AWOL on the Shore of Dream

Dressed in nothing but briefs, I found myself swaying from side to side along with the furniture, the floor and just about everything on the thirtieth floor of the hotel. I hadn’t been used to skyscrapers dance like willow leaves. I was just about to take a bath, but now hygiene had taken a back-seat in my mind. I remembered elevators were not to be used at a time like this and the idea of me running down thousands of stairs in my underwear seemed mighty ridiculous. I decided to wait it out—it was probably only an aftershock after all.
It all started two weeks before. I was just getting ready to pay for my groceries in the one-floor supermarket when everything started to shake. Since I come from a country mostly spared from natural disasters, I relied on the natives to be a litmus paper for how much I was to freak out. My very first earthquake, I though, and looked at the young Japanese man at the register, who continued placing my fruit in the basket unperturbed. Ha, these people eat such earthquakes for breakfast like cereal. Or miso soup.
But the trembles didn’t cease, they grew even more violent and the man in the red shop uniform seemed restless, paying less and less attention to my groceries. I’d learned that the Japanese are reserved people and their emotional reactions seem—to us, Westerners—subdued, so I rightly interpreted the man’s hesitation as mortal dread.
I left my groceries unattended and moved to a nearby exit, dutifully waiting until the line of retired people cleared out. On a parking lot outside a group of my friends, foreign students like me, gathered. We looked on at the city and I realized how inappropriate the word quake was. It felt like being onboard a small boat, asphalt swaying underneath you. The buildings on the horizon were theatre props being reassembled—imagine painted plates of wood moving around on stage to create an effect of sea waves.
As soon as the ground became reasonably passive I went back in to get my groceries. The electricity was out, but my register turned out to be just the one among the twenty others to have a backup generator. Behind it, a single neat line of shoppers snaked into the darkness. Except for a few fallen cans, there was little damage.
On my way home, I meant to ask somebody whether this kind of quake is an annual, semi-annual or a more frequent occurrence. There was nobody around and I only later learned that the most recent comparable natural catastrophe that happened here in Japan was in 1923.