Nomiya was one of those who had disappeared on that day in March, many years ago.
In Sendai, where I grew up, March hovered on the borderline between winter and spring. If the sun appeared to soften things, the air retained a silent frigidity at its core; if there was warmth in the air, it was belied by the gray of the sky, redolent with the heaviness of winter. The colors that your eyes perceived failed to align with what you felt on your skin. As you attempted to make sense of this rift between vision and sensation, spring would spread as if dissolving through the world, all the colors melting — until a big snowfall came to return everything to white again.
March 11, 2011, was one such day when we were abruptly pulled back to the gray of winter. From the middle of the afternoon, after the violent tremors and rumbling pushing up from deep in the earth, the Tōhoku area and its vicinity was cut off from everything. It was then that the wall of water came pressing in from the sea, swallowing up the coastal area. The wall enveloped everything, surging inland with a momentum that eclipsed past experiences and records, engulfing people and houses and forcefully wresting them away from the land before receding back in the direction of the sea.
Being at home as I was that day, in my family’s house up in the mountains, I experienced the tremors dragging on, the heavy bass rumbling the earth. The quaking made cracks appear in the walls of our house. Most of the tiles in the bathroom cracked and fell off, the books came flying from the shelves, various pieces of furniture toppled over, and almost all our tableware
broke. Fearing the chaos indoors, I escaped outside with my sister, who’d. been in bed with the beginnings of a cold, and our dog. The electricity and gas stopped before the end of the day, and the water the following day. No information reached us, either.
I’d never lived near the sea, so the possibility of a tsunami didn’t even cross my mind. The anxiety about the tremors and the destruction had left the inside of my head completely blank. In addition to my distance from the sea, I suppose another reason that the danger of a tsunami didn’t occur to me was my conviction that the earthquake was a recurrence of the earthquake whose epicenter lay in offshore Miyagi, as had been predicted. Tsunamis hadn’t featured in my parents’ accounts of their memories of the previous Miyagi quakes, after all. At that time, I was far more concerned about the destruction to the inland region. I had no concept of what might occur after the tremors subsided, and in my panic and confusion, I kept my eyes glued to my cell phone, which was refusing to connect me to my parents. By the time the aftershocks hit, information was already becoming scant. The temporal and geographical severance had already begun.
That night, I managed to move enough of the scattered books out of the way to crawl into bed, still in my clothes, glaring continuously at the screen of my phone. The screen informed me that 300 bodies had washed up on Arahama beach. Then it fell silent. This tiny window of information that had been struggling to remain open finally shut, leaving me in a place of obscurity and confusion. It was then that, for the first time, the faces of my friends living by the coast rose to my eyes, tainted by the anxiety and fear induced by the totality of the blackout. These images ruffled my consciousness, ravaged faces floating within the profound darkness spreading around me that remained the same whether I opened or closed my eyes. In the pauses between the voices on the radio that I could hear coming faintly from my parents’ room, the quiet reverberations of my sister’s coughing echoed out through the night. I still couldn’t reach several of my friends. As I lay listening to the night’s deep breathing, like the distant rumble of the earth, my body remained vigilant, poised for action. Downstairs, the dog would whimper in fright with each aftershock.
That night, I floated around in a shallow sleep, waking with each tremor, and in that absolute darkness, I would push the button of my phone whose only functions were now those of dim illumination and clock. In the bed I’d thrown myself in without changing into the nighttime skin of my pajamas, the thick denim of my jeans and the bulkiness of my sweater scuffled with the blankets, pushing sleep still further away. I tried burying my ears in the pillow, but I could still hear the faint rumbling, trapped inside my head like a ringing. Unable to sleep in such complete darkness I opened the curtains, but the streetlights stood there forlornly — there was no light to be seen from outside either. Yet in the midnight sky shone a sprinkling of ruthlessly beautiful stars, still and fierce. Up there, facing this one, was a world of peace and tranquility. My line of sight, which had wandered automatically upward to the sky, was struck by its glow and disappeared. I was still totally incapable of imagining what was going on below.
After some days had passed, I was able to access some fragmentary information. Nomiya had been in his house in Ishinomaki on that day. The town’s fishing port floated in miniature inside the window frame of his second-floor bedroom, the gently breathing sea melding into the scenery of daily life. He had lived alongside it — lived with images of both its quiet and its bleakness forever superimposed in the recesses of his vision. In the time that accumulated inside him, his ears would have stored up the sound of the distant sea like conch shells, and his tactile, olfactory, and other sense memories must also have been interwoven with it.
None of my friends had been able to piece together Nomiya’s movements that day. When Sawata had gotten in touch with him on the 9th, Nomiya mentioned meeting up with an old friend who was back in town, paying a visit to family and friends. He’d exchanged a few brief words with Sawata about the earthquake that took place just after lunchtime. But we couldn’t trace his steps after that, couldn’t work out where and how he’d been swallowed up by the water. Our hopes of understanding how his final moments had been remained unfulfilled.
Nomiya’s house had been entirely desecrated by the tsunami, and all of his family members had been swallowed up by the wall of water, separately from one another. His family didn’t have any close relatives, and most of their local acquaintances had also lost their lives to the tsunami. The sea, which had remained a stable presence throughout the majority of Nomiya’s time, hadn’t left behind even the slightest trace of their memories. His younger sister’s body was discovered at the beginning of April, and at the end of July, his father was pulled from the water. Three years later, his mother had finally been returned. Yet nine years afterward, Nomiya and his younger brother still hadn’t been recovered from the sea.
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