21
All the buildings on Hashima Island were disintegrating. From the top floor of a block that had remained more or less intact, I watched the members of Yuzonsha wade with dignity through the rubble of slate-grey structures that had collapsed decades ago. The clouds hiding the moon took the shape of a dragon, dark and menacing, only its head glowing with silvery light. A row of red lamps marked the path leading to the spiral staircase, known as “the stairs to hell” by superstitious fishermen. The massive balconies of the half-collapsed neighbouring block were leaning against it, their haphazard shapes shrouded in the lamplight and the darkness. Our classical poets called the night the mother of our fears. If that’s true, my father was her lover. His display of decorum struck me as simply theatrical, but it worked on his followers.
I was in my father’s study. The building was fitted with powerful generators. The room was full of the latest Toshiba desktop computers, with access to the Internet. We received radio and television stations, and owned a brand-new satellite telephone, the type reserved for high ranking army officials. The technology was in its infancy then and the quality of the connection left much to be desired. The person on the other end often sounded as if they were speaking underwater. That was what my father’s voice sounded like in my dreams, when he got angry at me for trying to convince him that I wasn’t like him. I rebelled, like all teenage girls. On television, and later Internet, I discovered a world completely different from the one I lived in. Father said this was our destiny as forerunners of a new race. It sounded too far-fetched to me. Besides, the mirror didn’t lie. I saw us as failures of nature. I wanted to know how that had happened. My father only answered: Shoganai. We are as we are. By sheer willpower and ruthless ambition – and as I later realised resentment – my father tried to twist our abnormality into a mark of superiority. But I couldn’t do the same. He kept insisting I had no right to be different from him. What had made him so sure? I decided that to understand my father, I’d have to plumb the depths of his past. One of his characteristics that baffled and sometimes frightened me was his changeability. I’ve never seen him at peace with himself or others. I believed his restlessness was a flight from himself. When I told him what I thought and used examples to back up my theory, he just threw back his head and laughed. He called me his “personal little soul shepherd”.
But was I wrong? One moment, he was urging scientists of Yuzonsha to conduct genetic experiments and extensive research on artificial intelligence. The next, he was obsessed with the idea that Japan would have to go to war with China, the “Sleeping Dragon”, if it wanted to maintain its dominant position in Asia. At the same time, a rifle through his personal documents taught me that he was one of the biggest importers of drugs from the Chinese province of Yunnan, a place alive with the brightest poppy fields and the darkest rivers. The rivers seemed to flow in parallel lines and on a map they looked man-made, but in truth the water irrigating the red and green poppy fields came directly from the Himalayas.
My father’s mind worked like a Tibetan prayer wheel, turning high on a desolate mountain, and powered by a force he considered divine. He tried to impress on the Yuzonsha that he wanted to pioneer bold scientific innovations that would lift Japan out of the economic crisis. Coming from him, even the most megalomaniac plans and projects always seemed to make some kind of sense. But I had also read his former physician Hayashi’s medical files, which my father had kept all that time, and I knew that he was just as preoccupied with his bizarre origins, the shadowy stories about his birth, and the World War II legends he’d absorbed as a sixteen-year-old.
The pieces of the jigsaw puzzle I was patiently assembling didn’t help me see the bigger picture. I refused to accept that an intelligent man like my father, a cunning and formidable leader, believed himself to be the embodiment of the old Japanese nature spirit Rokurobei. And yet he never deviated from this conviction in conversations with me, no matter how I tried to prove its absurdity. Should I have taken this as a sign of insanity? What did that say about me? What did I see in the mirror? Just like my father, I towered over his bodyguards; my neck was abnormally long, my features crooked, my hands and feet elongated. I couldn’t hear the word “beautiful” without flinching. While his appearance gave him power and confidence, mine made me shy and miserable. I hardly ever left the island. My father often crossed over to the mainland at night, where he issued orders to loyal Yuzonsha members. He worked hard, I was neglected. His study was the nerve centre of an important part of Nippon’s invisible economy. My father saw our race’s deep desire for self-fulfilment personified in him. He liked to refer to popular myths and legends that featured heroes with exceptional powers. For all that, he still believed his worldview was rational. But I was convinced that his astonishing mind followed the unpredictable rhythm of the night – its outlines shrouded in shadow, and reeling with concealed desires.
These thoughts were milling around in my head like kites as I watched the Yuzonsha men walk up the path. Rich and powerful members of the secret brotherhood, leaders in high places in politics, industry and the army. I felt their excitement billowing towards me like fog. I thought I understood their need for these ritual meetings. As my father knew, it had its roots in an age-old tradition of men gathering around a campfire when the night stoked their deepest fears, where they would drink, sing, dance and summon spirits. This is the way it has always been, and always will be.
As a woman, I was barred from the meeting, but my father wasn’t the only one with an interest in technology. The miniature cameras I’d hidden in the assembly room were connected to my monitor. The screen filled the room with blue light, making my shadow seem long and twisted. I knew the sentence my father would use to open his speech to the assembled Yuzonsha, I had heard it often enough: “The meaning of life is to perfect it.”
When he said “to perfect” I think he meant “to conquer”.
My father wanted to create the perfect human being because it had been attempted with him – unsuccessfully.
22
A narrow, inconspicuous building with smoked glass windows. Hiroshima is more discreet than Tokyo. Takeda remembers Tokyo’s extravagant love hotels from his training in the capital – grotesque medieval castles, even flying saucers. Unlike the average Japanese man, Takeda doesn’t see extramarital sex as relaxation. His colleagues boast about visiting the rabu hoteru for free, in exchange for leniency when neighbours complain about drunken punters making a racket at night, storming out, unhappy with the service. Takeda’s physical need runs deeper. He turns to prostitution for mizu shobai, the “water trade” as it used to be called, water symbolising a dream-like mental state dominated by desire and imagination. Takeda needs prostitutes to bridle his obsession with the unbearableness of existence, which, unknown to him, is deeply rooted in his youth. When he’s penetrating a whore, Takeda often pictures himself as the Japanese guard who raped his mother. He can hear her groan softly. Not too loud, he thinks to himself, it would put her life in danger. In his most embarrassing fantasies, Takeda is wearing a sword, intent on using it to decapitate the woman if the sex isn’t satisfactory. Such moments fill him with shame and sadness, but his anger and need for the fantasy are stronger than his shame. Most prostitutes are used to drunken clients and rough treatment so they keep quiet. When he comes, the half-breed policeman laments the day he was born, ashamed of his behaviour.