As Reizo Shiga steps down from the Takanobashi tram, hours of exhausting yoga exercises, meditation, and tests to gauge his pain threshold behind him, his brain is throbbing with alpha energy. He’s confident that he’ll be one of the ten to secure a teleporter. On his way to meet his girlfriend Yori, he crosses the main road and walks through the red-light district of Mitsukoshi. A woman, young, slightly tipsy, emerges from a love hotel. There’s something about the way she walks that reminds Reizo of the other streetwalkers. Her handbag is silvery, glittering. She’s leaving work early today, probably because she realises she’s had too much to drink. Reizo Shiga follows her and watches her closely. On the corner of the street, close to a lamppost, he strikes. He’s done this many times in the past months. He knows for certain that he’s good at it, perhaps the best. He was surprised by his own brutality first time round, but the woman’s bloodied face only urged him on, like coke bubbling in his veins. Since then, Shiga has developed a fast and effective technique: a sharp blow to the shoulder with his elbow, paralysing the arm that holds the bag, while yanking down the strap with his other hand. The girls are usually too startled or frightened to react. Sometimes they’re drugged and they gaze at him goggle-eyed, pupils dilated, swaying on their legs. Reizo Shiga knows he can use more violence – and get more satisfaction – if he doesn’t rob girls on the street, where he needs to be fast, but this will have to do for the time being. His latest victim is tough. She slaps him and screams. There’s no time to think. The alpha energy he built up in the sanctuary is discharging. Shiga butts her with his forehead. She reels backwards, hits the back of her head against a lamppost and sinks to the ground, unconscious. He snatches the bag and makes his getaway. “Where are the police when you need them?” he mutters with a grin. Nothing can beat this overwhelming feeling of power, this buzz of pure consciousness. Further down the road he starts rummaging in the bag without slowing his pace. He finds a large amount of yen, more than he’d dared hope for, and more than enough to score a couple of times.
Still running full tilt, Reizo Shiga feels the breath of fate brush over him. Tonight is going to be different. Why submit to years of servitude to the Blessed One? Why not take a shortcut to the highest level and show the Blessed One that Reizo Shiga is a disciple with exceptional qualities?.
Greater, perhaps, than the Blessed One himself?
15
Beate Becht thinks the Righa Royal Hotel is kitschy, overpriced and amusing. Its pompous domed ceiling makes the lounge look like an old-fashioned UFO. Her room looks out onto a neat square pond with an artificial island, trees and pontoons.
The hotel staff are also a source of amusement, if mixed with occasional irritation. They’re polite, servile and stereotypically inscrutable. Beate, whose friends call her “Peter Pan with boobs” because she’s boyish and has short hair, has spent the last few days wondering whether her father Hermann Becht would have approved of her latest photography project. Years ago, on his death bed, Hermann Becht told his daughter that suffering could not be aestheticized. He was a man of principle to the last. Beate’s publisher is a different kettle of fish. Bruno Günder of Bertelsmann Publishing, the man who canonised single malt whiskey, greeted Beate’s idea of publishing a tribute book to her father with “cosmic enthusiasm”. To her, it would be a way of exorcising her feelings of guilt. As a young photographer with the German army during WWII, her father Hermann had joined the fighting in Berlin to defend the city at the end of the war, when cameras, film and heroic Germans were few and far between. Beate sees echoes of the war in all his later photo-books. She wonders almost every day whether her father’s photo coverage of the Chernobyl disaster nine years ago wasn’t actually a painful, roundabout way of committing suicide. The man was 60 years old when he accompanied vomiting rescue workers and took pictures of men clearing radioactive rubble with spades and wheelbarrows, just after the disaster in Chernobyl. Hermann Becht had indoctrinated Beate from early childhood with his Calvinistic belief in damnation: man is predestined to evil. In her teenage years, Beate raged against her father’s fatalism. Now, at 30, she realises that her anger has become chronic, concealing a minefield of sorrow that she daren’t enter. She compensates by being friendly and polite to everyone. It uses up tons of energy. Beate knows well enough that she’s angry with her father for not understanding her work. Hermann Becht was a press photographer, every inch of him, and he was appalled by the sexually charged punk photos his daughter published. Her work, labelled “neo-symbolic”, was a complete mystery to him, “far-fetched”: shocking, slightly Gothic-looking female nudes, slender nymph-like creatures with chalk-white faces, blood-red lips, heavy eye-shadow – a glimpse of vampirism, a hint of lesbian lust with long fingernails; tethered silhouettes of women, powerless yet endowed with superior sensuality, slavish princesses, some wearing leather masks, their faces hidden, in tortuously painful poses replete with ambiguous passion. One critic wrote that her pictures “personified the ecstasy of the senses run wild”. Black-haired women with large crucifixes between their pallid breasts, naked female torsos with bull’s heads on their shoulders. Her father called her symbolism pretentious. Hermann Becht had never understood that his daughter’s pictures were an attempt to dispel her childhood fears. One of those fears, perhaps the greatest, was her uncertainty about being loved. Did her father love her? Beate Becht never found out. When she reached adolescence and first encountered sexual desire, she wondered whether she would ever be able to love anyone – the powerful intoxication she needed to stir her lust made love seem tame. Ten years later, she published her first book, Forbidden Fruit, which pictured beautiful young women next to dwarfs, invalids, decrepit tramps, and hunchbacks. Languid and pleading, the beauties gazed at their hideous partners, who humiliated and abused them and afterwards carelessly pushed them aside.
Beate is now convinced that things aren’t as bad as they seem and that she simply doesn’t have time for love. She makes sure her needs are satisfied on a regular basis. Man or woman? She leaves that to fate. It makes no difference to her sweaty palms or feelings of inadequacy, of being small and saying the wrong things. She describes herself to her artistic friends as a workaholic, pronouncing the word with a rolling ‘r’ in a self-deprecating parody of her Bavarian accent.
She came to Japan to complete her latest photo project, but the country has been a disappointment thus far. It irritates her that the Japanese, who treated their Second World War prisoners worse than the Nazis, claim to be the victims of the war because of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. She’s read in the news editorials that extreme right-wing nationalism has gained more support than ever before during the economic crisis. Powerful political factions are openly demanding Japanese domination of all of Asia. The journalists who wrote about them didn’t capitalise “Great Japanese Empire” for nothing. The atmosphere in the country is not the only disappointment for Beate. Why isn’t the renowned Japanese sense of aesthetics visible in the street? Hiroshima gleams with false glamour and uninspired replicas of American architecture. The city centre, on the other hand, feels grimy and neglected. There’s hardly a trace of classical Japan anywhere.