All the buildings on Hashima Island were disintegrating. From the top floor of a block that had remained more or less intact, I watched the members of Yuzonsha wade with dignity through the rubble of slate-grey structures that had collapsed decades ago. The clouds hiding the moon took the shape of a dragon, dark and menacing, only its head glowing with silvery light. A row of red lamps marked the path leading to the spiral staircase, known as “the stairs to hell” by superstitious fishermen. The massive balconies of the half-collapsed neighbouring block were leaning against it, their haphazard shapes shrouded in the lamplight and the darkness. Our classical poets called the night the mother of our fears. If that’s true, my father was her lover. His display of decorum struck me as simply theatrical, but it worked on his followers.
I was in my father’s study. The building was fitted with powerful generators. The room was full of the latest Toshiba desktop computers, with access to the Internet. We received radio and television stations, and owned a brand-new satellite telephone, the type reserved for high ranking army officials. The technology was in its infancy then and the quality of the connection left much to be desired. The person on the other end often sounded as if they were speaking underwater. That was what my father’s voice sounded like in my dreams, when he got angry at me for trying to convince him that I wasn’t like him. I rebelled, like all teenage girls. On television, and later Internet, I discovered a world completely different from the one I lived in. Father said this was our destiny as forerunners of a new race. It sounded too far-fetched to me. Besides, the mirror didn’t lie. I saw us as failures of nature. I wanted to know how that had happened. My father only answered: Shoganai. We are as we are. By sheer willpower and ruthless ambition – and as I later realised resentment – my father tried to twist our abnormality into a mark of superiority. But I couldn’t do the same. He kept insisting I had no right to be different from him. What had made him so sure? I decided that to understand my father, I’d have to plumb the depths of his past. One of his characteristics that baffled and sometimes frightened me was his changeability. I’ve never seen him at peace with himself or others. I believed his restlessness was a flight from himself. When I told him what I thought and used examples to back up my theory, he just threw back his head and laughed. He called me his “personal little soul shepherd”.
But was I wrong? One moment, he was urging scientists of Yuzonsha to conduct genetic experiments and extensive research on artificial intelligence. The next, he was obsessed with the idea that Japan would have to go to war with China, the “Sleeping Dragon”, if it wanted to maintain its dominant position in Asia. At the same time, a rifle through his personal documents taught me that he was one of the biggest importers of drugs from the Chinese province of Yunnan, a place alive with the brightest poppy fields and the darkest rivers. The rivers seemed to flow in parallel lines and on a map they looked man-made, but in truth the water irrigating the red and green poppy fields came directly from the Himalayas.
My father’s mind worked like a Tibetan prayer wheel, turning high on a desolate mountain, and powered by a force he considered divine. He tried to impress on the Yuzonsha that he wanted to pioneer bold scientific innovations that would lift Japan out of the economic crisis. Coming from him, even the most megalomaniac plans and projects always seemed to make some kind of sense. But I had also read his former physician Hayashi’s medical files, which my father had kept all that time, and I knew that he was just as preoccupied with his bizarre origins, the shadowy stories about his birth, and the World War II legends he’d absorbed as a sixteen-year-old.
The pieces of the jigsaw puzzle I was patiently assembling didn’t help me see the bigger picture. I refused to accept that an intelligent man like my father, a cunning and formidable leader, believed himself to be the embodiment of the old Japanese nature spirit Rokurobei. And yet he never deviated from this conviction in conversations with me, no matter how I tried to prove its absurdity. Should I have taken this as a sign of insanity? What did that say about me? What did I see in the mirror? Just like my father, I towered over his bodyguards; my neck was abnormally long, my features crooked, my hands and feet elongated. I couldn’t hear the word “beautiful” without flinching. While his appearance gave him power and confidence, mine made me shy and miserable. I hardly ever left the island. My father often crossed over to the mainland at night, where he issued orders to loyal Yuzonsha members. He worked hard, I was neglected. His study was the nerve centre of an important part of Nippon’s invisible economy. My father saw our race’s deep desire for self-fulfilment personified in him. He liked to refer to popular myths and legends that featured heroes with exceptional powers. For all that, he still believed his worldview was rational. But I was convinced that his astonishing mind followed the unpredictable rhythm of the night – its outlines shrouded in shadow, and reeling with concealed desires.
These thoughts were milling around in my head like kites as I watched the Yuzonsha men walk up the path. Rich and powerful members of the secret brotherhood, leaders in high places in politics, industry and the army. I felt their excitement billowing towards me like fog. I thought I understood their need for these ritual meetings. As my father knew, it had its roots in an age-old tradition of men gathering around a campfire when the night stoked their deepest fears, where they would drink, sing, dance and summon spirits. This is the way it has always been, and always will be.
As a woman, I was barred from the meeting, but my father wasn’t the only one with an interest in technology. The miniature cameras I’d hidden in the assembly room were connected to my monitor. The screen filled the room with blue light, making my shadow seem long and twisted. I knew the sentence my father would use to open his speech to the assembled Yuzonsha, I had heard it often enough: “The meaning of life is to perfect it.”
When he said “to perfect” I think he meant “to conquer”.
My father wanted to create the perfect human being because it had been attempted with him – unsuccessfully.
22
Hiroshima – Rabu Hoteru – Inspector Takeda –
night, March 13th/14th 1995
A narrow, inconspicuous building with smoked glass windows. Hiroshima is more discreet than Tokyo. Takeda remembers Tokyo’s extravagant love hotels from his training in the capital – grotesque medieval castles, even flying saucers. Unlike the average Japanese man, Takeda doesn’t see extramarital sex as relaxation. His colleagues boast about visiting the rabu hoteru for free, in exchange for leniency when neighbours complain about drunken punters making a racket at night, storming out, unhappy with the service. Takeda’s physical need runs deeper. He turns to prostitution for mizu shobai, the “water trade” as it used to be called, water symbolising a dream-like mental state dominated by desire and imagination. Takeda needs prostitutes to bridle his obsession with the unbearableness of existence, which, unknown to him, is deeply rooted in his youth. When he’s penetrating a whore, Takeda often pictures himself as the Japanese guard who raped his mother. He can hear her groan softly. Not too loud, he thinks to himself, it would put her life in danger. In his most embarrassing fantasies, Takeda is wearing a sword, intent on using it to decapitate the woman if the sex isn’t satisfactory. Such moments fill him with shame and sadness, but his anger and need for the fantasy are stronger than his shame. Most prostitutes are used to drunken clients and rough treatment so they keep quiet. When he comes, the half-breed policeman laments the day he was born, ashamed of his behaviour.
Takeda is shattered after a day of meetings. The spectacular poison attack on the Dai-Ichi-Kangyo bank has taken priority over all the other investigations and dozens of details and lines of inquiry are piling up, screaming for attention. His bosses want arrests. The press is already bleating about “incompetence”, “unwillingness” and “deceit”. Brash television programmes are talking about obscure paramilitary organisations set on toppling the government and restoring the emperor’s divin
e status. Every lead has to be followed; an impossible task for the local criminal investigation department, especially with the national security police throwing spanners in the works.
Takeda opens the door to the room he’s hired for the hour and undresses, folding his clothes carefully on a chair. The woman will be here soon. Takeda likes the love hotels’ anonymity. Two months ago, a discrete hand slipped the keys under a frosted glass window, now all you have to do is insert your cash into a machine and out pops the key with your change. Takeda lies down on the bed, aware of the tension in his body. Dealing with the National Guard liaison officers was unpleasant; men in grey suits who made no effort to hide their contempt for the metropolitan police. His colleagues claim that the Guard aren’t averse to using the old methods to force confessions, the kind used in the camps fifty years ago. Given his own past, every allusion to that period makes Takeda feel uncomfortable. He has a pile of books at home on Japan’s military history. He later developed an interest in fiction. Languages fascinate him. He still speaks Dutch, practising regularly with language CDs. Years ago, he took evening classes in English and started reading English-language comics. Later he switched to more sophisticated literature. He even read Haruki Murakami in English. The man’s amazing Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World tested Takeda’s language skills to the limit. His colleagues consider his flair for languages a curiosity. They only speak Japanese themselves, convinced it’s not in the nature of the Japanese to speak other languages. Takeda secretly hopes that his skills will get him promoted one day, although chief commissioner Takamatsu clearly has his doubts. Only that morning, his boss had poured scorn on his theory about the dead baby underneath the peace memorial. The case was closed, the incident written off as the desperate act of a young mother who had secretly given birth to a deformed child. So why was the baby embalmed? Takamatsu had grunted something about street gangs and “satanic rituals”. End of discussion. But Takeda feels there’s more to this case. Had the body been embalmed out of love or hatred? It was certainly symbolic, as police doctor Adachi had remarked dryly. At that moment, Takeda thought of his unborn half-brother, drowned in the concentration camp latrine.
A knock at the door. The woman who comes in is in her mid-twenties. Takeda always chooses the same age category. Many other Japanese men prefer younger prostitutes. Enjo kosai is popular in Japan: eighteen-year-olds, dressed up like school girls complete with pleated miniskirts, servicing older men. Young women are made out to be the pinnacle of pleasure, and they bring in a fortune. Takeda’s mother was twenty-five when she fell pregnant with him. Nothing is said. There’s no need. The woman does what she was taught to do. She undresses, her head turned away slightly in feigned modesty. She then takes him in her mouth with a look of fear on her face. She’s learnt that this makes men feel powerful and strong. When Takeda enters her, she winces as if he’s too big for her. That’s what Japanese men like. Takeda is slow to respond. Her body is too sinewy for his taste. He makes her go down on hands and knees and penetrates her from behind, trying to act out his favourite fantasy. His mind refuses to cooperate. He hesitates, can’t quite grasp what’s wrong.
Suddenly, he pulls back, chases her off the bed. The prostitute is baffled. She’d understand if he were drunk. Inspector Takeda pays her and motions her to hurry. They get dressed in silence with their backs to each other. The woman slips out of the door, relieved that her client didn’t get violent.
Takeda isn’t drunk, but he might as well have been. He’s intoxicated by something that anyone else, anyone other than a policeman, would call inspiration.
He’s determined to get home as quickly as possible.
23
Hashima Island – Yozunsha meeting in the old island cinema
and Rokurobei’s speech – February 15th 1994
You call me Rokurobei, as dictated by tradition since the founding of the Yuzonsha. Like the legendary demon from the noble Kami family, my task has been to bring you prosperity and good fortune. That is what I have done. For forty years, I have made sure that you are among the most powerful men in Nippon. I have summoned you today to assess your level of makoto. You know the meaning of the word in Japanese: it encompasses an immaterial value that translates into righteousness, which is something very different from honesty. The ancient Chinese definition is even more interesting: ‘the word that was kept and thus came to life.’
“I gave you my word in all righteousness many years ago, and have waited all this time for it to germinate. Your wealth and power may have made you weak and unstable. But my tamashii, the soul I have been given, has the power to turn you back into the men you were in your youth.
“Remember that a male Rokurobei is rare. A nature spirit of my eminence wants first and foremost to shine, to prove his worth. With greater maturity, however, success and self-fulfilment make way for more altruistic goals. At that moment a Rokurobei has no choice but to follow unmei, his fate.
“As a people, we are not individualists like the Westerners. We think and act as a group. We think and act as a nation. My fate and yours are therefore the same. In the next hour, I intend to reveal my plans to you. First, I want to explain the steps necessary to take Nippon to the absolute top of the software industry. Even though our technical innovations and our industry are renowned the world over, we do not make enough use of computers ourselves. Ten years ago, our Tandy 100 was the first laptop on the market, but only a third of our business people today have a computer of their own. Computers cost twice as much here as they do in the United States. Keyboards are not suited to our language, and as a consequence to our way of thinking. The ancients didn’t call Japanese ‘the language of the devil’ for nothing. Our writing system is the most complex on the planet. We use more than 4,000 kanji, and in order to employ these symbols in all their subtlety and elegance, we need over half a megabyte of computer memory for the characters alone. Our language was made to be drawn and painted, to do justice to the subtle and multifaceted meanings conveyed by our kanji. Communication is vital for a people with a highly developed sense of community. But when the Japanese try to communicate through computers they feel awkward and misunderstood.
“We can turn this around, however. Language is an essential part of intelligence. If computers understand language, their intelligence increases significantly. For this reason I have ordered the development of new software that will shortly enable computers to recognise the network of meaning underlying our language, allowing them to think with us. Once this first hurdle has been taken, we can overcome the next. Western scientists have warned that artificial intelligence will surpass the human intellect in the foreseeable future. Computers double their performance every eighteen months, while human evolution has stagnated. If we are to keep up with the artificial mind we are creating, we need to alter the genetic make-up of our brains and bodies. At the moment, modifications to the body seem to be more readily within our reach. By deactivating the gene that regulates myostatin, we can strengthen and improve the human body. Modifications to the mind are more difficult, but not impossible. By increasing the complexity of our DNA, we can develop the brainpower needed to meet the challenge of artificial intelligence.
“All these possibilities are within our grasp. But global and national forces are preventing the experiments necessary to carry out this vision of the future. What has happened to our country? Our current emperor’s father dishonourably renounced his status as arahitogami, a deity become human, after the Second World War. He denied being the embodiment of the divine natural spirit, thus insulting the Japanese people and damaging our souls.”
* * *
I distinctly remember the way my father turned his head. It swung round like the head of a large predatory bird. He stepped away from podium and suddenly his enormous face was filling my screen. He laughed. His canines, filed sharp and carefully set with small gems, gleamed in the bright light of the spotlights behind him.
One rapid movement, then grey, dancing pixels.
Had he sensed the miniature camera?
He had removed it before his speech was over, but I’d heard enough.
My father wanted to be the creator of a new arahitogami, a divine emperor the likes of whom Japan had never seen before.
24
Hiroshima - the canal behind the Genbaku Dome –
Reizo and Xavier Douterloigne – night, March 13th/14th 1995
Xavier Douterloigne soon realises that the Japanese boy in front of him is high. Or drunk. Or both. His affected behaviour makes him look like an actor in a French play.
Xavier wouldn’t have been too worried – even though he’s realised that he’s dealing with Reizo, Yori’s boyfriend – if Yori hadn’t told him the story about the stabbing. Then there’s the sweet-and-sour breath Reizo is blowing into his face, his rigid stare and pouting lips, and the duct tape tying Xavier’s hands behind his back. The second boy is slumped on the floor of the van, hands dangling between his knees. He’s tall and lean, and grinning with a malicious delight that’s making Xavier nervous.
“I wanting make suicide as long as remember,” Reizo says in pitiful English. “In Nippon, making suicide is artistic, yes? But shortly I think that shit. First immortality with novel, then everyone knowing when I do the suicide.” His clumsy sentences have a smug ring to them. Xavier realises that he’s going to need all his experience as a diplomat’s son. There’s a cunning gleam in Reizo’s eyes, as if he’s calculating the effect he’s having on Xavier.
“Suicide?” Xavier replies in immaculate Japanese. “In your case, that would be a waste of talent.” He’s laying on the flattery with a trowel, but it’s working. Reizo drags both hands through his hair, sniffs and bends over to his companion. “A foreigner – one of the unclean – who speaks Japanese. This’ll be fun,” he says. The other boy shrugs.
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