The decline of the Suicide Club started when a number of its members joined Aum Shinrikyo. Reizo was against it at the start, but he soon realised that he was powerless to stop it. When the sect itself suggested he might become a member – with the prospect of speedy advancement – he took the bait. His competitive instincts were aroused by the fact that many young Aum Shinrikyo members had degrees from prominent universities yet still venerated the radical ideas of its founder Shoko Asahara. From the outset, Reizo was intent on climbing the hierarchical ladder whatever the cost, but in spite of the promises they had made him he hadn’t moved anywhere in the organisation, and certainly not upwards. His followers took note and abandoned him one by one. Before long the Suicide Club was facing money problems. At that point even his most faithful followers departed in silence.
Reizo stands at the window and notices the rear lights of a car driving off in the distance. He checks his nose, cautiously, convinced Mitsuko has broken it. He sees his dull reflection in the opal glass. He was always a handsome figure. He can’t bear the idea that his nose will no longer be a perfect feature. He has to be an immaculate, shiny machine. The tiniest blemish irks him intensely. He analyses his subdued despondency and comes to the conclusion that he’s afraid of Mitsuko. The untamed temperament she keeps hidden under her hesitant and diffident exterior leaves him weak. All his life, Reizo has struggled with an inner self that mocked him and belittled him. He has no idea where it came from. His contempt for the world is a result of the self-hatred that devours him. When he was fourteen, he read about the troubled youth of Yukio Mishima who had been abused by his parents. It only served to stoke Reizo’s inexplicable aversion to his own absent but gentle parents, although there was no reason for it. When he was small, his father had never threatened to throw him in front of a passing train, although Reizo later imagined he had to make him feel more like his great idol Mishima. He had never been forced to play with girls and he didn’t have a tyrannical and violent grandmother. When he looked at himself in the mirror he saw Reizo Shiga alias Joe Bloggs. The youth decided to learn kendo, the sport at which Mishima had excelled, but he found it hard to control his aggression and would smash his bamboo practice sword to pieces whenever he lost a duel. He was thrown out of the kendo club, but came to treasure the rejection as evidence of his superiority. He started to read Mishima’s essays, and although he didn’t understand much of what he read, he quickly understood that he was eloquent enough to use a couple of Mishima’s core ideas to convince his peers of his special mission. Reizo dreamt of a Japan in which the younger people ruled the roost. A strong Japan that would rise to its predestined place at the head of all the other nations. He embraced Mishima’s conviction that politics was a rat’s nest and that the only thing that could give a life meaning and depth was a glorious death. He imagined a society in which everyone would opt for an idealistic and honourable suicide when they reached the age of twenty-five. From the age of seventeen, Reizo had dressed in military black. He was like a magnet to other young people and he enjoyed the times he was able to manipulate them. He had moments of euphoria, but his character tended on the whole to be melancholic. He didn’t fantasise about sex, instead he pictured himself fighting heroic duels. He would cut it fine but always win, and then he would die from his wounds. There was often a homo-erotic tint to his daydreams, but he would never acknowledge that side of his character. Men were blood brothers, women were for slapping around. That’s what real men did. Reizo developed a fascination for porn in which the act of penetration was speeded up so that the actresses looked like inflatable dolls rolling back and forward on the bed. He was turned on by close-ups of faces twisted with pain. He loved to see the actors slap their partners’ breasts or take them from behind. The orgasmic explosion it gave him wasn’t lust, it was more like an overwhelming wave of physical energy, like having power over life and death. Reizo had the constant feeling he had been saddled with an immense hunger that could never be satisfied. He looked down on the popular mangas and assumed an arrogant artistic air, but in reality he was obsessed with comic books featuring aliens with supernatural powers. He was ashamed that he was human, a weak creature with unforgivable flaws in its basic design. He was plagued by an unbearable sense of his own triviality. Drugs were the only way to escape it. Cocaine turned him into a superman. But the euphoria only lasted half an hour, then he would crash into the ink-black darkness of self-humiliation. His frustration grew. He tried time and again to push back his boundaries. The things he didn’t dare were the most attractive. The challenges he set himself became more and more grotesque. Dare I disguise myself, stab my girlfriend, then drive her to hospital like an affectionate boyfriend? Do I dare expose someone to the potentially lethal sting of the Irukandji and note every detail of his last mortal hour to use in my novel? Do I dare lock up the daughter of a legendary mafia boss and force her to write down her life story, knowing that her father is looking for her and is holding out the prospect of a serious reward for finding her?
Every time Reizo realised what he had done, a fear took hold of him that thrust him upwards into a rage, a rage that would allow him to do something he had dreamt about for so long without daring to admit it to himself.
78
Hiroshima – Nagarekawa district – gay bar Splash –
1-23 Yagenbori – Takeda, Adachi, Yori and Becht –
night, March 15th 1995
“800 yen for the first drink,” says the barman at Splash. Takeda only has to look at him to make him change his mind. “On the house, this time.” Takeda orders a beer. His body feels dehydrated. A memory is haunting him, throbbing with the intensity of a wound. Years ago he had staggered drunk one night into his wife’s bedroom. He can’t remember whether he wanted to have sex with her or ask for indigestion tablets. His wife was on her knees beside the bed, her eyes closed. When he asked what she was doing on her knees in the middle of the night, she said: “I’m talking with my heart, Akio.” It sounded so infantile that Takeda answered condescendingly: “And does your heart have anything interesting to say?” His wife tilted her head and looked at him, one of her usual understated if slightly accusatory looks. He’d seen it a thousand times. He often compared her expression with that of a cart horse: nervous, gentle, ready to run. He couldn’t have been more mistaken. Now, Takeda sees her eyes again and remembers with astonishment how they ploughed their way through the mud and mire of his embitterment and buried sadness. The inspector rubs his temples and shakes his head.
The other people in the bar – a chubby type with a girlish haircut and a skinny young man with slick, combed back hair – had been keeping a furtive eye on him since he arrived in the place, but now they turn their surprised attention to a trio of new arrivals: Dr Adachi and two women. Adachi gives Takeda a hug, completely out of character. Takeda is frozen to the spot. He catches sight of Beate Becht over Adachi’s shoulder. The German photographer reacts to his gaze as if she’s just been caught taking a picture of the embracing pair without permission.
“Akio,” Adachi whispers in the inspector’s ear. “I’m bitterly sorry. Why do I have to bring you such news?”
Takeda wriggles out of Adachi’s embrace without a word. His wife’s voice resounds in his ears as if the words she said that night are only now hitting home: “You should listen to your heart, Akio. Don’t let it turn to stone.”
79
Hiroshima – Suicide Club squat –
Kabe-cho – Reizo Shiga – night, March 15th 1995
Reizo Shiga tilts his head as if he’s listening to something. He looks around the poorly lit room. The third futon on the floor belonged to him and Yori. He treated Yori like a pin-up, but deep in his heart he always feared the day she would see through his disguise. He leaves the main room, descends the stairs to the cellar, heads for his improvised office and sits in front of his computer. He opens the file with the text of his novel, rereads the final paragraph and start
s to type. A few sentences later he shifts to a new document. He sits for a while, motionless, his fingers resting impotent on the keyboard. When the undersecretary of Aum Shinrikyo told him in exchange for drugs that the woman the sect members were looking for was the daughter of a shadowy kumicho by the name of Rokurobei, a plan started to mature spontaneously in his head. Convinced that fate had led the daughter of a powerful organised crime leader into his group, he wasn’t about to just hand her over to the sect’s leader Shoko Asahara without something in return. As always, the plan to exchange Mitsuko for power and influence started as a vivid daydream. And as always, he had been unable to make a distinction between his own dream world and that strange, confusing, frightening thing other people call reality. He hadn’t dared imagine that Mitsuko would put up such a fight. He had wanted to play with her, like he liked to do with people, but the game had gotten out of hand. To his great surprise, he realised that his life had always been like that, wild, out of control. The anxiety that accompanied this conclusion grabbed him by the throat. He had to go back to the metro tunnel, immediately, set Mitsuko free, offer her his apologies, convince her that he didn’t know what he was doing most of the time, and hope for the best.
He remains at his computer, waiting for the moment to get up and carry out his plan. But it doesn’t come. Past and present mingle anew in his head to create a new story. As an adolescent he had poured over hundreds of photos of the young David Bowie. When he was fifteen he bought a jack-knife. He had always been terrified of being mugged, but he also secretly hoped that someone would try just to see if he would have the guts to use it. In those days he wrote jisei no ku, death poems in which he tried to get “drunk on death”.
He waits for a long time, then starts to type. Instead of a new scene in his novel he writes:
I never wanted to be born. I never wanted to be so lonely and so venomous.
80
Hiroshima – Nagarekawa district – gay bar Splash –
1-23 Yagenbori – Takeda, Adachi, Yori and Becht –
night, March 15th 1995
Takeda, Adachi, Yori and Becht are huddled together in an alcove in the gay bar. Yori has the least to say of all four, but she’s listening carefully to the others. Beate Becht tells Takeda how sorry she feels for him, then tells him again. Adachi repeats what Yori told him about her friend Mitsuko. He insists that fate brought them together. He hands Takeda the documents Yori gave him, Mitsuko’s documents. The inspector has a quick look at them and they put his head in a spin. He now understands why Adachi arranged to meet him at a bar where no one would expect to find them and not at the inspector’s home.
As they try to unravel the puzzle, it becomes clear that each of them has a unique perspective that can help clarify the situation. They’re all agreed that Takeda has to go into hiding. The police statement Adachi picked up on the radio at his apartment was crystal clear: Takeda is suspected of killing his wife in a domestic quarrel and every unit in the Hiroshima prefecture is looking for him. Every cop in the city knows the score and they’re all on the lookout for the inspector. Takeda’s wife died at home from multiple stab wounds. The knife was from the kitchen in their apartment. There were no signs of a break-in. Chief commissioner Takamatsu issued the arrest warrant in person. The magistrate who signed it has been a close friend of Takamatsu for decades. Everything is pointing towards a set-up, but they have no evidence. How do they prove it?
Yori explains in detail what Mitsuko told her before she disappeared: about her father – the mafia boss known as Rokurobei –, his Yuzonsha group, and the abandoned island of Hashima he uses as his operations base. She adds that, according to Mitsuko, the murdered ceo of the Dai-Ichi-Kangyo Bank was one of the members of Rokurobei’s criminal fraternity. Adachi and Takeda are forced to conclude that Takamatsu must also be a member of the Yuzonsha, or at least in their pay.
“What’s the next step?” Adachi asks. In spite of the tricky situation, there’s a sort of familiarity in the group, as if they’ve known each other for years.
“Can I make a suggestion,” says the photographer hesitatingly.
“I’m all ears,” says Takeda.
Beate points at the documents: “If I understand it right, the chief commissioner belongs to a band of criminals that wants to cover up the attack on the bank because it has to do with Japan’s wartime past. If you ask me they’re not going to stop there if they want to keep their boss’s identity a secret. I’ve heard enough to figure that Japan would be turned upside down if the true identity of Rokurobei were to be exposed.”
“Are you suggesting I contact Takamatsu and offer him the documents in exchange for my safety?” says Takeda.
“You make the suggestion but you don’t go through with it,” the photographer answers. “And that’s why we need to go to my hotel room first.”
81
Notes from Mitsuko’s basement prison
Go away, my son. You’re not real. I left you behind as a sign for your father, my father. I didn’t want you to live when you slithered out of me, far too slimy, without even a cry of anger. Even then your indifference was complete, so don’t pretend now that you’re grieving the loss of your life. I can see the umbilical cord around your swollen neck, I can see your parched tongue. That is no big deal. My tongue is parched too. Be happy you’re already dead. I still have to face my end, and the thought of it pains me in the very place you spent so many months in hiding, kicking me now and then.
I begin to fear that Reizo Shiga isn’t coming back. His tragedy threatens to become perfect and he’s not even here to write it all down. Your presence is all that I have, my son, but I still want you to go. You’ve suffered enough. You weren’t destined to live, just as it would have been better if my father and me had never lived. Your life would have been a misery, populated by therapists, social workers and, who knows, perhaps even machines to help you move and talk. Don’t pretend you’re not a monster. You were deformed, helpless. Death was the best for you. I dressed you like the baby I found deep in the cellar on Hashima, years ago, embalmed, a chrysanthemum on its right heel and birth and death certificates with the seal of the imperial physician who had filled the small corps’ veins with formalin and the eye sockets with caustic soda. According to the documents, they also used zinc acetate, salicylic acid and glycerine.
That baby looked just like you, my poor son, just like you.
I was thirteen and had developed an interest in the history of the island. When I looked up at the sombre ruins against the dark grey sky, I imagined I could hear voices and sensed a hand with wispy fingers reaching towards me from behind, trying to grab my hair. Such thoughts left me with a strange feeling in my belly, a terrified ecstasy. I enjoyed fantasising that there was a curse on the place and that my father and me lived here because humanity had rejected us. I wandered for hours in and out of the apartments the mineworkers had once lived in, trying to picture what they would have been like when they were occupied. My father told me that the Chinese and Koreans who had worked in the mines deep below sea level had been treated like animals. The first time I made my way down to the cellars that gave access to the mineshafts I trembled from head to toe, but I enjoyed every second. Just before descending the broad staircase, I looked up at the sky: greenish-grey with clouds hanging like smoke over the rust-coloured ruins. The crumbling dilapidated walls stood out against the dirty white colossal chimney that rose from the ground behind the buildings. I descended the grimy stairs that gave access to the cellars where the mineworkers changed before they clambered down into the narrow shafts that brought them deep underground, far below sea level. I imagined I could smell them in their underground vault. There were still a few dusty overalls in the changing room, overalls the men had worn and left behind. They had become thin as paper and had the colour of stale rice. Because life on the island was a treeless existence, the only colours I trusted were dull shades of brown
, grey, slate, the sombre indifference of the empty windows in the apartment buildings. I kept a close eye on the uniforms, afraid they might come to life at any moment. Bits and pieces of miner’s tackle were scattered here and there, including half a motorcycle. God only knows how it got there.
The iron-coloured chest in the corner beside the metal lockers caught my eye. I rambled through the room, pretending to myself I wasn’t going to open the chest. What might be inside? I knew I couldn’t stop myself, but I resisted as long as I could. I turned on my heels and in a couple of nervous steps I was standing in front of the metal box. I was young, but even then I had an eye for detail. The chest wasn’t covered with dust like the other things in the cellar. The locking mechanism glistened as if it had just been oiled. I held my breath and clicked open the lid. I remember an explosion of heat in my body when I saw the dead, deformed baby. The dry air in the place made it look as if the baby was asleep and might wake up at any moment, in spite of its terrible deformities. Its head was swollen and disfigured. Hardened fibrous tissue bulged from its eyes. A lump of flesh bulged from its lipless mouth. The naked little body had the colour and texture of black porcelain. Its crotch was distended, a snow-white protuberance, the genitals melted like congealed egg-white.
The sight of the baby didn’t terrify me long; rather I felt sorry for it. It looked as if it could come to life at any moment, rub the fibrous tissue from its eyes, and beg for love, protection, warmth with its as good as lipless mouth.
Someone must have loved the poor creature a lot to have taken so much trouble to embalm it.
And as I thumbed through the documents I found in the chest – certificates signed by the imperial physician with reference to the nationality of the mother – I learned who that person was. I saw the chrysanthemum on the baby’s right heel and I read the date of birth.
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