The Kizuna Coast: A Rei Shimura Mystery (Rei Shimura Mysteries Book 11) Read online

  I really hoped that Carly’s reaction was overkill. Japan had planned carefully for earthquakes and tsunamis; state-of-the-art construction and evacuation routes would ensure optimum safety. But I had relatives and friends in Japan, where I’d lived about four years. This made the disaster a personal one.

  Trying to calm myself, I slipped out of my sandals and walked barefoot through the dining room. The small room was furnished with just a few pieces: a persimmon-wood Japanese tansu chest, and a low paulownia tea table flanked by two indigo cushions. This was where I planned to serve our supper of grilled tuna, asparagus, and Japanese rice flavored with kombu.

  In the back of the house, near the kitchen and bathroom, was the original bedroom that we’d converted into our study. The small room held an old mission-style desk from Michael’s former apartment, his desktop computer, and a rattan daybed I’d covered with vintage Japanese quilts. This served our few guests and was a favorite lounging place near our only television.

  Michael was in the study on his phone call, keeping his eyes on the wall-mounted flat screen. CNN showed an aerial view of the Pacific Ocean. Although the sound was muted, a scrolling newsfeed confirmed Carly’s report.

  Major Earthquake Hits Northeast Japan to be followed by tsunami. Thousands feared injured. Richter scale 9.0. And then, the message repeated.

  The Richter scale reading was probably off, because I’d never heard of such a powerful earthquake. I raised the volume to low, so I’d get more details without disturbing Michael’s call.

  An American newscaster was reporting that the earth’s plates had shifted under the Pacific about two hundred miles from the city of Sendai. The newscaster was chattering about the coast’s many seawalls and sirens going off everywhere and people evacuating in an orderly fashion.

  As he spoke, the picture shifted from the ocean to traffic-clogged roads and collapsed buildings of a town identified as Sugihama. Its name was familiar; I’d probably been through the area antiquing. With anxiety, I watched people hurry up steep outdoor tsunami evacuation stairs, past gawkers stopped along their route with cameras and phones pointed toward the ocean. I wanted to yell at them that this was not a YouTube moment, and they were slowing escape for others. But who would hear?

  Michael finished his call and came to sit with me on the daybed. “It’s Friday afternoon,” he said in a low voice. “Plenty of fishermen are out on the water.”

  And everyone else was at work or in school, or out shopping or inside their homes. Sure, they’d hear the sirens, but not everybody had a car they could speed away in, or legs strong enough to run.

  Michael’s eyes were fixed on a foamy white line growing across the dark-blue ocean. “Hank says it’s a couple of minutes away from hitting land.”

  “It’s long, but doesn’t look that high.” After speaking I realized the overhead camera couldn’t reveal the wave’s height. I had no way to judge, until the event itself.

  “I don’t think there are any seawalls taller than fifteen feet,” Michael said, as if he were thinking along the same lines. “Let’s hope that’s high enough for this little town. Oh, no, hold on. There it goes!”

  The line finally turned into a real wave that rushed smoothly over a seawall. The powerful, monstrous surge was lifting up all kinds of things—houses, street lamps, buses—before sucking them under. More water kept pushing from behind, and soon the entire small-town landscape was no longer there.

  All of it, gone.

  I grabbed Michael and buried my face in his chest. I felt his heart beating rapidly against my wet cheek.

  “It’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen.” Michael breathed deeply. “I’m really sorry, but I can’t stick around. Hank’s informed me that a complementary tsunami wave is headed for Hawaii.”

  “What the hell is that?”

  “The rebound of the energy generated by the wave that hit Tohoku. Sirens will go off all over Honolulu and coastal towns in a couple of hours, and if people in this development want to avoid a massive traffic jam they should gather their valuable papers now and evacuate.”

  I stared at him, feeling this news was too much to process. “Will you tell them?”

  “I’ve got to get to the Tsunami Warning Center, and I suppose I’ll get my orders from Hank over there. You can spread the news at Ewa Landing.”

  My own cell phone rang, and I snatched it up. “Hello?”

  “Rei-chan, did you hear?” All the way from San Francisco, my father’s voice crackled with worry.

  “Yes, Dad. Michael’s here, too. I’m putting your call on speakerphone so we can all hear each other.”

  “Hi, Toshiro.” Michael’s voice was warm. “You must be worried for your brother’s family.”

  “Indeed I am. I called his house and had no answer, even though it’s a time that Norie should be home,” my father said. “And I never heard of an earthquake measuring 9.0, have you? We’ve been told to stay away from the beaches because there will be a reciprocal wave coming from the earthquake’s epicenter.”

  “I hear you. In fact, I’m just getting ready to help my office deal with our own potential tsunami.” As he spoke, Michael was putting all kinds of communications gear into his briefcase.

  “Please stay overnight at Honokai Hale. That is truly high ground.” My father was speaking of the cliffside home belonging to Uncle Yosh, his son Edwin, and daughter-in-law Margaret.

  “Don’t worry, Dad. I’ll drive over with Uncle Yosh. He came to our neighborhood this evening to play mah-jongg, so it’ll be very easy to get going.”

  “Good. I won’t have to worry about any of you, then.”

  Two heavy knocks thudded on the front door.

  “That may be him now. Michael, can you get the door?” I asked, but my husband had already vacated the room, leaving nothing but flip-flop sandals behind.

  Chapter 2

  Even with Uncle Yosh walking alongside me, my door-to-door encouragement of neighborhood evacuation attracted no interest. People wanted to huddle in their homes, watching the tragedy replay across each network. Lilia had been watching her TV nonstop and informed us the wave had been twenty-three-feet tall. Shaking her head, she told me, “We got nothing that we can’t handle, compared to that.”

  Michael called my cell from his office to say he wasn’t sure if he’d be released from work that night and hoped Uncle Yosh could leave a key near the front door.

  “No need for locking; nobody messes with Shimuras,” my uncle answered tersely.

  “I’ll try to take that as an invitation,” Michael said, when I repeated my uncle’s bon mot. “But don’t wait up.”

  Uncle Yosh and I got in his vintage Toyota sedan around six, and quickly realized that outside of Ewa Landing, others were evacuating. Driving west on Farrington Highway, the Celica was quickly absorbed in a long line of taillights that reminded me of the candle-lit paper boats that floated on water during O-bon ancestor-remembrance ceremonies.

  We rode mostly in silence; my brain was fogging as badly as the windshield of the twenty-five-year-old car. I knew the horror was just beginning. In the hours that lay ahead, thousands of people would remain trapped underneath buildings and debris or marooned in buildings surrounded by water. And then there were those who were without anything to cling to, who were swimming, floating, and drowning.

  Yosh and I were received warmly by our relatives, who offered drinks and a yakisoba dinner. I found it impossible to relax, even after everyone had gone to their rooms and the living room was darkened for me to sleep on the fold-out sofa. Aunt Margaret must have heard me rustling, because she came in the wee hours with a container of Tylenol PM. The pharmaceuticals eventually did the trick, but over and over, I dreamed the wave had come to us. I was on a staircase, desperately trying to scramble higher, but an obstacle blocked me from safety. A dog barked somewhere, over and over, until the nightmare finally ended.

  It was full-on morning; I awoke to sun streaming straight into my eyes and the smell of g
rease in the air. I was still sprawled on the folded-out sofa bed in the Shimuras’ cluttered living room. My head was cloudy from the sleeping pills, and a line of pain ran across my midback, courtesy of the sofa bed’s bar. Michael was on the other side; he’d slipped into bed when I was knocked out.

  From the kitchen, I could hear my aunt and uncle talking about the local impact.

  “Just a tiny one-foot wave hit Waikiki,” Uncle Edwin scoffed. “All those warnings for evacuation made no sense. The lady at Safeway was saying our wave was too small even for a toddler to surf.”

  “Better safe than sorry. Remember the 1960 tsunami in Hilo?” Aunt Margaret’s high voice reproached from the kitchen. “People knew it was coming, but some stayed to watch like fools and got themselves killed.” She looked through to the living room and waved at me. “Rei, you and Michael gotta get up! Come watch over the veggie bacon Edwin got for you. Everyone else is having Portuguese sausage.”

  Rubbing my eyes, I went into the kitchen. The artificial bacon was sizzling on the stove; using a spatula, I flipped it, although it held no appeal for me. Looking toward the crowded kitchen table, I saw the little television Aunt Margaret always kept going. The TV was broadcasting a repeat of one of the morning news shows, and a newscaster was speaking about the results of the earthquake and tsunami. Then came the horrifying pictures of destruction and people searching for loved ones. I wanted to turn away but couldn’t.

  “Rei, did you speak with your Japanese auntie yet?” Margaret asked. “I bet you’re worried. We all are.”

  “I couldn’t get through to her last night. One time, I did get a recording from the phone company saying circuits were full.” I stopped talking to listen to the television, where an American reporter in Japan was talking about schoolchildren who’d vanished on a kindergarten bus that was presumed taken by the wave.

  “Rei, your bacon’s burning!”

  Michael rushed in wearing nothing but shorts and grabbed up the spatula I’d forgotten. With soft eyes he looked at me, then put the burnt bacon on his own plate.

  Still in a fog, I dropped Michael at Pearl Harbor a few hours later and returned to Ewa Landing. After doing some work check-ins, I left my office for a late lunch and settled down at the kitchen table with my phone. The first six times I called my Shimura relatives in Yokohama, there was neither a dial tone nor even a busy signal. Just a static-filled silence that was mystifying and only served to make me feel like the whole country had gone under. But on my seventh try, the crackling gave way to the usual double-beep of a Japanese phone ringing. My heart began pounding. If someone picked up, what would I learn? Maybe something I didn’t want to hear.

  Three more rings. Just as I was expecting the answering machine to pick up, my aunt Norie answered “Hai” as if it was an ordinary morning.

  I was almost too frazzled to remember the proper telephone greeting of moshi-moshi. I blurted, “Obasan! I’ve been so worried.”

  “Rei-chan, it’s very thoughtful of you to call. Don’t worry. We are not near the devastation. But what a bump it was; the ceiling tiles fell down right on the flowers I was arranging during my class at the ikebana school.”

  “It sounds as if you were in Tokyo yesterday afternoon. Where were Uncle Hiroshi and my cousins?”

  “Chika-chan was traveling for work in Osaka, where she didn’t even feel the earth tremble because it’s so far away.” My aunt gave a half laugh at this. “Tom was at his hospital in Tokyo. He took care of almost a hundred people, stayed overnight, and is continuing work there today. Your uncle was on the train from Tokyo to Yokohama. That train slipped partly off the track but fortunately did not turn over.”

  “Thank God!” I had not thought about the impact the jolting would have on the thousands of trains crisscrossing Japan.

  “The situation in Tohoku is much more serious. So many people are missing from small towns along the coast. It’s a blessing that you aren’t in Japan,” Aunt Norie continued. “Because of your work travels, you might have even been in that region where the wave hit so hard.”

  As an antiques buyer, I had traveled up and down Japan, looking for special things. The Sendai region was famous for furniture carpentry. I’d traveled to a spring auction there each year with my dear antiques-dealing friend, Mr. Ishida.

  Mr. Ishida was the closest person I had to a grandfather, since both of my own were deceased. We exchanged a phone call every two weeks or so. Now I remembered with awful certainty that he had talked about going to Tohoku sometime during the spring.

  “Have you heard anything about conditions in Sendai City?” I asked my aunt.

  “Some people were killed by the earthquake, which was quite strong. Actually, Rei-chan, I must end our call soon. The government wants us to keep the phone lines as free as possible.”

  “Sure. I’m just glad to know you’re all right. Give everyone my love.” I hung up and went into my cell phone’s web browser, typing in the auction name. Only Japanese language pages came up. As fragmented as my Japanese reading ability was, I could still make out that an auction of tansu chests had been planned for March 10, the day before the tsunami. This meant Mr. Ishida could have made it back to Tokyo that very evening. However, I needed to call him to confirm.

  As I punched in the number, I pictured the interior of his charming shop, full of tall, polished wooden furniture, and dazzling Imari porcelain. It was a haven for wonderful historical objects, and the best part was that Mr. Ishida lived upstairs.

  His answering machine wasn’t turned on—something that happened with him a lot. Mr. Ishida had mentioned hiring a part-time apprentice, the same job I’d done occasionally during my years in Tokyo. I’d said a brief hello to her once when I’d called for him, but it had been so brief I’d never learned the young woman’s name.

  It was ten thirty; maybe the apprentice wasn’t in yet. The most regular inhabitant of the shop at this hour was Hachiko, Ishida-san’s recently acquired dog. She was a mixed breed of Akita and beagle. I’d asked Mr. Ishida to text me a picture, but his phone wasn’t sophisticated enough, he said. He stayed loyal to his early-model Nokia, a semi-antique in its own right.

  The phone rang on. Perhaps the lines were jammed and the call wasn’t even really going through. Another possibility was that Mr. Ishida had closed the shop because nobody was in the mood to buy antiques in the midst of a disaster.

  I didn’t want to think about the third possibility: that he couldn’t answer because he’d gone to Sendai on the tenth and never returned.

  Chapter 3

  As often as I continued calling Ishida Antiques, nobody picked up.

  And since that same shop phone rang in Mr. Ishida’s upstairs apartment, it seemed clear he was not in Tokyo.

  On Saturday, when there was still no response, I phoned Aunt Norie and asked if she could go to the shop and check on him. But she told me that transportation was still halted, and there were rolling power blackouts throughout Tokyo. My aunt, however, pledged to keep calling, in case she had better luck than I did.

  “Doesn’t Mr. Ishida have his own family?” my old Tokyo friend Richard Randall inquired when I phoned to ask him if he wouldn’t mind going to the Yanaka neighborhood to check on Mr. Ishida.

  “He never had children. Other people in the neighborhood might know his whereabouts, but I think the people he was closest to are all in the senior citizens’ tai chi group that meets in Ueno Park at sunrise.” As I spoke, I doodled the kanji for “big energy,” the meaning of tai chi.

  “The subway isn’t running today. There’s no way, no how I’m getting to Yanaka or Ueno,” Richard grumbled. “And we’re not supposed to use taxis for anything other than an emergency. Why don’t you telephone the police?”

  “I already called his local precinct. The officer said a patrolman could check on whether he’s in the store, but that I should expect not to have an answer for several days because they’re busy with public-safety concerns. We can’t wait that long, Richard. There might b
e a puppy inside who needs to be fed.”

  “Don’t use we with me,” Richard snapped. “And I can’t be a pet sitter! I’m busy enough with my own demon cat.”

  “I’m not asking you to take care of a dog. I don’t even know if the dog’s there. But it’s another reason to check on the store. If the only thing that’s out of order is his telephone, that would be really good news. And I’ll get off your back.”

  “Okay, okay. I’ll bike over this afternoon. Ishida Antiques is on the main drag in Yanaka, right?”

  “Yes. It’s near a shop that sells roasted senbei crackers.” I could smell them in my imagination, and that sent a rush of homesickness through me. “I’ll forward an Internet link with a photograph of Mr. Ishida.” I’d only found one picture online, but unfortunately Mr. Ishida was half-blocked by a teenage girl with blue hair.

  Richard sighed theatrically. “You’re lucky the salon’s closed, so I have the time to undertake your errands.”

  “Which salon?”

  “Blond Apparition. Did you forget that I started a cosmetology apprenticeship last year?”

  “Yes, you did tell me. How soon before they turn you loose on actual paying customers?”

  “I’m usually seeing four or five clients a day, thank you very much.” Richard sniffed. “But right now the salon’s closed. Our owner says she doesn’t know when anyone will feel chill enough to come in for a blowout. You can’t believe what the city’s become like. People are saying it’s the worst crisis since World War II.”

  Michael and I decided to spend that evening in our backyard watching the sunset. Sitting together on plastic garden chairs I longed to replace with teak ones, I told him that Richard had made it back from Yanaka and found Mr. Ishida’s store locked up with the lights off. Per my instructions, he had rung the exterior doorbell to Mr. Ishida’s private apartment located above the shop and had no response. A neighbor had said to him that he believed the shop had been closed since Thursday evening—and what was really strange, the neighbor thought, was that Mr. Ishida hadn’t mentioned the closing to him—nor had he left a sign about the reopening date on the shop door, as was his normal custom if he traveled.