His lips curl; it’s not a pretty sight: “Then it’s time I set a new example.”
Yori looks up at him, her eyes screwed up, and quickly changes the subject: “Are you still worried about all the recent publicity?”
Norikazu rests his hands on his belly like a shell. “Aum solved that problem for me too. Look at the media: everyone’s talking about the sect. No one could care less about me anymore.”
Yori lifts her chin. Her eyes glisten when she asks the question she can no longer hold back: “You got the documents back. Are they authentic?”
His eyes are clouded, but he smiles: “They’re authentic.” He steps forward and takes her in his arms.
Yori is pressed against his chest, her voice muffled: “Then there’s only one more question, father: do they relate to you?”
She feels his arms tighten around her in a firm embrace, like a giant reptile that could crush her at any minute.
“The last time someone asked me that question, my daughter, was also here in this same place. A woman. Women can be so curious. Alas, I loved her deeply.”
With her mouth pressed against his tunic she asks: “What happened to her, father?”
He sighs and relaxes his arms: “She fell from the parapet. Her body was dashed against the rocks and then tossed into the sea. It all happened so quickly, like a hawk diving into the waves, desperately searching for an answer to a question that must never be asked.”
Yori carefully extricates herself from his embrace and steps away from him. A tear glistens in her left eye, but she smiles nevertheless. “I don’t want to know the answer to that question, father. All I want to know is this: do you love me with all the energy love can muster?”
The Lord of Lies smiles from ear to ear and gives her the answer she wants to hear.
122
Hiroshima – metro service tunnel –
metro workers – March 23rd 1995
Two metro employees are faced with the surprise of their lives when they open the service tunnel door. They flinch at the sight of a woman lying dead over a pile of boxes, writing material and sheets of paper on the floor beside her.
The two workers approach with caution. The expression on the woman’s face makes it clear that she didn’t die in peace.
“Look, there… She’s handcuffed… There’s something not right about this.”
They lean hesitatingly over the body with a mixture of anxiety and compassion.
“God, she must have tried to open the cuffs with a pen... she’s cut deep into the wrists.”
“I don’t think so… If you ask me she was trying to gnaw at her wrist with her teeth. Aren’t those teeth marks?”
Both men sense the residue of a terrifying death that still hangs in the air around them. They urge each other to get out and inform the police, but instead they slowly circle the body.
“Those papers… Can you read that?”
“… Illegible… Makes no sense to me... looks like gibberish. Take a look yourself.”
“… Same here. Is that Chinese? It looks like Chinese.”
“No, those are Japanese characters, but it still makes no sense. Maybe fear drove her crazy.”
“Or maybe she was already round the bend and this is a sort of suicide. What would drive a person...”
“Poor kid.”
“Poor kid? Look at the size of her. She was colossal.”
The smaller of the two crouches in a corner. “Look... What’s this?”
“The keys to the cuffs by the look of it.”
“I wouldn’t touch them if I were you! Do you think she did it herself?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“She wouldn’t have struggled so much to escape.”
“Maybe she changed her mind. You never know with kids these days. She could have decided to commit suicide by cuffing herself down here and throwing away the key. Then she realised what she had done. Drugs might explain it. Look at her. Maybe she was sick of being stared at.”
“Or a prank that got out of hand. I can’t follow the younger generation anymore. You’d think they were from another planet at times.”
“Whatever it was, she died a pretty ugly death. Look at her eyes.”
“And you can be sure it’ll remain a mystery. The police aren’t interested in kids who turn their back on society.”
123
Excerpt from the Stern –
April 4th 1995
The prepublication of Beate Becht’s photo book Underground Japan in the German weekly Stern is a phenomenal success. The magazine is usually good for a million copies, but this edition sells almost two-hundred thousand more. The photographs, as the accompanying text explains, represent a change of direction in Becht’s work. Street Photography from Japan’s Underbelly! one of the subtitles screams. The photos are printed in black and white. They’re coarse, grainy, crooked, sombre and threatening. They portray, among other things, a street brawl with knives, a grotesque and bloated corpse tied to a sun bed, and the tattooed back of a half-naked Japanese girl being held by the hair by a giant of a man with a strange, angular, pockmarked face. The faces are barely recognisable because of the heavy shadows that typify Becht’s photographic style. The final image of the report, which announces the book’s publication in the autumn of 1995, is an exceptionally powerful collage: the giant from the previous photograph is standing on the roof of a grey, dilapidated apartment building looking out over the ruins of what looks like a deserted city, a veritable ghost town, brooding, mysterious, terrifying. The centre segment of the collage was clearly taken from a boat at sea, close to an enormous walled embankment. The sea has the colour of rusty metal and green-grey clouds hang low in the sky. The final segment is a close-up of a pair of dark, hypnotic eyes in a face that appears to have been damaged by illness. It’s a cruel face, but it also exudes authority. Becht explains in the accompanying text that it’s the face of a local mafia leader known by the name of a Japanese demon and feared in Hiroshima and its surroundings. The photographer claims that the man suffers from delusions of grandeur and tries to convince everyone that he’s a prince rejected by the Japanese imperial family and banished to an island, an industrial wasteland where he awaits the arrival of better times. Becht concludes: “Rokurobei was so insane it was hard to believe that he wasn’t really possessed. Every minute I spent in his company, I felt as if I was under the influence of some sort of force field that threatened to absorb me completely. I’ve never met anyone in my life who seemed less human as Rokurobei, both inside and out. His claim to ‘divine origins’ was thus more unnerving than ridiculous.”
124
Hiroshima – Hijiyama Park –
Xavier Douterloigne – April 10th 1995
Xavier Douterloigne still has problems with his balance. They told him to be patient, that it would get better. He might never be the same as he was, but after such a lengthy period of recovery he has to be grateful he’s alive. He looks back at his stay in hospital as one of life’s lessons. It gave him time to think things over, but more than anything else to dream. His calm exterior still conceals a sense of guilt, a desire to return to a childlike state of grace. Xavier is now aware that he has to realise his own grace.
He’s taking a stroll in Hiroshima’s Hijiyama Park. He’s in no hurry. Every step is filled with hesitation, as if he’s walking on unstable ground. He has a better eye for detail than before. The Yamazakura cherry blossom trees have yet to bloom, but their buds are already visible. Xavier makes his way to the tenth tree, standing neatly in the row, exactly as it was more than ten years ago. He sits at the foot of the tree and closes his eyes.
* * *
Xavier and Anna buried the time capsule in Hijiyama Park on Anna’s eleventh birthday. They were in the southern part of the park, surrounded by the pink of fluttering Yam
azakura cherry blossoms, when they popped the tin box in a hole in the ground at the foot of the tenth tree, which extended its branches above them like a fan. Anna had a serious expression on her face. She always believed wholeheartedly in the things she did. Xavier was different. He felt a little giggly, but he was still impressed by the importance of the moment.
“Why here, on holiday, Anna? Why not in Tokyo?” Xavier didn’t tell her that he planned to dig up the capsule once in a while to look inside and to play with the toy car he had contributed to the box’s contents. They had filled the box with Anna’s poems, Xavier’s most cherished model car – a Porsche 956K Hockenheim –, a lock of each other’s hair, an old medal that once belonged to their mother, and a pen belonging to their father.
“Because this is the City of Peace and love,” said Anna, still serious. She gestured towards Hiroshima to their left below the park.
“It’s also the city of death,” said Xavier. He had read it somewhere. Xavier pictured death as a long journey over stormy oceans filled with monsters and the like.
“Don’t be so pig-headed,” said his sister. That’s what she always said when she wanted to get her way. “Say after me, Xavier: this time capsule seals our love as brother and sister. In ten years time we will dig it up again and still love one another.” Xavier felt slightly embarrassed and lowered his gaze, but he repeated his sister’s words nonetheless.
“As brother and sister we will do everything to make each other happy,” Anna continued. ‘Everything’ sounded like an awful lot to Xavier. Anna was eleven, a year older than him, and sometimes a little bossy in his eyes. But Xavier still looked up to her, her quick-wittedness, the way she brushed her hair, stuck out her chin, and then, out of the blue, without warning, her fears at night when she had a bad dream and asked if Xavier would get in beside her. When he did, the world suddenly seemed much smaller, as if they were in a space ship on a long journey to a world more beautiful than Earth.
They dug with their hands; the soil was sticky. When they were finished stamping the soil flat again, Anna looked at her brother – still serious –, took him by the arms and kissed him on both cheeks. At that moment a cloud of butterflies flew out of a nearby cherry blossom tree and surrounded their heads in pastel coloured wings and feelers. Anna and Xavier followed the swarm as it nestled in another tree. “They’re our witnesses,” said Anna. It was as if a large wheel had turned in Xavier’s head; a vague and nameless feeling filled his chest. “Now we have a secret,” Anna continued. “Our life will never be the same again.”
“Shoganai,” said Xavier. He wasn’t exactly sure why he said what he did. It was a word he had borrowed from the adults who surrounded him.
* * *
Sitting under the tree in Hijiyama Park, Xavier Douterloigne decides that when people ask him back in Belgium how it happened he’ll answer them. He’ll tell them how Anna ended up in a wheelchair and later committed suicide. He’ll tell them why he thinks it’s his fault, although the law sees it differently. He’s determined to do it, but the thought of it weighs heavy in his stomach. He had the same feeling the day Anna predicted her own death years earlier in the war cemetery in Ypres.
* * *
“Gently sloping, traditional, provincial farm land.” Anna Douterloigne giggled. She could always see the funny side of things, whatever the situation, in spite of the fact that she was the type of girl who liked to collect signatures to put an end to dolphin hunting and the like. When Xavier wanted to tease her, he called her “engaged” in a tone that made it sound like a venereal disease. It was a blustery day, June 1983, and there was a hint of summer madness in the air. Anna called it A Day of Mischief. Such a beautiful, mysterious expression; especially now, as they sat together in Tyne Cot Cemetery. She had completely changed in the preceding two years, in the way only girls could. She was fourteen, but she tried to convince Xavier that she’d been in cafés in Ypres during the holidays where you had to be sixteen. Anna stuck out her chest and took an exaggeratedly deep breath. “Où sont maman et papa?” she drawled in French.
“Over there, nosing around in the family’s history, with a horde of Japs in their wake.” Xavier wanted to sound macho, intent on not falling behind too far when compared with Anna.
Anna sighed and straightened her blazer. “Father always has to play the diplomat and impress the mayor... even on holiday.” She laughs. “Let it please the lord mayor of Ypres...” The Japanese delegation listened enthralled to her father as he explained the region’s wartime history in another part of the cemetery.
“I’ve heard we won’t be staying in Tokyo,” she continued.
“What do you mean? Are we moving back to Flanders?”
Anna looked at Xavier as if he was the village idiot in need of a moment of mental clarity. Her mother had helped her to put on make-up that morning. She seemed so adult that Xavier had the feeling he had to brace himself. Xavier had a preference for the things Anna called traditional. That was also the way he liked to dress. Anne called him her “little professor”, although he was head and shoulders taller than her. In Anna’s eyes he was “the perfect diplomat’s son”. Anna was extravagant, a magnificent bird of paradise. She often dressed in a way that made her mother choke with laughter while at the same time dramatically touching her heart as if she would die at the spot. Adolescents bent on confrontation aren’t likely to find understanding parents anything but boring, but in the Douterloigne household most issues were solved with a smile and a little humour.
“I wouldn’t mind moving back to Flanders,” Xavier continued in response to his sister’s silence.
“I would have preferred a few years somewhere else,” said Anna, “in another country. Like the daughter of father’s predecessor we met back in Japan. What was her name again? Amélie, wasn’t it. She was mad! What was her surname?”
“Nothomb,” said Xavier obligingly.
“That’s right. Amélie Nothomb. She complained nonstop that she had lived in too many different countries, but I quite like the idea.” Anna looked up at the deep blue sky that set the white gravestones of Tyne Cot Cemetery in sharp relief and gave the treetops a burnished sheen. She pointed to her parents. “But we shouldn’t forget that they aren’t getting any younger. They want to be near their family.” She laughed. “Jung says that parents become totems to their children.”
“Should we dance and haw-haw around them like American Indians?”
Anna was always moved when Xavier tried to be funny. She laughed out of duty: “Jung was talking about idols. We have to knock them down instead of dancing around them. Otherwise we’ll spend the rest of our lives on our knees in front of our idols.” Anna had read about Jung in a journal recently and raved about him at every opportunity. She tried to read his books and even quoted him now and then.
“If you ask me,” said Xavier, a little affectedly, “the revolt of the younger generation is a bit passé and I don’t need it. We’re not living in the sixties or seventies anymore.”
Anna laughed. “You’re such a goody-goody, the spitting image of dad, only dad’s funnier. He managed to preserve his inner child. Just like Carl Gustav Jung. Even after he became a renowned psychiatrist, Jung still built miniature cities in his living room using sticks and stones and other bits and pieces. It was also something he did as a child. And as an adult he wanted to feel what was going on inside when he was a child, what animated him. He had an Egyptian spirit guide named Philemon. I wouldn’t mind hooking myself someone like Jung when I’m a little older; I’d never be bored again.”
“He probably smoked opium,” said Xavier. “Everyone did in those days. And if you didn’t see yellow skeletons dancing a jig after smoking opium then you were completely gaga.”
Anna laughed: “You’ve been nosing around in my books again. How many times do I need to tell you that you’re more the Tintin type?”
“Help,” said Xavier. “Yo
u’re so funny my sides are bursting...”
“The unconscious,” Anne continued enthusiastically. “I’d give anything to know what’s hiding in it, and what it can do if you bring it to the surface.”
“Make you fly? I don’t think so,” said Xavier. Anna gave him a playful punch on his chest. “The unconscious is beyond time and space, idiot. It can take me to a different planet or catapult me back in time.” She pointed to the graves. “To 1915, for example, when those crumbled bones beneath our feet were young men who whistled as they shaved, with a healthy clump of hair under their arms, brown from the sun, and dangling braces.”
“What a morbid horror you are,” said Xavier. He liked using words like morbid. Anna abruptly changed the subject as she often did. “Let’s agree that the first of us to die has to try to give the other a sign.” Xavier’s thoughts were elsewhere: the narrow paths that crisscrossed the landscape and led to inward-looking orchards, the chestnut trees with their blossoms, the nettles, the hedges, the ochre clouds blocking the sun, the absurd noblesse of the cemetery, blinding white exclamations, endless under the distant sky as it peered towards the sea. And suddenly the world was magical, inexplicable.
“What?” said Xavier. In spite of the distractions around him, he had in fact heard her every word.
“I’ll be the first,” Anna continued in a restrained tone.
“Nonsense. You can’t know that.”
She looked at him. Her face glowed like the flame of a candle in the sun. “I don’t know it, I feel it.”
“Are you going to ruin my day with that crap?” said Xavier. He looked away from her, turned towards a tiny lizard enjoying the sun of one of the snow-white gravestones. The creature’s head flashed in the sunlight like a fake diamond.
“You shouldn’t say that kind of thing,” he concluded shiftlessly. She placed an apologetic hand on his arm and pointed to the reptile. “Lizards are messengers of the gods. This one was sent to seal our pact.” She tried to keep it light: “If you die first and forget to give me a sign then your ghost will grow donkey’s ears. Or a lizard’s tongue... it’s your choice.” She laughed and waved at her mother who signalled they should stay close. She headed back to her. Xavier followed then stopped and looked over his shoulder. The lizard disappeared behind the gravestone in a flash of green and gold.
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