NEW SUN RISING: STORIES FOR JAPAN (post 2)

THE ANTHOLOGY IS OUT THERE. (see the post below this one)

Here's a piece that didn't make it into the anthology but represents a knee-jerk response to the catastrophe over a year ago.

THOUGHTS OF HOME

It was on the news. Pictures of buildings shaking, and inside the buildings books falling from shelves and clocks dropping from walls and people knowing what to do and crawling under tables to be safe.

There was someone I worked with and her sister was married to a Japanese man. The sister had children and another on the way. They lived in Tokyo, my colleague’s sister and her family. I’d seen pictures of them taped to the wall beside my colleague’s computer. Holiday snaps mostly. And I’d tasted chocolate brought back from Japan and left on my desk with a postcard that was never sent. So, seeing the news and the pictures, I was worried for this woman I worked with and the sister over there.

‘No, no, it’s fine. She’s safe. They are used to it. They know what to do. There’s been an e-mail.’ 

And though the school building where the sister worked had danced and shook, and the school bell hadn’t stopped ringing, and they’d been under the desks for almost six hours before they could come out, the sister and everyone was fine. She was a school teacher, the sister. I hadn’t known that before. Seven months pregnant and crouched under a desk needing a pee but not daring to go. We laughed at that and hugged and said, ‘Thank goodness.’

But there was more to come. A tsunami and aftershocks and nuclear reactors not doing what they should and countries ordering their citizens home and evacuations and still more aftershocks. Whole villages had been washed away and on my tv a crook-backed woman, shrunk to child-size, stood looking lost in a place that should have been home and was nothing more than split timbers and mud.

‘She’s still ok,’ said the woman I worked with and meaning her sister. ‘She’s gone to the south of the country, to a beach there.’

And we laughed again, at the idea, thinking a beach was the last place to be in the circumstances. We laughed, but she looked strained as though she’d slept little, as though she was only pretending to laugh. We hugged again and I think that was too much. There were sudden tears then and she said she was being silly and I said she wasn’t. And she showed me pictures again, the same ones as before, pictures of Lucy and her husband and the children she had, and I made my colleague a cup of tea and we talked. ‘His name’s Kiyoshi. It means ‘quiet’. That’s nice, I think, that names have meaning. And he is quiet. Talks in whispers and considers what he says before he speaks. I like that.’

She was worried about her sister’s condition. Lucy’d been to the hospital in Tokyo before heading south. They’d checked her over, the baby’s heartbeat and hers, and they’d said everything was normal and there was nothing to worry about. Of course, that wasn’t quite what they meant, not with what was going on.

‘I said she should come home. She’s my sister, why wouldn’t I say that? But she got cross. She said she was home. She said it firm, so there was nothing more to be said. And it made me cry when she said it, like I was losing something.’

I remember watching the television that night, the replaying pictures that were already old, and the black water sweeping across the screen, and houses scrunched like paper, and things falling in the street, and people wearing face masks digging through the rubble, and snow falling in big flakes, and the crook-backed woman looking lost again, and one of the nuclear reactor buildings exploding. And then there was something new, a woman in her twenties and she was standing before a board with lists of names, the names of those who had been found, and she was comparing them to the list she had of those still missing. And she said they were people from her village, the place where she had lived all her days, the place that was home and now was no more. And doing this was doing something, she said. It was the least she could do, and her voice was cracked and her eyes held back tears and she turned away and she ran one finger slowly down the thousands of names listed on the board.

And I touched the walls of my own house and felt them reassuringly solid, and I looked at pictures of my own kids, all their grinning growing-up pictures, and I thought of my brother and how we had not spoken in some time, and I picked up the phone and clicked on his number.