Into the Forbidden Zone by William T. Vollmann

season was still too early), we turned onto National Highway 288.
    Since he had been born in 1941, I asked him how he compared the dropping of the two atom bombs with the reactor accident, and he said, “There was a movie I saw as a child, a black-and-white movie, so vividly showing the ruins of Hiroshima and Bikini Island. Now, Koriyama is farther than the thirty-kilometer ring; in fact, it’s sixty; but if there’s a hydrogen explosion, I’m afraid that Koriyama may be in the forced evacuation zone. Having reached the age of seventy, if we’re told to evacuate, I said to my wife, where should we go, Sado or where? When I see the situation of evacuees, I don’t seem to be in a good condition! In Koriyama there are three evacuation centers, mainly from the forced evacuation ring around the reactor. Most people are in a hall called Big Palette, which can accommodate three thousand people. There’s also a baseball stadium which holds three or four hundred, and. . .”
    Night globes glowed in a roadside restaurant, and then at a gas station. We rolled across the Inasokamatsi River, then down through a cut tasseled with golden grass, a gray-green volcanic-shaped mountain projecting itself ahead upon the pale cloudy sky. An old man in a russet robe toiled slowly uphill toward his house, swaying from side to side. Presently we entered the municipality of Funehiki. The driver said, “You know Chernobyl? I watched on the news; there was a ninety-year-old woman who grows her own vegetables, lives alone, and gets sick occasionally but is basically fine.” How inspiring, I thought.
    Turning away from the route that led to the famous limestone caves, he said, “Where we are going is about forty kilometers from the plant. If you stay on this road, you will go straight there,” at which the back of my neck prickled slightly. “If you pass that point up there, you approach the mountain and then you go down again.”
    “Have you ever been there?”
    “Once. It was a tour. At that time we never thought this could happen.”
    That afternoon while we waited for the rain to stop, the interpreter and I had swallowed our Cold War–era potassium iodide tablets, courtesy of my friend Dave, who had purchased a bottle at some gun show. The bright yellow-green, crumbling pills were to be taken only in the event of fallout, said the label. (My tongue tingled for days and I got a rash; the interpreter remained unaffected.) In retrospect I am ashamed that we did not think to bring one along for our driver. Fortunately, the meter remained at 2.4.
    We entered the town of Tokiwa and stopped at the shrine. The mask had fogged up my glasses so badly that I pulled it off, gratefully inhaling the chilly air. The interpreter and I ascended the stone stairs. Above the wooden-slatted offering box, the immense corn-hued tassel, the size and proportions of a girl-child’s skirt, barely swayed in the breeze, ferruled (if that is the word) by a tall hexagon engraved with the name of the person who had dedicated it. Climbing the last wooden steps in stockinged feet as tradition requires, I peered into the windows of the place and, as usual, saw mostly darkness, interrupted by the reflection of that tassel behind me and by indistinct golden gleamings deep within. My heart revolted at slipping the mask back on, but I did, descending toward the pines and clouds and down to the steep edge of this high place, down the decrepit stone steps, which might have been damaged by the earthquake. I could smell the pines.
    Informing the driver that the dosimeter still indicated a safe amount of radiation, I asked whether he would be willing to take us farther.
    “Sure,” he laughed. “I’ll take you to the point where you can’t go anymore.”
    “The radio announces it every day,” he remarked. “For the past few days, this area has had a very low level.”
    So we drove up the road toward Futaba, the pallid roofs of houses fading into the low oaks. “This area