I assure you, my value to you is indisputable. For example, I can confirm that today, April 29, the youth was not only at the shelter but also at the very site of your investigation: the old printing press. For I am no ordinary witness; I’ve been following him for months.
I was never a strong man. I’d given up physical pursuits for a life of the mind, sacrificing my muscles and bones to feed what I believed to be the higher calling. Especially after defeat I clung to this belief. For isn’t it the mind that endows humankind with the faculty of memory, without which there can be no historical awareness, no accountability? Yet in mere months, tossed into a dog-eat-dog hell, we the defeated have forgotten all our values except the needs of our bodies. Indeed, dawn has broken over our ruined country, but far from illuminating a new society repentant of modernity’s excesses, it has revealed the modern brutality of our civilization, consumed as ever by how to profit off another human’s back.
It is in this context that I became keenly aware of a young woman minding a stall at the Ueno market. She wasn’t a classical beauty, a limp in her step and her lips trembling ever so slightly, but, supple and alive, she catalyzed my reunion with my body. I began buying her exorbitant pellets of rice, my parched fingers reaching like a tongue to skim her palm opened to take my coins…
On the last day of July, circumstances lured me to reach for more…Suffice it to say I was thwarted by the youth. Humiliated, I beat my retreat, but the youth was not done. I was halfway up Ueno Hill when I saw him loping toward me with feral speed, and in a flash he was upon me. I fought as never before, his flesh and mine locked in a mortal struggle until I, with my flaccid muscles, pinned him down. I cannot describe my elation! As my fingers pressed into his windpipe, engorging his face, I experienced what can only be called ecstasy. I saw the Truth. In my desperate greed for survival, I was choking none other than the suffering Redeemer incarnate.
Let it be known I released my grip and suffered his fists upon my face. Over the following weeks, unable to forget, I roamed the area for another glimpse of him. I finally found him walking with the market woman, the two bumping along like besotted cousins before disappearing into what appeared to be a block of tents but turned out to be a welfare shelter that even the likes of me, debased as I was, dared not enter.
Luck, however, favored me; I heard the woman’s voice, and from the gaps in the flimsy panels I saw the pair enter a tent occupied by two young men—students I recognized from my university. It did not take me long to understand that the youth and the students had made this place their home. Where the woman lived, I never learned, but the four convened daily, and I became attached to their shapes moving like a family behind the tarpaulin. Then, a month ago, the students received a visitor. A small fellow in a stuffy suit. The woman was there too, but not the youth. Two days later, the woman stopped showing up. After that, the youth began coming and going unpredictably. There was no doubt he was looking for her. I never saw the visitor again.
Today, April 29, the youth appeared at the shelter around noon. He was agitated, barging into the students’ tent and instigating an excited conversation before dashing back out. I followed him. This is how I ended up at the old press. The youth knocked, then tried the door and disappeared inside. He stayed perhaps a half hour before reemerging and leaping onto a tram. I lost him then, but my attention was riveted to the figure who’d emerged with him. A droopy fellow with a wilted profile who stared after the youth with a hateful yearning I recognized: it was my own face, the animal face of a broken soul.
Let us remember the Messiah comes in many guises. Whether He’ll lead with the steps of a man or the hoofs of a beast, what’s certain is that the youth are the inheritors of this earth. Whereas you and I are trapped, you in your uniform, I in mine in a manner of speaking, the youth is of a new species rising from the ashes to lead the world of today into what we, with our lost heads and craven spirits, cannot begin to imagine. You mark my words.
Q. You were seen at Occupation Headquarters. You were seen at the American Embassy. Were you planning to attack General MacArthur?
Pecking down the boulevard with a fluency that impressed and frightened him, Konomi headed, as Furukawa had said she would, toward another Occupation building: the American Embassy. Should he show himself? He panned the busy street full of soldiers and military police. He slunk along, hoping she’d turn onto a side street, but the hulking Embassy soon rose before them, and Konomi stopped. Exchanging words with the guards, she disappeared through the gates.
Was Furukawa right? People came and went from the many offices in Occupation Headquarters, but the Embassy, currently housing the American general, was closed. He rubbed his temple; a dull pulse the size of a barley kernel rolled beneath his finger. He knew that since the Americans began cracking down on Party members, the Party, increasingly unnerved by what it saw as the Occupation’s authoritarian slide, had begun to agitate; with the ghost of their ineffectual wartime resistance still heavy on their minds, everyone agreed they had to take measures. Furukawa, who favored an armed revolt, gathered his supporters. Konomi and the students, critical of violence even as a means to a revolutionary end, joined the opposition. It was a heated situation, but it was when Furukawa proposed involving the Party’s Soviet comrades that everything shifted.
The pulse in his temple grew to the size of a pebble. What if Furukawa was preparing a full-on, possibly Soviet-backed, military coup? Would Konomi, a diehard pacifist, risk working with the Americans to stop him? This morning when he greeted the rōjin, the old man had told him what he then told Furukawa: that he’d seen Furukawa with Konomi. What the boy didn’t tell Furukawa was that the rōjin had heard them arguing. Was Furukawa mobilizing against his opposition? He pictured Ōtsuka’s curled body, the shock of his pulped face. Furukawa never admitted to killing him, but his bitterness had been real. The boy stood. A sharp pain crazed his skull. Then he was out, dragged away by someone trailing the smell of hot paper and printing ink.
WITNESS #5: PROPRIETOR, THE HEAVENLY CURTAIN HOTEL’S HOUSE OF HOPE
TOKYO METROPOLITAN POLICE DEPARTMENT, APRIL 29, 1947, 22:00
He’s a nice kid, that one. Covered in boils, but who can judge people by their faces these days? Take my place: The Heavenly Curtain Hotel’s House of Hope, The Fortieth Welfare Hostel in trust to, and under the management of, the Greater Tokyo Federation of Non-Luxury Hotel Associations. On the face of it, you’d think it a respectable establishment, with such a grand name and endorsement. In reality, it’s a clapboard bunkhouse extended and divided by oiled curtains, also used as roofing to protect our guests from the heavens above. Hence, Heavenly Curtain Hotel’s House of Hope. Not to be mistaken for a shelter, mind you. As classifications go, we’re a Welfare Hostel, which might lead you to believe there’s a social security program in place to support the residents and their place of shelter, such as it is. But let me assure you: there is not, despite our Compassionate Occupiers, the Mighty Democratic Vanguards of the New World. This is the sort of place I run, just to be clear.