Return to Hiroshima

by Bob Van Laerhoven

  “Then I must love Reizo in your language.” She giggles, again shielding her mouth with her left hand. “Reizo is talented, I’m convinced of that. But he has a strong death wish.”

  “I expect that makes him artistically interesting,” Xavier Douterloigne remarks calmly. “But it must be very tiring, I guess.”

  She shrugs again. “I can’t complain. If a man isn’t dynamite what use is he? Most men are so blinkered and moody. I like them better when they’re weighted down with mental burdens. I’ve been pushing him too much to finish his book recently. It drove him mad, so he used his knife to teach me a lesson. He’s writing about a future in which Japan is an authoritarian police state. The young are considered dangerous. When they turn seventeen, they’re dropped on an island, where they’re filmed by television cameras, fighting each other to the death like the gladiators of old.”

  Yori takes a large mouthful of tuna fish and dashi, a sour broth based on seaweed and soy sauce.

  “The plot might seem a bit over the top, but it’s actually cool,” she says. Xavier thinks the way she purses her lips to pronounce the word “cool” is hilarious. “I’ve read a few chapters. Blood and sadism, right? He writes about a Japan that’s concealed in each and every one of us.”

  “My sister kept a diary,” Douterloigne says. It was out before he knew it. Yori ignores the past tense. “I thought you were an only child.”

  “Only son. I’ve got a sister, Anna.” Xavier bends down to fish Anna’s grey, misshapen diary from his suitcase and puts it on the table between them. Yori looks at it, but doesn’t touch it. “She’s in a wheelchair,” Xavier says. He’s not a very good liar and he has a feeling his words sound artificial and hesitant.

  “Was she born with a handicap?”

  Xavier leans back. “No. It’s only been a little over a year.”

  “How did it happen?”

  Yori watches the tall blonde Xavier take a deep breath. He looks away from her. “I’d rather not say.”

  This kindles her interest. “Why not?”

  The European is starting to feel very ill at ease, she can tell. Yori licks her lips. “I’m a child of hibakusha myself. My parents were just children when the bomb was dropped. They survived, but it left them scarred. So they were bullied, humiliated and excluded.” Yori pats her stomach. “We, their descendants, are handicapped on the inside. Genetic time bombs, is what we are. My father only lived to be thirty-six, my mother just made it to forty-nine.”

  “Descendants,” Xavier says. “That’s a beautiful word. It isn’t used much.”

  Yori laughs again and presents her face in profile, mimicking the pose of a modest Japanese woman subtly trying to seduce a man. Xavier finds the cast-down eyes especially convincing. Realising he’s rumbled her, she lifts her chin and looks up. Xavier isn’t sure what she wants from him, but he’s content to be sitting here opposite her. It makes him think his trip might turn out to be what he wanted it to be after all: a journey through the past, to a time before Anna’s injury.

  “Did your sister change once she needed a wheelchair?” Yori asks. “So much that you thought she was a different person?”

  “Before, she was always where the action was. Afterwards...” He doesn’t finish the sentence, casting around the room again as if looking for an escape route. “Why do you ask?”

  “Because a different situation can change people dramatically. Not that long ago, Reizo was an ultra-nationalist, then he joined a crazy sect with weird ideas. Now he thinks the emperor should be deified again, that Japan should assemble a powerful army and show foreigners the door. His views on men and women changed at the same time. He disapproves of my desire for freedom and is constantly needling me, to prove that he’s the boss. He often has me shadowed by a bunch of thugs, and accuses me of going out with other men. He doesn’t want me to have anyone else, but at the same time he neglects me. He’s stopped working on his novel. He says he has bigger fish to fry, something about alpha energy.” She giggles. “If you ask me all that alpha stuff is just an excuse for not writing. He’s afraid he’s not talented enough.”

  Again, Xavier doubts Yori is telling the truth. She might be trying to arouse his pity so she can make her move. Young Japanese women are mercilessly competitive and seducing a Westerner would give her a serious edge on them.

  Xavier is flattered, despite his reservations. He’s also starting to feel agitated. If anyone knows how cruel fate can be, how it can change a life, he does. He came back to Japan to remember how happy he and Anna had been. That was the only reason. A crazy reason, maybe, but the only one. Xavier needs to remember Anna the way she was before the wheelchair. Only then can he continue his life.

  “Perhaps you’re his obsession,” says Xavier.

  Her answer surprises him: “Reizo is just a boy, wild and crazy. You look like someone with an obsession.”

  Xavier Douterloigne is still thinking about her words when they leave the restaurant fifteen minutes later. Outside, three young men are waiting for them. They appear from nowhere, and before Xavier fully grasps what’s going on, they’ve grabbed his arms and put him in a headlock. He tries to shout, but he can’t. They drag him into an old Volkswagen van. He attempts to catch a glimpse of Yori out of the corner of his eye. In vain.

  18

  Hiroshima – the Suicide Club squat – Mitsuko –

  night, March 13th/14th 1995

  The night seems never-ending. I’m drifting on an ocean of remembered fragments. Not a raft in sight. If it goes on like this, I’ll drown.

  I kept a diary when I was a teenager, as I imagine most young girls did. I stopped after I found I’d written words, even sentences, that I didn’t understand. They were in a foreign language. The handwriting was mine, but the characters that filled the pages were incomprehensible. A chill ran down my spine every time I encountered those perplexing pages. Then it would switch seamlessly to sentences I recognised and remembered, as if the automatic writing had suddenly stopped.

  Images of a young woman – me? – biting a man’s shoulder appear in my mind’s eye. The man: the one I called Mayumi?

  What was he doing to me?

  Or me to him?

  When I became aware of my sexuality, and started stealing glances at the torsos of the seamen who delivered provisions to Hashima, I discovered my body could be a source of pleasure, but also disgust and aggression. My father said the seamen were a lesser species. I was above them on the evolutionary ladder. So why didn’t it feel that way? Looking at their young, nimble bodies, their unashamedly hairy armpits, the way they bent over while unloading our supply boats, I felt clumsy and grotesque. In my father’s study, I’d found video tapes of people mating. I watched them when my father was off the island. It struck me that all the actors were blonde Westerners from a distant and unashamedly cold land. Hairy as apes and just as unselfconscious, they smiled and looked into each other’s eyes while copulating. It looked like aerobics. I imagined they were big children, my children. I learned to pleasure myself, but what I enjoyed most was picturing the surprised faces of the cream-skinned people on the screen when I joined them, naked. In my fantasies, they always looked submissive. I despised them for hiding the fact that my body shocked them. They bowed low, cringing like domestic animals, and obeyed my every command. I would tolerate their presence or send them away. It all depended on my mood.

  Afterwards, when the fantasies subsided, shame inevitably rushed in, filling me with a sense of my own emptiness.

  19

  Hiroshima – the Righa Royal Hotel – Beate Becht –

  night, March 13th/14th 1995

  Beate Becht has decided the cover photo on the Japanese magazine on her bed is a coincidence. But its resemblance to Satsuo Nakata’s photo from fifty years ago is still chilling. She thinks back to the portraits her father took of the Japanese photographer. She was only
a child at the time, but the short and shrivelled man with thin wisps of hair combed carefully over his balding scalp looked exotic to her. Papa travelled all over the world while she stayed behind at boarding school. Beate still remembers dreading the way her father’s Japanese colleague always looked at the camera sideways, as if ashamed, or in the process of hatching some devious plan. Hermann Becht first met Nakata while shooting a photo reportage about the Niigata earthquake victims in 1964, a year before his daughter was born. Hermann had travelled to Japan to cover the Olympics in Tokyo. Shortly before the games were opened, an earthquake struck the Niigata region, killing hundreds of people. Becht, the misery-addict, immediately left for Niigata. Years later, he would tell his daughter bitter-sweet stories about his encounter with Satsuo Nakata in Niigata. Shortly after the nuclear attack on Hiroshima, the Japanese photographer had taken pictures only eight hundred metres away from the epicentre of the explosion. Despite her tender age, Beate understood that her father was jealous of his colleague’s achievement. Nakata had told Hermann Becht an endless stream of stories about what he had seen and heard, which Becht later passed on to his ten-year old daughter without noticing the shock on her face. More than twenty years later, Beate still feels the fear and disgust the stories evoked in her. She gets up from the hotel bed and takes Lens from her suitcase, one of her father’s books, an overview of his career in pictures and text. She studies a self-portrait of Hermann Becht in Chernobyl. He’s standing in a doorway dressed in a shabby-looking radiation suit with the background brightly lit. The suits turned out not to be proper radiation suits at all. The Soviet authorities couldn’t afford the real thing and distributed cheap gas suits instead, which offered little if any protection against radiation. The deceit was kept secret for a long time. Beate hears her father’s voice in its customary flat, drawling tone, as if he’s standing next to her: radiation victims have between twenty-five and thirty bowel movements a day… with blood and slime. The skin on their arms and legs starts to burst…

  Beate looks at her father’s eyes in the picture. He seems surprised by something. His right hand is holding the camera like a weapon, barrel pointing upwards.

  Beate rolls onto her back and stares at the ceiling. After a minute, she picks up the book again. She finds what she’s looking for; a story Nakata told her father about something he had witnessed in Hiroshima that had etched itself in his memory. A young artist had accosted Nakata outside the ruins of his house and told him what had happened to his family. Hermann Becht had published the story verbatim in Lens to commemorate the suffering caused by the atomic bomb. His daughter has read it many times, always wondering why that particular story had made her decide to go to Hiroshima.

  * * *

  “I was heavily burnt when I came round. My wife looked terrible too. Our children? I tried to call them. Was that my voice? I was croaking like a frog, unable to utter an intelligible word. I walked a few paces, stumbled over something. A man. I didn’t recognise him; he looked as if he had been roasted in an oven. To my great surprise, he was still alive. ‘Leave me, children,’ he whispered. ‘Run!’ The voice sounded like a dog barking but it was familiar all the same. Only then did I realise it was my father’s voice. But looking at him, I thought: no, it isn’t him, it can’t be. ‘Hurry!” he screamed in his dog voice. It is him, I thought. I ran to get water, but couldn’t find anything, just rubble, and acrid white dust covering everything. Everywhere I looked I saw fire and sooty smoke, and a red glow in the few houses that were still half standing, illuminating them from within like lanterns. I went back, looked at my father’s contorted face, his pain, the throes of death. No, I thought, it’s not him after all. At that moment, my wife tripped – not over an adult, but over the body of our youngest child Masaru, a baby scarcely two weeks old, swollen almost beyond recognition, distended by a force from within. Our infant son was the colour of fried liver. My wife was inconsolable. The blaze from the houses further down the street was getting closer. My wife tore at her hair, and to my horror, clumps of it came out in her hands. Her skin was covered in scorch marks that kept changing shape, abscesses bursting open, a dark, thick fluid oozing out. I dragged her away, screaming that our children must both be dead and that we would die soon too if we didn’t move quickly. She resisted, with a strength I didn’t know she had in her. In the rubble of our house she had spotted some paintbrushes and paint from my studio. The paint in the open pots had evaporated in the heat, but two of the pots were still closed. I saw her staring and stopped trying to pull her away. She had gone insane, there was no other explanation. I wanted to leave her behind. She grabbed my arm. Her voice trembled as she begged one last favour of me, a token of respect for Masaru, to wish him well before we left him behind. I did what she asked; it took me less than a minute. Out on the street, we noticed a stranger. He looked at us with a contorted smile, eyes as hard as marbles. He was taking pictures of the destruction. I don’t know why I approached him. I told him I’d painted a tribute to our divine emperor on the corpse of my youngest son, that I’d done it for my wife, but that I cursed the emperor myself. He nodded as if that was a matter of course, jerked his arm away and walked towards the blaze, to our house, where I saw him bend over the corpse of my dear, innocent Masaru… The camera clicked again and again, and while I knew it wasn’t possible, the sound rang in my ears like shots from a cannon …”

  * * *

  In her mind’s eye, Beate Becht pictures Satsuo Nakata walk through the rubble in the surreal light. The man bends over, peers at the dead, distended infant and takes photos from all sides. She looks at the reproduction of Nakata’s picture in Lens, then at the cover photo of the Japanese magazine. The two deformed babies are identical.

  Beate wonders whether she’d be capable of such a thing, taking pictures of a tiny corpse in a place where death reigns supreme. How could Nakata have ignored the risk to his own life? What drove men like her father and his Japanese colleague to sacrifice their lives to bear witness, to testify? She’ll never understand. In the past months, she’s often wondered what she’s hoping to achieve with her new book project. Is she trying to expose the cruelty of the human race? Or exorcise her own ghosts?

  She calls the project a homage to her father and it’s the reason for her stay in Hiroshima. Becht has collected her father’s unpublished photographs, ranging from his last pictures taken during the Gulf War in Baghdad, portraits of babies with AIDS in South Africa and child soldiers from Angola, to an astonishing series about the zeru zeru, Tanzanian albino children who are hunted down and murdered for their hair, skin and bones, which magicians grind to juju powders believed to turn any man into a sex god. Beate uses the material in collages, combining it with her own punk photos, in which her models – teetering on the balance between male and female – parade their hidden sexual fears and aggressions. She wants to end on a completely different note: a serene series on Hiroshima during the fiftieth anniversary commemoration of Little Boy on August 6th. They’re planning a nocturnal procession with lanterns illuminating prayers for peace painted on huge silk banners. Beate is hoping it’ll be surreal, like a fairy-tale. She wants to stay in the city for the next couple of weeks, soak up the atmosphere, and then come back in August. A number of famous writers have agreed to contribute pieces on war and violence to her book. The project looks good on paper – her publisher leered at her when they signed the contract and waved his trademark silk handkerchief – but for some reason Beate has been feeling low for over six months. Her shrink, who charges ninety marks an hour, said something about an existential-artistic depression with symptoms of a deep-seated father complex. The brylcreamed psych licked his lips and rattled on about “affectivity issues” and “bisexual impulses”. He prescribed Clonazepan, Anafranil and Valium, but they didn’t seem to help. One minute she felt listless, the next overwrought. Patience and a new appointment. These things take time, her psychiatrist pointed out, especially with someone as sensitive as you. Bea
te takes another look at the baby on the magazine cover, and then at the picture Nakata took after Little Boy had fallen.

  Twin brothers?

  20

  Hiroshima – the Suicide Club squat – Kabe-cho – Mitsuko –

  night, March 13th/14th 1995

  Chronology. The word haunts me. Have years of loneliness eroded my memory, or am I a person without chronology? “God is omnipresent, even in the smallest parts of himself.” Reizo’s pompous words have stuck in my mind for some reason. After all, my father was revered as a god by some. I don’t believe that a lack of chronology drives you mad. But with a mind like mine, a mind that wants to shine its light into every hidden corner of my being, what does it do?

  “Revered as a god by some.” Easy to say, perhaps, but it’s only when you really think about the situation that you realise how weird it is. I took the veneration of my father for granted, but “some” didn’t refer to just anyone; they were men of high social standing. As a people, we adore secrets. We form underground brotherhoods that have tattooed a cult of complex rituals, mutual dependence, bloodlines and ethereal goals onto the map of our society. The Yuzonsha, the society of my father’s followers, is one such a brotherhood. I tried to listen in to one of their meetings in February 1994, a little over a year ago. I’ll never forget it. It marked an irreversible turning point in my life. Lying on a hard mattress, in this damp space that was never meant to be lived in, I relive the scene as if I’m sitting in the old Hashima cinema, watching it like a war film from long ago, with a cast of black-and-white characters I don’t know and can barely understand.

  21

  Hashima Island – an old block of flats –

  Rokurobei, the Yuzonsha and Mitsuko – February 15th 1994