Hanzai Japan: Fantastical, Futuristic Stories of Crime From and About Japan (30 page)

City people would sell their daughters to buy food. That’s what Okada said. But while the cities were vulnerable, city people were not. They had weaponized their motor vehicles. Okada had assumed that people with land, people growing food, would be in a strong position at a time like this, but he was wrong. The winners were not the people who grew food, but those who used force.

I saw another disabled vehicle beside the main road, then a line of them with flat tires. They all had Tokyo plates.

Finally I figured out what was happening. A group of village men blocked the road ahead, armed with knives and pruning shears. One of them ran toward me, but another was already calling to him.

“Calm down! That’s Mr. Hashimoto, from the bakery.”

My Lexus still had its Tokyo plates. A man I’d never seen before, wearing fire brigade gear, strolled up to my window.

“We’re out here hunting cars. Kazuo’s son, old Mrs. Yamashiro, Ryuzo’s grandson, all of them, run down in the fields by these damn cars. They boom right across the fields with their four-wheel drive, steal our crops and run away. Don’t bother with 110. Help never arrives.”

What happened to Okada was happening at other farms, but the police didn’t have the manpower to deal with hit-and-run incidents. Many refugees had probably run someone down on the way here. Law and order had broken down everywhere. Now the village men were defending themselves against the only weapons the city people had.

The firefighter waved me through and I headed toward the gas station. I was too late. The part-timer manning the pumps dismissed me with a wave. “All out.”

A broken-down light truck pulled in after me. “Round the back,” the boy told the driver. They had gas after all. They just weren’t selling it to outsiders.

“Listen, I live here. I run the bakery.” I was starting to lose my temper.

“Sorry, I can only sell to people with local plates.” He hurried toward the back of the gas station.

“Hey, I’m a legal resident. I pay property taxes. I’m not a refugee!” I yelled after him, but he ignored me. I gave up and pulled back out into the road. Things couldn’t go on like this for much longer. Once the situation in Tokyo was under control, this lawlessness would end and things would return to normal. They had to.

The thought helped me calm down.

Nearing home, I sensed something was different. As I passed the pension two doors down from my house, I saw that the white paint was scorched black. It looked like arson. I pulled up at the house with a sense of dread and hurried through the backdoor into the kitchen.

I gasped. Tufts of Siesta’s hair were scattered all over the room.

“Siesta!”

I called my beloved dog, but there was no sign of that long, joyous face. Alarmed, I called his name again. An answer came from behind our upstairs bedroom door. It was my wife.

“Siesta’s gone.” She came down holding Hiro. Her lips were bloodless and trembling.

“They took him. Goddamn it, I swear I’ll kill them. They waited for you to leave. They stole all the flour, forty kilos, and took all the food in the house. Siesta went after them. They had metal bats. They beat him senseless and dragged him off, laughing. ‘Looks like meat’s on the menu,’ one of them said.”

My knees nearly buckled. I barely had the strength to ask the next question.

“Did they hurt you?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Her tone was sharp and incredulous.

All I could do was mumble something unintelligible. She started screaming at me.

“What are you thinking? People don’t want sex when they’re starving. There was a woman, a young woman wearing sandals. She beat Siesta with a bat. She called to him. ‘Here boy, nice dog.’ Then
wham,
she hit him. I’m going to find that bitch and kill her.”

“Please don’t say that. You can’t say that.”

I collapsed to my knees, surrounded by hanks of golden fur, and held my head in my hands. When I saw the first footage of the quake, I thought we’d dodged a bullet. If people from Tokyo made their way here, I was ready to extend a hand and do whatever I could.

Everything was going wrong. If the quake had affected a smaller area, the refugees wouldn’t have come. If only a dozen or so had shown up, the village would probably have come together to help them.

By evening, the empty lot across the street was filled with tents. My wife peered out from the cracks in the metal shutters, muttering about murder and mayhem. I had to force her to sit down and try to be calm.

There was a commotion outside, then someone pounding on the shutters.

“Help! We need help out here. People are hurt. They need water.”

I didn’t move and didn’t answer. Neither did my wife. My son stared at us. He seemed baffled. “Aren’t you going to help them?”

“Please!” The voice came again. “They’re bleeding terribly. Please help.” Whoever it was sounded genuinely panicked. My wife smiled thinly.

“What should we do?” I whispered.

“It’s not our problem. Our problem is, we’ve
got nothing to eat.
”

She was right. Yet once the situation was under control, we’d get along somehow. Vehicles could reach us from Nagano, to the west. At least they could bring in enough to supply the village. Relief supplies from other countries had to be coming. Even now, I couldn’t see things any other way.

“Go get something,” said my wife.

“What?”

“Go to the village and get us something.”

“Nobody’s going to give me anything.”

“You’re a local. You live here.”

“Here. Not in the village. We’re outsiders.”

There was another loud bang on the shutters.

“Please, they’re going to die! We need medicine and bandages.”

These people were not our enemies. They were city people like us. They were victims of a terrible disaster. I ignored my wife and reached for the first aid kit.

“Fool.” She sounded like she’d given up on me once and for all.

I went outside. A crowd of refugees was milling around in the darkness. In the middle of the crowd I could make out bodies on the ground. There were six of them, four men and two women, all covered with blood. One man’s shirt was pulled up around his neck. His intestines spilled from a wound in his abdomen. One woman had a sucking chest wound and was struggling to breathe. The air wheezed from the hole in her breast.

“What happened here?” I held out the first aid kit to one of the refugees. All it contained was a few Band-Aids and some iodine, useless for injuries like these.

“They attacked us when we tried to take a shortcut across a field.”

That was probably a lie. They hadn’t cut across the field. They’d been stealing.

The woman with the chest wound shuddered violently and breathed her last as we stood there watching helplessly. The same thing would probably happen to the rest of them before first light.

But I had a far bigger problem. When the sun rose, my family would have nothing to eat.

Next morning, my son wore himself out looking all over our little home for Siesta. If I tried to step outside, he whimpered fearfully. My wife stood in the empty kitchen, staring into space with an irritated look. Finally she took a carving knife from the drawer.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m going to find a farmer and get some food.”

“Are you crazy?” I tried to take the knife away from her.

“Let me go. I won’t threaten anyone. It’s for protection. Who knows what they’ll do to me if I’m carrying food?”

I sighed. It was true. Things really were that bad.

“Don’t worry, I’ll go.” I grabbed the cars keys and went outside.

A middle-aged man with thinning hair walked up to me as I was getting in the car.

“Thank you for last night.” He bowed politely.

“What happened?”

“They didn’t make it. But at least you tried to help. We won’t forget it.”

Even in the midst of tragedy, some people were still human. Not demons who would take someone’s beloved dog, beat him to death, and eat him.

As I drove toward the village, wondering where I might find a farmer willing to sell me some food, I noticed a man standing at the edge of a field under the blazing sun. He was holding a sharpened spear fashioned from a length of bamboo.

My jaw dropped as I got closer. It was the potter who lived down the street. I was careful to avoid his eyes as I passed. Farther down the road was the home of a farmer I’d met once or twice. I pulled up in front of his garden.

A voice called from somewhere in the corn. “Oh, it’s the baker.”

“Excuse me. Might I possibly buy food from you? Some people forced their way into my house and made off with everything we had. They even took our dog. If you could spare us a little, just enough for my son. I’ll pay you generously, of course.” I kept bowing obsequiously as the farmer came closer.

“No, no, that’s not necessary.” Always gentle and taciturn, he seemed to be groping for words. “I don’t need money, but a favor if you could. I need you to stand guard. I’ll make it worth your while.” He glanced at something on the ground near my feet.

A bamboo spear. I remembered the woman from the night before and shuddered. This was just the kind of weapon that could have dealt someone a wound like hers.

“The fire brigade and some boys from the youth association got together and whipped up three hundred of them. We can’t work the fields with people trying to run us down or sneak up and whack us over the head. If we don’t stand our ground, they’ll pull the crops up, no matter if they’re not ready to harvest. I can’t see stabbing anyone, even in self-defense. Throttling chickens is bad enough. Can’t work, either, with one of these in my hand.”

“What would I do with it?” I squatted and picked up the spear.

“I’m not saying you have to use it. Just stand guard with it. They’re sure to stay away. Then me and the missus can work without worrying. The pumpkins and eggplant are going to rot if we don’t get them in.”

“Kind of like a scarecrow.”

“Something like that.” The farmer smiled.

I accepted the primitive weapon and took up a position at the edge of the field. I had discovered the truth: no one was going to sell me an ear of corn, no matter what I offered.

I looked down the road and saw another man with a spear coming toward me. It was the owner of Le Lagon, a small hotel in our neighborhood. He looked like a proper mercenary with his camo shirt. When he saw me, he acknowledged our shared mission with a bow.

“Things are bad, aren’t they?” I said by way of reply. I looked closer at his shirt. My throat tightened. The camo pattern was spattered with blood.

“What happened? Are you all right?”

He thrust his chin out proudly and smiled.

“I got a young one. An old lady surprised him trying to steal her potatoes. He slugged her and ran off. When I yelled at him to stop, he pulled a knife on me. I had to run him through.”

He stood legs apart, spear planted on end in the road, chest thrown out like some old samurai. I was speechless. All I could do was gape at him.

“Let me tell you something, Hashimoto. There’s no shame in living like a mouse. A man can stand behind a counter and kiss the customer’s ass. ‘Very sorry, it won’t happen again.’ ‘Yes, I’ll do exactly as you say.’ That’s life. But to defend your wife and children, you do whatever it takes.”

I spent the rest of the day by the road, holding my spear while the sun roasted the top of my head. Luckily I didn’t have to use my weapon, and as the light was fading, a few young men from the fire brigade arrived to take over for the night.

The farmer gave me two rice balls, some pickled eggplant, and an ear of boiled corn.

When I got home and told my wife what I’d been doing, and showed her what I’d earned for it, she smiled gently for the first time in days.

“You stood guard. Good for you. Be careful, though. You can’t just stand around with a spear. You have to know how to use it.”

My heart froze. My wife woke our son up and fed him steamed corn and a rice ball. I let the food sit. I didn’t feel like eating. She pushed the rest toward me.

“Come on, eat up. You’ll need your strength when the time comes. Don’t worry about me, I don’t need it.” She smiled affectionately.

Morning came sunny and cloudless again. The sky had the deep blue of autumn, but the sun had lost none of the heat of summer. I idly pictured a helicopter passing overhead, parachuting big packages of food and medicine. Sure enough, soon after that a helicopter did pass by, but it dropped no packages. It was heading straight for the shattered metropolis. It wouldn’t be dropping supplies there, either. It was a broadcast helicopter, on its way to capture scenes of starvation and violence for the titillation of people watching safely at home.

I still couldn’t grasp what was happening. Even if there was no relief from abroad, people wouldn’t have to risk their lives to steal food if the rest of the country pitched in to gather supplies and distribute them equally. It wasn’t as if Japan was facing a food shortage like the one Okada always warned us about.

The little tent village in front of our house was gone. Probably they had given up trying to survive here and had pushed on toward Nagano. But people kept trudging in from the direction of Kofu.

The news showed rescue teams reaching emergency shelters on the outskirts of Tokyo. Now the death toll was five thousand. That didn’t mean five thousand had died, it was just the number confirmed. There was nothing said about the breakdown of order and the shortage of food.

I set out for another day of security duty. When I reached my post and got out of the car, I heard a strange, high-pitched mewling that sounded like an animal in distress. Late at night, when footsteps sounded on the road outside our house, Siesta had often whimpered like this.

The sound seemed to be coming from a cabbage patch by the road. I crept closer. Someone, probably the fire brigade, had dug a deep pit a few feet off the road. I peered over the edge. A man and a woman, clad in blood-soaked T-shirts and jeans, lay at the bottom. They were impaled on sharpened bamboo stakes.

A booby trap. Who could have done such a thing? A pit of sharpened stakes in the middle of a cabbage patch?