Ryoko Sekiguchi 関口涼子. Excerpts from Ce n’est pas un hazard. © P.OL, 2011.


 
I call continuously for half an hour without any luck. No one picks up at my brother’s either. I begin to worry. I write them a collective email. I finally realize that if no one picks up, it’s not because my mother is away from her cell phone but because the line is inundated.

A call. I pick up. A French friend. “I’m in front of the T.V.,” he says to me, “the tsunamis are impressive...” Then, I lose my temper. I can’t help it; abruptly, I interrupt him: “Impressive or not, I don’t give a damn! For us, it is not an image, it’s a reality that falls on our heads!” However, at the moment when I say this, in the distance, the tsunami cannot be for me anything other than an image. The ordinariness of these images. But in this instant, I don’t grasp the seriousness of the situation.

Without a doubt the impossibility of reaching my family made me angry. Maybe I also exaggerated a little because I was speaking to a foreigner. He must not have had much experience of catastrophes. The temptation of taking the high ground. Yet, there is nothing to be proud of. The information that I had in that instant recalled the catastrophes of the past. Serious, certainly; but we’ve known some serious ones, too.

Three hours later, I finally reached my mother on the phone. She is doing well, but has no news of my father. A call from a cell phone company agent who offers me a “competitive deal.” In general, I am quite patient with this type of call. I imagine myself in the place of some- one who must do that work. But this time, it was impossible; I didn’t have the mental space for it. I told this to the woman on the other end of the line, who responded: “Okay, I’ve noted it.”

“It’s noted.” What is noted?

Okai, a friend from Japan, worries about nuclear plants; I read his commentary on a website and spent some time consulting specialized pages. Until then, no one around me had considered this risk because so many were captivated by the image of the tsunami.

When I think about it, on this first day, all the way through until late afternoon, most Japanese thought that they were dealing with a natural catastrophe like those that they had already experienced, even if the power of the tsunami was incomparable.

However, it is never the same thing. Even if one has survived others, every catastrophe is without precedent until the moment in which one experiences it. And this time, I worry this was more real than ever.

Returning home, I watch the NHK channel on repeat on my computer; it’s a news channel par excellence for this type of situation. It is in this way that I begin to realize the enormity of the situation.

In the evening, I invite my friends over to my place. It’s better to be many than for each to be alone in his or her corner, imagining the worst. The further one is, the more one’s imagination gets carried away.

There are seven of us glued to the NHK website.

Among my friends, some were still not able to reach their families. Each time that the television announced a new aftershock, the igniting of a fire, one of them picks up the phone in vain.

It is then that I am seized by a strange sensation: I had already lived this.

I remember: my brother and I stayed up until three or four o’clock in the morning watching the city of Kobe burn, ravished by flames as if after a bombing. I remember myself, I was a middle schooler, when a district of the island of Miyake was 70% destroyed by lava. I also remember an earthquake in the very region that was affected today.

So many images return to me, of earthquakes and typhoons, that I can no longer distinguish between them. The images superimpose themselves one on top of the other. And all at once they are and are not images. As soon as one is affected, the image is not an image, but a reality; but when one is not directly affected, the image keeps in some form its status as an image, and it is these image-realities that affront us each time Japan is victim to a catastrophe, and which superimposes themselves before our eyes as we rest riveted before the T.V.

But at a distance, far from the drama, here in Paris, I suddenly feel surrounded by my Japanese friends who are assembled in my small apartment like small animals looking to take shelter.

It suddenly strikes me that there are people who never know this, who have never been confronted with such a situation in their lives, like the French, who stand upright on solid ground—it is an incredible good fortune.

Even us, in this anguish, we cannot help but to think that we are, us too, also well-sheltered Parisians.


 
March 12

At three o’clock in the morning, my father finally returned home. My parents’ house is located in Kanagawa, west of Tokyo, too far to walk home like certain Tokyoites did after the earthquake surprised them at work.

Impossible, clearly, to find a train or a taxi. No room either on the regional bus, the line was interminable. My father had to walk to the Tokyo train station to take the Shinkansen, the Japanese high-speed train, that had resumed service by evening and which dropped him off due west, in Odawara, eighty kilometers from Tokyo. From there, he finally was able to find a taxi and retrace the twenty-five kilometers to his house.

Undoubtedly, he could have spent the night in Odawara but, worried about my mother, he wanted to return home at all costs.

On the 61 Bus, there is a mother and her two children beside me—a boy and a girl. They take turns screaming about where they would like to spend their summer holidays. “Me, I want to go to Brazil!”; “Me, Mexico!” It’s like a list of countries learned at school. At one point, the boy says: “I would gladly go to Japan—oh, actually no, that’ll be for later.”

While walking, I become aware that I am indeed on firm soil.

It is this afternoon when I begin to write. On March 11th, I had not yet sat down to write. I don’t know what triggered it. Undoubtedly, among other things, it is because I thought about a lecture that I had to prepare for the following Tuesday. I knew that I couldn’t read a text as if nothing had happened.


 
March 13

Exhausted, the Japanese poet Tatsuhiko Ishii arrives in Paris.

He came to make several talks and to participate in a round table, in which I will also be a part, on March 15. His flight was not canceled, but since the airport shuttle didn’t seem to be working anymore, until the last minute we thought he could not come.

Ishii taught me the etymology of the word “disaster,” in Italian “disastro,” which means “under an inauspicious star.”

An article in a French daily newspaper asks how the Japanese can continue to live on an island that is subjected to such extreme catastrophes. I would really like to know if the journalist would have dared to say something similar to the inhabitants of regions with harsh climates, or of certain African countries, or Iran, where there are also lots of earthquakes.

...

They tell me that people from Kyoto do not feel affected. Seen from here, in Paris, it seems that all of Japan trembled. It is really not the case. In the West, people must figure they have already gotten their fair share with the earthquake of Hanshin-Awaji in 1995. One must also feel just as removed from, not to mention critical of, the portrayal of events by the Japanese media in the West. They are right: it is as if all of Japan revolves around Tokyo. Even if the capital was not directly impacted, it is enough that it was a little affected—the systematic rationing of electricity, owing to the problems at the power plant in Fukushima—for the media to run wild. When other regions are affected, there is no common measure. On March 30th, I receive an email from a friend who is a breeder in Okayama. He congratulates himself for having left Tokyo twenty-seven years beforehand in order to settle in the countryside. The egotistic attitude of the media was unbearable to him.

...

As long as this catastrophe does not tarnish Tokyo’s image. Or perhaps it is already too late and the city is already irreversibly sullied?

Japanese cuisine contains a lot of algae. They’re excellent for one’s health because they are rich in iodine. Well that is why people buy it in astronomical quantities, believing that they are protecting them- selves against radiation. It’s a bad joke.

Very quickly, we learn that once the sea is polluted, algae not only retain radioactive particles, they actually condense them.

The reading and round table in the amphitheater of the Paris VII University. There’s a lot of people. In general, this type of event doesn’t attract many young people. Today, there seems to be a significant number of students. A strange atmosphere pervades the room. The audience has come to listen to poetry, but we who read have a hard time pretending as if nothing happened.

Before beginning to read, Ishii explains in a few words that he had chosen these texts well before the earthquake, entirely by coincidence.

It struck me, too, to be bothered by this coincidence. Last year, we created a sonic piece with Eddie Ladoire, a ceramicist and composer, that we had played on tour. I was interested in the great Molasses Flood in Boston on January 15, 1919, that killed 21 and injured 150. A distillery tank—15 meters high, 27-meter diameter, which could contain up to 8,700,000 liters of molasses—collapsed.

The incongruity of the catastrophe had intrigued me, but I had also wanted to reflect as a way of imagining the eve of such a catastrophe.

As for the writers and artists who are wrought by this issue, it is not surprising that their creations, their thoughts, immediately precede or coincide with a catastrophe.

As it turns out, Eddie put this musical piece, “The Day Before”, up online on March 10, 2011. I posted it on FaceBook on the same day. On exactly that day. These things happen. What matters is not to let oneself be surprised by chance; this type of coincidence has nothing, in and of itself, to tell us.

The important thing, when one asks oneself about “what is possible after a catastrophe,” a question asked many times by the world, is to be in the state of mind that one also has on the eve of other catastrophes to come. Thus, it is equally necessary to interrogate oneself about what one can write before a catastrophe, or between two catastrophes, which is the permanent state in which we live.

Ishii says that he cannot write a Tanka about an earthquake. This makes me understand one thing: one can perhaps writes about catastrophes—but afterwards. To write a poem after, it is probably possible. Not during. I would be incapable of writing a poem during.

I also understand it too; what I am in the midst of writing is not literature.

It’s a “report.”

I draw up a report, the most sincere possible

Before images of the earthquake and the tsunami, what returned to me in memories are literary souvenirs as well as images from the television. A passage from The Makioka Sisters by Tanizaki, which describes the great flood of Hanshin in 1938. Also, the image of a character walking on the edge of train tracks; I couldn’t immediately find in which text it originated. A friend reminded me that it was from a scene in Morio Kita’s The House of Nire, which mentions in one instance the great earthquake that hit Tokyo region in 1923. The character, who found himself in Hakoné, hundreds of kilometers from there, returns to Tokyo on foot. Cécile Sakai also reminds me about one of Tanizaki’s short stories in which a character is haunted by the image of a big earthquake in a dream-like world.

During the round table and the dinner that follows, there is a palpable unease. Each person keeps an eye on his or her cellphone “just in case” there is news. A tremor in Shizuoka, 6 on the Richter Scale. It’s closest to the area where my parents live. I try to reach them without any success. Panic.

Tatsuhiko Ishii retorts to the ones who are worried in a joking tone: “If the emperor leaves Tokyo, it will be the end of us.”

The emperor like the Geiger counter.

A few hours later, I finally succeed in reaching them. They are incredibly calm. There is only me, in my distance, who shows herself to be so fragile when they are the ones in the middle of the event.

Strangely, I find myself overwhelmed by the same sensation that preceded my grandfather’s death. He was the dearest person in the world to me. He was very sick and we knew that the end was near. Living in Paris, I asked myself when I should leave for Japan in order to arrive “in time,” but in a way, I dreaded returning, as if doing so risked speeding up his death. It was a kind of superstition, but that’s the way it goes; I waited in Paris, living my everyday, in anguish.

It was the sensation of living the day before without wanting to admit it to myself.

One would like that it not happen, but waiting is so unbearable that one reaches the point where one almost wishes that something would happen, during which one closes.