Return to Hiroshima

by Bob Van Laerhoven

  “My darling child!” says Bruno Günder. The publisher’s voice trembles with excitement. He speaks posh affected German, melodious, not unlike the way the Austrians speak. He’s infected the entire management at Bertelsmann with it.

  Beate has been telling him about the men who tried to stab her in Hiroshima because she witnessed some sort of weird incident. She doesn’t miss a detail.

  “In the City of Peace, no less?” Bruno crows.

  “The inspector and I have reached a compromise,” Beate concludes. “He insists I have a police escort, but how can I work with a couple of yellow uniformed monkeys hanging around me all day? So I refused.”

  “Beate,” Günder groans, savouring every moment. “You’re a true professional.”

  “But I’m still not rid of him. He dropped me at my hotel and made me promise I would wait for him while he talks things over with his superiors.”

  “You know the Japanese, darling, everything according to the book,” Günder growls. “Not an ounce of creativity! But I don’t think you’ll be able to refuse that escort forever. I’ll talk with our lawyers about it asap.”

  “OK,” says Beate. She feels excited, bubbling with ideas. She knows that she might be suffering from shock, but she wants to stay with the feeling, intensify it. Ideas flow thick and fast. Her new book is going to be her best yet, it’s inevitable.

  “One more thing, Bruno. I’m not allowed to talk to the press about this.”

  A short silence follows. “But you didn’t talk to the press, sweetheart,” says Günder, his accent even thicker. “You spoke to your publisher about it.”

  Beate gently replaces the receiver. She looks in the mirror. She’s beaming. At this moment, she realises, Günder is having his staff prepare a press release and is about to milk the hype. With a bit of luck it’ll go global. She can see the headlines: “Attempted murder of renowned German photographer in the City of Peace!”

  In her mind Beate Becht pictures Günder lighting one of his expensive cigars. She smiles and looks at her reflection in the mirror. A sacred light glistens in her eye.

  Someone knocks at the door.

  47

  Hiroshima – the Suicide Club squat –

  Kabe-cho – Mitsuko – March 14th 1995

  After my confrontation with Reizo in the storeroom I make my way back to Yori, but she’s not on the futon where I left her. I don’t understand these people. They sneak in and out like rats in their ideological struggle to break the daily bread. I explore the rest of the dingy and miserable squat. There’s no one here. It’s time for me to get out too, but I first want to be sure Yori is safe. I peer through the green and grimy windows, framed in rusting rectangles. Extinguished neon signs still decorate the facades outside, remnants of what the place used to be: a sewing workshop, a restaurant, a firm that produced boxes and packaging. I make my way back, call Yori’s name. I realise what made me feel at home here so quickly, in spite of the state of the place. It reminds me of Hashima Island, the same weathered atmosphere, the same suppressed hostility. I wander through the dark mouldy spaces, not quite sure of what I’m doing. Judging by the black stains on the walls and the floor there must have been machines here, probably not so long ago. I retrace my steps and peer through the doorway of the main room, the machine room as Reizo calls it. There are futons and tatami mats all over the floor, shelves with provisions, laundry, yellow plastic containers we use to store drinking water. A mixture of smells, predominantly rusty. The parking lot in front of the building is overgrown with weeds, and there’s a swing barrier twisted up into the air, crooked, broken. Yori told me the city authorities were planning to ask a court to decide who was responsible for cleaning up the site for redevelopment. The Suicide Club didn’t have much time left. I walk down the ramshackle stairs. On the ground floor there’s a pale grey iron door, bolted shut. I try the bolt and it opens without a problem. It’s been recently oiled. I can see a ladder disappearing into a hole in the ground, a dark, damp cellar. I can just see the reflection of the tiles on the floor. There’s a light switch. A single light bulb illuminates the cellar with a bluish glow. I’ve no reason to go down, except for the fact that the ladder is new and someone went to the trouble of tapping electricity from the web of cables that criss-crosses Hiroshima.

  48

  Hiroshima – the Righa Royal Hotel –

  Beate Becht and Yori – March 14th 1995

  The moment she opens the door without checking first who has knocked, Beate Becht realises she is acting foolishly. She stands there, frozen to the spot. But it’s just a Japanese girl, not an attacker with a knife. The girl is dressed in an unimaginative grey suit, the type worn by the majority of Japanese women when they’re at work. Her hair is tied up in a bun and she’s wearing a hat that’s both pert and artless. She’s also wearing spotless white gloves. She says she has a message from the hotel desk. Her English is lumpy. Beate automatically steps back and invites her in. The first thing the girl does is lock the hotel door behind her.

  Beate grimaces in a state of panic. The girl takes off her hat, shakes her hair loose, and makes a reassuring gesture.

  “Not recognise?”

  For an instant Beate looks as if she’s about to throw herself at the girl and force her way to the door. Then her penny drops. It’s the Japanese girl who drove the van to the hospital. She was dressed differently back then. The stiff two-piece made her unrecognisable. Beate remembers that she was wearing gloves that night too, shiny, with a tiger motif. It takes a while for the girl’s words to penetrate. She apologises in her broken English for abandoning Beate at the hospital. She was scared. Now she wants to ask her something, or better, how you say? Beg? She hopes Beate will listen, she won’t regret it. “Please listen. My name is Yori.”

  She then does two things. She unzips her belt bag and produces a well-thumbed copy of the American edition of Beate’s first photo collection, the one with all the punk, horror and sadomasochistic grand guignol motifs.

  She then removes her left glove. Her left hand looks as if it’s covered in snake skin. The fingers are slightly clawed and she has no nails. She bursts into tears. She points at herself, searches for her words, repeats again and again:“Hibakusha!”

  49

  Hiroshima – the Suicide Club squat –

  Kabe-cho – Mitsuko – March 14th 1995

  The cellar has vaulted corners. The bare light bulb dangling from the ceiling casts shadows everywhere. In the far left corner a couple of old-fashioned metal filing cabinets create a separate space with an opening to the left. I slip through it and stop abruptly as if I’m facing a wall. A hideous creature is staring at me, only feet away. It’s grey, with horns, a flat pig-like nose, yellow eyes with black pupils, a frozen grin and sabre tooth tiger tusks. A crop of stiff hair has been planted between the horns like a horse’s mane. Déjà vu, I think to myself, and a familiar sense of panic creeps up on me. The feeling remains, gnawing at the edge of my consciousness, even after I realise it’s a Noh mask. There’s a desktop computer on top of a table. I open a drawer in one of the filing cabinets. It’s full of manga comics exploding with sexual sadism, sweat drenched female bodies being taken in every imaginable position by demonic creatures with grotesquely engorged genitals. One manga is situated in feudal times and depicts an adulterous woman undergoing bukkake: all the men in the village older than fifteen gather around her trussed, gagged and naked body. The men masturbate in her face and fill her nostrils with their seed until she chokes. I see her eyes bulging in a circle of exaggeratedly swollen penises. I know bukkake was invented by the Japanese porn industry in the 1980s and isn’t a classical sexual practice, but the manga artist has a skilled imagination. On Hashima I was fascinated for a while by the works of Freud and his rigid sexual theories. They transported me into a dream-like state in which I designed my own world. I was only sixteen at the time, but in hindsight
my daydreams were perverse, and I still don’t know why I didn’t realize it at that time. Bodies were objects to be used and abused and they had a use-by date. Emotions were enlarged and inflated, a caricature of reality. Rage and cruelty monopolized the conversation. Sex went hand in hand with humiliation and often with death. Bodies beaten and bent double were tossed from the cliff into the sea. I saw details, colours, heard sounds, was overwhelmed by the maelstrom of this alternative world. Later the visions stopped. I don’t remember when or why, but I can sense them creeping up on me again in this dark cellar, whispering in my ear that I’m a deviant, a freak of nature. I close the drawer with the same feeling that I’ve seen all this before. The other cabinet contains folders with photos of a man I recognise to my surprise as a member of my father’s Yuzonsha. He has strong Mongolian features, his eyes almost invisible. He’s wearing what looks like a curtain of long black hair and appears to be the spiritual leader of some sect or other. Apparently, he’s called the Blessed One and he presents himself as humanity’s new redeemer and the saviour of Japan. Baroque statements vie with each other in their use of elevated words like “light”, “unity”, “the Almighty Creator”. His complicated and highly symbolic creation narrative seems more intended for children than adults. I’m about to return the folders when I’m distracted by one of the titles: Mu: the beginning of humanity.

  At that moment they all flood back, the endless rambling monologues my father delivered from his eagle’s nest while the wind tugged at his hakama. His never-ending stories about the age-old continent of Mu of which Japan was a part, and the magnificent inhabitants of the mythical land, superior in every way to modern men and women. His accounts fascinated me. Why do I find it so hard to remember them now? Why do I have the feeling I’m in shock? That I’ve lost touch with myself? Is this mental state only a result of recent events? Ever since I started to bleed from my vagina and realised that the blood was mixed with lumps of tissue I’ve been unable to shake the idea that there’s something seriously wrong with me. Did Dr Kanehari lie to me? I was at his clinic only a few days ago, but I can barely remember his face. His words sound distorted in my mind, as if they’re being spoken under water: phantom pregnancy. My heart begins to race and I feel dizzy. I try to concentrate on the text in the folder in the hope it will focus my memory. In a very roundabout manner it states in essence that Japan is the oldest country in the world and that in the olden days there was an umbilical cord connecting heaven and earth that brought forth the god Kunitokotachi-no-Mikoto. The Japanese are direct descendants of the children sired by this divinity, but they are unaware of it. A shiver runs down my spine as I read these words. The feeling that something is being whispered in my ear is so intense it makes me turn and look behind me. No one. I read on. Once again it claims in bombastic language that “the yellow race of Mu”, the people of ancient Japan, was superior to every other yellow people, and all of them superior to the white, black or brown races. The people of Mu understood the language of the divine signs, the kamiyomoji, which served as a source for all future alphabets and ideograms. It reminds me of my father’s dogged determination to develop software that would enable his computers to communicate with kanji. It scares me to think that Reizo’s cellar, a young man I consider to be mentally disturbed, contains ideas and images similar to those of my father. In another drawer I find some Oni masks with horns and fangs, most of them red, a couple black, with tresses of coarsely braided string.

  I start up the computer but it asks for a password. I decide to shut it down again, but type something on the off chance, not sure why: baita – whore, a word Reizo uses a lot when he’s talking to Yori. I have access to the files. I’m not even surprised. Everything in my head is floating, weightless, as if I’ve been taking drugs. The text I open looks like a chapter from the novel Reizo’s always going on about. Ostensibly it takes place in the future in the middle of a “brutal conflict” between the youth and the Japanese government. The government is determined to round up all the troublemakers and isolate them on an island without provisions. There’s water on the island in the form of a couple of lakes, but there’s no food. Knives and axes: all they have. Tiny airborne cameras flutter around keeping them under surveillance day and night. Before long the young people form groups and fight each other over meat, each other’s meat. Their blood drenched battles and cannibalistic orgies are broadcast worldwide on 3D television. The novel’s subject is sickening and there’s no explanation for the conflict between the adult “wrecks”, as Reizo calls them, and the young antagonists who call themselves “wolves”. The style is also pretty woeful. Reizo’s talent doesn’t reach beyond scenes of violence and characters that continuously foam at the mouth. My finger is hovering over the off switch when I notice at the bottom of the page that a new delivery of young rebels has been dropped on the island to keep the bloodbath going. One of them is a giant: “bolted together like simple meccano, face like a pumpkin, the daughter of Rokurobei, the celestial slut. Every warm-blooded young man on the island wants to plant his seed in her, now not later, in the hope of siring a child with exceptional qualities, an heir to Amatsu Mikaboshi, the lord of Evil”.

  I can hardly believe my eyes.

  50

  Hiroshima – restaurant Sawa No Tsuru –

  Robatayaki – Takeda, Becht and Yori – March 14th 1995

  “Try the bacon wrapped asparagus. Delicious.” Inspector Takeda points to the English menu the Tencho-san – the proudly grinning owner of restaurant Sawa No Tsuru – has placed on the table in front of them. Beate nods. Yori has buried her head in the Japanese version. Beate peers at her out of the corner of her eye and notices the girl’s eyes are closed. Takeda taps loudly on the table. Yori jumps. “I should have arrested you on the spot and taken you to the station,” he says. “But I gave in to our foreign visitor to avoid unnecessary complications. She has access to the media all over the world. I advise you to enjoy your meal. It may be your last as a free citizen.” The girl looks up at him, misery written all over her face. Takeda senses Beate’s disapproving stare and adds in English: “Normally I should have arrested her and taken her to the station for interrogation. I broke the rules to do you a favour.” In reality, he was doing himself a favour when he had agreed to Beate’s suggestion that they first give Yori a chance to speak. His pride hadn’t quite dealt with the humiliation he had suffered in chief commissioner Takamatsu’s office. The inspector had reported the attack on the German photographer by the Iranians. He figured it had to do with the attempted murder of the Belgian – maybe Beate knew more than she pretended - but he still had described it in his report as robbery. If Takamatsu got wind of his suspicion that the German woman was attacked because of her involvement in one or other conspiracy he would hand the case over to a team of detectives. Takeda’s determined to keep the chief commissioner out of it.

  “She’s innocent,” says Beate. “She told me everything.” She sees the scepticism in Takeda’s face and adds: “In spite of the language problem, I still think she’s telling the truth. I believe her.”

  The Japanese girl had spent more than an hour in Beate’s hotel room trying to tell her story. Beate understood the gist of it. She was entranced by the dramatic images Yori’s story planted in her imagination. Yori’s account fascinated her, drawing her in bit by bit. She was convinced the young woman was genuinely afraid and saw no way out of the dangerous situation she was in. She decided to take Yori for a meal. They were just getting out of the lift when Inspector Takeda appeared. Beate was completely taken aback and blurted that the girl was the one who had driven the young Belgian to the hospital. Yori had turned at that point and was about to run away, but the high heels she was wearing slowed her down. Takeda took three steps in her direction and grabbed her arm. Beate was nervous and suggested that they all three go to dinner “to clarify the situation”.

  To her relief the Inspector agreed. On their way to the restaurant, Beate caught he
rself fantasising about a photo session with Yori, her deformed hand in full view of the camera, provocative, seductive, skittish, a lizard woman. A new sensation creeps up on her in the restaurant. Beate feels attracted to the frail Japanese figure, her furtive glances, her slightly immodest pose – which is probably unconscious – a Lolita with a magnificent flaw. So many different sensations all at once, she thinks, and in such a short period of time. When she turns from Yori to the inspector she smells freshly laundered sheets and sees images of glorious decadent depravity. Takeda and the Japanese girl are deep in conversation. Beate sees hints of the inspector’s age in the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. Otherwise he looks surprisingly good for a fifty-year-old. The way he moves his hefty, barrel-shaped body makes her think of the powers of nature, forceful, compelling. She stares at his broad face and tries to picture the old man he will later become. She chooses a garden with stone Buddha’s as background. It’s one of her hobbies. She’s convinced that when people reach a certain age the years start to swing back and forth like a pendulum between youth and future. She wants to picture the old Takeda as a classical Japanese monk, at peace with himself, a hint of sarcasm in his face. When she took photos of him during the fight with the Iranians she saw a metamorphosis that fascinated her. She already knows what she’s going to do with the photos when she gets back to her studio in Hamburg. She’s sorry she doesn’t have her laptop with her to sketch her ideas while they’re fresh in her mind. She doesn’t trust lcd screens and doesn’t like working with laptops because the resolution is usually crap and they don’t have enough capacity, although a colleague swears that nec are ready to release a 2 kilo laptop with a trial version of Windows 95 onto the market. Her prosaic train of thought is interrupted by the look of concentration that appears on Takeda’s face. He clenches his left hand into a fist. He’s aware that Beate is looking at him and that she’s surprised: “One door closes, another opens, Miss Becht. That’s life. Her boyfriend, the one you say was responsible for trying to kill the young Belgian, happens to be the nephew of the ceo of the Dai-Ichi-Kangyo Bank.” He sees that she doesn’t understand, his mouth slams shut, and he scowls as if he’s just inadvertently betrayed a secret.