61
Hiroshima – metro tunnel – Reizo and Mitsuko –
evening, March 14th 1995
My fear is an embarrassment. But it’s so immense it has me shaking uncontrollably from head to toe as if I had a fever. The same shadows and underground caverns that terrorised me as a child are pushing me to the edge of hysteria. The blindfold Reizo tied around my head has slipped a little. My hands are tied behind my back with what feels like a strip of rubber. I can see vague slivers of light and there’s a cold wind blowing down the corridor. I hear Reizo open the iron door. I’m afraid I might stumble and fall onto the rails. I can smell metal and the same putrid stench I noticed earlier, like rotting fish. I don’t understand how Reizo managed to overpower me since I’m stronger than him. I freeze at the idea. A paralysing electrical charge runs through my body.
“Keep moving.” He sounds irritated. I hang my head. He pulls at me, but I refuse to move, like a workhorse that’s decided it’s a donkey. He walks around me, pokes his pistol in my belly.
“Keep moving.”
I focus my head butt on his voice, pay no attention to the pistol or the fact that it might go off. I see stars. The blindfold has slipped even further and I can now see with one eye. Reizo has staggered backwards. His nose is bleeding. But he’s still on his feet and my hands are still tied behind my back. I race past him, but it’s hard to run. The head butt has left me dizzy. A wound above my exposed eye begins to bleed, making it even more difficult to see. The rails are glistening and in the distance I can see a light with a blue halo around it. I begin to tremble once again. A reflected metallic light on the tunnel wall is getting steadily closer. I stand between the rails. The questions that have plagued me all my life, the pain and the loneliness, the doubts and the inner turmoil, everything suddenly focuses on this moment. I want to die. I know it. Life has been a trial and there’s no escaping my father. How can I ever find a lover, ever start a family?
I stand on the rails. I feel nothing. The approaching light turns into a miniature sun. I bow my head. The blood in my eye shrouds everything in darkness, but I know that the darkness can be transformed at any moment into a flash of light. Something heavy hits me on the back and I fall to one side. Hands push me like a ragdoll against the tunnel wall. The pain in my limbs is so intense I can’t fight back.
Then: shuddering, a rush of air that evolves into a deafening trumpet blast, a passing tornado, the stench of warm metal. I lie still, overwhelmed by the power of the train that has missed us by a hair’s breadth.
His voice is close by, dark and nasal: “If you don’t want to know what I’m capable of, don’t try to hurt me.”
I already know what he’s capable of.
62
Hiroshima – metropolitan police headquarters –
Fukuyamakita – Doctor Adachi – evening, March 14th 1995
So what’s the deal with inspector Takeda, Adachi asks himself on his way to the police station. The doctor knows Takeda has always seen himself as an outsider and for that very reason he always played it by the book. Not anymore, Adachi suspects. He has heard plenty of rumours about Takeda’s infamous intuition, exaggerated no doubt during noisy police get-togethers in the city’s karaoke bars. Does his farfetched theory about the bank robbery and now that dead baby have anything to do with that intuition, or has Takeda been able to finally put together the pieces of some complex puzzle? It’s been one scandal after another of late: police bribery, even police involvement in bank robberies. The crisis has had some bizarre consequences: the pride post-war Japan achieved through its industrial superiority is slowly evaporating. And we can’t live without pride, Adachi thinks to himself. We’re losing the plot, especially the younger generation with their painted hair and their crazy underground culture. They’ve turned their back on us and our values. They forget how we did without after the war. They forget about the typhoid, the lice, and the obsessions: eat now, drink now, find shelter now. We tried to survive in spite of the diseases and the radioactive residue. The horrors we had to look at were beyond belief. Skeletons walked the streets and at night you could hear the dead, the blistering dead, weeping, vomiting, coughing, mumbling.
No wonder I enjoy a drink, thinks Adachi as he pulls into the car park in front of the police station. He looks up. It’s dark already and he imagines that he can see a tiny light far above his head that can unfold at any moment into a tempest of fire, scorching and devouring everything in its path.
The police doctor smiles as he informs the duty officer that he’s come to pick up a couple of documents. He takes the lift to the basement. His hands are sweaty, his forehead burning. How did that hanhan Takeda, that fucking half-breed, manage to turn my head with those crazy stories of his about wartime treasures so big that a senior police commissioner wasn’t even afraid to have one of his own inspectors eliminated just to keep a lid on things?
He makes his way to cold storage where they keep the corpses prior to post-mortem, opens box 23 and pulls back the sheet covering the body. The misshapen head of the baby found at the Peace Monument appears. Its eyelids are dried up and shrivelled by the cold and the corpse appears to stare at him in terror. Adachi examines the right heel and instinctively holds his breath.
A sign, Takeda had said. It might be a sign.
Of what?
63
Hiroshima – metro service tunnel –
Mitsuko and Reizo – evening, March 14th 1995
Reizo has prepared every detail of my imprisonment here in the service area next to the metro tunnel. That means he’ll keep his word and come back for me. There’s a writing pad and some ballpoint pens on a chest I’m expected to use as a desk. My left hand has been handcuffed to a pipe. The place is damp and stinks of stagnant water. The metro workers use it to store replacement track, bolts and other material. It’s stacked up behind me on racks. When Reizo handcuffed me at gunpoint I could see his bruised and bloodied face at close quarters. His eyes sparkled, his movements were jerky. He didn’t seem to have much control over his body, but he was still rational about the situation, and that worried me. He left a battery operated desk lamp for me. The shadows here remind me of Hashima. If I look away from the light too long I begin to have trouble breathing. I’ve lived a life in the shadows and it looks as if I’m going to die in the shadows. What is life? You turn a corner and in the blink of an eye you’re face to face with death. Nothing prepares you and you can’t believe your time has come. Has my time come? The will to live is unfathomable. Moments ago I was thinking about suicide, now I can’t believe that this is the way I’m going to die. Reizo promised time and again that he would come back and let me go: “What else can I do? You’re my muse. I need you.” His mind is damaged, I’m sure of that, but I’m also convinced he’s a man of his word. He kept saying he wanted to integrate my life into his novel because it’s so “extraordinary and contradictory”.
Where did he get this obsession? When we meet people with this level of insanity we’re inclined to back off. We find it hard to believe, blame it on something else: voices, possession, schizophrenia, evil spirits, but never the person in front of us. He’s just a toy in the hands of a power we name at random and never fully understand, although we recognise echoes of it in our own mind.
When he was standing at the door Reizo said with apparent indifference: “Start with your earliest memories on Hashima. Can you still remember?” His face was as contradictory as my life: a swollen and bloody nose, at once brutal and childlike.
“A piece of open ground between the ruins,” I said. “I emerged from the rubble and saw what looked like a black carpet, but it was moving. I didn’t understand at first, then I realised it was a bunch of crows. They flew off as I approached. Their cawing and fluttering wings filled my world. They skimmed past me. I saw their eyes, sparkling with a strange and sinister light. I’ve never been so afraid in all my life
.”
I lied: I’m more afraid now.
“Crows,” Reizo roared. “There are so many crows in my book! I want to hear them, now!”
With that he slammed the iron door and left me alone and lonelier than I have ever been.
64
Hiroshima – Suicide Club squat –
Kabe-cho – Takeda – evening, March 14th 1995
“Where are you?” says Dr Adachi on the police frequency.
“In front of the warehouse Yori told me about. It looks abandoned.” Takeda is sitting in his Subaru Legacy staring at the neglected facade of the building and the remains of a couple of grimy neon signs. A street lamp casts an inhospitable grey light over the ripped tarmac of the car park.
“Your intuition was right,” the doctor continues. “The corpse has a chrysanthemum tattoo on its right heel.” He coughs. “It’s faded and small, but it’s clear enough.”
“It wasn’t intuition,” says the inspector. “The idea came from the photographer.” Adachi doesn’t react to Takeda’s observation. “So, where are the ladies?” the inspector continues.
“They’re watching TV. CNN. A documentary about the earthquake in Kobe on January 17th. Time flies, doesn’t it. So easy to forget.” Takeda can tell from his voice that the police doctor has been drinking. He makes nothing of it.
“Your mind is like a clock, Daichi.”
“And yours is a pink cloud, Akio.”
They laugh in unison.
“So what’s next?” says Adachi.
“Complete the puzzle.”
“How?”
“By carefully fitting together the pieces I already have.”
“If you ask me you don’t have enough pieces.”
“I can set my pink cloud to work.”
“You sound tired.”
“You’re right. It’s been a long, hard day. And it’s already after ten.”
“Whatever you do, be careful.”
“Is it impolite to go visiting after ten? You were raised the old fashioned way, weren’t you? You should...”
“Very funny. It’s extremely impolite and you know it. But I’m guessing it’s not really an issue.”
The two men sign off. Takeda takes a final look at the building. Before Adachi called him on the radio he tried to open the front door. It was locked. He thinks of giving it another try, but then decides it would be better to leave now if he wants to make it to Saijo, a city suburb, before midnight. It would be exceptionally un-Japanese to break the rules of politeness and go knocking any later.
As he drives away, a vague glow appears behind one of the windows.
65
Hiroshima – Saijo –
Takeda – evening, March 14th 1995
Reizo Shiga’s parents live in Saijo, a fancy district on the outskirts of Hiroshima, residences surrounded by paddy fields. Takeda parks in front of the house. It looks like an oversized Swiss chalet: a wooden frame with white plaster walls. The inspector straightens his tie but doesn’t get out of the car. He had stopped on the way and called his wife from a telephone box.
“You don’t have to wait up.” That’s his usual way of letting her know she’ll be alone tonight. After this final visit Takeda has plans for the rest of the evening: a woman and a good night’s sleep.
“Okay. How was your day?” Under normal circumstances Takeda would have offered some meaningless reply to his wife’s meaningless politeness. But this time he said nothing, peered out over the swarming neon lights of the city. Why was everything so chaotically clear these days? He pictured his wife next to the phone, her right hand on her lap, the left holding the receiver to her ear.
“Problems with the boss,” he said.
A lengthy silence followed.
“Big problems?”
“He doesn’t agree with the way I reason things.”
He heard her breathe.
“There’s nothing wrong with the way you reason things, Akio.”
Takeda was touched that she had sided with him without even knowing what the conflict was about. Their long marriage, the nonchalance with which he had absorbed her existence into his, the loneliness she had endured for so many years, seem to fall on his back like an avalanche. He sensed his shoulders tense.
“I’m not Japanese enough,” he said. “I...” He didn’t complete the sentence. It surprised him that he had almost said: I’m not good enough, and how easy it would have been.
Instead he said: “I’ve tried to be a good husband, Ayako.”
“I know.” That was all she said.
“We should have had children.”
More than ten years earlier he had forced her to have an abortion. Since then he had used a condom on those rare occasions they made love. The idea of becoming a father had filled him with horror and panic. He had tried to explain, but all he could manage to tell her was a vague story about being in a Japcamp as a toddler and seeing so many children die. It had left him a little thin-skinned about the idea of starting a family. It was a lie: he was only seven months old when he and his mother were liberated.
When she was drunk, his mother would follow him through the house, screaming about what had happened to her and what she had done to his older half-brother. She threatened to do the same to him. Later she would whine and dribble, begging his forgiveness as if he was his nameless brother’s reincarnation.
Takeda’s wife had accepted his decision as always, although he noticed occasional sidelong looks of reproach. When he looked her straight in the eye she would resign herself.
“How do you feel?” said Takeda. “I’ve never really asked you how you feel.” He sensed panic because he had let his mask slip. “At work they used to praise my intuition. It was as if I could get under a criminal’s skin. None of it was true, but I enjoyed the reputation and never contradicted it. It was just guesswork, sheer luck, with the odd hint of insight. What I actually sensed were echoes of the terror, powerlessness and fear of the victims, because I had experienced the same as a child.”
He fell silent. He should have explained it differently. He was sorry he called her.
“I hope the problems get solved, sooner rather than later,’ said his wife.
They hung up simultaneously.
As he took the exit for Saijo, Takeda realised that his renowned intuition had always ignored the echoes of terror, powerlessness and fear coming from his wife.
66
Notes from Mitsuko’s basement prison
Where do I begin? Like some grim fairytale... once upon a time there was a lonely girl living in a world of rot and decay. There were crows everywhere, in huge flocks, never alone. The sea was a giant and sinister crater. The girl saw her father as a mat-finished ball, always on the move, rolling all over, crushing everything in its slippery path. The world slowly took shape, as it does for young children. But for the lonely young girl it remained a Shangri-La much longer than normal, a place where everything was possible, a place where dreams had no boundaries. The girl stopped growing when she was seven feet tall, but inside she stayed small. The girl has been alone for as long as she can remember. The ghost of her mother haunted the place. She was a shadow, a pale face, a vague pain in her heart. Her father’s face seemed carved from stone when he came to tell the girl that her mother was dead.
Death played a leading role in the girl’s life.
She had a friend, a bald and portly man, the father of a babysitter, who lost his head.
There was a boy fleeing love so hard he thought he was a crow.
(What else should I write? Why does there never seem to be a way out for me? Here, in this cellar, I’m forced to conclude that I’ve always felt the same: no way out. A rumble in the distance just then means a train is on its way, advancing at speed through the tunnel. Why can’t I be sitting in a carriage, wat
ching a nice landscape slip by, far from here? When I was a teenager the world drew me like a magnet. I wanted to go to a place where people would ask without embarrassment why I was so tall and so clumsy. That would be less painful, I told myself, than the furtive glances I had to put up with my father’s minions when they visited the island.
Would Reizo come back? What’s he planning to do? Will I ever see the sun again? On Hashima I used to peer at the rising sun between the charred and half-ruined apartment buildings, on my guard, as if I was afraid its rays would pulverize me if they touched me.)
I can’t remember what age I was when I became obsessed with stories about children who grew up in strange places. How many times did I read Jungle Book? I pretended I was Mowgli and transformed Hashima’s miserable ruins into a sultry jungle teeming with life. I had to watch out for Shere Kan, the mighty tiger, lord of the animal kingdom, who was coming to get me. When I heard him roar I would tremble. My Shere Kan was more powerful than in the book: at regular intervals he turned into a human being, a giant of a man, with a long neck and penetrating eyes.
When I was older I grew fascinated by the story of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese soldier who hid in the Philippine jungle for decades after the capitulation because he didn’t believe the war was over. He surrendered in 1974. I read about him in the magazines my father brought from the mainland after I had complained ad nauseam that I was bored and unhappy. I couldn’t get my obsessions out of my head. My life was lost in its own interiority.
Three years ago we got internet on the island. The world wide web was laborious at first, but I was soon surfing at speed in search of points of contact. Without being aware of it I also searched for people who shared my misfortune. I found the weirdest stories that somehow reconciled me with my fate, if only for a while: children locked up by their parents for years on end in sheds and attics as if they were animals, adults who hid children in musty cellars and treated them like luxuries to be indulged whenever they felt the urge.
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