From the Fatherland, with Love, page 8
Once every three days a dried fish or fish sausage would make an appearance on the Yamada family table, and once every five days the father would allow himself a single glass of the local sake. The man had dreams of farming but no actual knowledge or skill: the tomatoes and cucumbers were consumed by insects, the taro patch was decimated by a flock of crows, and in winter the house, with no heat apart from the cooking pit, was so cold that they all had to sleep huddled together, teeth chattering. The cold and hunger robbed the entire family of any strength or vitality, no one cleaned up or did the laundry, the kitchen and backyard filled up with garbage, and the outhouse overflowed with their waste. Malnutrition and lack of hygiene resulted in Yamada’s skin breaking out, and even the smallest cut would fester and refuse to heal. If you looked closely you could see that he had cute, rather rabbit-like features, but in middle school—thanks to the pimples that covered not only his face but his entire body, together with the sores on his arms and legs and the cheap, soiled, smelly clothing he wore—he’d been bullied mercilessly.
The following spring, his mother left. His father went to Tokyo to find her and bring her back, but days went by and he still hadn’t returned. There was no food in the house, and one morning Yamada collapsed on the dirt path to school. He was taken to the hospital in the nearest town, where they found that as a result of chronic malnutrition he was developing tuberculosis. His parents couldn’t be contacted and no money was available to pay for treatment, so he was moved to a prefectural facility. During his three weeks there, he never once saw his father, let alone his mother. When he was released he went back to the thatched house, and there, above the packed-dirt floor of the living room, he found his father hanging by the neck. Yamada tore the IN PRAISE OF POVERTY scroll from the wall and stuffed it in his pocket, then stayed with his father’s corpse until the police showed up. No one was able to get hold of his mother, and Yamada was put in welfare, where he met Mori. The two of them were exactly the same age.
Mori had ended up there after his brother, four years older, had bought a knife in order to commit suicide but chickened out, murdered his parents instead, and seriously injured his little brother as well, stabbing him in the stomach, the scars of which Mori still bore. Yamada and Mori had similar personalities and a similar air about them, but whereas Yamada resembled a rabbit, Mori looked more like an owl. Both were tight-lipped, uncomplaining, and incredibly gentle and even-tempered. From the welfare facility, the two of them commuted to the same middle school, but they were so self-effacing that it was as if they weren’t even there, and since they didn’t react in any way when teased or bullied or beaten, eventually everyone—students and teachers alike—learned to ignore them.
They got the tattoos when they were fourteen, at Mori’s suggestion. Mori had been obsessed with the story of a serial killer in a book he’d read. The hero was a man who’d grown up bullied and abused, a complete loser and weakling, until he got a dragon tattooed on his back that gave him the power to kill one person after another. Yamada had heard the story many times, and one day during the summer vacation of their second year in middle school Mori took him to a tattoo shop in Shibuya. The place was run by a man named Kan-chan, a flamboyant tattoo artist they’d read about in a magazine. His work didn’t come cheap, but Mori, who’d received a portion of the inheritance from his parents in cash, paid for both of them. Kan-chan had a hundred and forty-eight piercings, from his temples to his ankles, and was cradling a French doll with one burned, melted eye and needles sticking out all over its body. The boys had planned to get a tiger and a dragon tattoo respectively, but Kan-chan convinced them that tigers and dragons were old-fashioned. Besides, he explained, they could be dangerous for people who couldn’t handle the powers they summoned. Trusting in Kan-chan’s advice, they’d gone with Mickey and Minnie, and not on their backs but on opposite deltoids. When they stood shoulder to shoulder, it looked as if Mickey and Minnie were holding hands.
Believing they were now ready to become killers, they decided to murder a stranger as a trial run before going after Yamada’s runaway mother and Mori’s parricidal brother. They bought two knives apiece at a hardware store, but the clerk got suspicious and notified the police, who promptly arrested them. They were still on probation when they planned an attack on Mori’s paternal grandmother. Yamada’s mother had vanished and Mori’s brother was in a hospital, so they’d decided on Granny, who was now the executor of the parents’ estate. But on their way to her house with new metal baseball bats they were arrested once again. This time they were put in a psychiatric institution. It was there that they came across one of Ishihara’s poems, reprinted in a tattoo magazine. They didn’t understand the poem very well, but there was also a photo of Ishihara. Something about his face spoke to them, and they decided to go to Fukuoka and check things out. Even now Yamada kept a worn, crumpled sheet of paper on the wall of his room that read IN PRAISE OF POVERTY.
The stairway down was a long one and made a right turn every five or six steps, so even though Tateno descended two steps at a time it seemed to take for ever. The ground floor had been used to store furniture and had a high ceiling. When he opened the heavy steel door at the bottom, he felt a gust of fresh air on his face. The automatic doors at the entrance had been made of plate glass, but the glass was no longer there. The large floor space was home to mounds of ruined furniture that no one had ever bothered to claim. Any usable pieces had been carted off long ago, and what was left were things like tables with one leg, sofas with foam rubber popping out of the seams, quilts and comforters that had been reduced to rags, or rusty and bent metal shelves. Tateno stepped outside through the glassless door frame. The infrared sensor, supposedly long since dead, would trigger occasionally, opening and closing the doors as if in remembrance of days gone by. Whenever this happened, it gave Tateno the feeling that maybe Hino was right—maybe buildings really were alive.
Outside, he turned and looked up. Only the ground floor had a few small windows; from here you couldn’t tell how many stories there were. A big H was painted near the top of the white outer wall that loomed over him like the hull of a tanker. No one casually passing by would ever imagine anyone was living there, much less kids like himself or Shinohara or Yamada. The cluster of warehouses covered four blocks, which met at a crossroads. There were sixteen in all, from Building A to Building P, and they’d been built about forty years earlier. A couple of decades ago the company that owned them had gone belly-up, thanks partially to just-in-time distribution systems by which warehouse inventories were being reduced. An auction was held, but there were no takers for the buildings, and since it would cost money to tear them down they were left as they were. Ishihara lived in Building C. Several of the other buildings housed a few members of the group that had formed around him. There were about twenty guys in all, and Tateno had met each of them individually, though he’d never seen them all together in one place at the same time.
Ishihara wasn’t living there illegally. When he’d first come to Fukuoka, he and Nobue had rented an apartment near Hakata Station. Nobue eventually opened a shop selling vintage jeans and Hawaiian shirts, and when it became fairly popular with local youngsters he opened another selling imported motorcycles. Development in Nishi Ward had collapsed in the late 1990s, and an organization called the Young Entrepreneurs Group spearheaded an attempt to turn the abandoned warehouse district into a “fashion town.” Nobue rented Building C for very little money and opened a new shop, but the whole project soon floundered. New land had been reclaimed everywhere, resulting in a glut of condominiums, hotels, and shopping malls. Tenants failed to materialize, and so did shoppers. Nobue’s store, all by itself among the vacant buildings, continued to do a trickle of business; and in time, youths who’d been abandoned by parents, relatives, and even welfare institutions began drifting in from various parts of the country. Tateno once asked how the first kids had heard about Ishihara and Nobue, and Ishihara had said simply, “Hell if I know.”
Ando, one of the first members to have joined the group, said he’d come to Fukuoka after hearing rumors about these two legendary and very strange old dudes who had once committed murders and even blown up a section of Tokyo with a bomb of mind-boggling proportions, just for fun. At the age of thirteen, in a housing development in Yokohama, Ando himself had killed a girl from his class and cut up her body with a handsaw. Fukuda, who’d come to Fukuoka shortly after Ando, said that Ishihara and Nobue simply had an aura about them that attracted boys with no home in the world, the way a magnet attracts iron filings. Fukuda claimed to be the only child of two members of a cult that had carried out coordinated terrorist attacks. He wasn’t listed in a family register and hadn’t even attended elementary school.
For some years, the informal group had struggled to get by on the trickle of income from Nobue’s shop, but a major turnaround in their financial situation occurred with the arrival of a man named Takei. Takei was in his forties, not a kid like the others. After the departure of Nobue, he became the only older man in the group aside from Ishihara himself. He’d once worked in the foreign exchange department of a major bank but was laid off when he was thirty-one, after which he attempted suicide by slitting his wrists. Recovering in a hospital bed, he happened to read a book that explained the rewards Islamic martyrs received when they reached Paradise. After doing some research on the Internet he traveled to Yemen to join a training camp for militant Islamic guerrillas. He didn’t know anything else about Islam but was very taken with the bit about the seventy virgins.
Takei underwent training for some six months, but he’d been sickly as a child and had grown into a frail and extremely nearsighted man who was only a hundred and fifty-eight centimeters tall, weighed a mere forty-six kilos, and couldn’t register more than eighteen with either hand on a grip dynamometer. Unable to run the fifty meters in under eleven seconds, drive a car, or even ride a bicycle, he was judged unsuitable for guerrilla operations and advised to go back to Japan. Nevertheless, the fact that he’d traveled all the way to Yemen to join the group had impressed the leaders and the other recruits, and he’d gained their trust. During his stay in the camp, he instructed the leadership in the basics of financial investment and foreign exchange—explaining to them, for example, why investing capital in a hedge fund was safer than trying to hide it in bank accounts, or how the dollar would react in the event of unrest in a politically unstable nation like, say, Bahrain. The organization actually profited from his advice, and this of course boosted his standing with them.
After returning to Japan, Takei heard rumors and legends about Ishihara and Nobue that compelled him to seek them out. He was still in contact with the guerrilla group at this time, and soon after his arrival he received information from them that an anti-government organization in Iran was going to attack the island of Abu Musa, on the western side of the Strait of Hormuz. He advised Ishihara to short the stocks of American oil companies operating in the Persian Gulf, and took the same position himself. Between this and speculation on oil futures, they cleared nearly a hundred million yen. He continued with his investments, relying on information from Yemen, and provided Ishihara and Nobue with very substantial funds. He was also given, by a Syrian guerrilla, the exclusive Far Eastern distribution rights to a soap made of olive and laurel oils, advertised as “The Soap Cleopatra Loved.” Takei formed a company and made an obscene profit as the exclusive importer. This was before the big boom in “nutritious” soaps and shampoos containing wood vinegar, herbs, seaweed, and so on, but at one point, after the Cleopatra soap was discovered by women’s magazines, sales reached into the hundreds of millions.
When Ishihara won the Kyushu Public Literary Prize for Poetry a decade ago, the city of Fukuoka took the opportunity to recognize his contribution to child welfare. The kids he was known to have taken under his wing were apparently no longer involved in illegal activities, and the city tacitly considered the Ishihara-Nobue operation a convenient way of shifting responsibility for these problem children. In fact, of course, the boys hadn’t changed or been “rehabilitated”; they were only catching their breath, allowing themselves a period of rest and recuperation. The city didn’t know, for example, that Shinohara was raising poisonous insects. No one knew how many youngsters were involved or what they were up to in those warehouses, and no one could review their backgrounds or personal histories since most of them had no resident-register codes.
Takei was an admirable financial manager for the group. But his real purpose in financing Ishihara was to start a revolution in Japan, and he seriously intended to employ the youths as soldiers in his struggle. When Tateno first met him, Takei had spoken at great length about these plans. Through his connections with the armed militants in Yemen, he’d been purchasing weapons and explosives, little by little, from such places as Russia, the Philippines, and China. Containers addressed to Takei’s company arrived about once a month at the port of Hakata. Most of the containers were full of soap, but now and then weapons and explosives were mixed in with this cargo. According to him, about eight hundred thousand assorted containers reached the port each year. That made for more than two thousand a day, and it was impossible for Customs to inspect them all. To do so would mean clogging up the distribution system and forcing Hakata to lose out to rival ports such as Busan and Shanghai. Tateno hadn’t seen any of the weapons yet, but Hino told him they included side arms, automatic rifles, and hand grenades, as well as high explosives.
Shinohara and Yamada had told him that Takei’s arrival and all this talk of revolution were what triggered Nobue’s departure. Nobue didn’t like Takei. And he became completely disillusioned and left for good when young Kaneshiro joined the group. Kaneshiro was a guy who was interested in nothing but terrorism and devising different schemes for large-scale attacks, and several of the other kids had fallen under his sway. He seemed to hole up in his room every day, revising his plans, and Tateno had only met him twice. But after seeing what he could do with a boomerang, Kaneshiro had been enthusiastic, saying, “We can use this!” He seemed a thoroughly serious person, genuine and sincere and not motivated by self-interest. But because he spent all his time thinking up ever bigger projects, he’d never actually done anything. Ishihara seemed neither to like nor to dislike Takei or Kaneshiro, or anyone else for that matter. He continued writing his poems, aloof from the minutiae of everyday life and growing increasingly sage-like and mystical. Terror, murder, revolution—whether such things occurred or not was of no real interest to him.
Ishihara often explained to the group that the important thing was to live apart from the majority. When he spoke about things that excited him he emitted a powerful aura, as if he were illuminated from behind, and his shining eyes, set adrift in their sockets, made you wonder what he was staring at. At times he seemed all-seeing, at others half-blind. His hands fluttered about as he talked, his fingers tugged at his hair, which stood straight up as a result, and he pumped and jiggled first one leg and then the other. He had an overwhelming presence. Once, while he was talking, Shinohara had leaned over and whispered in Tateno’s ear, “There’s a millipede called the Ethiopian Giant that I’ve only seen pictures of, but it’s forty centimeters long and looks like something from outer space. It’s so trippy that the Ethiopians think it’s a messenger from God, but I’d say it’s got nothing on Ishihara-san.”
The man would begin speaking suddenly, as if struck by a revelation.
“I and I stopped masturbating. Or so we thought. But then I and I awoke this morning pulling the old pud. It’s the plain Truth. Terrorism is awesome, violence is awesome, and even murder is awesome, but war sucks. War is for the mojority. Not majority but mojority. The little people are always the ones who lose. That’s why the only ones who want war are the mojority. They either bully the little people or ignore them altogether. I and I hate pain and would rather not see things like terror and violence and murder in the world, but sometimes the little people have no other choice. The only thing I and I hate more than pain is the mojority. Whether on the level of village or city or country, their interests always come first. It was the need to protect the mojority that created the nation state, and in a country like this, it’s no easy thing to live apart from all that. I and I and Nobue-chin were always ignored by the mojority, which left three-hundred-mile-long scars on our hearts, but now I and I realize that we were fortunate never to be accepted by them. Fortunate, not fartunate. I and I will repeat this over and over again many times and say it only this once because it’s so important: you must never join the mojority. Even killing people would be más mejor than doing that.”
The crossroads that separated the sixteen buildings pointed in all four directions. The road north ended at Hakata Bay, and going south took you straight to downtown Fukuoka. To the east was the shrine in the forest where Shinohara collected insects, and the road to the west dead-ended at a ghost town that was once meant to be a housing development. In the yards of the few houses that were still inhabited were the inevitable vegetable patches and chicken coops. Once Japan’s foreign reserves were exhausted, oil became scarce and food distribution faltered to the point where some politicians said the country would soon face starvation. But neither Tateno nor anyone else in the Ishihara group was afraid of going hungry. They had all experienced things much worse than that.
The sea was some two kilometers away, but Tateno could smell it as he walked up the road, bordered on both sides by thick tangles of weeds. Down at the far end of the reclaimed land, looking out over the bay, was a girls’ high school that had been abandoned and relocated when crime began to spread in the area. Tateno was from landlocked Yamanashi, so any view of the sea was something new and amazing to him, and since joining the group he’d discovered any number of spectacular lookout points. Next to the old girls’ school were a sandy beach and a small, narrow park. There was a broken slide in the park, and by climbing its ladder you could see all of Hakata Bay. Dead ahead was an island, with a small ferryboat always either going or coming.
