by Max Brooks
In Japan, hibakusha, “survivors of the bomb,” occupied a unique rung in our nation’s social ladder. We were treated with sympathy and sorrow: victims and heroes and symbols for every political agenda. And yet, as human beings, we were little more than social outcasts. No family would allow their child to marry us. Hibakusha were unclean, blood in Japans otherwise pristine genetic onsen. I felt this shame on a deeply personal level. Not only was I hibakusha, but my blindness also made me a burden.
Out the sanatorium’s windows I could hear the sounds of our nation struggling to rebuild itself. And what was my contribution to this effort, nothing!
So many times I tried inquiring about some manner of employment, some work no matter how small or demeaning. No one would have me. I was still hibakusha, and I learned so many polite ways to be rejected. My brother begged me to come and stay with him, insisting that he and his wife would take care of me and even find some “useful” task around the house. For me that was even worse than the sanatorium. He had just gotten back from the army and they were trying to have another baby. To impose on them at such a time was unthinkable. Of course, I considered ending my own life. I even attempted it on many occasions. Something prevented me, staying my hand each time I groped for the pills or broken glass. I reasoned it was weakness, what else could it be? A hibakusha, a parasite, and now a dishonorable coward. There was no end to my shame in those days. As the emperor had said in his surrender speech to our people, I was truly “enduring the unendurable.”
I left the sanatorium without informing my brother. I didn’t know where I was heading, only that I had to get as far from my life, my memories, myself, as possible. I traveled, begged mostly … I had no more honor to lose… until I settled in Sapporo on the island of Hokkaido. This cold, northern wilderness has always been Japan’s least populated prefecture, and with the loss of Sakhalin and the Kuriles, it became, as the Western saying goes, “the end of the line.”
In Sapporo, I met an Ainu gardener, Ota Hideki. The Ainu are Japan’s oldest indigenous group, and even lower on our social ladder than the Koreans.
Maybe that is why he took pity on me, another pariah cast out by the tribe of Yamato. Maybe it was because he had no one to pass his skills along to. His own son had never returned from Manchuria. Ota-san worked at the Akakaze, a former luxury hotel that now served as a repatriation center for Japanese settlers from China. At first the administration complained that they had no more funds to hire another gardener. Ota-san paid me out of his own pocket. He was my teacher and only friend, and when he died, I considered following him. But, coward that I was. I could not bring myself to do it. Instead I simply continued to exist, working silently in the earth as the Akakaze went from a repatriation center to a luxury hotel and Japan went from conquered rubble to economic superpower.
I was still working at the Akakaze when I heard of the first domestic outbreak. I was trimming the Western-style hedges near the restaurant, when I overheard several of the guests discussing the Nagumo murders. According to their conversation, a man had slain his wife, then set upon the corpse like some kind of wild dog. This was the first time I had heard the term “African rabies.” I tried to ignore it and get on with my work, but the next day there were more conversations, more hushed voices across the lawn and beside the pool. Nagumo was old news compared to the much more serious outbreak at Sumitomo Hospital in Osaka. And the next day there was Nagoya, then Sendai, then Kyoto. I tried to push their conversations from my mind. I had come to Hokkaido to escape from the world, to live out my days in shame and ignominy.
The voice that finally convinced me of danger came from the hotel’s manager, a stiff, no-nonsense salaryman with a very formal manner of speech. After the outbreak in Hirosaki, he held a staff meeting to try to debunk, once and for all, these wild rumors about dead bodies coming back to life. I had only his voice to rely on, and you can tell everything about a person by what happens when he opens his mouth. Mister Sugawara was pronouncing his words far too carefully, particularly his hard, sharp consonants. He was overcompensating for a previously conquered speech impediment, a condition that only threatened to rise in the presence of great anxiety. I had listened to this verbal defense mechanism before from the seemingly unflappable Sugawara-san, first during the ’95 quake, and again in ’98 when North Korea had sent a long-range, nuclear-capable “test missile” streaking over our homeland. Sugawara-san’s articulation had been almost imperceptible then, now it shrieked louder than the air-raid sirens of my youth.
And so, for the second time in my life, I fled. I considered warning my brother, but so much time had passed, I had no idea how to reach him or even it he was still alive. That was the last, and probably the greatest of all my dishonorable acts, the heaviest weight I will carry to my grave.
Why did you run? Were you afraid for your life?
Of course not! If anything I welcomed it! To die, to finally be put out of my lifelong misery was almost too good to be true… What I feared was, once again, becoming a burden to those around me. To slow someone down, to take up valuable space, to put other lives in danger if they tried to save an old blind man who wasn’t worth saving… and what if those rumors about the dead returning to life were true? What if I were to find myself infected and awake from death to threaten the lives of my fellow countrymen? No, that was not going to be the fate of this disgraced hibakusha. If I was to meet my death, it should be in the same manner as I had lived my life. Forgotten, isolated, and alone.
I left at night and began hitchhiking south down Hokkaido’s DOO Expressway. All I had with me was a water bottle, a change of clothes, and my ikupasuy,” a long, flat shovel similar to a Shaolin spade but which also served for many years as my walking stick. There was still a sizable amount of road traffic in those days-our oil from Indonesia and the Gulf was still flowing-and many truck drivers and private motorists were kind enough to give me a “ride.” With each and every one, our conversation turned to the crisis: “Did you hear that the Self Defense Force has been mobilized?”; “The government’s going to have to declare a state of emergency”; “Did you hear there was an outbreak last night, right here in Sapporo’” No one was sure what the next day would bring, how far the calamity would spread, or who would be its next victim, and yet, no matter whom I spoke to or how terrified they sounded, each conversation would inevitably end with “But I’m sure the authorities will tell us what to do.” One truck driver said, “Any day now, you’ll see, if you just wait patiently and don’t make a public fuss.” That was the last human voice I heard, the day before I left civilization and trekked into the Hiddaka Mountains.
I was very familiar with this national park. Ota-san had taken me here every year to collect sansai, the wild vegetables that attract botanists, hikers, and gourmet chefs from all over the home islands. As a man who often rises in the middle of the night knows the exact location of every item in his darkened bedroom, I knew every river and every rock, every tree and patch of moss. I even knew every onsen that bubbled to the surface, and therefore never wanted for a naturally hot and cleansing mineral bath. Every day I told myself “This is the perfect place to die, soon I will have an accident, a fall of some kind, or perhaps I will become ill, contract some sickness or eat a poisoned root, or maybe I will finally do the honorable thing and just stop eating altogether.” And yet, every day, I foraged and bathed, dressed warmly and minded my steps. As much as I longed for death, I continued to take whatever measures necessary to prevent it.
I had no way of knowing what was happening to the rest of my country. I could hear distant sounds, helicopters, fighter planes, the steady, high-altitude whine of civilian jetliners. Perhaps I was wrong, I thought, perhaps the crisis was over. For all I knew, the “authorities” had been victorious, and the danger was rapidly fading into memory. Perhaps my alarmist departure had done nothing more than create a welcome job opening back at the Akakaze and perhaps, one morning, I would be roused by the barking voices of angry park rangers,
or the giggles and whispers of schoolchildren on a nature hike. Something did arouse me from my sleep one morning, but not a collection of giggling students, and no, it wasn’t one of them either.
It was a bear, one of the many large, brown higuma roaming the Hokkaido wilderness. The higuma had originally migrated from the Kamchatka Peninsula and bore the same ferocity and raw power of their Siberian cousins. This one was enormous, I could tell by the pitch and resonance of his breathing. I judged him to be no more than four or five meters from me. I rose slowly, and without fear. Next to me lay my ikupasuy. It was the closest thing I had to a weapon, and, I suppose, if I had thought to use it as such, it might have made a formidable defense.
You didn’t use it.
Nor did I want it. This animal was much more than just a random, hungry predator. This was fate, I believed. This encounter could only be the will of the kami.
Who is Kami?
What is kami. The kami are the spirits that inhabit each and every facet of our existence. We pray to them, honor them, hope to please them and curry their favor. They are the same spirits that drive Japanese corporations to bless the site of a soon-to-be constructed factory, and the Japanese of my generation to worship the emperor as a god. The kami are the foundation of Shinto, literally “The Way of the Gods,” and worship of nature is one of its oldest, and most sacred principles.
That is why I believed their will was at work that day. By exiling myself into the wilderness, I had polluted nature’s purity. After dishonoring myself, my family, my country, I had at last taken that final step and dishonored the gods. Now they had sent an assassin to do what I had been unable to for so long, to erase my stink. I thanked the gods for their mercy. I wept as I prepared myself for the blow.
It never came. The bear stopped panting then released a high, almost childlike whimper. “What is wrong with you:” I actually said to a three-hundred-kilogram carnivore. “Go on and finish me!” The bear continued to whine like a frightened dog, then tore away from me with the speed of hunted prey. It was then that I heard the moan. I spun, tried to focus my ears. From the height of his mouth, I could tell he was taller than me. I heard one foot dragging across the soft, moist earth and air bubbling from a gaping wound in its chest.
I could hear it reaching out to me, groaning and swiping at empty air. I managed to dodge its clumsy attempt and snatched up my ikupasuy. I centered my attack on the source of the creature’s moan. I struck quickly, and the crack vibrated up through my arms. The creature fell back upon the earth as I released a triumphant shout of “Ten Thousand Years!”
It is difficult for me to describe my feelings at this moment. Fury had exploded within my heart, a strength and courage that drove away my shame as the sun drives the night from heaven. I suddenly knew the gods had favored me. The bear hadn’t been sent to kill me, it had been sent to warn me. I didn’t understand the reason right then, but I knew I had to survive until the day when that reason was finally revealed.
And that is what I did for the next few months: I survived. I mentally divided the Hiddaka range into a series of several hundred chi-tai. Each chi-tai contained some object of physical security-a tree or tall, flat rock-some place I could sleep in peace without the danger of immediate attack. I slept always during the day, and only traveled, foraged, or hunted at night. I did not know if the beasts depended on their sight as much as human beings, but I wasn’t going to give them even the most infinitesimal advantage.
Losing my vision had also prepared me for the act of ever-vigilant mobility. Those with sight have a tendency to take walking for granted; how else could they trip over something they’ve clearly seen? The fault lies not in the eyes, but in the mind, a lazy thought process spoiled by a lifetime of optic nerve dependency. Not so for those like me. I already had to be on guard for potential danger, to be focused, alert, and “watching my step,” so to speak. Simply adding one more threat was no bother at all. Every time I walked, it was for no longer than several hundred paces. I would halt, listen to and smell the wind, perhaps even press my ear to the ground. This method never failed me. I was never surprised, never caught off guard.
Was there ever a problem with long-range detection, not being able to see an attacker several miles away?
My nocturnal activity would have prevented the use of healthy eyesight, and any beast several kilometers away was no more a threat to me than I was to it. There was no need to be on my guard until they entered what you might call my “circle of sensory security,” the maximum range of my ears, nose, fingertips, and feet. On the best of days, when the conditions were right and Haya-ji was in a helpful mood, that circle extended as far as half a kilometer. On the worst of days, that range might drop to no more than thirty, possibly fifteen paces. These incidents were infrequent at best, occurring if I had done something to truly anger the kami, although I can’t possibly imagine what that would be. The beasts were a great help as well, always being courteous enough to warn me before attacking.
That howling alarm that ignites the moment they detect prey would not only alert me to the presence of an attacking creature, but even to the direction, range, and exact position of the attack. I would hear that moan wafting across the hills and fields and know that, in perhaps half an hour or so, one of the living dead would be paying me a visit. In instances such as these I would halt, then patiently prepare myself for the attack. I would unclasp my pack, stretch my limbs, sometimes just find a place to sit quietly and meditate. I always knew when they were getting close enough to strike. I always took the time to bow and thank them for being so courteous to warn me. I almost felt sorry for the poor mindless filth, to come all this way, slowly and methodically, only to end their journey with a split skull or severed neck.
Did you always kill your enemy on the first strike?
Always.
[He gestures with an imaginary ikupasuy.]
Thrust forward, never swing. At first I would aim for the base of the neck. Later, as my skills grew with time and experience, I learned to strike here …
[He places his hand horizontally against the indentation between the forehead and nose.]
It was a little harder than simple decapitation, all that thick tough bone, but it did serve to destroy the brain, as opposed to decapitation where the Living head would always require a secondary blow.
What about multiple attackers? Was that more of a problem?
Yes, in the beginning. As their numbers swelled, I began to find myself increasingly surrounded. Those early battles were… “untidy.” I must admit, I allowed my emotions to rule my hand. I was the typhoon, not the lightning bolt. During one melee at “Tokachi-dake,” I dispatched forty-one in as many minutes. I was washing bodily fluids from my clothes for a fortnight. Later, as I began to exercise more tactical creativity, I allowed the gods to join me on the battlefield. I would lead groups of beasts to the base of a tall rock, where I would crush their skulls from above. I might even find a rock that allowed them to climb up after me, not all at once, you understand, one by one, so I could knock them back into the jagged outcroppings below. I was sure to thank the spirit of each rock, or cliff, or waterfall that carried them over thousand-meter drops. This last incident was not something I cared to make a habit of. It was a long and arduous climb to retrieve the body.
You went after the corpse?
To burry it. I couldn’t just leave it there, desecrating the stream. It would not have been… “proper.”
Did you retrieve all the bodies?
Everry last one. That time, after Tokachi-dake, I dug for three days. The heads I always separated; most of the time I just burned them, but at Tokachi-dake, I threw them into the volcanic crater where Oyamatsumi’s rage could purge their stench. I did not completely understand why I committed these acts. It just felt correct, to separate the source of the evil.
The answer came to me on the eve of my second winter in exile. This would be my last night in the branches of a tall tree. Once the snow fell, I would
return to the cave where I had spent the previous winter. I had just settled in comfortably, watting for dawn’s warmth to lull me to sleep, when I heard the sound of footsteps, too quick and energetic to be a beast. Haya-ji had decided to be favorable that night. He brought the smell of what could only be a human being. I had come to realize that the living dead were surprisingly bereft of odor. Yes, there was the subtle hint of decomposition, stronger, perhaps, if the body had been turned for some time, or if chewed flesh had pushed through its bowels and collected in a rotting heap in its undergarments. Other than this, though, the living dead possessed what I refer to as a “scentless stink.” They produced no sweat, no urine, or conventional feces. They did not even carry the bacteria within their stomach or teeth that, in living humans, would have fouled their breath. None of this was true of the two-legged animal rapidly approaching my position. His breath, his body, his clothes, all had clearly not been washed for some time.
It was still dark so he did not notice me. I could tell that his path would take him directly underneath the limbs of my tree. I crouched slowly, quietly. I wasn’t sure if he was hostile, insane, or even recently bitten. I was taking no chances.
[At this point, Kondo chimes in.]
KONDO: He was on me before I knew it. My sword went flying, my feet collapsed from under me.
TOMONAGA: I landed between his shoulder blades, not hard enough to do any permanent damage, but enough to knock the wind out of his slight, malnourished frame.
