by Kaz Morran
On the way out of the cannery, sloshing through the icy water and no longer able to feel their legs, Taiyo stopped in front of the skeleton of a house.
“Come on,” Dad said. He’d given up trying to appear strong for his family. His voice shook with cold and exhaustion, but not yet impatience or anger; he rarely got angry. “Keep moving, or your legs will freeze.”
Taiyo didn’t move. A dislodged streetlamp spanned the breadth of the ground floor, from the top left of what might have been the living room, to the bottom right at the splintered front door. A fishing net entangled the head of the shattered streetlamp, and caught in the net hung a familiar blue bicycle.
“What is it, Tai?”
“The bike.”
“You can’t ride anywhere in this.” Dad lifted his foot out of the water and made a splash with his boot.
“It’s rusty.”
“Yeah, Tai, saltwater does that. Let’s keep moving, buddy.”
“It was rusty before the tsunami,” Taiyo said, not taking his eyes off the bicycle. “I recognize it.”
Dad stood with him a moment, but neither said anything more about it. They didn’t have to. They didn’t have the energy to. The worst thing was knowing there’d be more moments like this. Some easier. Some harder. Some moments would creep up slowly and drag like a hanging muffler. Other moments would jump out like the boogeyman: a quick strike, then sink back into the shadows and wait for next time.
Up above, on the second floor of the gutted house, the boogeyman was waiting.
“You see that up there?” Dad pointed.
The bow of a little upside-down blue and white fiberglass fishing skiff stuck out, teetering where there should have been a wall like a pointy balcony over the floodwater and rubble that had replaced the front yard. It looked precarious, but the weight of the outboard motor must have been keeping it from falling.
“Yeah, I see it,” Taiyo said. But he didn’t know what the big deal was. Earlier, they’d passed a nine-ton fishing trawler stopped at an intersection as if waiting at a red light, and they’d seen the 516 bus for Sendai Station sticking up out of the roof of 7-Eleven like a big fat chimney.
“Well, come on then,” said Dad, and he motioned for Taiyo to follow him toward the house.
The whole way up the crumbling wood staircase, it gnawed at Taiyo’s flesh that doing this somehow desecrated the family who’d lived there. The family had likely survived, but that hardly helped. A step collapsed under Dad’s weight, but the handrail kept him from falling. Now Taiyo thought about what he’d do if the house collapsed.
From the top of the stairs, they followed a dark, narrow hallway, stepping on and over scattered books. They passed a room without looking inside. Around a corner, the hallway ended at the open doorway of the master bedroom.
Standing in the entrance beside his father, Taiyo saw that the back end of the skiff didn’t have an outboard motor counterbalancing it after all. Keeping the boat from plunging off the second floor were one end of a soggy mattress, some wet clothes, and a fragmented dresser.
Dad said, “You go hold down the back end so I can pull the mattress off.”
Taiyo cut his eyes to the dark patch of floor on the other side of the skiff.
Dad darted his gaze around the room but paused as if his brain had glitched at the view through the absent front wall, out to the horizon-wide destruction. “Are you sure we should do this, Dad?”
“Huh?”
“The boat. You sure it’s a good idea?”
“Sure. Of course.” Dad grabbed hold of the edge of the mattress. His hands were shaking. “Climb over to the other side and put your weight on it while I pull.”
“Dad, I hear something?”
“What?”
“That noise.”
A blast of cold wind whipped through the house and clawed a shudder out of both Taiyo and his father.
“Just the wind,” said Dad, his voice barely audible.
“There’s something else.”
“The house is still settling. That’s all.” Dad said it like they shouldn’t worry.
“Let’s be fast then, okay?” said Taiyo, and he stepped over a heap of sopping laundry, and landed at the back of the fishing skiff. The sound, though only heard between the whistles of wind, got louder, more distinct. The creaking of soggy, torn floorboards further muffled the noise when he moved in between the wall and the rear of the boat. When he stopped, he heard it again. Something scratching the wood floor. Something tearing. Something chewing.
The wind shifted, and the smell hit him before he saw it. Now Taiyo glitched. He couldn’t turn away without first making sense of the scene laid out before his eyes.
“Just watch where you walk,” Dad said as he approached. “Remember in the snow, how you used to walk in my footprints? Pretend it’s like that. Just follow my—”
Dad saw it, too.
Bodies. Bloated. Three of them. A family trapped in the corner, on the floor in the crook of the wall and bed frame, pinned beneath a sheet of heavy glass. The wave had pushed in the sliding glass door of the balcony, cracking but not breaking it. Taiyo could see their palms pressed to the glass, fighting in vain against the relentless pressure of the water, the fear and desperation on their faces frozen in time. He was grateful for the filth and fog on the glass; what he saw behind the hands was less vivid, if more horrific.
The girl lay more or less on her back, one bare knee and shin to the glass and the other leg bent at an angle that flipped up a corner of her skirt, revealing the edge of soiled panties.
There was movement behind the glass—not human.
“Look away,” Dad told him.
Too late.
One crow leveraged the floorboards, its nails slipping and regaining purchase, while it tore at the blue school blazer to access to more flesh. Another crow stood on Sakura’s face, claiming her eyes.
***
Taiyo must have helped drag the boat down the stairs, or maybe they’d heaved it off the second floor. Memory was a fickle thing. It didn’t matter. He now stood between Dad and the floating skiff, knee deep in a slough of filth and seawater. Bits of plastic, styrofoam, bamboo shards, fishing lures, and kelp clumped into little rotating islands, like the accretion disks of planetary genesis.
Taiyo’s mother was there, too. She screamed at his father like never before, adamant that taking the boat was no different from the crimes people at the shelter were accusing Chinese and Koreans of.
Dad wanted out of the despair and decrepitude of the evacuation center and its apocalyptic surroundings. Taiyo had never known his mother to make space in her mind for extenuating circumstances, and she would’ve stayed at the shelter—stayed chained to the perceived authority of community volunteers—if not for the fanaticism in her husband’s voice and eyes.
“Get in the boat,” Dad yelled for the fourth or fifth time, and Taiyo’s mother made one last protest before pulling herself up out of the frigid water by the vacant motor mount.
That’s when, for fear they’d never survive the journey up the coast, Taiyo refused to get in, and Dad hit him.
And the blow to the face did what Dad had intended it to do. It got Taiyo to obey. Not for fear of being struck again; the act of violence had been so uncharacteristic he didn’t know how else to respond. After the blow, Dad had stood there in the water, chest and shoulders heaving as he caught his breath, looking at Taiyo with pleading eyes—eyes that said he hated what he’d done but would do it again if he had to, so strong was the conviction that he had to get his family out of there.
Taiyo would never learn whether or not it had been necessary to flee the shelter, but fleeing did not turn out to be the suicide mission he’d expected.
Before heading north, they took their tarp, blanket, and rations from the shelter, and scavenged driftwood for paddles.
Taiyo's mother put her cold red hand to his swelling cheek. The gesture made him recoil. She hadn’t touched him since … He couldn’
t recall a time.
Alone in the boat between his parents, he watched the high school fade into the horizon. He wished he’d never gone home from school that day. Worse, he wished so hard from deep within his guts that he’d never let Sakura come with him.
When they were too tired to paddle, they used the tarp as a sail and let the icy wind propel them across the stretches of flooded rice fields. They spent two long cold nights, and several bouts of snow and sleet, beached and huddled together beneath the tarp. Passing through decimated villages, they traversed flooded streets when they could and hugged the rugged coast when they couldn’t. They battled winter weather, waves, and treacherous rocks. Through the final night, sheer cliffs at their portside prevented a landing, so they had no choice but stay awake and alert beneath the moonlight or be thrown by the choppy water into rocks. The morning the fourth day they reached Ofunato—or where the town used to be. Funneled by a narrow bay and high valley walls, the tsunami had purged the port and downtown from existence.
As Dad had anticipated, the Yamazaki family home sat too far inland and uphill for the tsunami to reach. When they arrived at the little old house, one of a hundred or so laid out in a neat grid that formed the compact community, no one asked about Taiyo’s bruised face. His grandparents were only glad to see everyone alive.
Grandpa credited the flexible cedar frame with keeping his home standing through the earthquake. “Like Tai, here,” he said and smiled with teeth rotted from decades of smoking. “He sways but won’t break. In ancient times, bamboo did the same thing. And even if the house did fall down, at least it didn’t crush everyone. Of course, these days they want to build everything out of concrete …”
“These days nothing works right,” said Grandma. “How many days now? And they still can’t get the lights back on. Could be a month for the gas and water. No gasoline either. Not that there’d be roads to drive on.”
In the freezer, a week’s worth of meat risked going bad. Lacking any means to cook it indoors, it seemed obvious to Taiyo to make a backyard fire pit.
But Grandpa was as stubborn and illogical as the daughter he’d raised. “This is hardly a time for a barbecue party. Besides, look at it out here. It’s snowing! What would the neighbors think?”
“They’d probably think we were resourceful,” Taiyo said, in spite of his mother’s scolding. “Rational, even.”
“The smoke and the smell. It’ll drift.”
“You burn your garbage.” Taiyo barely raised his voice. “Right there in the backyard.” Everyone around there did.
His mother cuffed him. “Stop it right now. Apologize! I can’t believe how rude you are.”
She turned and glared at Dad, implicating, as always, the foreign half.
Dad kept his mouth shut, and Grandma sided with Grandpa. “What if the neighbors don’t have anything to eat? They’d smell ours. It’s not very nice manners to enjoy a meal in front of others if—”
“We can share,” Taiyo pleaded. “There’s lots.”
But Grandpa would have none of it.
And so, Dad and Taiyo stood in line in the park for hours, in the cold and snow, where community volunteers cooked rice and boiled water for tea—over a smoky open-pit fire.
Taiyo and Dad brought rice balls back to the house, which Grandma served on her best china alongside a spoonful of canned corn. Sitting on the floor, wrapped in a blanket and with legs tucked under the low table, Taiyo picked at his food without tasting it while a battery-powered radio, one speaker blown but still cranked to full blast, recycled the same horrific details of the disaster.
Now and again, the emotionless newsreader sprinkled in something about the power plant in Fukushima, and it occurred to Taiyo that Dad’s insistence on fleeing north from the shelter might have had something to do with expanding cloud of radiation.
As the radio droned on and the grownups talked, Taiyo did a lot of thinking. Dad’s use of force to get him into the skiff had worked. It had gotten full cooperation out of his mother, too.
He snorted at the thought, earning glances but no questions. Kernel by kernel he fed corn into his mouth with chopsticks.
Consensus by force kind of described how Japan functioned as a whole. Japanese society did not, as a rule, condone violence, but it did use other means of coercion to achieve … He struggled to finish the thought. To achieve what?
He pondered as he chewed, and for the first time, he tasted the sweet juice in the corn.
Harmony, of course.
This realization hurt Taiyo far worse than getting punched by his father.
Harmony and Japan were so synonymous in people’s minds that the kanji character 和, read as wa, meant both Harmony and Japan.
It was taken as dogma that the harmony in Japanese society stemmed from its homogeneous population and ability to bend without breaking, like bamboo in the wind. That sounded nice and poetic and all, but it was a load of shit. People were expected to bend to the soul-destroying hardships of corporatocracy without breaking; to crony, gerontocratic authority without questioning; to outdated, inefficient, ineffective methodologies without challenging … And if they couldn’t bend, they were banished to the silent fringes or committed suicide.
Japan’s brand of harmony was not about being flexible. It was about conformity and obedience; you stayed in line and performed within the limits of the neat little box society has defined for you.
And above all else, harmony in Japan was about hammering down the nail that stuck out.
39
“What the fuck, Taiyo? What did you do? Oh, God. What did you do to him? Oh, God …”
Nel cut a look up at Taiyo from a spot on the ground where she and Kristen were attempting miracles to revive the lifeless mound, Ronin Aro.
Nel didn’t need to say anything. Her face said enough: Look what you’ve done, you monster.
Her eyes, aglow beneath the headlamp, had sunken deeper over the days; the sockets darker, skin paler, and her features now had edges.
Taiyo threw his hands around the back of his neck and paced. “Check his pulse,” he told them. “Listen for breath. He’s just winded.” He couldn’t have hit him that hard. He moved closer to check, and on the way, his foot hit the stray headlamp, which he picked up held over Ronin.
Nel had her ear to Ronin’s chest. Kristen was praying.
“Is he … ?” Taiyo started to ask.
“Just keep the fucking light still.”
But he couldn’t. He stammered backward.
“What were you thinking?”
“I …” He pinched his eyes shut while he shook his head. “I don’t know. I really don’t know.”
“Drop it, Tai,” Nel yelled. She looked scared. “You drop that on the ground right now. You hear me?”
What?
“Don’t you come any closer with that. Put it down. Tai. Do you hear me, Taiyo? Tai, look at me. Put it down.”
They were both shouting at him now. Kristen, shrill; Nel firm and commanding.
“Taiyo Yamazaki, do you hear what I’m saying to you?”
He realized now. … His stance. Like a crab, ready to strike—but only in self-defense. In case Ronin jumped up and tried to get him back.
“Taiyo, I need you to put the knife on the ground, okay?”
“Put it down!”
Knife?
He pointed the headlamp to a spot at arm’s length. There, clenched in his right hand, shaking, he saw a multitool, blade extended.
Oh shit. His chest pounded; breaths heaved.
But he’d already tossed the knife. He knew he had. He had, but … In his hand now …
How? Because it wasn’t the same multitool.
He’d had two—one, he’d gotten from Anton—and he’d only gotten rid of one of them.
Nel kept her gaze on Taiyo, but gave both him and Kristen orders—it seemed she feared Kristen's inability to hold it together would somehow trigger Taiyo.
He folded in the blade and looked away whi
le he held the multitool out for Nel to take. She snatched it away then stepped back.
“Oh, thank God,” said Kristen, and repeated it a second later when she found Ronin's pulse.
Taiyo, chest still heaving, carved his fingers through his hair. “The knife,” he said, “I didn’t know. I’m sorry, I really thought—”
He stopped when he saw a smirk on Ronin’s face. Taiyo squared his shoulders and stiffened his posture as he pointed to the pathetic piece of shit on the ground. “You …” Taiyo bore his teeth and curled his pointed finger into a claw, then a fist. “You tried to kill me. You left me there for the crocodile.”
“Taiyo,” cautioned Nel, ever the voice of calm. “Look at me. Don’t look at him. Look at me.”
He did. “In the hammock,” he said. “He tied me. And …” He almost couldn’t remember, so furious were his thoughts. “The crocodile. Ronin left me to—”
“It’s just a monitor lizard,” Ronin blurted. “And you’re not dead.”
Kristen helped Ronin sit up, and Nel led Taiyo out of his seething fury with some deep breathing.
But Kristen ruined it when suddenly she shrieked at Taiyo, “Have you lost your fucking mind? You have. You’ve lost it. You’re insane. Stupid and insane.” She sounded like his mother.
She flicked her wrist at him and turned her focus back to Ronin.
“Me?” A last-second impulse kept Taiyo from hurling the headlamp to the ground. He remembered Walter smashing the hand-crank recharger.
“Focus on your breathing, please, Tai,” said Nel. Though it came out as a demand, she had a hand softly on each of his shoulders. He saw no anger in her face. In fact, she was trembling. “You’re being selfish right now,” she added.
He felt an incredible sense of guilt. Not for injuring Ronin—although he knew he’d reacted poorly—but for hurting Nel. For disappointing her. It had never occurred to him that she might have looked to him help them through this nightmare in the cave. In a sense, in tackling Ronin, he’d made himself the hammer to Ronin’s nail, and in doing so, he’d smashed the crew’s harmony.
