Horses, Horses, in the End the Light Remains Pure

A Tale That Begins with Fukushima

Hideo Furukawa, Doug Slaymaker, Akiko Takenaka

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780231542050
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Littérature générale

"As we passed from the city center into the Fukushima suburbs I surveyed the landscape for surgical face masks. I wanted to see in what ratios people were wearing such masks. I was trying to determine, consciously and unconsciously, what people do in response. So, among people walking along the roadway, and people on motorbikes, I saw no one with masks. Even among the official crossing guards outfitted with yellow flags and banners, none. All showed bright and calm. What was I hoping for exactly? The guilty conscience again. But then it was time for school to start. We began to see groups of kids on their way to school. They were wearing masks."

Horses, Horses, in the End the Light Remains Pure is a multifaceted literary response to the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown that devastated northeast Japan on March 11, 2011. The novel is narrated by Hideo Furukawa, who travels back to his childhood home near Fukushima after 3/11 to reconnect with a place that is now doubly alien. His ruminations conjure the region's storied past, particularly its thousand-year history of horses, humans, and the struggle with a rugged terrain. Standing in the morning light, these horses also tell their stories, heightening the sense of liberation, chaos, and loss that accompanies Furukawa's rich recollections. A fusion of fiction, history, and memoir, this book plays with form and feeling in ways reminiscent of Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory and W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn yet draws its own, unforgettable portrait of personal and cultural dislocation.

THERE’S this scene:

An older brother questions his younger brother. He wants to know,

—What if there were this extraterrestrial, and the extraterrestrial is riding in a UFO, and this UFO is outfitted with a stereo system; what kind of music would you have the extraterrestrial play? Flying through the air, there, what would you want him to listen to?

The younger brother cannot answer, so he changes the question.

—What if there were this extraterrestrial, and they are in their UFO, and you could pick just one Beatles song for them to listen to, what would you pick?

Younger brother answers immediately: “Strawberry Fields Forever”; the answer suggests no other possibility.

“Strawberry Fields”: the name of an orphanage that really existed in Liverpool, the harbor town that looks out on the Irish Sea. An orphans’ song. A song of the orphans maybe, certainly for the orphans.

An open atlas brought the scene to mind. The scene calls up many related emotions. Not a map of England. It had nothing to do with England, or even Europe, nor North America. It is a 1:140,000 scale map of a place labeled “Nihonmatsu.” The city of Nihonmatsu occupies the center. But I wasn’t looking at the center of the map but up to the north and east. In the upper right-hand corner of the open page, along Route 114, you can find the “UFO Friendship Center.” Everyone who lives there calls Route 114 the “Tomioka Highway.” There is a “UFO Road” close to the UFO Friendship Center, complete with statues of extraterrestrials, according to the explanation in red letters. I read the whole thing. I read the whole thing, my gaze stopping on the place name and the explanation. That’s what called up this scene. The scene of the two brothers. Right then, seemed like the most natural thing in the world, I knew I had to go there. The next instant, I rejected that decision. What was I hoping for? What I hoped for in that instant was for the statues of the extraterrestrials to be toppled, to be crushed, reduced to shards scattered and broken across the landscape. Wanted them pulverized rather than not pulverized. I closed the atlas.

Closed it with a sharp slap.

Or maybe a softer rustle like the flapping of a great bird’s wings.

The UFO Friendship Center might be within the Fukushima city limits, or maybe it was Kawamata City, or maybe some other city. I didn’t double-check. Anyhow, north of Nihonmatsu, then east.

East, then north. I can’t forget that original scene. I am unable to forget it. Two brothers. The younger brother responds to the elder without hesitation. “Strawberry Fields Forever.” Once the song starts in your head, it won’t stop. I hear it now. I may be hearing it forever. “Forever.” It’s a scene from a novel. And I’m the author of the novel.

“North” plus “east” adds up to Tohoku, as in the prefectures of northeast Japan, which is what “Tohoku” means.

There’s the voice again. It overlaps with the song. A clear command: “Go there.”

Eyes must be closeable. It’s a characteristic of sight. It’s what fundamentally sets it apart from hearing. Eardrums have no lids. But retinas are outfitted with eyelids. So it should be easy; you’d think, but I can’t do it. I keep staring at the television; now the surface of my eyeballs is totally dried out. More like the dam has burst, actually. Teardrops fall. They are dripping like rain. How many times can it occur in an hour? Frequency can’t be ascertained. “One hour,” the unit of measurement disappears. Not twenty-four of them in a day. Commercials have disappeared from the TV. Delimiters disappeared. Things that cannot happen in the mere span of one day are happening, expanding—expanding, proliferating, on and on. The only phrase I can think of that captures the experience: “time is extinguished.” To phrase it more concretely, consciousness of the date on the calendar, the day of the week, has collapsed. I think I can put a name to it: “Spirited away.” Abducted by spirits. When a person is spirited away, seven days are experienced as half a year; three months feel like a matter of seconds. Time can’t be accounted for, it’s impossible to measure. I wrote about being “spirited away” in a novel. You know which novel, that novel.

Here’s another scene. It’s also related to a Beatles song.

The younger brother is asking the older: “What song is it, the one where the gull cries. You know, the one where you hear the seabirds in the intro, which one is that?” Older brother has an answer: “Tomorrow Never Knows.” They used a tape loop so that the psychedelic song had an effect that sounded like seagulls. Both of them know about this, about these seagulls—known as “sea cats,” actually—that sound like mewing cats, with their breeding ground up on the coast of Sanriku. They know all about it. And both of them are remembering the time they set off for the harbor town of Miyako up in Iwate Prefecture. Who knows why, but the younger brother remembers only the fierce birds, the kites, that gathered there. “In Miyako,” he starts to say to the older brother, but older brother cuts him off, “Nope, we also saw the gull-like birds they call sea cats.”

They went straight through Miyako.

On one of the roads taking them through to the next prefecture.

Which took them into the six northern provinces, to Tohoku.

I passed through there too. Just like the brothers, I saw Miyako, and also traveled up north past the Sanriku coast, and stayed one night in some budget hotel, just to be able to describe that scene. That scene with the two brothers. I still remember all those birds, black kites, nothing if not fierce. Like they owned the town. But I am staring at the TV, watching the news, and that Miyako is not to be seen. The town has disappeared. The elevated roadway there is probably Route 45. I have a vague memory of it being laid out like that. Everyone up there called Route 45 “the Beach Road.” I wonder if there is anything else recognizable. I open the atlas again. I run my eyes down the coastline. I wonder if the line on the map is still true to the actual coastline. Impossible. Wondering about things in Jōdogahama? Geez, makes me want to rain curses on such a place name: Jōdo? As in “the Pure Land”? Where’s the heaven in that?

Such a place now seems far away.

Infinitely far, I’m thinking now. I am remembering the scene but my brain won’t call up the melody for “Tomorrow Never Knows.” It continues, “Forever,” on repeat. “Strawberry Fields” brings to mind the sea breeze. I remember the Miyako harbor and the Hei River. This all feels wrong.

I close the atlas with my thumb between the pages.

It closes with just a whimper of a sound. Iwate Prefecture, Miyagi Prefecture to the south of that, south of that, Fukushima Prefecture. Even without the map everyone knows the shore continues, on and on. I can’t get the two brothers out of my mind. On and on, I can’t. I gave animal names to the two of them. The novelist who gave them those names was, well, me. They have inu—dog—in their last names, and their first names? One is ushi—cow—and the other is hitsuji—sheep.

I experienced one day as though it was a week. Or three days that felt like a month. This is how “spirited-away time” works. I was not the only one that lost all sense of days of the week, I was not the only one for whom the dates of the calendar disappeared. (Everyone I was talking with seemed to be experiencing the same thing.) Meantime, everyone living outside the places deemed a “disaster zone” was able to escape the “spirited-away time”; I was one of those people. At the end of the ongoing and repeated announcements about the situation that “exceeds all expectations,” we entered a phase more of stagnation than progress. Not a particularly exciting conclusion. At that point I canceled two projects. Given that I am a novelist, my work is writing novels. One project was a monthly serialization, the other was an installment of a serialized novel that had already been commissioned and for which the publication schedule had already been planned months into the future.

But the answer was clear. No way I could write.

Right before beginning this manuscript, it came to me. I had not taken a break from writing for as long as I can remember; never gave it a thought. There has not been a day in which I did not write, for many years now. I have no concept of a day off. Stop and think about it: I have been averaging three novels a year for a long time. And even in the periods when, you might point out, I only produced one volume, that volume was five or six times as long as any normal novel. Given the sheer size of the thing it was impossible to simply refer to it as a “long novel.” I called it a “mega-novel.”

But why did I continue writing like this? An internal necessity, drive, compulsion. Relentless.

That’s just how it was. No other way to express it. I mean, I had just canceled two projects. Fiction, or anything that requires planning and then writing, was out of the question. I couldn’t write. I couldn’t see my way to writing. OK, not exactly unable to write. I experimented with some short things. Even while locked away in the midst of the “spirited-away time,” if requests came in, I would write pieces for magazines and newspapers. As long as I could believe my words might have some direct impact I would give it all I had and pull out what I was thinking. I never thought that literature is useless. No doubts about that. The problems came with genre. If prose was requested, then what kind of prose? In what style? For what imagined readership? All these years I feel like I have been writing novels for anybody, everybody. No imagined reader in mind. That approach was no longer going to work.

I began writing this essay on April 11, 2011. I was about ten pages in when there was an aftershock off the coast of Fukushima. Just over magnitude six.

Every time there was a strong aftershock, I would revise.

The aftershocks left no options. A clear voice: “Revise completely and thoroughly.”

Same voice as that earlier voice that said: “Go there.” So I followed the voice, waited for some things to fall into place, and started writing this. When the flow of things gets stopped up, sometimes you have to devise a way through. So I fashioned one. A month had passed from March 11, 2011; I started thinking. Having written down the dates I started thinking. I first wrote dates according to the Western calendar. The Western calendar seemed the most normal way of starting. Maybe because the damage was global in scope. The international support was encouraging (to all of us Japanese, whether inside or outside the damaged area). But I had written a novel that never once referenced the Western calendar. I had written this mega-novel that only used the imperial reign years to mark dates. It’s that one, that mega-novel. Even though it looked like a historical novel, I only used the imperial reign years. The publication date of the novel was recorded with the reign name: Heisei 20. The reason will be obvious: the first year of the Meiji era inaugurated a new system of assigning one reign name per emperor. In order to keep up a continual reference to the emperor system, I avoided using the Western calendar in the tale. At that time the voice commanded complete expulsion. Now, that doesn’t mean 100 percent disregard for the Christian calendar, of course. I talked about the Bible in that novel; from the beginning I referenced Christ’s family tree, and I kept it up obsessively. Even the title of the novel —“The Holy Family”—touches on it. Christianity, down to the details of Christ’s family tree. The origin of that mega-novel The Holy Family comes from the Holy Family that is so important in Christian art.

Wait: I unconsciously capitalized those two words, written here in English: Holy Family. Never noticed that before: the two letters standing out at the beginning of the words—HF—resonate with my own name, are my initials. There’s a surprise. Whatever; doesn’t matter.

If the Bible gives birth to lineages and gives birth to myths, what are the comparable “holy writings” of Japan? The Kojiki maybe? The first part of it consists of myths, the latter part of imperial lineages. In that sense it is Japan’s “Bible.” In that mega-novel The Holy Family I only briefly touch on the early Japanese texts like the Kojiki and Nihonshoki. I really don’t touch on the Kojiki at all. Know why? Because the Kojiki is about bringing to light the origins of the Japanese nation, and I was trying to describe the areas of Japan it doesn’t mention. The Holy Family is a novel about the six prefectures that comprise the Tohoku region of northeast Japan. The Holy Family has those two brothers as main characters. While dozens of characters play main roles, those two are at the center.

An older brother and a younger. A family name that contains the character for “dog”; one has a first name with a cow, the other with a sheep. So many different scenes and events.

Now that dates have been introduced, I will continue to use them as I write. Two days before I started writing was April 9, a Saturday. Here’s what happened that day. I went to the CD release party of a young friend and his band. He is the songwriter. The show was supposed to take place the previous month on the thirteenth; it had been rescheduled and I was going to Shibuya for the rescheduled show. The CD went on sale on March 16. The event space was packed; the fact that the release had been postponed seemed not to make any difference to anyone, or perhaps that is why it was packed. A great performance. Good energy in the place. Just what everyone wanted. T...