Base-Isolated Life
The app on our phones uses a sound that doesn’t exist in nature. It is a digital chime, too bright for the middle of the night. Since we moved to Tokyo last summer, we hear it at least once a week. Usually, the notification tells us about a tremor four hundred kilometers away, off the coast of Fukushima or deep beneath the mountains of Ibaraki. We look at the glowing screen, turn back to whatever we were doing.
But the first large one came in November, around three in the morning.
There was no chime from the phone that time. Instead, a computerized, female voice said, “Earthquake. Earthquake.” The bed didn’t shake; it sloshed. It was a fluid, sickening motion. My wife sat bolt upright. We didn’t speak. We clung to the frame of the mattress, our knuckles white, watching the shadows swing like a pendulums in the gray light of the window.
The next day, our language teacher explained it to us.
“Base-isolation,” he said. “Your building separates from the earth. It is designed to sway. You are safer inside than on the street.”
He smiled, a polite, practiced gesture, and told us there was nothing to worry about. We nodded.
I started reading a book about the one in 2011. I learned that the earth shifted on its axis by several inches that March. I learned that the sea took twenty minutes to arrive. Sometimes I would read a sentence aloud…about the silence in the evacuation centers, or the sound of the asphalt cracking…and my wife would stop her hands, holding a pair of black socks mid-air, before nodding and placing them in the basket.
Every few months, The Japan Times runs the same feature, updated with fresh data. The Tokai Earthquake: A 70% Chance Within 30 Years. The numbers are always large, round, and impossible to visualize. Thirty thousand dead in the first six hours. Two million households without electricity. A city of concrete and glass reduced to smoke.
You read these things in the dawn hours, while the sun hits the white walls and the refrigerator hums. It feels like reading a weather report for a century you won’t live to see. Except the thirty years are happening now, ticking away while we buy groceries, while we separate the plastics, while we sleep.
The locals do not seem to read these articles, or perhaps they have simply memorized them.
Last Tuesday, I was jogging along the Sakai River. The air was crisp, smelling of damp stone and June flowers. Halfway through my loop, the pavement beneath my sneakers suddenly shifted. It felt as though the asphalt had liquefied for a fraction of a second. My balance broke, and I stumbled into a green metal lamp post, gripping it with both hands.
The water in the canal churned, creating miniature, chaotic waves that met in the middle. The overhead cables bounced between the utility poles like skipping ropes.
I stood there, my heart hammering against my ribs.
A few meters away, a man was walking his daughter. She couldn’t have been more than four, wearing a bright yellow school hat and a matching backpack shaped like a ladybug. The man didn’t stop walking. He didn’t grab the lamp post. He merely shifted his briefcase to his left hand, reached down with his right, and took his daughter’s small hand.
He didn’t look up at the swaying wires or down at the trembling ground. He just adjusted his pace to match hers, his voice low and rhythmic against the hum of the city.
“Daijōbu, daijōbu,” he said. It’s okay, it’s okay.
He said it the way a mother tells a child that the soup is just a little too hot, or that the dog barking behind the fence is tied up. It wasn’t a reassurance born of ignorance; it was the tone of someone who had reached an agreement with the ground beneath his feet. A contract signed long before I arrived with my suitcases.
When the shaking stopped, I walked the rest of the way home. My wife was at the kitchen table, typing on her laptop.
“Did you feel that?” I asked, taking off my shoes at the genkan.
“A little,” she said, not looking up from the screen.
I walked over to the window. Down on the street, an elderly woman was pushing a cart full of cardboard boxes toward the recycling depot. A cyclist navigated the narrow lane, a bag of convenience store pastries dangling from the handlebars.
Our building sat quietly on its rubber bearings, detached from the earth, waiting for the next sway.
Zary Fekete
Zary Fekete grew up in Hungary and currently lives in Tokyo. He has a debut novella (Words on the Page) out with DarkWinter Lit Press and a short story collection (The Written Path: A Journey Through Sobriety and Scripture) out with Creative Texts. He enjoys books, podcasts, and many many many films. Twitter and Instagram: @ZaryFekete Bluesky:zaryfekete.bsky.social
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