A TINY creek and its valley blooming with purple irises in an abandoned village in Fukushima prefecture is called the Whispering Passage. A handwritten wooden sign urges visitors to drink water trickling from a bamboo pipe from the "god of the mountain" above. The effect is ruined by the wailing of a Geiger counter: the sacred water is laced with caesium-137, as are the flora and fauna of the surrounding village. Pasted onto the window of the house opposite are short poems that, in defiant tones, mock Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO), owner of the disaster-stricken Fukushima nuclear-power plant nearby. One is very like a haiku: "Crying in temporary housing. Thank you, TEPCO. Almost 15 months since the tsunami and nuclear accident, the pain of evacuation lingers for many of the 100,000 or so people dislodged by invisible radiation. Jotaro Wakamatsu, an anti-nuclear poet who lives on the edge of the 20km (12.5-mile) evacuation zone around the plant, has written verses inspired by the suicides of four local people. They include a 93-year-old who hanged herself, saying in her farewell note that the only evacuation she now wanted was to a graveyard. Most evacuees either rent homes paid for out of TEPCO compensation money, or live in temporary accommodation just big enough for futons, a television and a fridge. Even in the towns hosting temporary accommodation, levels of radiation are often above the standard international limit. Parents remain anxious about their children's health. In April the government eased restrictions on some villages in the exclusion zone, saying that areas with annual doses of radiation below 20 millisieverts (mSv) a year are safe to visit - provided residents do not stay overnight. Yet the effort has so far been vexed. Villagers say that despite work decontaminating the soil, many radioactivity hotspots above 20mSv a year still exist. In the Whispering Passage, the Geiger counter measures above 100mSv a year. Much of the water supply is not working. There is still a lot of earthquake and tsunami rubble about but, because it is radiated, it cannot be disposed of. Worst of all, there are no jobs: farmers cannot plant rice and fishermen cannot catch fish. Indeed, one common complaint among evacuees is that the government's whole decontamination effort is a red herring. It pushes resolution of their problems so far into the future that by then their children will be too settled into new schools to move back home. Their communities will be scattered and forgotten about. A hint of new thinking, however, may offer a bit of hope for evacuees. Yoshio Ando of the government's new Reconstruction Agency says that temporary towns may be built next to existing municipalities. Into these would go former residents of the four towns, Futaba, Okuma, Namie and Tomioka, closest to the nuclear plant. These temporary towns would have their own schools, shops and facilities. That, he said, would at least prevent communities from collapsing. Many obstacles would have to be overcome under such a plan, including how local taxes should be collected and disbursed. But consultations are being held among evacuated communities and in towns that might adopt them, to see if solutions can be found. Locals like the idea, but some are still distrustful. "It's like a picture of sticky rice cake," says Morihisa Kanoya, an elderly fisherman from Namie who now lives in a tiny temporary home far from the sea. He means that it is pie in the sky. Others, though, see the first, admittedly tentative, sign that reconstruction really is starting at last.