Tomo Read online

  Published by

  Stone Bridge Press

  P.O. Box 8208

  Berkeley, CA 94707

  tel 510-524-8732 • [email protected] • www. stonebridge.com

  Cover and part-title illustrations by John Shelley.

  Cover and text design by Linda Ronan.

  “Be Not Defeated by the Rain” by Kenji Miyazawa, translated by David Sulz, online in The World of Kenji Miyazawa. “Bad Day for Baseball” by Graham Salisbury in Shattered: Stories of Children and War, edited by Jennifer Armstrong, Laurel Leaf, 2003. “Blue Shells” by Naoko Awa, translated by Toshiya Kamei, in The Fox’s Window and Other Stories by Naoko Awa, U.N.O. Press, 2009, and online in Moulin Review. “House of Trust” by Sachiko Kashiwaba, in Japanese as “Shinyodo” no shinyo in Onigashima Tsushin 22 (December 1993) and in Mirakuru famirii (Miracle Family) by Sachiko Kashiwaba, Kodansha Bunko, 2010. “Yamada-san’s Toaster” by Kelly Luce in Ms. Yamada’s Toaster by Kelly Luce, University of Tampa Press, 2008. “Hachiro” by Ryusuke Saito, in Japanese as Hachiro by Ryusuke Saito, ©Keiko Saito 1967, Fukuinkan Shoten Publishers, Inc., Tokyo, Japan, 1967, All Rights Reserved. “Anton and Kiyohime” by Fumio Takano, in Japanese as “Anton to Kiyohime” in SF Magazine (September 2010), Hayakawa Shobo. “Fleecy Clouds” by Arie Nashiya, in Japanese as “Fleecy Love” in Suki, data: hajimete no shitsuren, nanatsu no hanashi, Media Factory Bunko DaVinci, 2010. “Love Letter” by Megumi Fujino, in Japanese as “Rabu rettaa” in Shukan shosetsu (March 5, 1999), Jitsugyo no Nihon Sha. “Wings on the Wind” by Yuichi Kimura, in Japanese as Kaze kiru tsubasa by Yuichi Kimura, ©Yuichi Kimura/Seitaro Kuroda, Kodansha Ltd., 2002.

  First edition 2012.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher.

  library of congress cataloging-in-publication data on file

  isbn 978-1-61172-006-8

  isbn 978-1-61172-518-6 (e-book)

  In memory of all those lost in the Great East Japan

  Earthquake and Tsunami of March 11, 2011

  and dedicated to all the young people of Tohoku

  Be not defeated by the rain,

  Nor let the wind prove your better.

  Succumb not to the snows of winter.

  Nor be bested by the heat of summer.

  Be strong in body.

  Unfettered by desire.

  Not enticed to anger.

  Cultivate a quiet joy.

  Excerpted from David Sulz’s

  translation of the Kenji Miyazawa poem

  “Be Not Defeated by the Rain”

  (Ame ni mo makezu)

  Foreword: One Year After

  by Holly Thompson

  For many years I’ve lived in the seaside town of Kamakura, where in 1498 a powerful tsunami destroyed the temple building surrounding the huge thirteenth-century bronze statue of the Great Buddha. The foundation stones remain, and the Buddha still sits there serenely, though now in the open, exposed to the elements season after season. Until March 11, 2011, it had always seemed impossible to me that a tsunami could reach so far inland—a full kilometer—with such force. Now, of course, post Great East Japan Earthquake, I know better.

  Watching video footage of the March 11th tsunami blasting away towns so similar to the one in Japan that I call home—towns nestled between rolling hills and the sea—left me shocked and distraught. It could have been our town, I knew. It could have been us racing to reach high ground. The suffering and loss in Tohoku were immediately palpable. I ached. Yet in an odd twist of timing, I was in the United States that week. While many were fleeing Japan, I wanted desperately to return.

  Like others, I donated goods, I donated money, I donated my writing. And once I returned to Japan, I immediately signed up for an eight-day volunteer tsunami cleanup trip with the NGO Peace Boat. I felt the need to do something physical to battle back the damage the tsunami had done.

  In Tohoku, I camped out with other teams of volunteers—volunteers from Japan and from countries around the world—and together we shoveled tsunami sludge, bagged debris, scrubbed away mud from shops and homes, cleared drainage gutters, and picked up eighteen tons of rotting fish scattered from coastal markets. It was sobering work; seemingly endless swaths of cities and towns had been destroyed, and even far inland from the coast, homes and businesses were ruined. The stunned yet stoic locals we met were coping with layer upon layer of loss.

  As a writer whose work is often focused on young adults, I surveyed the scenes around me in Tohoku, and my thoughts turned to teens. This trauma would follow them through their lives. I wanted to find a way to support the teen survivors as they navigate the rough months and years ahead—through grief and frustration, recovery and hope. I began to formulate a plan.

  I envisioned collecting young adult short fiction from authors and translators with a connection to Japan by heritage or experience. The resulting anthology would be read by teens worldwide, enabling them to “visit” Japan through these stories. Proceeds from the sales of the book would support teens in quake- and tsunami-affected areas of Tohoku. It seemed a far-fetched idea in the exhausting and unpredictable spring of 2011, but thanks to the unwavering support of Stone Bridge Press and the hard work of so many phenomenal Japan-connected authors and translators, Tomo has become a reality.

  The thirty-six stories collected in this anthology range from contemporary to historical, fantasy to realistic, folk tales to ghost stories, and from prose to graphic narrative to stories in verse. Most of the stories are set in Japan or within Japanese families or communities outside of Japan. One story, Wings on the Wind, originally written post 9/11, seems an apt parable post 3/11 as survivors struggle with guilt over those they weren’t able to save from the tsunami. Nine stories in this anthology are translated from Japanese, and one story is a translation of the Japanese transcription of an Ainu yukar. Five contributors from or with strong connections to Tohoku have been included.

  A few days before the six-month anniversary of the earthquake and tsunami, I was in Tohoku volunteering again, this time helping a community on the Oshika Peninsula clean and prepare a shrine in order to hold annual festival rites. The community was a fraction of its previous numbers, but the volunteers and the locals together helped ready the shrine grounds and shoulder the mikoshi (portable shrine) through the harborside rubble. Together we boarded several fishing boats and took the mikoshi out into the pristine harbor. Flags waved from tall stalks of bamboo in the bows of the boats. The sea was calm and sparkling. The sun was brilliant. The mountains all around us were undulating rolls of lush green from recent rains. The March 11th tsunami’s immensity was again impossible to grasp, too cruel to fathom. Kenji Miyazawa’s poem “Be Not Defeated by the Rain” (Ame ni mo makezu), about being strong in the face of adversity and compassionate toward others who may be struggling, repeated over and over in my head.

  May the hard-hit communities of northern Japan find the strength to move forward. May the young people of Japan cultivate a spirit of compassion and play key roles in reviving Tohoku. Tomo means “friend,” and I am profoundly grateful to everyone who joins me in saying to the people of Tohoku: We are with you, we will help you, we will cheer you as you take your steps to recover.

  Shocks and Tremors

  Lost

  by Andrew Fukuda

  It is night and then it is not. I feel myself rising out of the murky depths of my subconscious, surfacing, an opaque light shimmering above. And then I am through, my eyelids lifting, heavy, my body wrung out and spent.

  Everything is white, a bleached glare made manageable only by squinting. White bedsheets, white walls, even the linoleum floor is white. An air-conditioning unit, humming with exertion, billows the white curtains against the cl
osed windows back and forth, back and forth, like the resigned gills of a beached fish. I do not recognize anything about this room. From behind, I hear the electronic ping-ping of a monitor.

  An elderly woman lies in a bed on the other side of the room, upright metal handrails flanking her, a tangle of bedsheets kicked to the foot of the bed. She is on her side, staring at me, but her eyes are blank. Blank as the white emptiness of the room. Her chest draws in quick, shallow breaths. Like my dog, Tito-chan, after a walk on a hot summer day, flopped in the shade of the tree, panting hard and hot.

  I pull myself up, feel an unexpected heft and weight about my chest. There’s a tube in my arm; wires connect somewhere against my ribs.

  I am in a hospital. I have no idea how I got here.

  For a minute, as my head spins, I stare out the window. Only slivers of scenery slip through the shifting gap between the billowing curtains. What I see confuses me: my head is not clear, I think to myself. It is seeing things not there. It is seeing unimaginable things.

  I swing my legs to the floor. I’m expecting weakness in them, but not erosion. I fall to the floor with a cry. The white linoleum flings itself at me and smacks me hard, like a vicious slap.

  I lie on the ground, wait for the arrival of nurses, those quick shoes clip-clopping along the corridor and into this room. But no one arrives.

  When the pain subsides, I pick myself up, holding up my weight by leaning against the bed. Better now, my legs feeling more like they occupy actual physical space, strength returning to them. I make my way to the bathroom, one slow meter at a time, hands pressed against the mattress, then along the wall, until they grip the bathroom sink. An automatic sensor, slightly delayed, turns the light on. The fluorescent lamp flickers above me, then holds fast. Too much light in my eyes; I shut them, then open them slowly.

  The reflection before me. It is me. And it is not me.

  I seem older than I should be. My hair, even though tussled and unkempt, falls below my shoulder. How did it grow—

  No, something is wrong. I touch my hair, distrusting it. It feels coarse and wiry in my hands, but it is mine. And there are other changes about my face.

  My cheek fat is diminished, my face sallow. Cheekbones I never thought I possessed protrude out. Acne scars litter my forehead. I lean forward, needing to look closer. Warily, I reach out and touch the acne lightly with my fingertips. I feel the slight rise of them against my skin. I blink. I have never had a single pimple in my life.

  And then my eyes course down, past my face, past my neck, to my chest. I see under my loose hospital gown two soft mounds of breasts I’ve never seen before, never possessed. When I last fell asleep, my chest was flat. My reflection before me now blinks as I blink; yet it is an alien body.

  Footsteps entering the room. A gasp, a short cry. Then the figure of a person walks into view. My mother, her hair uncharacteristically frowzy, her face more lined than I remember. A slight bend to her back, of fatigue and of a weight deeper than that of physical tiredness.

  “Mother?” I whisper.

  She turns around, sees me. Her hand rises to her mouth, trembling. My mother’s hand, the curtains behind her: both shaking together.

  “Noriko?” Her eyes are shining now, flooding with tears that never fall.

  “Mother.”

  And she comes to me, clasping me in her arms. Her body is skinnier than I remember, frailer; yet there is a desperate strength to her arms as well. And she is so much shorter than I remember, as if she has shrunk. My head used to reach only her neck; now we stand eye to eye.

  And then I think: No, it is not her, it is me. I have changed.

  “What happened, mother? What happened to me?”

  And she does not say anything, only strokes my hair, my long, long hair, over and over, as if hidden in those strands are those words that elude her, the answers that hover just out of her reach.

  There is something wrong with me. Not with my body, which has seemingly ripened overnight. But with my mind. Days after I come to, I see the doctors conferring over MRI scans, brows furrowed and fingers pointing, then jabbing at the scans. Then, their opinions apparently consolidated (or their patience run out), they stream out of the office. All except for one, who calls Mother and me into the office. He pulls on sagging, pockmarked cheeks, his tired eyes refusing to meet ours as he points to the illuminated scans, my brain, my soul lighted up for all the world to see: here, here, and here. Dark spots, gray spots.

  “What do they mean?” my mother asks.

  “Amnesia,” the doctor says. “During the . . .” His voice fades, his eyes shift. Then: “Your daughter must have hit her head against something. She has lost her memory.”

  “How much of it?”

  “It appears she has lost the memory of the past two years. From what we’ve been able to gather, her last memory was when she was twelve.”

  “She’s lost two years?” my mother says.

  The doctor continues speaking as if I’m not in the room, as if I’m not hearing every word. His beady eyes resist shooting down to his watch. He searches for a silver lining to end this conversation. After awaking days ago, I’ve picked up on a few of the doctors’ tricks. No matter how devastating the news, end on a positive. Leave the patients with something. It makes the getaway that much easier.

  “Well, at least she does not remember.”

  My mother whispers, “The earthquake?”

  He nods, slides away.

  My mother looks at me. Envy seems to cross her face. Then her head swivels to look out the window at the wreckage that lies outside. She does not speak. As if she is still trying to absorb those words, the full weight of their implications. She does not remember. She does not remember. She does not remember.

  I do not remember.

  The truth is explained to me very, very slowly. Over the next few days, little by little, another layer removed, another drop of knowledge crashing down, rippling the wavering surface of my consciousness. So slowly, until I have begun to piece things together even before they tell me. Their words, hushed like a dark secret, draped over me as gently as possible.

  The earthquake struck on January 17, 1995, at 5:46 a.m., with a magnitude of 7.3 on the Shindo scale; the shaking lasted for about twenty seconds. These are just numbers to me. I do not feel the raw violence of them, the devastation that they must represent. I only see the trembling of my mother’s fingers, the quivering of her lips as she utters these numbers, as if she still, so many weeks after the quake, experiences the aftershocks internally, in her bones and muscle and heart and lungs and lips and fingers. The violence suffered by her, by this land, is unimaginable, I think.

  But it is imaginable. When I gaze outside the window of my hospital room during those endless hours of unbroken solitude, at the flattened homes crushed like discarded, folded cardboard boxes; at the concrete slabs of government buildings that rise up like gray tombstones; in those moments, it is imaginable. And where there are gaps in my imagination, they are more than adequately filled in by images that flash from the TV screen. Eventually, I shut off the television and never turn it back on.

  Over the next few days, my mother tells me what I need to know. Bit by bit. Her voice is polished as she speaks, smooth like a fragile vase. She says, “Our home is gone.”

  A day after that, she finally whispers my younger sister’s name. This is how she says it: “Keiko is gone.”

  And this, although I had already suspected it days ago, still jars. I keel over, crumpling the bedsheets in my lap. I stare at the creases in the sheets, incoherent calligraphy, jumbled and jangled. A warm hand on my back, tears falling into the grooves of the wrinkled sheets. Not my tears, not yet; they belong to my mother, her eyes squeezed shut, hand over mouth, her head bobbing up and down, her grief inconsolable. The vase broken, shattered. I shut my eyes.

  The next day: “What of Father?” I ask only because she has not mentioned him, and does not appear to be intending to.

  She
stiffens and turns her back to me as she picks up her handbag. “He is still trying to visit. But it is . . . difficult for him.”

  She sees the confusion on my face, my lack of comprehension.

  Then she remembers. That I don’t.

  “He lives in Hokkaido Prefecture now.”

  “He was transferred?”

  She does not answer.

  “Since when?”

  She is quiet for a moment. Then: “Your father moved to Sapporo about eighteen months ago.”

  “Why?”

  Again, she does not answer. She stands perfectly stationary, as if stillness will make this moment, that question, simply fade away. Only her hands move, trembling like a weeping willow tree in the breeze. I gaze at the pale alabaster skin of her hand, still unbroken by wrinkles. She has always taken care of her hands, meticulously lathering on hand cream late every night in the silence and darkness of the living room as she waited for Father to return from work. Even the skin of her fingers is perfectly smooth. And then my throat catches. Where her wedding band once was, now there is the white of emptiness.

  Her lips tighten, stretch out in grim white lines, like the laundry lines that used to hang outside the bedroom windows. Before she leaves the room, her head nods once to confirm my unspoken suspicion, quickly, as if something has suddenly snapped in her neck.

  At night, when the darkness outside seeps inside the hospital, when the scurry of footsteps in the corridor outside fades to silence, my mind gets itchy, my hands restless. All my life I have written at night, in a secret journal I have never allowed anyone to read. I don’t even allow myself to read it, except once a year, on the last day of December. That is how I always spend New Year’s Eve Day—rereading my entries, reminiscing about the year gone by.

  When I ask my mother if she would buy a new journal for me, her fingers twitch.

  “A journal? That may be hard to come by right now,” she tells me.