“Descendants,” Xavier says. “That’s a beautiful word. It isn’t used much.”
Yori laughs again and presents her face in profile, mimicking the pose of a modest Japanese woman subtly trying to seduce a man. Xavier finds the cast-down eyes especially convincing. Realising he’s rumbled her, she lifts her chin and looks up. Xavier isn’t sure what she wants from him, but he’s content to be sitting here opposite her. It makes him think his trip might turn out to be what he wanted it to be after alclass="underline" a journey through the past, to a time before Anna’s injury.
“Did your sister change once she needed a wheelchair?” Yori asks. “So much that you thought she was a different person?”
“Before, she was always where the action was. Afterwards…” He doesn’t finish the sentence, casting around the room again as if looking for an escape route. “Why do you ask?”
“Because a different situation can change people dramatically. Not that long ago, Reizo was an ultra-nationalist, then he joined a crazy sect with weird ideas. Now he thinks the emperor should be deified again, that Japan should assemble a powerful army and show foreigners the door. His views on men and women changed at the same time. He disapproves of my desire for freedom and is constantly needling me, to prove that he’s the boss. He often has me shadowed by a bunch of thugs, and accuses me of going out with other men. He doesn’t want me to have anyone else, but at the same time he neglects me. He’s stopped working on his novel. He says he has bigger fish to fry, something about alpha energy.” She giggles. “If you ask me all that alpha stuff is just an excuse for not writing. He’s afraid he’s not talented enough.”
Again, Xavier doubts Yori is telling the truth. She might be trying to arouse his pity so she can make her move. Young Japanese women are mercilessly competitive and seducing a Westerner would give her a serious edge on them.
Xavier is flattered, despite his reservations. He’s also starting to feel agitated. If anyone knows how cruel fate can be, how it can change a life, he does. He came back to Japan to remember how happy he and Anna had been. That was the only reason. A crazy reason, maybe, but the only one. Xavier needs to remember Anna the way she was before the wheelchair. Only then can he continue his life.
“Perhaps you’re his obsession,” says Xavier.
Her answer surprises him: “Reizo is just a boy, wild and crazy. You look like someone with an obsession.”
Xavier Douterloigne is still thinking about her words when they leave the restaurant fifteen minutes later. Outside, three young men are waiting for them. They appear from nowhere, and before Xavier fully grasps what’s going on, they’ve grabbed his arms and put him in a headlock. He tries to shout, but he can’t. They drag him into an old Volkswagen van. He attempts to catch a glimpse of Yori out of the corner of his eye. In vain.
18
The night seems never-ending. I’m drifting on an ocean of remembered fragments. Not a raft in sight. If it goes on like this, I’ll drown.
I kept a diary when I was a teenager, as I imagine most young girls did. I stopped after I found I’d written words, even sentences, that I didn’t understand. They were in a foreign language. The handwriting was mine, but the characters that filled the pages were incomprehensible. A chill ran down my spine every time I encountered those perplexing pages. Then it would switch seamlessly to sentences I recognised and remembered, as if the automatic writing had suddenly stopped.
Images of a young woman – me? – biting a man’s shoulder appear in my mind’s eye. The man: the one I called Mayumi?
What was he doing to me?
Or me to him?
When I became aware of my sexuality, and started stealing glances at the torsos of the seamen who delivered provisions to Hashima, I discovered my body could be a source of pleasure, but also disgust and aggression. My father said the seamen were a lesser species. I was above them on the evolutionary ladder. So why didn’t it feel that way? Looking at their young, nimble bodies, their unashamedly hairy armpits, the way they bent over while unloading our supply boats, I felt clumsy and grotesque. In my father’s study, I’d found video tapes of people mating. I watched them when my father was off the island. It struck me that all the actors were blonde Westerners from a distant and unashamedly cold land. Hairy as apes and just as unselfconscious, they smiled and looked into each other’s eyes while copulating. It looked like aerobics. I imagined they were big children, my children. I learned to pleasure myself, but what I enjoyed most was picturing the surprised faces of the cream-skinned people on the screen when I joined them, naked. In my fantasies, they always looked submissive. I despised them for hiding the fact that my body shocked them. They bowed low, cringing like domestic animals, and obeyed my every command. I would tolerate their presence or send them away. It all depended on my mood.
Afterwards, when the fantasies subsided, shame inevitably rushed in, filling me with a sense of my own emptiness.
19
Beate Becht has decided the cover photo on the Japanese magazine on her bed is a coincidence. But its resemblance to Satsuo Nakata’s photo from fifty years ago is still chilling. She thinks back to the portraits her father took of the Japanese photographer. She was only a child at the time, but the short and shrivelled man with thin wisps of hair combed carefully over his balding scalp looked exotic to her. Papa travelled all over the world while she stayed behind at boarding school. Beate still remembers dreading the way her father’s Japanese colleague always looked at the camera sideways, as if ashamed, or in the process of hatching some devious plan. Hermann Becht first met Nakata while shooting a photo reportage about the Niigata earthquake victims in 1964, a year before his daughter was born. Hermann had travelled to Japan to cover the Olympics in Tokyo. Shortly before the games were opened, an earthquake struck the Niigata region, killing hundreds of people. Becht, the misery-addict, immediately left for Niigata. Years later, he would tell his daughter bitter-sweet stories about his encounter with Satsuo Nakata in Niigata. Shortly after the nuclear attack on Hiroshima, the Japanese photographer had taken pictures only eight hundred metres away from the epicentre of the explosion. Despite her tender age, Beate understood that her father was jealous of his colleague’s achievement. Nakata had told Hermann Becht an endless stream of stories about what he had seen and heard, which Becht later passed on to his ten-year old daughter without noticing the shock on her face. More than twenty years later, Beate still feels the fear and disgust the stories evoked in her. She gets up from the hotel bed and takes Lens from her suitcase, one of her father’s books, an overview of his career in pictures and text. She studies a self-portrait of Hermann Becht in Chernobyl. He’s standing in a doorway dressed in a shabby-looking radiation suit with the background brightly lit. The suits turned out not to be proper radiation suits at all. The Soviet authorities couldn’t afford the real thing and distributed cheap gas suits instead, which offered little if any protection against radiation. The deceit was kept secret for a long time. Beate hears her father’s voice in its customary flat, drawling tone, as if he’s standing next to her: radiation victims have between twenty-five and thirty bowel movements a day… with blood and slime. The skin on their arms and legs starts to burst…