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

her laughing mouth.
    Whenever I mentioned Hiroshima the whole family grew sad and silent, so I hated to bring up the matter, but it seemed my duty to raise it once more with the patriarch, which I did while we were still eating in the dark. The whites of his eyes seemed to flare. “Because Fukushima is prosperous on account of their fishery,” he said, “I fear their decline.” To me this seemed so Japanese, to worry about others first! He went on: “Atomic power is very dangerous. To me, it’s so dangerous. To me, it’s like war.”
    That afternoon I had asked Takuto how he imagined the worst might be, and he replied, not quite a week before the Japanese government admitted that the reactor accident was a Level Seven like Chernobyl’s: “Like Chernobyl. Oshima could be contaminated. In the summer the wind comes from the south.”

Soldiers in Ishinomaki. Photo by William T. Vollmann

THE WIND THAT COMES FROM THE SEA
     
    REGARDING THAT DAY’S PLEASURE DRIVE, I will tell you that shortly after five in the evening, once the nasty and potentially hazardous rain had ceased, the interpreter and I hired a taxi to convey us to the Komatsu Shrine, of which none of us, including the driver, had ever heard; the interpreter and I had chosen it after a glance at her map. The driver was a bald old man who insisted on his financial rights. His stubbornness had nothing to do with the danger; the question was whether to pay by the hour, the meter, or the job. Finally we compromised on all three. The driver then said that this journey might not even be allowed, because it seemed as if Komatsu Shrine might lie—what a coincidence!—within the forced evacuation ring. He radioed his boss, who gave us his blessing, and off we went. Needless to say, I watched the dosimeter, expecting radiation to rise in proportion to the inverse-square law, but anyhow I have already spoiled the suspense of that business.
    The driver had picked up only two fares that day, both of them insurance company operatives who were verifying earthquake damage. Now the highway was open, he continued, so that made it smooth. He was a good talker, and I had already begun to like him. The dosimeter remained at 2.4 and the evening was clear, the bare trees on the verge of appearing springlike. Here came more lovely silver-white plum blossoms in the dusk. The driver said that he used to party in Kesennuma; he was an angler; the fish were so good there. I did not have the heart to tell him what the fisherman in the orange windbreaker had told me in Oshima—that all the fishing was ruined there for years to come. 33
    He said that Koriyama was very quiet at night now.
    Rolling up the ever emptier road into the grassier hills, we saw here and there a long straight line of cabbages in the grass, or jade-colored onions growing high. We were all wearing masks for the dust. The taxi was hot; my mask made me a trifle nauseous; but I thought it best not to roll down the window. Did the driver worry about the contamination? ( Contamination was once again the word they all used; oh, it sounded so much better than radioactivity !) Not at all, he chuckled. “My wife,” he laughed, “she told me since it was raining not to go out, but I don’t care at all! The government always says: no immediate effect on your health! Ha, ha, ha! Every day they announce the level of radiation within the prefecture. Compared with an X-ray check, which is 600 sieverts, 34 that doesn’t sound scary at all!”
    “Was that sieverts or millisieverts?” I inquired.
    “I thought it was six hundred,” he said vaguely, “but however strong the contamination is, it’s not comparable. We have never thought about these things.”
    The driver’s bald head was as pale yellow as the bamboo leaves at sunset, and he seemed rather happy, the local road winding us under bluish-purple clouds, ostensibly toward Funehiki, and then as the driver mentioned a fine cherry-blossom-viewing spot (although the