A memoir about the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. Excerpt below. For full text email coreywaite [at] gmail [dot] com.

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WHEN I'M FORCED to recall Kinoyogo in the Spring, the memory always begins with Tawada sensei, the sound of her sock feet padding down the long hallway towards the teacher's room. I can't see her face, but I know her mouth is drawn small and tight, pushed down and to the left. She's mumbling to herself, as she often did between classes. During lessons with the children, Tawada was full of energy and poise, inflated by genuine curiosity about what her students thought and felt. Around other adults, though, Tawada sensei shrank, withdrew, as if she didn't trust the logic of the grown world. In the memory I'm forced to recall, Tawada slides open the office door, bows briefly, then turns to look at me trailing behind. I flash a smile. Her eyes dart down, the door slides shut. And then the memory starts again, a closed circuit, the snfff whump snff whump sound of her feet beating against the tatami, her soft voice making words in a language I cannot understand at any volume.

     Of course when I'm thinking hard enough, I know the story doesn't begin there. It begins with the earthquake, the thing itself. It starts with subterranean plates shifting, grinding, not violent but long and sustained, like a piece of thunder stretching out across the sky on an overcast day. It begins with the children covering their heads, ducking under the desks. I'm standing in front of them, completely still, with a dumb smile on my face that I'm sure is betrayed by the fear in my widening eyes. I watch as the entire room is thrust into a ritual from which I'm once again excluded, everyone but me prepared for disaster. It goes and goes and goes and then stops, eventually. And that's when, I know now, the countdown begins, that the clock starts ticking down…