by Unknown
He laughed in their faces. I’d never seen him so ecstatic.
The whole thing was nauseating. I started to drive off, but Okada waved me over. I stopped and leaned out the window. He leaned in and whispered to me.
“It looks like there’s no food to be had, pretty much anywhere. The population of Kofu and Takasaki has quadrupled. The refugees are pretty much eating their way through everything.”
“Aren’t any supplies coming in?”
“The government’s paralyzed. Food can’t get through from Osaka because the roads are destroyed, or full of people trying to get out. Supplies from outside Japan are coming soon, but it could be months before people can put the food in their mouths. By then they’ll be starving.”
His expression had changed completely. It was warm and friendly. “If you run out of food, just let me know. I don’t have much, but you’re a friend.”
“Thank you.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say. I was disgusted and drove away quickly.
Toward evening a Mercedes stopped in front of the bakery. Soon there was a hesitant knock at the door. A women in her twenties with expensively styled hair was standing there with two small children. She held out a Thermos and asked for water.
I asked where she had come from. She told me she lived in Kofu and had fled her apartment. I was surprised; Kofu wasn’t in the disaster zone. Her husband had been in Tokyo on business, and after waiting five days she had finally run out of food. By then the stores were empty.
She thought she might find someone who would sell her food if she drove west. And so she had finally ended up all the way out here.
“But you must’ve had something in the house. No rice? No instant noodles?”
She shook her head. There was a convenience store on the first floor of her building. The only thing she had ever bothered to stock up on was snacks for the kids.
She didn’t ask me to bake for her. Her pleas for food must have been refused tens, maybe hundreds of times already. When I handed her the Thermos full of water, she thanked me and turned to go.
“You can rest here for a moment, if you want.” I pointed to the coffee area.
My wife poked me in the back.
“Don’t. She’ll never leave. And there’ll be more like her. You can’t make a habit of inviting strangers into the house.”
My wife, who a few days ago was wallowing in the world of Kenji Miyazawa and Peter Mayle, had suddenly become a flinty realist. I was appalled.
The woman sat her children down under the big larch tree in the front yard. They shared the water and started munching on little cookies.
As I looked closer, I doubted my eyes. The “cookies” were dog kibble. It must have been the only thing they could find in the stores after five days.
I hurried back into the shop. Two of my wife’s butter rolls were left over from yesterday’s batch. She was preoccupied helping our son change his sweaty T-shirt. I grabbed the rolls, went into the garden and pressed them into the woman’s hand.
She looked like she was going to cry. “I’m so sorry,” she said, and drew a thousand-yen bill from her purse.
“You don’t need to pay me.”
“You’re so kind. At least some people are still human.”
I went inside. My wife stood by the window, staring out coldly. “Next it’ll be some old man or woman. You’ll feed them too, I suppose.”
I didn’t answer. If none of this had happened, I never would’ve discovered what my wife was really like. I could have gone on loving her in blissful ignorance.
The next morning the woman and her children were gone. They had probably headed for Nagano in search of food. The village was filling up with people. Every household seemed to be sheltering family and friends who had survived the trek from Tokyo. There were many others with nowhere to stay.
For miles around, in fields or on farmhouse doorsteps, refugees were flashing wads of cash and still being turned away. Strangers were gradually taking over the village, squatting in the grounds of the village shrine, sheltering in the co-op warehouse, or commandeering space at the village hot spring.
Three of Okada’s friends finally arrived too. He’d told me he was expecting to shelter twenty or so people from eight households, assuming they all made it through.
True to his word, he had a sack of soybeans ready when I dropped by.
“It’s nothing much. I’m still an apprentice farmer,” he said awkwardly as he gave it to me. I felt abashed and grateful. My family had nothing but bread to eat.
“Three women came this morning. They must’ve been in their thirties. Wanted me to sell them some corn. They offered to trade me a necklace and a bag, some fashion-house brand. Of course I said no. Finally one of them actually said ‘How about me?’ I almost told her to go look in a mirror, but then I felt sorry for them. So I took all three of their designer bags and gave them some rice.”
I was relieved to hear this. Okada actually had some compassion after all.
“But I didn’t give them anything to put it in. I told them to hold out their hands, and I filled them with rice. You should’ve seen them panic. Finally they had to put it on the ground, take off their tops, pick up every grain and wrap them up. Then they went off in their bras. I don’t know how they planned to cook that rice, but I wish you could’ve seen them down on the ground, picking it up with their tits spilling out.”
“Take it.” I thrust the bag of beans at him. I felt like a coward for even thinking about depending on a man like him for food.
“Whaat?” He gaped with surprise. “What’s wrong? What did I say?”
“I’ll starve before I take food from you.”
Before he could answer, we heard the roar of a car revving its motor. We both looked around, but the road was empty.
It took a few seconds to realize that the noise was coming from Okada’s field, beyond the tall corn. There was a sound of crashing stalks before the huge grill guard of an SUV heaved into view and stopped. I turned instinctively and ran.
“You idiots! What are you doing?” Okada shouted.
The car spun its tires against the fallen corn and lurched toward him. The grill guard struck him with a sickening sound. His body vaulted up onto the hood and over the roof, corkscrewed through the air and plunged headfirst into the tomato patch.
I screamed and covered my face. Okada was tough. He groaned and tried to rise up.
The SUV backed up. Trembling like a fool, I half-hid behind a tree and tried to memorize the license number, thinking they were going to run. But the car made straight for Okada. Its huge tires threw up sprays of soft black earth, crushing the eggplants and tomatoes and pumpkins as it rolled over him and backed up again, spattered with tomatoes and something else that was a deeper red.
Okada’s body was half-entombed in the dirt, but he was still groaning.
The car stopped. Four young men in suits leaped out. They started ripping ears of corn clumsily off the nearest stalks and pitching them into the back of the car.
One of Okada’s friends came running out of the house. The men jumped in the car, gunned it again and went for him. I heard the man scream as he somersaulted through the air and landed in an irrigation ditch. After that he didn’t move.
Their next move was calm and deliberate. They drove across the field to Okada’s storage shed, removed all the rice, soybeans, and whatever else they could lay their hands on, loaded it quickly into the car, and drove off. It was all over in a few minutes.
They probably hadn’t had a plan. At first they must have tried to buy food, but after failing too many times, they’d decided to use their car as a weapon. At first they were only after food that was ready to be harvested, but after killing one person, killing the next one who tried to interfere was easy. After that they’d have no qualms about stealing anything they could.
But at what price? Okada’s lifeless body lay amid the flattened remains of his garden. What had he died for? His unshakable faith in the coming food crisis had found its ultimate vindication, but his beloved crops—for which he had given up his family, his Tokyo home, his social standing, and nearly all his money—had been ground into the dirt, and he had been robbed not only of them, but of his life.
I retrieved Okada’s final gift of soybeans and raced to the police box, five minutes away. The little hut was locked and dark. In the last few days the village seemed to have filled with strangers. With trouble breaking out all over, I could hardly expect to find the officer relaxing in his chair. No, there was more than trouble. We were descending into lawlessness. The police, the armed forces, the government, they were all floundering. Japan’s command and control systems had broken down completely.
The soybeans were missing when I got back to the car. I’d been in such a hurry to find a policeman, I’d left the key in the ignition. The car was untouched; the bag in the front seat was the only thing missing. I clucked my tongue in frustration and turned toward home, feeling helpless.
As I emerged from the village I almost ran over a young man in a T-shirt who sprinted in front of me. I slammed on the brakes and saw a farmer in hot pursuit, brandishing a hoe. The youth was clutching an entire soybean plant. The farmer caught up to him and started beating him with the hoe.
When I arrived home, the metal shutters were down. I’d never closed them before, even outside business hours. I went through the back and found my wife clutching Hiro. She was nearly apoplectic.
“Somebody tried to get in here. They heard you were giving out bread.” She glared at me with moist eyes that flashed with panic and fear and anger. “You knew this would happen if you helped one of them.”
“What happened?”
My wife drew our Afghan hound close and stroked his long, slender neck.
“Siesta is a better protector than you are.” She showed me the pot on the stove. It was filled with soup and flour dumplings. “This is dinner. I can’t bake anymore, they’ll smell it. I don’t want those people to come back.”
I couldn’t ignore the sense of dread rising in the back of my mind. Another incident like this and we might have to flee. But we had nowhere to go. If we left, we would be refugees too. We had enough food to survive for the time being, but we’d be very vulnerable if we couldn’t use the car. All this time I’d been thinking about food without realizing that our local filling station might run out of gas at any time.
I rushed back to the car. I had to get the tank filled.
On the way, I passed a family squatting by their car at the edge of a drainage ditch, peering at the tires. They would have driven over rubble and debris to get here, and even the toughest all-terrain tire is not immune to punctures, but all four of their tires were blown.
When I got down out of the foothills, I saw a farmer in a broad-brimmed straw hat by the roadside, biting her lower lip. The black earth of the field behind her was crisscrossed with tire trails. Her vegetables had been pulled out by the roots.
I saw the same thing in other fields. Okada had warned everyone that a food crisis was coming, but he thought the cities would be vulnerable, that people with farmland in the countryside would be safe. I sighed.
City people would sell their daughters to buy food. That’s what Okada said. But while the cities were vulnerable, city people were not. They had weaponized their motor vehicles. Okada had assumed that people with land, people growing food, would be in a strong position at a time like this, but he was wrong. The winners were not the people who grew food, but those who used force.
I saw another disabled vehicle beside the main road, then a line of them with flat tires. They all had Tokyo plates.
Finally I figured out what was happening. A group of village men blocked the road ahead, armed with knives and pruning shears. One of them ran toward me, but another was already calling to him.
“Calm down! That’s Mr. Hashimoto, from the bakery.”
My Lexus still had its Tokyo plates. A man I’d never seen before, wearing fire brigade gear, strolled up to my window.
“We’re out here hunting cars. Kazuo’s son, old Mrs. Yamashiro, Ryuzo’s grandson, all of them, run down in the fields by these damn cars. They boom right across the fields with their four-wheel drive, steal our crops and run away. Don’t bother with 110. Help never arrives.”
What happened to Okada was happening at other farms, but the police didn’t have the manpower to deal with hit-and-run incidents. Many refugees had probably run someone down on the way here. Law and order had broken down everywhere. Now the village men were defending themselves against the only weapons the city people had.
The firefighter waved me through and I headed toward the gas station. I was too late. The part-timer manning the pumps dismissed me with a wave. “All out.”
A broken-down light truck pulled in after me. “Round the back,” the boy told the driver. They had gas after all. They just weren’t selling it to outsiders.
“Listen, I live here. I run the bakery.” I was starting to lose my temper.
“Sorry, I can only sell to people with local plates.” He hurried toward the back of the gas station.
“Hey, I’m a legal resident. I pay property taxes. I’m not a refugee!” I yelled after him, but he ignored me. I gave up and pulled back out into the road. Things couldn’t go on like this for much longer. Once the situation in Tokyo was under control, this lawlessness would end and things would return to normal. They had to.
The thought helped me calm down.
Nearing home, I sensed something was different. As I passed the pension two doors down from my house, I saw that the white paint was scorched black. It looked like arson. I pulled up at the house with a sense of dread and hurried through the backdoor into the kitchen.
I gasped. Tufts of Siesta’s hair were scattered all over the room.
“Siesta!”
I called my beloved dog, but there was no sign of that long, joyous face. Alarmed, I called his name again. An answer came from behind our upstairs bedroom door. It was my wife.
“Siesta’s gone.” She came down holding Hiro. Her lips were bloodless and trembling.
“They took him. Goddamn it, I swear I’ll kill them. They waited for you to leave. They stole all the flour, forty kilos, and took all the food in the house. Siesta went after them. They had metal bats. They beat him senseless and dragged him off, laughing. ‘Looks like meat’s on the menu,’ one of them said.”
My knees nearly buckled. I barely had the strength to ask the next question.
“Did they hurt you?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Her tone was sharp and incredulous.
All I could do was mumble something unintelligible. She started screaming at me.
“What are you thinking? People don’t want sex when they’re starving. There was a woman, a young woman wearing sandals. She beat Siesta with a bat. She called to him. ‘Here boy, nice dog.’ Then wham, she hit him. I’m going to find that bitch and kill her.”
“Please don’t say that. You can’t say that.”
I collapsed to my knees, surrounded by hanks of golden fur, and held my head in my hands. When I saw the first footage of the quake, I thought we’d dodged a bullet. If people from Tokyo made their way here, I was ready to extend a hand and do whatever I could.
Everything was going wrong. If the quake had affected a smaller area, the refugees wouldn’t have come. If only a dozen or so had shown up, the village would probably have come together to help them.
By evening, the empty lot across the street was filled with tents. My wife peered out from the cracks in the metal shutters, muttering about murder and mayhem. I had to force her to sit down and try to be calm.
There was a commotion outside, then someone pounding on the
shutters.
“Help! We need help out here. People are hurt. They need water.”
I didn’t move and didn’t answer. Neither did my wife. My son stared at us. He seemed baffled. “Aren’t you going to help them?”
“Please!” The voice came again. “They’re bleeding terribly. Please help.” Whoever it was sounded genuinely panicked. My wife smiled thinly.
“What should we do?” I whispered.
“It’s not our problem. Our problem is, we’ve got nothing to eat.”
She was right. Yet once the situation was under control, we’d get along somehow. Vehicles could reach us from Nagano, to the west. At least they could bring in enough to supply the village. Relief supplies from other countries had to be coming. Even now, I couldn’t see things any other way.
“Go get something,” said my wife.
“What?”
“Go to the village and get us something.”
“Nobody’s going to give me anything.”
“You’re a local. You live here.”
“Here. Not in the village. We’re outsiders.”
There was another loud bang on the shutters.
“Please, they’re going to die! We need medicine and bandages.”
These people were not our enemies. They were city people like us. They were victims of a terrible disaster. I ignored my wife and reached for the first aid kit.
“Fool.” She sounded like she’d given up on me once and for all.
I went outside. A crowd of refugees was milling around in the darkness. In the middle of the crowd I could make out bodies on the ground. There were six of them, four men and two women, all covered with blood. One man’s shirt was pulled up around his neck. His intestines spilled from a wound in his abdomen. One woman had a sucking chest wound and was struggling to breathe. The air wheezed from the hole in her breast.