From the Fatherland, with Love, page 72
Seragi offered her the book. Taking it with both hands, she bowed her head: “Arigato gozaimasu.” On the torn, reddish-brown cover was the title: The Red Shoes and Other Tales. Seragi’s reading had moved her almost to tears. But what exactly was an “angel”? She remembered hearing about them, but her impression was hazy. “They come from the next world,” he explained, stretching out his arms and adding: “They have wings.” Hyang Mok smiled at the gesture, wondering where the white-winged angel had taken her own child. It had been only a year old and knew only the village area. Had the angel taken it to the orchard or the stream? To her mother’s house, or the foothills where rabbits and pheasants lived? When she imagined the baby folded in those white wings and flying through the sky above her village, she felt her frozen heart begin to thaw. And with that warming came another suppressed memory from her youth. She had always wanted to help the many children in her village and surrounding areas who had lost their parents and become homeless beggars. It had been her dream one day to set up an orphanage back home, when her military career was finished. Whatever happened to that dream, she wondered.
The sound of sirens came from somewhere in the distance. Fire trucks were no doubt on their way. Seragi’s hands were resting on the windowsill as he looked out over the campground. The loudspeakers were announcing something, but the closed windows made it difficult to hear. “What are they saying?” he asked. Hyang Mok approached the window and, standing next to him, looked out. “‘There are a number of intruders,’” she said, interpreting the last words of the announcement: “‘They are on the run.’” MAVs could be seen driving along the streets in the vicinity. The elbow of her gray suit brushed against his white coat. He was a kind man, she thought, as she put the book he had given her into her shoulder bag. Perhaps she should mention the orphanage idea to him.
“Doctor,” she said. And just as Seragi turned to her, thick clouds of dust burst horizontally from the base of the hotel, billowing out like the jets of smoke at a rocket launch, giving the high-rise a skirt of swirling soot that enveloped the entire base of the building. There was a sharp popping sound, as cracks appeared in the glass of the balcony windows, and a second later they heard the roar of an explosion that shook the earth. Hyang Mok immediately covered her ears and crouched down. Amid the smoke, glass shards flashed and glittered in the sunlight. Troops in the campground were frantically trying to escape the flying debris, some crawling under tables, and the stretch of water beyond was seething, with overlapping waves breaking against the seawall. Seragi had fallen to the floor on his backside, but he reached for the windowsill and pulled himself up beside Hyang Mok to look out.
Smoke, borne by the sea wind in their direction, parted to reveal a great black cavity toward the base of the hotel. Hyang Mok experienced a strange sensation: her field of vision seemed to rotate clockwise, as though she herself were falling to the left. As she watched the glass snail-shaped structure near the bottom disintegrate, she realized that the whole hotel, still maintaining its knife-like shape, was toppling over. There was a deep rumbling, followed by a quick, fierce wind that made the trees reel and sent paper trash and garbage whirling up into the air. Through the windows they could hear the crack and crunch of collapsing steel, quite as though a giant had stepped on a pile of dead wood, sending bits flying as far out as the now white-capped water. Fishing boats were turning and making for the open sea.
The roof of the fourth floor’s covered entrance was crushed and its pillars catapulted into the campground tents, tearing them to shreds and mowing down the poles to which the loudspeakers had been fastened and on which KEF flags had been hoisted. Dozens of soldiers lay prostrate on the ground either already dead or trying to escape the windblast. An MAV flipped over, skidded across the road, smashed into a pillar supporting the elevated expressway, and burst into flames. The wall of the Dome was battered and pushed inward, opening a big gap beneath the silver roof. The tremors were so powerful, like waves rolling through the entire landscape, that Hyang Mok was lifted right off her feet, then instantly dropped down again. The shock of it shot up her spine from her tailbone to her brain. She grabbed onto the window frame for support and screamed, if only to keep from fainting. Seragi too was shouting something, but she couldn’t hear him over the deafening noise. The Medical Center continued to bounce and sway. It felt as if its girders were askew and the floor and ceiling on the verge of collapsing.
Above the length of the fallen hotel a mushroom cloud was taking shape. The burgeoning smoke looked literally like some furiously multiplying fruit or fungus. It grew until it enveloped and concealed the campground, the Dome, and the waters beyond, and now rose to fill the sky, turning day to night. Debris flew through the darkness at ferocious speeds, flattening whatever lay in its path. In a trice the warped walls and the roof of the Dome across the way resembled tin plates riddled and shredded by machine-gun fire. Soldiers who had taken shelter in the shadow of a water tower simply disappeared, swept away by chunks of concrete the size of oil drums. Sections of steel and pieces of concrete collided and rained down on the hospital like meteorites, delivering a series of powerful jolts. A small black shadow appeared amid the smoke and instantly grew to the size of a refrigerator: part of a girder spinning toward them. It smashed into the next room to their left, causing the wall on that side to burst apart and collapse. The glass was pulverized, the window frame twisted out of shape, and big cracks opened up in the pillars and ceiling. The bookcases had fallen, strewing their contents on the floor. Seragi was holding his right leg, his face distorted with pain—apparently he’d twisted his ankle. Hyang Mok reached under his arms and pulled him away from the window toward the center of the room, though it wasn’t easy going, with the toppled furniture and bits of broken glass and wall plaster littering the floor. She shoved him between the protruding legs of the capsized desk, then crawled in after him.
Shards of glass and fist-sized stones continued to pour down, and now a car-sized concrete mass was hurtling toward them. A moment later it made impact, and the balcony was gone, shorn right off by it. The air in the room was so thick that they couldn’t keep their eyes open. “Doctor, can you get up?” Hyang Mok shouted into Seragi’s ear, but he could only reply with a weak shake of his head. The door had been ripped off its hinges, and the room might collapse at any moment. She draped his arm around her shoulder. Her mouth and nose were filled with fine particles of concrete and glass dust that got in her eyes, making them flood with tears.
Seragi’s glasses were broken. He had a cut at the corner of one eye, and the side of his shirt was stained with blood. Hyang Mok took out the book he had given her, put it in an inner jacket pocket, and tossed the shoulder bag aside. In the haze of the smoke-filled room, she covered her mouth and nose with a handkerchief and tied the ends around the back of her head, before struggling over the jumble of books and plaster toward the door. Looking back, she could just see that the view outside was different now. The sea had turned a muddy brown, and a low-lying cloud of dust hung like mist over the land below. The Dome was flattened and unrecognizable. A section of its silver roof lay in the parking lot of Hawk’s Town, wavering eerily in the wind.
The campground had become a mountain of rubble, and the KEF headquarters was no more. It was unlikely that anyone had survived. Had the Japanese government launched the attack? Was it the Americans? In any case, the Koryo Expeditionary Force had been wiped out. With no hostages, the main body of soldiers would be forced to turn back. And yet, strangely enough, Hyang Mok felt neither grief nor despair. This destruction, she thought, was the wrath of heaven, bringing all things back to their beginning. She had no doubt that she herself would be arrested and put to death. And she had no fear of that punishment: she deserved it, for letting her own child die. Still, she had to rescue this doctor. If she could get him to the other side of the hotel, he should be fine.
Outside the windows in the corridor, she saw that the white dust enveloping the camp was being dispersed by the sea wind and carried skyward. Maybe this is what it looks like, she thought, when an angel spreads its great white wings.
EPILOGUE 1
April 14, 2011
Akasaka, Tokyo
SANJO MASAHIRO was considering the night’s playlist while he filled the espresso machine. It seemed that quite a few of his regulars would be along earlier than usual this evening. Even a few from the various ministries had emailed that they were coming. He supposed they’d all want to get his take on the KEF story. He turned the TV on to watch the news, but it was still showing endless shots of the ruined hotel, and a series of idiots calling themselves experts were trotting out their useless theories, so he turned it off again.
Sanjo had asked a number of his government contacts whether or not US special ops had been brought in to blow up the hotel, but nobody knew anything. It had been one hell of an explosion, yet there were surprisingly few civilian casualties. The hotel had collapsed in the direction of the Dome, which acted as a shield, and the blast and wreckage hadn’t reached all that far. But the Kyushu Medical Center, overlooking the camp, had been hit hard. Altogether there had been a hundred and eighty-seven civilian fatalities and numerous injured, most of them patients, but some medical staff as well. Still, it was an extraordinarily low number, considering the mountain of rubble the hotel had left behind. It was lucky the hospital hadn’t collapsed too.
The North Korean fleet had refused to believe that the KEF in Fukuoka had really been wiped out and had encroached ten nautical miles into Japanese waters despite warning shots from the SDF, so that tensions remained high for a while. According to the Ministry for Foreign Affairs it was only after Beijing threatened to send in submarines that they finally withdrew. The bodies of most of the KEF lay deep under the wreckage, making it impossible to confirm the exact number. The officers in the hotel had received the full force of the blast, and though pieces of them were found, there were no DNA samples or dental records to identify them. Six KEF engineers had been working in another location and had escaped the collapse of the hotel, but on returning to the ruins of the encampment they’d all apparently committed suicide, to avoid being taken captive. One staff officer alone seemed to have survived—the handsome Lieutenant Jo. He’d been recording his broadcast at NHK at the time, and was currently being held by Fukuoka prefectural police. The government and the National Police Agency in Tokyo were demanding that he be handed over, but the city authorities had yet to comply.
All the people under arrest by the KEF, as well as all the City Hall staff on secondment, had perished. The question of just who had planted the explosive devices remained, however. Many of the foreign news agencies were claiming that the Japanese government had been behind it, and the Cabinet had neither confirmed nor denied this. But it had to have been America, thought Sanjo, as he looked through his vinyl collection on the shelf. US Special Forces must have planted the explosives, then detonated them by remote control. There were so many unanswered questions, though. Wouldn’t it have been to America’s advantage to have the rebel army stationed in Fukuoka? That would have kept a check on military expansionism in Japan. America would then probably have sent, say, ten thousand troops to Kyushu as a UN Peacekeeping Force. Even if war had broken out, there would have been a need for weapons and materiel, and firms supplying the military would have made a bundle. And since the KEF was a rebel army, it wouldn’t have damaged relations with North Korea or necessarily antagonized China. Still, even if the attack was carried out by, say, the Navy Seals, it must have been backed by the Japanese.
*
The first customer to arrive was Tom Kai from the Ministry for Home Affairs. When Sanjo pointed out it was only seven-thirty, Kai said he’d left work early since there was nothing to do. Fukuoka City wasn’t giving them any information, so they were all just twiddling their thumbs. Fukuoka had evidently lost all trust in the central government.
“I really feel like listening to some Wes Montgomery,” said Kai. Sanjo selected ‘Full House.’ He dropped the needle onto the record, and they both listened in silence for a while. You didn’t get guitar playing like that anymore. Montgomery’s technique of simultaneously thumbing the same note on two strings an octave apart was brilliant. There were plenty of other guitarists who played octaves, of course, but it all originated with him. Jazz had once been a real movement. Not anymore. Now it only lived on in old recordings for devotees. Youngsters like Kai, who’d never heard jazz in its heyday, had no idea. “That’s Wynton Kelly on piano, isn’t it, Sanjo-san? Wasn’t he still with Miles Davis at the time of this recording?” Sanjo said that yes, he probably was with Miles then, but privately he thought, so what? Wes Montgomery couldn’t read music. His octave technique was probably just something he’d hit upon and then developed, because he liked the way it sounded and felt. Playing jazz and being up on jazz were two different things.
At least Kai wasn’t talking about the hotel’s collapse. Up until just yesterday he’d phoned and emailed Sanjo repeatedly, asking who he thought did it. It was hard to believe it could be the government, since not even the top brass in the ministries seemed to know anything. Overseas, the Japanese government was praised for presumably bringing in a domestic commando unit. Resolving a crisis like that with a loss of fewer than two hundred civilian lives was deemed a great success. If, however, the government had not in fact been involved, Sanjo believed that Japan was going to sink even lower than it already had. Kai and other bureaucrats he knew acknowledged that government officials didn’t seem to have any intention of investigating what had really happened. Nor did they seem interested in sending any fact-finding missions to interview local officials or ordinary citizens. They couldn’t get around the fact that they had imposed the blockade, but as always they tried to avoid facing up to unpleasant realities.
Real life was full of troubles and problems. Post-war Japan had avoided facing up to reality by depending on America for protection. Countries like that refine their own society and culture as they cruise along with a false sense of reality, but eventually they lose their drive and decline. Part of Sanjo was sad that the KEF had been wiped out, since their presence in Kyushu would have forced Tokyo to get real. Sooner or later there was bound to have been open conflict with the KEF. The US and China would have been drawn in, and it could have developed into a mini-world war, with Kyushu as the battlefield. As far as Sanjo was concerned, it might have been a whole lot more interesting had they stayed in Fukuoka, though this sort of nihilistic curiosity would probably have soon worn off.
The door to the bar opened again. More bureaucrats, probably, or some fairly well-heeled people who’d come to down expensive wine or cognac as if nothing had ever happened. Just one thing still bothered Sanjo: what had happened to all that money taken from the “criminals”? There must be a considerable sum sitting in a private bank account somewhere. Who was going to get their hands on that? Still mulling this over, he called out a professional-sounding “Irasshaimase” and went over to greet his customers.
EPILOGUE 2
May 5, 2014
Sakito Island
SERAGI YOKO had taken a train from Fukuoka to Huis Ten Bosch Station in the city of Sasebo, and had then got on a bus headed for Sakitojima, an island linked to Kyushu by several bridges. A doctor who had trained under her grandfather at the Kyushu Medical Center had opened a clinic there, and still scrupulously sent midsummer and year-end gifts of fresh sea bream, abalone, or lobster. Today he was holding a small celebration at his clinic, and Yoko had been invited in her grandfather’s place.
The seaside town sparkled in the sunlight. Azaleas were in full bloom along the road, and a pleasant breeze came through the bus window. “Perfect weather, innit?” said the old lady sitting next to her. They both spoke the same Kyushu dialect, but her accent was slightly different. “And the azaleas are lovely,” said Yoko in return. The old lady was reading a women’s weekly magazine that featured a close-up of a woman anchor from NHK Fukuoka named Hosoda Sakiko. Hosoda was a prominent supporter of the sole surviving KEF officer, who was in Fukuoka Prison. Under the KEF occupation, the officer had his own TV program at NHK Fukuoka, and his good looks and his way with words had earned him a lot of female fans. Even now, three years later, Hosoda continued to correspond with him and to visit him regularly.
Jo Su Ryeon had been recording his program when he learned that the Sea Hawk Hotel and the KEF camp had been destroyed. On hearing that the six remaining engineers had committed suicide, Jo turned himself in to the police. The government declared him an enemy of the state, but the local people—both KEF sympathizers and detractors alike—had opposed their demand that he be handed over. All the government had ever done for them was cut them off; it hadn’t offered any help or even tried to negotiate with the KEF, so why should they cooperate?
Hosoda Sakiko was at the forefront of those opposing Jo’s transfer to Tokyo. “Yes, he has to face up to his crimes. All I’m saying is that the investigation and trial should take place here in Fukuoka,” had been her line, and she had attracted many other supporters. In time, Jo had come to symbolize the antagonism between Fukuoka and central government, and neither the city nor the prefectural police had shown any inclination to turn him over. Eventually, the government had stopped referring to it, though they hadn’t officially dropped their demand. Jo had been tried in the Fukuoka District Court in double-quick time, and was sentenced to life imprisonment. Some sympathizers even said that this was too harsh, given that it wasn’t a murder or kidnapping case. Others held that he was in the safest place possible: having been involved in a covert foreign plot, his life would always be in danger on the outside. It seemed that with Hosoda’s encouragement, Jo was spending his time improving his Japanese and writing fiction and poetry.
