Into the Forbidden Zone Read Online Free PDF Page B

roof tiles. Unlocking the safe, she removed “the memory of the ancestors,” evidently their Buddhist memorial tablets, and then, believing she still had time, searched for a cotton furoshiki cloth in which to wrap them. One of the granddaughters then suggested that she might wish to take the cell phone. And so they fled in the car. Sending the two girls ahead, she returned to the vehicle to retrieve their dog and her wallet. Here her hands began twisting tighter and tighter together in her lap, and when she said, “I took a narrow way, and then I saw the tsunami in the middle of the road,” I found the horror in her round reddish face nearly unendurable.
    “The first wave took all the belongings away from me, so then I ran to where the wave was lower. I know that a human cannot escape the tsunami once she is caught in it, so I removed my shoes and climbed a wall, and first it was unstable, but I found a stable place, clinging with my toes. The water was up to my waist, and then it was up to my chest; I was holding onto the roof so that I couldn’t be carried away; I was screaming help, help, help! to the spirit of my late husband. . . Then it came.”
    The grandchildren went on reading books in their galoshes in the fishy, diesely wind (and since it might for all I knew be blowing from the reactor, I inspected my dosimeter, which at six in the morning had been reading 1.9 accrued millirems and now after three hours in Ishinomaki turned over to 2.0, which signified that the radioactivity here was at least twice that of Tokyo’s—not bad; never mind those hypothetical beta particles riding on the wind); and a crow cawed; there was a heap of tires; from a glassless window, sodden futons hung out to dry.
    “I was on the rooftop, so I was rescued at the end, before it got dark. I didn’t see my granddaughters for two days, but their teacher told me they were all right. . .”
    Behind a leaning grate, her old neighbor was picking up clinking things from the mud of his former yard.
    “How relevant is the nuclear accident to you?” I asked her.
    “The power plant may be necessary, but they ought to publish the facts. It seems to be stopped all right, but is it really? They’ve said that in some fishery products the concentration is low, but accumulation will be bad. . .”
    Gazing down at the sand by her feet, I saw a small fish-mummy, convulsed.
    In a narrow zone of sand between two ruined houses, an old man was planting seeds. Streams of plastic twitched in the tsunami-pollarded trees. A twisted cypress, still green, rested against the patio wall of a house that had been smashed open on its eave-end. I bowed goodbye to Mrs. Ito, who slowly crept into her house.

CONCERNING A KOTO NOW UNDER REPAIR
     
    HOW MANY SUCH STORIES would you care to hear? I collected a number; they are much the same in the one quality that causes journalists to seek them out, just as are the grimacing, often swollen, frequently forehead-bruised corpses whose images face us on the fluttering blue tarp-wall of that temporary morgue at Ishinomaki; their expression much depends on the angle of the head. The survivors who view them keep calm, in the best Japanese manner, gesturing each other forward with a polite “hai, domo!”, offering one another the best views of those horrid faces, whose eyes are usually closed.
    One woman was explaining to another: “I came here to look for my mother-in-law, but since the faces are swollen it’s difficult, and the number I specified was wrong; that’s why I couldn’t identify her right away. . .”
    On the other side of the long rectangle of sunlight, a priest was ringing a bell, and a photograph gazed down upon a bed of donated flowers. Relatives bowed over the ritual bowl; candles flickered. The priest bowed. My throat ached with dust.
    Thinking to learn more, I asked a policeman for information, so he referred me to his chief, who could do nothing without the big boss, who when I asked him how many