Takeda looks over Adachi’s shoulder at some people at the bar. “There’s nothing hidden about me. My mother brought me up with clear principles; don’t trust anyone / life can screw you at any moment / today your best friends, tomorrow you devour each other / always be on the look…”
“Friends don’t devour each other, Akio.” Adachi seems genuinely hurt. Takeda looks him in the eye. The police doctor is short, almost puny, delicate, his facial features blurred as if he’s withdrawn deep inside himself. Yet there’s still something dignified about him, a readiness to see things as they are.
“Not my words, Daichi, my mother’s. She tried to brainwash me at every turn. Can you blame her after what she’d been through?”
“She filled her child to overflowing with fear,” says Adachi. “You can blame her for that.”
“Not after…”
“That’s no excuse.”
“She always said: you don’t understand. You can’t. You had to be there to understand.”
“It’s not fair that you had to share her fear and her pain, that she blamed you for it all in a sense.”
Takeda smiles, almost imperceptibly. “She didn’t exactly love my ‘father’, don’t forget. I was destined for the latrine, just like my half-brother.”
“Treating a child like that is just criminal.” Adachi speaks with great authority, although himself childless.
“But I can’t blame her.”
“You have to.”
“Why? Your father laughed at you and despised you because you were gay. He did everything he could to dominate you, but he never experienced the camps, he was never raped by a guard and all the rest of it. He’s to blame for his actions, but I can’t say the same for my mother.”
Adachi blinks nervously. When anyone, even his friend, mentions his father, he senses danger lurking behind his back. In such moments, he wishes he could be smaller than he already is. He takes a deep breath, adjusts his glasses.
“My father couldn’t bear the idea that his son was a ketsuman. Ketsuman, ass cunt, ketsuman, ass cunt, he would scream at me, right in my face, his lips twisted with disdain. That’s wrong, I agree, but I was a disappointment as a son. You were anything but, yet your mother still treated you like shit…”
“She didn’t insult me, she took care of me. It was only when I caught her looking at me unawares, in silence, that I knew what she was thinking.”
“That’s worse than a frustrated father who slaps you around and screams at you because you don’t live up to his expectations.”
Takeda beckons the bartender with a wink. The man seems indifferent, has an arrogant expression on his face, purposefully takes his time. The condescending attitude of café staff is a recent trend in the bars in Hiroshima and elsewhere in Japan. “Live up to your own expectations, Daichi, and leave the past for what it is,” says Takeda.
“Speak for yourself.”
“I can’t forget my past.”
Adachi wants to ask him why the abrupt answer, but Takeda doesn’t give him the chance and orders another round of drinks yakuza-style. The barman drops his superior facade, bows, and scurries off to prepare the order.
“If I’d told him to get a move on because I’m a policeman he would have laughed in my face.”
Adachi smiles. “But because he thinks your mafia he’s off like a rabbit with a kilo of gunshot in its ass. You haven’t changed, Akio. And you still know how to change the subject when you think you’re being backed into a corner. Allow me to repeat my question: what about you?”
“Guilt.”
Silence. Adachi takes off his glasses, rubs his eyes, and puts them on again as if he wants to get a clearer look at his friend when he asks his next question: “I haven’t mentioned this for years, but does that guilt of yours have anything to do with the man you tracked down more than twenty years ago, the man behind the military id-tags from WWII? You gave me them when I was working at the Ministry of Health and asked me if I could help you find him. Is that what it’s about?”
Takeda stares at his friend, astonished. “So you… for all these years…”
“I had a hunch, Akio, nothing more. A hunch. You should have seen yourself when you asked if I could find that soldier. The hate was seeping out of your pores. Don’t you remember? It seemed like a reasonable request, but your eyes couldn’t lie.”
“Then you know what I did.”
“No, I don’t, and I don’t want to know.” The doctor tosses back half his drink.
“My life became one big lie from that day on,” says Takeda.
“Wrong. I hate to use clichés, but this one fits: from that day on you started to convince yourself that your life was one big lie.”
“I was a young policeman. What I did was…”
Adachi holds up both hands. Takeda falls silent, shakes his head: “The bastard deserved it, but it’s like a millstone round my neck.”
“If he deserved it then so do you,” says Adachi cryptically.
Another silence. The moment empties like a balloon, turns gaunt like winter skin.
“So you figured what I was going to do but you still helped me?”
A hint of a smile appears at the corners of Adachi’s lips. “Friends don’t devour each other, Akio.”
Takeda blinks. “I think it’s time I left the force, Daichi.”
“You’ve been saying that for years.”
“This time I mean it.”
“How long have you been a policeman? More than twenty-five years? You would be crazy to give it up now. We might not get a fortune at the end of each month, but the pension makes up for it. Can’t you just close your eyes to all the crap? Japan’s not the only place with problems. The world’s a mess. The economic miracle’s gone up in smoke. What’ll you do if you resign? Night-watchman, on a subsistence wage?”
“I remember the early days,” says Takeda. “I didn’t make it to university, remember. It took blood sweat and tears to make sergeant, then assistant inspector, then inspector. But I never forgot what our instructor hammered into us at the academy: protect and serve. And what did I do?”
“Protect and serve.” Adachi holds his glass up to the light of a lamp behind their table and eyes the contents as if it’s a prism. “Protect and serve. Sure. But the question is: who?”
“Exactly,” says Takeda. “I used to know the answer to that question, until a couple of years ago. Now I’ve no idea.” The inspector gets to his feet, the ruddy glow of a heavy drinker on his puffed veiny cheeks. “And do you know what’s worse, Daichi? It wasn’t him, it wasn’t my father. I got the wrong guy.”
41
The voices are loud and stroppy. They make a deep impression on me. They sound familiar, as if I’ve heard them before, when I was young and shy. It’s almost noon, but I must have dozed off and I’m still exhausted from the previous night. I try to concentrate and recognise the voices. Reizo and Yori are rowing again. It quickly turns nasty, below the belt, an explosion of pent-up anger meant for something else, something long past. I can’t help thinking that something changed yesterday, that the Suicide Club is now falling apart. These people are like shadows that merge at given moments but have little effect on one another. They preach an alternative society, but in fact they’re only interested in themselves. The group has been plagued by an ongoing power conflict. One part of the club moved to another squat. The other, three members, is lying here like me on an old mattress, staring at the ceiling as if nothing’s wrong, but I hear the dull thud of a fist hitting someone’s body. Yori screams. I jump to my feet and before I know it I’m standing in front of Reizo pushing him back with my hand on his chest. Yori is lying on the floor, simpering, holding her bleeding nose. Reizo’s in a state, calls her darashinai, dissolutely, a slut who screws around with blonde foreigners. He roars at the top of his voice that Yori has sabotaged a unique literary experiment and that she thinks his novel is pathetic. I grab his arm. Reizo leers at me through keyhole eyes and kicks me in the gut. He’s fast, his muscles are like springs. I feel bile rise from my stomach and gag. I grab him instinctively by the throat, shake him back and forth until his eyes reach the same level as mine. Two members of the Suicide Club are standing to my left. I can’t remember their names. They nudge and prod each other, shake their heads. I realise I’ve lifted Reizo from the ground. Disgust, at him and at myself, wells up inside. I toss him aside and he lands meters away after tumbling over a huge slab of mica on trestles we’ve been using as a table, library, and hobby area. He stays where he is, his back on the floor, groaning, pulling up his knees.