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  SACRED CESIUM GROUND AND ISA’S DELUGE

  WEATHERHEAD BOOKS ON ASIA

  WEATHERHEAD BOOKS ON ASIA

  WEATHERHEAD EAST ASIAN INSTITUTE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

  LITERATURE

  DAVID DER-WEI WANG, EDITOR

  Ye Zhaoyan, Nanjing 1937: A Love Story, translated by Michael Berry (2003)

  Oda Makoto, The Breaking Jewel, translated by Donald Keene (2003)

  Han Shaogong, A Dictionary of Maqiao, translated by Julia Lovell (2003)

  Takahashi Takako, Lonely Woman, translated by Maryellen Toman Mori (2004)

  Chen Ran, A Private Life, translated by John Howard-Gibbon (2004)

  Eileen Chang, Written on Water, translated by Andrew F. Jones (2004)

  Writing Women in Modern China: The Revolutionary Years, 1936–1976, edited by Amy D. Dooling (2005)

  Han Bangqing, The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai, first translated by Eileen Chang, revised and edited by Eva Hung (2005)

  Loud Sparrows: Contemporary Chinese Short-Shorts, translated and edited by Aili Mu, Julie Chiu, and Howard Goldblatt (2006)

  For a complete list of titles in this series, see page 165.

  SACRED CESIUM GROUND AND ISA’S DELUGE

  TWO NOVELLAS OF JAPAN’S 3/11 DISASTER

  KIMURA YŪSUKE

  Translated by Doug Slaymaker

  COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

  New York

  This publication has been supported by the Richard W. Weatherhead Publication Fund of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University.

  Columbia University Press wishes to express its appreciation for assistance given by the William F. Sibley Memorial Subvention Award for Japanese Translation from the University of Chicago Center for East Asian Studies Committee on Japanese Studies.

  Columbia University Press wishes to express its appreciation for assistance given by the Pushkin Fund in the publication of this book.

  Columbia University Press

  Publishers Since 1893

  New York Chichester, West Sussex

  cup.columbia.edu

  Isa no hanran by Yusuke Kimura

  Copyright © Yusuke Kimura 2016

  All rights reserved.

  Original Japanese edition published by Mirai Sha Tokyo.

  Seichi Cs by Yusuke Kimura

  Copyright © Yusuke Kimura 2014

  All rights reserved.

  Original Japanese edition published by Shinchosa Publishing Co., Ltd., Tokyo.

  This English edition published by arrangement with Mirai Sha, Tokyo

  In care of Tuttle-Mori Agency, Inc., Tokyo

  Copyright © 2019 Columbia University Press

  All rights reserved

  E-ISBN 978-0-231-54832-8

  Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from the Library of Congress

  ISBN 978-0-231-18942-2 (cloth)

  ISBN 978-0-231-18943-9 (paper)

  A Columbia University Press E-book.

  CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [email protected].

  Cover design: Julia Kushnirsky

  Cover image: Private Collection Archives Charmet/Bridgeman Images

  CONTENTS

  Sacred Cesium Ground

  Isa’s Deluge

  Translator’s Afterword

  SACRED CESIUM GROUND

  So, this looks to be it: the “Fortress of Hope” …

  I sat behind the wheel for a minute longer, looking around. I recognized this scene from images I had seen; but with it in front of me, normal as can be, it didn’t quite feel real. It had been my idea to come, but even so, seeing it right in front of me, it was hard to believe.

  I was parked on a road lined with cedar trees. A short distance ahead a road forked off to the left, but the main road was barricaded and blocked. While the open road was paved, it was wide enough only for a single vehicle. That would be the entrance to the cattle farm.

  I concentrated on taking deep breaths, to calm myself down, and to calm my anxiety about the unknown tasks ahead. With every exhale I released emotions lingering from last night’s fraught phone conversation with my husband. I looked at my watch: ten to eight. Yasuda had emailed that I should arrive by nine, so no particular need to rush. But it was the first day and I wanted to arrive early, so I inched a little further up the road. I had picked up this compact rental car at the Shinkansen station nearly three hours earlier.

  Yasuda’s message had warned, “Be careful. There are wild animals in the area,” but I had seen nothing. She was, I am sure, concerned for my well-being, but I am sure she was also worried about the harm to the animals were I to run into one.

  A sign bearing the farm’s original name stood where the road branched off. It stood next to a discarded yellow tractor, a sort of bulldozer with a digging scoop. Not one of those Caterpillars with metal tracks, but a tractor with large wide rubber tires, like the ones used for snow removal. The banner stuck to its side read, “Fortress of Hope.” The scoop, completely rusted and biting the earth, bore yellow spray-painted words in that 1960s student-radical angular style of writing; the words conveyed a fierce determination: Unconditional Rescue. Solidarity. It stood there imposingly, a fierce guardian protecting the entrance to a sacred precinct. I pulled into the road off to the left but remained focused on it as I drove by.

  Off to the left were huge sacks stuffed near to bursting, stacked three stories high; they appeared to contain cattle feed and looked as though they had been out in the open for some time. Further in the distance was an open structure of steel girders and corrugated sheets for a roof; hay was stacked to the rafters.

  I was distracted by the sight while moving forward … and then, there they were. All the cattle, dark brown in color, scattered across the pasture off to my right. Many more crowded the fence right in front of me. A single thin wire separated the road and pasture. I assume the only reason they didn’t go through that single thin wire was because it was electrified. The cattle were so close I could have reached out and touched them had I wanted to; they calmly stared at me, the intruder. Two adult steers, rather small of stature, drew closer.

  Okay: it’s a pasture, no reason to be surprised to see cows. I brought the car to a stop. I couldn’t stop staring. Had I ever seen cows so close up before? I searched my memory but could not come up with any time that I had. “It’s good to see you,” I mumbled. “It’s really good to see you all.” I wonder if that little one is here somewhere, not a brown cow but the black-and-white-patterned Holstein. I looked but didn’t see it.

  This farm had originally been called Sendō Farm. Even now, that’s what shows up on my GPS. But then came a moment in history and a line was crossed. The owner had changed the name to Fortress of Hope.

  I continued slowly along the gently curving road until it was blocked by an electric fence stretched across the road; I could go no further. Further in the distance were two cattle sheds on the left-hand side; the sheds’ longest sides faced the road. The Fortress of Hope website instructs one to open the gate and enter, but many cows were gathered on the other side of the fence, blocking the road. Further, off to the right, a long single-file line of large cattle were climbing the hill to meet the others at the side of the road. While they climbed some bellowed: umuoooooo.

  There was no way I was going to drive a car into this. Still not sure what I was going to do I pulled the car into an open space on the left where the grass was shorter. I pulled two surgical masks from the sports bag on the passenger seat; I placed them over my nose and mouth. I pinned back my bangs and clipped my ponytail to the top of my head. I pulled on a knit cap, doing my best to keep my hair out of
sight. I put on waterproof kitchen gloves and pulled cotton work gloves over those. I put on the black windbreaker that I had hurriedly bought at the big-box home center.

  I wanted to change into my rubber work boots, but there was no room in the driver’s seat so I opened the door and stepped outside. I was about to remove my sneakers when I glanced at the ground and gasped. Right there next to my foot, black, curled like a swirling eddy or an ammonite fossil, was a cow patty.

  But of course, it’s a cow pasture after all. I murmured self-encouragements to myself, changed into my boots, always careful of that pile of shit.

  I took only my phone and lip cream; my wallet and cosmetic bag stayed in the car; I couldn’t imagine I would need them anytime soon. One thing was still bothering me: do I take the Geiger counter? I ultimately decided against. I figured that while working there wasn’t going to be time to be checking radiation anyway. Plus, I’m already here; I’m not going to back out now. That Geiger counter had, for some time now, been steadily beeping … Bi-bip … Bi-bip … It had been bad enough on the road from the hotel, but it was now ringing with a frequency I hadn’t heard before. Then the numbers on the LED screen were registering numbers that, no surprise, I had never seen before. They were now ten times over the official level that would require Decontamination Implementation Protocols; forty times higher than the measurements I got where I lived in Nakano, in Tokyo. If this were Tokyo the residents would be in an uproar; how do I make sense of the fact that I am now in a place like this? I had no idea.

  I locked the car door and started to message Yasuda that I had arrived when I heard the roar of heavy equipment from the other side of the electric fence drawing closer. It was the same kind of rubber-tired thing that I had seen earlier at the farm’s entrance, but this one was pale blue. The cows were also startled by the sound; they quickly parted to make way for it.

  The tractor stopped at the electric fence. Through the cab window I could see the driver. I let out an involuntary gasp of recognition. It was the sixtyish farmer himself, Sendō.

  I couldn’t tell if he saw me or not. Mr. Sendō, with his sun-bleached hat, got off the tractor and unlatched the gate on the electric fence. He climbed back into the cab, drove through the gate, climbed down again, and relatched the gate. I assume it is because he is always out in the wintry air, but he looked just like the kids from my hometown up in the north country, same red chapped cheeks. And with the well-worn jacket, jeans, and rubber boots, with graying hair sticking out from under his hat, he looked exactly the same as he did in all the books and documentaries about him. He climbed back into the cab and bobbed his head: I suppose he had caught sight of me, but he had not exactly looked in this direction. I hurriedly bowed a greeting in return. With that he headed back in the direction from which I had just come, toward the farm gate, engine roaring.

  I hadn’t expected to run into someone so famous, to me anyway, as Mr. Sendō. I was a little starstruck. I remembered that I had been trying to message Yasuda, so I picked up the phone. I called the number she had provided earlier but got no answer. I figured she would be calling me back before too long anyway, so I followed Sendō’s example and opened the gate, walked inside, and then closed it after me. It looked to be a gate hand made from thin wire. The latch was plastic. Even so, maybe because it was covered in water and mud, a slightly painful tingle surged through the gloves, the distinctive blood-draining shock of electricity.

  When I looked up again, a group of large unmoving cows were planted directly in front of me. They all stared at me warily, some from the side, some straight on. Again, from the back came a bellowing, like from a conch-shell trumpet. I studied the cattle right in front of me, so close I could hear them breathing. They were huge, oppressive. Some cows’ flanks were higher than the top of my head. The documentaries had not conveyed their mass and oppressive presence. If they had any wish to, these four-hundred-plus-kilo creatures could easily have trampled my lightweight body into unrecognizable pieces. And those menacing horns, glossy like polished stone, waving in the air. Nearly all of them had been cut off in the middle, but some remained in their natural state, grown out to sharp points.

  I was feeling slightly anxious as I searched the area, peering through the spaces between cows, but there was no hint of another human being anywhere. I thought about phoning Yasuda again. I could hear myself saying something like, “I came to volunteer, but it seems that it is me that is going to need a hand here. Sorry for the bother.” To myself I murmured, “What’s your plan here if you can’t even figure out something like this?” Trying to whip up nonexistent courage and praying that the cows wouldn’t start moving in on me, I slowly made my way forward, searching for gaps between bodies. And also careful to avoid those cow piles.

  They were exactly like boulders that had sprouted limbs, these cows, and they seemed to be paying careful attention to me, but, thankfully, there were no sudden movements. I somehow made my way through the densely packed mass. The tenseness of my body dissipated. Apparently I had forgotten to breathe, too.

  Cattle were walking together in groups along the right side of the road. Those coming up from the pasture formed a line and were trudging off further into the distance. We were all moving in the same direction; a fixed space remained between me and the group of cattle, save for one single cow rooted in the middle of the road. As the cow turned his, maybe her, big eyes in my direction, I timidly extended the back of my right hand, same as when approaching a stray cat on the street. My intent was to give some time for it to familiarize itself with me, but then he, maybe she, drew closer to my helplessly dangling hand and smelled it with that big wet nose. Brown hair sprouted in the space between its ears, like hand-tousled bangs, curled-brown locks. It was like meeting a friend. I extended my hand to ruffle the hair, but the cow flipped its head away with a sharp snort as if to say, “Don’t touch me” and backed away.

  According to the website map, the cattle shed closest to me, on the left, was barn number 2, while the one farther back was barn number 1. The trees on the right, where the road veered off, were laden with small bloodred fruits. Pretty as a picture, it was, as those cattle trudged steadily forward under the trees. The sight allowed me to relax a bit. Through the trees I could clearly see the expanse of the pasture, a recessed area like a large bowl. Cows, individual black dots, were scattered across its surface. I stopped moving in order to take in this wide peaceful pasture, in these days before Christmas, and draw a deep breath … and stopped.

  Many cows here too, in the space that opened between the two sheds. Yet still no humans to be seen, anywhere; increasingly uncanny.

  “Is that you, Nishino-san?”

  A woman’s voice called from the distance, from the direction of barn number 1. It was a voice I recognized from that documentary about Mr. Sendō. Her high-pitched voice carried far. I turned toward it. Without waiting for my response, Yasuda opened the gate to the shed, pulled it open a crack, and made her way toward me. I called back, flustered, “Yes, Nishino here. Again, thanks; sorry to be such a bother.”

  “Think nothing of it. We’re glad to see you.”

  Yasuda flashed a big broad smile. Even though she was easily ten years older than me (and I was thirty-three), she had the rustic simplicity of a young girl of the steppes. She wore a black cap but no surgical mask. I was close to staring, thinking that this woman was that woman, the one single-handedly providing food to all the cats and dogs that had been left behind in the confused period immediately after the nuclear meltdown. She had also visited farms while all that was going on, and it had literally changed her life, so gruesome were the sights she saw.

  “Good morning!”

  I heard voices coming from another direction. I turned to look and found a man and a woman about my age, or maybe younger, making their way toward us, walking through the cows standing in the road. As they got closer I could see that they were both wearing black knit caps and surgical masks and also—hers in pink, his in yellow—wi
ndbreakers from one of those famous sportswear companies.

  “Yasuda-san, sorry we have been out of touch. But here we are again.”

  “And all the way from Yokohama! Thanks for making the effort.”

  The woman was talking with Yasuda. After I introduced myself she continued, “I am Matsuo Mikako; this is my husband.”

  “Matsuo Jun here. Hi.” This tall thin man murmured nothing else, blinking nervously.

  “Nishino-san, is this your first time here?” Mikako then asked.

  “Yes, it is the first time for me. I’ll need you to show me what to do.”

  “Well, not like we know: it’s only our second time. Plus, only for two days this time. We go home tomorrow.”

  “I see. I’m going back the day after.”

  Unusual how, even though we had just met, there didn’t seem to be any of that first-meeting tension one expects. Maybe because we were all aware what a mysterious place we had come to. While Mikako and I were talking, the reticent Jun was staring intently at the small device he held in one hand. The instrument sealed in a plastic bag was, of course, a Geiger counter.

  “Well, I know you have all just arrived, but can I ask you to help me with this?”

  Yasuda called to us and we fell in behind her. She walked between cows toward the second barn, trudging through the mire. Without a second thought I made off through the mud as well; but with the first step I gasped. I realized that this mire, although it looked like regular mud, was actually sedimented excrement and manure from the cows. Manure that is like mud; it was “mudshit.” Here I was, already standing in it, too late to turn back now. As soon as I pulled a boot from the sucking sludge I could see an intense yellow liquid had filled the space I’d left behind. Beyond the puddles it was firmer, a black, ankle-deep muck. It proved surprisingly sticky. I was afraid it would pull the boots right off my feet. All this while trying to sidestep the cow firmly blocking my path. I now worried I might lose my balance and tumble over.