Bob van Laerhoven - Return to Hiroshima

Xavier is amused by her attempts to use English. Before he can answer, she’s laughing in her furtive, nervous style. “Maybe you won’t think it’s that funny. Westerners have a different mentality from us.”

“Not me.”

Yori shrugs. “A year and a half ago, I was attacked on the street close to our squat by a man wearing a motorbike helmet. He stabbed me four times with a knife and left me bleeding. I can still see him standing in front of me, licking the blade clean. He wanted me to see. I was found by an acquaintance, who contacted my boyfriend. Reizo came running, wept onto my bleeding chest, picked me up and took me to the hospital on his moped. It was touch and go.”

“That was very noble of your boyfriend.”

Yori lowers her eyes, and this time Xavier notices her face twitch nervously. “He still thinks I didn’t recognise him.”

He doesn’t understand what she means and knits his brows.

“The man with the helmet who stabbed me was Reizo himself. Completely out of his mind on amphetamines. That’s what I believe.”

“How do you know?”

She shrugs her shoulders. “When he’s high he cuts himself, the back of his hands, then he forgets. His hands are covered in scars. I got a good look at my attacker’s hands.”

Xavier knows how ambivalent relationships can be, but he still suspects she’s made this story up. He doesn’t know why. It makes her even more interesting.

“You stayed with him, though.”

“We’re two shipwrecked people on a raft,” she says. “If one of us jumps off, the balance is disturbed and we both end up as dinner for the sharks.”

“Dangerous love.”

Yori shrugs and looks at the tabletop feigning bashfulness. Her lips are the colour of an open wound and as soft as silk.

“Love is for sick minds. In Japan, we only refer to it in novels, or when there’s a crime of passion. Reizo is my koibito .”

Xavier nods. The word “love” is a nineteenth century French invention, exalted by the literati of the day. He’s aware how uncomfortable the Japanese are with it.

“ Koibito : the one who arouses your passion.”

She nods. “Against your better judgement.”

“Did you know that your word for love, ai , is a cry of pain in my language?”

“Then I must love Reizo in your language.” She giggles, again shielding her mouth with her left hand. “Reizo is talented, I’m convinced of that. But he has a strong death wish.”

“I expect that makes him artistically interesting,” Xavier Douterloigne remarks calmly. “But it must be very tiring, I guess.”

She shrugs again. “I can’t complain. If a man isn’t dynamite what use is he? Most men are so blinkered and moody. I like them better when they’re weighted down with mental burdens. I’ve been pushing him too much to finish his book recently. It drove him mad, so he used his knife to teach me a lesson. He’s writing about a future in which Japan is an authoritarian police state. The young are considered dangerous. When they turn seventeen, they’re dropped on an island, where they’re filmed by television cameras, fighting each other to the death like the gladiators of old.”

Yori takes a large mouthful of tuna fish and dashi , a sour broth based on seaweed and soy sauce.

“The plot might seem a bit over the top, but it’s actually cool,” she says. Xavier thinks the way she purses her lips to pronounce the word “cool” is hilarious. “I’ve read a few chapters. Blood and sadism, right? He writes about a Japan that’s concealed in each and every one of us.”

“My sister kept a diary,” Douterloigne says. It was out before he knew it. Yori ignores the past tense. “I thought you were an only child.”

“Only son. I’ve got a sister, Anna.” Xavier bends down to fish Anna’s grey, misshapen diary from his suitcase and puts it on the table between them. Yori looks at it, but doesn’t touch it. “She’s in a wheelchair,” Xavier says. He’s not a very good liar and he has a feeling his words sound artificial and hesitant.

“Was she born with a handicap?”

Xavier leans back. “No. It’s only been a little over a year.”

“How did it happen?”

Yori watches the tall blonde Xavier take a deep breath. He looks away from her. “I’d rather not say.”

This kindles her interest. “Why not?”

The European is starting to feel very ill at ease, she can tell. Yori licks her lips. “I’m a child of hibakusha myself. My parents were just children when the bomb was dropped. They survived, but it left them scarred. So they were bullied, humiliated and excluded.” Yori pats her stomach. “We, their descendants, are handicapped on the inside. Genetic time bombs, is what we are. My father only lived to be thirty-six, my mother just made it to forty-nine.”

“Descendants,” Xavier says. “That’s a beautiful word. It isn’t used much.”

Yori laughs again and presents her face in profile, mimicking the pose of a modest Japanese woman subtly trying to seduce a man. Xavier finds the cast-down eyes especially convincing. Realising he’s rumbled her, she lifts her chin and looks up. Xavier isn’t sure what she wants from him, but he’s content to be sitting here opposite her. It makes him think his trip might turn out to be what he wanted it to be after all: a journey through the past, to a time before Anna’s injury.

“Did your sister change once she needed a wheelchair?” Yori asks. “So much that you thought she was a different person?”

“Before, she was always where the action was. Afterwards…” He doesn’t finish the sentence, casting around the room again as if looking for an escape route. “Why do you ask?”

“Because a different situation can change people dramatically. Not that long ago, Reizo was an ultra-nationalist, then he joined a crazy sect with weird ideas. Now he thinks the emperor should be deified again, that Japan should assemble a powerful army and show foreigners the door. His views on men and women changed at the same time. He disapproves of my desire for freedom and is constantly needling me, to prove that he’s the boss. He often has me shadowed by a bunch of thugs, and accuses me of going out with other men. He doesn’t want me to have anyone else, but at the same time he neglects me. He’s stopped working on his novel. He says he has bigger fish to fry, something about alpha energy.” She giggles. “If you ask me all that alpha stuff is just an excuse for not writing. He’s afraid he’s not talented enough.”

Again, Xavier doubts Yori is telling the truth. She might be trying to arouse his pity so she can make her move. Young Japanese women are mercilessly competitive and seducing a Westerner would give her a serious edge on them.

Xavier is flattered, despite his reservations. He’s also starting to feel agitated. If anyone knows how cruel fate can be, how it can change a life, he does. He came back to Japan to remember how happy he and Anna had been. That was the only reason. A crazy reason, maybe, but the only one. Xavier needs to remember Anna the way she was before the wheelchair. Only then can he continue his life.

“Perhaps you’re his obsession,” says Xavier.

Her answer surprises him: “Reizo is just a boy, wild and crazy. You look like someone with an obsession.”

Xavier Douterloigne is still thinking about her words when they leave the restaurant fifteen minutes later. Outside, three young men are waiting for them. They appear from nowhere, and before Xavier fully grasps what’s going on, they’ve grabbed his arms and put him in a headlock. He tries to shout, but he can’t. They drag him into an old Volkswagen van. He attempts to catch a glimpse of Yori out of the corner of his eye. In vain.