The Future Is Japanese (36 page)

Benes woke up to the sound of tapping at the window and jumped out of bed. It was already light outside.

“Kanaan?”

Benes went outside and found a rucksack by the windowsill.

Opening it, she cried, “Kanaan—why?”

The girl looked up at the sky, sensing where her dear friend had gone.

The photographs clutched in her hand fell at her feet.

Tears streamed down her cheeks.

“Why did you have to go? You just got back …”

Kanaan’s breathing was labored. The right wing was nearly completely torn in two.
Will I make it?

He felt a kind of affection for the two worlds he’d left behind.

But the world Kanaan wanted to glimpse began here in this rarefied air.

Climb higher and farther. Reach for the skies—for the stars.

The sky was no longer blue.

Countless stars sparkled in the violet-colored world.

Kanaan spotted one star that flickered a different color than the rest. Maybe it was his imagination. Nevertheless, adjusting the angle of the wings, Kanaan rode the fading current and ascended toward the pulsating glow.

Miss Sato left the hostage compound. Her liaison was waiting in a rusty Toyota pickup.

Miss Sato’s guide in Tsushima was the star reporter of a local broadsheet called
Truth Dawn
. Yoshida was a gangling twenty-two-year-old with a broad bamboo hat, a dirty undershirt, cargo shorts, Brazilian flip-flop sandals, and a pet terrier.

Yoshida helped Miss Sato into the back of the truck as the frisky dog barked a greeting. “So, how’s the old woman doing?”

“The ‘old woman’ looks twenty years older from her sufferings,” Miss Sato declared. She knotted a scarf on her head and grabbed the pickup’s roll bar. “She used to look so pretty on television. I campaigned for Mrs. Mieko Nagai, you know. That was part of my political awakening.”

Yoshida removed his big conical hat, examined the bright autumn sky, thought better of the exposure to surveillance, and put the hat back on. “You campaigned for the hostage? That’s an interesting angle to your story.”

The Toyota jounced along the crumbling roadbed. Miss Sato and Yoshida had to ride standing because a bulky Russian antiaircraft gun took up most of the room in the truck bed.

This rugged Russian gun had arrived on Tsushima with two Russians, bored young mercenaries from Kamchatka. Bumper stickers on their truck made the absurd claim that Tsushima was a Russian island, but since the stickers were in Cyrillic, nobody noticed or cared.

Yoshida spoke up over his terrier’s excited yapping. “I hope you assured Mrs. Nagai that my newspaper’s party line is firmly against hostage-taking. Mrs. Nagai does read my work, right?
Truth Dawn
offers free subscriptions to all political prisoners.”

“Where are we going?” Miss Sato hedged. She had seen a land-mine crater scarring the road ahead.

Miss Sato had experienced close calls on Tsushima, but thanks to due caution and her steady alertness, she had never been blown up. Miss Sato had learned to read the wreckage on Tsushima the way one might read tea leaves. The neat round holes in roofs and walls were American naval artillery. The shattered palm trees and big dirt craters were aircraft bombs from the mainland provisional government. All the other bombs had been built and exploded on Tsushima itself.

The pirate island of Tsushima had wireless belt-bombs and miniature pocket grenades. Tsushima had head-breaker cell-phone bombs. Leg-breaker land mines. Car-breaker bike bombs. House-breaker car bombs. Every once in a while, in particular fits of malignant frenzy, Tsushima had truck bombs that could demolish a city block.

The center of this story, the Gojira of this transformation, was “The Bomb.” That half-forgotten monster of Japanese history, “The Bomb.” “The Bomb” had entirely smashed Tokyo. “The Bomb” remade Japanese history. Even when The Bomb was just a crude, barely ballistic, North Korean bomb.

With Tokyo in ruins from the North Korean sneak attack, Nagoya became the emergency center of southern Japan. Northern Japan rallied around Sapporo. In the chaos, the obscure rural island of Tsushima had been abandoned to its own devices. Its esoteric, electronic devices.

The first pirates to settle in Tsushima came from North Korea. These wretches were starving North Korean refugees, Asia’s latest boat people, fleeing the vast, searing, vengeful blast zones of the many American hydrogen bombs. The North Korean refugees had quickly overwhelmed what passed for law and order on the sleepy little tourist island.

In the wake of the Korean invasion came all of Asia’s waterborne criminals: Taiwanese arms dealers, South Korean drug merchants, and Hong Kong triads. Even the Russian mafia drifted south from the Kuril Islands. These network-savvy global marauders shared a single goal. They all came to rob Japan, a land without a government or a capital, the world’s richest and newest “failed state.”

The Americans observed this development with grave concern—because the Americans had already much seen the like in Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan, Columbia, Mexico, Pakistan, and Nigeria. “Boots on the ground” rarely triumphed against “global guerrillas.” The insurgents merely scattered, regrouped, and left their roadside bombs to kill soldiers.

The Americans, much overstretched in Korea, Iran, and elsewhere, could not invade and pacify the rugged pirate island of Tsushima. But the Americans did possess tremendous air power and precision satellite targeting. So the Americans pounded Tsushima. They pulverized the island’s harbors, bridges, power plants, and telecom towers.

A great and lasting silence and darkness descended on the island. A silence broken only by bombs.

That was what always impressed Miss Sato about her life in Tsushima: not the bombs, but that deep, lasting darkness. Mainland Japan was not dark. North Japan and South Japan had restored their shares of the broken power grid. Everyday life in post-atomic Japan was about as bright and busy as life in Argentina. But Tsushima was dark to its core.

Tsushima’s darkness was damp, dense, and mystical. No neon, no traffic. No electrical power, and no Internet. No light, no heat. No banks, no credit cards. No passports. The pirates of Tsushima were stateless, anarchic, gun-toting marauders from all over the world. They had no documents, no official identities. No marriage, no religion. No police and no priests. No running water. They didn’t even have clocks.

Tsushima was haunted by bombs and by a head-bending swoon of illegal narcotics. The ragged coasts swarmed with fast, small boats full of hard, scarred men of every shape, size, and language. They rushed ashore to raid the fat and peaceful coastal villages of Japan, and they ran off with anything and anyone they could grab.

Tsushima had newfangled global crimes that hadn’t been named yet. This was Miss Sato’s island of Tsushima. She spent much more of her life here than she ever did in her cheerless little relief office in Nagoya.

“So, what can you tell me,” said Miss Sato to Yoshida, as the war-truck squeaked and rattled, “about a blind man, some kind of pilgrim or gambler, who visits the Mechatronic Visionary Centre?”

“Oh, that poor old guy’s not news to anybody.” Yoshida grabbed the rusty roll bar welded to the Toyota’s roof. “He’s like the Mechatronic janitor. They let him in and out because he’s blind and he can’t steal the precious hardware stored there. He used to live in there, before the Tokyo Bomb.”

Miss Sato grew alert at this intelligence. “What kind of role did he have in that laboratory?”

“The role of some helpless blind man, I guess,” Yoshida said with a shrug. “That ‘Visionary Centre’ was supposed to be the research lab for a Japanese camera company. We all knew that was just the cover story. So many weird people coming in and out of that place … Foreign scientists, the military, politicians, bankers … spies, yakuza gangsters. They were up to no good in there, and every weekend, we Tsushima people had to get them drunk and find them women. And we did that for them too. But was that news story ever in the mainland Japanese media? Never! Not at all! Not one word!”

“The women’s movement knew about the military lab on Tsushima,” Miss Sato objected. “We women were aware that the Japanese Self-Defense Forces were contravening the Constitution. They were reacting with covert violence to the pirate attacks on Japanese shipping in Somalia. They used offshore, deniable proxies.”

Yoshida scowled. “That’s the problem with you peacenik feminists: you have no ideological insight! Pirate, anti-pirate, that is just pure dialectic! A covert War on Terror is the same as the Terror itself. It all becomes the same in the long run! Once you abandon the quest for social justice, it just becomes a matter of market price.”

Miss Sato tactfully overlooked this Marxist tirade. “I’m sure your readers agree with you, so, then, may I ask, can you please introduce me to this Zeta One? I need to talk to him. Mrs. Nagai says that whenever he visits the labs there, he always brings the hostages steamed buns and pickles. He can’t be that bad a person if he feels such pity for other human beings.”

Yoshida nodded impatiently, his bamboo hat wobbling. “Yes, I interviewed your Mrs. Nagai. You know what? She has Stockholm Syndrome. She’s gone crazy in her head.”

“It isn’t crazy that Mrs. Nagai sympathizes with her pirate oppressors.”

Yoshida bent down and unclipped his dog’s leash. “Yes it is. She’s in chains, but she spends all her time crying about pirates in prisons on the mainland! What a joke!”

“Mrs. Nagai wants to arrange a prisoner exchange. She wants to go home to her family. She wants all this mutual suffering to end. Tsushima should be at peace with Nagoya. We’re all Japanese, even if we have no capital city anymore.”

“Well, that’s just not going to happen,” said Yoshida, grinning with conviction. “If Nagoya ever released those pirates, they’d just jump back into their speedboats and seize more Nagoya politicians, just like they grabbed her. No government is that stupid—not even your sorry little emergency government.”

“It’s true that our hostage negotiations have progressed rather slowly to date,” said Miss Sato, restraining herself. “But progress might go very quickly if I could find an authority who could release Mrs. Nagai.”

“Forget that,” scoffed Yoshida. “If there was anyone in charge here, the Americans would kill him with a drone bomb. That’s what they always do.”

“Well, since this blind pirate is allowed inside the prison with the hostages, he must have some political influence. Maybe he can lead me to Khadra the Pirate Queen. I’ve received certain signals that Khadra the Pirate Queen would respond positively to my peace initiatives.”

“I can’t believe you’ve been in Tsushima this long and you still have such harebrained ideas,” Yoshida said. “Zeta One is useless! Half his head and both his eyes were blown off by a mobile-phone bomb. Zeta One is poor, he’s in rags, and he’s a drunk. Plus, he smells. And Khadra is not the ‘queen’ of anything. Nobody’s seen Khadra for months. She’d hiding or she’s dead. So, forget all about them. Zeta One is not a story, and today I got a hot new lead on a great story. We’re going to find a buried treasure today!”

The Toyota rambled past a motley mess of black-market shacks. These shabby hovels had been built to blow over, in storms, or fires, or car bombs, or drone strikes. The pirates who manned them looked just as makeshift and temporary as their shacks.

The Tsushima pirate shacks featured a great many cardboard signs, hand-daubed in English, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, even Tagalog, Malay, and Filipino. They offered the various products of a boat people’s theft-based economy.

Used clothing appeared in ragged heaps, with plenty of used Chinese shoes. Also beans, dried tofu, dried fish, bark, roots, seeds, fried insects, anything remotely edible: seaweed, boiled taro stems, acorns scrubbed with soap. Big “wood ear” mushrooms were growing from clear plastic bottles stuffed with wet sawdust.

Also, hand-forged bicycle parts, useless power tools all gone to bright red rust, handwoven bamboo baskets, rusty radish graters, little clay stoves with tall chimneys. Gloomy pirate molls and their ragged pirate children had some bundled stacks of fuel for sale: straw, reeds, and twigs.

Then, in bursts of relative prosperity, came whitewashed concrete-block hovels, which sold all kinds of things made from dismantled Japanese cars. These long-dead vehicles yielded chairs, big glass windows, mirrors, wire jewelry, engine-block anvils, and muffler oil lamps.

The truck began weaving back and forth uphill.

Gripping the Toyota’s roll bar in the crook of his bare arm, Yoshida unfolded a yellowing sheet of old-fashioned notebook graph paper. “You’re good at reading English, right? Kindly read this pirate treasure map for me.”

The folded graph paper held a map of the city of Tsushima, a modest village that stretched along the island’s eastern coastline. This fiendishly detailed diagram was spotted and dotted all over with bomb craters, skulls, and furious hand-scribbled notes in the English language.

“Maps are always so complicated,” said Miss Sato, squinting in dismay. “I can read some names of dead men and the dates when they died … This says ‘whacko,’ in English. Here it says ‘wacko,’ which is a different English spelling. Also, here it says ‘wako,’ but that word is in Japanese.”

“Yes, a computer-vision genius drew that map,” said Yoshida aloud, tapping the side of his close-cropped noggin under the hat. “Computer hackers love puns! When there’s no electricity, and their computers are all dead, programmers get touched in the head. My source used to snort Korean speed and stay up for days drawing this map. With nothing but paper and a pencil!”