This was also the first time he had slept in a strange house. Could wander around a different bedroom, kitchen, and bathroom. Explore shelves and open drawers. This was a discovery that had immeasurable consequences.
Whenever the opportunity arose, Yoshie would try to gain entry to the house of a neighbor or classmate. Nothing excited his curiosity, his embarrassment, and his pleasure more than snooping around inside. Becoming familiar with other houses—which he always found more interesting than his own—showed him that it was possible to live in a different way. With new furnishings, spaces, rules. On the eve of his tenth birthday, without ever having reached the boundaries of his island, Yoshie had become an emigrant.
He was amazed to discover that, contrary to what he’d imagined, not all the cities at war had had their own atom bomb. Uncle Shiro revealed this information with visible unease, before adding that certain topics weren’t suitable for children. He was even more astonished when, at school, he learned that only two cities in the world had experienced it. Yoshie couldn’t help but feel absurdly proud that he knew both of them. Nobody else in his class could say the same. He was unaware that between five and ten thousand hibakusha lived in Tokyo.
As though they had been trained, recalls Watanabe, his fellow classmates rarely inquired about it. His teachers, especially at first, treated him with a concern he found most agreeable. They didn’t even scold him for spending hours in a trance, detached from his surroundings, drawing in his notebook, doodling eyes, and more eyes. An almond with a black spiral inside.
The only subjects that caught his attention were math and language arts, two excellent ways to use thinking as an escape. He also quite liked history, although it was taught very differently than in Nagasaki. The textbooks were filled with pretty illustrations. One contained a list of all the adversities their great nation had suffered, a list Yoshie was quick to memorize: “Fires, earthquakes, tsunamis, viruses, wars, riots, and others.” That last category was the most terrifying.
When his teachers—seldom and fleetingly—did mention the war, they would allude to the bombs as if they were natural disasters. They spoke of them only as dates, framing the current era of reconstruction and peace. Nobody had dropped the bombs. They’d simply fallen.
On one occasion, the students were asked in what natural form they would choose to be reborn. They excitedly cried out the names of different animals. When Yoshie’s turn came, as his aunt Ineko would remind him for the rest of her life, he said he’d like to be turned into sand. And not just any old sand, he specified: the kind at the bottom of the ocean, so that no one could tread on him.
IT’S A MONTH AFTER the earthquake and the tsunami. The disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant has monopolized the country’s news, debate, and imagination. The International Atomic Energy Agency has raised the incident to the highest possible categorization on its scale: the same as Chernobyl a quarter of a century ago. It’s spring.
Every day, Mr. Watanabe is outraged by the conflation of the two catastrophes, the seismic and the atomic. An earthquake is unavoidable, he argues in his discussions, a natural phenomenon. But a nuclear power plant, like a bomb, is man-made. There’s no comparison between the devastation they cause.
Even the notion of a natural disaster strikes him as increasingly suspicious. Earthquakes and tsunamis occur spontaneously, that is incontrovertible. But before they happen, precautionary measures are planned. Financed. Developed. And the response to them depends on training, and especially on the authorities. All of these factors are controllable, can reduce or increase the amount of damage. That’s why, in the strange arithmetic of catastrophes, a magnitude 7 earthquake in Haiti can be greater than a magnitude 9 in Japan. Watanabe thinks that should be the real news.
Throughout this long month, news reports about the nuclear plant in Fukushima have created a ladder of alarm, denials, and omissions. He has been scaling it rung by rung. Now he looks down with the dizziness of a climber who makes the mistake of wanting to gauge how far he’s climbed.
* * *
The weekend after the earthquake, more than two hundred thousand people were evacuated from the immediate area surrounding the nuclear power plant. The explosion in the first reactor left four people injured, and a fresh explosion in the third reactor wounded another eleven. The electricity company assured everyone that the temperature was stabilizing and that the emergency was over. That same day, Watanabe recalls, another explosion, in the second reactor, split part of the containment vessel. The Nuclear Safety Agency had no choice but to admit that there was a probable radiation leak.
At the moment of the announcement it was raining in Tokyo. He was listening to the radio with his eyes fixed on the picture window: the raindrops grew, collided, fused. They usurped the image and distorted the world. With the latest news the rain became something to be feared. The changeable winds were a portent like in ancient times. As the level of background radiation increased for a few hours, a silent panic (this national characteristic, reflects Watanabe) gripped the city. His neighbors hurried home. In elevators, they exchanged looks the way astronauts might just before liftoff.
The following day, the authorities requested that people within a thirty-kilometer radius of the power plant refrain from opening their doors and windows. Everything was being divided into uchi and soto, inside and outside. That same day, a fire started in the fourth reactor. The U.S. Army was brought in to help douse the flames.
Meanwhile, radiation leaks were confirmed after a fire in a fuel depot. Watanabe read that the director of nuclear security in France had declared the containment system no longer hermetically sealed, and that in his estimation, the accident had reached nearly peak severity. We should listen to the French, Watanabe says, sighing. They’ve carried out more nuclear tests than any other European country.
Columns of smoke were seen next to the third reactor. Due to the radiation, only helicopters could get near enough to drop water. The European Union’s commissioner for energy described the situation as literally apocalyptic. This adverb alarmed Mr. Watanabe more than any other piece of information.
The director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, who, of all things, was Japanese, accused the commissioner of being alarmist. The use of face masks became widespread. Like a lung, the streets of Tokyo filled and emptied. People went to work, but few ventured out in the evenings, as if leisure were more radioactive than productivity.
The next day, thermometers plummeted due to a sudden cold spell that reflected the collective temperature. The government imposed restrictions on energy consumption, after announcing that demand for electricity now exceeded capacity. Transport services were reduced, hotels filled with workers unable to return home. As the manager used to say during Watanabe’s apprenticeship in Paris, someone always makes business out of a lack of business. The city lost its color once more to avert a massive power cut. Flashlights, batteries, and candles filled pockets and conversations.
On that night of anomalous silence, Watanabe discovered that his fear of the dark was greater than his fear of acid rain. As if he might never emerge from darkness. The impossibility of switching on the heat took him back to his Parisian winters, when cold was part of the shared language.
A week after the earthquake, a hundred Tokyo firefighters traveled to spray water cannons on the nuclear power plant. In particular the third reactor, which contained plutonium, the lethal element in the Nagasaki bomb.
When traces of radiation were found in some food in the prefectures of Ibaraki and Fukushima, a ban was imposed on the sale of produce from that area. Even so, the government assured people that the contamination posed no immediate risk to the consumer. Mr. Watanabe’s eyes narrowed when he read the word immediate.
People rushed to devour kelp, which is rich in iodine and prevents the absorption of radioactive elements. The stomach has its own obscure memory: something similar had happened with miso in Hiroshima. For the first time since the postwar years, rice and
bread were becoming scarce. Customers in supermarkets avoided buying spinach and milk, which were as suspect as a government spokesperson.
The following day, the government announced it was shutting down the Fukushima nuclear power plant. As if there had been any doubt, Watanabe thinks with astonishment. Gas stations ran out of gas. Suddenly petroleum, hitherto considered expensive and polluting, became welcome and essential. As his boss in Paris had said, et cetera.
When traces of radiation were discovered at a water treatment plant in Tokyo, the municipal authorities ordered that children stop drinking tap water. Bottled water became a basic necessity that was sometimes impossible to find. Things previously taken for granted now took on a sinister aspect. We have no control over our basic needs, he thinks. They’ve taken it away from us while we were at work or watching television. Of course, he’s in no position to complain about the latter.
That same evening, he followed on a public channel (on the ultra-slimline Me television in his bedroom) the kamikaze exploits of the firefighters. These were the first images ever shown of the emergency services: out-of-focus helmets, hi-vis outfits, garbled loudspeakers, nocturnal sirens, gas masks. They are heroes, reflects Watanabe, and that’s the problem. When a nation broadcasts its heroism, no citizen is safe.
The next day, two firefighters were hospitalized after being exposed to excessive levels of radiation. Heroes don’t protect, they merely predict. They act like seismographs.
By now, traces of contamination had been found in the water supply of six prefectures. He used his remaining bottles to make liters of green tea.
The following day, the Japan Meteorological Agency announced that the cherry trees had come into bloom.
* * *
When the disaster first struck, the majority of Watanabe’s acquaintances refused to believe there was any real danger of the power plant exploding. He believed it right away. Assuming the worst gives him a morbid sense of relief. Some people prefer to envisage the lesser evil, and to modify their expectations as the facts grow bleaker. Such a strategy plunges him into a state of anguish. It makes him feel like a deer in the sinking sun, moving along the shadow line.
When news of the possible radiation leaks at Fukushima first spread, his friends blamed it on foreign propaganda. Specifically, on the nuclear rivalry of the French. After all, many of the countries showing solidarity are the very ones that ban Japanese imports and try aggressively to capture Japan’s position in the market. His friends refused to believe the nonsense published in Western media. Japan didn’t function that poorly. Their technology couldn’t possibly fail like it did in other countries. Truth be told, Watanabe shares this belief. In his view, Japanese industry is intrinsically superior.
But, since it’s been proven that inadequate seawalls allowed water to penetrate the power plant, flooding the instruments and causing a chain of malfunctions, disillusion has been rising like a tide. It seems there were also some fatal design errors at play. Those involved in both the plant’s internal administration and its external supervision are being accused of neglect. According to revelations made in the past few weeks, not only had the highest waves flooded the reactors, but smaller ones had knocked out the emergency generators as well. The latter were, inexplicably, located in a basement.
Watanabe continues to read, his brain also feeling flooded. The waves were equal in height to those of the 1896 tsunami. Which means they’ve had over a hundred years to defend themselves against another disaster like this. Their failure to do so has resulted in many deaths. In a final act of trust, victims fled back to the same shelters that had saved them on previous occasions, or ran to shield themselves in vain behind the faulty seawalls.
These findings have given rise to a general sense of defenselessness, as if he and his compatriots were also running blindly about in a desperate attempt to escape being engulfed by a cascade of truth.
All along the coast, ancient stone markers warned of the heights reached by tsunamis. In the tiny village of Aneyoshi, for example, one inscription still reads: DO NOT BUILD YOUR HOUSE BEYOND THIS POINT. This time, Watanabe learns, the waves stopped a few meters short of the warning. These markers have gone unheeded. When their villages expanded after the war, most of them spread down the mountain toward the shoreline.
AFTER HE HAD RETIRED AND SETTLED BACK IN TOKYO, Mr. Watanabe realized that the culture shock of returning to his country was greater than that of leaving. He found that he didn’t understand some of the expressions used by his youngest compatriots. And that to them, he sounded hopelessly old-fashioned.
Once, in response to a question about a downtown address, a young man, wearing his cap backward and mistaking him for someone who wasn’t fluent in the language, replied to him in English.
Nice cap, Watanabe had growled back in Japanese, exaggerating his Tokyo accent as he walked away.
For the first few months, he noticed that in certain situations, he was prone to act like a Latino. Spanish speakers had frequently remarked upon his reserve, but now in the eyes of his own countrymen and women, he appeared to suffer from an incurable garrulousness. If he missed his stop on a bus or train, he would jump up and rush toward the doors, while the other passengers looked at him as if he were a madman. He would shout on his cell phone, much to the annoyance of his quiet neighbors.
As other languages had entered his life, Watanabe became aware of the extent to which his mother tongue limited the possibility of improvisation, of meandering through a sentence in search of its point. The flexibility of Spanish, in particular the long-windedness of its Argentinian variant, was a structural impossibility in Japanese. Once he’d vanquished his doubts and insecurities, he’d learned over the years to enjoy that slipperiness. Which, he is sure, even altered the way he walked. He suspects now that his gait gives him away as much as his intonation.
The first thing he did after setting up his desk was place the mouse on the left side of the keyboard.
* * *
In spite of the cost and the advice of his friends, he decided to move to the hectic neighborhood of Shinjuku. Among other reasons, because of its convenient proximity to public transportation. The only thing he feels increasingly miserly about is time. In Watanabe’s opinion, wasting time requires more effort than making the most of it: the supply is infinite.
Contrary to the numerous objections he has heard, he continues to believe that living in the center of a city, aside from being extremely practical, is the best way to live nowhere. Its equidistance turns it into a multiple frontier. The center seems to him less a fixed point than a revolving axis, where currents converge for an instant, only to scatter in all directions. During his wanderings, Watanabe has come to understand that the Western image of the urban nucleus differs from his own. Instead of something full, to him it represents a dynamic void.
Not far from where he lives, the train station unfurls with hundreds of departures that lead to as many other worlds. Mr. Watanabe remembers it being rebuilt when he was a child. He’s aware that virtually none of the passengers who use it today have seen the station in that former state. When he compares those ruins with its present vitality, it seems to him he can see his entire country: it has been raised at the expense of forgetting its foundations, like a skyscraper floating in air. Shinjuku Station is inhabited by nojuku, mendigos, or beggars, depending on the language of the person averting their gaze.
Although Watanabe seldom writes letters, he finds the proximity of the post office reassuring. Watanabe feels that every individual is a potential castaway. The greater the access to help, the happier isolation can be. The only things that bother him are the adjacent districts of Chiyoda and Minato, where several rival companies still have their headquarters. He occasionally walks past them, pausing to observe the comings and goings of employees, suppliers, executives, public officials. Not knowing who they are makes him feel a mixture of relief and bitterness. In his mind, the senior employees always look older than him.
B
ut above all else, he has chosen this neighborhood because of the number of foreigners. Here, the movements of every possible race and nationality overlap, like a whirlpool drawn by hand. At this stage of his own disorientation, Watanabe would be incapable of living in a zone that is too homogenous. His previous cities have accustomed him to melting pots. They make him feel he is in several places at once. It could be said that nothing in Japan is less Japanese than Tokyo. Perhaps this is a sublime form of being a capital city.
His friends claim the area has been invaded: hotels and tourists are popping up all over the place. This invasion doesn’t upset Watanabe. Were it not for the nervous astonishment of the new visitors, he would scarcely notice his surroundings.
* * *
The neighborhood also offers a variety of nighttime entertainment, some of it respectable. Its lights and sounds are as tireless as its consumers. Filled with video games and slot machines, the area itself seems to him like a video game, one that accepts all kinds of currency. During the day executives work here, produce, act like responsible citizens. And at night they spend recklessly, invest in vice, sponsor exploitation.
Mr. Watanabe avoids certain places, for cardiovascular reasons rather than on moral grounds. He dines at a small izakaya, where he orders a plate of sashimi with vegetables and sesame dressing. Or, if he is allowing himself a treat, tempura squid and fried bread. He has lost weight since his return. After decades of gastronomic adjustments, he is glad to be reunited with this landscape of paper lanterns and cloudy fish tanks. He has missed wiping his hands with an oshibori before his first mouthful. We Japanese, Watanabe often says, have always been good at washing our hands.
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