The Floodyear

A history of the 282nd Low Tide, written in its thirtieth year by Ume Kaji, schoolteacher of the north canals. It draws on the Ferry Guild's Floodyear ledgers, the Wall Office's report of the 284th Low Tide, the fishers' petition of the 279th, and the testimony of forty-six people who were there.

The old wall

Before the Floodyear, Seiran's sea wall stood further out than it does now. It ran from the Shell Quay along the length of the Point, a low spit of land that curved out into the bay, and ended at the foot of the lighthouse on the Point's tip. Behind it lay the fisher quarter: low stilt houses, drying racks, boat sheds and the smell of tar.

The old wall was wide enough to walk along, and on summer evenings it was the best place in the city to fly a kite. Children ran its whole length, out to the lighthouse steps and back, and their parents shouted at them to come down, and they did not.

It was also old. In the 279th Low Tide, two hundred and eleven households of the fisher quarter signed a petition to the Wall Office describing cracks along the Point "wide enough to post a letter through". The Wall Office acknowledged the petition and scheduled repairs for the 283rd Low Tide.

The night

The storm came on the twenty-second spring of the year, late in the summer, some sixty days before Low Tide. By midnight the sea was higher than anyone living had seen it.

The surge broke the old wall at the Point in three places. The fisher quarter flooded to the eaves in less time than it takes to tell. By morning the Point itself had gone under, and it never came back. The lighthouse on the tip was left standing on its own, in open water.

The dead

Four hundred and twelve people died in the Floodyear. Forty-one of them were children, most from the fisher quarter.

The city knows the number exactly because of the lanterns. On the morning after the storm, lanterns appeared at the windows of every room where someone who had died had slept. Some of those windows were in houses the water had reached. The lanterns burned there anyway. The guild's clerks went from house to house by boat, writing every name down.

The Wall Office's report gives three hundred and ninety-seven, counting only the dead named by their families. The other fifteen are in the guild's ledgers: lanterns that appeared in lodging houses and in the cabins of boats along the Shell Quay, for people who slept in Seiran that night and were not from it. Nobody came to claim them. The guild wrote each one down as "a traveller". The city uses the guild's figure.

The four nights

That year's Low Tide carried the four hundred and twelve and the year's other lanterns, close to nine hundred more, and it could not be done in one night. The guild rowed out on four nights in a row, each on the ebb.

The three lantern-making houses worked together in the Oda workshop for forty days to make enough bow lanterns.

On the third night, some lanterns did not go out at the Markers. They drifted on past the posts, still lit, then slowed, and began to come back against the ebb. Two ferries went out beyond the Markers to meet them: the Grey Heron, steered by Mother Tsuru of East Landing with five oars, and the Little Wren, steered by Noriko Hase with four. Fog came down behind them. Neither ferry came back.

Their lanterns appeared at their own windows the next morning. The guild rowed them out the following year.

At the assembly after the Floodyear, the guild wrote the rule of the Markers into its customs: no ferry goes beyond them.

The new wall

The Wall Office began the new sea wall in the 283rd Low Tide, further inland. The master mason, Gen Takata, built it from new stone and from the stones of the old wall that divers raised from the Point. In its middle he set the sea gate: a stone arch, opened once a year for the lantern ferries. The new wall was finished in the 289th Low Tide.

The lighthouse

It still stands, past the Markers, in open water. The Harbour Office moved the harbour light to the sea gate tower in the 284th Low Tide and has listed the old lighthouse as unlit ever since.

Fishers coming home late say that on clear nights there is a light at its top. The Harbour Office has not changed its list.

Where the sources disagree

• The hour. The Shell Quay bell-keeper, Goro Tanabe, rang the alarm "at the third hour after midnight". The Wall Office report says the wall failed "shortly after the second hour". Both may be right, since the wall broke in three places. The north canals' song Over the Wall puts it at "the hour the cats came in", which is no help.
• The petition. The Wall Office report says the repairs could not have been brought forward. The fishers say they had been promised them since the 276th. The report never mentions the petition.
• The ferries. The guild's ledgers say the Grey Heron and the Little Wren followed returning lanterns past the Markers. The Harbour Office says they were lost among the drowned stones of the Point, which had not been charted, and that "returning lanterns" are a guild story. The guild has never replied to this, which is its way of replying.

A note on sources

The guild's Floodyear ledgers fill four volumes, one for each night. They are kept in the archive at East Landing. I was allowed to read them on condition that Mother Sabe sat in the room. She did not say a word in nine days, and on the last day she made me tea.