Return to Hiroshima

by Bob Van Laerhoven

  (And you, you should be jealous! You may be a monster, but you’re nothing compared to me. Perhaps the kami were right after all when they whispered in your pathetic confused brain that I was your muse. A seagull follows the wind and gobbles up everything that glistens, whether it be a shard of glass or a diamond.)

  I arrived at the Peace Monument. The young people avoid the square at night, I imagine out of some rudimentary sense of respect. The place was deserted. I removed my dead son from the holdall and drew a chrysanthemum on his right heel with a felt-tipped pen. I abandoned my poor, hideous and accursed son at the foot of the monument, knowing full well that he would be found, that the press would get wind of it, and that a picture of his tiny corpse would one day whisper in my father’s face: because of what you did, I curse you with the blood of your own son.

  So that’s my story. Satisfied? Ah but you’re right, of course, it isn’t finished. What about the second part of me? It convinced me that I had visited the clinic of Dr Kanehari and dreamt under anaesthetic that I had seen the face of my father, Rokurobei himself no less, hovering above me when I awoke, but that Dr Kanehari told me I had experienced a phantom pregnancy. A story that may be a bit farfetched, but rational and plausible, indispensable to allow me to wander the streets of the city until my message reached my father – I’m here in Hiroshima. Before long he would be standing in front of me and I would do what I had to do.

  Perhaps you’re smarter than I imagined. We all make a story of our lives. But the leading role we play is split, subdivided within us. We incarnate both the lover and the goddess of revenge, the witch, the whore and the Madonna. My story has its roots in years on Hashima, when I lost the ability to distinguish dream from reality. We all do the same to some degree since we’re neither animals nor angels, but those who go too far, like you with your dismal imagination, are doomed to wallow in a pool of self-torment for the rest of their lives.

  (If you don’t come back; if this is the price I have to pay for the sorrow I feel for my child, then the curse I have endured will turn on you, and – as I imagine you already know – you will come to a bad end.)

  72

  Hiroshima – Saijo – Takeda, Nagai Shiga

  And his wife – midnight, March 15th 1995

  Takeda turns to Reizo’s father. “Where can I find your son?”

  “He left home more than a year ago. He wants nothing to do with us.”

  Takeda turns to Reizo’s silent mother. She’s sitting on her heels, her hands resting on her lap. Her face is a world of contradictory emotions. He catches her eye. He nods almost imperceptibly.

  “He’s living in a squat in Kabe-cho,” she says, staring at the floor. “With a group of foolish youngsters. He deals drugs and he’s addicted himself.”

  Nagai Shiga looks at his wife, surprised, irked.

  “I was there earlier this evening,” says the inspector. “The place is locked up. There was no one there.”

  Nagai Shiga rubs his cheeks and then his eyes. “Those kids are creatures of the night. Then they wander round in their dreams, which they defend to the hilt.”

  His wife pours a second cup of tea. “Who knows what’s going on in their heads? They’re greedy, they don’t know how to cope with their lives so they create their own world. Reizo was always a difficult child. He had such an insatiable longing. I don’t know where it came from, but it got worse as he grew up. Then, about a year ago, he joined that sect...” She turns to her husband.

  “Aum Shinrikyo,” says Nagai Shiga finishing her sentence. “Reizo made his vows in the temple.” He looks at the inspector almost apologetically. “The sect doesn’t only target people with an infantile understanding of the world like Reizo, they also attract highly educated academics. They say the founder, Shoko Asahara, is just a front for someone else. Nobody’s sure who he is, but he’s supposed to be nicknamed Rokurobei.” The economist observes the inspector’s silent reaction and continues: “I’ve tried to find out as much as I can about the sect, inspector. I wanted to protect my son. But for reasons I don’t understand, his father no longer matters to him.”

  “Your brother Tomio Shiga, the managing director of Dai-Ichi-Kangyo Bank, died recently in a mysterious gas attack together with a number of other senior staff and assistants.”

  The economist glances at his wife. “They told us that the police still don’t have any information that might lead them to the perpetrators.”

  “I have a theory,” says Takeda. “Your father…”

  “Please, inspector,” says the economist. “It’s late and we’re tired, my wife and I. Can’t we continue this conversation at another time? Let me walk you to your car, but first...if you’ll excuse me for a second...” Takeda notices a silent supplication in Nagai Shiga’s eyes. Shiga says nothing for a second or two, then respectfully bows his head, stands and leaves the room.

  Did his wife notice the silent message? She adjusts the collar of her kimono and mumbles: “Reizo was always a dreamer... boundaries for him were unacceptable. Mishima was his great hero. Reizo was convinced Mishima’s coup d’état should have worked. He shouted it from the rooftops. Then, according to Reizo, there would have been more real men in this country of ours.” She directs her pale, dispirited eyes at Takeda. “You might think I’m just a foolish mother, inspector, but let me tell you this: hungry, unbridled fantasies like those Reizo nurtures have been the cause of more evil in human history than passion and greed.”

  73

  Hiroshima – Takeda’s wife Ayako in their apartment -midnight, March 15th 1995

  In her sleep, a great fatigue weighs upon her. Once her body could run for hours. She wasn’t fast, but equably. Her friends – she was a student then – called her “the Diesel.” She never dared to ask if it was a compliment or an insult.

  There was so much she never dared in her life. She likes to think of herself as an oyster, clamped shut, hiding precious beauty behind her tough shell.

  She sits up before she realizes that she’s awake. A familiar small breeze whiffed from the corridor: the front door opening and closing, her husband coming home earlier than expected. The man who enters the room is a total stranger, not even a Japanese. She’s standing now, her arms in front of her. The way how he comes up to her. She backs away, turns, runs into the kitchenette. He’s right behind her, a silent stranger. Her body is hot now, burning with a sudden fever.

  It turns heart-stopping cold when he grabs one of the kitchen knives out of the rack.

  74

  Notes from Mitsuko’s basement prison

  When I was a teenager, I dreamt about a house in the middle of a garden with laughter and the sound of splashing water. I saw a man next to a little pond with a pretty waterfall. He was pushing a child in a swing. The garden was a haven of light and colour. Dreams had become my reality, my waking life a dream. Now that my life has descended into a nightmare, why can’t I picture that sweet garden anymore? Why does it hurt so much when I try? Why is the pain so incomprehensible, so terrifying?

  For a time there was a woman in my life – not my mother – who looked after me and asked me all sorts of questions. Her name was Mayumi. Something happened to her. Then my father cut off her father’s head. Why? And that’s not the only strange thing. When I think back to that horrible episode, something doesn’t square. There was a switch somewhere.

  Switch: it has become a keyword in my life. As if someone switched places with me, early on, unexpectedly.

  (You didn’t even leave me a glass of water.

  Does that mean you won’t be away for long? How long have I been here? I don’t feel thirsty, no, not yet.

  If I die here, my father will dip the tips of his fingers in your blood and paint my name on your belly.

  Come back! Get me out of here. The pressure of the earth above me is suffocating. The thunder of the trains is like the breath of s
ome resentful ghost in my neck.

  Don’t chance your luck, fool. You’re dealing with the daughter of Rokurobei.)

  (Get me out of here. You can have me. I’ll have sex with you. I’ll climb on top and do the things I saw in my father’s films. You’ll die dribbling with pleasure.)

  Father, why don’t you come?

  75

  Hiroshima –Adachi’s apartment near the Peace Tower –

  Adachi, Yori and Becht – midnight, March 15th 1995

  Adachi isn’t sure how to deal with the situation. He feels as if he’s landed in a nightmare. He’s suddenly reminded of a statement made by the Noh director Tadashi Suzuki, someone he’s admired all his life: “People say Noh theatre is absurd and grotesque, pregnant with tragedy, a chaos of gods and demons, but I say: Noh theatre dines at the table of reality. So many people close themselves off to the tears in the theatre curtain in which we have wrapped reality and dam up their lives with work and karaoke, with laws and prohibitions. Look around you, listen to the stories your friends have to tell you, open the papers, turn on the TV: the cycle of meaning is everywhere. You read about the threads of people’s lives becoming entangled with others, acquire insight into coincidences that create extraordinary new circumstances, you imagine yourself as an urban cannibal chopping up his victims and eating them, you are the father who lusts after his daughter, you live in a world of rats and syringes, you are the mother who strangles her child at birth, you are the hero who rushes into a burning house to save the lives of complete strangers.” Adachi has never forgotten Suzuki’s statement about the absurdity of life, but he’s never fully understood it. Now he’s convinced he’s got himself into the kind of situation the Noh master had in mind: his entire life is suddenly out of kilter, and what amazes him most is the self-evidence of it all.

  The police doctor tries to explain the situation to Beate Becht while simultaneously doing his utmost to untangle the confusion left behind by Yori’s declarations. “I need time to study these documents,” he concludes. He can see that the photographer is growing impatient. How long before she takes things into her own hands? Adachi asks himself if Takeda knows what he’s got himself into. The inspector is in the middle of an intricate hornets’ nest and needs to be kept abreast of unexpected developments.

  Adachi’s thoughts are interrupted by the bleating of the police radio in his living-room.

  76

  Hiroshima – in front of the Shiga residence in Saijo –

  Nagai Shiga and Takeda – night, March 15th 1995

  The economist is standing next to Takeda’s car watching the lights in his house go out one by one. “My brother Tomio was the oldest.” He sounds calm, but there’s still a tremor of subdued tension in his voice. “He inherited our father’s professional secret and was ordered that he should commit seppuku rather than reveal it to anyone.” He turns to the inspector: “In those days, in the early 1950s, it didn’t sound so crazy. People still believed back then,” he says defensively.

  “Professional secret?” Takeda asks, ignoring Nagai Shiga’s remark. “You mean ‘the secret of the Golden Lily’? Wasn’t that all a bit dramatic?”

  “Exactly, but I say it again: the generation before ours was a different race altogether, obsessed by different ideals. Japan was a different country in those days.” Nagai Shiga smiles, but with a hint of malice in his eyes. “We even had a god as our leader.”

  “They say it was the emperor himself who gave orders for Japan’s war treasures to be hidden in out of the way places.”

  “The idea came from Hirohito, but it was Prince Chichibu who did the work, with the help of zaibatsu, the army and the secret service. The prince apparently didn’t think twice about hiring criminals for the job. Gold, platinum, silver, diamonds, antiques and objet d’art were stored away in underground warehouses. Prisoners of war did the actual work. Afterwards they were shot or buried alive.”

  “Your father Taro Shiga helped choose a number of those locations as Hirohito’s banker.” Takeda doesn’t mention the fact that his hypothesis comes from a recently published American book. He hopes to take the economist by surprise and tempt him to reveal more. Nagai Shiga takes a step backwards. For a moment Takeda fears he has gone too far. “A credible hypothesis,” says the economist. His voice deepens. “Nobody can keep a secret where so many people are involved. A year ago I was approached by Kenji Eda, a professor of history in Tokyo. He had evidence of my father’s complicity. But I had already figured it out because of the family secret that had been passed on to my brother Tomio and some of the vague remarks he made when he had been drinking. I thought it was all about his involvement in the emperor’s unsavoury secret, not about complicity in the murder of so many prisoners of war.” A sad smile. “Do you have a family, inspector? You know how it works. We all vow secrecy and fidelity come what may, but sooner or later we end up looking for a shoulder to support our ailing consciences. When my brother talked – albeit indirectly – about the Golden Lily, I wrote it off as wartime idealism. I knew that my father had close links with the imperial family and that he revered the wartime ethics of the day. As a banker, he was one of the driving forces behind Japan’s war effort. But please understand me: he was my father. I wanted to believe that all those stories were totally unfounded, or at least exaggerated.”

  Takeda thinks about his own father, the unknown Japanese soldier, rapist, child killer, and nods. “My brother laughed in my face because I pretended not to believe him. He too was a banker, just like my father. Do you understand? He was conditioned to think in terms of money flow and power. In his eyes, I was a boring and slightly naive academic who spent his days poring over tables and economic fluctuation charts, a slave to the system, while he was at its helm. He dismissed my predictions of the present crisis. His confidence in Japan’s monetary and economic resilience was limitless. When the bubble burst he didn’t see it coming, or didn’t want to. And even when it was impossible to deny, he still maintained his confidence in the ability of the banks to rectify the situation and restart the economy. I wasn’t the guardian of the family secret. That was his burden. But when I look back I have the feeling he wanted to share it and that he was frustrated by my inability or refusal to believe him.” The economist shakes his head. “Why did I behave as I did? Jealousy? Contempt? Shame about my family? I don’t know. In any event, a couple of months ago Tomio handed me a photograph and observed cryptically ‘take good care of this should anything happen to me’. Here, I had a copy made.” Nagai Shiga fishes a black and white photo from his jacket pocket. Its background grey with age, it pictured two men in uniform from the Second World War posing in front of a life-size statue of Kannon, the hermaphrodite god of mercy and compassion. In line with tradition, this emanation of the Buddha glistened in polished gold. The crisp shadows suggest the photo was taken with powerful lighting. Takeda has the impression that it was shot in a cave. While both men pose straight-backed and rigid, he can see no evidence of pride in their eyes. On the contrary, they’re wide open, as if whatever they’re looking at is a shock to the soul.

  “I checked it out,” says the economist softly. “There was no golden statue of the Buddha in the caves of Abukama-do when they were officially discovered in 1969. But this picture is clearly from 1945.”

  “How do you know it was taken in Abukama-do?”

  “Look at the Christmas-tree like stalagmite behind the statue of Kannon. It’s more than two meters tall and is considered one of the biggest in the Far East. There’s nothing like it anywhere else.”

  Takeda looks at it carefully and nods. “So where is the statue buried?” the economist continues. “The larger caves at Abukama-do are open to the public, but more than two kilometres of corridors and smaller caves are inaccessible. You need a precise location in an underground complex like that.”

  “Which your brother knew?”

  The economist gesture
s with his hands: who knows?

  The radio in the police car splutters into life. In spite of the tinny quality of the message, inspector Takeda recognises the voice.

  But he refuses to believe what it says.

  77

  Hiroshima – the Suicide Club squat –

  Kabe-cho – Reizo Shiga – night, March 15th 1995

  Reizo Shiga switches on the lights in the main room of the Suicide Club. The place is empty. Recent tensions, arguments about the best drugs and the best prices, Reizo’s leadership style and the growing influence of the Aum Shinrikyo sect have driven the group apart. At the end of the day, junkies are only interested in one thing: their next score.

  Reizo’s ideas about a youth front determined to eradicate tired and decrepit social structures sounded cool as long as his few followers were high and could gesticulate wildly in long discussions about the inhumanity of the social system and the elite who were to blame for the profound economic crisis ravaging the country. They whined about the education system that turned young people into well-trained rats, paralysed by stress, and forged plans to take out bankers, the ceos of major companies, and well known politicians as the German Baader-Meinhof group had done in the 1970s.