From the Fatherland, with Love, page 7
“So what do you make of it?”
Kawai looked up at the ceiling and was quiet for a while, but finally shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“But you’re sure that it’s something new?”
“Yes. Although it’s also possible that the Coast Guard just failed to spot such activity. This is the high season for fishing off our west coast, and there are a lot of fishing boats out. If North Korean boats blend in with all the others around the fishing grounds, there’s no way of telling them apart. What’s more, there’ve been a lot of days with poor visibility recently, because of the weather.”
Listening to this plausible-sounding explanation, Suzuki felt his doubts recede. He often felt uneasy about something or other in the vast amount of information he processed every day. Sometimes his unease was justified, sometimes it proved groundless.
“Thank you,” he said. Kawai bowed and went back to his desk.
Suzuki quickly glanced over at the Chief ’s desk by the window to check if he’d been seen talking to Kawai, but the desk was empty. His gaze moved to the window next to it, and suddenly he realized what it was that had been nagging at him just now. There were stains on the glass from where birds had flown into it. When a bird had hit the window at lunchtime while he was talking to the Chief, the only person who had shown any surprise was the new girl in the economics section. Nobody, least of all the Chief, had paid any attention to it; they were all used to seeing birds crashing into the glass. If you encounter the same situation over and over again, it becomes so familiar you no longer notice. It occurred to Suzuki that something similar might be at work here. Perhaps the North Koreans were deliberately repeating the same actions in order to cover up something else, allaying suspicion by frequently dispatching large numbers of ships. It was just a hunch, however, and the Chief was unlikely to take it seriously. He sighed and put the report in the “done” tray.
INTRODUCTION 2
THOSE WHO WAIT
March 19, 2011
Fukuoka City, Kyushu
“HEY, TATENO!”
He wasn’t used to hearing his name spoken. Since leaving home, he’d rarely even told anyone what it was. In police stations and reformatories, it was always the first thing they asked him. What’s your name? What do they call you? A kid your age, you don’t know your own name? He wouldn’t reveal it even when they threatened or beat him, which made them decide he wasn’t right in the head. Not wanting to tell people your name—was that really so strange? It must scare them. Stating your name was the first step to submission.
“Tateno!” It was Shinohara, a guy who kept poisonous frogs and spiders and scorpions and things. None of the people here, from Ishihara down, had ever asked Tateno his name. Whenever one of them paused in the course of conversation, as if wondering what to call him, he’d simply say, “I’m Tateno”—information he hadn’t offered freely to anyone since elementary school. Within three months everyone knew what his name was, and he had absorbed everyone else’s in the same informal way.
Now that he thought about it, that man Nobue—the one in the homeless park with the ugly scar who’d told him about this place—hadn’t asked his name either. The man had given him Ishihara’s phone number, and Tateno had hitchhiked and sneaked free rides on trains all the way to Fukuoka. “I was sent here by a guy named Nobue,” he’d announced. All Ishihara said in reply was, “Oh yeah?” Nobody stared at him. Nobody asked his age or where he was from, or anything else. No one here had much interest in things like that.
Tateno was sixteen and figured Shinohara was two or three years older. But he had no idea how old Ishihara might be. Ishihara was a small person who at times might have passed for a high-school student and at others looked seventy. His eyes were always sleepy, but there was something absolutely magnetic about him. According to Shinohara, he was a poet who’d won several big awards. Tateno thought he’d like to read his poems sometime. It was Ishihara who had shown him to this room that first day and said, “You’ll have to share the place, but you can handle that, right?” He wouldn’t have to pay any rent, of course, and he could always get something to eat over in Ishihara’s quarters. Apparently a lot of the guys living here had part-time jobs or other ways of earning a little spare cash. Tateno knew he’d been accepted into the group because of Nobue’s introduction. It was clear that Ishihara wouldn’t let just anyone in.
“Hey, Tateno!”
He put down the book he was reading and opened the door. Shinohara’s face was as smooth as a hard-boiled egg. “You hungry?” he asked, and handed him an enamel pot decorated with a flower design. “I made some chicken stew. Help yourself. It’d be great if you could wash the pot when you’re done.” He was wearing a coat and a backpack, and Tateno asked him where he was going. “To the shrine in the woods,” Shinohara said, without looking back. Probably to catch ants and other bugs, Tateno realized. “Would it be all right if I came up there later?” he called after him. “Sure,” the other said, turning the corner in the corridor and disappearing from view.
When Tateno stepped back into the room, Hino was beginning to stir on the upper bunk. “Morning,” Hino said, and he returned the greeting. It was nearly noon, but Hino always slept twelve hours or more. He was from Nagoya. When he was six, his salaryman father had bought a new house in a suburban development there. His mother had adjusted badly to the move, complaining of the house’s synthetic building materials, and suffered a breakdown. She became convinced that poison had been mixed into the wall paint, and what with one thing and another she ended up blinding her husband by spraying undiluted disinfectant in his face, then stabbing him eighteen times with a knife. Before she cut her own throat she tried to kill seven-year-old Hino as well, but he escaped with only a stab wound to the shoulder. Having been repeatedly told of the danger lurking in painted walls and urged not to breathe near them, Hino always felt drowsy or lethargic indoors. He was placed in an orphanage, but when he was thirteen he poured gasoline on the floor and started a fire that resulted in the deaths of four people who worked there.
After that he was put in a juvenile detention center, from which he escaped twice. Using a fake ID he found jobs at various construction sites, mainly working on high-rises. He felt comfortable inside the unpainted concrete walls of the buildings-in-progress and chose to sleep wrapped in blankets on the bare concrete floors rather than in the workers’ barracks. Hino loved skyscrapers. He thought of them as living things—the way they grew, gradually changing shape as they reached for the sky. Not as if they were living things; he believed they were literally alive. “Think about it,” he’d once told Tateno. “If an alien from space looked at your average high-rise building, why wouldn’t he think it was some sort of life form?”
According to Hino, a building’s electrical wiring and plumbing and air ducts were exactly like the blood vessels and organs and nerves you have in the human body. It was particularly the “respiratory system”—vents, ductwork, and so on—that interested him, and his supervisors had often told him he should try for a license as an air-conditioning engineer or a pipe-fitter. He knew that if he did that, however, they’d find out he was lying about his age. At sixteen he was found out anyway, on a construction site in Shinagawa, and sent back to the detention center. Unable to bear life confined within walls, Hino used a steel pipe to bludgeon a probation officer, and this time he was sent to a psychiatric institution. It was there that he met a young psychiatrist and social worker who had heard of Ishihara’s group in Fukuoka and suggested he look them up after being released. Hino did so, bringing with him his prized collection of tools for pipe-fitting and ductwork—portable acetylene torches, cutters, saws, breakers, and whatnot. He’d stolen most of the tools from construction sites, and he kept them stashed somewhere in the room. “I’ll show them to you sometime,” he would say, beaming, whenever the subject of high-rise buildings or ventilation systems came up.
Tateno put the enamel pot on a propane burner and lit the fire. “Smells good,” Hino said, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. Tateno told him what it was. Hino stretched elaborately, then fell back on the bed and began doing his ab crunches, muttering, “Chicken stew, chicken stew,” to himself. The room they shared was in what had once been a warehouse. The place wasn’t hooked up to city gas, but it did have water and electricity. The bathroom, shared by all, was down the corridor, across from Shinohara’s room. There was no water heater, however, so when you wanted a shower you walked over to the building Ishihara lived in. The entire complex stood near the bay, on relatively old reclaimed ground in Fukuoka’s Nishi Ward, an area crammed with warehouses, commercial buildings, and housing projects, most of which were now deserted thanks to the long economic slump and the decline in population, not to mention a big flood several years earlier. The place was like a ghost town now. Some buildings were only steel skeletons from the third floor up, their developers having gone bust, and there were dozens of poured-cement foundations on which houses had never been built.
Tateno didn’t know when Ishihara had first come to live in this area. Shinohara said it was about ten years ago, but others thought it was more like fifteen, and the Satanists—five guys named Orihara, Sato, Kondo, Miyazaki, and Shibata—claimed it was twenty. The Satanists were all from the same town in Kumamoto. When Orihara was thirteen, Sato eleven, and the other three twelve, they’d told their teachers and subsequently the police that they’d met the Devil and been forced to become members of a secret religious organization called the Temple of Satan. As proof, they showed them sketches they’d made of the Devil, messages from the Devil they’d taken down in automatic writing, dead pets the Devil had dispatched in their neighborhood, and scars from burns and cuts on their own arms and backs and stomachs that they claimed he was responsible for. The descriptions of Satan given by all five were consistent and had a real ring of truth to them, and since the scars on the boys’ bodies were clearly genuine, the mass media had jumped on the story. Soon the kids were famous as leading characters in what came to be known as the Lucifer Incident. Even Tateno remembered it; the Lucifer Incident had been the lead story of every news weekly and tabloid TV show for weeks.
He remembered seeing the five of them on TV, guiding a cameraman and reporter to a vacant lot or the woods behind their middle school or the neighborhood park and showing them the charred carcasses of dogs and cats, as well as fragments of metal arranged in peculiar patterns and a sort of altar covered with a thick black cloth. He also remembered the overexcited reporter shouting, “Is this the final proof that Lucifer—the Devil!—really exists?” The public—fed up to the back teeth with political and economic news about banks not letting you withdraw your own money, the government not letting you change your dollars for yen, and big corporations and financial institutions going bankrupt—became obsessed with the Lucifer Incident. In the end, according to police investigators, no actual proof of the Devil’s involvement was discovered, but it had become evident that all five of the children had suffered severe physical abuse at the hands of their respective parents. Eventually a local resident testified that he’d seen the boys themselves tormenting dogs and cats. It was typical, the experts said, for abused children to do to pets what their own parents were doing to them. After undergoing psychological testing, they were all put in an institution, but two years later they escaped, fled to Fukuoka, and joined the Ishihara group.
Hino dropped down from the upper bunk, threaded his way between the wall and the table and chairs and shelves, and brushed against Tateno as he swept out of the room, saying, “Toilet.” This room the two of them shared had once been a rental storage space and was about the length of three shipping containers lined up end to end. The bunk bed was at the far end from the entrance, and the only other appointments were small bookshelves, Hino’s laptop, a table, and a couple of chairs, but the space was so narrow that they had to walk crabwise and couldn’t pass each other without making contact. There was a rarely used radio, but no TV and no windows. Ishihara instructed everyone not to watch TV. According to him, television had a way of artificially suppressing the sorrow and rage and weirdness that are natural to us all. He recommended reading instead, and all the boys here seemed to read a lot. Tateno too was getting through more books than he ever would have thought possible.
He’d been here three months now. For the first month he and Hino had spoken very little. Hino had the round and expressionless face of a stone Jizo statue, and when he was in the room during the day he was either lying in bed reading or doing exercises to strengthen the muscles in his stomach, shoulders, arms, and back. It was only after Tateno demonstrated his boomerang skills in an empty field that the two of them had begun to talk a bit more. Their first night as roommates he’d asked Hino if he really liked reading, and all he got was a clipped “Whatever.” But Tateno hadn’t been offended; he didn’t mind that sort of curt reaction. There was an unspoken understanding here that it didn’t matter if you weren’t sociable, or if you didn’t talk much or greet people properly or agree with everyone, and Tateno liked that.
When the chicken stew was warmed up, he put half of it aside on a separate plate for Hino and ate the rest, along with some bread and margarine. After washing the pot, he decided to go and look for Shinohara at the shrine in the woods. He had a feeling he’d be warm enough in just a shirt, but with no windows in the room he wasn’t sure. He opted to wear a jacket just in case. One thing you learn when you live with homeless people or travel long distances hopping trains is that aside from human violence the thing to be dreaded most is the cold. When it’s hot, you can always take off more clothes, but if it gets cold enough you can die. Last winter in Ryokuchi Park, Tateno had seen people freeze to death before his very eyes. He shouldered his boomerang case and walked out of the room, and was just passing the bathroom when Hino came out. Tateno told him that he was off to the woods and that there was a plate of stew waiting for him in the room. Hino had washed up in the bathroom and was still toweling his hair as he walked back down the corridor.
Plastered on the door to Shinohara’s room, across from the loo, were handwritten signs in English, Japanese, and Chinese saying THIS DOOR TO REMAIN CLOSED AT ALL TIMES. The room he slept in was of the same long and narrow design as Tateno’s, but he had a total of six other rooms at his disposal, which were exclusively for his frogs, scorpions, spiders, centipedes, cockroaches, and other assorted leapers and creepers. Shinohara claimed that the rooms provided an ideal environment for raising his pets. The lack of windows reduced the danger of their escaping and facilitated temperature and humidity control, and there was just enough space for two rows of cases and an aisle down the center—a perfectly efficient arrangement for attending to the needs of his frogs and bugs. Just once, Shinohara had given Tateno a tour of some of these rooms. Inside one was a sort of greenhouse, made of large panes of plate glass, that served as a breeding environment for poison-dart frogs. There were any number of varieties, some small enough to sit on the tip of your finger, others as big as the palm of your hand, but they were all decorated with astonishing colors and gleamed with a sort of flawless, metallic sheen, like the bodies of Ferraris or Lamborghinis. According to Shinohara, dart frogs lost their poison when bred in captivity, but at home in the jungles of Central and South America they were many times more poisonous than the king cobra. “They don’t make much noise normally,” Shinohara had said, “but in the mating season, when several different species are singing at the same time, it’s really beautiful—like crystal bells.”
In another room, he was raising cockroaches that grew to be almost as thick and long as a baby’s arm. The mere sight of one of these monsters, with jointed, sectioned abdomens like those of snakes, was enough to make Tateno feel queasy. Known as Madagascan Giants, they were wingless, but there was no mistaking them for anything but roaches. Shinohara said he could sell their plentiful offspring at high prices, as feed for arowana and other large tropical fish. Tateno was perhaps most impressed by the centipedes, the majority of which were varieties he’d never seen before. One, a toxic-looking, dark-red native of Haiti, was described by Shinohara as a “ferociously aggressive little sucker.” He said it would literally leap into the air to attack anything that moved. There was also a woodlouse the size of a tennis ball that uncurled to expose legs like thorns. Tateno gasped as he watched the armor-like sections of its dark-brown body move, each bristling with fine, busy little hairs. Shinohara casually picked the bug up and put it on the palm of his hand, then whispered to it as if cooing to a baby: “Let me see you curl into a ball… Good boy! Now stre-e-e-tch…” Tateno felt every hair on his own body stand on end. He vowed never to cross Shinohara.
The bedrooms were on the third floor, and Tateno had to use the stairs to get to the first floor and outside. There was a freight elevator, but it was broken. On the landing between the second and ground floors he ran into Yamada and Mori. They were both carrying plastic bags from a convenience store. “Hey,” Tateno said, and Yamada responded with a grunt. Mori said even less—he was silently eyeing Tateno’s boomerang case. Yamada and Mori had tattoos respectively of Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse on their shoulders. Yamada had been born in Tokyo, but when he was twelve his father lost his office job and moved the family to a remote mountain village in the Tohoku region, in north-eastern Honshu, to pursue some dream he had of becoming a farmer. They rented a thatched farmhouse three kilometers from the nearest bus stop, four from the nearest neighbor, five from the nearest elementary school, and eight from the nearest store. His father hung a scroll of his own calligraphy on the wall—IN PRAISE OF POVERTY—and began cultivating a field. He declared that they’d all have to live on a thousand yen a day. This was just as inflation was beginning really to take off, and in order to stay within this budget the family had to get by mainly on corn and wheat dumplings, rice being too expensive.
