Japan Sinks

by Sakyo Komatsu

  For the first time in some years, Onodera was in Kyoto for the Daimonji Festival, watching from the veranda of an inn in Ponto-cho overlooking the Kamo River. The veranda was packed with people. And the bridges as well as the banks of the river were lined with a massive outpouring of spectators. So thick was the crowd that the auto traffic going from the west bank to Minamiya and the Keihan Railroad Station along brightly lit Yonjo Avenue was blocked entirely.

  Etched in fire on the side of Mount Higashi, Dai, the Chinese character for “greatness,” had been blazing brightly for some twenty minutes, together with the other traditional fires of the Bon Festival, all alike requiems offered for the souls of the departed.

  Onodera listened with half an ear to his friends’ conversation as he leaned against the railing watching the now subdued burning of the Daimonji fire. He had extended his vacation from two to three weeks and had not only attended Goh’s funeral service but had gone to the trouble of traveling to Shikoku for the formal ceremony at his home place. The Dai monji fire flickered softly, Goh’s requiem flame. In this country nothing was destroyed, nothing died, Onodera mused. Was it really so? Kyoto, for example. In it lived a thousand years of history. Today in this ceremony the past was alive, alive within the present. But what of the future? What of the next thousand years?

  “Would you like a bit more?” A no-longer-young geisha was standing beside him. “Aren’t you enjoying things? You seem a bit out of sorts. Let me fill your sake cup.”

  After the geisha had gone her way, someone began to play a samisen in the neighboring room. The breeze died abruptly, and the muggy heat became more oppressive.

  “Is Mr. Onodera here?” From the main room of the inn, a waitress put her head through the doorway. “You have a phone call from Tokyo, sir.”

  Surprised, Onodera got up from where he had been sitting by the rail. He left the veranda and walked to the desk, where he picked up the receiver.

  “Onodera? This is Yukinaga,” said the voice on the other end. “I would like to get together with you as soon as possible. Are you coming back to Tokyo tomorrow?”

  “Yes, sir. I intend to. If there’s a great hurry, I can get a Super Express tomorrow morning. What is it about, sir?”

  “I’ll tell you tomorrow. I have the utmost need of your cooperation. And so . . .” Yukinaga faltered. “The truth is that it’s work that pertains to Professor Tadokoro.”

  At that moment the line went dead.

  “Hello, hello,” Onodera shouted into the receiver. “Hello, hello.”

  As though he had suddenly become drunk, he felt his body begin to sway back and forth. A young geisha screamed shrilly. Sliding doors began to vibrate loudly, setting up a fearful racket. Before Onodera could even gasp with surprise, an awful, thundering roar seemed to roll up from the earth below, and at the same time the entire inn seemed to whirl about with terrible force. Wrenched from its frame, the crossbeam of a doorway came crashing down. Dust fell in thick clouds from the ceiling and walls. Together with the creaking of the building and the rumbling of the earth, cries of agony began to rise on every side. Onodera grabbed a doorpost to keep his feet. In the hall opposite the inn office a closet door came open, and what looked like a stoutly made desk bounced into the corridor. When he saw the desk, Onodera took hold of it. He tipped it on its side against the wall and then dived beneath it. A fraction of an instant later the inn was plunged into darkness, and something hit the top of the desk with a thunderous crash. Onodera glanced at his watch and noted the time. Since there had been almost nothing in the way of warning tremors, the center of the quake must be very near. How long would it go on? Onodera wondered. A thought struck him that chilled the back of his neck. Twisting his head, he took the risk of looking out from the shelter of the desk. A glimmer of light from the outside showed through a black jumble of door frames, walls, sliding doors, and other debris. Where the veranda had been, there was nothing at all.

  The Great Kyoto Earthquake, coinciding as it did with a massive influx of people for the Daimonji Festival, claimed a large number of victims. Of the vast crowds gathered along the Kamo River, many were hurled in tangled masses from the bridges and from the houses lining the banks down into the riverbed, others were crushed beneath collapsing buildings, and still others were trampled to death beneath the feet of the terrified crowd. In one brief moment 4,000 people perished and 13,000 were severely injured. Whole sections of Kyoto were leveled. The effect upon the nation was profound. The plague of earthquakes had spread to long-tranquil Western Japan.

  III

  The Government

  1

  By April of the following year, Yukinaga was fully absorbed in a project that had been designated “Plan D,” working day and night in an office building in the Harajuku district, one floor of which he and his colleagues had taken over. The heart and soul of Plan D was Tadokoro.

  Yukinaga was filled with misgivings. Suppose all this turned out to be nothing more than a wild fantasy of Tadokoro’s? He had taken a leave of absence from the university at a time that was especially critical for him. His superiors were just beginning to recognize his achievements, and if he behaved himself, he had a good chance of advancing to a full professorship the following year. But now he had let himself become entangled in a bizarre affair that defied rational analysis. How was he going to explain things to his academic patrons?

  Kazunari Nakata, a friend from college days and one of the world’s foremost authorities on informational science, frowned with concentration as he studied the reports. “No matter how you look at it, it’s an absurd kind of game—like trying to grab hold of a cloud,” he said with a groan. “The qualifiers are extremely complex. Why, even a PERT might not be able to handle them. What we have to do is think in terms of some sort of new softwear. The problem is that the government is going to give us money only on a stage-by-stage basis and not once during the intermediate stages are we going to come up with unequivocal evidence that this is actually going to take place. Can we persuade the government, then, despite this intrinsic uncertainty, to commit itself fully at some point, realizing full well that this will entail the expenditure of a fantastic amount of money? And then there’s the whole business about secrecy!”

  “It might even happen that new legislation is necessary,” said Kunieda, a young man from the Prime Minister’s Office. ‘In that case, secrecy would be out of the question.”

  Yukinaga, naive as he was in such matters, had at first favored the open implementation of Plan D, but Kunieda and Nakata had persuaded him otherwise. According to Tadokoro’s rough calculations, the earliest possible date was two years off; the most remote, fifty years. The phenomena in question were still extremely vague and impossible to interpret clearly. Should the evidence, however, begin to point toward an actual occurrence and that, if not in two years, at least in the next few years, then the formulation of a government program to deal with it would have to be done in secret in order to avoid public turmoil. Nor would secrecy be any less necessary in the area of foreign relations should the dreadful crisis come to pass. The news would have to leak out eventually, of course, and it would therefore be a question of how much the government would be able to accomplish before then.

  Nakata’s responsibility lay in coordinating the workings of Plan D. The group as yet numbered no more than five, and they were young, ranging from the late thirties to forty years of age. Besides Yukinaga, Nakata, and Kunieda, there was Yamazaki, of the Intelligence Section of the Cabinet, and Yasugawa, the youngest of the group, who had been taken from an architect’s office to handle the accounts.

  “About the money aspect,” said Yasugawa, “it seems to me that we’ve already gone beyond the budget given us. And soon we’ll need still more people and an incredible amount of equipment.”

  “Let’s just leave worries of that nature to the Prime Minister and his friends,” said Nakata. “No matter how much we thrash it around, we’re not going to get anywhere with that problem. S
o let’s get down to work with whatever means we have avail able and get some results. The rest is out of our hands.”

  The meeting broke up, and Kunieda and Yukinaga were left to themselves as the others went downstairs for coffee. Yukinaga envied Nakata his cheerful confidence. He stared moodily at the magnetized map of Japan on the wall. Large red arrows had been attached to the southeastern section of the Archipelago, which was mottled with a variety of colors, and to the Japan Trench. The start of Tadokoro’s plan.

  Suddenly Yukinaga realized that the board was shaking gently from side to side. “Another tremor,” he muttered.

  “The old gentleman, Watari, has let go a part of his art collection, I hear,” said Kunieda absently as he puffed on a cigarette.

  “And that’s how we got part of our money?”

  “I think so. They say that some of his pieces are classified as National Treasures.”

  That shriveled-up old man in the wheelchair—what was his game anyway? Yukinaga wondered. Kunieda came from the same village as he, and it was most likely the old man’s influence that had put Kunieda into the Prime Minister’s Office. A city boy himself, Yukinaga could not fathom the nature of that village solidarity whose deep roots remained firm even to the present. At any rate, Kunieda seemed to have maintained con tact with the old man at all times, and it had been through Kunieda, to whom Yukinaga had confided the nature of Tadokoro’s “concern,” that Watari had come into the affair. Yukinaga had known nothing of this relationship, nor had he even heard of the old man, though after Kunieda had explained things to him, he had a vague recollection that he had seen the name somewhere years before.

  Immediately after the earthquake meeting, he had been in vited to come to see the old man with Kunieda. He had been astounded at the fierce spiritual strength that lay hidden behind Watari’s withered appearance and at the keenness of the mind that posed such laconic, concise questions. Watari’s manner was never anything but gentle, the very image of the good old man, but Yukinaga had gone away that day thoroughly awed. With his own eyes he had seen Watari summon the Prime Minister to his residence in Chigasaki and with a few words persuade him that Plan D should become a reality. And then there were the mysterious individuals and the hard-eyed young men, the latter obviously bodyguards, who surrounded the old man. There was also a beautiful young woman, mysterious enough in her own way. This was the stuff of legends, Yukinaga thought, a world whose depths he could not fathom, and he could not help feeling that something sinister lurked in the background.

  “The old fellow—aside from this project, I wonder what goes on inside his mind,” said Kunieda, snuffing out his cigarette.

  “I was going to ask you that,” said Yukinaga.

  “I don’t know much about him either. We’re from the same town, it’s true, but if you tried to follow up any lead about him as a native son, you’d quickly come to a dead end. But it’s quite certain that his forte has been to work behind the scenes in two major worlds: politics and finance. He spans the Meiji, Taisho, and Showa eras, and he has a knowledge of their dark side that he carries with him into the present. Certainly, according to our way of thinking, he’s done some evil deeds, I suppose. But at times it seems that unless some villain with immense power comes along, nothing at all can be accomplished.”

  “If you had lived for a century, what the devil would you think of things, I wonder?” said Yukinaga. “And more than just living, if you had exercised authority all that time, what would be going on in your mind? What would you want to do?”

  “I have no idea,” said Kunieda, getting up. “I’m sure only that it’s because of his power that Plan D has actually gotten under way.”

  Kunieda went downstairs, leaving Yukinaga to his thoughts.

  2

  “Well, they’re really getting down to it, aren’t they?” said Nakata, laughing as he read a transcript of the secretary general’s press conference at the end of September, in which he urged the nation to look outward.

  “Is that your doing, too, sir?” asked the young Yasugawa.

  “No, no. It’s the brainchild of some politicians and bureaucrats acquainted with the situation. They seem, however, to have made use of some suggestions of mine—bringing up that slogan from the old days: ‘A Bold Leap into the World.’ “

  “But they’d better be careful,” said Kunieda, pointing to a section of the paper. “There might be somebody out there who can put two and two together.”

  He had indicated a humorous item enclosed in a box. It was a parody of an old song popular at the beginning of the Showa Era, when immigration to Manchuria was at its peak:

  If you go, I go too.

  Who wants to stay behind

  In shaky old Japan?

  Nakata laughed when he read it: “So you think there might be some people keen enough to tie this up with the earth quakes, eh? The Japanese people, it’s true, are great for intuition.”

  The door opened with a frightful bang, and Tadokoro surged into the room, his shoulders squared.

  “What’s the news on the Kermadic? Is it here yet or what?” he demanded fiercely, a question he had asked countless times before. “What’s causing all this delay? Has it sunk on the way?”

  “Everything’s all right. It’s already passed Okinawa, and to morrow it’s going to dock at Moji,” answered Nakata.

  “Moji?” Tadokoro’s face turned scarlet and his eyes bulged. “What’s the idea, sending it there? What we want to investigate is the Japan Trench. We’ll lose two days in extra sailing time.”

  “The idea is to keep it out of the public eye, Professor,” said Nakata with great care. “If it was a matter of Yokohama or Kobe, the reporters would be on our necks. When it clears the port, they’ll load it on a naval vessel there, the Takatsuki, which will then sail directly for Ise Bay. The diving tests will be in Toba Bay and the Kumano Sea.”

  “I’m going to Ise, then,” said Tadokoro. “The main thing is that we’ve got to move. Look at this. One section of the Rikuchu coast is now sinking at the rate of .5 centimeters a day. At the bottom of the sea off Sanriku, shallow earthquakes of small to medium intensity are occurring at the rate of several per day. When will the survey equipment arrive?”

  “Part of it has already been sent to Moji and Toba. But by the time all of it is put in order and installed, it will be another week or ten days, no matter how much hurrying is done.”

  “Ten days!” Tadokoro groaned like an animal. “Dammit to hell! With speed so vital! And while we’re standing here, down below in the Japan Archipelago, here, there, everywhere, changes are taking place from minute to minute. We’ve got to get a line on things at the earliest possible moment. What will happen if we’re late, I ask you?”

  “We share your fears,” said Kunieda distractedly. “But about the time factor there’s nothing we can do.”

  All eyes turned to the situation chart on the wall. It was a board lit by electronic luminescence on which light lines indicated the progress of every task that had been programmed into the LSI computer. The board was still filled with categories altogether unlit. In the date-designation portion, marked by vertical red lines, however, several had already reached the point indicating their starting date.

  “Don’t you people see?” demanded Tadokoro, striking the hand in which he held his papers with the back of the other. “In essence, our work is a fight against time.”

  A buzzer rang. Yasugawa went to the phone and picked it up. His voice indicated surprise.

  “It’s from the Christina.”

  “We’re using a foreign ship?” asked Tadokoro sourly.

  “Dutch. It won’t be noticed as much as a Japanese ship,” answered Nakata as he took the phone. “It’s Onodera,” he told them. Then he spoke into the phone:

  “I see. . . . Well, right now we’re sending Kataoka from Defense Research to meet you at Moji. There’s nothing to worry about. I don’t think you know him at all. He’s one of those who just joined our group, and whe
n it comes to machinery, he’s a genius.”

  Nakata hung up and turned to Yamazaki. “Call Kataoka. He’s at the arsenal in Yokosuka. Arrange for him to fly to Moji. He’s to wait for the Takatsuki, which we’re sending to meet the sub. The Christina will arrive tomorrow morning at ten o’clock.”

  “Why is that fellow going?” asked Tadokoro, not at all happy.

  “There’s some sort of problem with the engines on the Kermadic. Onodera can’t fix it, he says,” Nakata answered. “But this Kataoka is a wizard.”

  “Professor Tadokoro . . .” Yukinaga stood up from the desk, holding a sheet of paper upon which he had just done some calculating. “The total quantity of energy in earthquakes and in the movement of the earth’s crust this past year in the Japan Archipelago surpassed—though just by a little—the theoretical limit.”

  “Well, I wonder where the excess energy came from,” said Tadokoro, taking the sheet and staring hard at it. “Where from, eh? What caused it, do you think?”

  Yukinaga gazed down at the relief map of Japan on top of the desk. It was made of clear plastic of varying tints, which showed the mantle beneath the surface.

  “Well, this may be rash, but,” he said at last, “it seems to me that the only way that we can track this thing down is to set up a simulation model involving the entire globe, focusing upon the crust and mantle of the East Asian land mass, especially the movement of the Japan Archipelago.”

  “What we lack is data,” said Tadokoro, rapping the computer with his fingers. “That’s of first importance.” Suddenly he glanced at his watch. “Nakata, I’m going to Moji, too. Okay?”

  “Well, Professor . . .” Nakata’s eyes widened. “If you’d like to . . .”

  “I’d like to check the situation again in the West,” Tadokoro said, putting on his coat. He had all at once become like a boy. “I was thinking that maybe in the West. . . Well, I’m somewhat concerned about the Aso and the Kirishima volcanic belt.”