A Tale for the Time Being (28 page)

No one said anything. The girls were jutting out their chins and hips and shifting restlessly from side to side. Finally, I guess old Jiko understood what she was looking at. She dropped my hand
and I held my breath. And then she bowed.

I couldn’t believe it. It wasn’t a little bow, either. It was a deep bow. The girls were, like, what the fuck? One of them, a fat girl squatting in front, kind of nodded
back—not quite a bow, not completely respectful, but not a punch in the face either. But then the tall one in the middle, who was clearly the girl boss, reached over and gave the fat one a
swift punch in the head.

“Nameten no ka!” she snarled. “Chutohampa nan da yo. Chanto ojigi mo dekinei no ka?!”
¹¹⁸

She smacked the fat girl once more, and then she stood up straight, put her palms together, and bowed deeply from the waist. The rest of her crew jumped up and did the same. Jiko bowed to them
again, and nudged me, so I bowed, too, but I did it half-assed, so she made me do it again, which made things even because now it was like old Jiko was the girl boss of our gang, and I was the fat
screwup who couldn’t bow properly. I didn’t think this was so funny, but the gangbangers thought it was hilarious, and Jiko smiled, too, and then she took my hand and we walked on. When
the bus came, Jiko sat by the window and looked back out at the parking lot.

“I wonder what omatsuri
¹¹⁹
it is today?” she said.

“Omatsuri?”

“Yes,” she said. “Those pretty young people, dressed up in their matsuri clothes. They look so gay. I wonder what the occasion is. Muji remembers these things for me
. . .”

“It’s not a matsuri! Those were gangbangers, Granny. Biker chicks. Yanki girls.”

“They were girls?”

“Bad girls. Juvenile delinquents. They were saying stuff. I thought they were going to beat us up.”

“Oh no,” Jiko said, shaking her head. “They were all dressed so nicely. Such cheerful colors.”

2.

“Have you ever bullied a wave?” Jiko asked me at the beach.

We had eaten rice balls and chocolate and were hanging out. Jiko was sitting on a small wooden bench, and I was lying on the sand at her feet. The sun was beating down. Jiko had tied a damp
white hand towel around her bald head and seemed as cool as a cucumber in her grey pajamas. I was hot and sweaty and feeling restless, but I hadn’t brought a bathing suit and didn’t
really want to go for a swim. But that’s not what she was asking.

“Bullied a wave?” I repeated. “No. Of course not.”

“Try it. Go to the water and wait for the biggest wave and give it a punch. Give it a good kick. Hit it with a stick. Go on. I will watch.” She handed me her walking stick.

There was no one around, except for a couple of surfers way down the beach. I took old Jiko’s stick in my hand and walked and then ran to the edge of the ocean, waving it above my head
like a kendo sword. The waves were big, breaking on the beach, and I ran into the first one that came at me, yelling
kiayeeeee!
like a samurai going into battle. I smacked the wave with
the stick, cutting through it, but the water kept coming. I ran back up the beach and escaped, but the next one knocked me over. I got to my feet and attacked again and again, and each time the
water crashed down on top of me, grinding me against the rocks and covering me with foam and sand. I didn’t mind. The sharp cold felt good, and the violence of the waves felt powerful and
real, and the bitterness of salt in my nose tasted harshly delicious.

Over and over, I ran at the sea, beating it until I was so tired I could barely stand. And then the next time I fell down, I just lay there and let the waves wash over me, and I wondered what
would happen if I stopped trying to get back up. Just let my body go. Would I be washed out to sea? The sharks would eat my limbs and organs. Little fish would feed on my fingertips. My beautiful
white bones would fall to the bottom of the ocean, where anemones would grow upon them like flowers. Pearls would rest in my eye sockets. I stood up and walked back to where old Jiko was sitting.
She took the small towel from her head and handed it to me.

“Maketa,” I said, throwing myself down in the sand. “I lost. The ocean won.”

She smiled. “Was it a good feeling?”

“Mm,” I said.

“That’s good,” she said. “Have another rice ball?”

3.

We sat there for a while longer, waiting for my shorts and T-shirt to dry. Down the beach, in the distance, the surfers kept falling into the water and disappearing.

“The waves keep beating them up, too,” I said, pointing.

Jiko squinted, but she couldn’t see them through her flowers of emptiness.

“There,” I said. “See that one? He’s just standing up . . . he’s up . . . he’s up . . . oh, he’s down.” I laughed. It was funny to
watch.

Jiko nodded, like she was agreeing with me. “Up, down, same thing,” she said.

It’s a typical Jiko comment, all about pointing to what she calls the not-two
¹²⁰
nature of existence when I’m just trying to watch
some cute guys surfing. I know better than to argue with her, because she always wins, but it’s like a knock-knock joke, where you have to say “Who’s there?” so the other
person can tell you the punch line. So I said, “No, it’s not the same thing. Not for a surfer.”

“Yes,” she said. “You are right. Not same.” She adjusted her glasses. “Not different, either.”

See what I mean?

“It
is
different, Granny. The whole point of surfing is to stand on top of the wave, not underneath it.”

“Surfer, wave, same thing.”

I don’t know why I bother. “That’s just stupid,” I said. “A surfer’s a person. A wave is a wave. How can they be the same?”

Jiko looked out across the ocean to where the water met the sky. “A wave is born from deep conditions of the ocean,” she said. “A person is born from deep conditions of the
world. A person pokes up from the world and rolls along like a wave, until it is time to sink down again. Up, down. Person, wave.”

She pointed to the steep cliffs along the shoreline. “Jiko, mountain, same thing. The mountain is tall and will live a long time. Jiko is small and will not live much longer. That’s
all.”

Like I said, this is pretty typical of the kind of conversation you have with my old Jiko. I never completely understand what she’s saying, but I like that she tries to explain it to me
anyway. It’s nice of her.

It was time to go back to the temple. My shorts and T-shirt had dried out and my skin was superitchy from the salt. I helped Jiko to her feet and we walked back to the bus stop together, holding
hands again. I was still thinking about what she said about waves, and it made me sad because I knew that her little wave was not going to last and soon she would join the sea again, and even
though I know you can’t hold on to water, still I gripped her fingers a little more tightly to keep her from leaking away.

1.

You can’t hold on to water or keep it from leaking away. This was a lesson that Tepco learned in the weeks following the tsunami, when they pumped thousands of tons of
seawater into the reactor vessels at the Fukushima nuclear plant in an attempt to cool the fuel rods and prevent the reactor meltdowns that in fact had already happened. They called it the
“feed and bleed” strategy, and it created about 500 tons of highly radioactive water each day—water that needed to be contained and kept from leaking.

On the opposite side of the Pacific, Ruth pored over reports of the disaster. The International Atomic Energy Agency, which was monitoring the situation, published the daily 2011 Fukushima
Nuclear Accident Update Log, describing the details of the desperate efforts to stabilize the reactors. Here’s a very short excerpt from the April 3 log:

Paragraph after paragraph, page after page, the log detailed the intricate system of pumps and drains, surge tanks and feed-water lines, intakes and injection lines, suppression
pools and pits, flow rates and leakage paths, trenches and tunnels and flooded basements, that were being used to hold on to the water.

This Update Log of April 3 was the first to mention a crack, discovered in the side wall of a containment pit below Reactor #2, next to the seawater inlet point. High concentrations of
radioactive iodine-131 and cesium-137 were found in samples of seawater as far away as thirty kilometers from the reactors, with levels measuring tens of thousands of times higher than before the
accident. The containment pit was leaking what
The New York Times
later reported to be rivers of highly radioactive water, which flowed directly into the sea.

On April 4, the Update Log reported that Tepco received permission from the Japanese government to release 11,500 tons of contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean. That much water is roughly
equivalent to the contents of five Olympic swimming pools.

On April 5, the Update Log noted that the dumping had begun. It lasted for five days.

The radioactive levels of the contaminated water were about a hundred times over the legal limits, but the Pacific Ocean is vast and wide, and Tepco didn’t foresee a problem. According to
the Update Log, the company estimated that a member of the public, eating seaweed and seafood harvested from nearby the nuclear plant every day for a year, would receive an additional annual
radiation dose of 0.6 millisieverts, well below the level that would be dangerous to human health. The company didn’t estimate the consequences to the fish.

Information is a lot like water; it’s hard to hold on to, and hard to keep from leaking away. Tepco and the Japanese government tried to contain the news of the reactor meltdown, and for a
while they were successful in covering up crucial data about dangerous radiation levels in the region surrounding the crippled plant, but eventually the information began to leak. Japanese people
pride themselves on being stoic and slow to anger, but the ongoing disclosures of mismanagement, lies, and cover-up touched a deep core of rage.

2.

In medieval Japan, people used to believe that earthquakes were caused by an angry catfish who lived under the islands.

In the earliest legends, the
mono-iu sakana,
or “Saying-things Fish,” ruled the lakes and rivers. This supernatural fish could shapeshift into human form and speak in human
tongues, and if any humans trespassed against his watery realm, he would appear to them and deliver a warning. If the offenders failed to heed this warning, the enraged
mono-iu sakana
would punish them by sending a flood or some other natural disaster.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the
mono-iu sakana
had morphed into the
jishin namazu
, or Earthquake Catfish, an enormous whalelike creature who caused the earth to
shake and tremble by his furious thrashing. The only thing holding him in check was a large stone wielded by the Kashima Deity, who lives at the Kashima Shrine.

This stone is called the
kaname-ishi,
an untranslatable Japanese term that means something like “keystone” or “rivet stone” or “lodestone.” The
Kashima Deity uses the
kaname-ishi
to immobilize the catfish by pinning its head to the ground. If the Kashima Deity dozes off or gets distracted, or is called away on business, the
pressure on the catfish’s head is released, allowing it to wiggle and thrash. The result is an earthquake.

If you go to the Kashima Shrine, you won’t see much, since most of the stone is buried underground. A small roofed enclosure shelters a bare patch of earth, from which a small, round
stone, about twelve inches in diameter, emerges from the earth like the crowning skull of an infant, trying to be born. It’s impossible to know how big the stone might be underneath the
earth. How amazing to think that the fate of the Japanese islands rests on the assumption that the buried and largely invisible crowning keystone is large and hefty enough to subdue an angry
earthquake catfish!

3.

The Earthquake Catfish is not solely a malevolent fish, despite the havoc and calamity it can wreak. It has benevolent aspects as well. A subspecies of the Earthquake Catfish is
the
yonaoshi namazu
or World-Rectifying Catfish, which is able to heal the political and economic corruption in society by shaking things up.

Belief in the World-Rectifying Catfish was especially prevalent during the early nineteenth century, a period characterized by a weak, ineffective government and a powerful business class, as
well as extreme and anomalous weather patterns, crop failures, famine, hoarding, urban riots, and mass religious pilgrimages, which often ended in mob violence.

The World-Rectifying Catfish targeted the business class, the 1 percent, whose rampant practices of price-fixing, hoarding, and graft had led to economic stagnation and political corruption. The
angry catfish would cause an earthquake, wreaking havoc and destruction, and in order to rebuild, the wealthy would have to let go of their assets, which would create jobs in salvage,
rubble-clearing, and construction for the working classes. The redistribution of wealth is illustrated in satirical drawings of the time, which depict the World-Rectifying Catfish forcing wealthy
merchants and CEOs to vomit and shit out gold coins, which are being pocketed by laborers.

But sadly, earthquakes result in collateral damage, and often the catfish is filled with remorse. In one poignant drawing,
seppuku namazu
, the Suicide Catfish, slices open his stomach
to atone for all the deaths he’s caused. Gold coins pour from the wide slit in his belly. In one hand, he’s gripping the ritual disemboweling knife that he has thrust into his stomach.
In the other, he’s holding a gold bar and offering it up to a group of humans, while overhead, the Kashima Deity and the spirits of the dead look on.