From the Fatherland, with Love, page 19
“You talk about helping them, but…” Ishihara turned away from the muted TV to address the group. His eyes looked sleepy. “Won’t you just be seen as meddling?” The last word had a big impact on everyone. It was a word rarely pronounced here, and one that represented a hated concept. Yamada hadn’t even heard it in years and couldn’t remember at first exactly what it meant, but it had a slimy and nauseating vibe to it. Ando grimaced and repeated the word under his breath: meddling.
Ando was eighteen and had a handsome face, with remarkably regular features. Yamada could only dream of looking like that—lean and sculpted. Like himself, Ando enjoyed watching sports and reading, and the two of them sometimes exchanged books or discussed soccer or the marathon. When Ando was thirteen and living in the suburbs of Yokohama, he murdered a classmate and used a handsaw to cut her corpse into eighteen pieces. He had subsequently been placed in a mental institution under strict surveillance, but a handful of websites popped up treating him as a hero. A male nurse had once shown him printouts of some of the sites, and Ando still despised the man for meddling like that, sticking his nose in where it wasn’t wanted. Ando had come straight to Fukuoka after being released and hadn’t yet had an opportunity to punish the guy but often said that if he ever did meet up with him, he was going to murder him on the spot. He told Yamada that being treated as a hero was repulsive to him. “All I wanted was to prove to myself that if you killed even the best sort of person and chopped them up, they’d just be plain old slabs of meat, so I did it to the girl I liked and admired most in my class.”
Kaneshiro was looking at Ishihara in a wounded way. “You think?” he said. “Meddling?” He probably saw this as his long-awaited opportunity to wreak havoc. And Yamada had to admit he felt much the same way, if not, perhaps, to the same intense degree. To tear things down, to lay waste, to slaughter everyone, and turn this world into piles of rubble in the wilderness, was a vision that surely all the boys who’d gathered around Ishihara shared. The fixed belief that this dream would one day come true was all that allowed Yamada and the others to maintain a certain precarious mental balance. “But, Ishihara-san,” Kaneshiro said, “didn’t you just tell us to go ahead and assist them?”
“Yeah, but I and I was faaar faaar away just then.” Yamada loved the musical way Ishihara spoke sometimes. It seemed to open the door to a vast new universe. “But, hey, you’re all free to do as you like. I and I don’t care one way or the other.” As he said this, he got up from the rocking chair, took the remote from Kaneshiro, switched the channel from NHK to TV Asahi, leaving the sound off, and watched the female news anchor baring her gums. “I and I have tried and tried to forget,” he said, “but there’s one thing we just can’t remember. These guys are lying through their teats. They’re not a rebel faction. If they were rebels, they’d rebel in their own country, right? Normally. Even I and I think taking thirty thousand hostages is pretty cool, but there’s something fishy going on here. Did you know that this newsbabe’s knowledge is as wide-ranging as her vagina but not as deep? I know a guy who dated her for three months and said that in order to make her come—stop me if you’ve heard this before—he had to pump her wide-ranging knowledgina for so long he ended up with a slipped disk. However. Be that as it may. Kaneshiro, you want to fight the Self-Defense Force, right? But that’s nut banana happen. The SDF will stand down because of the hostages. So who do you fight? You gonna kill all those average citizens sitting there watching no baseball game?”
Ishihara was right, of course, but he’d already won the argument the moment he used the word “meddling.” A poet can conquer armies with a single word, Yamada thought. Just as Kaneshiro sank to a sitting position on the floor, deflated, the anchorwoman began gesticulating excitedly. Ishihara chuckled. “As an anteater probed at her hole,” he intoned, “the newsbabe was shouting out ‘Goal!’” Kaneshiro reclaimed the remote and turned up the volume.
“…have been sighted, according to information we’ve just received. We’re cutting now to our harbor cam.”
It was a dark, grainy picture of the night sky that slowly resolved itself into things you could see were clouds, with waves below. What had been sighted? As Yamada peered intently at the screen, a small point appeared, like a pixel of light. It grew larger and fuzzier, and then two more points of light appeared behind it, then three behind those two, and five behind those. “Birds, migrating?” someone wondered aloud. The growing shapes did indeed resemble birds, but they didn’t feel like birds. It was as if a many-eyed beast of indeterminate shape was slowly emerging from the darkness.
Yamada had experienced starvation once, as a child. When you don’t have anything to eat, and gnawing hunger gradually becomes the horror of starvation, everything you see around you begins to look like food. Your visual acuity becomes incredibly sharp, but hunger interferes with the brain’s analysis of the data. Toward the end of his ordeal, Yamada was sitting slumped in a chair, too weak to stand, when he noticed a mosquito coil. It took what seemed like hours to convince himself that the familiar but strange-shaped object wasn’t food. He kept staring at it, and as he did so, tiny specks of light began to dance around in his field of vision, like fireflies filling the room. They were quite beautiful, Yamada thought. Like colored molecules.
The specks of light on the TV screen looked a lot like those starvation molecules. They were coming in low over the sea. Finally, when they were caught in the glow of the city itself, their shapes became discernible. They were biplanes, flying in formation. The lead plane made a wide, sweeping turn parallel to the coastline, simultaneously lowering its landing gear. “Is there anywhere to land in that area?” the anchorwoman wondered. The camera was panning, following the plane. You could see the narrow, bridge-like sandbar called Umi-no-nakamichi, which connected the tip of Kashii to Shikanoshima Island, and along which ran a Japanese Railways line. Next, a regularly spaced row of lights came into view. They were the lights beside the tracks, Yamada realized just as the first biplane was touching down.
It landed on a long, straight stretch of concrete partially overgrown with weeds. “It’s the old Gannosu Air Station,” Fukuda said. As the second and third planes were preparing to land, the first came to a stop at the end of the runway, a hatch on one side opened up, and a stream of soldiers poured out. “Who are these guys?” Takei said. “They’ve got trench mortars!” Mori was counting the soldiers as they jumped to the ground. A total of sixteen emerged from the first plane. Eight of them spread out to secure the runway, and the rest began offloading the baggage—big camouflage-patterned duffel bags and wooden crates and metal boxes, which they carried over to a vacant lot next to the JR station and piled up there. “I couldn’t see very well, but I thought I saw AGS-17s too,” Takei said, and was about to expound further when Kaneshiro interrupted. “Let’s watch quietly for a minute, all right?” Takei clammed up and began taking notes on the soldiers’ weapons and equipment.
Once it was unloaded, the first plane taxied off the runway and came to rest in front of a large public park with soccer and athletic fields. The second and third planes landed and went through the same procedure, and now there were dozens of soldiers scattered around the old airfield. Ten or so split off from the main group and ran across the park toward Gannosu railway station. They were holding handguns and crouching as they ran, as if attacking an enemy stronghold. “Can I say something?” Takei said. Kaneshiro nodded, and without stopping his note-taking Takei offered his opinion. “This is an operation they’ve rehearsed dozens of times. Unless they constructed an airfield with the same dimensions as this one and went over the operation again and again, getting the timing down, they couldn’t possibly do this so efficiently.”
The planes were lining up facing the park. Two pilots emerged from each, and some of them were waving signal lights to guide the next wave of planes while others picked up their weapons and joined the soldiers. By now the unloaded boxes and crates were piled as high as freight containers. A clearer picture came on the screen, a close-up of some of the men who had just deplaned. They had hooded camouflage jackets, lace-up boots, AK-74s slung from shoulder straps, and soft camouflage caps rather than helmets. They were hollow-cheeked and not very big, but with a steely intensity in their eyes. The soldiers you saw in movies or on CNN were usually American; the sight of narrow-eyed Asian troops in this sort of gear had a strangely powerful impact.
Men were shouldering boxes from the planes and carrying them to the growing stacks of cargo. Not a single soldier was just standing around watching. Some stood guard with their weapons at the ready, some unloaded cargo, and others raced off to help guide planes, direct the newly arrived troops, or establish communications via radio, walkie-talkies, or mobile phones. They all seemed to know exactly what to do. Takei was right: it had been meticulously planned.
“An NHK mobile broadcasting unit has apparently arrived near the scene,” the anchorwoman said. “We are presenting this in cooperation with NHK.” Her voice was trembling slightly. She must be scared, Yamada thought. Well, he was scared too. “These guys are from North Korea or whatever, right?” Fukuda said. “And Japan and North Korea are enemies, yeah? So if these guys are rebels, that means they’re enemies of the North Korean government, or at least of Kim Jong Il, which makes them our allies, right? So why aren’t they acting like allies? If they had to get out of their country after a failed coup, the first thing they would do here is lay down their arms, no? This looks more like the way an occupying army would behave.” The program switched back to the studio, where the anchor, who looked noticeably paler, said, “We’ve just received word that reporters are questioning the Chief Cabinet Secretary.”
Shigemitsu Takashi had been a core member of the conservative faction of the former Democratic Party of Japan and served as a liaison with LDP members who jumped over to Japan Green at its inception. Having arrived from Okayama by bullet train to a rainy Tokyo Station, he’d been spotted and surrounded by the media swarm. At first he tried to wave the cameras away, saying he had yet to discuss the situation with the Prime Minister, but the reporters weren’t having it. Many of them were angry. “You’re not dodging us!” they shouted. “Say something! Think of the hostages’ families! Speak!” Hemmed in and jostled by the crowd of reporters, Shigemitsu banged his forehead against the lens casing of a camera; and when he finally made a statement, blood was mixed with the rain trickling down his face. “Our first and foremost concern is the safety of the people of Fukuoka. I am on my way to the Cabinet crisis-management room to discuss how best to deal with the situation.” Ringed with security guards, he then climbed into a waiting car and was whisked away.
That statement was too lame even for a fucking politician, Yamada thought. The worst part was the guy’s face. Not the rain and blood, but the shame that was written all over it. Yamada’s father had looked like that not long before hanging himself—so ashamed of his own failure that he wanted to die. He’d tried to hide his shame from everybody, but there was too much of it inside him, and it oozed out on his face. A face like that is unnerving to look at. It would have been better if Shigemitsu had just burst into tears and sobbed, I’m as scared as you are!
“That was Chief Cabinet Minister Secretary Shigemitsu speaking with the press,” the anchorwoman announced as the screen switched back to Gannosu Air Station. Ishihara sprang to his feet again. “Interesting!” he said, and began moving his hips in a lilting rhythm. “Verrry interesting!” Yamada didn’t understand what he meant and asked Mori and Sato, but nobody seemed to know. The scene switched from the airfield to the street in front of Gannosu railway station, identifiable by a large black-on-white sign. The station had been unmanned until a few years earlier, when the neighborhood was redeveloped on a major scale. Outside the exit was a small roundabout where nine or ten taxis were parked. It was a scene you might find in any provincial city in Japan, except for the North Korean soldiers combing the streets, commandeering vehicles at gunpoint.
They took control of every taxi, truck, bus, and passenger car in the vicinity. Everyone but the drivers was ordered out of the vehicles. Trucks’ cargoes were quickly unloaded and left by the side of the road, with a soldier in the passenger seat then directing the driver toward the landing strip. Troops were standing on the highway that ran alongside the railroad tracks. Several tractor trailers and dump trucks that had just delivered materials for repairs at Umi-no-nakamichi Seaside Park were also commandeered. No one resisted. Everyone was overwhelmed by the sight of the army fatigues, the no-nonsense weapons, and the intensity in the soldiers’ eyes, to say nothing of their sheer numbers. “What’s interesting?” Kaneshiro asked Ishihara, who didn’t reply but continued shaking his hips, interjecting a rhythmic but unenlightening “Hoi! Hoi!” as he did so. Yamada couldn’t see anything funny about North Korean soldiers carjacking Japanese citizens. But if Ishihara was amused, there had to be a reason.
The stacks of cargo were transferred piece by piece to the vehicles. A soldier or two joined the driver in each truck or car, and larger squads filled the buses. The camera zoomed in on a soldier in the passenger seat of a taxi, telling the driver where to go. “Fu-ku-o-ka Do’,” Mori said, reading the man’s lips. The driver shook his head and tried to explain that the road to the Dome was barricaded. Apparently the troops who’d arrived on the planes didn’t speak much Japanese. Rather than repeat his command to the driver, the battle-ready soldier simply punched him in the side of the head. He did this mechanically and without hesitation—just part of procedure. Other drivers were clobbered not with fists but with gun butts or knife handles.
The soldiers’ expressions never changed—not even when hitting a man, or watching him bleed or scream. An air of ruthlessness had been unleashed, and it was an atmosphere that Yamada knew all too well. There had been attendants with violent tendencies at his institution, and whenever one of the kids got beaten an electric tension would pass through all the others, cowing them into submission and compliance. That sort of atmosphere didn’t come suddenly into being; nor was it introduced from somewhere else. It was always there; you just didn’t always notice it. It appeared as if out of a lifting fog, conjured into existence by a momentary action and reaction. The drivers—even those with blood or tears running down their faces—put their engines in gear and drove. From the landing strip, the procession of vehicles cut across the park to the highway and headed west.
All the biplanes had landed and were now parked in one long, straight row. The anchorwoman said in a shaky voice that there were a total of either thirty-one or thirty-two of them. Ishihara, still swaying his hips, raised his index finger in front of his face and ticked it back and forth, going, Tsk, tsk, tsk! It was clear that he disapproved of something, but it wasn’t clear what it was. “Don’t tell me you still don’t get it?” Ishihara spun to the right so that he was facing everyone and blocking the TV. “Everything that nincompoop just said is poppycock,” he said. “Which nincompoop?” Kaneshiro asked, and Ishihara snatched the remote from his hand and cracked him on the side of the head with it, hard. The blow resounded sharply, and two triple-A batteries flew out and clattered to the floor.
Kaneshiro held his head and moaned. “Why’d you do that?” he said, with an accusing sort of pout. “Sorry,” Ishihara said. “When I and I saw those dudes hitting the drivers, we got all itchy inside with the desire to do like as they did. But you’re partly to blame. Asking us which nincompoop… What other nincompoop could it be? Kiddies! Who remembers what the nincompoop said? That the safety of the citizens of Fukuoka is the government’s highest priority. Which means they can’t offer any resistance, yo! They have no counterstrategy—no nothing, yo! It’s what you call an antinomy, yo! Interesting, no?”
On the TV screen, half hidden by Ishihara, riot police were reopen ing the expressway at the Kashii on-ramp. They were dismantling their own barricade of thick, pointed timber posts, behind which were parked a pair of windowless duralumin-surfaced armored vans, which other cops were now beginning to move. They must have received word that a convoy of vehicles filled with North Korean soldiers was approaching. “Ishihara-san, we can’t see the TV,” Kaneshiro said, standing and taking a step back, preparing to duck. Ishihara moved to one side petulantly, stamping his feet but still wriggling his hips. “Nooooo!” he said. “No, no, no, yo! Why keep watching this?” A voice off-camera—a male anchor this time—said, “The North Korean rebel troops who are holding the crowd at Fukuoka Dome hostage have announced that any helicopters approaching the area, including those belonging to news organizations, will be targeted with surface-to-air missiles!”
The armored vans backed slowly down the on-ramp and no sooner had they cleared the lanes than the first taxi roared up and squealed to a stop just short of the tollbooth. The passenger and rear doors opened, and two soldiers emerged, the first armed with a pistol and an automatic rifle, the other a pistol and an RPG. One of the vans was still slowly backing up, and a lone riot policeman, clearing away the last timber post, froze in his tracks. The weapons were trained on him. Even on TV, you could see that the RPG was aimed at his chest and the pistol at his forehead. The driver of the van must have noticed what was happening; the van hiccuped violently and stalled. But by now the convoy was arriving, and the two soldiers lowered their weapons, keeping their eyes fixed on the riot cop, and got back in the taxi, which sped off up the ramp onto Route 1.
“You can piss in a shitter,” Ishihara said, “but you can’t shit in a pisser.” On the screen behind him, a succession of taxis, trucks, passenger cars, and buses was moving at speed up the on-ramp. Solemnly he announced that “The nincompoop is dropping into a shithole of epic profundity.” He then raised the remote over his head and said, “Takei! Who is this nincompoop of whom we speak?” Takei cowered and said, “The newsbabe?” Realizing he’d guessed wrong, he turned to scramble away but was too late. He caught the remote on the back of his head and curled up, cradling his skull. “It’s the politician,” Kaneshiro told him. “That’s right,” said Ishihara, and cracked Kaneshiro on the head again. “You’re right, I’m left, she’s da-a-ancin’ away!” He swiped at the heads of Tateno, Shinohara, and Hino as he chanted this, but they were too fast for him, and he missed all three. “You can’t shit in a pisser,” he intoned again and pointed toward the ceiling. Everyone gazed upward, but there was nothing to see but dusty pipework and stained cement. “Made you look,” Ishihara said, and began literally roaring with laughter—laughing so loudly that it drowned out the TV. He writhed and twisted as he did so, thrusting his hands this way and that, hopping about, and yanking at his hair. This was Yamada’s first experience of the full-blown Ishihara laugh. It was a laugh that made you feel that nothing was impossible, and that nothing really mattered—that even if everything were destroyed and the planet reverted to a primeval wilderness, it wouldn’t really be such a big deal.
