Almost all the major roads appear to be reopened, although they are not always in a very good state. However, the local roads remain an unknown, a scribble of cracks. Often, the information says one thing and the comments on forums something different. To complicate matters, those comments often contradict one another.
Since there’s no consensus about the precarious portions of his journey, Watanabe relies on his intuition. He will start by heading north on National Route 4. Terrain permitting, he will attempt to turn off onto the secondary roads toward the coastal towns. At that point, he’ll make his way south.
He fires up the Verso, and leaves in a car that isn’t his to a place he doesn’t know.
THE SKY PIERCES the transparent roof: an endless blue tile. Mr. Watanabe has to make an effort not to be distracted by that other landscape circulating above his head. In the end, he thinks, we never look where we should. Although he has just had breakfast in Natori, he feels hungry. Given his small appetite, he knows this is a sign of anxiety.
The road looks unnervingly clear. He passes scarcely any other vehicles. Some parts are still full of cracks from the floods and the shifting of the tectonic plates. From time to time there is a brief rumble beneath the wheels, like bags full of air popping.
At intervals, Watanabe drives past small police checkpoints. The officers cast him strange looks. A few order him to stop the car, give information about the state of the roads, and ask him questions before allowing him to go on his way.
To amuse himself, or perhaps because he’s afraid the truth won’t sound plausible, he tells one officer he’s writing an article for a Tokyo newspaper. He tells the next one he’s making a documentary about the tsunami. He explains to the following one that he works in television (well, he thinks, that isn’t so far from the truth). The next one seems more mulish, and he tells him that he has relatives who have been affected. Every good lie, reflects Watanabe, is based on different layers of truth.
He can’t find any music he likes, and keeps the car radio tuned to the news. According to the latest estimates, the total number of people wounded, killed, or missing has risen to almost thirty thousand. It’s a number that, because of the years he spent in Argentina, gives him a particular feeling of revulsion.
In different locations across the region, the radio informs him, radioactivity twenty-five times above the maximum safety level has been detected. Despite appeals for caution, the hypothesis has begun to spread that people residing in those areas won’t be able to return to their homes for a long time. If at all.
A river of cracks down the asphalt. Bags of air beneath the wheels.
* * *
In the prefecture of Iwate, as the sunroof frames midday, Mr. Watanabe turns toward the coast on Route 343. The GPS informs him he is approaching Rikuzentakata, a place that remains associated in his mind with an unfortunate headline: WAVE WIPES QUIET COASTAL VILLAGE OFF THE MAP.
To be expelled from the map, wiped off the planet. To cease being real. “The town no longer exists,” he’d read in March. And yet its name is still there, flickering on the radar. He imagines a silhouette traced around a hole, like the chalk drawing around a corpse. He wonders what difference there is between disappearing beneath a ring of fire and a blow from the ocean.
At the next fork in the road, Watanabe turns toward the sea and takes the 340. He reads a sign that seems like an elegy: TAKEKOMA KINDERGARTEN. A moment later, another that says: MURAKAMI DENTAL CLINIC.
His car moves forward, he enters the town, and he both wants and doesn’t want to get out. He is surrounded by a landscape in pieces, but he looks only straight ahead. He looks only at the ocean.
A couple of kilometers farther, the beach comes into view. He steers along mud paths hardened by the sun. He gets as close as he can and leans his head out of the window. The murmur of waves fuses with the noise of cranes.
He stops the car, climbs out, and runs toward the beach.
He is running fast in his mind, slowly in his body.
In the distance, one of the workmen watches him with dismay, fearing perhaps that he means to plunge in fully clothed and be carried away by the current.
But Mr. Watanabe stops running, drained from his exertions, startled all of a sudden by a tree on the shore. A tree that is no longer really visible.
Only the base and roots remain. The water’s ax has lopped off almost the entire trunk and has sliced a meter into the earth where the tree once grew. With its roots exposed to the elements, the stump now looks like a hesitant spider or a paralyzed crab.
As he walks back to his car, he contemplates the reconstruction work. Its painful slowness. Its patience from another era. Its conviction.
Then he notices that a man is waiting for him next to the car. He is wearing a hi-vis jacket and a safety helmet that doesn’t seem to offer much protection. They both bow at the same time, as if they had seen the same object on the floor.
A journalist? asks the man.
Just curious, replies Watanabe.
What’s the difference? the man says with a grin.
During their exchange, he learns that Toshiki lost his wife on the day of the tsunami. The wave took her and she hasn’t turned up yet. Toshiki knows she won’t come back, but he’d like to recover her body. To have somewhere he can visit her. He is now working as a volunteer, he explains, so that he doesn’t go crazy. He helps the fire department, which has lost most of its men, and the local health services, which still can’t cope.
Before leaving, Watanabe asks if he has thought of moving away, of starting a new life. Toshiki removes his helmet. He is completely bald and yet smooths his head. He gazes at the sea and replies: I like this town. I want to live here. This place exists. It’s ours.
Mr. Watanabe returns the way he came. He leaves behind the gap that was once the town hall, turns onto Route 45, and heads northeast.
* * *
After an unexpected roundabout, which he enters slightly too quickly, and a nerve-racking series of bends that seem to twirl through the compass points, he is almost at the coast’s edge. Now he drives parallel to the narrow bay of Ōfunato, which acted as a funnel for the tsunami.
He slows down. Reaches for his phone. He enters the place name in Wikipedia and, scrolling with his thumb, three facts catch his eye. One. On March 11, following the earthquake, the sea here swept three kilometers inland, while in Tokyo he walked a similar distance to his house. Two. The city of Ōfunato is a sister city to Palos de la Frontera, the port from which Columbus’s caravels set sail for the Americas. And three. Fifty years ago to the day, it gained notoriety after being hit by a tsunami caused by an earthquake in Valdivia, Chile, the biggest in the history of the world.
As he drives on in his car, Watanabe observes the intricate destruction all around him, as though a flotilla of ships had smashed to smithereens on the shore. Yet, despite everything, the destruction is matched by a sense of order. Every vestige has been classified, gathered, and organized with an almost unreal efficiency that inspires as much horror as the preceding chaos. The pine trees are piled up alongside one another. Remnants of houses are also heaped up, outlines of the homes they once were. Cars are pressed together like an exaggerated sculpture made of millions of beer cans.
All this apocalyptic symmetry, Watanabe imagines, is a part of some industry whose aim is to dismantle and undo. To de-produce.
Clouds cross the sunroof as he drives through the outskirts of Ōfunato. He lowers the window. He breathes in what he is seeing. The mountains and the sea seem to be arguing: cool air descending from one, a wave of humidity rising from the other.
He zigzags through streets that have lost their edges. Their steel girders torn out, the buildings also reveal their roots. Others preserve a precise memory of the water, thermometers unable to forget the sickness that assailed them: the first floor ruptured completely, the second badly damaged, the third with a few blemishes, the fourth filthy, the fifth intact.
By the road, a drin
ks vending machine flashes. He pulls up across from it and stares at the lengthy cable trailing behind a wall. The machine is still lit up, colorful, inexplicably upright, like a drunken sentry who hasn’t realized that the enemy has already attacked. All at once, every object appears to have some other meaning. Maybe because destruction is illegible, a language no one can speak.
Only then does he become aware of the hollow sensation in his stomach, the throbbing at his temples, the dryness in his mouth. He feels in his trouser pocket for some change. He steps out of the car. He inserts the coins into the luminous slot.
Nothing happens, except for the noise of the wind.
* * *
In the center of Ōfunato, a tilted house welcomes him. The tide washed it here and deposited it in that strange lozenge-like position. Anyone trying to inhabit it would live a sideways existence.
In his rearview mirror half a white vehicle quivers. When their two gazes meet, the floating head of the other driver nods a greeting. For a second, before passing the tilted house, he sees an optical illusion: a head on top of a house on top of a mound of earth.
He stops outside a half-demolished building. A cross on one of the walls, made with a spray can, attests that it has been searched by the rescue services. Mr. Watanabe approaches the building and, changing his glasses, pokes his head inside. Among the rubble he sees several pieces of porcelain (three teacups, two bowls, a blue dish) set out on the floor, without a scratch, misinformed. A postwar picnic.
Meanwhile, across the road, a family is tending their flowers. They’re working on their knees in the improvised garden they have made on the foundations of what was once their home. Some neighbors are watching them from their surviving window.
Watanabe strolls through the holes in the city, ashamed to look around him and unable to avoid it. These ruins aren’t like others he remembers. Everything here has become floppy, unraveled, deboned. The workers are cleaning up an ambiguous substance, something between solid and deluge. The cranes lift up all kinds of objects, now crumpled, that had seemed immovable. Bent like a metal rag over a railing, a car awaits its turn. Over on the far side of the bay, he spies the cement factory’s ironic chimney. The ground is strewn with shards of what was once indivisible. But what’s really astonished him since childhood is that things keep their wholeness.
Farther on, away from the port, he stands motionless before a sight that ought to be a mirage: an enormous boat grounded in midavenue, navigating the afternoon. Around it, abnormal fruits, bits of clothing hang from the branches of cherry trees.
* * *
The Verso turns south. Watanabe munches on the one and only piece of hosomaki he found left in a denuded grocery store. After his brief excursion around the prefecture of Iwate, he is ready to explore the prefecture of Miyagi. Spring cushions Route 45 like a parenthesis. The asphalt is one dark sentence; the digression of flowers does its best to change the subject.
In this year of cold fronts, rain, and fear, the plum trees have blossomed late. Now that they have finally done so, he thinks, they give the impression of not wanting to stop. The blossoms slow him down, cajole him, and almost without realizing it, he lifts his foot off the accelerator.
Some cherry trees have kept their petals, refusing to accept that the sakura season ended at least a couple of weeks earlier. These late flowers look like flames. Mr. Watanabe remembers that the samurai considered cherry flowers their companions, as much for their brief lives as for their color, which resembled the blood that bloomed in combat. Nowadays they are supposed to denote innocence and rebirth. This shift leads him to reflect on the moral omissions of today. He has always thought that the awareness of death is the basis for any appreciation of beauty.
He recalls the poisonous splendor of the oleander, the official flower of Hiroshima, the first to appear after the atomic bomb. Oleanders are capable of enduring far more pain than the gardeners who grow them. He has seen them divide highways in the States, Spain, Argentina. Far from home, surrounded by this empty landscape, Watanabe feels like he is traveling backward. Each kilometer repays a debt.
Suddenly, a car overtakes him, and he grips the steering wheel, startled. He can’t remember when he last encountered another driver. During the days of sakura season, families, couples, and friends gather beneath the trees, but now there is no one here to celebrate the endurance of these cherry blossoms. They survive without an audience. The only ceremony is spring itself, the silent miracle of its insistence.
For some years now, Mr. Watanabe has preferred plum trees. The worldwide interest in cherry trees has reached such an extreme that they sell apps to follow in real time the appearance of the first buds, the progress of their blossoming, the effect of the atmospheric pressure on their petals. Pocket pastures.
This year, however, all the weather indexes are busy measuring the direction of the wind and radiation levels. He himself intends to use his brand-new dosimeter when, tomorrow or the day after, he reaches the prefecture of Fukushima.
During the past few springs, he’s noticed that young people take selfies next to the cherry trees. What really blossoms there are the observers. Unlike photography in his day, it isn’t so much the events that are immortalized as the photographers themselves. From that point of view, the trees here are lonelier than ever. No people smiling in front of them, no lovers kissing beneath their shade, nor youngsters pulling funny faces. Watanabe feels the urge to take a picture of himself with one of those that dot the horizon.
He stops by the roadside. Gets out of the car. Walks over to a tall, gleaming plum tree. He takes his phone out of his pocket and points it at himself. He feels embarrassed and puts it away again.
* * *
Outside the railway station at Kesennuma, the rubble browns and dries out. Mr. Watanabe skirts it slowly, walking with his eyes on the ground, measuring each portion with his feet. The railway tracks resemble scattered matchsticks. A sign on a post welcomes past visitors.
As he walks along the tracks, an oddly rapid movement amid the stillness, he tries to imagine the daily routine of this city before the earthquake. Perhaps the eloquence of wreckage is based on that, on the need to complete what is not there.
Watanabe raises his eyes toward the harbor, which is blocked by a wave of debris. In the distance, the lone silhouette of a cherry tree stands out, like a crane striving to raise the fallen landscape. Stripped of all context, its isolated blossoms contradict (or highlight?) the surrounding destruction.
May I be of some assistance? He is surprised by a voice behind him, carried on the wind.
He turns and a mouth smiles at him, puckered as if to whistle. It’s a young firefighter with a very wrinkled brow. A firefighter with two faces, two ages, he thinks.
Are you looking for someone? the young guy asks, spinning the helmet in his gloved hands.
More candidly than anticipated, Mr. Watanabe murmurs: No. I don’t know. Possibly.
Did you have relatives here?
Not here. In Nagasaki.
The lad’s smile is swallowed by the wrinkles on his face.
Aha. I see, I see.
Watanabe peers down at his shoes. The fireman’s boots are enormous.
Forgive me, says the lad, do you know what today’s date is, and where we are?
Mr. Watanabe raises his head.
Of course, he replies, indignantly. Do you, young man?
The fireman puts his helmet back on and his wrinkles disappear.
I have to get back to work. There’s no end to the wreckage from the burned-out boats. We still have a lot of clearing up to do. Good afternoon.
Yes, we still have a lot, Watanabe says, sighing, and turns around.
THE AFTERNOON LOSES HEIGHT and reddens. It’s that time of day when everything suffers an attack of shyness. The road trembles, wavers, turns hazy. Mr. Watanabe changes glasses again.
Although this stretch of National Route 6 is in passable condition, there are few cars. Especially going south where he is
headed. He finally makes his way into the prefecture of Fukushima, closer and closer to the nuclear power plant. The circles are narrowing and seeking their center. Watanabe imagines the ripples in a pond, contracting in reverse.
As the kilometers go by, he drives through communities that still show signs of damage and the fear of radiation, but are outside the areas forced to evacuate. At least for now, he thinks. He notes that these communities are partially populated and are struggling to return to normalcy. The inhabitants move about with a certain emphasis, as though determined to fill the gaps left by their absent neighbors.
Tired and hungry, he decides to have dinner and spend the night in the first town he comes by. The Verso’s GPS tells him it is called Sōma. The name makes him think of the drug they take in Brave New World.
Before he arrives, he stops at a gas station. He buys two bottles of water and uses his radiation meter for the first time, with no significant results. While he fills up the Verso, he chats with another driver, who informs him that he lives to the west of the city. Sitting in the back seat are a boy and an enormous dalmatian. When the man says a name that Watanabe can’t quite hear, he’s left wondering whether he was referring to his son or the dog.
The driver tells him that though Sōma is almost fifty kilometers from the power station, and therefore safe from harm, half the inhabitants have chosen to leave. While he is talking, he keeps looking over at the back seat. Watanabe wonders if the man’s wife has stayed home, or if he is a single dad, or if he might even be fleeing himself. The tsunami, explains the driver, flooded the eastern side of the city, engulfing the coast, the harbor, and their famous strawberry farms. Our strawberry farms, he repeats, in an overly loud voice.
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