Sacred Cesium Ground and Isa's Deluge Read online

  A sigh, another sip of coffee. He enjoyed recording Uncle Isa’s life. It was an odd sort of gratification, not unlike picking up unusual badges and foreign coins to fill an empty keepsakes box.

  (But what had turned Uncle Isa into such a violent person?)

  Compared with his gifted brothers, he was apparently a child with rough edges by nature, could even be said to have a violent disposition. His father, a strict disciplinarian, was overbearing in his attempts to smooth his edges.

  There was a time, for example, when he was being chased by his father for some infraction, and he stuck his head into a thicket near the house. When his father found him he went at him with a stick—one of those thick sturdy rods used in threshing rice—and hit him with it over and over again. His father was heard to say when he returned home, “The beating I just gave him should last him the rest of his life,” in a voice that sounded completely worn out.

  Having written that far Shōji sighed and put down his pen. He scratched his forehead with his pinky, although he felt no particular itch.

  You have to wonder what the child Isa was thinking, after having been so roundly beaten. While screaming and begging for mercy he no doubt thought, “I’m going to be killed.” Seems possible that that aspect of his father, the coldhearted part that went well beyond discipline, had lodged itself deep into Uncle Isa’s bones.

  All of a sudden he found it hard to breathe. The same thing had happened yesterday while listening to Hitoshi’s stories. He remembered a time in middle school when he had taken someone’s bicycle. It had been parked out in front of the school. He rode around on it for a while before eventually throwing it into the river. He was soon found out. He remembered then that his father, Yūsaku, who also served on the PTA board, had grabbed him by the left ear and started hitting him as hard as he could, on the right cheek, with his open hand. It ended only when one of the schoolteachers standing nearby made him stop. The only thing he felt from Yūsaku at that time was hatred.

  It still remains there at the base of his ear, the feeling that it is about to be torn off. Shōji ran his finger along it, and it struck him that he had no memory of ever receiving a kind word from Yūsaku. Ever since boyhood he had been instructed to “act appropriately for a firstborn son”; were he crying in front of some toy that he wanted, were he to fail at proper introductions when there were visitors to the house, he would be hit. Once in high school one of his teachers had praised an essay he had written in class and had read it out loud to the entire class. He told his mother, Harumi, about this; Harumi told Yūsaku, who scornfully snorted, “And what good is that to anybody?” Why was Yūsaku unable to voice anything that looked like “praise”? On the other hand, he was kind and thoughtful in his speech with Shōji’s outgoing and cheerful younger brother Teruhiko. Shōji, however, in contrast to his brother younger by two years, had always been clumsy with people and stubborn. He didn’t want to acknowledge it, but he resembled Yūsaku in personality.

  This line of thought was depressing. In an attempt to change his mood, he turned his attention back to the notes.

  There was a time when Uncle Isa went to live with some relatives who had no children. Shōji seemed to remember talk about this being the first steps toward Isa’s being officially taken in as a foster child. But he proved undisciplinable, rebellious, and violent so was sent back to the main house in short order. His father found this to be an unbearable embarrassment and became even stricter with Isa from that time forward. Children usually get money gifts from their parents at New Year’s, but Uncle Isa was only scolded with “You don’t listen to what anybody says” and “You don’t do anything around the house” and received nothing. Uncle Isa would be crying in the shadows; his mother would come by later to secretly pass money to him from her own purse. Also, in his last year of middle school, even though all the siblings had gone on to high school, his father told him it would be a waste of time for him to go on, and he did not permit him to progress to high school.

  He remembered something Hitoshi had said last night: “Uncle Isa, when he got drinking, considered everyone around to be beneath him.” When he started drinking, it was quickly only vitriol and poison: “Damn them, those fuckers, always trying to make me look bad.” Like putting gasoline into a tank, he would gulp down the sake and head off toward the main house.

  When he was a kid there used to be a bar near Shōji’s house. Right inside the door was a plank laid down to make a simple counter. No seats. Sake was sold by the glass. Come nightfall it would fill with men in their laborer outfits, towels wrapped around their heads. Behind the counter was a thin middle-aged woman of few words pouring sake into the customers’ glasses from a large bottle. As far as food, there was nothing but dried snacks; it was truly a shop solely for drinking, a place that Uncle Isa often went to. It was less than a ten-minute walk from there to the main house. Isa’s own house was halfway between the bar and the main house, so it was really just a few steps away. Whenever it became known that Isa was drinking there someone would immediately alert the main house. And then the main house would be in an uproar—“Isa’s comin’, Isa’s comin’; hide all the knives, the knives!!”

  “Hey you all, all you bastards, come on out now.” True to form, Isa was soon on his way, roaring. “No one to come out and say hello? No one? Pretend you don’t know I’m here? I’m gonna kill you all dead, I am …”

  Uncle Isa would then storm straight into the house, shoes still on his feet, and like a hurricane go after the low table and the chest of drawers, the flower vases, and anything else that was within reach, and things would be turned upside down, smacked around, torn to pieces, pounded and broken. He would not stop even though his fists were bloodied. Kanezō, the father who had so harshly disciplined him, was now powerless. Tensed up in a corner of the room, poked with the handle of the knife, grabbed by the back of the neck and thrown to the floor, he could do nothing but wait it out. Isa would show up at the main house time after time. There was no diminishing of his hatred.

  Sometime later Kanezō suffered a stroke and died. On the day of his funeral Isa kicked open the front door and stormed into the house. “Your cheap-ass door seemed a little stuck there,” he jeered scornfully. At the end of the funeral, when it was time to close the lid, it came to Isa’s turn to hammer in a nail with a stone. Uncle Isa did not strike the nail; instead, while silently looking down at the coffin, just the BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, BOOM as he fiercely pounded on the casket.

  The sun was still high in the sky. He was going to meet up with Kakujirō in the evening, but there was still a lot of time until then. Shōji, who never managed to keep in contact with his old friends, never heard from anyone when he returned home.

  Continually smoking cigarettes at Hitoshi’s house meant that he now wasn’t feeling very good, so he thought he might head out to the wharf at the Tatehana fishing port and get something to eat. Among the shops he knew there, run by people involved in the fishing industry, there was one shop that sold noodles and oden.

  At the side of the house he found a bicycle with a broken basket. It was unlocked, so he got on and rode it to the port. When Hitoshi was a kid this whole area was lined with wooden row houses, but now it was all sterile new apartments and single houses; it was hard to get any sense of the noise of life. Except, that is, for three single-story houses of metal sheets that faced Hitoshi’s; there you could still see the old-style house. Attached to the front of each one was a stovepipe-like chimney to draw off the fumes and to prevent things from smelling too bad; each house was still, you could be sure, outfitted with a nonflush toilet.

  Riding along on his bicycle Shōji recalled the tales of how the entire area used to be like a “squid curtain” with all the squid strung up on drying racks. Destined to be surume snacks, the smell of them drying, together with the odor of the squid offal simmering in big metal drums, covered the entire town. He was trying to recall how powerful that stench had been when it struck one’s nose, but no hint remained
and he was having a hard time imagining it. For whatever reason this reminded him of what Hitoshi had been telling him about, about how loose the morals were of the wives living in the row houses.

  “So, the wives in those houses, ya see, when their husbands got on the squid boats and headed out to sea, I mean as soon as they took off, the women would start feeling restless. They would seduce men, and stuff, or in their skimpy underwear, and not much else, would be walking around town just like that. There was somebody, I forget who, hearing about the cabaret opening up in Konakano, went over to check it out. Who did he meet there but this woman who had just said good-bye to her husband and wished him luck as he went out to sea, in a miniskirt, thighs on display for all to see, who came out to see him.”

  The road, lined on both sides with marine-product processing plants, ended at a T, blocked by the municipal fish market building. The market stood at the mouth of the Niida River; if you turned right you found bait and tackle shops, plumbing shops, and a string of homes in buildings that appeared to have originally been shops. Other than the tackle shop most all of them were shuttered. No one seemed to be around.

  On the left-hand side, facing the river, was a concrete wall. Shōji rode his bike to the top of the embankment and took in the view as he continued upstream. In the past you could have counted on numerous squid and other fishing boats to be moored along the dock at hand, crowded cheek by jowl, as well as along the dock farther off, but now it felt empty, like a mouth of missing teeth.

  In the spaces between the smattering of boats, houses could be seen lined up on the distant bank: old waterlogged wooden houses, and houses with rusted metal siding, and a few concrete buildings showing signs of weather. Directly behind them was a sheer cliff. The leaves of the tall trees growing from the slope covered the weather-beaten buildings in a deep green. Far above the thick growth of trees the blurred outlines of scattered clouds hanging in the open sky of early summer. A small squid boat on its trip up the river suddenly cut across his field of vision. Behind the boat, gliding up the river, two seagulls flew in hot pursuit, just barely clearing the water’s surface.

  He made his way back to the road leading from the seawall and crossed over a small bridge. Passing through a short tunnel he could see the open space of the Tatehana fishing wharf spread before him; he was surprised to find that the road running alongside the open space was thronged with people. He drew closer, with a sense of unease. He followed the gaze of the crowd, looking off to the right, and unconsciously brought his bike to a halt.

  A squid boat, which should be, which one had every right to expect to be, out on the open sea, was lying on its side next to the four-lane highway. It was much larger than the usual squid boat. This was a two-hundred-ton ship, the kind used for deep-sea fishing. It was hard to believe that such a ship could have been carried up and over the sea wall and its wide embankment. What looked to be the hull of the ship, originally painted red but now weathered pink, was exposed for all to see. The radar mast sticking up from the bridge was caught in the nearby telephone poles; what had been the underside of the boat had mercilessly crushed all the greenery planted by the side of the road. A thing that should not, could not, be, right in front of one; a strong sense of unease. At the same time, there was an uncanny sense of déjà vu, like being shown a well-constructed computer-graphic image of something meant to appear “real.”

  The entire area was blocked off with construction fencing, all traffic was stopped. Shōji, like all the other spectators gathered in front of the fencing, just stared blankly. The bright white of the ship’s body glittered and shone in the strong sunlight like all the other squid boats used to do, but here the massive crablike claw at the end of a crane penetrated straight into the side of the boat. A repetition of merciless actions, clothed in violence.

  None of the people around him—the older man with the baseball cap and well-sunburned face, the scraggly unshaved man similar in age to Shōji, the small-statured woman of a much lighter complexion next to him—said a word. They all stood still, eyes squinting, looking up at the ship.

  The tsunami damage after the earthquake was very heavy along this entire coastline, including the Tatehana wharf. The television coverage on the day of the disasters had led him to expect the worst, and the extent of it was also later confirmed by his mother. Large numbers of fishing boats and cars had been swept away by the water. After the tsunami had receded, thousands and thousands of used televisions, probably for export, were now piled by the side of the roadways; there were even reports of forklifts that had been thrown into building walls and remained stuck there. There were the people who had encountered the tsunami while still behind the wheel of their cars. And, of course, all the people who lived near the water found that the entire first floor of their houses was destroyed and rendered uninhabitable. Some people went back to look at their homes after the tsunami had receded; all they found were the remains of marine life scattered in their old rooms.

  But for all that, in Hachinohe there was only one reported casualty from the disasters. It was a disaster area, to be sure, but compared with the many places where the streets had been turned into rubbish heaps with thousands of people missing, the damage seemed rather light. Even at his parents’ house the seawater had surged up the nearby creek, pushing water right up to the floor of the house, according to his mother. After a few days he was able to get a call through to his parents and gain an idea of the degree of damage to the house and neighborhood. His landlord seemed to remember that he was from Hachinohe and asked about it: “Everyone back at your parents’ house doing okay?” He had no idea how to respond to this, exactly. “It sounds like there was serious damage, but compared with other areas it was quite light; thanks for asking,” he answered, feeling rather abject, like he should apologize or something, because he didn’t have anything more dramatic to offer.

  He wasn’t sure what to make of such messed-up feelings, but now, with the material ravages of the tsunami on naked display before his eyes, his original sense of befuddlement remained undiminished. The image scratched away inside his brain; within his heart he murmured, “As bad as this, but still, not any worse than this …”

  Shōji returned to Hitoshi’s house and lay down on the sofa. He dozed off thinking about how to put all this stuff about his uncle into a novel. Perhaps it could work if told as a record of Hitoshi’s childhood experiences. “And for the young Hitoshi …” or some such way to start the narrative. The imagery from last night’s narrative, what he had heard as he listened to Hitoshi, played across his closed eyelids like a magic-lantern show.

  Shōji sat up on the sofa. He opened the notebook that he had left on the low table and hastily began to write down those images, now fleeing from grasp.

  “The young Hitoshi often went with his father to visit the main Kawamura house, where his uncle Isa had been born. In the main house lived Chōkichi’s aged parents, Chōkichi and his wife, and their daughter—Hitoshi’s cousin—five people in all. Whenever Hitoshi went to visit, the faces of both Chōkichi and his wife would light up in smiles. They greeted him as though he were their own child. If it happened to be a mealtime Chōkichi’s wife—Tae was her name—would urge him to take more food. “Eat up there, young man,” she would urge, pushing more rice and soup on him, even though he had just filled his plate a second time. Since he was never fawned over like this at his own house he was very pleased by this treatment, although, truth be told, it left him rather overwhelmed and flustered as well.”

  Shōji lit a cigarette. He kept working on the paragraph, erasing some lines and adding others. He thought this could work. Committing to paper the flickering ephemeral images in his brain proved an endless, hard task. Maybe because it had been a while since he had worked at this sort of assignment, his brain felt rusty; the words wouldn’t come out smoothly, and it frustrated him. Even so, it also seemed odd to him that he felt none of the frustration that had plagued him as a student, back when he had tried to write essa
ys about himself. In fact, this had some of the excitement one gets when putting together, piece by piece, the various parts of a plastic model.

  Even when he would go off to visit and to play at their house, Chōkichi and his wife were overwhelmed with farm chores, as they were at all times of the year. Plus, the girl cousins were all older than he was. And since there were no others to play with, the young Hitoshi soon found himself bored. At those moments, almost of their own accord, his feet would carry him in the direction of Uncle Isa’s house. Even though Isa was quite eccentric, compared with all the other adults around, Hitoshi could tell that Isa was really very fond of him. Further, Isa would nonchalantly show him sides of the adult world that he knew nothing about. Any number of times, for example, he took him to see pornographic films. Inside the movie theater with its unhealthy stuffy atmosphere and foul smoked-squid-like smells, the young Hitoshi found himself absorbed in glistening skin and bodies on the screen, even though it was not entirely clear to him what was going on. Whenever they left the theater, as if on cue Uncle Isa would rub between Hitoshi’s legs, adding, “Ho-hoh, this drill bit and balls, standing stiff, no?!” in his loud guffaw. He often made fun of his little-boy penis, nothing but skin and wrinkles, calling it his drill and balls.

  His uncle’s house was no more than three minutes’ walk from the main house. There was one time, when the young Hitoshi went over, his uncle, standing among the sake bottles and strewn clothing, filling the space with cigarette smoke, said, “Ah, there you are” as though he knew he would be coming. Hard to tell if he had even washed his face, the lower half of his face being oily and unshaved. He wore, as always, his work clothes, but unbuttoned at the front; his pants were held up with a rope rather than a belt. It appeared to be the same outfit as always, but this time, since it was wintertime, and apparently even he felt the cold, he had on a black turtleneck, piled and balled up, under the top layer. And who knows why, but there was a bamboo birdcage placed on top of the kotatsu. Inside was a lone bird that looked like a sparrow, but with yellow feathers from the base of its breast up to the sides of its head. When young Hitoshi asked him what he planned on doing with that, “Catch finches,” he said with a broad laugh. Another cloud of smoke as he rose to put on his leather jacket.