofa. The cushions and a stuffed dog, all encrusted in sand, were scattered across the floor. Stains where the wall met the ceiling marked how high the water had been.

  Nothing was growing in the empty fields and open land around the house. Those vacant lots were no doubt the scars that remained of neighboring houses already torn down and removed. Other than the sound of waves from the other side of the pine grove a short distance away, the area was enveloped in complete silence. No hint of human life. On just this side of the pine grove he noticed a vinyl record that had slipped out of its cover. He bent over to look at the yellow label. “John Coltrane” was the title.

  The class reunion was to take place in a pub in one of the small side-street alleys off the town center, where the bars and restaurants were. It was part of a major chain, one often seen in Tokyo.

  He was well aware that this was not a gathering at which he would be the center of things, but even so, Shōji was feeling awkward, as though he was cutting a not-very-impressive figure. He was anxious. He worried he might throw up. One last adjustment of his coat lapel and a sigh of resignation as he stood at the entrance.

  “Shōji, is that you?”

  He was surprised to hear someone call his name. As he turned in response he saw a short woman with bobbed hair. He had a vague memory of her but couldn’t place her. The frilly cream-colored dress and red enamel shoes were made for someone much younger.

  “Sayoko, is that you?”

  “It’s been a while!”

  Her laugh showed off a fetchingly crooked smile. At the moment that that registered, her face from middle school came to mind and he felt a powerful surge in the chest. He had completely forgotten what it felt like, that sort of pleasurable twinge.

  “Look at you, Shōji! You haven’t changed at all!”

  “That seems unlikely.…”

  For whatever reason he had shifted into standard Japanese. He wanted to give the usual response of “And Sayoko too, you’ve not changed at all!” but couldn’t say it. Back then her gym suit had emphasized the fullness of her breasts and rear, especially for someone so short, but she had become quite slender, with wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. Before seeing her he had thought he had many things he wanted to talk to her about, but none of them now came to mind.

  “How ya been?” he asked out of desperation. Shōji was sure this
rang of a forced question, but she responded with the same bright voice. “Great! I’ve been great. Thanks for asking. I think everyone’s here! Let’s go on in!”

  The automatic door opened as she guided him inside. As they waited for the hostess to come and show them the table she whispered to him, “So, will we have a chance to talk after?”

  Shōji had to conceal a gasp. He turned to look at Sayoko. She was still looking up at him with that cherubic smile. He nodded slightly, “Of course,” wondering to himself what it was they were to talk about. He felt a slight twitter in his chest.

  The hostess guided them to the second floor and opened the door onto the private room. Voices rose from every corner. And all these people were now full adults, all of them with traces of how they looked so long ago. Everyone was smiling and looking his way.

  “Shōji! It’s Shōji!”

  “What a surprise this is!”

  “Like nothing’s changed, ya just got bigger!”

  To be affirmed like this left Shōji surprised. But, of course, he realized, they knew only the me prior to this worn-out dust rag. This made him happy. All the inferiority he felt before meeting everyone seemed to fly away. However, when that fluorescence of nostalgia passed, he realized that even though he had gotten bigger he was still of no particular importance to any of his classmates; everyone seemed at a loss as to what to say next. For his part as well, he couldn’t think of whom to call out to or what to say. In a moment’s time having crossed over twenty-plus years he felt himself back at that place where it mattered little to anyone in the group whether he was there or not. With a smile still plastered on his face he headed toward a corner of the room. Sayoko sat with the women gathered near the entrance. He stopped at one of the low tables in the middle of the room and sat on the floor, stretching his legs in the area below the kotatsu table.