The bus stops at 8pm in front of the headquarters if the Dai-Ichi-Kangyo Bank. The bus is marked Municipal Cleansing Department. The building is impressive, perfectly apt for an important branch of the biggest bank in Japan. Hiroshima’s harbour activities bring in a lot of money. There’s a meeting underway with the ceo of the Dai-Ichi-Kangyo Bank who’s here from Tokyo. There are two security guards in the lobby. They allow three men into the building with containers on their backs. They’re wearing white facemasks and white gloves, the prescribed clothing for this sort of work. The bank’s logbook contains the words: extermination of vermin. Once inside the lobby the men pull out pistols with silencers. They shoot the security guards. They put on gas masks and march through the corridors as they open the valves on the containers on their backs.
8
Night falls, but I don’t go dancing in a disco. I walk into the nearest hotel and book a room. I can’t sleep, but I’m not surprised. I toss and turn in the tiny bed. I miss the familiar curves of my belly and feel like a ghost lost in the wrong body. I wasn’t raised with other people, I was raised with shadows, and dreams like a puff of breath in the neck when you’re alone. A girl can create her own world in such circumstances, a world in which everything has meaning. On Hashima, books and rubble were the focal point around which my existence seemed to turn. Rubble was everywhere. The island was one massive industrial ruin. My father took care of the books. They were delivered in bulk. When it came to books my father set no limits. As a girl, I liked to wander down to the shingle beach and read at the foot of the sea wall surrounding the island. If you looked up from the beach, the blackened buildings on the island seemed to be on the verge of falling over. People called the island Gunkan or ‘the battleship’, because of its shape. It was a place that left you short of breath because of the secrecy it exuded. The entire island was built over and there were few if any open spaces. My father only allowed me to go to the shore when the weather was good. Each time I was laden like a mule with books. I was crazy about them because they could make the world big or small at will, interfere in the fate of nations, but also seek out your hidden thoughts, illusive, intangible, like silver-coloured fishes at the bottom of a deep lake.
When the weather was bad I would sit in the old cinema. A good many of the wooden chairs were broken and the screen was torn. I sometimes pictured the characters in the book I was reading coming to life on the screen, making each other’s lives a misery, fighting and then loving each other. Those were lonely moments, a little creepy too, as if my head was capable of containing much more than I wanted it to. Everything was covered in dust. From time to time the uncontainable wind would toss it into the air and it would form itself into a figure in my mind’s eye. Then I would quickly look back at the page in front of me. Books protected me from reality. I remember them as a choir of pale shapes, sometimes hysterical, other times comforting, vividly prophetic, or disquieting, like a piano being played in the dark. I’ve always been convinced that stories influence the mind: they haunt regions of the brain where reason has lost its way. Stories made people see my father as Rokurobei, a demon of classic mythology. His background and the way he had been treated will also have had a role to play, but the main reason he acquired the status had its roots in the old stories and their superstitions. When I was a teenager, I was also convinced he wasn’t completely human. My father was treated like a god by his followers and he considered it nothing out of the ordinary.
Memory is a monstrous thing: I can remember various moments in my youth when I witnessed his supernatural powers at work. It was only after I read the reports of his personal physician that I realised the truth, or should have realised the truth. I’m twenty-one, and even now I still catch myself doubting.
I spend the entire night struggling to settle scores with my past. The lonely existence I shared with my father seems to have more control over me now than ever before. I realise that this very characteristic, so difficult to put into words, is what makes my father so intangible: he’s like a creature you encounter in a dream, yet at the same time he’s pure reality.
I fret over what to do next. The old power networks my father exploits might only operate undercover, but they’re still to be feared. Rokurobei will deploy every soldier in his shadowy army to find me. I talk to him in my imagination and beg him to leave me alone. He remains unmoved, like an old pagan temple. My thoughts return unwilled to the baby that had filled my belly. I’m no longer sure it was real.
But I still felt it.
I talked to it.
I shared my pain and my shame.
The creature was tiny and kind. It understood. It forgave.
It was a universe of comfort.
Dr Kanehari insisted that it had never existed. His glasses flickered an unambiguous message, but I was unable to decipher it.
9
The night security team arrives at the Dai-Ichi-Kangyo bank at 11pm. The security officers are taken aback by the thick mist in the lobby. First they find their two dead colleagues, then some members of the evening shift lying in their own excrement, surrounded by vomit. Their tongues are swollen, their faces contorted, the pupils in their dead eyes barely visible. They call the police. Moments later they’re overcome by violent spasms and nausea. By the time the first police officers arrive, the night security team are writhing on the floor, gasping for breath, spitting out chunks of undigested food. Appalled by what they see, the police pay little attention to the abnormal humidity. The security cameras have been destroyed. There are no recordings. The police officers feel unwell. They too are overcome by cramps. Within six minutes the cramps make way for uncontrollable bouts of vomiting. Eyes bulge, collapsing lungs heave in an effort to supply their bodies with oxygen. One of the officers manages to warn his colleagues over the walkie-talkie. A huge police presence assembles in front of the bank. The neighbourhood is shut down. It’s almost morning when a special team in protective clothing from the national security police discover what caused the poisoning: acetone cyanohydrin mixed with water and sprayed into the air using atomizers. On contact with water, acetone cyanohydrin separates into highly inflammable acetone and highly toxic hydrogen cyanide. The security police find the containers with the water valves. They discover the corpses of the assembled bankers in the meeting room. Here too the security cameras have been destroyed. After a provisional investigation, the members of the elite unit announce that the bank’s safes have not been tampered with. Only a detailed investigation can confirm their report, however, since rumours abound that the Dai-Ichi-Kangyo Bank is involved in all sorts of shady financial dealings. The local police insist on leading the investigation, but the National Guard disagree. Friction ensues. Inspector Takeda is assigned to a special group under the leadership of chief inspector Hirasawa.
The inspector calls his wife. It’s going to be late. She takes his message with the politeness of a civil servant at an office window.
Takeda fiddles with a toothpick in his mouth. He thinks about the past. He thinks about the present. He thinks about everything at once.
He focuses: the dead baby under the peace monument is still preying on his mind. Why?