The City Waiting to Die (A Short Story)
Tokyo taken from the Skytree Tower (2013)
The other day, I was listening to a song called, "The Air You Breathe In" by @zipporah. She wrote it "not long after the earthquake and subsequent tsunami that flooded Japan in early 2011." While listening to her song, it reminded me of the story I wrote several days after the quake. I had written it for an anthology of stories and poems that was to be sold to help aid the survivors of the earthquake. It contained contributions from 16 global writers and poets.
Unfortunately, the anthology is no longer in print. If anyone is interested in purchasing a copy, just click this link for a used copy of Rainbow Lights Ablaze. My story from it is reprinted below:
“The City Waiting to Die”
By Kenneth Wayne
Did we experience the quake of March eleventh? Yes and no. My family lives in Tokyo, my wife and I were home in the afternoon as the first big jolt hit at 2:47, and we were here during the dozens of aftershocks that followed. Luckily, along with the vast majority of homes in Tokyo, we suffered little physical damage. The worst for us was the cracking of several crystal glasses that fell over in our hutch. Our home didn’t collapse nor was it washed away by a 45-foot-high wave. In fact, our neighborhood has yet to experience a rolling blackout since the convoluted boundaries of our district must have made it too confusing for Tokyo Electric to include us in one of the sectors slated for short outages. The most trouble we have suffered are occasional shortages of food staples, mostly due to hoarding, and the growing fear of radiation poisoning from the nuclear power plant in Fukushima that was damaged by the quake and tsunami.
No, we didn’t suffer the broad stroke of destruction unleashed in Fukushima, Iwate and Miyagi. We once again dodged a cruel bullet shot through the gun of nature even though we live in the city that volcanologist Bill McGuire has stated is “waiting to die.”(1) We didn’t dodge it by much, though. If the epicenter had been a mere hundred kilometers or so farther south, the result would have been very different. Our son would have had it much worse than walking for hours from his workplace through Tokyo until he finally reached a train line that was operating. Our daughter would have suffered much more than the discomfort of waiting several hours in a subway station.
Even so, within seconds of the initial tremors from the magnitude five or low six jolt we received, I left my cubbyhole of an office, bolted up the stairs to the second floor while shouting to my wife to follow me outside to the field behind our house. After I slid open the barrier-free door at the top of the stairs, I found her sitting on the sofa in our living room; waiting for the TV to report the strength of the quake.
“Let’s get the hell out of here!” I yelled.
“It’s safer inside,” she replied as the light fixtures swayed violently. Being claustrophobic I seek open spaces, so I grabbed one of her arms, pulled her to her feet, but she only got as far as the dining-room hutch and started putting her weight against the glass doors to keep them from opening and dashing our dishes against the hardwood floor. I know our recently built house is far safer than confronting falling objects outside, but our dog’s incessant barking and the image of the wide-open space provided by the field of cabbage behind us seemed to be beckoning me.
“Com’on, let’s go. Who gives a shit about the dishes?” I said as forcefully as I could.
“This house isn’t going to collapse! I don’t want to come back to a floor covered in glass.”
“That damn dog keeps barking,” I muttered as I headed down the stairs. I staggered down the short hallway to the front door as the shaking increased, hoping my wife was close behind, grabbed a coat from the clothes tree, directed my feet into a pair of loafers and opened the door to the outside that appeared to be swaying with the ongoing tremors. As I stumbled in the direction of our barking Japanese Spitz, standing by her doghouse under the rattling aluminum carport, I felt a little queasy either from the quake or from a tinge of guilt for leaving my wife inside. I unleashed our dog from her line and grabbed her walking leash hanging on a nearby hook. Having been born and raised in Japan, my wife had lived through more quakes than I since I only started living in this quake-prone land as an adult. Images of me jumping out of our futon to run outside while my wife stayed under the covers went through my mind as I led our dog to the field out back.
After taking a couple of steps, the front door of the house across the street opened and out ran the young wife with her two children to join me and our dog. My wife, however, remained in our house. My neighbor was shaking with fear and kept saying over and over that she was frightened.
Once we got to the field, I gave the dog’s leash to her son and held her baby while she tried to zip up her jacket. Her hands were shaking so much that I considered helping her, but her baby was not pleased to be in my arms, so I started to bounce it to distract it from reaching for mama. As I did so, the ground under us swayed back and forth and the windows of a nearby apartment building rattled loudly. While she struggled with the zipper, I watched my house ride the waves of tremors with ease. Once she got her coat in order, I handed the squirming baby to her and noticed how happy her kindergarten-aged son looked standing between her and my dog whose leash he controlled. No doubt the new found responsibility made him nonplussed about the instability of the soft soil on which we were balancing our bodies like skateboarders. It may have been shock but he just smiled and said nothing during the couple of minutes we stood among the recently planted cabbage seedlings.
“I’ve never been in such a large one,” my neighbor said as the tremors decreased.
“I can’t believe my wife stayed inside. It’s much safer out here.”
“Your house is new,” she replied as though it explained everything. Actually, her comment made me realize how much of a coward I was to abandon my wife. As I went back inside, I was surprised that almost nothing had moved except a couple of light boxes had fallen from a shelf in a storage room close to the foyer.
“Why didn’t you go outside?” I asked my wife while I got the vacuum cleaner out to suck up a few pieces of broken crystal inside the hutch she felt essential to protect.
“I’m frightened to be hit by a falling roof tile or something.”
“The only house with tiles is Ikeda’s, but his roof doesn’t face the path to the field.”
Within minutes, my wife’s cell phone started buzzing an early earthquake warning. This didn’t go off with the initial quake, but it was working now. We were sure this meant a much larger one was about ready to hit, so my wife humored me and came outside. As we opened our door, the woman across the street opened hers as well and joined us. Her son started petting our dog, so I handed him the leash again and he stood grinning. Soon, we were joined by an elderly woman who lives two houses down from us.
“My house is too old,” she said. “Once I saw you, I decided it was best to go outside. I’ve lived in Tokyo my whole life and never experienced a quake like this.” After waiting a couple of minutes, we decided it was a false alarm so went back inside. As the hours went by, the alarm system sometimes sounded and sometimes didn’t as we experienced less and less intense aftershocks. After the first false alarm, we no longer bothered to go outside.
Around eight, our daughter returned and told us she was unable to contact us by cell phone since she couldn’t get a good connection in the subway station where her train waited for several hours. Shortly after the quake hit, our son sent a message that he was fine, but we heard no more from him until he returned after midnight and explained that he had walked for hours across much of Tokyo since the trains had stopped and the roads were jammed with traffic.
We were relieved to be reunited, but I had difficulty sleeping that night since the realization that I was a coward gnawed inside. The horror that was revealed over the TV the following day, though, quickly dissipated my petty concerns with ego. Video footage of villages being washed away, of towns twisted and piled with debris as though being scenes from some epic conflagration between civilizations hell bent to destroy each other, of people standing in horror as they watched their homes and livelihoods vanish intoxicated me with regret and sadness for the misery of the tens of thousands suffering in the aftermath of the fourth largest quake in the past 100 years. My cowardice paled in significance.
Several days later I watched a reporter on TV question an old man standing alongside the ruins of his home. He periodically stopped talking with the reporter to call out to his dead wife buried in the rubble. As I watched, I became aware at how closely his situation paralleled my own. He had tried to pull her outside with him, but she chose to stay in the house to gather together some possessions. He just made it outside seconds before the house collapsed. No doubt that old man will spend the rest of his life blaming himself for not succeeding in coaxing his wife outside. That “coward” had saved himself to spend his remaining days consumed with guilt for not saving a wife who considered possessions more important than her personal safety. Another coward a couple hundred kilometers to the south has been lucky to dodge his guilt for now in a city waiting to die.
(1) "The City Waiting to Die" is the name of a chapter on Tokyo in McGuire's 2003 book, A Guide to the End of the World: Everything You Never Wanted to Know (Oxford University Press, ISBN 9780192804525, p. 120).
Copyright (©) by Kenneth Wayne
Thank you for sharing this absolutely riveting account of that day. I’m honored to know that my song sparked a memory for you — that my melancholic conveyance of a distant reaction — across an ocean and worlds away — somehow matters. 🙏🏼 You’re a wonderful writer.
Songs, poems and literature do matter: words frozen in time. By the way, thanks.