Bob van Laerhoven - Return to Hiroshima

When I was thirteen, my father became obsessed for a while with the discovery that the government had dumped nuclear waste in the deepest mineshafts under Hashima at the end of the 1970s, five years after the mines had been closed and the island evacuated. The shafts had then been filled with a thick layer of cement, but that hadn’t prevented him from wandering around the abandoned city for days on end, once the most densely populated place on the planet, now “the city of ghosts”, staring at his Geiger counter. I followed him like a puppy. Sometimes I heard the thing crackle like crazy. My father would shake his head. I did exactly the same and it felt good.

In my teens my father was my idol. I knew we were different. We were the New Humans, the future. We had to be careful, because the old human race was small-minded and vindictive. They would kill us if they found out about us. We had to multiply first before we could seize power.

In hindsight, my faith in this transparent and infantile lies makes me blush with shame. Maybe I’m being too hard on myself. My father’s stories and the romantic teenage world I inhabited were a perfect match. I looked at photos of girls in magazines. I compared them with my image in the mirror. I couldn’t understand why a new human like myself could be uglier than an old human. Perhaps the future was going to be so harsh and rough that people would need to be thick-skinned, tanned and tall like me just to survive.

“And you,” my father continued. “It’s time you faced up to who you are.”

“I’m the victim of the way you live your life,” I said, surprised at my daring, but a chill had entered my bones that stirred me to hostility. “It’s time I…” I couldn’t finish my sentence. I had always thought that his rage would never touch me. I was his favourite, and in spite of his unbending character he had always indulged me.

My father was a creature of the night. I rarely saw him like this, in the light of day. After so many years I must have grown accustomed to his appearance and mine. But the sight of his long neck and his Adam’s apple jumping angrily up and down still filled me with fear and trembling. My father tried to swallow his rage. “You’ve nagged me for years to be able to live somewhere else, to have contact with other people. My answer was always the same: when the time is ripe. You’re not capable of living in the outside world. I am your protector and in exchange I demand obedience. And what do I get instead? A daughter who eavesdrops on her father to find out what he’s planning. Why didn’t you just ask?”

His reference to the mini-camera surprised me. I tried not to answer. He paid no attention to my answers when he was in this kind of mood. But I couldn’t let go of his remark: you’re not capable of living in the outside world. Resentment dug itself deeper and deeper inside me. My own father found me too ugly, too clumsy, too stupid to be allowed to mix with other people.

He pointed to the mainland. “One day that will be your home. You’ll be a person with authority. You’ll change the course of your country’s history. Show yourself worthy!”

In spite of my anger I tried a little girl manoeuvre: “I’m so lonely, father.”

Bad choice. It made him angrier. “Korean prisoners of war died like flies to dig the mineshafts and apartment buildings on that godforsaken lump of rock I’ve called home for the last fifteen years. I, a refined spirit of nature, have been doomed to live in a place where the souls of the dead maraud through the streets at night in search of revenge. And you speak of loneliness?”

I’m taken aback by the amount of emotion in his words. Anger, but also frustration and sorrow. I had never associated my father with sorrow. He was right, of course. Nights on Hashima had a melancholy power that often left me longing for death. As a young girl I used to wander through the empty halls and corridors. I sometimes sensed I was being followed by a tiny figure, much smaller than me, with a doll in her right hand, eyes like a hawk, and the reddest mouth you could imagine. A doomed soul perhaps, but I wanted to be her.

He stepped towards me, pointed to the island: “There really are ghosts over there. And sometimes, you, my daughter, are one of them.”

I stuck to my guns and pretended I hadn’t heard him.

“I have a plan; we can move to Nagasaki right away.” There, it was out. There was no way back. “We can say that we’re descended from hibakusha , that we suffered genetic damage because of the bomb,” I rattled.

I still don’t know why, but my remark threw him into a rage. He lifted his huge deformed hand and I was convinced he was about to slap my face. “Silence, I tell you. Enough! You live in your own world. You don’t want to hear what I have to say.”

I realise now that I couldn’t imagine anyone doing me any harm in those days, not even my father. Perhaps my hysteria was a terrified response to the sudden awareness that he was capable of more than I thought. Or was it an explosion of accumulated anger? An entire lifetime concentrated into a single instant? Before I knew it I was screaming: “I’m your prisoner! I’d rather die than live another day like this!”

His black eyes narrowed. I saw the tension in his body, but I couldn’t stop myself. “It’s your fault my mother jumped to her death in the sea!”

To my surprise he started to laugh. “Mitsuko, poor Mitsuko, is that what you really think?” He took me by the shoulders and whispered in my ear: “Don’t you remember what you did to gentle Mayumi? And to your mother? ”

Me? My throat closed as if he was squeezing it with his hands. He looked at me, his face like a lump of stone ready to crush me. Before I had the chance to speak he said: “Don’t you remember what you did to the boy you called Crow?”

The Lord of Lies. That was all I could latch onto, the only thought that made sense. I pushed his hands from my shoulders and staggered backwards. His enormous body blocked every escape. He thrust himself against me and whispered: “If I’m Rokurobei, then you’re Harionago. Think about that before you open your mouth again.”

Harionago? The female demon of death with her barbed hair? I had longed for love all my life. How dare he compare me with that bloodthirsty harpy who drove disease and epidemic into the world just to be sure she had enough souls to catch in her net. He was the one who had robbed me of everything I loved. Blood rushed to my head. “If I’m Harionago, then you would be the first to join me in hell and there would be nothing you could do about it!”

An electric shock ran from my belly to my head when he grabbed me by the throat. I’d seen him loose control before. But always with other people. I invariably had the chance to disappear, look away, pretend it wasn’t happening. In spite of the years of denial, I suddenly realised I knew exactly what he did when he lost control. I couldn’t breathe, felt dizzy, my chest heaved.

“Father,” I whispered.

His hands were already gone, but before I had the chance to breathe again he did something incomprehensible. He tore my furisode , the pretty long-sleeved kimono he liked to see me wear. He lunged forward, bit my neck, restrained me with one hand and loosened his belt with the other. As he penetrated me, burning, dry, grinding, his eyes closed, his face distorted, I watched the island behind us ablaze in the morning sun. It didn’t last long, didn’t hurt much… it was a dream and only certain details etched themselves in my mind: his Adam’s apple as he threw back his head, his strangely curved penis as he pulled out of me, spattering seed on my belly, the way he pinched his eyes tight as if he was in pain. I felt as if I had been yanked out of my own body, as if I was hovering above it all. My mind was painfully clear, but it no longer seemed attached to my body, my existence.