Into the Forbidden Zone by William T. Vollmann Read Free Book Online

multicolored garbage-flecks, a seagull flying very low, a lost bamboo pole, and the orange prow of a ship sticking out of the water upside down like the bill of a dead porpoise, we landed at Oshima Island (165 kilometers from the reactor; population about three thousand), where Professor Morimoto’s student Murakami Takuto awaited us.
    The Murakami family’s is the last tsunami story I will tell. They were of old stock, their ancestors marine soldiers who fought on the side of the Heike in that famous twelfth-century civil war, about which so much great literature has been written. The Tale of the Heike opens in a way not devoid of reference to the events of this essay: “The bell of the Gion Temple tolls into every man’s house to warn him that all is vanity and evanescence. The faded flowers of the sala trees by the Buddha’s deathbed bear witness to the truth that all who flourish are destined to decay.” 27
    The first floor of their house had been half submerged. The second floor was fine. Almost all of their electrical appliances would have to be replaced, from the rice cooker to the new television to the heating system, which unfortunately and uncharacteristically had not employed natural gas.
    In the dining room, which now needed work, Grandmother Fumiko (born in 1933) said, speaking very slowly, tilting her wide, handsome face: “On that day I was in the garden when the earthquake broke out. When it stopped, I came in; there wasn’t much damage, just some glasses and candlesticks. Then I heard the tsunami alert: someone from the fire department calling on the loudspeaker. I cannot run like others. Then I saw the wave: lots of bubbles, so it was white. It was low. And I saw another big wave coming behind it, and so I tried to run. I ran to a higher place. Had I taken the big road I would have been drowned. I took the narrower, higher road. I looked back; the neighbor’s house was floating. After that, I picked up a bamboo stick and used it as a cane. In this city an elementary school is used as an evacuation center. I still live there. I just came here to welcome you.
    “In the beginning we couldn’t communicate with anyone. After five days the parents came and I learned that the three grandchildren had survived. It was so scary that I trembled and couldn’t stop. I couldn’t sleep. Friends offered me clothes, rice balls, 28 and a futon, so I’m doing fine.”
    She then said: “For 350 years our family has been living here, and our ancestors’ saying is that in the Meiji era the big tsunami could not come up to here; therefore this house is safe. If I believed the saying of the ancestors, I wouldn’t be alive.”
    “Are you concerned about the accident in Fukushima?”
    “The radiation, when it rains, they tell us not to get wet. . .”
    (Her grandson later told me: “About radiation people on this island don’t know anything.”)
    I made my usual remark that after Hiroshima and Nagasaki it seemed particularly sad to me that Japanese were once again suffering from radiation, to which the old lady replied, clasping her hands: “I just want them to be careful.”
    “The pines are all fallen and gone,” said the grandmother, stretching out her left hand toward where they used to be, out across the broken trees and sand and over the sea toward the former location of the great rock that the two grandsons used to call their “target” when they swam together. “From here we used to be able to see the sun rising through the pines. We were so proud of that. Now the ocean seems closer. That’s a little scary.”
    In the garden she had grown corn, rapeseed, spinach, pumpkins, and white radishes. 29 She said, “I feel so lonely now that I have nothing left to work on.”
    The interpreter, Professor Morimoto’s student Takuto, and I went for a walk. Down on the futile breakwater of the wrecked beach we found a dripping Chinese book for boys and girls—the property of his late grandfather. “But we