The day before the Tōhoku earthquake, I stopped on a hill in Tokyo to photograph it.

A plum tree was in full bloom. Behind its pink flowers stood a Japanese schoolgirl, her face hidden. Above them, the sky was grey but luminous, the kind of light that made the afternoon still.

It was March 10, 2011. Winter was giving way to spring. I had left a meeting and was walking back after lunch. I remember the energy of Tokyo, yet on that hill there was an unexpected calm, an anticipation of warmer days. I lingered, wanting to take it all in.

There was something I could not quite name — a strange pressure in the air. Twenty-four hours after I took the photograph, the earth shook. The sea followed, and the consequences reached far beyond the coast.

The ume blossoms were announcing spring. The earth was keeping its secret.

They told us to guard the town. Guard what? The town was empty. It had been emptied fast, from the look of things. They didn’t tell us where the townspeople were taken, or why. They said don’t touch anything.

We were supposed to patrol in pairs, but I walked off by myself. In a Main Street hardware store, the lights were on, but the aisles deserted. A pair of beige pumps lay unattended on a shoemaker’s counter. On a pharmacy floor, pill vials had spilled from a dropped bag.

A residential street was tree-lined but without birds. A Toyota stood in someone’s driveway, door ajar, engine running. I shut it off. I heard a cat crying inside the house. I went in. It rubbed against my ankles.

In the refrigerator, I found a package labeled PASTEURIZED PROCESS CHEESE FOOD.

The cat didn’t care. He ate it. He’d have starved otherwise.

When I was seven, running back from school under water-pregnant charcoal clouds propelled towards me by crazed wind, I was convinced that it was the end of the world. They were racing from the wrong side of the Judaean mountains, changing shapes, ready to consume me. I can’t remember why I was alone, along the forbidden shortcut knee-deep in mud, screaming for my mother. The wind blasted my screams back into my mouth. It was the first time I realised my pitiful smallness and was overwhelmed with hysterical fear.

I could see our white-washed house behind the wind-wall and rain. And then I saw my mother running towards me, faster than the wind behind her.