“If a body is taken into the ocean and disappears,” Takagi told me, “it’s hard to say what happens to it. No one ever really knows how the sea moves or flows. If a body is pulled down to a certain depth, it stays there. If it catches in fishing equipment, it might float across the Pacific and turn up in Hawaii. A body in the sea will mostly become soft as cheese, so that if you touch it, the skin falls apart. In other cases the body may become encased in a substance called grave wax that makes it turn hard like plaster.” For grave wax to form, which can happen when the body’s fat decomposes, the body usually needs to be in a cold, wet, oxygen-free environment, he explained. If a body floats, it’s not grave wax. “Decomposition may take anywhere from a few days to several years,” Takagi said. “In Onagawa, after the tsunami, it would have taken about half a year to become ‘cheese’ and a year or two for the flesh to decompose completely, so that all that’s left are bones.” But it depends on the season, he said, and other variables, including sea animals who might eat the body. He described a body with flesh on its back but with no flesh on its stomach. “I think animals ate it,” he said.

A month after the tsunami, the air and water were cold, so the bodies had only just begun to decompose. A muddy cornea here, he said, a green belly there. There were some bodies floating on the surface of the ocean, but most of the bodies were on shore. If a body was found with foam bubbling from its mouth or nose, it meant the person was still breathing underwater before dying. When we think of a tsunami, Takagi told me, we think about drowning, but people also died as a result of hypothermia or blunt trauma (they washed up missing an arm or a leg). There were burn victims, too. In Ishinomaki, a school bus floating on the surface of the wave caught fire, and a search team recovered four charred children. “Only kids,” Takagi said, “with milk teeth.”

A few years ago, a tsunami victim washed up on the shore of Ibaraki as a skeleton with clothes on and bits of tissue on its chest. Clothes float and take longer to decompose than flesh, and so sometimes bones return in the shape of a body, held together by coats, pants, gloves and sneakers.

The people who lived in the mountains, where the houses were stacked atop one another, between cliffs and trees, wouldn’t have seen the tsunami coming. But those who lived in the rice fields did. In these flat areas, the tsunami traveled about four miles inland at a speed that gave hundreds of residents time to react but not escape. The supervisors at an elderly care home near the rice fields decided to put all the residents in one room. The elderly were discovered, all dead, with their medical tubes and equipment still attached. “I worked on these, too,” Takagi said. “I saw 300, 400 bodies lined up in a school gymnasium. I’m traumatized, and I will never forget.”

On a Friday morning, Takamatsu and I toured the routes he made years ago when he searched for Yuko on land. We drove on twisting seaside roads. He noted the shaggy cedar trees, the graveyard he crossed to get to the beach with the squeaking sand. There were forests of black pine and overlooks of amaranth and silver grass. After the tsunami, in the thaw of spring, he followed snowmelt on its way to the sea. At Tsukahama Beach, he showed me the dark waters along the concrete port where Michiko Tanno was found. Takamatsu was skittish and walked in a circuitous pattern. We found a pile of purple starfish stashed like cookies behind a mound of old fishnet. He dipped his fingers into a pile of rope and watched crabs scatter. I followed him up a ladder to the top of a concrete wall, about five feet high, that separated a length of dock from the ocean. He put his hands on his hips and squinted at the water. There was nothing. We went to another spot where the seafloor was sparkled with bathroom tiles popular 40 years ago, light blue and dark blue. Plates, bowls and a microwave. On one of his dives, he saw a clock stopped forever at the hour of the tsunami.