by Tobias Hill
You also inform me that Mr Abé’s police ID was not revoked until yesterday, and that the Missing Person withdrew savings of almost one million Japanese yen before leaving the north island of Hokkaido. I feel obliged to point out also that with his finances and identification, Mr Abé could travel undercover to almost anywhere in the world if and when he reaches mainland China. Officially, it would be necessary for Mr Abé to apply for a Chinese visa before crossing to the People’s Republic. Unofficially, it is far easier to enter China from Hong Kong by sea than vice-versa.
If you wish me to alert the Chinese authorities I would be willing to do so, but I must point out that it will be difficult to trace Mr Abé on the mainland, and should the authorities reach him, he will be treated as an illegal alien under Chinese law. Nor will his nationality incline the authorities to treat him sympathetically. I am sure you understand.
I trust this information is of some use.
Yours faithfully,
Sergeant J. McConnell
*
(Picture postcard, undated, postmarked ‘Kunming City, People’s [illegible; date illegible]’. The picture is of a lake, flat and empty. Behind the lake are the buildings of a sprawling industrial city. In the far distance are the outlines of sheer green hills. The handwriting is small and crabbed. The last eleven lines are cross-written up the left-hand side of the card.)
AIRMAIL EXPRESS
* * *
Keiko Yamada
International Library
Festival District
Kobe 2
Japan
* * *
My love, If you didn’t think I was mad yet, I guess you will now: imagine sending you a postcard! As if I’m on a company vacation. But I know how many postcards arrive at the international library, too many for the pinboard, right? This won’t get noticed. I wanted to explain myself to you first. Then you can choose who to tell or how much to keep secret.
I worked it out. I’m following Trailer Man. I had it all the wrong way round. But he is a killer. I’m going to bring him back.
Before I was sacked I was checking the tattoo designs, ringing tattooists, trying to ID the artist. First call, the skin-digger asks, Why is the skin so damaged? So I tell him, Acid. He says, Sounds like a removal gone wrong. Turns out half his work is taking off unwanted tattoos. Big ones he does with acid – HCl. He didn’t think it would be possible to burn off an entire body-tattoo. He thought that would kill most people. No one lives without skin, right?
I traced the acid seller, Keiko. I’ve met him. He thought he knew where the man had gone. Trailer Man. He was trying to burn off his skin.
I must catch him, you see? To be just. Please believe in me. Give me time. Then there will still be time for us.
All my love. See you soon!
Yasuhiro
5: The Fugitive
He got out of jail and headed for Hokkaido where the sky is wide. From the bullet-train he watched the stone-pickers bent double in the winter fields, a piano factory in a town of zinc roofs, a colt learning to run to the sound of wheels. In the seat beside him, a young office girl ate raw liver from a polystyrene dish printed with gold leaves.
Under the sea from Honshū to the northern island, the Seikan Tunnel was cold and a faint odour of salt permeated the immaculate train carriage. The tunnel was more than fifty kilometres long, and the train slowed, cautious. Around him, the other passengers became quiet and distracted. The rhythm of sodium lights passing overhead was incessant. Somewhere in the rows of seats a child began to cry loudly. In her lap, the girl’s hands were white fists. He found it hard not to reach across and touch her skin at the knuckles, feel the quick, faint pulse there. He tried to sleep, but the motion of the train was too smooth. When he closed his eyes he had the sensation of slipping forward, without control. Beyond the tunnel, the landscape was hard and real and he held it with his eyes.
He telephoned his old office from a pachinko parlour in Sapporo. An extra zero had been added to the code and he had to redial. A machine with no recorded welcome took the call. He listened to his own breathing being amplified by the fibre-optic cable and cradled the receiver without leaving any information. He moved away through the chrome roar of pinball games. There were rows of players in crumpled nylon suits or house-dresses, their faces waxy in the artificial light. At one machine a foreigner with shaggy white hair sat staring at the game, only his arms moving, stabbing at buttons. A career woman in a power-suit and sunglasses paused as he passed, watched his progress. He didn’t look back. The air smelt of excitement and boredom. In the street he slipped on the impacted snow, got up and kept going.
There was money waiting for him and he bought land and set his land in order. He lived in a trailer home on the sour earth of old factory ground. When it rained he stood outside and let it fall against his upturned face. In prison, he had thrust his hands through the window’s grille, catching the rain’s cold movement on the tips of his fingers.
There were no buildings or mountains to limit the sky here: it engulfed the landscape. He thought of Tokyo, where the city’s mass had been a rats’-maze of compartments; hectares of sky between offices, gridlocked junctions, steel elevators, foot-streets, capsule hotels, tea rooms. The scale of cloud formations and the curve of horizons threatened him. He expected walls. Sometimes he felt them to be there and when he looked there was only distance and the cries of flatland birds. He missed the hard certainty of concrete at his back, a prop. On the second day it rained and the sky was reflected brokenly in the fields. He hid from it in the cell of the trailer home. He measured distances in prison cells; three to the paddy-fields, seven to the expressway. He walked with the short steps of the exercise yard.
He waited for instructions. He had become old in captivity, and the emptiness of freedom disturbed him. For weeks he kept to his prison schedules. He woke at six-thirty although he had no clock, and prayed at a miniature plastic house-altar which had been left in the trailer bedroom. He washed in the squat-bath, mechanically scrubbing his hairless chest and thighs. Then he worked solidly until sundown, turfing out broken concrete and rusted iron pylons from the muddy ground with a broken shovel. When it was too dark to see he would go back inside, lie down on the foldaway bed and allow himself to sleep.
Then it no longer seemed necessary to be ordered. He slept in the afternoons and lay awake in bed until morning, his tattooed skin flat and colourless in the dark. Often he forgot to eat, sometimes for two or three days. After a month the Company men still hadn’t come and he wondered why, until he remembered that he had left no directions for them, nothing but his breath on the open line. It would take them some time to track him down. He still waited. He wondered if they would let him retire.
His hunger returned. In the mornings he ate breakfast outside. There was a striped red-and-white deck-chair stored under the trailer with a jumble of old farming implements and fire-blankets. He set up the deckchair beside the trailer’s back door, where there was most sun in the mornings. The noise and dust from the expressway didn’t bother him, he liked their vinegary smell. He watched the cars passing as he ate. Their contoured enamels were new to him. They looked like animals or women.
He thought of cooking as a woman’s skill. He had never prepared food. There was a microwave oven in the mini-kitchen, and a rice steamer with a digital timer. He unplugged them and stored them under the trailer where the deckchair had been. There was a Chinese wok and two gas-rings. He boiled, fried, steamed and simmered his meals in the wok. The rice he made was always dry and tough, or flabby with excess water. He ate it all slowly and with pleasure, enjoying the freshness, the rich flavours of raw egg and salty miso soup.
He thought about women when he cooked, mostly out of lust, but also from a simple love of their sounds and movements. At night the office girls drove home from the nearby Morinaga caramel factory. He watched them from the unlit windows of his mini-kitchen, leaning his head across his folded arms. The office girls wore Western-style
work dresses and high heels. They smoked as they drove, like men.
He tried to remember the last woman he had touched. She had been a prison cook, not much younger than him. Every day she had touched his hand when she passed him his plate, stroking. He couldn’t recall her name or face, only her assurance, how complete she had seemed, and the softness of her skin behind her thumb. She had left after a few months. No one came to the trailer home. It lay as if abandoned in a wilderness of rice paddies and warehouses, dwarfed by the monotony of waterland.
For a month he walked stooped, watching the trudge of his feet on the frozen ground. Then spring came and the sun pushed him upright and lengthened his stride. He cleared the last brambles and rubble from his few hectares. He stood on the slight rise at the end of his land and looked at the distance to the horizon. It made him want to shiver, he could feel the tension in his arms and chest. He breathed in and was surprised by the capacity of his lungs. He sighed, watching his breath cloud the sunlight.
He planted soy-beans in the sour earth. Lotus flowers grew in the oily ditches and he dug up their hollow roots and ate them. The flesh was white and sappy. He sliced the tubers open with a long curved fishknife. Sealed cavities radiated from the centres, a flower pattern hidden in the roots. He fried the sliced tubers in chicken fat. He found their bitterness satisfying.
As the lotus flowers died, their heads rotted and turned the colour of wet ash. Cosmos flowers began to appear on the lee-side of the trailer, around the deckchair. Their stalks were thread-thin, covered with green hairs. The buds were taut with papery petals. He weeded them out. He dug pungent eucalyptus seeds from under a stand of the trees across the expressway. He planted the seeds where the cosmos flowers had been. He liked the straightness of the eucalyptus, and the speed of their growth. The way they jealously claimed the sun.
When there was no work, he sat in the deckchair and allowed himself to think. His appetite, the sunlight and the expanse of paddy fields made it feel as if his brain had been stripped down, cleaned to gleaming, reassembled. He was aware of this; he was more aware of himself than he could remember being. Birds came to his allotment, tiny and green with white-rimmed eyes. He found he wanted to know their name and was surprised.
He couldn’t draw, so he wrote a description of the birds on the flattened inside of a biscuit box. The standard character script felt clumsy in his hands. The angular blades and staves of brush strokes were like weapons. He bought paper at Circle-K and wrote the description again, letting the characters soften. The strokes were like stems of grass, curved together. He drowsed in the chair and when he woke and looked down at the paper he saw his father’s ‘grass-writing’ calligraphy. He couldn’t remember if this was what his own handwriting looked like. The characters were expressions of movement. He began to write a short poem about the birds, a haiku. He couldn’t find the correct words. He became angry with himself and threw the poem away.
He ran his hands through his hair to help him think, to allay his growing sense of desperation. He didn’t know what it was he feared. The hair was grey and quite fine. He swore at himself and shaved it back to a hard stubble. He washed water over his naked scalp and stared abruptly at himself in the bathroom mirror. In half-shadow, his face looked cruel as a Kabuki mask of anger. There were blue spiders inked indelibly into his forearms. They filled him with a horror of his own skin. He stood under the cold trickle of the shower and scrubbed his illuminated chest, his feet, until his flesh was raw and pinked with capillary blood.
He waited for the Company men. When he had to leave the allotment land, he dressed in his farmworker’s clothes and a long-sleeved coat to cover his forearms. He looked like a tramp. He avoided other people. He felt the way they looked at him. As if he were an Untouchable or an outcast. He was ashamed because he understood himself to be both. One night each month, at 2 or 3 a.m., he would walk along the expressway for supplies. He kept his head down, out of the beams of oncoming cars. The road smelt of tar and wheat and the sweet fragrance of benzene. The grit stung his eyes and caught in his mouth and nostrils.
It was twelve kilometres to the outskirts of Yoichi town. Before the first homes was a deserted junction. In between the hard shoulders of roads were several all-night stores: Circle-K, 7-Eleven, Lawsons. He went to them in rotation. They sold frozen foods, computer games, house-sandals, pornographic comics. He bought plastic sacks of Japanese rice, meat, and rice wine in two-litre bottles.
He listened to the yard-dogs barking on their chains. When summer came, bell-beetles filled the dark with a sound like telephones, and frogs sang in the scented warmth of rice paddies. Once a dog on a frayed rope followed him home. It had hair the colour of Chinese noodles. Its forepaws were black, like a crab’s claws. He fed it on offal and pork bones. It slept under the trailer in a nest of old fire-blankets.
He didn’t allow himself to think any more. Many days he did nothing but look at his tattoos in the gloom of his bedroom The faded illustrations covered him like the clothes of a farmworker in summer – open-chested shirt, short trousers. A design in Sanskrit characters crossed the bare strip of his withered chest. He couldn’t read it, and had never asked the tattooist its meaning. He copied the characters onto paper and stared at them until his fascination turned to rage.
His ribcage was an oasis of flowers. Dwarf-maple leaves fell across his shoulders. Chrysanthemum the colour of birthmarks spotted his barrel-ribbed sides. Carp leapt waterfalls towards his collarbone from thickets of pink lotus. The entire design was edged with a scalloping of peonies. Waves and flecks of spindrift rimmed his thighs, the skin tinged red with rising sunlight. Flowers even broke through the water and crowded at its shore. He didn’t think of the flora as feminine. They meant other things to him: death, heroism, the pain of understanding.
On the flat canvas of his back a demon loomed in a flaming gateway. The creature’s skin, the skin of the man, had faded from cobalt blue to the colour of arteries. From the gateway a halo of fire flowered out behind the monster towards the man’s shoulder-blades and hips.
He remembered the night sweats of cadmium fever, the hot baths he had taken to ease the toxic shock. How the nagging stab of needles would become hypnotic, sending him to sleep as he sat crosslegged on the tatami mats with runnels of blood collecting at his hips. The radio on the workshop floor, a hush of static between programmes. Scar-tissue hardening in lines, following designs like termite-roads.
Near his armpit was the tattooist’s signature, ‘Horicho III’, inked black and thick-lined in a black box. Beside the signature one peony in the tattoo’s edge remained uncoloured. He’d asked the tattooist when that would would be finished. ‘When you die. I made you a skin. But only God makes perfect skins.’ They had eaten together, noodles from the street-stall, green tea from the kitchen. But he had never been introduced to the tattooist’s wife or family. A customer, not a friend. He remembered how that had suited him. He thought about going back to Kobe, finding the tattoo artist, or the artist’s children. He could ask them about the Sanskrit characters, about how things were on the mainland. He sat in the deckchair and thought about leaving the north island. The imminence of danger made his skin crawl.
The pore system of his skin had been destroyed. In summer he was sweatless, cold to the touch as the belly of a fish. Digging for lotus roots, he would have to stop and gasp for cool air. Once, while he dragged prunings together for a bonfire, a massive weight lodged in his chest and he couldn’t breathe. He sat clumsily, legs splayed, head down. Then his heart righted itself and began to beat again and he felt a surge of blood that lit up his head. He lay back and breathed delicately with his eyes closed. Later he tried to work out his age, counting back through the reigns of emperors. He had been incarcerated for twenty years, nearly a third of his life.
The sun tanned his face and hands, stressing the frown lines on his forehead. On his torso and arms it was unnoticeable. He became convinced that his skin had died on him, that nothing would affect it. He repr
essed the urge to run, to kill himself. One evening, as he was clearing deadwood, the trailer began to jolt on its wheel-blocks. He didn’t realise the ground was moving until he lost his footing, a curved pruning-saw still in his hand. He cut himself across one many-coloured forearm as he staggered against the earth tremor. He watched with a kind of joy as blood obliterated the coils of a Chinese dragon. He examined the wound for hours in the bluish striplight of the mini-kitchen. He noted the layers of skin, the shallowness of the ink’s penetration. The designs felt foreign as a disease. They were thin as appleskin.
He dreamed frequently, but retained only sounds or smells with clarity. There were a few motionless images, like photographs. Often these were events from his childhood. A Japanese officer standing at a train window. The sigh of friction between the steel blades of his mother’s dressmaking scissors. The sizzle and char of octopus meat burning on an iron skillet.
Once he woke crouched under the trailer in the tepid summer mud, the dog barking him awake. He had a kitchen knife in his hand. He recalled running. The demon in his tattoo was hunting him. Its name was Fudo – guardian of hell and justice. He could feel its heat on his back. It roared behind him like a typhoon. He traced the creature’s iconography across his shoulder-blades. It held a rope to trap the guilty and an Indian straight-sword immolated in fire. Punishment.
He allowed himself to understand. He was running from the Company. He no longer wished to be a part of it, and he had run to ground. At night he drank Sapporo beer on the trailer steps, the dog curled around his bare feet. Its skin would spasm at the movements of fleas as it slept. He stared at the moon’s face, where his mother had shown him the shape of a hare. It had leapt from the arms of a god, she had whispered, her lips warm and ticklish against his ear. It had been running forever.