Hanzai Japan: Fantastical, Futuristic Stories of Crime From and About Japan Read online

  The movie is a Western, cowboys shooting pistols over wide un-Japanese vistas. I hate it. It’s a sound picture. I find the speaker switch. Pow, pow. The Victor lurches to life.

  They are filtering in now, American sailors on the arms of hungry local girls. They don’t care about the movie any more than I do. But I like it in here. I can pretend I am a child in Niigata again. My father’s theater was magnificent: parquet ceiling, velvet curtains, the smell of incense and the fragrant taste of Sakuma Drops, sugar gemstones spilled under the seats by rapt moviegoers, rescued by my small fingers and rolled sweetly on my tongue. And the faces in the movies: suffering wives, grim samurai. The world of adults was full of roiling passions and fevers expressed quietly in tatami rooms. I was too young then to know what made the women bite their lips bitterly or duck their heads in shame. I know now.

  I check the sixth reel and, sure enough, it’s not rewound. I swipe the bloodied splicer to the side and spool the reels up on the rewind table. I spin the handle and remember my father in the projection booth, his small eyes peering through the window, squeezing his mouth into a stroke of ink as he twists the focus ring. Pay attention, he says, soon you’ll be in charge of this grand machine. And me, small, pigtailed, cheeks pressing close to him and the hot white light, the mush-edged grey world on the screen snapping to startling clarity at my father’s command: faces cut out from backgrounds like paper dolls, surfaces swimming lively with grain. The rewinding film passes between the cloth in my fingers but I don’t feel it. Some part of me could still leap in delight then, before Tokyo, before men and bombs and hunger. And Taro, dark tutor. Something in my memory breaks and melts in the gate.

  There’s a sudden snap of sparks in the corner of my eye and I turn, hoping to watch the reel burst into an unquenchable nitrate flame. But the film is still chugging away merrily. I hear the crackle of downed wires, the burst of white smoke. A low roar of dismay wafts up from the audience, unhappy there’s no cowboy gunfire to cover the sound of sucking. The Victor speaker is dead. I look out over the audience. The cowboys race around in funereal silence, their feather-light horses making no hoofbeats upon the ground, their guns emitting gentle puffs of smoke as if exhaling.

  And then I hear the cultured voice wheeze up, a gentle Kyoto warble feeble with age: “Ladies and gentlemen, let us allow our orchestra to rest, so that men may continue our tale.” What I thought was a bundle of trash unfolds itself out of the seat and staggers towards the stage. It’s an elderly man wrapped in a brown yukata, tabescent chest drunkenly bare. He veers alarmingly off course into the shadowed edge of the theater, but his voice rings out clear from the dark. “Our hero!” he cries out, and blunders back into the light, saluting the cowboy. “Our hero of the Western invasion!” His pale, pockmarked flesh reflects the projector’s light like the surface of the moon.

  I remember: the benshi.

  My father’s theater had a benshi. He arrived on a Tuesday in a taxi, the first time I’d ever seen someone ride in one. He was ragged and elegant in his hangover. My father served him miso soup with clams and shooed me out of the projection booth and let him watch the week’s movie in advance. I’d never met anyone so important that he could have a movie all to himself. I hid behind the curtains under the stage and watched him watch: whispering lines of imagined dialogue to himself, waving his hands in gentle swan wings as if to the music of an invisible symphony, nipping from a bottle under his jacket. That night he stood before a thousand patrons, bathed and shaved and sharp in a Western suit, and narrated the movie, voiced every part, colored silent scenes with his descriptions until his words bled into the audience’s imagination. He would do every show, five or six times a day, Tuesday through Sunday. On Monday he would disappear, and my father would oil the projector and repair broken seats. “No one wants to see a movie without a benshi,” he’d shrug.

  This drunken benshi was older than the one my father hired: even from my perch in the projection room I could see his toothless mouth was a dark theater with only one ivory seat remaining. But he had the same courtly distinction, the same twinkle of conspiracy with the audience. “But what is this?” he feigned surprise as the Comanche warlord circled the wagons. “Our hero is surrounded. His bravado and arrogance have failed him. His bullying has brought just desserts. Go ahead and discharge your little weapon, bully. The ancient people outlast you.”

  I can’t help but smile. The devil with my father’s six-reel rule. I delve into the stacks again and uncover cans scrawled with names like sutras: Ozu, Mizoguchi, Naruse. I snap reels out of safety coffins and kill the cowboy monstrosity. Before the groans rise up again I’ve already threaded up the film I want. Dragnet Girl. It’s only one reel, the last reel, the shootout, the rooftop escape. Tokiko, baby-faced in her smart striped dress, begging Joji to come to his senses. The benshi is tickled by my choice.

  “Joji, let’s give up!” he says in the moll’s girlish purr. “A new life is waiting for us, right?” And then, burying his chin into his chest to growl in the voice of that callow gangster bastard breaking her heart: “You can get arrested, girl, but not me.” I think about my poison-green dress and gore-red lips and how a bold girl like me in shy Niigata loved Dragnet Girl, how much I wanted to be Tokiko and have the world look up at me from where I’d pinned it beneath my pointed heels. I didn’t know then what one must endure to be burned down into something bright, clean, shining, the white-hot atom pinprick at the start of a chain reaction that tumbles into clouds blossoming like jellyfish up into Nagasaki skies. I wear heels so I can forget what it’s like to walk barefoot on rubble already sticky with other people’s blood. The things I have seen … the woman I have become to wear this dress and never, ever move my face …

  The benshi can see me, through the jagged window. “No regrets, my jade angel above,” he cries, the clairvoyance of the drunk. “Your fortune smiles down upon me.” He is sending me love letters, from one cinema lover to another. The movies made us and saved us. They are why we are still standing when nothing else stands on the scorched circle of glass, they are why we will die with our heads high in this dead, raped city, dreaming …

  A beer can zings by the benshi’s head. “Aw, shaddap, grandpa.” A sailor staggers up out of his seat, his two girl companions reaching up to him to calm him, their slim silhouetted arms like plants straining for the sun. “And put that cowboy picture back on!”

  I clench my jaw. I’ll do no such thing. I reach for an empty film container to throw through the window at the gaijin when I see he’s pulled a gun: skinny muzzle, a Nambu. There’s better American guns afloat in Asakusa but he’s so pleased with what he snatched off a Japanese casualty. His girlfriends squeal and cower. “Go ahead, Jap,” he snarls, waving that corpse-stolen gun. “Keep on talking.”

  I grab the scissors. I wanted to stay in this projection booth until Taro burned the theater down. I know how the safety devices work: the soft-linked chains will melt and drop the metal shutters, and while the theater evacuates I alone will cremate in this coffin of dreams. But now, I have a noble death. I will die in defense of a benshi. The purity of this flutters up in me like crane wings. I tighten my grip on the scissors as I tear out of the booth and fly down the stairs. I will bury the scissors in the meat of the gaijin’s back if I’m quick, I must be quick, I must hurt him as much as I can before he shoots me and I die here in this dying theater, I am right behind him, he does not see me, I raise the scissors, I am ready to die for black and white and dreams—

  I have never heard a shot so loud. It breaks the last thing in me left to be broken.

  I look up at the benshi. He doesn’t know. He is in that spellbound state I have seen before, the body’s grace numbness before the realization hits. He is looking at me, perplexed, as if he can’t understand what has just happened. For the first time in years I can’t stop the hot tears spilling down my cheeks. All my murderous rage has soured to shame. “Forgive me,” I say, barely ab
le to keep looking into his eyes, “please forgive me.”

  The sailor is turning slowly towards me, swinging his weapon wide. I will not allow him the satisfaction of murdering me too. I aim the scissors at my own neck, ready to—

  The sailor falls at my feet.

  His companions shriek. They stomp all over his corpse in their stampede out of the theater. There is a red puddle pooling over the bastard’s heart. His gun is cold. The benshi is fine. His bare chest is unmarred. He is still staring at both of us, astounded. But who—

  I look up. There is Tokiko, glamorous moll, standing alone fifty feet high on a dark screen, silks pressed, jaw set, pistol in her grip. The smoke from the muzzle of her gun drifts away from the screen and rises to meet the theater ceiling.

  He was always cheerful, always hard at work, with thickly muscled, sun-bronzed arms, a man so masculine even other men fell quickly under his spell. We were both outsiders, fugitives from the big-city rat race. I wish my wife and I could’ve gotten to know Tetsuji Okada better, but we kept our distance.

  It was my wife’s idea to move to this area, thick with pension hotels, in the foothills outside the village. We managed a bakery that doubled as a café, but after two years I was already growing tired of our sham country life. Everyone, from the pension owners to the man who ran the crafts workshop, was pretending to live like Peter Mayle. The women planted herbs and berries, made jam and wreaths and vegetable-dyed cloth, and went into ecstasies organizing concerts by no-name musicians in the little local auditorium. Yet when autumn came and the tourists disappeared, many of our neighbors went back to Tokyo to make ends meet as cab drivers, factory workers, or bartenders, and routinely mocked the people of the village and their hayseed culture.

  Tetsuji Okada was different. He was the only real man among us fugitives from the city. He didn’t live in the alpine foothills with the rest of us. He’d settled in the flatlands where it was sweltering in summer and freezing in winter, built solid relationships with the locals, and managed forty acres of fields and paddies, growing rice, soybeans, and a profusion of vegetables. I was speechless with admiration.

  I first encountered him in the lounge of the village hot spring. My wife and our son Hiro, almost four, had been pestering me to take them. Hiro was too excited to sit still, and we’d retired to a corner of the lounge to eat our noodles, hoping to avoid bothering the locals, when Okada invited us to sit with him and his beer-drinking friends. We listened, rapt, as he talked about the joys and frustrations of rural life. He was a straight shooter, yet never anything but modest about his achievements.

  “I gave soybeans a go last year, but I just can’t get the hang of it. It’s hard to match what you guys do. You’ve got two thousand years of experience behind you.” He knew how to compliment his friends without flattering them.

  The toothless old man sitting next to him shook his head. “Not at all. Your farm is outstanding. You city people are amazing. You’ve almost got it down.” He clapped Okada on the shoulder encouragingly.

  “I owe it all to you.” Okada’s bow was modest and dignified. It did me good just to be around him.

  That was how our casual friendship started. Now and then we would meet for drinks in the little eatery that served as the village pub. Sometimes he would bring us produce from his fields.

  But it was around the third time we sat down for drinks that I noticed his face always took on a wild look when he got into one particular topic.

  He was convinced—almost obsessed—that some kind of major food shortage was just around the corner. Whenever the subject turned to farming, his usually sunny expression changed completely. A dark light seemed to shine from his haunted eyes and the words poured out of him as he condemned city people and the way they lived.

  “Tetsuji would be nice to be around, except for that whole ‘food crisis’ thing,” my wife remarked with a laugh. I chuckled too—and decided I’d keep our meetings outside the house. It would be better not to have him over. He was entitled to his own opinion, but this fixation of his seemed to border on mania. There was something unsettling about it.

  True, I found his bitterness easier to understand when he told me how his decision to move to the country had prompted his wife to divorce him, take their three children and their house in southwest Tokyo, and claim half of his severance pay from the big publishing house where he had worked for twenty-three years.

  “City people walk on thin ice every day,” he once said. “Even after the war, when people were starving, we grew more than half the food we needed, yet look how many people died. And how much food does Japan produce now? Less than 40 percent of what we need. Remember in ’72, when America stopped exporting soybeans? Now it’s global warming. Soils all over the planet are being exhausted, and American grain production has to start falling sooner or later. Southeast Asia? They’re paving their farmland over and industrializing as fast as they can. Doesn’t matter what international treaties say. What idiot is going to export food when there’s not enough at home?”

  By this point, his eyes would be moist with anxiety.

  “Cities are hotbeds of consumption and hedonism, but they don’t create anything essential for life. One day there’ll be no food in the supermarket. Nothing at the 7-Eleven. The first people to get wind of the shortage will run out and buy it all. There will be a panic. Only the ones who can pay the going rate will have food. The government won’t have options. Used to be they could go around Asia with wads of money and buy whatever they wanted. That won’t work next time. There won’t be any countries with food to spare. They won’t sell what they don’t have.”

  “Yes, I guess Japan will be in a tough situation by the time my son’s an adult.”

  This time I’d been in the neighborhood and dropped by to chat. We were out by his soybean field when he’d mounted his hobbyhorse again, and I didn’t feel like arguing with him on his own turf. I just tried to nod and be agreeable while I waited for my chance to escape.

  “No.” Okada gazed out over his fields and shook his head. “It’s coming. Five years, ten at the most. We’re on the brink. Most people are just dancing around at the edge of the abyss. They’re completely oblivious.”

  “Uhm-hm. Your edamame are coming in well.” I was desperate to change the subject.

  “Edamame? Don’t kid me. Are you telling me you don’t know that crops like edamame and sweet corn are a criminal waste of food? Letting them mature yields far more calories. But no, people want to eat baby soybeans because they taste better. That’s how people eat, without a care in the world. Same thing with corn. Cut the ears off before their time. ‘Oh, it’s so sweet!’ Edamame, baby corn, all that crap. Won’t grow it, won’t eat it.”

  We’d reached the stage where it was best for me to just keep my mouth shut. I kept nodding and saying “Uh-hmm, uh-hmm” as I started backing away.

  “In the end, there’ll be no soybeans, much less any edamame. The stores will be out of rice. There won’t be any food for tomorrow. And you thought they had it bad in North Korea. I guarantee you, city people will be coming out here to buy food with the money they got from selling their daughters.”

  “Right, selling their daughters.” I started to laugh but quickly stopped myself. Okada’s eyes weren’t smiling.

  “Listen, how about it? We’re weeding the paddies tomorrow. Why don’t you come? Some friends of mine will be here from Tokyo to help out. They take the future food crisis very seriously. I’ve promised to share my crops with them and nobody else. They take responsibility for their own food supply by weeding the paddies and helping me plant rice. I won’t sell my crops for any amount of money. But friends are different. I’ll set some aside for you too.”

  “Thanks,” was all I could say. I left without making any promises. Apparently he not only could see the future, he had disciples too. Just being around him was starting to make me nervous. I didn’t feel like h
anging out with a whole group of Okadas.

  I got into my old Lexus and drove over the dusty roads to home. On the way I passed an unmanned produce stand, a simple wooden table with a little roof overhead for shade. Bags of vegetables, all priced at a hundred yen, were piled up to attract the tourists. I’d heard local farmers complain that the coin box never held more than 70 or 80 percent of what it was supposed to at the end of the day. Yet they still made more money this way than selling to the supermarkets.

  I guess I never thought Japan’s comfortable situation would last forever. Someday people would find themselves hungry once again. Still, why forgo the advantages of a free market to prepare for a day you couldn’t predict with certainty? I didn’t want to leave our life in this beautiful setting, selling the bread my wife baked and brewing coffee for customers, even if the tourist season only lasted for the summer months, and for the other nine months our bread went to feed factory workers.

  When I got home, my wife was waiting. She was not happy.

  The damn weeds again. Hashimoto’s Bakery was a wooden building with a white-painted terrace out front. The terrace was surrounded by potted herbs, with zucchini, cranberries and blueberries down in front where our Afghan hound, Siesta, liked to play with Hiro. It was a peaceful, idyllic environment, but it wasn’t easy to maintain. Summer was humid and the temperature got up to 30 degrees Celsius, not the ideal climate for an English garden. But I had no choice. The tourists liked it and my wife demanded it.

  I went and got the sickle and a plastic bag. Of all the weeds in the yard, I hated kudzu the most. It carpeted the ground and engulfed anything vertical, from power poles to fences. It was a tenacious survivor with leaves of poisonous green and thick, sturdy stalks covered with tiny spines. No matter how much I cut it back, it always returned quickly. At the peak of summer, its sweet-smelling clusters of reddish-purple flowers hung beneath the shade of the leaves and looked rather elegant. But in the summer heat, the fragrance was oppressive, like a matron with too much perfume.