From the Fatherland with Love Read online

  “Nobue-san!” someone called out from behind him. “Good morning!” Nobue grunted a non-reply without bothering to turn and see who it was. He’d been living in Ryokuchi Park for a year and a half now. It was a vast swath of ground straddling the border between Yokohama and Kawasaki, and was one of the more prominent of the nation’s designated “habitation zones” for the homeless. The six-meter-high fence stretched some three kilometers along one edge of a grassy space the size of three or four soccer fields and criss-crossed with walking paths and a cycling course. To the north and south, the park was bordered by woods, beyond which were the developments. Sports fields had covered the eastern section before the homeless took over, but now only vague outlines were left of them. All the goalposts and nets, ropes, and bolts had been liberated for use in the construction of huts and shanties. The eastern edge was a steep slope, at the top of which was a narrow stretch that had once been lined with benches to provide a scenic viewpoint. Now it was lined with the tents of the NPO staff supervising the homeless.

  Nobue’s immediate plans were to visit a toilet and then get something hot to drink. He set off, sidestepping a Log who lay sprawled out on the grass. That was what they called the new arrivals who had no sleeping bags or tents or acquaintances here and had to spread cardboard or old newspapers on the bare ground to lie on—given that name, of course, because they lay around like fallen timber, ripe with the smell of decay and excreta, and displaying few discernible signs of life. There was a place in the park’s open market where you could buy the bare necessities for sleeping outdoors—cardboard and old newspapers and vinyl tarps—but the proprietor insisted on being paid in cash. The public restrooms required coins, and the portable toilets administered by the NPO and scattered throughout the park weren’t free either. All the same, people were still flocking to Ryokuchi. Right now the population was at about four thousand and rising fast. With the presence of the NPO, there was no danger of any trouble from outside, and at the so-called People’s Market you could buy anything you needed—provided you could come up with the money. The homeless living on the street or in other parks were often targeted by gangs of teenagers, and fatal attacks occurred almost daily.

  Losing his balance as he swerved to avoid a turd in his path, Nobue accidentally stepped on a Log’s hair. But he (or she—it was impossible to tell) didn’t even move. Most people, shortly after arriving there, fell into a kind of unresponsive funk, their bodies and nervous systems shutting down from a combination of exhaustion and an odd sense of relief.

  There were restrooms near what used to be the entrance to the park, and portable toilets had been placed alongside them. Close by were water fountains and two shops that served coffee and tea. As Nobue approached, a middle-aged man called out to him, asking if he had a minute.

  “I was just on my way to your tent,” the man said.

  He was one of the NPO staff in charge of the toilets. He was wearing a vinyl windbreaker, on the back of which were printed the words HARMONY AND SECURITY ARE UP TO YOU AND ME and a picture of two small animals shaking hands. The man’s head and eyebrows were shaved, and he had the English words LOVE & PEACE tattooed in red and green on one temple. The NPO staff at Ryokuchi were all associated with either yakuza or foreign mafia. In the beginning it had been a proper organization that provided the homeless with medical treatment and checkups, as well as employment services, but as the park’s population had grown to such massive proportions that even the police shied away, the underworld had begun moving in and taking over.

  “What is it?” Nobue said irritably. “I just got up, dammit. Gotta take a shit.”

  The middle-aged skinhead apologized, bowing deeply.

  “I’ll wait for you here,” he said. “Take your time. Enjoy.”

  The man turned to a youth with long hair, jerked his head toward the queue for the restrooms, and said, “Nobue wants to take a dump.” The longhair cleared a path through the queue, gruffly ordering people to step aside, and yanked open the door to one of the portables. A guy of about sixty was sitting on the toilet, coughing like mad. “Out,” the longhair told him. “Yes, sir,” said the coughing man in a timid voice. He was trying to pull up his pants as he stumbled out of the fiberglass stall. “Go ahead, Nobue-san, it’s all yours,” said the longhair. He was about to tear off a few sheets from the roll of toilet paper he was holding, when the skinhead shouted at him: “What’re you doing, asshole? Give him the whole roll!” The longhair apologized and handed it over. People waiting in line were watching all this with empty eyes. None of them complained or displayed any emotion. The man who’d been evicted stood bent over, still fiddling with his pants.

  Nobue was pleased to find the just-vacated toilet seat still warm—cold seats always made his hip hurt. The cream-colored walls were covered with graffiti. Written neatly in felt pen was a poem that featured the word “terrorist.” He began reading it aloud in a low growl. Know ye the compassionate heart of the terrorist / Betrayed by the nation, deprived of wealth / Know ye, sheeple, that we are one / Know that those who robbed us of property and kin / Shall not go unpunished / Revenge is nigh / Know ye the broken heart of the terrorist. As he read, Nobue was thinking what an idiot the anonymous poet was—another fool who got relieved of his life savings. The more he thought about it, the funnier it seemed, and soon he was rocking back and forth with laughter. The laughter burbled up from his bowels and burst out of his throat with such force that the entire Porta Potti shook.

  At about the time when that mentally challenged American president was compelled to admit that his attempt to force democracy on the Middle East had failed, the dollar had begun to fall precipitously. The yen rose for a while, then sank as rapidly as the dollar had. Municipal and semi-government bonds went into free fall, investors began dumping the yen, and finally national bonds went to hell, along with the stock market. An emergency was declared, and trading was suspended on the stock market. Soon banks were failing as well. Institutions with large holdings in national bonds went under, and debt decimated the economy. Further depreciation of the yen resulted in shortages of food and fuel, and it was openly declared that people would die that winter of cold and starvation.

  Nobue believed it was back in the spring of ’07 when the Prime Minister and the Minister of Finance had gone on television, bowing their heads as they tearfully delivered speeches to the effect that there was simply no other way to save Japan: all ATMs were being shut down, effective immediately. Limits were put on how much cash people could extract from their own bank deposits and savings accounts; they were allowed to withdraw only a minimal, predetermined amount deemed necessary for living expenses. Next a law was passed to prevent the yen from being freely traded for the dollar or euro. People with savings in these currencies ended up with assets they couldn’t use. Meanwhile, the sales tax was steadily increased until it topped out at 17.5 per cent. This was inevitable, according to the mournful explanations of the Minister of Finance, or the yen would become virtually worthless, the nation would face bankruptcy, foreigners would buy up the corporations and the land, and Japan would cease to be Japan. Before long, serious inflation set in, and the net result was that the nation succeeded in relieving its citizens of some forty per cent of their wealth.

  At this point, the Prime Minister and the Minister of Finance had at least had the sense to resign. When the dollar began its steep decline, Japan held an enormous quantity of US Treasury bonds but was put under pressure not to sell them. Yet even as they wheedled Japan into keeping these, the Americans maintained a high-handed approach toward their creditor. They raised the price of corn, on which Japanese livestock depended, by nearly thirty per cent; brazenly sold weapons to China; and unilaterally began negotiations with North Korea toward a non-aggression pact. As a result, everyone in the country—the politicians, the media, the intellectuals, the masses—soon began to lose any lingering affection for the United States.

  It was, many of them thought, as if the faithful old dog
had not only been suddenly denied its daily dishful but beaten with a stick into the bargain. A long-harbored, vague antipathy toward the US quickly turned into a seething hatred. Impoverished, Japan came to despise and be despised by its neighbors, and only stumbled further down the road to ruin. Ultimately, it was of no consequence to these other nations whether Japan liked them or opposed them. Japan was simply ignored. Left to its own devices by Asia, America, and Europe, the nation grew increasingly bitter and insular. A growing number of politicians, cheered on by street-corner crowds, loudly argued that Japan had nearly forty tons of plutonium and that producing atomic weapons would be a breeze. Apparently this was true. Thanks to the eccentric method of atomic-power generation known as a “closed nuclear-fuel cycle,” the country had stored up mounds of weapons-grade plutonium.

  Nations that are down on their luck and bitter about it are generally disliked and shunned by their neighbors, just as individual people in that position are. Those that are both impoverished and embittered tend to lose the ability to control themselves. They get angry easily. They snap and resort to violence or threaten to slit their wrists—or really do slit their wrists. When the NPO thugs found people like that here at Ryokuchi, they beat them half to death. People who couldn’t control themselves were dangerous unless you neutralized them by beating them hollow, beating them till they couldn’t stand or move. The targets of such attacks would end up unable even to obtain proper food. They had to scavenge for leftovers and grew steadily less careful about hygiene. Denied access even to the portable toilets, they had to relieve themselves in holes dug in the ground; and without paper to wipe themselves they soon gave off a stench that could be detected even at a distance. Body odor was like a badge of homelessness, but nobody wanted anything to do with people who also smelled of shit. When the NPO discovered real stinkers of this kind, they’d work them over mercilessly, until they were driven from the park for good. And what was true for individuals was also true for nations—once they lost control of themselves, they became objects of scorn, isolated and ultimately excluded from the world community.

  Sitting on the toilet, Nobue reflected that he’d still been hanging out with Ishihara in Fukuoka when his fellow countrymen surrendered forty per cent of their money to the government. Straining his abdominal muscles exacerbated the pain in his hip, and his shoulder hurt when he reached down to wipe himself. Standing up slowly so as not to strain his lower back, he wondered how fast he could run the hundred meters now. From middle school up until the time he enjoyed those meaningless massacres in the company of Ishihara and the others, he’d been able to run the hundred in just over eleven seconds. He sure as hell couldn’t do that now. His hip, his shoulder, his elbow—all his joints were wobbly and barely functional; if he ever did manage to run as fast as he used to, he’d probably fall apart like a disassembled doll. He pictured his various limbs literally coming undone at every joint, an image that made him start laughing again.

  The young NPO guy with the long hair was waiting for him outside and addressed him in a ringing voice as he emerged:

  “Nobue-san! I hope everything came out all—”

  Seeing Nobue in spasms of laughter, he swallowed the rest of the words and just held out a hot hand towel for him to use. Bent double with laughter now, Nobue took it and peered up at the longhair, his face contorted and his cobweb hair flapping in the wind. “You know what?” he said. “If I tried to run right now, I’d come apart at the joints! Like the old GI Joe doll!” He then grabbed hold of the guy’s shoulder for support and began cleaning himself with the towel in his free hand, wiping first his face, then his neck and under his arms, and finally his crotch, reaching inside his pants and scrubbing away. The hand towel went from white to brown to nearly black in the process. Nobue paused from time to time to inspect it, to sniff it, and to wave it about like a banner. The longhair, stunned by this performance, was still at a loss for words. People waiting in line to use the toilets watched the two of them in gaping silence.

  “There’s a new one here who looks like trouble. I’m wondering if I can ask you to have a talk with him.”

  The middle-aged skinhead was walking alongside Nobue as he spoke. “Whaddaya mean, trouble?” Nobue said. The two of them were crossing the fields toward the southern woods. They came to the section of land surrounded by paths and a cycling course that was known as the People’s Market. This, the lower half of the vast grounds, was packed with shops selling a variety of goods at cheap prices. Even people from outside Ryokuchi sometimes came here to shop. Merchandise was sold from open-air stands, tents, huts, and even a few prefab structures. And most of them had speakers in front blasting music and ads and what have you. Nobue loved the chaos of it all. The hubbub of people milling about made him feel as if he was on some undiscovered planet crawling with bizarre life forms. But the skinhead didn’t seem to enjoy the atmosphere: he began scowling the moment they arrived.

  “Whaddaya mean, trouble?” Nobue asked again, leaning to one side to speak right into his ear.

  “He won’t say anything. And he’s got these weird-ass weapons with him.”

  “So throw him out.”

  “We already beat the shit out of him twice, but he won’t leave. And he doesn’t even flinch when you hit him or kick him. It’s creepy.”

  Strange characters did show up now and then. About two years ago, a pale, skinny kid named Shinohara had arrived with a large trunk. Inside the trunk were hundreds of poisonous centipedes and millipedes, and out of boredom he’d sometimes have one of them bite a homeless guy, just to watch him go into convulsions. Several of the victims came down with horrific rashes and high fevers and nearly died, creating a panic among health-department workers, who mistook the symptoms for the outbreak of some sort of epidemic. The NPO, led by this same skinhead, had wanted to kick Shinohara out of the park, but they were all too scared of his centipedes to dare even approach him. Shinohara was a kid with dead eyes who would occasionally snicker to himself for no apparent reason, but wouldn’t react at all when you spoke to him or asked him a question. But Nobue, simply by walking up and sitting beside him for a while, eventually elicited a boyish smile from the kid, who then began to open up about his parents and his upbringing. “They told me you wouldn’t talk to anybody—how come you’re talking to me?” Nobue asked him. “It’s that face of yours,” said the kid. “Anybody who looks that much like an alien has got to be all right.”

  Shinohara had been living in Setagaya with his parents and his little sister, an aspiring cellist. His father was a scholar of some sort, his mother a translator. Since early childhood he’d been fascinated by poisonous creatures, and by the time he entered middle school he was using his allowance to buy frogs, spiders, and scorpions over the Internet. He began raising centipedes and millipedes and bringing them to school in his third year, and ended up being blamed for a classmate’s partial paralysis. Just before the police arrived at his house, Shinohara made an unsuccessful attempt to murder his own family. His parents had always doted on their daughter, the cello prodigy, and he felt ignored by the three of them. When he was released from the juvenile detention center he had nowhere to go. A probation officer was assigned to his case, but the man was afraid of insects and stayed away. Shinohara had been quite an expert on poisons even before being locked up, but inside he increased his knowledge to doctorate level by studying biochemistry and pharmacology. “They’re such buttheads in that place,” he told Nobue. “They won’t let you read books about poison, but pharmacology is just the flip side of toxicology—they’re basically the same thing. The morons don’t even know that much.”

  “Why are there getting to be so many weirdos around?” the skinhead asked, but Nobue didn’t reply. The question made no sense to him. He’d always thought that people who blindly followed society’s norms and conventions were the weird ones. One of his friends back in the old days, a guy named Sugioka, in an extremely bad mood one morning from lack of sleep, happened to be walking along
behind a fortyish divorcée whose jiggling ass, he said, was just begging to be touched. When he gave it a poke, however, he was rebuked by its owner in such an ear-splitting way that he’d felt compelled to use a commando knife he happened to be carrying. Everybody was capable of murder. The really strange ones were those who thought it strange that people like Sugioka and Shinohara existed. Human beings had the freedom and potential to do anything whatsoever; that was what made them so scary.

  People like Sugioka and Shinohara were dangerous, no doubt about it. But they weren’t as big a pain in the ass as most of the inhabitants of Ryokuchi. Expelled by a society that found them an inconvenience, turned out of house and home, robbed by the nation of their savings, these people were still looking for something to believe in. Not because they wanted to believe, but simply because they were afraid of not having anything to cling to or lean on. Compared to people like Sugioka and Shinohara and Ishihara, the Ryokuchi crowd had a vacancy about them, something insubstantial about their faces and attitudes and behavior. The whole scene had the quality of a daydream.

  “And he doesn’t have a code. It’s not that he sold it, either—supposedly he never had one. No telling what a nutter like that might do.”

  The resident-register code was an eleven-digit number, programmed into a chip or encrypted in a mobile communication device, that was used to verify one’s identity. Some of the homeless at Ryokuchi sold their codes to members of the Chinese mafia in the NPO. The creation of the Basic Resident-Register Network—or Juki Net, as everyone called it—had been entrusted to a select number of private firms, some of whom outsourced the work to companies in China and India. Once in possession of an individual’s code, the Chinese mafia were able to enter the Juki Net and change the personal information. They could then sell the code for serious money to foreigners or people who wanted a new life. There were, however, some Japanese who didn’t have a code. Shinohara didn’t have one, and neither, for that matter, did Nobue or Ishihara.