「空にみずうみ」、佐伯一麦 、中央公論新社、2015

A Lake in the Sky, Kazumi Saeki, Chuo Koron Shinsha, 2015

This book relates a year in the life of Hayase, a writer living in the Tohoku region, and his wife Yuzuko, a textile artist, as they return to some semblance of normal life after the earthquake and tsunami that hit the region in March 2011. The book covers the period from June 2014 to May 2015, when it was serialized in the Yomiuri Shimbun (in a post-modern touch, Hayase is writing this novel as we read it, lagging behind the reader by about three chapters). Kazumi Saeki, who worked as an electrician and a magazine reporter before writing full-time, has always mined his own life for his books, and it’s fair to say that Hayase and Yuzuko are thinly veiled versions of Saeki and his wife.

水琴窟 (suikinkutsu)

When the book begins, Hayase is lying awake listening to the calls of a Chinese hwamei. He began hearing this bird three years ago, and wonders if it had been accidentally released from its cage (Saeki leaves it up to the reader to make the connection between this timing and the circumstances that could have led to the bird’s escape). The bird’s singing is interrupted by a noise from his verandah similar to that made by a 水琴窟 (suikinkutsu), a buried earthen jar that makes a melodic sound when water drips into it. It sounds like a bass string is being plucked, and Hayase speculates that it comes from nearby broadcasting towers.

He first began hearing this bass sound in early May three years ago, when he and Yuzuko took a friend to the public gardens. This friend, a reporter for a national newspaper, had been walking the coast of Tohoku for the past three weeks. The area with the suikinkutsu was blocked off due to the risk of landslides so they are unable to reach it, but it is just two weeks later that he hears a similar sound from his own house.

The book’s last paragraph is an echo of its beginning, with Hayase back in the public garden listening to the suikinkutsu. He is reminded of his childhood, when he would flee to a nearby river when his parents got mad at him and throw rocks into the river, until he became so interested in the way that the impact of the rock on the surface of the water created a series of concentric circles that he forgot his tears. He likens this to people, who drop into this world at their birth and create ripples that expand slowly outward as they live.

These outwardly expanding circles are reflected in the structure of the book as well, with each chapter starting close to home as Hayase listens to the birds marking the changing seasons or discovers a new beetle in the hallway as he makes his way to his study at dawn. From there, the day gradually opens up to include friends and neighbors, with passing references to Hayase and Yuzuko’s pasts. Hayase helps a neighbor who has lost electricity in half of the house, which sparks his memories of working as an electrician when he was younger. When Yuzuko cooks soybeans to make miso, it brings Hayase back to his youth, when he delivered newspapers to earn money to buy books and records, and his route passed by a miso and soy sauce factory. But it is really the earthquake through which he filters events.

Although the word “earthquake” itself is mentioned only once, and in a completely different context, the twin disasters that hit the Tohoku region in March 2011 are always there in the background of this book. Hayase never mentions them, but simply refers to “that spring three years ago” –March 2011 has become the point from which he dates time now.

The earthquake seems to lie behind every interaction and memory. When Hayase is out drinking with an old friend, they talk about his friend’s move inland three years ago (code for “after the earthquake”) after spending his entire life living by the ocean. He and his wife climb in the mountains every day to build up their strength, “just in case”—he even wears weights around his ankles. Later, Hayase eats chilled tofu he bought from a man who drives around the neighborhood selling fresh tofu. He is just out of the bath, drinking sake and sitting at a low table with clothes drying around him. He feels he has gone back to a time with no air conditioners, computers or mobile phones. Just as he seems to be relaxing (and the reader with him), Hayase remembers that the tofu maker had begun selling from his truck, rather than his store, in that summer three years ago.

Lying in bed on a summer night, listening to the cicadas, Hayase thinks of a poem written about waking at dawn to the sound of cicadas, written in 1941. Hayase wonders if the sound of cicadas—usually not noteworthy—had special significance during wartime, when people would have been thankful for the everyday. This gratitude for normality is reflected in this book, which relates how Yuzuko made miso over several pages with enough detail that it could easily be used as a recipe, as well as how they dealt with a snake in the backyard and identified the beetle lopping off tree branches. There is even an entire chapter on the process of selecting a new desk for Hayase, and another on replacing their tatami.

The チョッキリ(chokkiri; there is no direct English equivalent that I could find, but they are similar to the Japanese weevil) that turned out to be culprit behind the branches lopped off in the woods. Source: parkinsect.exblog.jp

At one point, Hayase had suffered from depression. All of his senses were focused inward. Once he pulled out of this, he was able to see the scenery around him, and could hear again too. And once he was aware of the sights and sounds surrounding him, he knew he would be ok. I got the sense that Hayase and Yuzuko’s focus on the birds, trees and insects around them was not entirely due to their love of nature, but is also an effort to find comfort and reassurance in the sheer energy of the natural life around them, whether it’s the wasp nest under construction on their verandah or the snake shedding his skin in their yard. Their building manager comments that no matter how many times he sweeps away spider webs in the passages, they’re always back the next day. He says that you just can’t beat nature. This must be both comforting and frightening to someone who has lived through the Tohoku earthquake.

Throughout this novel, Hayase listens to Henryk Górecki’s Symphony No. 3, also known as the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. I read this as an expression, however indirect, of Hayase/Saeki’s grief over everything that was lost in the earthquake. The symphony is based on a series of traditional melodies, of which one—the lament of a mother mourning a son killed in war—has the refrain “where has he gone, my dear young son?” Another is based on the words, written on the walls of her prison cell, of a woman killed in 1944 by the German Gestapo, asking her mother not to mourn. The third melody is based on a 15th century Polish folk song, in which Mary speaks to her son dying on the cross. The drawn-out voice of the string players layered with the quiet notes of the piano reminds Hayase of the bass note of the suikinkutsu and ripples on the water spreading outward.

After the earthquake, Hayase began counting the days using a lunar calendar, so he does not mark the fourth anniversary of the earthquake on March 11, but on an evening five days after the spring equinox, when the moon is the same as on that night four years ago. He listens to a new recording of Górecki’s Symphony No. 3, and recalls a poem written by Hiroshi Osada, a poet from the Tohoku region:

The spring equinox is near

when you wake up in the morning,

look up at the sky,

and greet a pale blue, clear morning,

as if the sky were a lake in the heavens.

The dead nestled close to our hearts

Return without a sound.

In a New York Times editorial published just four days after the earthquake (which you can read here), Saeki wrote, “Will I ever again experience such peace?” This book seems to be his attempt to answer this question. Although it succeeds in capturing the moments of peace he has found since then, he seems all too aware of the impermanence and fragility of the life he has made.

Note: Hayase writes about visiting one of his favorite bookstores, and from his description (a bookstore housed in a building from the Meiji era with a white noren, home to globes, professional-grade microscopes, moss specimens, turtles and cats), it must be Miho Tanaka’s Mushi Bunko, which I wrote about here. Although I’d like to think there are many bookstores like this in Japan, it seems unlikely…