NATORI, Miyagi Prefecture--Kenji Sakurai often visits the spot where the wall of water two years ago killed his wife and two daughters and swept away the family home.
NATORI, Miyagi Prefecture--Kenji Sakurai often visits the spot where the wall of water two years ago killed his wife and two daughters and swept away the family home.
"Virtually nothing remains, but I go there even at night after I return from work," the 38-year-old said. "I still feel all the days I lived with them."
His home was in the Yuriage district of Natori, a coastal city devastated by the tsunami spawned by the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, 2011.
His wife, Megumi, 36, elder daughter, Ayaka, 14, and younger daughter, Manaka, 10, were at home at the time. He was out, at work, in Watari, about 15 kilometers down the coast.
Sakurai said one thought has troubled him time and time again.
"I wonder if I really should have been left alive, alone," he said. "That feeling has never gone away."
He said he has no place where he can now settle down.
"It is not because my home was destroyed but because my family members who should be with me are not here anymore," he said. "I want to see them. That is my one and only hope."
Sakurai and Megumi met when they were at high school. They wrote each other letters. He said Megumi always paid great attention to events such as anniversaries because she used to try to do everything with all family members involved.
One such event was St. Valentine's Day, a month before the disaster. When he returned from work that day, Sakurai received a chocolate as a present from his younger daughter.
It was a moving moment. Manaka used to suffer from epilepsy when she was small. She had been diagnosed with a cerebral dysfunction and was attending a special-needs school.
"She made the chocolate with my wife, putting her heart and soul into it," Sakurai said. "I am filled with warm feelings just thinking of that moment. But it also makes my heart ache."
Ayaka would have graduated from the Yuriage junior high school last year. Sakurai long debated whether he should attend the graduation ceremony on March 10, 2012.
"I was scared," he said. "If I saw the children who used to play with Ayaka, I would be sad not to see her among them."
He finally decided to go, thinking that Ayaka would have wanted to graduate with her schoolmates.
Ayaka's school was among the buildings destroyed by the tsunami, so the graduation ceremony was held at a local elementary school instead.
A pale-faced Sakurai arrived at a gymnasium 10 minutes early. He could not raise his eyes and broke into tears as the ceremony progressed.
"When a teacher put Ayaka's photograph on a chair, I felt I should not have gone," he said.
At that moment, Sakurai might have got up and left if he had not recalled Ayaka's words.
A few days before the disaster, Ayaka had suddenly said: "Dad, I want you to be a kind and cool father forever."
Sakurai thought: "I can never look 'uncool' before her. If I had run away from that hall, I would never have been able to get back on my feet again."
Sakurai visits his family's graves on the 11th of each month. Manaka's former schoolmates have visited it, too, to offer flowers.
Sakurai has been invited to the graduation ceremony at Manaka's former school on March 15. That school is further inland and escaped the tsunami.
He is still undecided about whether to go.
"Each and every place in the school is intertwined with memories of Manaka," Sakurai said. "I can still remember her walking along the corridor with her teacher and playing inside the school building."
Today, Sakurai continues to work, holding down a job at a housing company. But he said he now cannot see why he works or even why he still lives.
People sometimes tell him he has to live to take care of the graves.
"But I have yet to find a path ahead of me," Sakurai said.
"Two years have passed since the disaster, and everyone else is moving forward," he said. "But I am still seized with the sense of my family's loss. I think it is becoming difficult even to speak about the feeling."