Before the disaster, the day before, Ryūnosuke had gradually begun to feel better, reading Shibue Chūsai by the late Mori Ōgai in bed.
Before the disaster, during that morning, there had been brief showers and a strong wind. Ryūnosuke had finished reading the last chapter of Shibue Chūsai and had then flicked through the various newspaper reports on the formation of a new cabinet under Count Yamamoto, ignoring yet more articles on the love-suicide of Takeo Arishima and Akiko Hatano: the degenerate decadence and moral bankruptcy of the literati.
Before the disaster, just before noon, Ryūnosuke had had a piece of bread and a glass of milk, and was just about to drink some tea and smoke a cigarette when he felt a slight vibration. Moments later, the house was shaking to an extraordinary degree and he could hear tiles falling from the roof above him, his family screaming from the rooms about him. And the shaking did not subside, as was usual, the motion only becoming more intense, so Ryūnosuke led his mother out of the house and into the garden, while his wife rushed upstairs to rescue their second son, Takashi, who was sleeping on the second floor, his aunt gripping the feet of the steep ladder, trying to stay on her own feet, continuously calling their names. But then, after a short while, his aunt and wife emerged from the house holding Takashi, joining Ryūnosuke and his mother in the garden as the ground continued to tilt and to roll. Yet there was still no sign of his father or his first son, Hiroshi; their maid, Shizu, rushed back inside the house, then came back out with Hiroshi in her arms. And soon his father, too, appeared in the garden, and now the whole family stood together, holding and clinging and clutching each other as, monotonously, Ryūnosuke repeated, ‘It’s okay. It’s okay,’ while thinking, It’s not okay. It’s not okay. For still now the ground continued to rumble, continued to sway, heaving and tossing, the air filled with the thickening fog of a smothering dust, the choking stench of turning soil and the deafening screams of grinding timbers: Gii-ko, gii-ko, gii-ko, gii-ko …
After the disaster, the official record would state that the Great Kantō Earthquake had started at 11:58 a.m. on September 1, 1923, and had stopped after four minutes.
After those four minutes had passed, the biggest shakes seemed to stop, the waves of shocks seemed to lessen, and his wife, his aunt and their maids immediately began to bring essential provisions and the family’s most valued possessions from out of the house. They lined them up in the garden. His wife suggested Ryūnosuke should do the same with his most treasured books. Ryūnosuke went back inside the house to his study on the second floor. Many things had fallen or moved since he had last sat at his desk. He righted piles of books, he straightened sheets of paper. Then, for some time, Ryūnosuke stared around the room at his library, wondering which books to save and which to forsake: Baudelaire or Strindberg? Flaubert or Dostoevsky? But Ryūnosuke did not want to read poetry. He did not want to read drama. He did not want to read short stories or novels. Ryūnosuke picked up a volume by Voltaire. He put it back down. He picked up a volume by Rousseau. He put it back down. Finally, he chose the Bible and The Communist Manifesto. Then Ryūnosuke wrapped up the calligraphy by Sōseki-sensei in a furoshiki, picked up the statue of the Maria Kannon he had acquired in Nagasaki, and took them all down the ladder, out into the garden. He pulled leaves off a bashō plant. He put the leaves on the dirt of the ground. Then he put the books, the furoshiki and the Maria Kannon on the green of the leaves. His wife and his aunt looked at him with contempt. Ryūnosuke could not tell if their disdain was directed at his choice of books, the Maria Kannon or his treatment of the plant. Or maybe it was not contempt, maybe it was fear –
‘Look! Look,’ shouted his eldest son, Hiroshi, pointing at the sky.
From the gate of their house on the hill in Tabata, Ryūnosuke and his family could see thick black clouds of smoke rising from the fires that were now raging across the lower parts of the city, and Ryūnosuke and his family knew they had been spared the worst of the quake and, so far, the ravages of the flames; a few loose tiles had slid off their roof and smashed on the ground; the stone lantern near the gate had toppled over and broken into pieces. Ryūnosuke gathered up the fragments of the tiles. He stacked them neatly in a pile. But then the ground shook again and the pile collapsed. Ryūnosuke stared at the fragments of the roof tiles and then at the four pieces of the stone lantern. He tried to right the base of the lantern, but it was too heavy to lift. He left the fragments and the pieces lying where they had fallen.
That afternoon, their neighbour, Kurasuke Watanabe, a student, came to check on Ryūnosuke and his family. Even though he still felt rather weak, Ryūnosuke agreed to accompany Kurasuke on a tour of their neighbourhood.
People had escaped into the streets, yet were chatting amiably with a newfound cordiality, offering each other cigarettes and slices of nashi pears, and looking after each other’s children in a scene of unprecedented kindness. But further on, on the slopes of Shinmei-chō, there were houses that had been destroyed, and when Ryūnosuke and Kurasuke stood on the bridge of Tsukimi, for as far as they could see the sky over Tokyo had turned to mud, towers of flame and columns of smoke flashing and rising up.
Kurasuke decided to continue his tour, to find out what news he could, while Ryūnosuke would return to the house and his family. But when
