Bob van Laerhoven - Return to Hiroshima

“The bastards come and take photos then return with a whole squadron to firebomb us,” said another soldier.

“They’re turning,” the bespectacled soldier shouted. He followed them as best he could. Moments later: “One of them just dropped something with a parachute.”

Prince Norikazu made his way to the rear of the truck. The men bowed and made room for him. The young prince looked up. A parachute supporting a black object was drifting down towards the city. Norikazu narrowed his eyes, tried to get a better view of the object. A cold sensation ran through him, a pulse of excitement that paralysed him yet made him feel simultaneously as if his body was about to explode. The driver turned into the street leading to the Aioi. The sky suddenly turned into a magnesium torch followed by a tremendous bang and a surprising disappearance of the blinding light. The Toyota KB was lifted and thrown screeching across the street. Everything went dark. In the blink of an eye, the city’s wooden constructions were reduced to splinters. A dust cloud thundered like a steam roller over the stone buildings at eight hundred kilometres per hour. It was accompanied by a firestorm with temperatures reaching almost two thousand degrees Celsius. A cloud of smoke in the form of a mushroom rose to a height of eight thousand meters, purple, black, red and grey. People were scorched or tossed into the air like leaves by the pressure of the explosion. Houses were crushed, factories of solid concrete reduced to rubble.

Prince Norikazu and his company were more than two kilometres from the epicentre of the explosion, but the heat and the air pressure resulting from the atom bomb were still tremendous. Norikazu awoke from unconsciousness as two of his escorts dragged him from the burning truck. The military uniform he was wearing had been torn to shreds.

“ Heika ,” stammered the lieutenant designated by Colonel Tadao as convoy leader. “You must… The Americans have…” He fell silent, exhausted. His left eye bulged out of its smashed socket. His hair had been scorched away. Blood poured from a wound at the back of his skull. Strips of smoking skin hung from the prince’s upper torso. The sixteen-year-old’s bloodshot eyes stared through the reeling lieutenant as if he wasn’t there, then his gaze swung to the right, to a corpse lying on the ground. As he looked at it, fire burst from its fingertips and the corpse was quickly consumed by flames.

“I have seen Rokurobei,” said Prince Norikazu, barely audible. “His neck unfurled and his head filled the sky with darkness.”

Abunch of bosozoku are loitering around the arrivals hall of Saijo Station. These young outsiders see themselves as rebels. They’re revelling in the fierce wind blowing in from the platforms. Spring storms are rare in this part of Japan, but when they do move in they can reach wind speeds of more than one hundred kilometres per hour. In spite of the wind, the girls are wearing high heels or garish boots. Their jackets are as long as their miniskirts. Red, white, neon green, fluorescent blue. The boys wear their hair over their eyes and try to look mean in their baggy jeans and oversized hooded jackets. They’re sitting in circles in the covered hall. The rows of narrow windows don’t provide much light, a lot less then the blaze of neon inside, advertising power games, fashion articles, cars, computers. Two girls are standing in the middle, encouraging people to join a playful demonstration, part of the upcoming Peace March in Hiroshima.

Takeda and Becht walk into the station. The inspector thought it made better sense to get out of the centre of Hiroshima after hearing on the rental car radio that the prefecture police were investigating the attack on economist Nagai Shiga. Their spokesman said that traces had been found on the renowned academic’s bombed-out car that suggested the involvement of a group of “economic anarchists”. This mysterious group had already issued a death threat against Shiga because they saw him as the “instigator of expensive and useless public works that had intensified the crisis, deepened corruption, and made the poverty of so many unemployed Japanese men and women worse than ever”. In the car, Takeda had talked with his stubborn companion about their shared adversary. He is convinced that the yakuza leader who calls himself Rokurobei is being protected by the police higher up the chain of command than Takamatsu. And who knows: politicians, business people, senior civil servants? Organisations with extremist tendencies are all over the place and many aren’t averse to a dose of overblown samurai rhetoric or puffed up cultural folklore. Takeda is pretty sure that Takamatsu called off the official police investigation into him after their meeting at Denny’s Diner. He’s more worried about new attempts on his life. Before heading for Tokyo with the evidence he has at his disposal, he wants to track down Yori. There was no suggestion in Adachi’s apartment that Yori had suffered the same fate as the police doctor. It was possible that the capricious street urchin had left the doctor’s apartment before Rokurobei and his cronies arrived. There was a chance that they had taken her with them, but Takeda can’t think why the yakuza would do such a thing. It’s crystal clear in the meantime that Rokurobei and his followers aren’t afraid of murder. Takeda is convinced that the rejected crown prince can’t keep up his killing spree forever, but after more than twenty years in the Japanese police force he knows how pathetic the results of crime prevention can be. There’s a myth in the West that Japan’s crime figures are among the lowest in the world. That was more or less true until the middle of the 1980s, upheld by intimate entanglements between the yakuza and the police and by the typically Japanese need to show the outside world a respectable facade. But in recent years, crime figures had skyrocketed as a result of a crisis that had made society merciless and cynical and trashed the old values. According to Takeda, Rokurobei was probably determined to recover his anonymity as quickly as possible and get on with his clandestine operations. The more dead bodies he left in his wake, the more dangerous it became for the mafia leader. At the same time, Takeda knows that he shouldn’t underestimate the prince’s sense of hubris, let alone his twisted, fanatical nationalism. With the documents he received from Yori and Becht’s videotape, Takeda thinks he stands a good chance of worming his way out of this hornet’s nest, but he also thinks it wouldn’t do any harm to have Yori along in person as a witness.

But that wasn’t the only reason the inspector chose the busy station with its multiple exits to check out if anyone knew anything about Yori’s whereabouts.

Shortly after the explosion, a rain of condensation fell from the sky in the form of dense, dark droplets that hurt when they touched skin, a gluey rain that turned everything black. The black contrasted intensely with the yellow and red fires that spewed flames metres into the air. Prince Norikazu stretched his neck, tried to collect as much of the black rain as he could in his parched throat in spite of the pain it caused. Of the detachment charged with accompanying him only four had survived. The lieutenant was on his feet, waving his arms, muttering to himself. He wasn’t likely to last much longer. The horizon was a line of flames, smoke and ruins. When they passed a factory that had been completely flattened, the lieutenant turned to his superior; stuck out his horrendously swollen tongue and raised his arm as if he was about to salute him. He collapsed like a sack of salt. The prince crouched beside him, looked closely at the dead man as if he was measuring him up for a sturdy coffin, and then unfastened the katana hanging from the lieutenant’s belt. He greeted him with the sword.