Horses, Horses, in the End the Light Remains Pure

by Hideo Furukawa

  Those concentric circles would eventually distort into other shapes. By April 11 they’d already announced that the circles would be redrawn.

  “But still,” I thought to myself. This is long before April 11, while I remained wrapped up in “spirited-away time.” What’s with naming this whole thing after a nuclear power plant? Is there really any good reason to refer to the whole thing by the name of a prefecture that just happened to begin with “F”? This gave rise to concentric circles designed to deal with the radioactivity. While these two circles, the big one and the small one, vie with each other, they are actually collapsed into one big circle, which results in the second “Land of the Sun”; this newly born Japan pronounces this “Fukushima” to be its own. The entire world associates it with this place. It became clear to me again. Fukushima Prefecture was being locked down; no, let’s be precise: it was being blockaded.

  But that makes no sense. Fukushima Daiichi Power Plant is the property of Tokyo Electric Power Company. The plant is in Fukushima Prefecture so it should be under the jurisdiction of Tohoku Electric Company. Isn’t it within the jurisdiction of the Tohoku electric company? Just makes no sense. And then I get these reports: one-third of Tokyo’s electric power is supplied by Fukushima Prefecture. Or maybe it was that “one-third of Tokyo Electric Company’s electricity” came from there. No need to track down the precise phrase here because this all makes the point of the situation clearer than the details. I mean, really. Circles and concentric circles. Fukushima—no matter how you spell it—was being locked out. People have been chased outside those circles, but it’s all such an empty fiction. “Beyond the prefectural border?” Can one truly escape by leaving the prefecture?

  I put my hand on those circles.

  On the screen streaming the news.

  I can feel the rings. They speak to me. “Go.” I saw myself in the bathroom mirror, half of the hairs of my right eyebrow had disappeared; clearly I had been unconsciously plucking them. There I was, pale. “My god,” I thought, “how stressed have I been? What day is it? What day of the week?” “Go.” There was the voice. “You must go there. Inside the concentric circles.”

  What is this feeling?

  All the people have been chased away. Towns have been abandoned. All the dogs and cats, and cows, and the horses, too. There is not even any effort made to dispose of the dead bodies. All abandoned.

  I am compelled to stand in that place, but what is driving me to do this? When I analyze it I find that it was I who felt the need to expose myself to radiation, it was I alone exposing myself to this violence. I get that. It was a suicide wish. I am surprised that such an urge remains within me. I dealt with that in my twenties, but it had flickered out by twenty-seven or twenty-eight. By twenty-seven or twenty-eight I had decided on another thing. Can’t say now what, exactly, but I can sketch it out. Self-pity is, in the end, the hatred of others and the world. So first, get rid of hatred. No more of this talk.

  I know that such tendencies had negative ramifications for my chosen path of creator, of writer. Sometimes I feel this sense of “Why the hell was I born into this world?” Some of this is regret; some of this is an intuitive understanding of guilt and shame, overcoming self-pity. But I am not going to write about that, not going to search it out, and perhaps that stance is wrong. The wrong of ethically right or wrong. No, precisely because I have thoroughly pursued this already, I have excised the rawness that could be mistaken for the real. I will try to explain it in pseudo-theological terms. The guilty conscience that I mentioned earlier, I replaced it by strategically invoking the sense of transgression known as “original sin” in the Judeo-Christian tradition. From that starting point I used words and narrative and wove that sense into literature. I gambled on the efficacy of summary. Probably looks to the outsider like leaps in logic, or digressions. Since my understanding begins in the tradition of contemporary Japanese literature—one that was built on imported trends of Western literature, resulting in a naturalism that had ingested any number of misunderstandings that were, in turn, fed into the tradition of the “I-novel”—my digressions are the fruit of that vine. But then, where are the myths? Can one then simply deny the “creation” that is born of paraphrasing?

  Now, given such a declaration, I must direct some questions to myself:

  What of The Holy Family?

  Why did I write a novel about the six prefectures of Tohoku, of northeast Japan?

  And then, why such a novel that shuts in, blockades, those six prefectures?

  I have always felt like an orphan. But why? It’s not like I am one.

  I was born inland in the Nakadōri section of Fukushima, not along the coast in Hamadōri, which is by the Pacific ocean; Hamadōri is now the central core of the concentric circles. Moreover, I was one of those who left town. Never had any intention of staying in the old home area. The way I remember it, that choice was already closed off in third or fourth grade. This “leaving” had nothing to do with affection or hatred. Just this feeling that that area—around Kōriyama, Fukushima Prefecture—didn’t need me, had no use for me. That sense of things, and the present sense that Fukushima itself has been “snatched away,” is, in some ways—no, in every way—different. Can anyone explain how, or the reasons why, the people that “remained” had to be polluted in this way? The voice again. “Go. Get yourself radiated.” Or perhaps just, “Go. See.” I was born in the central Nakadōri section of Fukushima Prefecture. Now I had to go to the ocean side, the Hamadōri, section.

  But what can I do to share in their pain?

  But I also understand this: I can’t be too late, but neither can I be too early. Among the volunteers they need professionals. But I am no pro at journalism. They need volunteers who are pros at something, but I am no professional at anything. Nor do I have any of the nonprofessional qualities they need in volunteers. That’s because I am the sort of person who distrusts good intentions that come wrapped up in too-neat stories. Nor am I a journalist. Well, then, what, exactly? A novelist.

  A novelist unable to write novels. The deadline to start writing the 240 pages of the long section of Dogmother is pushing in on me, but dates don’t feel real. Dates don’t exist. A dogmother. I had not yet escaped the “spirited-away time.” What would be the novel about the Tokyo Bay area that is the counterpart to Dogmother, the Kyoto novel? Godstar, that’s what. A godstar. In that work I had the main character speaking about an earthquake that hit Tokyo Bay and turned the ground from that Edo-era landfill into liquid. Then, on March 11, 2011, it happened, and Tokyo Bay was liquefied.

  The fact that I didn’t have a driver’s license may have been a good thing in the end (or so it seems now, on April 15). I did have a license for a 50cc motorbike that I had gotten when I was sixteen, but I had never renewed it. I had no interest in preserving that form of identification. This is also related to my “leaving.” Not only was there no vehicle I could actually drive, I didn’t have the skill for it, nor did I have what it takes to be a “paper driver,” one of those people who hold a license but never drive. The trains were not yet running, and it was being reported that taxis and other hired vehicles were refusing to go into Fukushima. Further, there was no gasoline. Even in Tokyo the gas stations had begun to dry up, and it was not at all clear if any gas stations still existed up there. You had to know people up there to be sure of a supply of gasoline. So I couldn’t go too soon. I had no right to act like one of the victims. Given all that, with whom, and where, could I talk this through?

  I had at my disposal a number of ways to escape from within this constricting time. One of them was a manuscript for SWITCH, a magazine that was running one of my columns: I cranked out the twenty pages in one go and sent off the manuscript. The theme for that column was “Creativity (in novel writing),” which meant I could treat it as documentary. All the chaos within me, in the days following 3.11, could be written chaotically. In that non-novel manuscript all the urges could be laid out. All of the reader feedback
to the various statements published while in that period of being constricted led me to a path of escape. Then there was another journal, the arts journal Bijutsu techō. A sample of the next issue, to go on sale on March 17, arrived almost as though intended to shake me out of the “spirited-away time.” I had published a piece that I had produced in collaboration with a young artist. The work on this had been begun at the end of the previous year; at the beginning of March the artist checked that the colors looked right; all of that had been OK’d by the photographer working on it. So that magazine arrived. Something is being born, I thought to myself. A birth.

  This project was not limited to the published article. Another novelist, Fukunaga Shin, was there at the beginning to get the thing off the ground, a great project that we kept expanding. There was an exhibit slated to open at a gallery on March 19. The preparations for the two-man show had been progressing nicely. But we decided to postpone it. It felt like an appropriate decision. But we couldn’t cancel it completely. We had to re-create it. I realized this when the sample for Bijutsu techō arrived. We could manage a one-week postponement. That moved the opening reception to March 26. So we announced it, and with that the dates on the calendar—and a consciousness of dates in my brain—floated back into view.

  In short, the artist and I engaged with each other to produce a public work of art; with a single canvas between us we went at it, brush to brush. For my part, I worked with a pencil, with letters and words, in the present moment. A little over an hour of intense concentration. When I looked up, the event space (a gallery in Kiyosumi Shirakawa) was packed, so full it seemed no oxygen was left in the room. I was deeply moved to realize that even having changed the date, and even scheduled at such a time, all these people had come to see us. And reporters even came to do stories on me, people from the newspapers. I was pleased at the way unadorned, straightforward words spewed out of me. I conversed with a number of acquaintances, friends, and readers of my works; I talked with some of the publishing people who had come out. But when I greeted one of the editors my expression was all business. I had already planned what I was going to hit him with.

  I cut straight to it: “Thanks so much for coming today. But I have another thing I want to talk with you about.”

  With that S turned serious, too. He saw in my expression and tone, and the rapidity of response, that I was keyed up about this.

  “I want to get into Fukushima. Over to the Hamadōri section of Fukushima. Will Shinchō Publishing underwrite this for me?”

  “Sure will,” he responded right back. “I will arrange it,” he said. “And I want to go, too,” he added.

  He left the gallery right after that. I went back to my former relaxed state and continued the banter with any number of acquaintances, friends, and readers. We moved on to a bar for an after-party, nearly thirty people, I think, and I had a good time, felt fulfilled. Didn’t get back home until late. I started up the computer and checked my mail. Less than three hours after talking with S at the gallery, there was a message from him reporting that Shinchō Publishing wanted to cooperate on this. I also had a message from Y, the editor of Shinchō arts journal. It was now late and time for another drink.

  Technical conversations went back and forth after that: the fluid nature of the radioactivity levels, the risk of internal radiation, etc. In the end three people from Shinchō Publishing committed to traveling with me. I had to rethink things. I couldn’t put other people in danger; I wouldn’t do it.

  “You still have to go. Go see for yourself.”

  Another scene.

  An older brother and his younger brother. The two of them are in Iwaki City. Iwaki City is in the Hamadōri section of Fukushima, on the east side facing the Pacific Ocean. The novelist notes that authors of guidebooks, in their overblown style, call this “Fukushima’s East Coast.” That was my writing. The younger brother says to the older, “East is the ocean, right?” The older brother says to the younger, “East is ocean, south is Ibaraki.” Younger brother comes back, “Ibaraki is in Kantō, not Tohoku, right?” And so they head north. Up Route 6, after switching from one stolen car to another. In that region Route 6 is called Rikuzen Beach Highway; older brother’s got his hands on the steering wheel, younger brother is riding shotgun, humming, forever, “Strawberry Fields.” The two are driving the car alongside the tracks of the JR Jōban train line.

  JR Jōban line, the one that runs along the Pacific Coast.

  These two brothers that appear in The Holy Family, the fact is that they also have a younger sister. There are three siblings. The younger sister watches her two brothers with their names that include cow and sheep move around Fukushima Prefecture; it looks to her like sugoroku, that chutes-and-ladders kind of game. From one village in the prefecture to another town, from one town to another village, on to some other hamlet. “Like pieces on a game board,” she calls it. She asks: “Well, then, what is the end point of this game? What city, town, village? Where are they exactly?”

  Sōma, that’s where. Setting their sights on the boundary between Fukushima and Miyagi, they never got any farther north than that. They committed crimes, were surrounded by the police, searched. The two of them, especially the older brother, who was stuck with the “cow” name, carried a sense of guilt over being born, especially since this had led to the deaths of a number of people. Through hell screens, like on those big Buddhist renditions of Hell. So they couldn’t be pardoned, couldn’t run away. They needed a redemption. The two of them, the older brother and the younger brother.

  This is in Sōma city. Which points to the last stop, the end of the game. The younger brother starts talking and we hear his muddy Tohoku accent. “Yep. Stop there. What’s the name of this place? Sōma? Is this even a town? A city? Right: Sōma City. Yep. That convenience store there, that works. I’ll get some milk. I need to pee, too. Deal? You’re older: you go first.” With that the younger brother allowed the older to escape. I am writing out that dialogue right now. Sort of a Fukushima accent arranged to sound like an accent of the entire northeast. I said nothing about the nuclear reactors.

  When you open the big atlas to the page that has “Futaba,” the town, written in big letters as the section heading, you find the following explanation in red: “Hamadōri is the Nuclear Ginza.” Route 6 is there, the one known in that area as the Rikuzen Beach Highway, the JR Jōban train line runs there, and there are plans for a future extension of the Jōban expressway there. The first limestone caves that I ever went into when I was little (the biggest of the Abukuma caves) are there on the left hand side of that page. Over on the right side, on the Pacific Coast, is the Daini Nuclear Power Plant. Just a few centimeters above that is the Daiichi Plant. It doesn’t say how many reactors are there.

  We took off in the middle of the night. Four of us stuffed into a small car with a license plate from Kashiwa, in Chiba. A rental car. For the people from Shinchō Publishing this was just a continuation of the evening. But not for me. For me, following one or two hours of sleep, it was morning. So the ideas that come in the early morning hours and the kind of topics that get passed around in the middle of the night were all mixed together. Nonetheless, outside the window it was nighttime, clearly it was the middle of the night; inside the car the screen of the car navigation system was lit up. Up on the dashboard. This was no “spirited-away time,” but there were time slippages. Time for us—the four of us—began to mix in a three-to-one ratio, and the days of the calendar, too, were beginning to slip. Ms. S was driving; in the passenger seat with an open map was another S—young S—while Y and I were gathered in the back seat. We left Tokyo and headed out on the highway. The route was entirely overland, and we eventually got on the Tohoku expressway. I didn’t really expect the roads to be open all the way to Fukushima. Especially north of Saitama Prefecture, and up to the northern part of Fukushima. I was quite sure that for some time now all but emergency vehicles were being prevented from passing. But many places, wherever they could, had alr
eady returned to normal operations. We pulled into a service area somewhere in Tochigi Prefecture. Filled the car with gas. I was surprised when Ms. S told me that it looked like gasoline was going to be available when we got there. There was a cat at that service area. A female cat. A fat one. Y was petting it on the head. It felt to me that if the cat was fat the area must be safe. I had packed a bunch of fish sausages to feed to animals, along with other stuff, like cotton work gloves, rain ponchos, and liters of tap water that I had run through a water purifier and put into empty plastic bottles. In the lavatory at the service area were notices about the power outages scheduled to take place. But of course: all through the Kanto area there were these scheduled power outages. I saw how electric conservation reached into everything, darkened all sorts of areas, including these expressway facilities and service roads. I told myself not to get depressed about that. Eventually, dawn. As this little car with a Kashiwa license was running down the highway it was bathed in day’s first light, directly from the side, from the east. “There it is,” I thought, “the sun is out.” For me it was the second morning (second for this day). Next stop was the Abukuma service area. White breath in the air. 5:44 in the morning. Even with the slippage of days the hours were exact. Seemed to me just like the jetlag that follows an international flight. And seeing the white of our breath, it felt exactly like winter. “Just like an early daybreak in winter,” I thought. But this was early April. “Beginning of the fiscal year.” Stern note to self: can’t be late.

  Bright rays of light—shooting rays of the sun—bounced off of every surface of the service area, the metal surfaces of walls and pillars, the glass of the windows. Flying off at crazy angles.

  Off at the edge of the parking area I discovered an old stele. It was a replica (had to be) of the ancient Shirakawa barrier gate, very impressively written: “From here, Michinoku.” That brought a wry smile; at the same time, I was assailed by a strong sense of floating. Where are we? Where is this?