Scenes of a Forgotten Landscape
Jorel Chan
If there are to be any more surprises at the world’s state of affairs, they should not be for me to bear.
Much less so for Tomi-chan, the beloved grandmother who would come by everyday, ever since I arrived in this quaint town by the Pacific coast—now just an aggregate emptiness, laboriously anxious before each imminent dawn.
~
Squinting behind the half-tilted venetian blinds of this community house, its white ceramic floors arranged to catch the nascent light, I awoke to the distant sounds of a voiceless roar. In my mind a vague sense of foreboding formed, or perhaps, merely a lingering sentiment of what this place had borne witness to only three years ago.
Making my way downstairs, past the familiar wheel-barrow of fresh vegetables—onions, tomatoes, chives usually—delivered to my doorstep without fail every morning, I hurried along the neatly cleared gravel of what remained of these rural roads, assiduously lined by aged wooden townhouses. I arrived at a clearing that led to the conglomerate of harvest fields, only to behold one solitary figure from which the roar emanated, the clarity of its mechanised tenor all too visceral in our closeness. Up till this day, this otherwise routine memory of frail Tomi-chan tending to her fields so early in the morning never ceased to amaze me.
Focused on her labour, she was understandably oblivious to my arrival, her small two hands pushing along the weed machine that was twice her size and yet just half her presence. I stood and waited as Tomi-chan’s eyes eventually met mine, and her movements slowed to a halt. The quietening of the automaton gave way to a wide grin, only her crow’s feet left visible where her stoic eyes lay. She was always happy, it seemed, whenever I came around, and that made me glad; the truth of this sentiment was honestly inconsequential. By the nature of our mere acquaintance, I knew it was not my place to inquire into the subtleties in her smile.
I thanked her for the vegetables. She asked me how I was, and she asked again. She forgets more now, but not too often: a miracle considering she has lived through the aftermath of two Great Wars. Yet hardly surprising at all, considering the daily sights of the town’s orphans running around everywhere, like the seeds of harvest carelessly scattered.
We spoke until my vocabulary in her native tongue ran dry, after which we walked the rest of the way back, mutual comprehension acknowledged by tacit nods and gestured silence. The grounds are far better now than three years ago, she says; car debris has been cleared, most of the street lamps come on at night again, and the postal service finally works. “Be sure to send me letters when you leave!”—a kindly reminder for both of us, regarding the nature of my being here: a passing surveyor of their unadulterated lives, unfolding each day from abandonment to abandonment. I am certain she has since learnt not to hold things too closely, much less the contingency of my presence. As a visitor to these places I was more apparition than messiah, my grief not substitutionary, only vicarious. What is the lightness of my duty before the full weight of hers? Impalpable, impalpable, impalpable.
Her house stood just ahead. By now the strident sun had come into view. The only shuttle bus service into this town (from the last undestroyed train station on the Joban line) had just made its way ahead of us on its first morning trip; their own train station, now in utter disrepair, had stood no chance back then against the sudden rising tides. Directly across, down-slope from the decaying ticketing counter, Tomi-chan’s son’s grocery store had been completely submerged, but at least that kept their family house right behind sufficiently intact. Businesses are easier to fix than families, after all. From the outside, the newly-refurbished grocery store looked more than ready for its customers, though now consisting only of neighbours and, just for the autumn, this one additional humanitarian photographer.
In true Japanese fashion, humanitarian reconstruction was well underway, and undeniably efficient. Yet, I felt as though in place of the prior chaos, a quiet anachronism, unmoved and unfazed by the earth spinning restlessly on, was all that was left holding this town together, the shared loss of its residents like a dead knot of a rope keeping their lives from fraying apart. The destruction of critical transport infrastructure—that lay on the already far-off rural outskirts, no less—only exacerbated its irrelevance to the outside world. Life was slow here, and the people unbelievably kind. Everything was kept in place by everyone’s honest labour, striving towards the singular hope of better days. All they wanted was to sate their yearning for normalcy: to find work again, to send their children to school again, altogether to be allowed to be reborn—if such reiteration of lapsed life could ever be regained.
Natsukashii mirai he, vaguely, ‘towards a nostalgic future’. A meaningful contradiction, spray-painted on an abandoned container vessel far out from the town, near the colossal seawall erected along the entire coastline after the disaster.
Noticing my careless silence, Tomi-chan turned back long enough to catch my attention, beckoning me to follow her into her house. She continued through the freshly painted corridor into a windowless room; straight ahead stood a tower of drawers, rising with an ancient dignity before her. Undaunted, she pulled out one drawer just slightly below her chest, and raised her calloused hands to unfurl a perfectly kept kimono, revealing traditional patterns of the manifold waves and exquisite lines on sombre fabric, still as distinct and unfaded as it must have been decades ago. She vouchsafed it to me, this fabric holding her remembrances, because she knew I would not have to stay to struggle with the rest in this half-built, half-worn universe, treading with trepidation towards an unformed future. I did not belong to her world, so there was a safety in my inheriting the warmth of her belongings. To at least have a fragment of herself escape this trying destiny, this resort was a fugitive vision, embalmed by her own hands with the last slivers of hope.
~
I bade farewell to her, not for the last time, and took my bicycle from the community house and hurried towards the seawall. The sky was segueing into deeper shades of blue. Pedalling past the unkempt rows of wildflowers and vast strawberry fields, I reached the sandy ground where the phalanx of heavy machinery rested; before me rose the full height of the colossal seawall. I climbed the stairway leading to the top, every step bringing me closer to the heartless beating of the waves, wordless, my words subsumed within the roaring voice of unyielding time.
~
Jorel Chan is a Singaporean who has read philosophy, politics and economics in the UK and will be pursuing his masters in international relations in Japan this spring. He is also a humanitarian photographer whose photo-book regarding the refugee crisis in Fukushima will be published this coming year. He attempts to write on the side and has providentially been published in various literary magazines across UK and Singapore. For possible humanitarian, photographic or literary project collaborations, please feel free to contact him at jorel.chan@gmail.com.
