Into the Forbidden Zone Read Online Free PDF

floating; so, since that direction was no good, I made another U-turn and took a higher direction. At the river’s edge, the fire department personnel told me not to go that way, but it didn’t look bad. All the same, the water level seemed a bit higher, and then I saw it come over the dike. So I fled. I had to sleep on the ground for four days. I went to Yamato to confirm that my grandchildren were all right. Then there was a gas shortage, and it was so cold. I found a garbage bag to keep me warm—so cold, so cold! It was snowing. I tried to find someplace warm; I took more and more garbage bags for a shirt. . .”
    “What color was the tsunami?”
    He laughed. “I don’t remember. It was black, they said, with oil.”
    He was a cheery, rugged, white-bearded old man—sixty-six years old, with the face of a workingman. At the shipyard he was in charge of safety and hygiene. The neighbors stood around us. Cans of juice were on the filthy table. His wife had led some panicked Chinese girls up onto the second story of a parking lot, and they all survived. “Everyone went to the roofs,” he said. The second or third tsunami wave had been in his opinion the bad one, people floating in their cars and calling out for help until they sank. Mr. Kawanami said, “These images were in my brain yesterday, and I got depressed and confused. . .”
    A couple of his acquaintance had fled. The wife had returned home for their valuables, because she was a strong swimmer. Fortunately, they recovered her corpse, which still gripped a bag of precious things.
    “When you think of all you’ve suffered,” I asked him, “do you think the reactor accident might be better or worse than that?”
    “What shall I say? I can’t even imagine. This area is where elderly people are residing. It requires money to rebuild a house, and many people are scared. My wife says that if everybody leaves, then only we will stay. We think that since we are old, we can stay until we die, since this” —he must have meant the tsunami—“happens only on a thousand-year scale. I planned to retire this year and live a nice relaxed life. But the money for my future will have to be spent on repairs. Moreover, the people at the nuclear plant, they are talking about some nuclear explosion. Our governor is so proud of our nuclear plant, compared with Fukushima.”
    In the filth, muddy dishes were neatly stacked. Freshwater was still too rare for washing just yet.
    At my request, Mr. Kawanami took me upstairs to admire the sand and silt. He said: “When the wave came, each tatami mat struggled like this!” and his arms writhed.
    Thanking him and departing with my best bow, I was next introduced to Mrs. Ito Yukiko, age sixty-six, who received me narrow-eyed, with her shoulders drawn in and her fists on her lap as she sat on the edge of her chipped, cracked concrete porch, wearing orange wind pants, a dingy sweater, and a white-striped wool cap pulled down over her eyebrows. The toes of her slippers touched the mucky, rubbly ground, which happened to be decorated with broken dishes. Here as everywhere else in that neighborhood the smell of diesel was nauseating. Her two young granddaughters, wearing galoshes, played at sweeping the doorway, then settled down to read what might have been comic books. They were very shy; I left them alone. I did not ask, since no one mentioned them, where their parents might be.
    “I was born in the beach area,” Mrs. Ito said. “I have experienced the Chilean tsunami, and also another one in this prefecture. So I knew well that when an earthquake comes, you have to take care in case of a tsunami. But this one,” she said, grimacing (and stopping to pick up a spoon that one of the little girls had dropped), “this one was different.”
    Well aware that quake-deformed doors might trap people behind them, she had carefully opened the house door in advance, then rode out the temblor just within, for fear of getting brained by her