JAPAN: The Search

Whenever he could spare the money, which was seldom enough, Yonosuke Itakura, a poverty-stricken job printer, sent his sickly daughter Yoko from Tokyo to the hot springs in the Buddhist Temple of the Understanding Way in the mountains of Hakone. There, one day last summer, a landslide roared down the mountains burying the child, her mother and eight others beneath a varicolored rubble of clay, pumice, granite boulders and choking volcanic ash. Rescue workers searched among the debris for bodies, but before the remains of Yoko and her mother were found, the search was abandoned. Yonosuke and his sons went on digging alone, for he had vowed to "search for the bodies for the rest of my life, if necessary."

For two months the Itakuras dug in vain. The local villagers thought that the presence of the Itakuras was bad for tourist business, and sneered at them: "You are fools; why don't you give up?" The Itakuras dug on.

One day last week. Yonosuke fell asleep and dreamed of his daughter. "I saw her," he said, "not clearly, but as through a haze. She held out her arms and said, 'Daddy, daddy, my hands are all black.' " Back at his digging next day, Yonosuke noticed for the first time a thick slime of coal-black clay oozing out of the debris. He dug in the slime until a side of the trench fell in. There, embalmed in the clay which had blacked their hands and faces, lay the bodies of his wife and his daughter. "Some villagers rushed up to congratulate me," said Yonosuke, "but I just looked away."