Кобо Абэ - The Ark Sakura

“I told you before — I’m going to close off that passageway just as soon as I can get to it.”

“No, you’ve got to act now. Look, that guy came poking his nose in here only a little while ago. What’s the Broom Brigade anyway? Just a bunch of decrepit old street cleaners. Let’s go have it out with them!”

“Or we could simply assert our territorial rights, much as it might inconvenience them,” said the insect dealer, crawling up on the table like a wounded sea slug. “They look on it as a garbage dump, but we can put the space to far more significant use. Remember, Japan is a very small country, suffering from acute space deficiency, getting worse all the time. ”

“What are you going to do, plant a flag?” The girl kept staring curiously at my tears.

“Why not?” said the shill. “That or something else.” He spoke with great assurance, driving his words home. “The thing to do is to see that they give us service at a special rate, or pay us for the space they’re using. Somehow we’ve got to draw a firm line.”

Despite small individual differences, overall it appeared that everybody but me was in favor of some form of association with the Broom Brigade. I had a sense of double defeat: first the spy and then, as if that weren’t humiliation enough, the fact that it was the shill, not me, who discovered him. The Broom Brigade, for its part, having had its spy exposed, would surely be devising some swift countermeasure. If a confrontation was inevitable, what better time than now, when I was flanked by two self-appointed bodyguards?

I decided to let the girl score a few points. “I give up — you’re right,” I said, addressing her. “They’ve been scattering around a chromic waste fluid. Highly poisonous. You know,” I added, “ninja used to have keen noses too. Even in the dark they could distinguish people and objects by scent, like dogs.” (This comparison was perhaps a touch inept.) “They say the whole body of ninja lore comes down to perfecting the sense of smell. Why, you’re probably qualified to be a ninja right now.”

As it happened, my association with the Broom Brigade was a good deal more intimate than any of them suspected. Our first contact dated from just about a year ago. As the girl had divined, we were engaged in the illegal disposal of industrial waste (although the instigator was not them, but me). Once a week they furnished five polyethylene containers full of a heavily chromic waste fluid, fifty-eight times the permitted level of concentration. It was a pretty awful job, and the pay was accordingly high. To dispose of one container was worth 80,000 yen. That’s 400,000 yen a week; 1,600,000 yen a month. More money than I could ever hope to lay hands on again.

Of course it wasn’t as if I’d drawn up a contract directly with the Broom Brigade. There was a middleman. Every Tuesday just before daybreak, he came by with the goods, hauling five containers along the town road in a pickup truck. The rest was up to me. First, using a pulley, I lowered them to the roof of the abandoned car I used for camouflage (a Subaru 360); then I shoved them in through the back-seat window, where the pane was missing, and loaded them aboard ship in a handcart. It’s fairly hard labor, but when you want to raise money in a hurry, you can’t pick and choose. Besides, I didn’t want anybody finding out about my toilet.

Before setting up in this business, I did the necessary groundwork. I couldn’t rest easy without having some idea of where things flushed down that toilet would end up. Common sense said it was somewhere out at sea. But where? The complex topography of the sea bottom made it impossible to predict. Since I knew I would be handling illegal wastes, it was imperative to investigate the matter thoroughly beforehand: if toxic substances and corpses of small animals started popping up along the shoreline, people would inevitably ask questions.

One windless day, choosing an hour when there was little current, I flushed twenty ounces of red food coloring down the toilet. I then kept a steady watch from atop the pedestrian bridge on Skylark Heights, which commands an excellent view, but saw no telltale red stain anywhere on the surface of the water. Nor at any time since then have I even heard rumors of dead fish floating nearby. The underground water vein from the toilet must empty very far out at sea. Or perhaps an especially swift current sweeps the outlet clean. As long as no one raises any fuss, there’s no problem. The work goes along smoothly. In any case, the world is coming to an end soon, so what difference does it make?

Then, early this month, things suddenly changed. One day shortly after the rainy season was declared officially over, I was waiting in my jeep for a red light to change at the corner by the Plum Blossom Sushi Shop, when next to me there pulled up a black van like a paddy wagon or one of those paramilitary soundtrucks used by the neo-fascist right wing. On its side was an emblem of two crossed brooms, and on the corner of one bumper, a flag bearing the same emblem fluttered in the breeze. So this is the famous Broom Brigade patrol car, I thought, having heard about it from our middleman. I gazed at it not with any strong sense of identification but with genuine (quite neutral) interest; we were, after all, business partners. Then my eyes met those of the man sitting next to the driver. A big fellow, whose head brushed against the car ceiling, he was staring intently into my jeep. The shock was like sticking your hand into the chill vapor of dry ice, expecting hot steam. Large sunglasses and a goatee had altered his appearance, but there was no mistaking that green hunting cap. It was my biological father, Inototsu.

I had not seen him in five years. Just to find him in apparent good health was bad enough (a more fitting fate being pauperism or softening of the brain), but of all things, here he was seated in the patrol car of my best customer, the Broom Brigade, as snug as a yolk in its egg. Barely six feet away, the facings on the left sleeve of his dark blue uniform were plainly legible: thee gold inverted V’s. Gold for the rank of general, three for the highest grade within his rank. That made him their chief, or marshal, or supreme commander. Of course I couldn’t have known — but still, I had picked one hell of a business partner. My head throbbed as if I’d come down with Raynaud’s disease,* and after the light turned green I had trouble putting the car in gear.

* A circulatory disorder affecting habitual chain-saw users.

The reaction from his side was swift: the following week, orders for work were abruptly terminated. Naturally, my first suspicions rested with the intermediary, Sengoku. Unless he had said something, I figured, not even Inototsu was crafty enough to connect me with the consignments of hexavalent chromium. Probably, carried away by some desire to boast of his own evildoing (since bullying his family was part of the sadism he secreted like poison), Inototsu had told his followers about meeting me in front of the sushi shop; Sengoku, who happened to be present, then boasted that he knew me as the final recipient of the illegal wastes. For Inototsu to order an immediate halt to all deliveries would be the logical next step. His goal would be to starve me out, cutting off my supplies and attempting to recover my territory. As the one who had chained me to the toilet, he was no doubt well aware of its power.

Not surprisingly, Sengoku firmly denied my allegations. For his services, he pointed out, I regularly paid him twenty percent of the intake, which made him no less a victim of the work stoppage than me. That too made sense. No matter how attractive the Broom Brigade’s terms, he could do nothing without first finding another safe place for disposal of the chromium waste. Still vaguely suspicious, I resolved to leave the negotiations up to him, and meanwhile to prepare for a long siege.