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Yuko Takamatsu was somewhere in the sea off the coast of Japan. Two and a half
years had passed since the tsunami, and no one had found her; but no one was really
looking, either, except her husband, Yasuo Takamatsu, who loved her very much.
Takamatsu first searched on land, at the bank where she vanished, and along the
beaches of Onagawa, and in the forests in the mountains. After two and half years, in
September 2013, when he still hadnt found her, he turned to the sea.
He contacted the local dive shop, High Bridge, to ask about lessons. The dive
instructor, Masayoshi Takahashi, led volunteers on dives to clean up tsunami debris
along the coastline. Takahashi and his team had encountered bodies locked inside
cars or drifting through the water. Takamatsu felt sure Takahashi would be the one
to help him find Yuko. On the phone, he said, Lets just meet and talk about it. At
the shop, he confessed his plan. At the age of 56, he said, the reason Im actually
interested in learning to dive is that Im trying to find my wife in the sea.
Takahashi kept maps and records of Takamatsus searches, recording which
shore and what depth. Sometimes the men searched the same region several times,
because bodies and debris moved around in the currents. The shape of each search
was different: circular, semicircular, a straight sweep though a current. Now and
By JENNIFER PERCY
then Takamatsu
had an intuition that his wife was in one part of the sea or another,
AUG. 2, 2016

and Takahashi tried to accommodate his hopes. But there were many restricted areas
fishing routes, places with dangerous currents and Takahashi had to coordinate
each dive with the coast guard and fishermen.
On the first dive, Takamatsu took a boat out to sea. He was scared. The water
wasnt clear, and he knew that below the surface, there were dangers he could get
caught by a rope or cut by debris. A flipper might hit his head and flood his mask.
The regulator might not work. He might panic. He could die of hypothermia,
entanglement, the bends.

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For his first dive, he reached a depth of 16 feet. He had expected silence, but the
ocean had a sound. Takamatsu called it chirichiri the sound of hair burning or a
snake hissing. Takahashi instructed him not to touch the bottom with his hands or
fins because he might kick up a disorienting cloud of sand. Takamatsu kept his head
down and flippers up.
One day, Takamatsu visited the home of Masaaki Narita, a 57-year-old manager
at a fish-processing plant, who lost his 26-year-old daughter, Emi, to the tsunami.
She was an employee with Yuko at the Onagawa branch of 77 Bank, a regional bank
based in Sendai. The women had evacuated to the banks roof, but the wave swept
them away. Takamatsu felt sorry for Naritas loss and offered to look for Emi in the
sea, too. But Narita decided he would rather dive for the body of his daughter
himself. In February 2014, Takamatsu introduced Narita to Takahashi.
A heavy rain began the morning I watched Takahashi prepare Narita for a dive.
It was January 2016, a warm winter, and the flowers were blooming. Narita had
arrived to the shop late, in blue clogs and khaki wind pants. He stood in the corner
and tucked his hands under his armpits. He looked at the floor. The room was filled
with white orchids. It smelled like pine. Takahashi checked oxygen tanks and pulled
wet suits off the drying rack. T-shirts in the shop read Dive Into Your Life. A box
stacked with diving brochures read Onagawa, Land of Dreams.
We drove to a beach called Takenoura, just east of Onagawas main port. Narita
unloaded his gear. The ground was covered in cracked oyster shells, bathroom tiles,
porcelain bowls. Fishing ropes hung like nooses from pine trees, and orange buoys
clotted the branches.
Narita hoisted the oxygen tank onto his back and wobbled. He tightened his
flippers. His wife, Hiromi Narita, paced the loading dock. She climbed barrels of
plastic-wrapped oyster shells and lifted her hand to the sun like a visor. She watched
all her husbands dives because she worried about him. The ocean was dangerous,
and she didnt want to lose him, too. If I die, throw my ashes in the sea, he said. He
walked down the boat ramp, snorkeled to deep water and made the descent.
On weekends, Hiromi prepared special lunchboxes for Emi that she would
deliver into the sea on Sunday. They were packed with Emis favorite meals, things

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like pork soup, Salisbury steak, deep-fried shrimp, all in special boxes that
decomposed. She tossed the boxes off boat ramps, piers or rock ledges or set them
gently adrift on the water. Always someplace hidden, where no one would see her.
She had done this for five years. But in the year after the tsunami, when the family
relocated to Ishinomaki, a city 30 minutes away, she and her husband did this every
day, leaving the house at 5 in the morning to deliver lunch in Onagawa before the
workday began.
Thirty-five minutes passed, and Narita resurfaced in the glittering water. He was
alive, mouthpiece unhinged, breathing. Hiromi walked to her car and drove off. It
was time to deliver rice balls and deep-fried chicken.
You will do anything for your child, she said.
Takamatsu met Yuko in 1988, when Yuko was 25 and an employee at the 77
Bank in Onagawa. Takamatsu was a soldier in Japans Ground Self-Defense Force
and his boss introduced them. They fell in love right away, Takamatsu said. He
described her as gentle. He liked her smile, her modesty. She listened to classical
music and painted watercolors on canvasses she showed no one but him.
On Friday, March 11, 2011, the day of the tsunami, Takamatsu drove Yuko to the
bank. It was on the waterfront, at Onagawas main port. Later that morning, he
drove his mother-in-law to the hospital in Ishinomaki. Takamatsu was in the
entranceway of the hospital, on his way out the door, when the magnitude-9
earthquake hit. The shaking lasted for six minutes. Traffic lights went down.
Takamatsu made his way back to Onagawa on old farming roads and listened to the
radio for news of a tsunami. He received a message from the University of Sendai
about his son, that he was alive, but he couldnt reach Yuko or his daughter, a
high-school student in Ishinomaki.
Finally, at 3:21, he received a text from Yuko: Are you O.K.? I want to go home.
Takamatsu thought that Yuko would have evacuated to a hospital on Mount Horikiri,
about 800 feet from the bank. It was high up on a hill, one of many that surrounded
Onagawa, and a designated evacuation point for the town. But Takamatsu couldnt
get there. Firefighters blocked the road that led to the hospital. A house was in
flames on the hillside. He had no way to reach Yuko, so he went home. She had been

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lost once before, he told me, on one of their first dates, when Takamatsu took her to a
shrine on New Years Eve. He told her not to get lost in the crowd, but she did
anyway, for 20 minutes, until he found her again in the flow of exiting people. He
would never forget those 20 minutes.
Takamatsu returned to the hospital in the morning. Im here to look for my
wife, he told the nurses. A hospital worker asked him to write down his name on the
back of a calendar. He asked if anyone knew what happened to the bank employees.
Many people in the hospital had witnessed their fate their screams, their arms
extended but no one said anything. Finally a woman told Takamatsu that she had
heard that some of the employees were wiped off the roof. She was certain they didnt
make it. But I dont know about Yuko, she added.
Takamatsu didnt think she was dead. He went to every floor of the hospital, and
when he couldnt find her there, he walked to the gymnasium, the elementary school,
the hotels all the designated evacuation points. On this search, he ran into many
friends and neighbors, and from them he learned that his daughter was safe. Still, no
one had seen Yuko.
It snowed the day of the tsunami. The sky was leaden, almost black, and the
wind was strong between the high cliffs surrounding Onagawa Bay. The wave was
expected to sweep in from the ocean at a height of 10 feet. When it first reached the
shore at 3:20 p.m., it was surging as high as 45 feet. As it retreated, the buildings in
town began to crack and slide under its weight. The water was so cold that survivors
crawled toward the hospital but died of hypothermia on the way. Elderly victims died
of the cold even after they arrived to safety.
Soldiers from the Ground Self-Defense Force arrived at Onagawa, and the
morning after the tsunami they began poking the debris for bodies. They used long
poles in places the debris was 15 feet deep. They wrapped the bodies in blankets
and left them on the streets until they could return to collect them. All told, 613
bodies have been identified, many elderly who were discovered entombed in their
homes.
Takamatsu had retired from the Ground Self-Defense Force; he was supposed to
begin working as a bus driver that June. Until then, he searched for Yuko every day

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from morning till evening. Beginning in June, he searched on weekends. On one of

his first searches, he made his way by foot to the bank. He traveled carefully across a
field of debris. Trains lay twisted on the hillside. A car dangled from a fifth-story
window. A light pole bent down 90 degrees. Seemingly only the Marine Pal, a fish
market, was still standing. The police station was on its side. He stood outside the
building. It was nothing now, just a frame, gutted of everything.
Sometimes Takamatsu walked alongside the soldiers and listened as they spoke
over walkie-talkies. If they announced the discovery of a body, he would walk over to
them to ask what the body was wearing. Yuko was wearing black trousers and a
camel-colored coat. Even though he was searching for Yukos body, he was always
relieved when it wasnt hers.
A month after the tsunami, when the bank was cleaning its premises, someone
found Yukos phone in the parking lot. It was a pink flip phone. Takamatsu found a
text he didnt receive, written at 3:25. So much tsunami, it read. From that text he
knew she was alive until 3:25. He guessed the tsunami was up to her feet.
When Narita heard about what happened to the bank employees, all of them
swept off the roof by the tsunami, he returned home, crying. He had last seen Emi
the day before, on March 10. It was his wifes birthday, and Emi delivered a cake.
Hiromi Narita was at work at the Ishinomaki Royal Hospital when the earthquake
began, and she wasnt aware there was a tsunami until the following day. Their
house was washed away, so the Naritas stayed at the home of a relative. On Sunday
morning, Emis husband traveled to Onagawa by bicycle, and the next day the
Naritas traveled by car. They all looked for Emis body. Inside the bank they called
out her name. In a corner was a single windsock, shaped like a golden carp. They
found her business cards in the mud.
In April, six weeks after the tsunami, a body was found floating under debris in
the waters off Tsukahama Beach, on the opposite side of the port, in Goburra Bay. It
belonged to Michiko Tanno, a 54-year-old who worked at the bank for more than two
decades. Seven or eight bodies floated nearby. Tannos sisters, Keiko and Reiko, told
Takamatsu the news. They said the body was in good condition. It was intact, they
said.

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The body of a second bank employee washed up in Onagawa, at Takenoura

Beach, on Sept. 26, 2011. It was a 25-year-old named Kenta Tamura. The body had
been in the ocean for about seven months.
Tamuras parents, Takayuki and Hiromi, were called to identify their son at the
morgue. His body was badly decomposed, so the workers laid out his clothes. We
were so discouraged and afraid to see him, Hiromi said, so we didnt encourage
ourselves to ask, Can I see my sons body? She asked the police to run a DNA test
so she could be sure it was really her son. Days later, they burned the body. She
picked bones from the ashes. Looking back, she said, even though we were afraid,
we should have seen the body there at the morgue.
I understand that other families still have missing members, Takayuki told
me, and I should tell myself Im glad to find my son, but even though we found the
body, it still feels like hell. We had hope until they found the body.
Takamatsu worried that his wife would be next. If he did find her, he did not
know what to expect. He told me about a mannequin head he found on the hillside at
Takenoura Beach. For a moment, he thought it was Yuko. It was the closest he had
come to finding a body.
Tetsuya Takagi, a forensic pathologist at Tohoku Medical and Pharmaceutical
University in Sendai, told me about the fates of bodies lost in the sea. The day of the
tsunami, he was teaching in Tokyo. At the request of the Tokyo police, he traveled to
Sendai and visited gymnasiums filled with bodies. Over eight days, he examined
nearly 200 corpses.
If a body is taken into the ocean and disappears, Takagi told me, its hard to
say what happens to it. No one ever really knows how the sea moves or flows. If a
body is pulled down to a certain depth, it stays there. If it catches in fishing
equipment, it might float across the Pacific and turn up in Hawaii. A body in the sea
will mostly become soft as cheese, so that if you touch it, the skin falls apart. In other
cases the body may become encased in a substance called grave wax that makes it
turn hard like plaster. For grave wax to form, which can happen when the bodys fat
decomposes, the body usually needs to be in a cold, wet, oxygen-free environment, he
explained. If a body floats, its not grave wax. Decomposition may take anywhere

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from a few days to several years, Takagi said. In Onagawa, after the tsunami, it
would have taken about half a year to become cheese and a year or two for the flesh
to decompose completely, so that all thats left are bones. But it depends on the
season, he said, and other variables, including sea animals who might eat the body.
He described a body with flesh on its back but with no flesh on its stomach. I think
animals ate it, he said.
A month after the tsunami, the air and water were cold, so the bodies had only
just begun to decompose. A muddy cornea here, he said, a green belly there. There
were some bodies floating on the surface of the ocean, but most of the bodies were on
shore. If a body was found with foam bubbling from its mouth or nose, it meant the
person was still breathing underwater before dying. When we think of a tsunami,
Takagi told me, we think about drowning, but people also died as a result of
hypothermia or blunt trauma (they washed up missing an arm or a leg). There were
burn victims, too. In Ishinomaki, a school bus floating on the surface of the wave
caught fire, and a search team recovered four charred children. Only kids, Takagi
said, with milk teeth.
A few years ago, a tsunami victim washed up on the shore of Ibaraki as a
skeleton with clothes on and bits of tissue on its chest. Clothes float and take longer
to decompose than flesh, and so sometimes bones return in the shape of a body, held
together by coats, pants, gloves and sneakers.
The people who lived in the mountains, where the houses were stacked atop one
another, between cliffs and trees, wouldnt have seen the tsunami coming. But those
who lived in the rice fields did. In these flat areas, the tsunami traveled about four
miles inland at a speed that gave hundreds of residents time to react but not escape.
The supervisors at an elderly care home near the rice fields decided to put all the
residents in one room. The elderly were discovered, all dead, with their medical tubes
and equipment still attached. I worked on these, too, Takagi said. I saw 300, 400
bodies lined up in a school gymnasium. Im traumatized, and I will never forget.
On a Friday morning, Takamatsu and I toured the routes he made years ago
when he searched for Yuko on land. We drove on twisting seaside roads. He noted
the shaggy cedar trees, the graveyard he crossed to get to the beach with the

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squeaking sand. There were forests of black pine and overlooks of amaranth and
silver grass. After the tsunami, in the thaw of spring, he followed snowmelt on its
way to the sea. At Tsukahama Beach, he showed me the dark waters along the
concrete port where Michiko Tanno was found. Takamatsu was skittish and walked
in a circuitous pattern. We found a pile of purple starfish stashed like cookies behind
a mound of old fishnet. He dipped his fingers into a pile of rope and watched crabs
scatter. I followed him up a ladder to the top of a concrete wall, about five feet high,
that separated a length of dock from the ocean. He put his hands on his hips and
squinted at the water. There was nothing. We went to another spot where the
seafloor was sparkled with bathroom tiles popular 40 years ago, light blue and dark
blue. Plates, bowls and a microwave. On one of his dives, he saw a clock stopped
forever at the hour of the tsunami.
Along the water, on the way back to the car, about halfway to the parking lot,
Takamatsu stopped and closed his eyes.
Listen, he said.
Something like a heartbeat came from the ocean.
Takamatsu took a few steps toward some construction workers near a docked
boat. The sound emanated from a long burgundy tube that descended into the water.
Takamatsu said the tube must be connected to the fishbowl helmet of a diver.
So what is it? I said.
Its the sound of breathing, he said.
Three days of training with Takahashi, the dive instructor, earned Takamatsu
a beginners license. His sessions took place in the ocean, in the shallows. He learned
how to put on his mask and how to take it off, how to adjust his buoyancy, how to do
rope work, how to navigate in the shadows. He managed only a single dive a month
for six months before his breathing calmed and his muscles loosened and he could
finally follow Takahashi into the deep.
Takamatsu went out with Takahashis regular dive customers the ones who
dove for fun. They had no idea Takamatsu was searching for a body.

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Each dive began with an equipment check and recheck. Takamatsu, watched by
Takahashi, examined his regulator attachment, E/O connector, communication unit,
pressure gauge, depth gauge. He always carried a flashlight. Takamatsu hoped to
reach a depth of 100 feet. It took him a year to dive about 80 feet, and his deepest
dive was about 85 feet. At that depth, he could stay 10 minutes.
He was never alone in the sea, always with Takahashi or another diver, and
every month they swam slow and quiet as manatees over the seafloor. Their
flashlights illuminated dog bones and bird bones like constellations in the sand.
What did you see? I asked.
All the things in a persons life, Takamatsu said.
In December 2013, Takamatsu spent an hour each day reading a 350-page
textbook to earn the national diving certification that would allow him to move
debris and search for bodies. He passed the exam in February 2014. For months, he
dove with Takahashis volunteer groups to remove debris off the northern coastline.
He retrieved small items like fishing ropes, and once he found a tire and made a knot
on a rope so volunteers on the surface could pull it onto a boat. After six months,
Takahashi started to give Takamatsu lessons he wouldnt normally give: how to find
and retrieve bodies from the ocean, living or dead. Takamatsu learned the way colors
shifted at different depths, because it would help him locate a body that had sunk.
On sunny days, he descended through shades of blue, and in storms, shades of
brown. He learned that the bodies of drowned people are usually found poised with
buttocks high, hands and feet dangling. The corpses of scuba divers are like dead
bugs, on their backs, hands and feet floating.
By this January, Takamatsu had been on 110 dives, each lasting 40 to 50
minutes. He was not just looking for the body; he was also searching for a wallet,
clothes or jewelry anything that might identify his wife after five years in the
ocean.
I expected it to be difficult, Takamatsu said, and Ive found it quite difficult,
but it is the only thing I can do. I have no choice but to keep looking for her. I feel
closest to her in the ocean.

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I thought of the song that a French composer named Sylvain Guinet composed
for Takamatsu after he learned of his loss. The title is Yuko Takamatsu. Takamatsu
listened to the song, a piano solo, when he shopped online, ironed his clothes, drove
his car and as he fell asleep. I asked him if the song brought back memories of Yuko.
It does not bring back memories, he said. Because it is not something that I
forget.
We often think of searching as a kind of movement, a forward motion through
time, but maybe it can also be the opposite, a suspension of time and memory.
Heidegger wrote of a metaphoric pain, calling it the joining of the rift. Its this rift,
he said, that holds together things that have been torn apart, to perhaps create a
new space where joy and sadness can find communion. This is the space I believed
Takamatsu found beneath the sea, where he could feel close to his to wife, in the rift
between missing and deceased.
There was one survivor from the bank. The day of the tsunami, fishermen
found him, tangled in debris, drifting in and out of consciousness. A month later, the
families organized a meeting with the bank, and everyone hoped to speak with him.
They wanted to know why the employees evacuated to the roof and not the hospital.
They wanted to learn any details they could about their loved ones. But the meeting
ended before they could speak with the survivor. Everyone was quite confused,
Takamatsu said. We thought we would see him again. The bank would schedule a
meeting, but the survivor always canceled.
The following year, Takamatsu received a letter from the bank. It was a formal
invitation to a memorial service. We had nothing to talk to them about anymore,
Takamatsu said. At that point, he and the other families discussed filing a lawsuit. 77
Bank was the largest employer in the region, and no one wanted to sue, but they
needed to know what happened. Keiko and Reiko Tanno, the sisters of Michiko,
joined some of the families in the suit, with their elderly mother as the legal plaintiff.
Everyone assumed they died when they were trying to evacuate on the staircase,
Keiko said. They didnt mention that they were on the roof waiting to die. The trial
began in February 2014 in Sendai, and the district court ruled in favor of the bank,
concluding that its evacuation plan was reasonable. In April 2015, the families
lawsuit failed on appeal. By then, though, they had finally been able to hear the

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survivor tell his story in court.

In January, I met Keiko and Reiko at the bank memorial outside the hospital.
We sat outside in the snow around a foldout table stacked with court transcriptions.
Keiko told me the survivors story as she remembered hearing him tell it in court.
At 2:46, there was an earthquake, she said. The manager of the bank in
Onagawa was out of the building when it happened. (His name and the survivors
have been kept secret by the bank.) He returned at 2:55. The employees were fixing
things. He told them about the tsunami warning. Two customers fled. He told
everyone to lock up and put documents into a safety box. The survivor and Kenta
locked the front door and unlocked the door to the roof. It wasnt easy to open. The
manager called the bank headquarters in Sendai to notify them about where they
were going. He didnt consult with anyone about where to evacuate, and no one
doubted his commands about going to the roof.
One employee asked to leave. I want to go home, she said. Im worried about
my children. The tide was being sucked out to sea. She knew it was not safe to leave,
but she wanted to try to get to her children. When she stepped outside, it was 3:05,
and the tsunami sirens were already wailing. She lived.
At 3:10, the remaining employees climbed to the roof. They brought a radio. The
tsunami was expected to reach a height of 10 feet, and the roof was 30 feet. It would
arrive at 3:30. They had time. A few men went back downstairs to get coats. It was
cold and snowing. By 3:15, all 13 employees were on the roof. Everyone seemed calm.
They made phone calls and wrote to their families. Yuko wrote to Takamatsu.
Michiko wrote to her sisters: Im safe.
The bank manager told the survivor and Kenta to listen to the radio and monitor
the sea. There was a building between the bank and the water, so the men walked to
the edge of the roof and watched the bay. Kenta noticed that the hospital on the
mountain was crowded with evacuees. People were standing on top of cars in the
parking lot, watching for the wave. He talked to the survivor about the hospital and
wondered if they should go there. They agreed that they still had time to run.
Everyone seemed calm. They decided to stay.

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The survivor saw the ships near the fish market move suddenly over the water.
The bank was built on a floodplain over the ocean, and water swelled up from below.
It cracked the earth and spread through the streets. Shortly after 3:30, the wave
came. It was low at first and rushed past the building, but then the water level rose,
gradually at first and then quickly, to about 65 feet from 19 feet. It took five minutes
for the ocean to flood the first floor. The manager commanded everyone to the
highest point, a small electrical room with a three-meter vertical ladder. He was the
last to climb, and when he stepped up, the building was already underwater.
Masaaki Narita wore Mickey Mouse slippers, jeans and a sweater vest
patterned with reindeer. We were in his new home in Ishinomaki. He rubbed his
back and sighed. He said diving caused him back pain. At the shore dive earlier that
day, he wore eight kilograms of weight so that he wouldnt float.
Im grateful my husband is diving, Hiromi, his wife, said, because I can see
how deeply he loved my daughter. Hes still in training, so he doesnt talk much
about what he sees, but when he comes home, he looks good even though hes tired. I
think its a good process for him because he can feel closer to his daughter. Even if we
can find some of her things, Im sure its going to lead us to a clue of where we should
look next.
In the living room were two shrines to their daughter. Hiromi sat on the floor by
the coffee table and faced a life-size portrait of Emi. So we can still have her live in
the middle of us, she said. The portrait was based on a photograph of her and her
future husband at Disneyland seven years ago. Emis husband lived with them for a
year after the tsunami, but they knew they couldnt keep him forever; they told him
he should move on with his life and find another wife.
I cant think that this was her doom, Hiromi said. If it was inevitable, then at
least we would have sent her off on a warm bed. She wasnt born to stay in the cold
water. I have the feeling she might be saying, Why did you let me be born? Of
course, my daughter would have never thought her life would have ended the next
day. We take it for granted that tomorrow comes. I just wonder what she was
thinking as she fell asleep the night before.
Hiromi covered her face with her hands.

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She was my only child, she said. She was with me all the time ever since she
was born. The last five years I still cannot believe she is not with me anymore. She
would have been 31 this year. You have to live longer than your parents, she told
me. I tell that to everyone who is as young as my daughter.
Hiromis mother, Emis grandmother, joined us in the living room. She cooked
the food that Hiromi took to the sea. She wore a green apron patterned with flowers
and had a thick head of curly gray hair. She sat on the chair beside us.
Actually, Hiromi said, gesturing to the grandmother, she asked if I wanted to
join her in suicide a few times after my daughter was gone. The grandmother looked
at me and nodded. I dont really want to live anymore, but I just couldnt do it,
because if we are gone, my husband will be alone.
Does he know? I asked.
We told him later, she said.
Emi had been living in a second-floor apartment two minutes away from her
parents. All the floors were muddy after the tsunami, but the Naritas recovered most
of her things. They found a photo album filled with photographs of Emi that Emi had
wanted to show at her wedding reception, which had been delayed; instead, Hiromi
used them at Emis funeral.
They never found Emis cellphone. Hiromi didnt want to close her daughters
account, so she wrote a letter to the carrier and asked to keep it open because it was
the only way she could communicate with her daughter. The phone company came to
the house with a new phone same number and address as an offering to the
family. Hiromi added the cellphone to the shrine. Emis friends text her on her
birthday. Hiromi texts her every day. Im sorry, she writes. Im sorry.
Masaaki disappeared into his bedroom. Hiromi and the grandmother wept. We
need cake, Hiromi said. The grandmother hurried to the kitchen and returned with
cake. Chocolate, strawberry, chestnut. Masaaki was alone in the darkness of his
bedroom. The women ate cake and Hiromi told me a story about her daughters hair.
Because Emi was missing, they didnt have anything to put in the grave. She wanted

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something. So she pulled some of Emis hair out of the drain and buried it.
On Jan. 11, in the afternoon, Takamatsu, wearing a silver tracksuit and
high-top white sneakers, came to watch a body hunt conducted by the coast guard.
The tracksuit glimmered like tinfoil. Narita wore a puffy jacket with a fur hood and
small dark sunglasses. Keiko and Reiko, the sisters, arrived with food steaming
rice balls stuffed with oysters and sour plums.
The search was Naritas idea. Every now and then, he asked the Japan Coast
Guard to conduct an official search for his daughters body. He had asked them to
search in May, and in October, and again in January. The government let Narita
decide where. On this day, Narita chose a shipping route that belonged to the
government, because it was a place he would never be able to dive himself.
Not many people came to watch the search only the families of the bank
victims and Takahashi and a few local residents. Members of the Japanese press
outnumbered spectators.
The coast-guard divers arrived by sea. There were seven, dressed in bright
orange-and-black dive suits and thick yellow helmets. The men would dive for an
hour, tracing a length of rope dropped in the water. On the way, they would record
what they saw for Narita and Takamatsu. They docked and hopped ashore. They
were militaristic and ceremonial. Everyone was quiet. They stood in a line, saluted
their commander. After a brief speech, they saluted the families and drove the boat
20 meters from the dock.
Hiromi poured coffee in the ocean for Emi, and everyone took a photograph. She
walked over to me and pointed out to sea. Today I served Salisbury steak, she said.
Emis favorite. We waited an hour before the divers resurfaced. One by one, they
climbed belly first onto the boat ramp and came back to shore. The dive commander
briefed the families.
We found nothing, he said. Narita nodded and wiped his nose. Takamatsu was
very still.
Nothing that didnt already belong in the sea, the dive commander continued.

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The soda cans are all new. But do you want to see the photos anyway?
Yes, Narita said.
The underwater images played on a laptop computer in the back of a van. Narita
and Takamatsu leaned forward to look inside. The commander talked about the way
the water felt. Here is a section of a building, he said, and part of a clock. Here is a
Coke can.
Takamatsu walked quickly away from the crowd. He stayed close to the sea, and
I tried to catch up with him. He started searching again. He stepped onto a pile of
rocks, put his hands on his knees and stared down into the sea. The search for love,
the search his, hers, everyones is not for a needle in a haystack, nor a fish in the
sea. Its for a specific person on earth. The world never looks as big as when someone
is lost.
Jennifer Percy is a contributing writer for the magazine and the author of Demon
Camp. She last wrote about American vigilantes fighting ISIS in Syria for the magazine.
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your inbox every week.
A version of this article appears in print on August 7, 2016, on page MM43 of the Sunday Magazine with
the headline: The Lost Ones.

2016 The New York Times Company

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