The colonel wanted to say something, but the prince silenced him with a gesture of his hand. “The people at the court think I’m a creature of the past, with my ideas about war and honour. They refuse to see that I represent the future of the yellow race. They call me arrogant, melodramatic, puffed up by my own self-importance, a dark prince who – you never know – might well be slightly insane.” The young man laughed, but he sounded far from cheerful. “They don’t understand what the divinity of the Japanese emperor means, Koruzo. They claim I want to be larger than life itself. But what else can a man do if the gods are his only measure? Dwarfs! I’m surrounded by them, and they’re suffocating me.”
“Your faithful followers are firmly convinced that you are the next step in the completion of Nippon’s superiority, heika. Follow my advice, I beg you. You must go into hiding. When the time is right, you will ascend the throne of Japan. The results of our experiments here will be of inestimable value in the future. Where the Germans failed, our scholars succeeded: you are the beginning of a super race that will conquer the world.”
The young man straightened his shoulders. It was clear that the fanatical soldier’s words had done him good.
“As you wish,” he said. “I’ll do what you ask, hide myself, take on a false identity. No one will call me Prince Norikazu from now on.”
“How should we address you?” the colonel asked.
The young man sneered. “Let me think about it, colonel. I’m sure to come up with something ‘melodramatic’ and ‘self-important’.”
106
Hiroshima – Adachi’s apartment near the Peace Tower
– Takeda and Becht – March 15th 1995
Takeda has switched off the sun bed and covered the body with a sheet from the bed. The heat of the lamps had shrunk the ropes and they had done their work. The result was disfigured and horrific.
He insists that Beate Becht stay downstairs, but she ignores him. She waits in the doorway, staring at the sheet.
“It’s my fault,” Takeda realises. His voice sounds absent, as if his thoughts are elsewhere.
“What makes you say that?”
“It’s been running around in my head all this time, but I didn’t want to pay attention to it so I told myself it probably wasn’t important. I let something slip when I was talking to Takamatsu. I wanted to intimidate him. I told him I had help.”
I’m not alone. Takeda is convinced that Takamatsu took good note of his words. The man had years of detective experience and had honed his interrogation techniques to perfection. He’s also aware that the chief commissioner is an expert in the principles of ishin denshin, non-verbal communication. He once boasted about it. Takamatsu will doubtless have concluded from the delicate and dangerous circumstances in which Takeda found himself that only a good friend could be behind the ‘help’ he was receiving.
And who was Takeda’s only friend in the department, an outsider like himself?
“What are you going to do?” Becht stares at him wide-eyed. Takeda has the impression that he can see a glimmer of hysteria in them. He still can’t understand why she’s helping him, but he can’t escape the feeling that she’s in too deep and can’t cope. Maybe she’s just an extremely nervous young woman, an artist kicking on the moment. Takeda figures she’s had enough kicks. He decides once again that he’ll be better off without her.
“I’m going to take your film of my conversation with Takamatsu to the Public Security Commission in Tokyo together with the Norikazu documents. I have to move fast. I can still travel freely outside the prefecture, but it’s not going to last.”
“Will they believe you? It’s a pretty strange story.”
“I’m not a fool, Beate: in exchange for dropping the murder charge and the provision of a new life they’ll ask for discretion. Discretion is the greatest good. Such a scandal would shake Japan to its very foundations: a yakuza who should actually be the successor to the throne, living in hiding for decades. The world press would have a field day.”
“I’m going with you. I’ll back up your statement.”
Silence.
“OK,” says Takeda without looking at her. “We leave tonight for Kyoto in the rental car. Once we’re a distance outside the prefecture it should be safe to take the shinkansen.”
He glances over at the figure under the sheet. “I once read that just before you die, when the brain is short of oxygen and is determined to keep control of the body whatever the cost, the senses short-circuit and it feels as if your whole life is flashing by in front of you. I wonder what Adachi saw.”
“And you?” says Becht. “What do you expect to see when your time comes?”
The intimacy of her question surprises him. She’s the complete opposite of his wife.
“Loneliness,” he says. “A sea of loneliness.” He pulls himself together and adds: “But I guess that doesn’t sound very Japanese.”
“It does,” she says.
They make their way down the stairs. “I forgot my bag,” she says. Before Takeda can respond she runs upstairs and back into Adachi’s room.
Halfway up he sees flashlights. He runs up to Adachi’s room and waits in the doorway.
She’s removed the sheet from Adachi’s body and she’s taking photographs of it, one after the other, her lips tight, her eyes concentrated and emotionless, as if she’s withdrawn into a place inside herself where everything is locked out.
107
Hiroshima Harbour – Prince Norikazu –
8am, August 6th 1945
The boat was inconspicuous and unmarked, but it was heavily armed. The port of Hiroshima, a low-lying and extensive array of docks, quays and warehouses, had limited military value. It served rather as a repository for the hinterland. It was eight in the morning. Prince Norikazu was standing at the bow looking out over the city as the boat tied up. The company disembarked quickly and in orderly fashion. A Toyota KB truck in military khaki was at the ready. They set off in the direction of the river Aioi. A young soldier wearing glasses pulled back the tarpaulin and caught sight of three planes flying past above their heads. “American planes,” said the soldier next to him. “I heard the air-raid siren earlier, but they sounded the all-clear half an hour ago. They must be scouts.”
“The bastards come and take photos then return with a whole squadron to firebomb us,” said another soldier.
“They’re turning,” the bespectacled soldier shouted. He followed them as best he could. Moments later: “One of them just dropped something with a parachute.”
Prince Norikazu made his way to the rear of the truck. The men bowed and made room for him. The young prince looked up. A parachute supporting a black object was drifting down towards the city. Norikazu narrowed his eyes, tried to get a better view of the object. A cold sensation ran through him, a pulse of excitement that paralysed him yet made him feel simultaneously as if his body was about to explode. The driver turned into the street leading to the Aioi. The sky suddenly turned into a magnesium torch followed by a tremendous bang and a surprising disappearance of the blinding light. The Toyota KB was lifted and thrown screeching across the street. Everything went dark. In the blink of an eye, the city’s wooden constructions were reduced to splinters. A dust cloud thundered like a steam roller over the stone buildings at eight hundred kilometres per hour. It was accompanied by a firestorm with temperatures reaching almost two thousand degrees Celsius. A cloud of smoke in the form of a mushroom rose to a height of eight thousand meters, purple, black, red and grey. People were scorched or tossed into the air like leaves by the pressure of the explosion. Houses were crushed, factories of solid concrete reduced to rubble.
Prince Norikazu and his company were more than two kilometres from the epicentre of the explosion, but the heat and the air pressure resulting from the atom bomb were still tremendous. Norikazu awoke from unconsciousness as t
wo of his escorts dragged him from the burning truck. The military uniform he was wearing had been torn to shreds.
“Heika,” stammered the lieutenant designated by Colonel Tadao as convoy leader. “You must... The Americans have...” He fell silent, exhausted. His left eye bulged out of its smashed socket. His hair had been scorched away. Blood poured from a wound at the back of his skull. Strips of smoking skin hung from the prince’s upper torso. The sixteen-year-old’s bloodshot eyes stared through the reeling lieutenant as if he wasn’t there, then his gaze swung to the right, to a corpse lying on the ground. As he looked at it, fire burst from its fingertips and the corpse was quickly consumed by flames.
“I have seen Rokurobei,” said Prince Norikazu, barely audible. “His neck unfurled and his head filled the sky with darkness.”
108
Hiroshima-Saijo – Takeda and Becht looking for
Yori near Saijo Station – March 16th 1995
A bunch of bosozoku are loitering around the arrivals hall of Saijo Station. These young outsiders see themselves as rebels. They’re revelling in the fierce wind blowing in from the platforms. Spring storms are rare in this part of Japan, but when they do move in they can reach wind speeds of more than one hundred kilometres per hour. In spite of the wind, the girls are wearing high heels or garish boots. Their jackets are as long as their miniskirts. Red, white, neon green, fluorescent blue. The boys wear their hair over their eyes and try to look mean in their baggy jeans and oversized hooded jackets. They’re sitting in circles in the covered hall. The rows of narrow windows don’t provide much light, a lot less then the blaze of neon inside, advertising power games, fashion articles, cars, computers. Two girls are standing in the middle, encouraging people to join a playful demonstration, part of the upcoming Peace March in Hiroshima.
Takeda and Becht walk into the station. The inspector thought it made better sense to get out of the centre of Hiroshima after hearing on the rental car radio that the prefecture police were investigating the attack on economist Nagai Shiga. Their spokesman said that traces had been found on the renowned academic’s bombed-out car that suggested the involvement of a group of “economic anarchists”. This mysterious group had already issued a death threat against Shiga because they saw him as the “instigator of expensive and useless public works that had intensified the crisis, deepened corruption, and made the poverty of so many unemployed Japanese men and women worse than ever”. In the car, Takeda had talked with his stubborn companion about their shared adversary. He is convinced that the yakuza leader who calls himself Rokurobei is being protected by the police higher up the chain of command than Takamatsu. And who knows: politicians, business people, senior civil servants? Organisations with extremist tendencies are all over the place and many aren’t averse to a dose of overblown samurai rhetoric or puffed up cultural folklore. Takeda is pretty sure that Takamatsu called off the official police investigation into him after their meeting at Denny’s Diner. He’s more worried about new attempts on his life. Before heading for Tokyo with the evidence he has at his disposal, he wants to track down Yori. There was no suggestion in Adachi’s apartment that Yori had suffered the same fate as the police doctor. It was possible that the capricious street urchin had left the doctor’s apartment before Rokurobei and his cronies arrived. There was a chance that they had taken her with them, but Takeda can’t think why the yakuza would do such a thing. It’s crystal clear in the meantime that Rokurobei and his followers aren’t afraid of murder. Takeda is convinced that the rejected crown prince can’t keep up his killing spree forever, but after more than twenty years in the Japanese police force he knows how pathetic the results of crime prevention can be. There’s a myth in the West that Japan’s crime figures are among the lowest in the world. That was more or less true until the middle of the 1980s, upheld by intimate entanglements between the yakuza and the police and by the typically Japanese need to show the outside world a respectable facade. But in recent years, crime figures had skyrocketed as a result of a crisis that had made society merciless and cynical and trashed the old values. According to Takeda, Rokurobei was probably determined to recover his anonymity as quickly as possible and get on with his clandestine operations. The more dead bodies he left in his wake, the more dangerous it became for the mafia leader. At the same time, Takeda knows that he shouldn’t underestimate the prince’s sense of hubris, let alone his twisted, fanatical nationalism. With the documents he received from Yori and Becht’s videotape, Takeda thinks he stands a good chance of worming his way out of this hornet’s nest, but he also thinks it wouldn’t do any harm to have Yori along in person as a witness.
But that wasn’t the only reason the inspector chose the busy station with its multiple exits to check out if anyone knew anything about Yori’s whereabouts.
109
Hiroshima – Prince Norikazu –
the burning city – August 6th 1945
Shortly after the explosion, a rain of condensation fell from the sky in the form of dense, dark droplets that hurt when they touched skin, a gluey rain that turned everything black. The black contrasted intensely with the yellow and red fires that spewed flames metres into the air. Prince Norikazu stretched his neck, tried to collect as much of the black rain as he could in his parched throat in spite of the pain it caused. Of the detachment charged with accompanying him only four had survived. The lieutenant was on his feet, waving his arms, muttering to himself. He wasn’t likely to last much longer. The horizon was a line of flames, smoke and ruins. When they passed a factory that had been completely flattened, the lieutenant turned to his superior; stuck out his horrendously swollen tongue and raised his arm as if he was about to salute him. He collapsed like a sack of salt. The prince crouched beside him, looked closely at the dead man as if he was measuring him up for a sturdy coffin, and then unfastened the katana hanging from the lieutenant’s belt. He greeted him with the sword.
The young giant continued on his way, with difficulty and determination, into the ruined city.
* * *
A woman staggered past the burning buildings with a baby in her arms. The heat had caused the baby’s skin to peel. He was limp and motionless in her arms.
A man tugged at the body of a teenager buried under the rubble. The boy’s skull was cracked open and brain tissue was hanging out of the wound. He had lost his right eye. He was calling out for his mother, his voice clear and steady. The man had pulled away enough rubble to see that both legs had been crushed. He tried to lift the boy. He succeeded. He continued on his way, the boy motionless in his arms.
A girl, blood gushing from her mouth, stumbled through the ruins of a school. Hands shot up from the rubble, bloody and smouldering. They tried to grab the girl by the ankles. Voices begged: “Take me with you, take me with you!” In panic she kicked at the hands and ran on, her arms outstretched as if she was blind.
Hundreds of people tried to reach the river Aioi. They screamed for help, lost direction in the ash-filled clouds of smoke, fell exhausted to the ground before they could reach the banks of the river and baked like clay stones in the raging fire.
Those who made it to the river couldn’t believe their eyes. A young man, his upper torso badly burned, was standing on the banks; a giant with an enormous, crooked head, waving with his left arm. In his right hand he held a katana. He held the sword into the air like an antenna. He shouted words the refugees didn’t understand: he was the crown prince of Japan, and he was going to lead them to the only surviving bridge across the river. They shook their heads: for some the atom bomb had brought mutilation, for others insanity. They refused to listen to the lanky scarecrow, forced their way past him to the river, jumped into the water to cool their burnt bodies, tried to swim to the other side with the little energy they had left.
The lunatic dropped his sword when he saw a whirlpool form in the river, a greedy centrifuge of water, as if some primal creature had awaken
ed from its sleep at the bottom of the river, gulping down the bodies one by one as they shrieked and flailed with their arms and legs, or submitted in silence, resigned, exhausted.
Norikazu turned away from the river of death and stared at the mushroom above the city. It was still swelling outwards and upwards, illuminating the sky with a blinding radiance, reflecting every colour of the rainbow. It was overwhelming yet attractive, the gate to a new world.
110
Hiroshima – Saijo Station –
Takeda and Becht – March 16th 1995
Beate Becht turns in a circle in the middle of Saijo Station, her camera at the ready. Bright colours swirl. The station building is a cacophony of sound and light. Voices, announcements, music, arriving trains. The youngsters around her are like a swarm of bees, constantly moving. They make her dizzy.
She decided to snap some shots while Takeda was asking around after Yori. As always, the lens narrowed her world and drew her to details. A pout, a dirty look under an orange Mohawk, a tattoo of a stiletto, high-heel pumps under a baggy skirt. She looked around when she was done, but Takeda was nowhere to be seen.
“Stay on the move,” Takeda had said that morning when they left the hotel where they had spent the night. “Norikazu knows it’s risky to spend too much time in the outside world. We have to get as far away from him as possible.” Beate was confused and angry at the heavy-set inspector who pretended nothing was going on. She was even angrier at herself. She didn’t understand why she had been so determined the night before. She had tried to seduce him. She had gracefully offered her boyish back and let her fringe fall over her eyes.
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