Yori is on her feet. She rests her hand carefully on my belly. She’s wearing shiny black gloves today, artificial leather. I’ve never seen her without gloves on. Maybe she doesn’t like the idea of touching naked skin, especially mine. Everyone’s afraid of the dragon, the miscarriage. I can hear my father’s voice as if carried on the wind. “You can’t hide or deny who you are.” I want to push Yori away but she beats me to it: “Mitsuko, you’re bleeding.” She’s not staring at my stomach, where I can still feel Reizo’s kick.
She’s staring at my crotch.
42
In his car on the way to the Righa Royal Hotel where he’s scheduled to question a German photographer about the bizarre incident with the young Belgian tourist, Takeda suddenly feels dizzy and his heart rate surges. He shakes his head. The main boulevard is awash with neon ads that burn night and day. Slithers of light flutter like streamers either side of the car. Nausea invades his stomach and bowels. He and Adachi had only had a couple. Surely not enough to make him sick? An illogical memory bubbles to the surface: the hurricane that threatened to carry him away as he stood on the beach on Hokkaido Island near the Suttsu city, just seven years old. After years in a concentration camp in the Dutch East Indies, his mother was, as she put it, “addicted to nature”. She loved to walk, long and lonely, and she always took her little boy with her without paying attention to his complaints or his sore feet. In Takeda’s memory, the bay of Suttsu is nothing but blue: the water paler than the deeper metallic blue of the surrounding mountains. It was the kind of location that looked down on you, made you feel out of place. The gusts of wind, the infamous Suttsu-dashi caused by the narrow, less than twenty kilometre stretch that separates the bay from the Sea of Japan and the mountains that funnel the ocean winds, were like punches from an invisible boxer. Takeda was terrified one of them would throw him into the water. The wind whistled like a steam train, and every new gust made him grab his mother ever tighter. To the seven-year-old’s dismay, Barbara Gerressen paid no attention to him. Rather she spread her arms as if she was stretching and screamed above the howling wind. Takeda couldn’t make out what she was saying. He dug his nails into her leg but she seemed not to notice, absorbed as she was by an emotion the young Takeda didn’t understand, although he could feel it. His mother’s entire body seemed to be abuzz. The boy was overcome by a terrifying rage: why did his mother refuse to protect him?
He was angry because he felt as if he was riveted to her.
Because he couldn’t move without her.
43
Reizo is gone. Looking for drugs as usual, Yori said. As usual. Her words are simmering with both anger and sadness. The others have also scattered. My scuffle with Reizo appears to have worked as a catalyst. The group is falling apart completely. Or maybe I’m imagining things and they’re just hungry, went out for a bite to eat. These people hate society, but they still believe in the law of the jungle and the profit principle. They think they’re different, but they’re not. From the moment I arrived here I made sure anything I had of any value was well hidden. If they find out what I have they’ll steal it. But in spite my suspicions, I just broke my own rule. I told Yori much more than I should have. I hope she doesn’t betray my confidence. After the confrontation with Reizo I ran outside to the parking lot in front of the Suicide Club and tried to regain my self-control. I was finding it hard to breath. A sense of sickening abnormality took shape in my mind, filling me with both panic and desire. The clawing heaviness of my bizarre life had me by the throat. The thirst for blood I had felt during the fight with Reizo made it hard for me to think straight. I had to face the facts: I couldn’t avoid reality, but I didn’t know how to divide it up into neat digestible portions. Most of us live our lives with our eyes downcast, bound hand and food to established rituals. A tough layer of surface skin protects people from life’s more toxic influences, but I don’t have such protection. My nerves are exposed like foam on a restless sea.
I felt as if I was standing on the edge of a precipice. A single thought anchored in my head: why did I write things in my diary as a child that I later didn’t understand, as if they were written in a different language? The thought concealed a threat that seemed ready to devour me at any moment. Yori’s gentle touch and the way she looked at me made that feeling ebb away. “Let’s go,” she said.
And what did I do? I followed her like a giant pug into a smaller room next to the common area, the place where she and Reizo normally spent the night. She pulled me onto a futon surrounded by fluffy toys with big ears and baby eyes, the stuff she made to sell on the street. I surrendered. She threw her arms and legs around my huge ungainly body and held me tight as she caressed my hair. I floated off into a limbo where time and identity were non-existent. I opened my mouth and listened in astonishment to my story about the documents and the talisman I had found in the underground shelter on Hashima Island. I tried to stop myself but I couldn’t.
I explained the blood down below. I told her that I had taken documents from the island that could back-up my story if need be.
Yori said nothing the entire time. She rocked me to and fro as if she was the mother and I the child. When I finished my story there was a long silence. I felt lightheaded. I had finally been able to confess it all. Yori didn’t react directly to my story, but told me in her turn about her boyfriend and how he was losing his mind and what he had done to the foreigner she had met just to go one better on his idol Mishima. By the time she had said what she had to say I had made a decision. But first I asked her if she thought that Reizo Shiga was crazy.
Her answer felt like a kick in the stomach: “He’s not crazy. It’s much worse than that… he’s just pretending to be.”
44