Photo/Illutration Takahito Kakuda on Jan. 29 sits on a sofa at his home in Kanazawa and recalls his wife and son, who died in the Noto Peninsula earthquake. (Hiroyuki Kojima)

KANAZAWA--Company employee Takahito Kakuda slept in the same room with his wife, Hiromi, and their 9-year-old son, Akinori, every night.

It was his job to put his son to bed.

The third-grader was so sweet that he always said, “It’s OK, I can tuck myself in,” out of concern for his busy father.

Laying out the futons for the family of three and gazing at his son’s untroubled, sleeping face--those were normal days for Kakuda, 47. 

Then he lost both Hiromi, 43, and son in the Noto Peninsula quake on New Year's Day.

It took about 10 days to hold a funeral service for them. Kakuda laid a futon between their two coffins and slept at the funeral home every night until the service.

“They are my family,” he said. “I believe that families should always be together. I didn’t want to leave them.”

The Kakudas lived in Kanazawa. On Jan. 1, they visited Kakuda’s parents in Suzu, Ishikawa Prefecture.

In the early afternoon, the family went to a shrine and drew fortunes, laughing and saying to each other, “We are all lucky with money.”

That late afternoon, as they were getting ready to return to Kanazawa, the earthquake struck.

The one-story family home collapsed. Kakuda and his parents were able to get out, but his wife and son were nowhere in sight.

“Hiromi! Akinori!” he shouted their names.

He heard a knocking “pow pow pow” sound coming from inside the collapsed house.

His son was knocking against the rubble, probably trying to show where he was. Kakuda followed the sound until it suddenly stopped, as if the boy knew his father had heard it.

Kakuda pushed himself into a gap in the rubble. He saw his wife and son lying with fallen beams on their heads and faces.

He heard a wheezing sound--his son’s breathing. But his wife had no reaction at all.

The boy had a beam on his chin, preventing him from speaking. His face was turned toward his mother, who was lying next to him.

“‘Please save mom.’ I think that’s what he wanted to tell me,” Kakuda said. “He was a son who always worried about his parents more than himself.”

Kakuda frantically cut the beams with saws borrowed from his neighbors. About an hour and a half after the quake, he pulled them from the rubble. But they were already gone.

He wrapped their bodies in blankets and blue tarps.

Kakuda’s parents’ house was in an isolated village. He did not know if there was a morgue, so he laid them in the grass near the house and stayed by them until the following day.

The Self-Defense Forces arrived on the third day of the disaster and took the bodies to a nearby morgue.

It was difficult to find a funeral home that would accept them. On the 10th day after the disaster, they were taken to a funeral home in Kanazawa.

Kakuda continued to sleep beside his family every night until Jan. 20, shortly before the funeral service.

He placed a kimono in Hiromi’s coffin and a new school uniform in Akinori’s casket.

“I just wanted to send them off like they are saying, ‘I’m heading out! See you!’” he said. “They are just on an outing.”

Since the funeral, Kakuda has lived in his family home in Kanazawa alone.

It is impossible for him to sleep alone in the same bedroom his family used to share every night, he said. So he sleeps on the sofa in the living room instead.

Near the sofa is his son’s black school bag. On top of it is an assignment dated Dec. 30.

The clothing his wife had hung to dry still hangs on the laundry rack.

“Time has stopped,” Kakuda said. “I think there are feelings within me that I don’t want to realize or admit yet.”

Sometimes Kakuda opens the bedroom door and takes a peek inside, thinking perhaps his wife and son are sleeping there.

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