by Tobias Hill
He allowed himself to remember. The first man he had killed had been a Company employee. His name had been Shinzo – ‘Heart’. His family had come from the southern islands and he was dark-skinned like a Hawaiian. He had a quick, kind sense of humour; he would recite short, comic poems when they were on their rounds. They had worked together in Kobe, collecting ‘security payments’ from small family businesses. One of the businesses was a salarymen’s bar. A woman served them strong green tea while the manager fetched their money. Her beauty was Japanese but not Japanese; her eyes were wide-set, the irises tawny-brown. Her hair was a dense, mercurial weight against her back.
She was a Korean woman, a refugee who had been forced to marry a Japanese rice farmer, then divorced. She spoke little Japanese. Shinzo couldn’t stop talking about her. He married her and then ‘washed his feet’ – divorced himself from the Company. They left Kobe with one suitcase and two weeks’ savings.
They had found him working in a mah-jong room on the outskirts of Tokyo. It had taken only eight days to locate him. Four of them had travelled up in an American car. They had no guns, only truncheons and a pair of heavy cleavers locked in the car boot. Shinzo had bowed when they walked into the club. He’d walked towards them trying to explain, not scared. The first blow had broken his jaw, cutting off his apology. They had clubbed him to death. After cleaning the room, they had found a bath on the fourth floor, large enough to section the body. They had disposed of the remains in five black plastic sacks on one of the huge Tokyo floating dumps, ‘Rainbow Island’.
Sitting on the foldaway bed, he began to cry. At first he wasn’t aware of it. Then he felt the coolness on his face. He didn’t know how to stop. He rocked gently, pulling himself up into a foetal crouch. He tried to count the people he had killed, but he couldn’t be sure. Sometimes they had left people for dead. It was always ‘they’. The Company. But he’d been good at killing. Efficient, he could remember someone saying, a man called Kozo. He could remember driving to Rainbow Island five or six times. That had been him alone. Hauling out the rubbish sacks, driving quickly away. Every few years a municipal worker would find a set of teeth or the small linked bones of a foot in the looming mountains of rotting plastic, rubber and fish.
It was two garbage workers who had seen him the last time. They had been Untouchables, cousins in the same underclass family. But in court they had looked painfully honest. Their testimony and identification, along with his record of minor arrests, had been enough for a conviction. Without the influence of Kozo, of the Company, he might have been sentenced to death by hanging. The Company had saved him. The Company had betrayed him.
Towards the end of July it began to rain. For short periods it came down hard, clacking like loose teeth against the trailer’s windows. Drumming the roof. Then for days it was a soft drizzle, insubstantial, billowing in the wind like lace curtains. From the trailer, the man couldn’t see as far as the expressway. The tundra of paddy fields had disappeared. He stood among the rotting lotus flowers, bare-chested, head back. The water coalesced against his patterned skin and ran down his belly and sides. It couldn’t wash him clean. The tattoos itched in him, half a century old.
6: Identification
His constabulary ID had expired. In Rat Buri, outside Bangkok, he bought a new one. The coach from the Chinese border had been freezing in the highlands, the metal armrest too cold to touch. Then as they travelled further south, it had become hot and cramped. His knees ached from the pressure of narrow leg-room. Movement felt good, blood re-entering his muscles, and he walked around the town for the sake of walking, not looking for anyone, just feeling the pain lessen.
He bought a cup of hot tea at a grocery and drank it in the sunshine. An Australian called Pat asked him if he needed a visa. He shook his head. Pat gave him a card anyway. On the card was the address of a jeweller’s shop with special printing services for tourists. He took out his wallet. In it were a photo of Keiko riding a pony, a bus-ticket receipt for a Japanese man with pictures in his skin, his own tickets from Kunming City to Bangkok, and his police ID. He looked at the card again. The shop was called Pearl of the Orient. He paid for the tea and walked along the dusty road, looking for a taxi.
Pearl of the Orient sold white-metal anklets, swimming goggles, nine-carat gold earrings and seed pearls threaded with fishing-line. In the outhouse were an Apple Mac, a Grant projector and a colour photocopier. The shopkeeper’s wife liked his photo, she grinned with her hands on her hips. She offered him two reproductions for $15 instead of one for $10. Her husband kept the jewellery shop while she worked with the outhouse door locked. He was small and quick, while she was loud and powerfully large. Yasuhiro sat with the two daughters in a courtyard. They wore their hair braided high on the backs of their necks and they pretended to be shy of him. They reminded him of Keiko and for a moment he felt a panic at what he was doing so far from the life he had planned.
There were wicker chairs in the shade of teak trees. One corner of the courtyard was filled with bougainvillea flowers and the entire house was awash with their scent. Yasuhiro bought some postcards of Thai temples from the shop while he waited. Then he went back and sat with the daughters. They watched a Schwarzenegger film on a flat-screened TV. He asked them about buying a new passport, in Japanese, in English. They smiled together and shook their heads; they didn’t understand. The shopkeeper brought him a Dragon beer and a paper plate of sticky Thai rice with a plastic fork. He asked Yasuhiro to try the rice, see if it wasn’t better than Japanese rice. Yasuhiro asked the shopkeeper about new passports. The man gave him some Bangkok addresses, friends of his, an uncle. He wouldn’t let Yasuhiro go until he’d finished the rice.
He went into Bangkok. The uncle sold passports from his festival bunting and calendar factory. The passports were cheap and low quality. Souvenirs rather than forgeries. Yasuhiro drank oolong tea in the uncle’s office. The walls were hung with pictures of calendar-girls, topless blondes or Thai women dressed in traditional dancing costumes. He asked about a man whose skin was a picture. The uncle shrugged and pouted. He knew about the Japanese mafia, but he had never met any. Did Yasuhiro want a passport or just information. Why hadn’t he said? The uncle wrote down some mobile telephone numbers on the back of the 1974 Ocean Harvest fishing fleet calendar and presented it to Yasuhiro. He told Yasuhiro to keep the calendar. In the street two skinny boys were playing handball against the factory wall. They shouted at Yasuhiro and ran after him. When he stopped and tried to give them money they wouldn’t take it. They wrote down their names on a piece of paper and gave it to him. A taxi stopped for him. The boys stood in the narrow street, waving. He waved back from the back seat, heart lifting.
He booked into a hotel where the rooms came with private phones. At night he lay on the bed and let the fan cool him while he listened to the lovers and prostitutes in adjacent rooms. He tried to think of Keiko while he masturbated, the sound of her laughter. In the morning he started trying the numbers on the calendar. Often no one would answer or the line would go dead as soon as he said hello in his accented English. Two of the forgers said they knew the Japanese man with body-tattoos. They had information, but it would cost. One of them told him to ring Nguyen the Vietnamese. She gave Yasuhiro another number. He rang Nguyen and made an appointment.
The passport-maker worked in a bare room above a computer-games arcade. Multicoloured light flashed up between the misfitted floorboards. Through the wire grid of the windows, Yasuhiro could see the Royal Palace, lit up. Nguyen’s hands were white and limp with sweat. He muttered to himself in sing-song Vietnamese, rocking his head, as he worked. He plugged a laptop computer into one blackened wall socket. On the computer were records of all the passports he had made. While Yasuhiro scrolled through them Nguyen offered to make him an original, using watered paper bought from government sources in six First World countries. He smiled, his eyes almost shut. He could even do visas, good as the real thing.
Yasuhiro stopped scrolling. The
green light from the laptop screen lit up his face as he grinned. The name on one of the copies was Hikari Basho. The photo was grainy, with little contrast between black and white. A thickset face, unsmiling, Japanese or Mongol. The passport was British, valid for ten years. Yasuhiro bought the printout for $500. Nguyen leered at him as he counted through the American currency. ‘What’s so special about him, mm that you run around the world after him, mm?’ Yasuhiro didn’t answer. The question put him on edge. He left while the passport-maker was still crouched over the laptop, winding its flex.
He felt packed with adrenaline, as if he’d never sleep again. He went to a disco bar near the university and sat by himself on the terrace. He watched the neon in the narrow street. A blue crayfish with waving claws, a pink dancing girl with vanishing clothing, a champagne bottle with rising bubbles. He thought how unnatural it was for neon to be so colourful, when everything else was grey and white in the darkness. He drank Japanese beer until he felt like a policeman again. It made him very happy. He felt relentless, he was an embodiment of justice. He couldn’t stop laughing. A Canadian man with blond dreadlocks down to his waist showed him the way back to his hotel. He had two girls with him, children, no older than ten or eleven. In the lobby of the hotel he tried to make Yasuhiro rent the girls. The hotel manageress bustled the pimp outside while Yasuhiro went upstairs. He locked the door of his room and looked for the telephone in the dark. The net curtains were infused with street-light.
He telephoned the airport. No one answered for a long time, but he let it ring, holding the receiver between his head and shoulder while he packed. He was drunk and he kept knocking the suitcase shut. A staff agent called Terry picked up the phone. He asked for the next flight to England. She told him there was a flight to Heathrow at 6.15 a.m. He could hear the rattle of computer keys in the background as Terry checked seats. Then she clicked her tongue against her teeth in mock disappointment. There were no economy or business class seats left. Yasuhiro asked for first class, feeling the sense of strength again, the conviction of the law. Terry asked him for his credit card details. He told her he would pay in cash, that he would be at the airport in half an hour.
He checked out of the hotel, apologising to the manageress. Her son called him a taxi and she made him a glass of lemon tea. In the car he lay back against the plastic seat and stared at the photocopied passport in the intermittent illumination of traffic signals and discos. The Yakuza’s face was emotionless. The features of a killer. The beer and the speed of the journey blurred the city into a montage of night-lights and canals and faces.
7: Naked
He feared pain because he feared death. Before prison, he’d been convinced that he could live forever. Now he was old and modest enough to recognise that he could die harvesting soya beans, or washing clothes, or simply from the effort of sleep. He watched the dog bite at its fleas, then fold its forepaws neatly as a knife and fork. His skin was tight and bruised with designs. He wanted to cut them out, and he feared the pain.
He went back into Sapporo for the first time in seven months. It was sixty kilometres along the busy road. He wrapped strips of fire-blanket around his feet to cushion them, and set out as soon as it was light. The rice had been harvested and the fields were already full of wheat. A mini-tractor moved far out in the large fields, tracks of wind moving through the crop and breaking against it.
On the far side of the road was the sea. It was the colour of bomb-sites after the war. Dust in the sunlight and ash in shadow. Beyond that was another country. The idea filled him with a kind of fearful excitement that reminded him of being young. He tried to imagine the country. He didn’t know its name. To the south was Hong Kong, he knew. East across the sea was America. The hard asphalt jolted his legs and blistered his feet. He walked along the shore instead, slipping a little on the brassy stems of sea-grass, following a jagged headland around past Yoichi town and Otaru city. For a while he thought he could see the foreign country, grey cliffs rising steeply in the far distance. He stood and watched it. Then the cliffs broke up and he realised they were only cloud. It began to rain. He walked inland, back to the road.
It was getting dark by the time he came to the outskirts of Sapporo. By the roadside an old woman with a yellow rainhat was selling milk and eggs from a formica trestle. The first high-rises loomed behind her. He stopped and picked up a litre bottle of milk.
‘Only 130 Yen.’ She spoke without looking up from her hands. The skin was discoloured with liver spots. She turned them palm-up. The flesh was soft and loose against the bones. ‘Cheapest you’ll find, unless you’ve got udders.’ Her hair was dyed black and fastened at one shoulder with an imitation tortoiseshell comb. ‘Real Hokkaido milk from real Hokkaido cows. Ha!’ She grinned and pared off one nail with her teeth.
‘I don’t have any change.’ His voice had no strength left in it and the consonants were lethargic. He sounded like a victim of palsy. It had been so long since he had spoken. The weakness shocked him and he thought of the pain and was scared again. The woman looked up at him, squinting from under the rainhat.
‘Damn, but you’re as old as me. How come I don’t recognise you? Do I know you?’ He shook his head. The shaking spread to his legs and he realised how close to exhaustion he was. ‘You must be something pretty shitty, huh. Not that I care. What are you, an Untouchable? Korean? An outcast? Come on, you must be something.’
He kept shaking his head. His mouth opened before he had anything to say. ‘Nothing. I used to be. Something. Now I’m nothing. It’s what I want.’
They stood looking at one another. The rain began to fall heavily. Above them, an arched street-light flickered and came on. He turned and began to walk towards the high-rise buildings. Behind him the woman picked up the plastic bottle of milk. ‘Wait! I don’t care about that stuff. Old man, take the milk. A gift. It’s good milk!’ He kept walking. A black Mercedes passed, tyres hissing in the rain. He stared past it, towards the city.
Before reaching the centre he turned off Great Street and moved south, downtown. Lamplit airships rolled slowly above the office blocks, advertising Morinaga caramel. The streets became brighter, shopfronts lit up with neon. A man in a tuxedo called out to him from the doorway of the Love Soapland sauna. He could hear singing from the karaoke bars and the thick chink of shot-glasses from basement kitchens. The smell of kebabs and soy sauce steamed from ventilators.
He turned into a side-street. It was darker here, and the pavement was cramped with dustbins and empty vegetable boxes stacked against kitchen doors. He slipped on something, a strip of pickled Chinese cabbage, and fell to one knee. It was hard to pull himself upright. He stood, waiting to catch his breath. At a third-floor window he saw a woman in a red cocktail dress, smiling and talking. She combed back her hair between her fingers. He watched until she moved out of sight.
Between a Korean restaurant and the service doors of a department store, he saw a sign painted with old-fashioned characters, ‘Skin-Digger’. The display-window was full of the machinery of the tattoo trade: traditional bamboo needles, electric rotary blades. Designs based on paintings by Hokusai. Beryllium laser tools. None of the items had price tags. The lasers had a small note saying ‘Removal’.
There were no opening hours on the door or in the window. He hammered on the door until he heard the sound of a cough and a bolt being drawn back. The skin-digger wore white under-trousers, no shirt or shoes. He smelled of pizza. His face was stubbly, heavy-cheeked as an Innuit. He was an Ainu, the aboriginal people of Hokkaido.
The walk had exhausted him and he couldn’t think what to say. The skin-digger began to shut the door. He wedged it open with one foot. ‘Shit. What have I done?’ The Ainu swore and began to whine. ‘There’s no money here, if that’s what you want. Skin-digging’s a slow business, you know? And my business is slower than most.’
‘No.’ He tried to think clearly. ‘I am a customer. I’ve come to buy something, to be a customer. Those.’ He moved back into the st
reet, pointed out the laser tools in the window. ‘I need them. How much will you charge?’
The tattooist was watching him from the doorway, eyes steady. ‘A gangster, ain’t you? A Yakuza. From the mainland somewhere. From Tokyo?’ He shook his head and spat off to one side. ‘Hell, even your cock’s tattooed, isn’t that so? And now you want to make it white as rice again, mm? On the run. You must be. And you want to clean your skin with lasers? Hah!’ The tattooist turned and went back into the unlit shop. He opened plan chests and cupboards. The man followed him. The shop smelled of ink and fried shrimp.
‘Yakuza! You people have got no power now. Just your shame. Don’t you feel ashamed? I would. All the things you’ve done to be what you are. Bad stuff, eh? Robbery, sure. I bet you’ve killed people. And now you’re carrying their bodies around on your back, is that it? Am I right?’ The man stood in the diffuse light from the display window. The tattooist flicked a switch as he moved around the room. The man raised his hands to stop the glare of a bare bulb. It hurt his eyes.
‘Easy to run away from the Yakuza, though. All you have to do is go abroad. Leave Japan. Easy. Where you going to go? Taiwan? Hong Kong?’
There was a chair behind the office door. He sat down. He remembered Hong Kong from before the war. He had gone there to threaten a Chinese merchant. With his friend, Kozo. Kozo had checked the paperwork and merchandise. A cargo of tiger bone bound for Kobe. He hadn’t killed anyone, only threatened. The merchant had given them seals carved from nephrite jade, the characters representing their Company and real names. A show of power. A gift, to signify trust. He had missed Japanese rice and the smell of miso soup.
‘I remember Hong Kong.’
‘There you go then, lucky you. You can run away. What’s left of you, hee! hee! And you think you can pay for my lasers? Really? And if you did, you know how long it’d take to clean your filthy skin?’ The tattooist stumbled back, leered up at him. ‘Rest of your life, old man. Here, take these.’ He pushed four small ceramic flasks into the man’s hands. ‘Acid. Might work on you, might not, depends how much you want to live.’ He pulled out a foam-lined box from under the chair, packed the bottles carefully, sealed the box. He looked up sharply. ‘200,000 cash, all right? Spread it thin, one smear at a time. No skin, no shame. And you’ll heal. Old men heal good, you know that? Now pay me and get out.’