LIEKO SHIGA HUMAN SPRING

Death, like the tsunami about to usher it ashore, moves toward her. She is standing unaware outside a grocery store in the city of Natori. She can’t see the ten-foot waves cresting in the Pacific Ocean. She doesn’t feel the seismic plates shifting, scraping, subducting, or lifting the sea floor approximately eighty miles away. All she knows is what they told her: tsunamis do not happen in Kitakama village, where the sandy coastline near her studio runs straight and narrow. Then the Great East Japan Earthquake hits on March 11, 2011, the first blow of the “triple disaster” that will claim more than 15,500 lives. But photographer Lieko Shiga, alone in a parking lot, twenty miles from the village, doesn’t realize this yet.

When the aftershocks subside, Shiga runs inside the store. Everyone is safe. She returns to her car and drives toward her studio—a prefab trailer nestled among the magical grove of pine trees adjacent to Kitakama beach. Her boyfriend calls, unscathed but upset. “Please don’t go to your village,” he says, having heard a tsunami warning issued over the radio. “It’s coming.” But she keeps driving until, suddenly, she sees it. The sea stretches out like a long, dark coffin. A massive, brown wave filled with debris barrels toward her white Mazda. She reverses quickly and races in the opposite direction, keeping one eye on the rearview mirror as the waves close in behind her. Along the road that leads inland, she passes a mother with her son walking calmly and obliviously. Shiga doesn’t know them, but she urges them into the car, where they wait out the snowy night together parked in front of Natori City Hall.

I first heard Shiga recount parts of this story in summer 2014. We were in Tokyo, and