I fantasised that I was rich beyond imagination and that I was in a coma in hospital after a car accident and could wake up at any moment, throw back the sheets with shouts of joy, and hop, skip and jump my way outside into the sun. I badgered my father almost every day to take me on a trip to the mainland, to my horizon paradise. I wasn’t as scared of him as before, but when I saw that look of impending doom in his eyes, I knew it was time to stop whining. I started again the next day.
(What sort of nonsense is this? How can I write down the story of my life as a rat in a cage in a metro tunnel? Only a madman would think I could! I can’t breathe... I’m going to die... Reizo’s sure to come back. He’s probably gone for food and something to drink. He’ll want to know if I’ve done what he asked. I need to write. I need to surprise him.)
At a certain moment, it must have been when my sexuality awoke raging and kicking from its slumber, I realised that I had been daydreaming for months that my father was chasing me. He was naked and so was I. I ran through the corridors and saw things that made me want to vomit, but at the same time they thrilled me, leaving me with a feeling of mortification, close to fear only more intense, more exciting. My daydreams slowly evolved: I would hide myself in niches and pose Lolita style as my father passed, expose my buttocks coquettishly before disappearing once again with the speed and elegance of a cat. My father – much bigger in my dreams than he was in reality – turned slowly into a Minotaur. He snorted, belched steam from his nostrils, scraped the ground with his hoofs, roared from the bottom of his lungs. It was fantastic. Then he found me and did what bulls do, savage, brutal, like a raging storm.
Afterwards I felt wretched, hung-over, bored.
(Is that what you want to read? Is that what gets your pathetic little junky dick hard? Do you think you have the same power as my father? We’re all insane, all capable of the most miserable things, but some of us do things in our dreams while others dream as they do what their warped minds dictate.)
(Come back and let me go this minute! You can’t imagine what my father will do to you when he hears about this.)
(My life? You want to drink my life? You want to have me? What is there to remember of my broken life? It’s spread out behind me like a swamp inhabited by pale formless figures, and who I am is only a shadow of the person I should have been.)
(What have I done... what have I done? Am I being punished for what I did? Oh, my baby, my baby....)
67
Hiroshima – Saijo – Takeda, Nagai Shiga
and his wife – evening, March 14th 1995
Takeda climbs the stairs to the Shiga residence. He straightens his crumpled suit for the last time, rings the bell and puts on his official face. There’s light inside the house. The woman who opens the door is small and broad-featured.
“Police, ma’am,” says Takeda. “Sorry to bother you at this late hour, but it’s urgent. We’re looking for Reizo Shiga. He’s wanted for question... attempted murder on a foreigner.”
The woman’s broad features seem to collapse. She turns without responding and shouts: “Nagai.” A cry from the heart, a release of pent-up anxiety and pain. She disappears down the corridor without inviting the inspector in. The same stark cry: “Nagai!”
Takeda takes the opportunity to push open the door, take off his shoes and wait in the corridor. The house is tastefully furnished: wood, sharp lines, pale blue tategu doors, elegant sliding panels. A mixture of classical Japanese and western interior design. A tall thin man with grey crew-cut hair and dark sunken eyes appears at one of the sliding doors. Takeda recognises him from newspaper photos: Nagai Shiga is an economist, and with Japan’s economic recession he’s featured in the media a great deal of late.
“My son?” he barks. At the same time he beckons Takeda into the main room of the house, ignoring the usual ceremony. Takeda notices a tokonoma, a traditional alcove filled with delicate flower arrangements, tiny fragile bonsai trees and other family bits and pieces. They sit on tatami mats at a low circular table. Subtle shades of colour, simple, carefully selected furniture, and the interplay of light and shade create a sense of serenity. But Takeda also senses suppressed tension in the room. The economist looks him in the eye: “I knew something like this would happen one day. You might be surprised to hear this from a man of science, inspector, but over the years I’ve come to believe my wife’s conviction that our son has been possessed from birth by a yokai. We’ve seen one psychiatrist after the other with our son, but none of the diagnoses they produced has ever been able to change my wife’s conviction.”
There are many different yokai, Takeda remembers. One is a demon that enjoys preserving a baby’s innocent exterior while transforming its inside into a monster unable to resist its bizarre needs.
68
Hiroshima – Adachi’s apartment near the Peace Tower –
Adachi, Yori and Becht – night, March 14th – 15th 1995
Dr Adachi parks in front of his apartment feeling ill at ease for not noticing the chrysanthemum tattoo earlier. But his conscience is clear: when the corpse of the baby arrived in the mortuary he had only glanced at it. He had no time to be exhaustive. He had noticed the dead infant’s deformities and made a mental note to do an autopsy later. The fuss generated by the bank raid simply got in the way. Yet he’s still annoyed at the way things turned out. He’s been trying to reach Takeda on the police uhf radio but there’s been no response. He’s probably with the Shiga family. Takeda doesn’t own a mobile phone: too big, too heavy, too unreliable. He does have a beeper, but Adachi doesn’t know the number. The police doctor has a two-way radio in his living room, operating on the police frequency. During the lonely hours, with only a bottle for company, he listens in to his colleagues’ messages and fantasises romantic tragedies behind their calls. He decides to try the inspector again later. As soon as he walks into the living room he senses the tension between the two women. The German seems frustrated, Yori dispirited.
The photographer gestures apologetically when she sees Adachi raise an eyebrow. “I tried to explain an idea I had for a photo. I wanted to shoot her at the foot of the Peace Monument with a doll in her arms, one with a chrysanthemum tattoo.” Becht points to a magazine with a photo of a chrysanthemum. “For one or other reason it made her really nervous. Her English isn’t good enough to explain what’s upsetting her. I think it has to do with a girlfriend…” the photographer stops speaking when she sees Adachi raise both eyebrows.
“You want to take a picture of her holding a doll in her arms with a chrysanthemum tattooed on its right heel?”
The German appears defensive. “I wanted to take a series of photos, actually. Start with a wide view then move in on her hand, a close-up – without glove – and the doll, which I would first scorch black. I saw a picture of a deformed baby the other day on the cover of a Japanese magazine and it made me think of my father who...”
Adachi turns to Yori and asks what’s going on. Before she answers, she grabs her bag and pulls out a pile of old documents. The first is rubberstamped Dai Nippon Teikoku Rikugun, the emblem of the “Land Forces of the Great Japanese Empire,” governed by the department that was referred to during the Second World War as the Ministry of War instead of the Ministry of Defence.
69
Hiroshima –Saijo – Takeda, Nagai Shiga
and his wife – night, March 14th – 15th 1995
Nagai Shiga’s head sinks to his chest when inspector Takeda tells him about the charges his son is facing. “When he was still small, my wife read him the story of the carp that turns into a dragon. She must have read it hundreds of times,’ he says, his eyes focused on the polished wooden floor in which his reflection is like a pale stain in the varnish. “I remember her voice as if it was yesterday, and his enthusiastic whoops of encouragement. The carp was expected to do the most impossible things to achieve its dream. How can a fish become a drag
on? But the carp was determined. He tried the impossible. He failed time and again. But he refused to give up. When I arrived home one evening Reizo hurled himself at me, a five-year-old bundle of energy: “Daddy, the carp turned into a dragon!’ He almost fell over himself from the excitement. I asked him what the carp was going to do now that it had become a powerful dragon. Reizo looked up at me; in the light of the room his eyes were black: ‘Make everyone dead who doesn’t listen to him’.”
Nagai Shiga withdraws into a long silence, staring at his cup of tea. Inspector Takeda thanks his lucky stars his marriage is childless. Then he reconsiders: perhaps a child would have helped make up for some of the things that happened in his youth.
Takeda hears a barely audible sigh at his back as Nagai Shiga’s small, trim and classically dressed wife enters the room. Takeda is surprised by the tautness of her face. Her voice is close to a whisper: “My carp became a dragon.”
70
Hiroshima – Adachi’s apartment near the Peace Tower –
Adachi, Yori and Becht – night, March 14th – 15th 1995
Adachi translates the gist of what Yori had told him about the tall, mysterious woman who had joined the Suicide Club a few days earlier. Beate Becht listens attentively. The story reminds the police doctor of his father, a doctor at Kyoto’s military hospital where his mother worked as a nurse. Adachi’s father had moved up the ranks to major. He had told him of rumours he had picked up about experiments carried out during the Second World War in laboratories in Tokyo and other secret locations, experiments on prisoners involving a secret military organisation called Unit 731. The maruta – the prison guards mockingly referred to the prisoners as “logs of wood” that were to fuel the fire of Japan’s success – were infected with typhoid and bubonic plague, among other things, and then injected with experimental substances to see what would happen. Adachi’s father also told him about decapitations after which the prisoner’s heart was ripped out of his body to see how long it would continue to beat. His father had dismissed the rumours as malignant enemy indoctrination. But a brief inspection of the documents Yori had given him had convinced Adachi that the rumours were more than rumours. His heart skipped a beat when he read about the background of the person on whom the court physician of the emperor himself had conducted experiments in 1932. Adachi doesn’t know what to think. He’s pretty sure the documents are authentic. Yori’s story about her giant of a girlfriend is bizarre to say the least and hard to believe. But as alcoholic, discrete homosexual and police doctor, Adachi has heard plenty of true stories that sound unbelievable when they’re repeated.
“Why did you try to tell the gaikokujin all this?” he asks Yori, making sure he uses the correct word for female foreigner. There was a possibility that the German photographer might recognise the word gaijin and take offence. Westerners often think gaijin sounds racist. As a member of a minority that the Japanese tend to look down on, Adachi avoids offending others as a matter of course.
“Because Mitsuko asked me to go public with her story shortly before she disappeared. She’s convinced her father will find her sooner or later and she’s not sure if she’s up to the confrontation. I ran away from Reizo that same day. He had flipped his lid. I didn’t know where to go. My parents are both dead. The only person I could think of was Beate. I heard her mention the name of her hotel when we were at the hospital reception.”
Adachi sighs. The number of people being left behind by the worst economic crisis Japan has had to face since the Second World War is increasing by the day. But he still has to make an effort not to picture the present generation as spoiled and spineless. When his father found out Adachi was homosexual he called him a ketsuman, a vulgar and abusive term meaning “ass cunt”. In a drunken rage he had grabbed a scalpel and threatened to give his son a “real” cunt. Adachi turns to Yori who’s staring at the floor, a look of resignation on her face. He feels sorry for her. If he’s properly understood everything she told him and she hasn’t been lying too much, she was a wildcat before they met, young and reckless. Now she’s terrified of being locked up because her boyfriend did something crazy with a foreigner. If truth be told, she’s more scared of her friend than she is of jail. Adachi thinks the youth of today read too many mangas and are addicted to video games that glorify violence.
But the story about her girlfriend Mitsuko is even weirder. Adachi isn’t a great fan of Japanese society with all its rules and regulations, but alternative lifestyles don’t inspire him much either. In his eyes, Yori and this Mitsuko are outcasts who need each other’s support and comfort because they’ve nowhere else to turn. Hence the “friends forever” stunt.
“What makes that Mitsuko of yours so sure her father will find her?”
Yori looks up. She has dark seductive eyes – that do nothing for Adachi –, dreamy eyes, ready to turn away from reality and build castles in the sky. Adachi can see how she must have been easy prey for her aggressive young friend.
“Because she left behind a sign he’s certain to react to,” she says.
She tells him about the sign.
Adachi turns pale.
71
Notes from Mitsuko’s basement prison
You want my life? You’re too late. Yori beat you to it. I lay in her arms and told her everything while she caressed my hair and kissed me. You can have the dirt and the shit, that’s all you’re worth. You can have the details about my baby, what I did to it. It’ll inspire you no doubt. I told whoever was willing to listen in your Suicide Club crew that I had experienced a phantom pregnancy, diagnosed by a proper doctor, all verifiable and traceable. His name is Kanehari and he performs abortions in his private clinic. I went to see him, heavily pregnant, but for some incomprehensible reason I couldn’t bring myself to allow the child that my father had forced into my womb to be killed by the hands of another. I didn’t realise it at the time, but I had already decided to do the deed myself.
I spent the final days of my pregnancy in the Islamic Dambara Centre, my loose fitting clothes concealing my swollen belly, the world around me a daze. I convinced myself that I hadn’t made a decision, and that was the truth: I hadn’t yet decided how, but in hindsight I’m certain I already knew deep in my heart what I was going to do.
Mother nature helped me: labour started deep in the night, sudden and intense. My waters broke before I realised what was going on. Less than half an hour later I was exhausted. Then came a series of cramps, regular, excruciating. I couldn’t think straight. I followed my animal instincts. I was always alone in the Centre at night. It wasn’t designed to house people on a permanent basis, but they had offered me a provisional roof over my head because I told them there was a danger my husband might try to kill me to restore his honour. I dragged myself to the gloomy square behind the prayer centre where a couple of nearby restaurants kept their garbage bins. The stench of rotting noodles and festering fish remains was unbearable. I crouched to the ground and lifted my hands heavenward. I cursed myself, my father, my miserable existence. And it came. It came so fast, as if it was greedy for life. My hips were broad enough. I didn’t tear. It was as if a wet ball had slipped from my body, accompanied by blood and slime. I can still remember the tension in my neck, as if I was screaming skyward in silence. It was an indescribable moment. Think about it good, you miserable skunk, write it down in your measly novel. It was at once bestial and passionate. I didn’t deliver a child, I spawned a child.
And what a child it was. I saw skin, I saw disfigurement, I saw milk-white eyes. And yet it screeched, its deformed body gasped for air. It was alive, I swear, it was alive.
I grabbed the umbilical cord and twisted it round its neck.
Had I gone insane? No. I wasn’t myself, but I knew what I was doing. I didn’t know why, that was all. Revenge for what my father had done to me? Horror at the little monster I had brought into the world? I’ve read about women who hide their
pregnancies, give birth in fear and isolation like animals in the woods, and then kill their offspring or abandon it in some remote place to die of hunger and thirst. I asked myself, as anyone would, how it was possible in the name of God for a woman to do such a thing. Our instinct tells us that motherhood is sacred, that children enrich our lives. I still believe that to be true.
But it doesn’t alter the fact that I twisted the umbilical cord as tight as I could. The creature struggled, wriggled its arms and conjoined misshapen legs. Its eyes bulged and its tiny tongue protruded from its lips. I’d never seen such a painful expression in my life.
And then it was over. I was soaked in sweat, wheezing like a pig, and had clumps of my own hair in my hands. I had to fight to regain my self-composure. I had committed a primal murder, the most horrible murder you can imagine, the greatest outrage imaginable. I knew I would have to pay the price and it was then that I decided – sweating on the outside, as cold as ice on the inside – to split myself in two to limit the damage. One part of me had to decide what to do with the body. It already knew. It was as if someone whispered it in my ear. The other part had to shield my emotions and make sure I didn’t lose my mind, the price most people pay for primal murder.
I went back inside, washed off the blood and the slime, improvised a tampon, put on two pairs of underpants, and gathered up my things. I hid the documents I had brought with me from Hashima that proved my father’s identity between my clothes. I threw everything in a holdall, made my way outside again, picked up the tiny corpse, wrapped it in a towel and popped it in the holdall.
I marched into the city at a determined pace, although my knees were still trembling and I could feel my underwear slowly getting wet. The streets were alive and noisy in spite of the late hour – it was after 2am. Groups of young people were gathered at every corner, hanging around, gesticulating, kicking each other for fun, flaunting their youth, their beauty, their bravado. I didn’t understand any of it. Why had they been given the grapes and me the thorns? I sensed a cold satisfaction, an abnormal melancholy. I had to control myself; otherwise I would have shaken the dead baby in front of their eyes and accused them of devouring the sun and leaving only the night for me. I wanted to shout at the top of my voice for all the world to hear that if I was pushed far enough I could be even worse than my father.
Return to Hiroshima Page 18
