The Bird in the Darkness: Memories of Death in Japan

I wake up with the vulture by my bed.

My subconscious mind has brought it here, in its free fall through all the unconnected images stored deep inside my brain. The scenes that come in the sleepless dark are usually joyful. The bird by the bed is a high-flying eagle. 

But on this night it is the vulture. He wants to take me back to Japan. 

So I don’t forget.

More than ten long years have passed since I embarked on that grim search for death in the rubble of that foreign land. 

Back then, I was a journalist working abroad and Japan was part of my beat, so when the earthquake and tsunami struck in the spring of 2011, I went to do my job.

Even today, the images lurk just beneath the surface, scenes of pain and suffering, and of a soaring human response to unspeakable tragedy.

And they have changed me, made me somehow older, more wary, suspicious of God and blind good fortune and dumb bad luck. 

Mostly, I cannot forget the faces, both of the living and the dead.

The vulture makes sure of that.

*

When the tsunami strikes, I was not in Asia, or even Japan.

I am in Miami, on home leave. My father has fallen and broken his leg and I sit by his hospital bed, playing patient advocate. When my editors call, I tell them I cannot go to Japan, not just yet.

I land in Tokyo a week later. Japan is doubled over in spasms of grief. Everything is happening in real time. My job is to report what I see, without knowing how it will all end. Those stories will be written much later.

I report to the damage zone. By now, the disaster is already entering into a new chapter. The flooding has at last receded along the coast and volunteers are wading into the watery marshland to reclaim the dead.

I travel with a veteran photographer, along with a Japanese driver and translator. We drive along a two-lane path known as Route 45, which has been transformed into chaos. 

The land is littered with upside-down houses, vehicles carried here from who knows where, blankets, car tires, dolls, an ice chest, a wooden ornamental sake bucket, a refrigerator door and a book called “Setting Free the Bears.”

We weave between mountains of debris at some places 40 feet high, from which the tail ends of cars protrude like Christmas tree ornaments. There's a yellow crane, toppled onto its side, too big to be moved, so we swerve around it.

We walk into the field, the mud sucking up to our ankles, and watch solitary men collect the dead. My lead aims to capture the details of tragedy.

“NAKANOSAWA, Japan — They covered the body with a child’s blanket, a fluffy blue-green cloak decorated with white lilies. Beneath the cloth was a man, maybe in his 40s, missing his right arm from the elbow, a final insult to one of the countless victims of this agricultural town’s tsunami nightmare.”

After that, we move southward, toward more grim discoveries.

*

The following afternoon, the photographer and I are standing on a rise overlooking a scenic coastal glen shaded by towering pines. We wait with the parents of 74 elementary school students, mothers and fathers insulted by fate.

Their children survived the initial earthquake, hiding beneath their desks as they had been taught. It was only after teachers led them outside, single file, onto the supposed safety of the playground that the floodwaters took them. 

And now they watch, handkerchiefs to their faces, as soldiers carry the covered bodies up the hillside. There's a girl who wore blue bows in her braided hair, and a husky boy who liked to practice judo kicks. 

One by one, the soldiers open the shroud of each arriving corpse, wiping down the faces with water to help with identification. I am waiting with one mother when the photographer taps me on the shoulder. 

Workers have laid a stretcher with a boy’s small frame. His mother is there. Who knows what she is thinking? Parents are not supposed to outlive their children. Probably that.

The mother slowly lifts the brown shroud as she and her husband move their hands along the body, a silent gesture of reassurance, as if to say, “Everything is going to be OK, son.” Then, slowly, they carry his body to a waiting truck.

“I saw his face and I knew it was him right away,” the father says. “I knelt down next to him and I told him that I already missed him.”

The father talks about his boy. “He was so clever. He wanted to one day design computer games. He loved the cookies his mother made. I’ll always remember that.”

He speaks as though in a trance.

*

As the terrible days turn into weeks, the photographer moves on to other assignments. But death is still my full-time job. 

The story has morphed yet again. Now I am tasked with writing not about the dead, but about the missing, and those left behind. I team up with a photographer named Tom, whose father is British and mother Japanese.

Tom doesn't possess the photographer's ironclad defenses. His face is round, his jaw set in the English way, but his eyes are soft and expressive.

One afternoon, we meet with a young firefighter who has lost both his wife and his daughter to the floodwaters. Months later, he is caught up in a personal obsession to find them. He knows they are dead, but he still wants run his hands along their faces, like those parents outside the school, and tell them that everything will be alright.

“I’m sorry,” he will them softly. “I’m sorry.”

*

The firefighter talks about loss and longing. As I scribble in my notebook, Tom suddenly bursts into tears. 

His emotions are the most natural thing I have ever seen.

He wipes his eyes and apologizes. It isn’t necessary. His homeland has been brought to its knees, the pain captured in the misery of this one grieving man.

And this is the image I seize upon in the dark — that of a young journalist who sets aside his camera to process life’s cruelty in human terms.

Now the vulture is gone, just as quickly as it came. 

I fall asleep.