Takeda is shattered after a day of meetings. The spectacular poison attack on the Dai-Ichi-Kangyo bank has taken priority over all the other investigations and dozens of details and lines of inquiry are piling up, screaming for attention. His bosses want arrests. The press is already bleating about “incompetence”, “unwillingness” and “deceit”. Brash television programmes are talking about obscure paramilitary organisations set on toppling the government and restoring the emperor’s divine status. Every lead has to be followed; an impossible task for the local criminal investigation department, especially with the national security police throwing spanners in the works.
Takeda opens the door to the room he’s hired for the hour and undresses, folding his clothes carefully on a chair. The woman will be here soon. Takeda likes the love hotels’ anonymity. Two months ago, a discrete hand slipped the keys under a frosted glass window, now all you have to do is insert your cash into a machine and out pops the key with your change. Takeda lies down on the bed, aware of the tension in his body. Dealing with the National Guard liaison officers was unpleasant; men in grey suits who made no effort to hide their contempt for the metropolitan police. His colleagues claim that the Guard aren’t averse to using the old methods to force confessions, the kind used in the camps fifty years ago. Given his own past, every allusion to that period makes Takeda feel uncomfortable. He has a pile of books at home on Japan’s military history. He later developed an interest in fiction. Languages fascinate him. He still speaks Dutch, practising regularly with language CDs. Years ago, he took evening classes in English and started reading English-language comics. Later he switched to more sophisticated literature. He even read Haruki Murakami in English. The man’s amazing Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World tested Takeda’s language skills to the limit. His colleagues consider his flair for languages a curiosity. They only speak Japanese themselves, convinced it’s not in the nature of the Japanese to speak other languages. Takeda secretly hopes that his skills will get him promoted one day, although chief commissioner Takamatsu clearly has his doubts. Only that morning, his boss had poured scorn on his theory about the dead baby underneath the peace memorial. The case was closed, the incident written off as the desperate act of a young mother who had secretly given birth to a deformed child. So why was the baby embalmed? Takamatsu had grunted something about street gangs and “satanic rituals”. End of discussion. But Takeda feels there’s more to this case. Had the body been embalmed out of love or hatred? It was certainly symbolic, as police doctor Adachi had remarked dryly. At that moment, Takeda thought of his unborn half-brother, drowned in the concentration camp latrine.
A knock at the door. The woman who comes in is in her mid-twenties. Takeda always chooses the same age category. Many other Japanese men prefer younger prostitutes. Enjo kosai is popular in Japan: eighteen-year-olds, dressed up like school girls complete with pleated miniskirts, servicing older men. Young women are made out to be the pinnacle of pleasure, and they bring in a fortune. Takeda’s mother was twenty-five when she fell pregnant with him. Nothing is said. There’s no need. The woman does what she was taught to do. She undresses, her head turned away slightly in feigned modesty. She then takes him in her mouth with a look of fear on her face. She’s learnt that this makes men feel powerful and strong. When Takeda enters her, she winces as if he’s too big for her. That’s what Japanese men like. Takeda is slow to respond. Her body is too sinewy for his taste. He makes her go down on hands and knees and penetrates her from behind, trying to act out his favourite fantasy. His mind refuses to cooperate. He hesitates, can’t quite grasp what’s wrong.
Suddenly, he pulls back, chases her off the bed. The prostitute is baffled. She’d understand if he were drunk. Inspector Takeda pays her and motions her to hurry. They get dressed in silence with their backs to each other. The woman slips out of the door, relieved that her client didn’t get violent.
Takeda isn’t drunk, but he might as well have been. He’s intoxicated by something that anyone else, anyone other than a policeman, would call inspiration.
He’s determined to get home as quickly as possible.
23
You call me Rokurobei, as dictated by tradition since the founding of the Yuzonsha. Like the legendary demon from the noble Kami family, my task has been to bring you prosperity and good fortune. That is what I have done. For forty years, I have made sure that you are among the most powerful men in Nippon. I have summoned you today to assess your level of makoto. You know the meaning of the word in Japanese: it encompasses an immaterial value that translates into righteousness, which is something very different from honesty. The ancient Chinese definition is even more interesting: ‘the word that was kept and thus came to life.’
“I gave you my word in all righteousness many years ago, and have waited all this time for it to germinate. Your wealth and power may have made you weak and unstable. But my tamashii, the soul I have been given, has the power to turn you back into the men you were in your youth.
“Remember that a male Rokurobei is rare. A nature spirit of my eminence wants first and foremost to shine, to prove his worth. With greater maturity, however, success and self-fulfilment make way for more altruistic goals. At that moment a Rokurobei has no choice but to follow unmei, his fate.
“As a people, we are not individualists like the Westerners. We think and act as a group. We think and act as a nation. My fate and yours are therefore the same. In the next hour, I intend to reveal my plans to you. First, I want to explain the steps necessary to take Nippon to the absolute top of the software industry. Even though our technical innovations and our industry are renowned the world over, we do not make enough use of computers ourselves. Ten years ago, our Tandy 100 was the first laptop on the market, but only a third of our business people today have a computer of their own. Computers cost twice as much here as they do in the United States. Keyboards are not suited to our language, and as a consequence to our way of thinking. The ancients didn’t call Japanese ‘the language of the devil’ for nothing. Our writing system is the most complex on the planet. We use more than 4,000 kanji, and in order to employ these symbols in all their subtlety and elegance, we need over half a megabyte of computer memory for the characters alone. Our language was made to be drawn and painted, to do justice to the subtle and multifaceted meanings conveyed by our kanji. Communication is vital for a people with a highly developed sense of community. But when the Japanese try to communicate through computers they feel awkward and misunderstood.