Bob van Laerhoven - Return to Hiroshima

Inspector Takeda vomits and tries to get to his feet. All the evidence he had is now gone. His last thought before losing consciousness: I should have fired a sea of bullets as I crossed the street, when I saw him there with his follower and their motorbikes and leathers and flashy helmets as if they were from a different planet…

The spring sky is bright and capricious as molten iron. The sea by contrast is deep blue with occasional white-crested waves. As sea and sky collide, the buildings on the island seem like relics of a forgotten civilisation of giants. Norikazu is made for this island, Yori thinks, as if its concrete ground gave birth to him. Today he’s without make-up. In the sunlight his pockmarked skin is speckled black. Yori once saw photos in an underground magazine of Vietnamese with skin diseases brought on by the American defoliation compound Agent Orange. Their damaged skin looked like that of Norikazu. It’s amazing how bright daylight makes him appear old when he’s without his make-up. Today Yori can clearly see that he’s well into his sixties. At other moments, at dusk and at night, he seems much younger, in part because of his jet-black hair, which he probably dyes.

“I saw it on TV,” she says. “They’re calling it ‘an aimless gas attack in the metro’. Aimless, father?” She likes to call him father. Norikazu smiles, exposing his pointed teeth. In this light they’re yellow and irregular.

“How did you manage to track down the inspector?”

He turns away from her. Today, as is often the case on Hashima, he’s wearing formal attire. His hakama is charcoal grey. His broad-waisted gi is black. His grey trouser skirt hangs to the floor and accents his height. He looks at once like a badly assembled meccano man and an impressive stage actor, larger than life itself.

“Come, father. You know how curious I can be.” She stands beside him, rests her head against his chest. He smells of metal long exposed to the sun. He almost always does.

He relents: “The German photographer was able to tell us the name of the motel he would use on March 18th. He had promised to take her with him and had reserved two rooms. She still had a record of their reservation. After that it was easy to trace Takeda and shadow him. He contacted the Public Security Commission and was given an appointment for the morning of March 20th. The rest is history.”

“Is that so? The papers say the attack was the work of Aum Shinrikyo, father.”

“The papers, the papers… They also say it’s a miracle that so few people died, my daughter. The sarin had been mixed with acetonitrile to slow its release. If it had evaporated quicker, thousands would have perished, perhaps even tens of thousands.”

“I heard that Shoko Asahara is a member of your Yuzonsha .”

He pushes Yori away and leans over her. His shadow covers her completely. “And who told you that, my daughter?”

“People talk, father, even here on the island.”

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.

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.”

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.”