MANCHUKUO 1987

YOSHIMI
Contents

FIRST: SUFFERING 4

SECOND: ORIGIN 67

THIRD: CESSATION 104

FOURTH: PATH 159

EPILOGUE: VANISHED INTO THE CLOUDS 216

 With blood running from his cut head, with his bowl broken and with his outer robe torn, the
venerable Angulimala went to the Blessed One. The Blessed One saw him coming in the distance and
told him: ‘Bear it, brahmin! Bear it, brahmin! You are experiencing here and now the result of deeds
because of which you might have been tortured in hell for many years, for many hundreds of years,
for many thousands of years.’
– Angulimala Sutta, Majjhima Nikāya
 FIRST: SUFFERING

A functioning police state needs no police.

- William S. Burroughs

1
For Keizo Munekata the morning began with the pain in his leg. He groaned his way out of sleep,
lying there on the futon in his underwear, and felt the fire catch, aware of it starting out at the right
side of his hip, a dull tickle, observing that it was coming from afar as if it were not part of him, as if
he were not wed to it, and then he followed it as it began to spread across tissue that for those first
few seconds only tingled as if he had slept on the limb badly, as if it would go away in a few quiet
moments; then with increasing tension he felt it coursing its way from his hip down his right thigh,
impressing itself deep into him, insisting, setting alight all the nerve endings it passed on its way
down to his knee, where it terminated in the usual final hateful flaring-up, which made him grunt
out loud and turn over in order to reduce the pressure, which put him face to face with the open
door to the balcony and the purple gromwell growing there, vivid flower petals blossoming up out of
their pots, waving in the breeze as if to remind him that it would be worth getting out of bed after all.
The pain was still with him. Grunting again he sat himself up, and he put his hands on his leg and
worked at it, massaging the flesh until it felt safe. Then tentatively Munekata reached for the
comfortable oak of his walking stick and took it, and with his other hand to the wall he eased his
body upward.
By then the pain had died down and become only a few brief murmurs of complaint from below.
He stretched himself, hearing the vertebrae in his neck crack, and with his stick walked over to the
balcony and the purple gromwell, both of them dressed in the glow of a brilliant morning sun, and
he went out onto it and felt the warmth upon his broad shoulders and chest and his sagging belly
and his thick arms and legs. He stood there and enjoyed it.
As he stretched he looked out at the town, first at his own surroundings, at Tenmei, the dour-
faced Japanese settler district, a fortress of angular wooden buildings lined up along narrow slanted
streets, which in regimented formation ran from the top of Stone Hill all the way to Showa Avenue,
the borderline. Downhill from there the town leapt into Yugongguan, the mess of Chinese shacks
and housing blocks, spires of bent and broken metal, corrugated iron and cracked and crumbling
rooftops, shattered arrangements of Qing-era tiles and weatherworn images of dragons and
phoenixes - and then from there it tumbled to the purity of the sea, where the water and the sun
kissed one another and melted together. Within the soft light of early morning he spied out over the
coast the unbroken glory of the horizon, marked only by the circling squawking silhouettes of the
gulls, a few lazy puffs of mid-summer cloud clinging to the blue abyssal sky, and a single navy ship
out there on its morning patrol, a squat gunmetal vessel with a 20mm anti-air cannon fore, taken
out so the sailors from the base could not only fill their patrol quota but only do some clandestine
fishing.
Neatly regimented Japanese Tenmei and the chaos of Chinese Yugongguan – together they made
Ryujin, a little port town on the underside of the Empire of Manchukuo, near the Korean peninsula
where the communists had just taken power; this little town where seven years ago he had come to
end his life, because from his point of view, back then, there had been little else left to do with it.
He thought these peacefully melancholic things to himself as he continued his stretching on the
balcony next to the flower, remembering faint impressions of things that had happened to him in
the ancient mists of the past, breathing in and out and moving, doing the best he could with his
aching muscles. It wasn’t quite what the Chinese called qigong but it was something similar. An old
kempei trick – making sure everything was awake, Arakawa would have said. He was getting fat but
not too fat. He wasn’t in bad health for someone as idle as he was, what was what Mrs. Tenma said
sometimes while she was cleaning, and she said as well that he should thank the heavenly sovereign
for his good fortune. He supposed she was right. The only exception was his leg and its nagging pain.
It gnawed at him as he exercised, reminding him of what he was. Munekata survived it as he had
survived everything else.
Afterwards he went back inside to the bedroom and to the wardrobe in the corner, finding for
himself a drab grey yukata and dressing himself and tying the sash tight. He then made his way down
the stairs, passing the portrait of the emperor – of Japan, the home islands, the real Empire, not the
geriatric Puyi, Emperor of Manchukuo, who he had been nominally sworn to during the Insurgency
but only for that time. He bowed to the portrait and in the dining room he proceeded to the
Buddha’s altar in the corner. He opened the cupboard beneath the altar and took out three joss
sticks and the lighter on the cabinet and he lit the joss sticks and he bowed before Amida Buddha,
repeating the Name to himself, praying for the enlightenment of all sentient beings and the
liberation of all life.
Then he went outside to the front door to collect today’s edition of the Ryujin Daily from the
porch at the front of his house, which in the narrowness of the street almost spilled out onto it,
almost overtook the precarious sloping road which cars could only inch along at best. An artificiality
– with its endless Chinese plains captured during the thirties Manchukuo was not Japan, the street
did not need to be cramped like a real Japanese street. Either it had been done so on purpose, in
order to make the settler-town more psychologically comfortable, or it was simply that the mass of
non-Japanese below, necessary for the town to function economically but unwelcome within its
limits, had over the years pushed up against it, made streets that weren’t actually that cramped
seem so, hemmed the Japanese in by their pressuring presence. He had heard both theories before,
over drinks. His theory was that the street was cramped because it was cramped and that that was
that.
Going back inside he made himself some rice congee for breakfast, using the cooker and adding
some pork, and he ate it while sat at the heated table, reading about the evolving situation in the
council where they were arguing over the racial pollution warning signs which still nobody had taken
down, which kept offending tourists from overseas, which officials from Shinkyo were warning
would undermine the ‘Manchuria Vacation 1988’ initiative. Shinji Aoba, that rascal, was writing in his
usual wry style that the whole thing would probably be cancelled within a handful of months anyway.
What use, he wrote in his column, would the Chinese Nationalists have for tourists coming to see
little Japanese display towns? And once you could have gotten locked up for writing things like that,
Munekata thought.
After finishing he cleaned his bowl and emptied out the rice cooker and checked his watch. He
went upstairs and trimmed his moustache and washed his face and changed again, because today
was Friday and he was required at the office. He replaced his yukata with the dark shade of his dress
uniform, red-banded cap and lieutenant’s markings on the collar, his belt fastened and his white
armband fixed around the right sleeve of his jacket. As a final touch he withdrew his sword from the
wardrobe, a factory-made shin-gunto, the metal of which was already beginning to lose its shine. He
looked at himself in the mirror and, satisfied, gathered his keys and his satchel and put his boots on
in the entryway, and locking the door behind him he went to work.
It was half past nine and the streets were quiet, with all the children already at school and all of
the Chinese street cleaners finished, and he ambled along tapping his stick along the pavement, by
now feeling a slight twinge from his leg but nothing more. It was a usual hot Manchukuoan
summer’s day, the sweat building up beneath his uniform, and he bought himself a bottle of water
from a vending machine and sipped at it as he went along. Mr. Mori, the deliveryman, went past on
his puttering moped, wobbling all the way up to Meiji Road. The gingko trees sat in their mountings
in the pavement still and pristine. A Honda car turned the corner going downhill towards the
Yugongguan frontier. All the neon signs were silent and the lanterns lining the roadsides were dull
and grey. Munekata crossed from the top of his road onto Cherry Blossom Lane, where a truck was
pulling up outside of Kaneda’s butcher’s shop, Chinese in straw hats clambering off and beginning to
lift up the steel door at its rear and unloading slabs of raw meat from the farms on the plains into
the shop’s waiting doorway. He went up Cherry Blossom and to the square which sat upon the top
of the hillside, alongside the wealthy settlers’ estates and the Stone Hill Temple, and he strode past
the pink chrysanthemums and the torii gate and to the central statue of Genichi Suda atop his horse
with sword drawn, and past that to the relative drabness of Government Building No. 4. Building No.
4 was not the white-granite grandeur of No. 1, the town hall, or No. 2, the faux-Heian style of the
Concordia Association branch office – the Concordia Association was the ruling party, a façade of
civilian officials who met dignitaries and drew foreign eyes away from the Japanese military, the
Kwantung, which really ran things and always had. The association had a splendid little palace, a
Japanese manor built to resemble the world of a millennium ago, with its pleasant garden and its
rain-shuttered guest hall and its Tang-style layered tile rooftops.
Government Building No. 4 was not as splendid as that. It was no symbol of the imperial state, or
at least not one that warranted showing off. It was merely a shabby red-brick place with a garden of
rhododendrons then in full bloom but slightly off colour, as if their brilliance had been sucked out of
them by the atmosphere of their surroundings, with the building’s worn exterior and barred-up
windows and old Private Sato reading his newspaper in the guardhouse that had a crack in the wall.
Munekata proceeded down the smooth concrete path and past the guardhouse. “Good morning,
private.” he said. His tunic half-unbuttoned and his face sweaty Sato moved his bulk, sitting up and
saluting. “At ease.” Munekata said. “Is the captain in?”
“No, sir.” Sato said, in that curt way soldiers talked when they had been caught relaxing and were
trying to make up for it. It was a forced kind of stiffness that didn’t quite work, that was visible upon
his face, tautness formed of anxiety. “Good, good.” Munekata said, letting him go. Sato slid down
into the chair again and picked up the newspaper and resumed relaxing. Munekata went through
the olive-coloured front door and into the reception area. Here Private Koyama – everyone called
her Miyuki, because she was a woman - was sat at her desk with the yellowed plastic phone, her
uniform loose and her cap on the table before her, a portrait of Puyi ignored at her back. “Good
morning, sir.” she said.
“Morning, private.” Munekata said. He passed her and went to his office, the last one in the
corridor, where the fan was noisily rattling away to itself upon a full half of the desk, where another
Puyi gazed down from a print of a painting of him in full dress uniform, uncertainly peering at
Munekata through his oversized spectacles. The bookcase with all of his military books and
documents and files, decades of work, was another quarter of the desk. The last portion of it was for
him, with a chair that was too big and his back to the window, which he always kept open in the
summer. He eased himself in and sat down and proceeded to have a nap. His dreams were of her
and of dancing. At lunchtime Miyuki woke him with a cup of oolong tea and his lunch, today katsu
curry from the ramen bar on the corner, and asked him how he was, and he yawned and said he was
fine.
There was no policework to be done anymore, not of the Kempeitai’s type, the old brutal secret
policeman’s gruesome remit, and he with his injured leg and his official commendation was even
more useless than the rest of them, and yet because of his years in the Survey Unit they paid him to
come and to sleep. Very few of the other kempei hung around the office now – they were busy
having affairs, or playing card games at the naval base, or involved in the kind of dirty business with
the anti-social organisations that old Ishihara had tried to pry at. Some days he used the time to do
his other work, to make money privately with little detective jobs, but more and more often he came
in and he slept or read a book or practiced his calligraphy, waiting to go home and to see her or to
get drunk or both.
After finishing his lunch he went for a walk about the building, through the meeting room with its
dusty varnished wooden table and on the wall the grand map of Manchukuo, the last colony of the
Japanese Empire painted in stark deep yellow, alarming and urgent, impressing itself upon what had
once been China’s three northern provinces, where in 1931 the settlers had first started to come in
bulk and then had never stopped coming. At the bottom of this map was Ryujin, far too small to be
labelled but labelled anyway, because that was the vanity of every little settler town, he supposed.
Munekata hobbled past it, stick clacking on the floorboards, and took the stairs up to the roof and
the garden there, where Sergeant Yagami grew his vegetables and several of the other kempei hung
up their dirty clothes to dry. From here, touched by the breeze, with the ocean one way and the
railway line surrounded by farmland the other, he could look down and see the yard at the rear of
the building, with its concrete floor and chainlink fence, and the two half-tracks with their 40mm
cannons unfired in decades or perhaps never fired at all. The national flag of Manchukuo and the
national flag of Japan stood together on a flagpole reaching just over the roof, moving limply in a
feeble wind. He went for a cigarette only to find there were none in his pocket – he was trying to
quit, he remembered. He sighed and looked out away from the sea, across the other side of Tenmei
– and to the suggestion beyond of the plains, the endless plains of Manchukuo.
When he came back downstairs Miyuki and Yagami were bringing something in from outside,
carrying it on a reinforced steel gurney, the overlarge, bearded Yagami on one side and tiny Miyuki
on the other, struggling to keep up with the pace of his thick legs. “Oh!” Miyuki said, seeing
Munekata. Yagami stopped too and almost saluted, but then he seemed to realise he was holding
one end of a gurney and didn’t. “Sir!” he said, in his thick settler’s accent, not really Japanese but
touched by the rolled r sounds of northern Chinese, or erhua, a betrayal of the race that had seeped
in over the decades. “We were just taking this inside, sir!” he reported.
“We thought you’d like to have a look at it, sir.” Miyuki said. Munekata peered around Yagami
and saw what was upon the gurney. It was a suit. It lay there empty and still, black reinforced steel
armour plating all across the body and limbs, a body thicker and heavier-set than anything human, a
steel coffin shaped loosely like a man. Beneath the armour the lightweight steel frame lined with
Prussian hydraulics, powered by the electric engine in the backpack, would support the user’s
muscles, making them faster, stronger, harder to kill.
He knew this. He knew the layer worn beneath the armour, grey fabric tight against the skin, and
he knew the feeling of all that metal pressing against him from without, and he knew better than his
own face the ballistic mask with the convex shape for deflecting bullets outward, the mask that they
had always tried to avoid wearing outside of combat because it gave out sweat rashes like nothing
else. A special attack suit - a Mark III just like his. He edged around Yagami, studying it, affecting a
kind of calm. But he was aware his fingers were slightly too tense upon his stick.
“Interesting.” he said eventually. “Where did you find this?”
“It’s a contribution from Colonel Mishima’s family.” Miyuki said. “Sir. His own uniform, sir.”
Munekata put a hand to the chest. It was as hard and cold and the thick gloves and the heavy iron-
tipped boots were just as his had been. He chuckled. “Well, you’d better put in in a case.” he said.
“You wore one, didn’t you?” Yagami asked.
“We used to field dozens of them at once.” Munekata said. “They’re too expensive now, mostly. I
believe the Kwantung have several units that use one or two of them, and there’s a few in the
Imperial formations up north near the Soviet border.” He paused, thinking. “But not like this. The old
Survey Unit style. Something only fit for a museum.” He looked at his hand and at the suit’s, the
black gauntlet ready to grasp. He shrugged. “You might as well put it on display. It certainly looks
striking.”
“Yes, sir.” Miyuki said, her eyes wide, nodding to him. “It does look cool. You guys really were
amazing!”
“Yes.” Munekata said, leaning on his walking stick. “We were.” Except for that there was no more
excitement that day. He enjoyed his afternoon nap and read some of his book, a history of the
British Empire by some mediocre Austrian, and he filled in some forms regarding a propaganda
operation the regular police were holding later that day that needed his approval, and he went
through the records of the candidates for the new seats on the town council which were still taking
place in four weeks’ time. And the day went by. When it was over as his shift came to a sleepy halt at
six he took himself back home, saying goodbye to Yagami and Miyuki, who were assembling the
special attack suit within a glass case in the lobby, affixing its parts to a mannequin they’d gotten
from somewhere, and he received a perfunctory salute from Private Sato in the doorway, who had
been reading a manga and drinking tea in his booth, and who went right back to it as soon as
Munekata was past him.
He walked back home, amongst schoolchildren crossing streets heading back themselves,
teenagers and middle schoolers and small children all, talking in happy voices, running and playing
together under the guns of the policemen, who barked orders in kyowa-go or xieheyu, “harmony
language”, the hated Chinese-Japanese pidgin, imperial language of command. The Manchukuoan
police were often Chinese, men of limited means and talent who had been trained in the imperial
way and who were still were not allowed to live here, who watched stoically, with their helmets low
over their eyes. If they ever faltered, there would be the Imperial Army, and if the Imperial Army
ever faltered, if the Chinese were completely lost, there was the Kwantung Army, the last bastion of
Japanese rule.
There was no Kwantung garrison in Ryujin – the naval base had Imperial Japanese Navy troops –
but there was always the threat of them, always the shadow of the old China War hovering distant
but present over every moment of life. The sun was coming down, its vast blazing bulk cracking on
the horizon and leaking brilliant orange across the whole of the bay. Boats moved in the water,
fishing vessels returning to port. On his way back he passed a propaganda poster, the classic ‘two
brothers’ style, the flags of Japan and Manchukuo together as one inseparable whole, with a parade
of caricature pan-Asian children passing beneath.
He remembered when he had first arrived here finding something startling in it, in how little the
children of Manchukuo’s settler towns had resembled these images of perfect youth, chubby-faced
and gleeful and quiet, unlike the kids moving around him now in their western-style uniforms and
with their hair and shoes all done up in so many differing styles. Now even the propaganda images
of cherubic innocence themselves were falling out of fashion, replaced in many places by abstract
flags which suggested nothing. The two brothers were as obsolete as he was, in his stuffy Kempeitai
uniform and with his sword sheathed at his waist. He ambled along on his stick, studying faces he
knew, smiling at children whose parents he had seen as data in a file, black and white photographs
and political history and personal information stamped out in stark typewriter font. He knew more
about their parents than many of they themselves did – but the files for this generation were
sloppily kept, and the data wasn’t as important, and the organisation that oversaw them was dying.
There was no more energy left for those kinds of things.
He arrived home and paid homage to the Buddha once again and as well to the emperor’s black
and white picture, and he changed out of his kempei uniform, hanging it up pristinely, and took a
shower. When he was finished and dried and again in his casual yukata he put his sandals on and
went out into the garden and found the shed, where the portrait of his father mounted on the altar
waited among other bad and good memories he didn’t always want to look at, and he opened the
shed and ignored the suit upon the wall there and went to the altar set against the far wall, dusty
and dark, and prayed there.
The Buddha was inside the house – Munekata had never wanted to let his father be so close. But
for the shed the garden was empty, with only a token flowerbed as yet unseeded and a tiny concrete
wall with a door to the alleyway beyond, which snaked up and down the length of Victory Lane
connecting each house until it opened onto Showa Avenue, where sometimes older Japanese
ventured to smoke at the smoking station upon the edge of no man’s land, looking over at their
Chinese counterparts who squatted on their side of the road and played dice games in the dust.
Today there was a dog in the alleyway, wandering uphill; he heard the pitter-patter of its paws on
the stone.
Munekata left the garden and went back inside. He went now to the phone on the wall by the
fridge, where he had pinned a picture of her, in her favourite purple qipao which she never wore for
him if she could help it, scowling performatively at the camera and at a cameraman who wasn’t him.
He dialled her number. After twenty rings she answered. “What?” she snapped.
“Are we meeting tonight, Miss Takamori?” he asked.
 A pause followed. “I dunno, did you lose all your money at the mahjong table yet?” She laughed.
“Come on. Don’t try to bullshit me with your gentlemanly play-acting. Tonight is our night, and you
know exactly what that means, don’t you? Don’t you know what you’re asking for? Cat got your
tongue, you impotent bastard?”
“My apologies.”
“I hate men who can’t shoot straight.” she said. “The Golden Dragonfly good for you? Or we
could try a Chinese place.” Now it was his turn to pause. Hana tittered. “What? Sure, I get it. You’ll
screw a Chinese but you won’t drink with them. No problem, old man. I’ll see you at the Dragonfly at
eight.” She hung up. Munekata sighed, feeling the effort it took to replace the receiver. He
nevertheless went to the bedroom, to dress himself up for her, because he did want her to love him
and he hoped always that dressing the right way might make it happen. For a moment stood there in
his underwear he wanted to stay at home and work on his calligraphy or poetry instead, but he had
no heart for such things, really, and anyway with Hana it wasn’t a question of what he wanted. He
was compelled to see her, by what he could only assume was his own terrible karma.
He dressed in a plain grey shirt and tweed jacket and plaid trousers, and combed his hair back
and checked his moustache and applied a slight amount of aftershave, which she would hate. Going
out in this way he went through Tenmei and to Tiger Street, tapping his stick on the street, not
leaning on it too hard, for he was trying to avoid that sort of thing. He passed through the Friday
night crowds which were already filling up all of the places, the restaurants and teahouses and bars,
and found the Golden Dragonfly in its cul-de-sac halfway up the hill, its bright golden neon filling the
sky.
Whether with Yagami or once or twice Captain Tonegawa or sometimes with that foreign
businessman Mr. Burton who lived nearby, Munekata always came here. He remembered the old
days, when the yakuza had hung about its backrooms. Once two years ago, by chance, by wonderful
chance, he had met Hana here, and since then he had begun to see Burton and Yagami less and her
more and more, all of him consumed by her shadow, and now it was where they met, where the
ritual they enacted at least once a week came to pass.
Munekata went inside and sat down, Brother Wang giving him his usual. Against the bar’s old-
fashioned stately oak and bronze interior the crowd tonight was young, alive with American-style
sports clothes and glam costumes, and the music had been changed appropriately – no piano here
but the thump of some foreign pop, heavy synth that warbled on and on. Although the Popov family
owned and managed the Dragonfly and that novel by Chen Jintian had made it a superficially
interesting tourist site, it was Wang who kept it going with tricks like this – just by fiddling with the
lights and the music he could change the bar’s entire aesthetic, noting what day of the week and
time of year it was and figuring who would most likely need a drink at that moment, whether
Japanese businessmen and their Chinese partners or a party of expats from Germany or America or,
on rare occasions, teams of government workers from the provincial capital.
He was no magician. The places on Divine Wind Pier in the bay were livelier at the weekends, and
cheaper too, and there was Kuro, the respectable sake place up on Peace Lane – but Divine Wind
was through Yugongguan and Kuro was ten thousand yuan for a single bottle and so the Dragonfly
kept on thriving, and so Brother Wang had made it, was one of those Chinese that the Japanese told
themselves didn’t really count, a credit to his race and so on. He had been allowed into Tenmei for
work, just like the colonial policemen, but would never make it into settler society – there were
evermore Chinese in this position, pushing against the fragile walls of the Japanese bubble. And with
the anti-pollution ordinances finally gone-
Burton came in around seven, big bearded white man in jeans and t-shirt made for an earlier
version of himself, one less bloated by good Manchukuoan food and drink. He was enormous, six
foot three, and he saw Munekata and beamed with a grin to match his height. “Keizo!” he called.
“Good to see you!”
Munekata shifted on his seat. “John.” he said, picking his English up from the disused corner of
his brain it inhabited between these meetings. “Hello, my friend.”
 Burton pumped his hand hard, that aggressive foreign custom. His warmth was a fluorescent sign
suddenly plugged in. “Christ, but you’re a sight for sore eyes!” he said. “Been busy?”
“Ah, yes.” Munekata said. “Well-”
“Wonderful, mate.” Burton said. He gestured at Munekata’s empty glass. “Let me buy your next.”
Munekata allowed this, acceding to western customs, and drank his whiskey and talked, or rather let
Burton talk: the energetic man from England had been here for three years and still had not run out
of words. Munekata was glad for it, the chatter of the western business class who still lingered,
hesitant, around the Empire as it lay on its back, wondering if it might heave itself upwards for one
last shot at life. They were shut out by the tight-knit Japanese and outpaced by the frantic Chinese,
but they knew how to smile and talk and how to ignore unpleasantness and make money, and so
even now they were coming and going. Many of them were German or Austrian, Reichsbürger still
exploiting the old attitude of official indulgence. Outside of that a few British came to the Dragonfly,
and French Republican types, and there were Americans everywhere. Burton was British and of the
old Hong Kong school, a China Hand, as they said, and it was this that Munekata liked about him. He
gossiped like a Chinese.
Today it was the fallout from Korea, the deal for the Showa Steel Works the Americans were, in
their insolence, he said with a wink, considering going back on, and there were rumblings that
Kobayashi, the Minister of Finance disgraced for his yakuza links, was set to return anyway, to fix the
crisis unfurled by his successor’s attempts to devalue the yuan. Burton chattered and Munekata
nodded and listened, enjoying the information which would not come in the official newspapers, the
honour of being treated as an equal by a freewheeling businessman who had probably never killed
anyone, and as well the heat that came from the whiskey settling in his gut. Burton kept on and at
five to eight Munekata checked his watch, and at ten past eight he checked it again. “Something up,
pal?” Burton asked.
“It is only,” Munekata said, helpless, “I was going to meet someone tonight.”
Burton drank his gin. His white face - so open and easy in its giving away of feelings - widened.
“Oh.” he said. “Crikey. Well – sorry for bothering you.” His words were a little slurred now. He had
gone through three glasses. “Well.” he said. “I’ll leave you to it, Keizo, old boy. Give her one for me,
eh?” Munekata did not know what this meant but he thought about it and he realized and ashamed
he turned half-away, looking suddenly at the table. Burton only grinned. The foreigner settled the
bill and stumbled off, to go find another bar, to find another Japanese loosely affiliated with the
state to give drinks to, perhaps Hariyama from the Commercial Group, who came here sometimes to
leak things to the foreigners – Munekata could not help thinking like this sometimes, thinking that
he was being used, that he was alone, that everyone was his enemy. An imprint left upon the shape
of his thoughts by years upon years of enemies being everywhere. But not now, he reminded himself.
There were no more enemies. Manchukuo, this beleaguered colony, had earned itself a kind of
peace. All around were friends, he thought, and he had another shot of whiskey.
She arrived about ten minutes after Burton left, and Munekata knew it was on purpose that she
was late. She, short young woman with a mole beneath one eye and her hair tied back in a loose
ponytail and a thin, oval-shaped face that was very good at sneering, was wearing a man’s shirt
patterned with leaves, green upon beige, and a pair of frayed denim shorts that showed in their
tightness how flat and basically unexciting her figure was.
Her shoes were cheap Russian-made slip-on pumps and her socks were falling down and it was
exactly the kind of mid-effort outfit she went for with him, because she knew that he had no interest
in pretension but also, with a man’s typical simplicity, he wanted a woman to show some of her skin
to him. It was a style too young for her age, which he did not entirely know but she had told him was
twenty-seven. He wanted a teenage girl, she sometimes said cruelly, which wasn’t true – but then it
wasn’t true in the same way that many things in Manchukuo were not true.
“Hey, old man.” she said, sloping onto the stool next to him. “Pay up.” He did so, drawing two
thousand yuan from his wallet and giving it openly to her. She took it and stuffed it into her handbag.
“Thank you.” she said, holding onto his arm and squeezing him, letting her fingers suggest things
with the patterns they traced on his jacket sleeve. “You’re always so generous.” she said hatefully.
She spoke Japanese and she spoke it like the Young Prussians of the post-war years, gangster-style,
bullets fired at him as she stood in the open, not daring to avail herself of cover. She spoke it as if he,
for forcing her to do so, was dirt beneath her heel. “Anything for you, Miss Takamori.” he said in a
desperate voice.
“Yeah, yeah.” she said miserably. “Can it. You have a bad day today or something? You usually
don’t get so pathetic until like five drinks in.”
“I saw something that reminded me of an old comrade today.” he said. He coughed. “Well, not a
comrade. A coworker. But-” He stopped, looked at her, leant with her chin on her elbow and her
elbow on the bar, hunched-over. “Did I ever talk to you about the Insurgency? What I did during
those years.”
She yawned with exaggerated disinterest. “I don’t care. What was that, ten years ago? Twenty?
Nicht mein Problem.”
“Yes, you’re right.” he said. “It shouldn’t be. Let’s enjoy ourselves.”
She made a face. “You’d better.” And she hugged him so tight it hurt slightly and he started
talking to her about his day. Hana never cared. She listened to him and replied with politeness, now
that the money had changed hands. But she was professional enough to know that only the bare
minimum was necessary, and that he relished it, that bare minimum. He had learned that she slept
with other men sometimes but she was only so abusive and hateful to him, as a treat, and that was
at least attention and he was glad enough to get it. Hana Takamori wasn’t her real name and she
would never tell him what her real name was and he would never ask.
He knew that she was no Japanese even without that, even despite her very good accent which
did not carry incriminating traces of erhua or kyowa-go or any other inferior cultural contamination.
Her fake ID was obvious – her face was even moreso, at least to him. It was the type of case that he
had dealt with early on, before the Survey Unit and the Insurgency – was that it? Did this all come
from some prior encounter, some half-remembered meeting of colonial enforcer and colonial
subject floating in the collective unconscious? Or, he mused, telling her about a case he had worked
last month for a Japanese housewife who had wanted him to tail her cheating husband, wasn’t he
just a pervert, and didn’t that explain her contempt for him enough?
Still he savoured it. He became drunk, on the whiskey and on her superficial interest, and he told
her too much, about his youth, about before the Kempeitai, about his father and his hometown in
Japan and about all the usual things. She listened and replied with a Japanese attentiveness so
timely as to be better than Japanese, asking him the right questions, not even saying anything rude
much (but sometimes it came out and that was part of the act, too). He thought beneath the fog of
alcohol and of her that he was saying things he shouldn’t, sentimental nonsense, but he didn’t know,
and he thought of the younger recruits at the office who asked him about the plains so innocently
and he felt anger at those who would never know and he felt anger at her, this lying woman who
used him so well, and that anger melted inevitably into passion, and so by the end of the night he
couldn’t help but stare at her even as she stared back at him with open contempt, daring him to
keep on babbling about his childhood. He was drunk and she was fine. He knew – remembered from
the old days – lots of girls who liked to drink as to make what came after easier, but Hana never
chose that option. She was too smart, too comfortably in control of herself. He hoped that she
enjoyed it but he would always hope for that.
“Come on, come on.” she said, helping him from his stool, pressing his walking stick into his hand.
“You old fart.”
He had dreamt once of dancing with her. It had come to him months ago, the fantasy, more
vulgar than anything else, and it wouldn’t go away: he in his finest dress uniform, with a leg that
worked, and she resplendent in a western-style gown of vivid red and white garlanded with flowers,
pink roses, and he took her gloved hand and raised it to his lips and kissed it, and held her in the
middle of the ballroom, an arm about her waist, and to the gentle rhythm of the band’s Viennese
waltz they moved as one across the floor, steps in time, their every motion matched, mirrored by
the other, her slightness and his overgrown bulk, the killer and the victim united in a moment
without blame or forgiveness, a space like a vacuum in which good and evil and cause and effect and
all the ever-flowing forces of karma no longer existed, her smile, confident but not arrogant, as her
narrow eyes met his and she refused to look away, to leave him to the mercy of the rest of the world,
and he took refuge in their flow, in their togetherness, and clasped her hand within his and knew
with the perfection of his stride and hers in unity with his that he would never feel more complete
than in this perfect moment of harmony.
“Ah, really?” she said, sweaty atop him in the dark of her room at the guest house, her skinny
body taut, the silver of the necklace she wore glistening. She leant down. Munekata was empty,
staring up at something unreal. “You know,” she said, “you don’t get to do it again just because you
came early.”
“I know.” he said, breathing. She laughed, the most beautiful sound in the world, and kissed him
on the forehead. “Mein alter Hund.” The pendant of her necklace which was cold and hard touched
his front. “If you’d paid a little more I might have let you go again.” she said in her fakest voice.
“Remember that next time.” He wanted to ask what she did with the money. He didn’t. She
detached herself from him, peeling the condom ruthlessly from his cock and tying it and placing it in
a tissue as if she were a worker handling some awful mechanical discharge on a factory line, and she
fell in beside him, hugging him, and for a few seconds it really was fine.
He left her around one in the morning, taking a taxi that Mrs. Abe who ran the guest house
always knew to get for the men who stayed with the girls on the second floor, and drunk and
showered and still with his body aching for her he was taken home. On his walking stick he
staggered up the path and inside, and didn’t face the Buddha or the emperor but went straight
upstairs and fell into his futon and lay there until morning, when his aching leg woke him once more.
 2
It was a problem for Sachiko and that meant it was a problem for Mizuki. Mr. Hagiwara stood
stiffly waiting and no voice answered his call and, with no other choice, the whole class waited with
him. Dust motes lit up gold by the morning sun as it crept in through the windows floated in the air
and drifted through the room, across scratched and faded wooden desks, past shelves of old
textbooks that stank of age, by Mr. Hagiwara’s parchment-dry face studying the assembled students
with serene disappointment, and then at the farthest point in their journey, just before the door to
the corridor and to freedom, finally the last few wandering specks came to a leisurely halt on
Sachiko’s desk, the only one in the room without a student sat behind it waiting. Mr. Hagiwara
cleared his throat. “Sachiko Suzuki!” he called. No reply came. He blinked, peering around the room.
“Sachiko Suzuki!” He coughed. “Very well.”
His voice was quiet, thin as the lone first note of some ancient koto performance ringing out in
the quiet of a summer night. “Absent once more.” he said in a detached sort of way, clicking his
tongue as though Sachiko’s absence was a lamentable piece of gossip he had just overhead in the
staffroom. He went through the rest of the class list while Mizuki in her chair by the window stared
at the doorway, still waiting, the only student still waiting by now. Everyone else would already have
forgotten, or would have decided that it was just Suzuki doing her thing again, and that Hagiwara
would beat her with his stick as he always did and that she would as always deserve it. Only Mizuki
held out hope.
Mr. Hagiwara bid them to pray to the old photograph of the emperor of Manchukuo on the wall,
which they did, and then to the portrait of the emperor of Japan next to him, which they did, and
then to pray in the direction of Japan, which they did, and then then to stand for the national
anthem, and they dutifully turned to the national flag next to their emperors and began in time with
the crackle of Hagiwara’s old Mitsubishi record player, which could barely manage the lilting notes of
the forties-era recording, sounding to break down halfway through the first verse.
Not a single student actually sang, all just mouthing, except for Mizuki, because that was her
responsibility as well, and because she loved that beautiful song with all her heart – after the second
verse Hagiwara snapped round. “Sing!” he insisted feebly, and the class reluctantly joined in with her,
all glowering, their voices heavy with disdain. Mizuki kept her tone clear and true, standing straight
as she knew she must. Then he told her to give the class the morning announcements and she stood
in front of them, all those bored faces, and talked about the upcoming festival arrangements and the
roster for cleaning duty next week and the award given to the Military Drill Club for their
performance at the Provincial Championship of which their own Shigeru Terukichi had played a key
part, a cue for them all to applaud. She ended the morning announcements with the customary
“may the emperor reign for ten thousand years!” and the chorus was feeble but enough for
Hagiwara, for today, and so then they were allowed to go to class.
Sachiko was outside waiting at the corridor to the history classrooms, and she swerved out of
nowhere into Mizuki and Mizuki was surprised but not much. Today she wore a t-shirt instead of her
blouse and had finished dying the rest of her hair red, which was subversive and worthy of reporting
to the class representative except the class representative was Mizuki. “Hallo.” Sachiko said, grinning,
hands behind her back, slightly pretty short-haired Sachiko who was growing up faster than the
other girls, defying all that was good and honest and Japanese by her insistence on loudness and
confidence and pride in herself. Sachiko who was thin and athletic and Mizuki who was dour and
stocky, who would not lose weight no matter how hard her father slapped her for eating too much
at dinner. Sachiko who knew how to smile, whose face was always open to visitors, and Mizuki,
whose long hair hung in a curtain over her forehead, for her to retreat behind when other people
became too much. Sachiko stuck her tongue out. “Did you miss me?” she asked.
“Sachiko!” Mizuki did not grab her by the sleeve of her jacket but felt very much like doing so.
“Where were you just now?” she did not demand but politely inquired.
“I was here,” Sachiko said, “waiting for you.” Mizuki grabbed her after all, and dragged her down
the corridor through the flowing rivers of students, and Sachiko as usual let herself be dragged. “I
just figured that if I was late again that bastard Hagiwara would beat the hell out of me,” she said in
a voice so full of sloth it made Mizuki almost shiver with anger, “so I decided to no-show.”
“Please, don’t speak so uncouthly.” Mizuki said. She pulled Sachiko across the corridor to their
Maths classroom. Sachiko, a smug ragdoll, went with her. “And he will punish you for it later.”
Mizuki turned her around, looked her friend in the eye. “He’ll punish me, Sachiko.” she pleaded.
Sachiko scratched at her neck. “Alright, alright. I’ll go say sorry. I’ll tell him it’s my fault, and that
I’m not good enough to kiss the ground you walk on. I’ll shave my head and retire to a convent and
chant the name of the Buddha every day. Happy?” Mizuki sighed. She did not smile but wanted to;
she felt that tug of affection which had begun to trouble her, that phantom sensation that made
everything Sachiko did forgivable. She shook her head and pulled Sachiko into the classroom and
they found their seats just as Mrs. Akiyama came in, and they were next to one another, and
ignoring what anybody else might have been saying they survived the class together. As always – as
always, Mizuki would have to promise Mr. Hagiwara that Sachiko would improve, that she’d start
taking things seriously, that tomorrow would be better, and as always it would be a lie.
Sometimes Sachiko tried and sometimes she didn’t. It was all the other class representatives
talked about, and it was what her parents worried over: that Mizuki Tachibana, star pupil and
Concordia Youth League prodigy, was going to the lowest, coldest level of hell over her useless
friend from the cursed Suzuki family. But together they survived maths class and science and poetry,
and then in PE, Mizuki at the head of a formation doing drill, a little out of breath too early but
keeping up appearances for everyone else, the other girls giggling at how her belly stuck out over
her shorts, Sachiko was her best and brightest trooper, and in German class Sachiko helped her out
with her grammar and in politics Mizuki gave Sachiko the answers to the questions on the ideology
of the Co-Prosperity Sphere and when she nearly fell asleep Mizuki kicked her lightly under the desk
just in time for a question about the three key roles of the Kwantung Army in local administration,
which would be obsolete by the end of the year but for now still had to be memorized and repeated
and faithfully recorded.
After school they sat down outside the courtyard, looking at the statue of Admiral Yamamoto,
who had never had anything to do with Ryujin but, to the students of an all-Japanese school, one
that sent the sons and daughters of the imperial homeland straight into the Concordia Association or
the Kwantung Army, was a useful political gesture. Anyway he made a dashing figure, stood there
next to a stylized impression of his aircraft carrier as if it were a noble steed. The Akagi, Mizuki
recalled. Another fact that would never leave her head, another piece of information that Sachiko
kept telling her would soon mean nothing. They were sat upon the stone steps near the grass,
dozens of other pupils passing by, going to and from classes, clubs, meetings with teachers, all the
things that were important and had to be done. Everyone said Mizuki would one day have a great
future even after the end of the world that was coming up. No one said that about Sachiko. Sachiko
sat there slurping at an ice lolly she’d bought, her face as always tense after a hard day of learning.
Mizuki looked at her and then at her hands.
A group of other girls came over – Tonegawa from 11B was at the head of them. “Hey,
Tachibana!” Tonegawa said with the strict clipped tone of a military instructor, how all the best
settler children talked. “Are you coming tonight?”
“Of course.” Mizuki said. “I understand we have a lot of work to do before the festival.”
“We do!” Tonegawa, beautiful battleship-sharp girl, long hair and an elegant pale face like a
perfect doll, her gentle features reflecting the beauty of an age gone by, narrowed her eyes. “Is the
activity list finalised?”
“Minato and I have finished it, yes.” Mizuki said. “We can present it later. I gave my notes to him,
so if you have any questions before the presentation please make sure to ask him. He can give you a
more detailed answer.”
Tonegawa surveyed her, studied her and evaluated her, sorted her – the Mizuki of today, who
was a different case entirely to the Mizuki of yesterday, or of a week ago. Tonegawa filled in a form
rating today’s Mizuki against the prior instances of Mizuki, to be put away in a great cabinet in her
mind that had every version of every one of her classmates to be rated day by day, for knowing
where one stood in relation to others, and where and how high others were in relation to herself
based on their daily performance, which was the baseline upon which civilised society functioned.
Mizuki sat patiently not doing anything. Tonegawa’s frown lessened slightly. “Very well.” she said.
“What about the budget?”
“Mr. Hagiwara said it would be fine for an increase this year,” Mizuki offered, a pitch-perfect
sentence, “given the extreme circumstances.”
“Right.” Tonegawa said. “Anyway, see you later, Tachibana. Make sure you’re there, okay?”
“Don’t play hooky.” Tonegawa’s friend Kamina said, giggling.
“Come on.” Tonegawa said. “Tachibana’s not some dirty disharmonious element, is she? She
comes from a good family, doesn’t she? We can trust her.” Briefly Tonegawa looked to Sachiko, ugly
smile flitting across her splendid narrow lips. She sniffed. “See you later, Tachibana.” she said.
“Goodbye.” They left. For a few seconds there was silence. Pieces of Sachiko’s ice lolly dripped
onto the stone. Mizuki turned to her. “Look-”
“Hey, don’t go to that bullshit tonight.” Sachiko said. She was looking away at some point over
Admiral Yamamoto’s head, at a thing within the orange of the falling dusk that only she could see.
Mizuki chewed her lip. Sachiko tensed, her whole frame tightening with the effort of some internal
battle which played out silently through her posture. Her lolly continued to melt. “Come out with me,
okay?” she pleaded.
“Sachiko-” The lolly fell to the steps, landing there in a puddle of itself. Sachiko had taken her
hand and was holding onto it tight. Her face was grim. “You said Minato has your notes.” she said.
“He’ll be fine. Tell them you’re sick. Play hooky with me.”
Mizuki felt the warmth of Sachiko’s hand around her own. The curious sensation of their skin
making contact, like an electric shock that was perpetual, that stirred something within her biology
just as when Mr. Kubo had demonstrated how to make a dead squid’s tentacles move by pouring
soy sauce on them. Mizuki did not know what it was that stirred but she forced it down at once. “I
can’t.” she said too firmly. “You ask me this every week, and I told you, I can’t. Forgive me, but I’m a
class representative. I have responsibilities.”
Sachiko did not quite let go of Mizuki but for a moment her grip lessened. Mizuki hated this, for
some reason. “I get it.” Sachiko said. “Go make Tonegawa and Hagiwara and all those people happy.”
“It isn’t like that-”
“It is. It always is with you nowadays.”
Mizuki sighed. She squeezed Sachiko’s palm. “Where are you going tonight?”
“Divine Wind Pier.”
“Oh, Sachiko…”
“What?” Sachiko now finally freed herself, putting her hand on her lap. She was leant back away
from Mizuki. Her nostrils were flared. “Dirty Chinese, is that it?” she said. “Untermenschen. Not
beautiful at all. But at least they’re not always just fucking pretending like we are. Geez. Acting all
polite to that Tonegawa – you know what she says about you behind your back, right? About us.”
“Yes.” Mizuki said, a second too late. “I do.”
“So why do you put up with it?” Sachiko asked. A demand, Mizuki realized, not only of she but of
the whole school, the whole world. Mizuki wished there would be any other answer than the one
she would give, the one she had to give because it was true. “She’s my senior.” she said. As Mizuki
said this she was aware it explained everything but also that it would not work. Sachiko only crossed
her arms. She was frowning. “So?” she said.
“I should show respect to her.” Mizuki explained.
Now Sachiko sat up again. “Oh.” she said. “Respect! Just like when Hagiwara hits us with his stick,
bruising our backs and breaking our skin, and we have to bow and say thank you afterwards? You
mean like that?” She turned her head and spat into the grass. “Is that what you want one day? To be
a tyrant like him? Suffer now, so later you can treat people like animals too? Why don’t you hit me
with a stick as well? Why don’t you join the rest of them up in heaven already, huh?” Her face was
hard and dark and terrible. Her voice had fallen to a whisper. “Pouring shit on all of us losers down
here from up above with Tonegawa and the others. Getting the respect people will owe you one day
too. That’s all you want, isn’t it?”
“Please, watch your tone.” Mizuki mumbled. But Sachiko, roaring ahead, grabbed Mizuki by the
wrist. Mizuki shrank back, trapped by Sachiko’s stare. “Is that what you want?” Sachiko asked.
“No!” Mizuki said. Several other students looked over. She averted her eyes from them and only
found Sachiko, her friend. There was nothing else in the world. Here at the abyss Sachiko relented.
Her snarling mask fell apart, revealing only what she was, which was, Mizuki reminded herself, a girl
just like she, who was lonely just like she. “So come out with me.” she said. “Please.” She inhaled,
looking away. “I don’t want to stay at home tonight. Not with my mother.” And she had brought up
her family just as Tonegawa had, and by the queer rules of the game they played that meant she had
won.
The Suzuki house was up near Stone Hill Temple, that was the reason - Stone Hill Temple had
been one of the first areas in Tenmei where Chinese had been allowed to visit, allowed in under
armed escort to pray to the Buddha in groups of four to five while the official Chinese temple in
Yugongguan was being refurbished. During that first tentative relaxing of the anti-pollution
ordinances, Mizuki’s father had told her, sneeringly, taking great joy in the fact, Mr. Suzuki had
celebrated this great liberal change by bringing Chinese women to his house and paying them for
things best not discussed in polite company. Now he worked in the city, only coming home to sleep,
and his wife stayed at home and kept things slightly cleaner than if the house had been empty. She
drank, as well, and Sachiko did not like to be there when that happened.
Because of this, because of their iron loyalty forged by of years of companionship, because of
how it had felt when they had held hands just now, Mizuki agreed to meet Sachiko at Showa Avenue,
next to the police box on the corner of Chrysanthemum Street where the taxis came in the evening.
It was where they’d used to meet up as kids, on the edge of known space, just before the Chinese
district where their parents had always told them to never ever go alone. Never mind that, she told
herself. She was Mizuki Tachibana, the girl with the iron blouse, and to her face they all loved her
but only Sachiko really understood her, and she was full of shameful contempt for her peers and
their casual cruelty, the same cruelty everyone showed the whole Suzuki family for something that
had happened when Sachiko had been in primary school, for their dirty history that their only
daughter had nothing to do with. Mizuki’s anger was righteous and burned her and carrying it close
to her chest she went straight home and washed herself and gave a polite report of the day’s events
to her parents in their manor’s sitting room, and then after dinner she told them she would go to the
library later to study. Her father, busy at his desk in the corner, barely nodded. “Who with?” her
mother asked from the kitchen.
“Myself.” she replied.
“You’re not going to your society meeting?”
“I have to catch up with my homework.” She bowed her head. “I am very sorry, mother. I have
fallen behind with my history.”
“You were always so good at history.” her father said in a deliberate tone. She stiffened and
bowed further. He turned a page in the binder he was bent over. “Never mind it.” he said. He sipped
his sake. “You may go to study tonight.”
“Thank you, father.” she said. She went to her room and surveyed her wardrobe. But for her
uniform Mizuki had barely any of the fashionable American, German or Soviet styles – all foreign and
degenerate - that Sachiko would favour on a night like this. It was all traditional Japanese garb, with
several Chinese-style dresses for certain political events. She settled for her grey blouse from the
Youth Patrol meetings, with the badges and pins removed and the collar slightly open, and combined
it with a pencil skirt received once for the New Year but barely worn, with a tight belt to hold in her
belly, and with that a pair of black tights. She tied her hair back and undid the top button of her
blouse and in the mirror she almost looked casual. She didn’t wear make-up, for make-up was a
symbol of cultural pollution. Her silver birthday watch with the chrysanthemum pattern was
acceptable. It had come from her grandfather. Thusly dressed she looked in the mirror and saw only
a modern but not too modern Japanese female, who was too fat and had a little bit of hair on her
upper lip but nothing could be done about such things, and with her schoolbag over her shoulder so
that her parents would trust her Mizuki ventured out.
She met Sachiko on Showa Avenue as casually as if this was their routine, although really it had
been – what? She thought at least a few months had passed since their last meet-up after school,
which had been for tea-drinking on Cherry Blossom, which only one of them had enjoyed. Sachiko
was already there, in dark men’s trousers and a sports jacket patterned with Chinese dragons, leant
against a lamppost with her Walkman’s earphones in her ears. An anti-pollution sign – JAPANESE-
ONLY AREA CHINESE MUST SHOW PERMITS – was on the wall at her back. She wore thick red lipstick
the colour of blood and had rouge about her eyes and both matched her dyed hair. Mizuki despaired,
for she knew that although Sachiko was beautiful, no honourable Japanese man would want to date
a woman as loose in morals as she looked, and she wanted her good friend – her only real friend – to
be heading for a promising future too. But she also knew to conduct herself with dignity and to
never trample upon the feelings of others, so she greeted Sachiko with a gentle smile and a bow.
Sachiko grinned. She took out her earphones. “Wow. Look at you! I can almost see some skin there.
What happened, hey? Did your old man pass a law saying his daughter can have fun now?”
Mizuki pushed her fringe out of her eyes. “That isn’t funny.”
Sachiko pursed her lips. “No.” she said. A strange ice between them. A glass floor beneath their
feet. She made a noise that was half a forced chuckle. “I’m sorry. But still.” She slapped Mizuki on
the back and Mizuki flinched. “Let’s go have a good time!”
“Where are we going?” Mizuki asked, drawing her sword and facing the surging foe.
Sachiko thought for a moment, chewing her lip. “I told you.” she said. “Divine Wind. There’s some
cool places to hang out there.”
“Okay.” Mizuki had to say. They crossed the street and in doing so crossed over. She felt her
heart quicken. She saw the dismal quarters of the Chinese, their houses of worn, filthy brick and
their streets not only narrow but disorganised, their inelegance a reflection of the inferior minds of
their owners; uneven, patchwork roads moved in odd directions, jerking sharply away from
themselves where someone had built a garden or hammered together an extension or blocked off a
road with an illegal settlement, bamboo struts on everything and dust and dirt thick in the air, voices
crying out in Mandarin and other rough mushed-up tongues, bicycle bells and motorbike engines
and everything moving about her. A stench of diesel and of spice and of danger.
Sachiko moved onto Fortune Street, the main passageway through Yugongguan, with the old
Chinese buildings all set in decay, slums and shacks and wooden houses all bolted on to ancient
stone, every speck of public space crowded with open-air food stalls and restaurants and businesses
in alcoves and mobs of people who played games or read books or slept on the pavements and in
the roads. Sachiko navigated all this with confidence. Mizuki, aware of being an alien, clung to her
back.
All eyes were upon her, the many eyes of the shiftless Chinese, with their mean faces and simple
expressions, half-dressed and ragged, the men fierce beasts who strained and huffed as they walked
and the women strange narrow-eyed things watching from doorways cradling infants or working at
stoves or furnaces ungainly and filthy out in the street, looking up from their work to behold her.
There was no more opium, her father had said, but they were always looking for new drugs, were
always getting themselves high and drunk at the end of each day, always looking for fresh meat to
satisfy their cravings with. Mizuki didn’t know who she was or what she was doing.
She clasped her hands together and followed Sachiko downhill, letting the babble and noise wash
over her. Steam rose from cooking pots and rows of dead animals hung from racks in shop windows.
Metal signs crowded the air over their heads, characters she could read but that still were
uncomfortable to her glowing a million colours as they advertised dinner, alcohol, girls and radios
and televisions and fruit and vegetables and medicine and clothes. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Sachiko
said as a bike roared past them, the owner carrying six metal boxes on his back and beeping
frantically as he barrelled towards the harbour. Even without the anti-pollution ordinances no such
bikes would dare cross over the barrier into Tenmei, to incur the wrath of the police. Mizuki
wondered at their base nature, at how they could even tolerate such rudeness. “Yep.” Sachiko said.
“Beautiful.”
Mizuki swallowed. Sachiko held her, steered her away from a salesman with a stall of adult goods
which were horribly visible even in the fading daylight. “Come on, come on.” she said. They
descended further, past Chinese gods painted on the doors of houses and two-storey housing blocks
with red lanterns garlanded over the entrances, past restaurants that sold food from Canton to here,
advertised with yet more neon signs and girls outside dressed indecently gesturing them inward.
Mizuki glimpsed a short Chinese girl with a faded white dress that showed the narrow bumps of her
breasts, the bare skin of her chest peeking out over a frayed, frilled hem, and the girl smiled at her
and she trembled and turned away. Soon they had broken through to the bottom of Fortune Street
which then turned onto Harbour Road, which went south first to the market and the fishery and the
harbour and then past that, invisible from here, the long cliffside path to the naval base.
Before then was the entrance to Divine Wind, where the concrete pier long and wide went out
straight into the water and on either side of it were more places to drink and eat, lit up in all their
ramshackle glory by a forest of vibrant neon signs. More girls in both Chinese and western dress
moved like liquid, escorted by men or not escorted at all, and gangs of boys hung out in the street
and gentlemen in suits moved about with hunched shoulders and narrowed eyes. Mizuki had heard
this part of Ryujin many times, listening to the music and chatter drift up to Tenmei of a weekend
evening, but had not been down here for many years. She had snuck down with Sachiko before the
end of the anti-pollution ordinances to play on the beach but then her father had beaten her with a
belt and she had stopped doing such things, because she was a good citizen.
“Sachiko-” she began. Sachiko pulled her along. They passed a sushi restaurant and a western-
style sandwich place, as big as a car and with a scattering of plastic chairs outside, and a series of
booths that sold barbecue manned by Chinese who called to them in dirty voices, and went towards
a place with a sign labelled it ‘Sunshine’, a ramshackle place fronted by narrow heavily-barred
windows set in dirty wood, through which she saw, as they approached, a lot of different men and
women sat around western-style tables drinking beer. She paused. “Ah, Sachiko.” she murmured.
“They’re drinking alcohol.”
Sachiko paused for a moment. “Yeah. And?”
“We’re too young.” Mizuki said.
Sachiko thrust her forward. “No such thing!” she said, laughing. There was a man upon the door
in a suit and American cowboy hat, which made Mizuki nervous because she had heard from school
that the new types of Chinese gangsters dressed like that and Chinese gangsters didn’t have honour
like the old yakuza did but would do anything to anyone if they had the chance. Bearded and with
one ear pierced the man peered at them. Sachiko smiled at him and Mizuki tried to. With a buff arm
he waved them inside. The air was heavy with smoke, vibrating with the strum of a guitar from the
stage where a man played in the mist, kaleidoscopic lights moving lazily above.
Sachiko found a table near the door and put Mizuki down there and Mizuki stared up at her in
surprise, looking for help. “It’s okay.” Sachiko said. “I’ll just go get us some drinks. Try not to touch
anything.” She gave a smug little smirk, one made of plastic. “Or be touched by anyone.” Mizuki
looked about at her neighbours, three men playing cards with a bottle of whiskey and two women
talking about work in brutal Mandarin. She inched her chair away from them and turned back to find
Sachiko but the crowd was all that was there and she was alone.
Her father had once stopped her from drinking cola because it would only make her fatter. She
eyed the glasses of frothing beer on the table with the two women, the liquid within painted a
shimmering gold by the glare of the lighting above. People who drank alcohol, her father had said,
were failures who needed to hide from themselves, and it was true that he drank, but then if she
would ever have pointed this out he would have slapped her and nobody would have stopped him,
so she supposed he was not a failure. She swallowed, fingering the latch on her bag. The man on the
stage was playing a jaunty little tune and singing in a language which she didn’t understand. Mizuki
watched him, long-haired and in a t-shirt and shorts, trying to work out what he was, for she had
studied all of the racial science textbooks but never met anyone who wasn’t clearly Chinese or
Japanese or Korean. By the shape of his skull and his facial features she guessed he might have been
a Manchu, one of those who the Empire had been founded for, in order to protect them from Chiang
Kai-shek’s despotism all those decades ago.
At the back of the stage was a mural and upon the mural hidden by the lightning and the smoke
and various other decorations, faces and cartoons and scenes of endless rolling plains – she saw it
clearly for only a moment, heart skipping a beat – there was a miniature image showing the emblem
of the Communist Party, illegal to display on pain of life in prison, and below it a slogan written in
Chinese characters: DEATH TO THE JAPANESE INVADERS. She wondered if the Kempeitai knew about
this and if she should try to find a police officer to tell them. No! she said to herself, thinking that
Sachiko needed this and Sachiko needed her and it was good when Sachiko needed her. She stayed
in her seat and watched and listened, wondering if the lyrics were subversive too. It was strange, she
thought, how little words meant when you didn’t know what they meant.
Sachiko returned with two slim dark glass bottles of Asahi beer. “You think he’s handsome, right?”
she said, nodding to the singer on-stage, who smiled at her.
Mizuki looked away. “Sachiko!” The beer bottles hit the wood of the table with a decisive thud.
Mizuki stared down at them and at the murky liquid within. Sachiko sat down opposite her. “Do you
do this regularly?” Mizuki asked.
“Not all the time.” Sachiko said. “But sometimes. I’m not an idiot. I know how to take care of
myself.” Sachiko picked up her bottle. “C’mon. Cheers!”
“Cheers.” Mizuki said, raising her bottle very carefully. She put it to her mouth and lifted it, so
that gravity carried the liquid within downwards, its path inevitable, herself devoid of all
responsibility, and she saw it descend and felt it against her lips wet and cold and without thinking
she opened her mouth and let it inside. It was even colder as she drank it and it tasted foul and the
bubbles tickled her throat and she mustered all of her years of discipline all her long life of doing
things she did not want to and she kept on drinking until half of it was gone from the bottle. She only
stopped when she saw Sachiko looked at her bemused. “Mizu, come on.” she said. She laughed.
“You’re not supposed to drink all of it in one go!”
“Oh.” Mizuki said. She burped. Her head was swimming away from her. Her cheeks felt hot.
“Sorry.”
“For such an egghead, you really don’t know anything about the real world.” Sachiko said.
“I know that stuff like this is dangerous!” Mizuki protested.
Sachiko frowned. “Oh, please. What’s dangerous is getting sucked into that cult stuff at school.
You know, nobody outside of our settler-colonial enclave gives a shit about any of that patriotic
garbage they try to fill our heads with. Real people – people out here - they laugh at the emperor,
they don’t bow to his picture.”
“That’s treason!” Mizuki gasped.
Sachiko only grinned. “For like half a year, yeah.” she said. “So enjoy being outraged about
opinions like that while you can. After the handover it’ll be Jahr Null. A fresh start. Rats like Hagiwara
will be as powerless as old dead gods in their temples.”
“You can’t talk like that.” Mizuki picked up the beer. She drank more of it, trying not to spit it
back out, hoping whatever this was would keep coming. “You’re just trying to upset me.” she said,
feeling warm, too warm, all of a sudden. She put the bottle back down and it nearly fell, Sachiko
catching it. “Geez.” she said. “I’m not trying to upset you. And you’d better get yourself under
control. I don’t want you to make a bad impression on my other friends.”
“Other friends?” Mizuki asked. Sachiko said nothing but smirked and drank up. Mizuki saw them
then a few minutes later, coming over from across the room purposefully, and she saw that they
were Chinese, a boy and a girl. Her heart spasmed in her chest. The boy was tall and with a bowl
haircut, and wore a vest that showed off his muscled arms, and the girl was thin and pale and her
shabby Chinese school uniform, a faded green and white tracksuit, was too big for her. “This is Xu
Mei.” Sachiko said, gesturing to the girl. Then to the boy: “And this is Li Huangqi.” The boy had a
tattoo of a Buddha on his right bicep which quivered as he moved. He had a thin moustache over his
arrogant snarl of a mouth and his eyes sparkled down at her. “Hey, guys.” Sachiko said to them.
“This is Mizuki, my friend from school.”
Xu bowed, a clumsy imitation of the Japanese gesture. “Nice to meet you.”
“Yeah.” Li said, thumbing his nose. “She looks scared. Hey, wallflower. This your first time in a bar,
or something?” They spoke Japanese with Mandarin words shoved rudely into it, kyowa-go, which
was for servants and coolies, and Mizuki didn’t like it and their features had that particular kind of
Chinese idiocy to them she thought. They sat down, Li Huangqi enormous next to her and Xu Mei
tiny next to Sachiko but both already with large glasses of beer, soon talking animatedly with Sachiko
about school, about things in Yugongguan, and about politics, how the Americans were right to have
criticised the Japanese prime minister’s speech against foreign interference in Asian affairs, how the
communists were back in the villages again and the Second Insurgency hadn’t even worked, how the
economy was in the doldrums since the end of the War Against Korean Communism (but they called
it “the occupation of Korea”) and the loss of easy access to the markets there, which had hit Ryujin
hard, and countless other political lies alongside these, and about how Sachiko’s Chinese lessons
were coming along. Mizuki didn’t know Sachiko had been learning Chinese.
Helpless, crushed on all sides by the deafening noise from their conversations and the dozens
going on all around the bar and the music and the fighting voices within her own head, she took
refuge in the beer, drinking so she didn’t have to speak, and soon she had finished it. “Here.” Li
Huangqi said, handing her a fresh beer, a large 500ml glass full to the brim. She stared at it. He
smiled at her. “Since you’re enjoying yourself.”
She hated that. She hated him and could only think of terrible stories about Chinese men and
Japanese girls, about her father and about Sachiko’s father, who had shamed his family and violated
the principles of racial hygiene which had made Manchukuo harmonious - great and lofty principles,
her father said, that were being destroyed by liberals and communists who didn’t understand
anything. It was baffling to her that Sachiko, who she had played together with since they had been
little girls, could be so unfilial, to compound her father’s dishonour by her playing about with these
types of people in this type of place. Sachiko made a joke and Li Huangqi roared with laughter, his
muscle shaking, and Xu Mei, who was much quieter, tittered to herself and made a reply in Chinese
which Sachiko feigned outrage at. Mizuki hadn’t understood it. She drank up and the conversation
went on.
After a while she noticed Sachiko looking at her. “You tired, Mizu?” Sachiko asked.
“Can we talk?” Mizuki said. They excused themselves, leaving Li and Xu at the table and going
outside, onto the pier, onto blessed quiet or at least less noise. There were crowds of people coming
and going all around them. Mizuki blinked, trying to walk. “You looked really unhappy in there.”
Sachiko said quietly. “You were making them feel awkward. I think. I – I’m sorry. I really want you to
– I want you to be part of my life.”
“I am part of your life.” Mizuki said. She shook her head. “Every day, at school-”
“Are you?” Sachiko had that same grim expression from the school courtyard again and it was
there and Mizuki was aware she had done so much to banish it only to end up bringing it back, here
at the climax. She had chased Sachiko in a great pointless circle and only exhausted herself in the
process. “At school, yeah.” Sachiko said. “The golden student being held back by her idiot friend.
Sure. But these days you don’t ever see me after class, at the weekend. We never do anything
anymore. Are you ashamed of me, Mizuki?”
“No.” Mizuki said quickly. “No, I’m not. But I don’t like this. I don’t like it. They’re bad people.
They don’t talk properly.”
“They don’t talk properly?”
“We’re in danger.”
“Mizu.” Sachiko said pathetically. “They’re my friends.”
 Mizuki shook her head. “No, no.” She saw Sachiko there beneath the surging waves and made an
attempt to stick her hand through the gale, to reach into the water and rescue her. “Look.” she said
in her best class representative voice. “These friends of yours, they’re…nice, but they’re not our
people. We shouldn’t be here. We should just go and find somewhere to have tea. Or try on yukata.
Koto practice. Or something. This isn’t good, this isn’t right, this isn’t what good Japanese girls
should be-” Sachiko was holding her by the arm. Mizuki looked at her friend at her face which was so
pretty and such a good shape and beneath the dyed hair and the closed-off hostile expression she
tried to find something she recognised. “Look.” Sachiko said. A softness came over her and Mizuki
felt her heart quicken. People continued to stream by them, visitors old and young, all unfamiliar
faces, all making too much animal noise. “You’re a little drunk.” Sachiko said. “It’s okay. These are
our people. Kids like us. They’re good. They’re – okay, on the outside they’re different from us.
They’re different to you. You just need to give them a chance and you’ll see that we’re the same.
They could even teach you some Chinese, maybe.”
Mizuki thought about this, about speaking their language, about tattoos and Mandarin words and
squatting in the street and communist banners out in the villages. She shook her head again, hair in
her face. “No. These are subversives. They’ve put communist symbols on the walls in there. They’re
terrorists!”
Sachiko gripped her. “Mizu-”
“This isn’t harmonious. I’m going home.” Mizuki tore herself free. Sachiko looked at her. Mizuki’s
arm hurt now but she had her bag and she shouldered it. “You should too.”
Sachiko furrowed her brow. Now she stared at Mizuki, ran her down with her eyes. “I’m staying
here.” she said. “With my friends.” Mizuki turned and left her there, left all of them. She marched
back to Harbour Road and back into Yugongguan and upwards, so angry and confused and drunk –
yes, she was drunk, she was dirty and corrupted and the kind of loser her father had always warned
her about – that the thousand eyes of the Chinese and the rot and the dirt lit up by the red lanterns
overhead and all of the things she’d spent so long avoiding the filth of were no longer as terrifying as
they had been before.
All she could think about was Sachiko’s expression, that unhappy look of not even anger but
betrayal, which had appeared now for the first time in its full form but which had been there for so
long in fragments, slowly assembling, that grey, lost, taut face that Mizuki had always found time to
be concerned over but had never graduated to worrying about – tonight it had achieved its glorious
fullness. Years and years of Mizuki politely disagreeing with Hagiwara and with the principal and with
the council and even once with the men from the police station who were keeping an eye on the
Suzuki family, of course they were – all of that and now she found herself accused, by that staring
stone mask of a face, of betrayal.
She was furious at Sachiko for making her feel this guilt when it was completely undeserved,
furious because she hated to feel like this and to be seen this way, rushing through an ugly Chinese
street crying and sniffing, her feelings so vast she was unable to understand what they meant. She
walked and walked until her feet hurt, until she had crossed Showa Avenue and passed where they
had met up earlier when everything had been tense and electric and strange but also in its own way,
she thought, kind of pleasant too. She stood there imagining the phantom feelings of another night,
where they had drank together and been happy and merry and after, perhaps, two or three or four
beers they had come here again, walking back home, and their hands had interlinked in some new,
terrifying sort of way…
Quickly Mizuki moved on, and she went not back home but up towards Temple Street, where the
Suzuki estate still stood, below the hill upon which Stone Hill Temple rested with its hall of buddhas
and its troughs of burning incense which now would be silent waiting for the negative karma of the
townspeople to come flooding in again tomorrow. She walked now with righteous purpose.
It was deep into the night. Policemen on the corners stood to attention like statues of temple
gods judging her in eternal silence. Music rose from nearby Tiger Street, from the Golden Dragonfly
where her father liked to drink, where degeneracy grew like a cancer in the heart of the town, the
dark organ from which one day evil would rise and engulf everything just as it had the Suzuki family
and Sachiko and all of the non-Japanese world. Held back only by Japan, but Japan was abandoning
them, wasn’t it? They’d grown soft in the home islands, her father said scathingly, turned liberal, and
that was why they’d lost Korea to the communists and Taiwan to the traitors who had agreed to
neutrality and everywhere else too, everywhere but here – and now they would lose here, wouldn’t
they? No one dared to answer.
Under the stars Mizuki made her way to the Suzuki house, an old manor not dissimilar to her
family’s but much dirtier, with the wooden gate chipped and battered and the garden overgrown
and the waterwheel stopped mid-turn years ago. She waited at the gate. Her feet had turned to
concrete. She could see through a gap in the outer walls the windows, lit by lanterns hanging from
the roof tiles, where shapes moved beyond, that of Mrs. Suzuki and some houseguest. This was the
home broken by miscegenation, which Sachiko now had sullied again by her associating with
degenerate elements.
Mizuki trembled with indignation, livid at the thought of her friend. And yet she did not move, did
not ring the bell on the outer gate that would bring Mrs. Suzuki to her and allow her to return things
to a correct and proper course by explaining where Sachiko was and who she was with. Mizuki
waited there, useless, unable to go back and unable to proceed. The moon was high, a sliver of itself,
half-shrouded caught in the rooftops of the temple complex looming overhead. She paced about,
thinking of how Mrs. Suzuki was a woman prematurely greyed, always tired, who sat and listened
even when no one was talking. The idea of dropping another heavy burden upon Mrs. Suzuki’s
sagging shoulders was what was holding Mizuki back. It seemed an act of cruelty she could not stain
herself with, even if it was for a righteous cause.
She decided she would tell Hagiwara perhaps, and not about the political problems but simply
about the drinking, out of her concern for her friend, so that Sachiko would still be punished for her
selfishness but not too much. She breathed in and breathed out. At this time the temple was closed
but still she left the Suzuki house gate and went up the hill, to its gates, and stood outside and
bowed to the Buddha in his shuttered and then she set off home. Before going inside she bought
some mints from Seven-Eleven to cover her breath from the stench of alcohol just in case, and she
thought that was quite a Sachiko thing to do.
By the time she reached the house it was close to nine o’clock. She said a quick and unconvincing
hello to her parents and went upstairs to her room and lay there on her hard futon looking at the
portrait of the emperor on the wall half-obscured by the dark. Her heart pounded in her chest.
Downstairs her mother had put the evening news on and the newscaster’s sonorous voice came up
ghostly through the floorboards. Outside her window the trees moved in the breeze, waving to her
from behind the glass. A terrible feeling came to her and whatever it was, nameless and formless, it
suspended her there and she was trapped sweating beneath her sheets, thinking of her
grandfather’s stories about the war with China all those years ago. Spirits hovered over her head,
the ghosts of her ancestors buried in the Ryujin Cemetery. She could smell funeral incense just like
when her grandfather had died, after they had taken the old soldier’s ashes and put them in the
altar, after one of his old comrades, a withered man in Kwantung dress uniform, had read a poem
from Prince Shotaku in front of the gathered relatives and friends of Keigo Tachibana, who had once
met the old Kwantung leader Nobusuke Kishi during an early harmonisation campaign, who had
used to entertain Mizuki by taking her into Divine Wind amidst the Chinese, who back then hadn’t
dared to be on the main streets in the evenings. He had paid for the paper-play performers on the
promenade to tell her stories of wartime daring and adventure and she had listened with awe and
resolved to one day join the army and fight for Manchukuo herself.
Mizuki felt alone and small, an empty nothing within her covers. Her bookshelf was haunted by a
thing that watched her, that warned her of nightmares to come. One hour passed in this way. Finally
she closed her eyes and willed herself to sleep, forcing a kind of obedience from her flesh, and for a
moment she was unconscious. She saw Sachiko, little Sachiko aged ten when it had all been so
simple when their parents had been friends too because it hadn’t been a terrible social disgrace to
know the Suzuki family. Sachiko wore her bluebird-patterned yukata and her tiny sandals and she
was stood on Settlers’ Beach below everything, looking over her shoulder. Her mouth moved and
Mizuki couldn’t understand what she was saying because she herself was no little girl but only a
beast of ten thousand limbs, a wretched centipede, and she tried to reply but only gurgled and spat
at pure beautiful Sachiko and she had so much to say and yet that was all that came out. She heaved
and stretched, the sounds coming from her like a pounding, a heavy impact of something against
wood.
Mizuki realized it was against her own door and that she was no longer dreaming. “Mizuki.” her
father said. “Mizuki, are you awake?”
“Yes, father.”
“Where did you go tonight?”
“I went to the library, father.”
“Not out with that Suzuki girl?”
“No.”
“Mizuki.” her mother said. On the other side of the wood they both sounded so far away. She lay
there looking up at the emperor. “Mizuki, please get up.” her mother said. “We need to talk to you.
The police just called.”
“The police?” She already knew it, by that point, although she didn’t know what she knew. Her
mother stopped. She heard the inhalation that signified – had always signified - the preparation of
bad news for release. “It’s your friend.” her mother said. “The Suzuki girl. She’s come in from…from
Yugongguan tonight. To the police station. They said she had some trouble.”
“Some trouble?” Mizuki repeated, playing her part. Her hands were gripping the bedsheets. She
could feel her hundreds of limbs twitching. “She’s been attacked by one of them.” her father said.
“Those Chinese animals. They…a man has assaulted her.”
“Oh.” Mizuki said. Her parents kept on talking, kept on asking, but she was elsewhere. She had a
small twinge of pain and something like a horrible black happiness with it, an awareness that she
had been right, and then a tide of despair bowled her over, and she lay in her bed until her father
slid the door open and came in and demanded that she account for herself. Mizuki had no idea. She
didn’t talk no matter how many times he struck her. The emperor too was silent upon her wall.
 3
Munekata had no work the next day, no private clients and nothing he needed to be seen
pretending to be doing at the office, and so he woke at his usual time and went through his morning
routine and then took a trip to Stone Hill Temple, where he prayed long and hard, reciting the Name
a thousand times in the central hall, knelt on one of the pews with his head bowed and the beads
clasped between his hands. It was not enough – it was never enough, for nothing could wash the
stain of her from his brain.
But it was something. The Buddha didn’t look down on him in judgement but in serenity, with
infinite compassion, and he allowed himself to become lost in that compassion, to find a peace that
would at least hold until she came back to him later. The bell rang out from the eastern hall where
the monks were holding a service. Their chanting came to him clear and pure and beautiful, and he
let it touch him and then depart, focusing himself solely upon the Buddha’s golden image, upon the
syllables that left him without coming to his tongue. Sandalwood hung in the air and that was all –
he felt as if the aches of his body and his leg had left him, as if he himself was dissolving.
In the end, however, he needed to get back up, and as he did so his leg betrayed him and one of
the monks came over to see if he was okay. Suitably chastened, reminded of the limitations of his
flimsy mortal form in this world of desire and suffering, he decided once upright to go home, and he
said thank you to the monk and slipped several dozen yuan into the donation box in the central
courtyard and he made his way back. It was a clear, crisp day, full of that mundane flavour of beauty
which his communion had given him the capacity to appreciate, and he walked slowly, unbothered
by his limp, tapping his walking stick upon the pavement, watching people as they went by. It being
Saturday there were children in the street going to the playgrounds, and he ran into Yagami and his
daughter carried on his shoulders and she called him uncle and reached out for his nose and
Munekata leant forward and allowed her to tweak it and she giggled.
He got home in the afternoon to find a staff car parked outside. It was a sheer black Mitsubishi
with the Manchukuoan flag flying out front, stuffed inelegantly into the narrowness of the road, and
the windows were tinted dark and it was faintly absurd in this parochial street, this enormous
vehicle with all of its grand state authority. He looked at it and thought. The door was open and he
went inside, past the entryway where a pair of heavy military boots rested and into the dining room,
where Major Karashima was sat at the heated table sipping oolong tea, his jacket and hat upon the
stand but his shirt and trousers and his stiff posture all still plainly official.
“Good morning, lieutenant.” he said in his soft voice. His bare head shone in the sunlight. He was
a racially-pure, aristocratic home islander who now was in his fifties, the little scraps of hair he had
at the side of his scalp already grey, framing a narrow, pinched face, tight and ready, without the
flab of a drinker or the excessive wrinkles of a worrier. He was a devoted tool of imperial power, a
handmade sword of high-quality steel pressed into the shape of a man. “I must apologise for the
intrusion,” Karashima said in his level tone, “but your housekeeper said it would be acceptable to
wait here.”
“Ah.” Munekata said. “Mrs. Tenma.” She had had an appointment today, morning and afternoon,
he remembered. She would have greeted this man from the army and bid him to wait, knowing that
Munekata had gone to the temple. He saw his freshly-cleaned house and could hardly begrudge her.
“I took the liberty of making myself some tea.” Karashima said. “I hope you don’t mind.”
“Of course not, sir.” He had already removed his sandals and now in his yukata he went to sit
with the major, who held out the teapot for him and poured him a cup of oolong. The house was
quiet. The Buddha sat waiting in his altar, studying in silence the foolish plays performed every
waking moment upon the stage of human existence. They drank up together as so many times
before. “I apologise also for wrongfooting you like this.” Karashima said. “A situation has developed
today, and as soon as I could arrange things I thought it best to drive down and see you.”
“Sir?”
Karashima’s eyes glittered. He smiled his knowing half-smile, the old man’s face suddenly alive
for that moment. The motion was limited to his eyes and mouth, contained within these quarantine
zones by the discipline of his facial muscles. “Tell me, Munekata.” he said. “Do you like this little
town?”
“I do, sir.”
“Do you consider it worth protecting?”
“Yes, sir.”
Karashima clicked his tongue. He drank more tea. “Well, seven years will do that, I suppose. Do
you know much of the political struggle in Shinkyo?” Munekata thought of Shinkyo, or Hsinking – the
old new capital, where the Kangde Emperor still nominally presided, a shrunken, senile ghost, the
last Qing emperor returned to power as a puppet of the Kwantung in the thirties, now dwelling
within the halls of the Salt Tax Palace, a home too vast for his semi-present half-life, a city where the
streets bustled with the descendants of the coolies in their prospering hordes, the slave labourers
who had overtaken the slavers, a million flowers blooming, where the old settler clans gazed out of
their enclaves at a city that, without the muscle of the Kwantung Army and the yakuza on the streets
as before, was rapidly threatening to leave them behind. Shinkyo – where he and Karashima had
first met. “As little as possible, sir.” he said.
Karashima chuckled. “Yes, of course. But you understand what is supposed to happen in six
months?”
“Independence.” Munekata said. “Or something like it.”
Karashima nodded. “Well. The details are still up in the air even now. Independent, although
under international supervision… to be made part of China one day, the Kuomintang are saying,
perhaps, feigning respectability and brotherly concern for their Chinese brothers over the border,
while their agents sell guns and drugs to the gangsters and bandits all over the country. Although
really it doesn’t matter. The point is that, whatever happens, we’re leaving the old era behind. No
more formal links with the home islands. No more Japanese monopolies over corporate ownership.
No more statues of Japanese heroes. No more anti-pollution. No more hatred, they tell me.”
He paused, sniffing. “The Japanese government wants to avoid another Korean disaster, so
they’re really going ahead with the Hong Kong Accords. The Manchukuoan nation will become a
friendly little western-style democracy, with foreign businesses sprouting all over her face like sores
over a plague victim. Isn’t that wonderful?”
The question hung there between them. Karashima, who seemed to have noticed the bitterness
that had seeped in over the course of his speech, was suddenly quiet and still. He drank his tea and
filled his cup again immediately, a gesture of mechanical precision. Munekata thought for a moment.
“I believe in leaving politics to the politicians, sir.” he said.
Karashima again gave that chuckle. “Yes, I suppose you do. But think about it. Our Manchukuo
was founded by the Kwantung Army, wasn’t it? And then it was ruled by the bureaucrats, by Kishi
and his ilk, who worked the Chinese like dogs to build an industrial powerhouse – and then, when
that all fell in, once more this land was ruled by the military, by the guns of Manchukuo’s own Survey
Unit. Now with all that abolished we’re protected from the vengeful Chinese only by the settlers we
protected for so long – civilians! Loyal, zealous, civilians, for all that, but still without the resolve of
the men who came before. That’s why it’s all unravelling.”
“Yes, sir.”
He shook his head. “And what a beautiful picture the more delusional of the Commercial Group
suits like to paint! By surrendering to international demands, we can retain our primacy! The
Chinese have prospered under our rule – they’ll never dare to overthrow it. They won’t know how to
run companies anyway, since their race is only good for labouring- they’ll need us to hold the whip
hand no matter what. It will all go on as before even without the Kwantung Army, and so on. I don’t
believe in such talk. But that doesn’t matter. I have a job to do. That job, the job of our Kempeitai in
its twilight, in these strange times, is the same as it ever was. To preserve order in the face of chaos.”
“Yes, sir.”
Karashima grunted. It was his old grunt, the little noise he always had given in briefings that had
prefigured countless tragedies. It was something that made Munekata feel young in the worst way
that it was possible for a man to feel young, reduced to what he had been at twenty and nothing
more, virtually a child before the unquestionable authority of those above him. It made him feel as
he had felt when this man had rescued him from a jail cell in Shinkyo decades before and given him a
new life, had let him leave himself behind and devote the new Keizo Munekata, reborn within the
dull brown of a Kempeitai uniform, to imperial service. With delicate hands Karashima sipped at his
tea. “Do you know what happened here last night, lieutenant?” he asked. “In this very town, which
you so wish to protect?”
“I don’t.”
He leant back, hands on the table. “There was an incident. A young Japanese woman from a local
family was found in the middle of the street near Divine Wind Pier, in a state of extreme hysteria,
exhibiting symptoms of some drug-related intoxication. She was crying about having being raped by
someone.” The word sat there ugly and terrible in the air between them. Munekata lowered his eyes,
ashamed to even have heard it. Karashima remained unphased. “Her name is Sachiko Suzuki.” he
said.
Munekata lifted himself up. He forced the darkness away from himself – thought of work, of
politics and consequences. “Sachiko Suzuki?” he asked. “Of the Suzuki family?”
“Ah.” Karashima said. “Even someone like you who lives apart from politics must be aware of the
Suzuki clan. Yes. It was her father who contacted me. A nightlife companion of mine, as it were. He
lives…apart from the mother. It is a delicate situation that I’m sure you’re aware of. He requested
that I do something. Akira Suzuki is notable in business circles in Jinzhou City, you see. He still pays
for the upkeep of the family’s nice house here in Tenmei. I received a phone call late last night from
him. He told me what had happened. And he hinted – in that old way – that my resources – our
resources - could perhaps extract some measure of vengeance for the girl’s ordeal.” Karashima
cleared his throat. “I have made preliminary enquiries about town, and learned a little from the
parents of a girl Miss Suzuki was with, one Mizuki Tachibana.”
“Tachibana.” Munekata repeated.
“Yes.” Karashima said. “That Tachibana. From the council. You understand the kind of weight that
is being thrown about here. Now, these two girls were apparently out together yesterday evening,
although Miss Tachibana has yet to actually admit it. And but for her outburst last night Miss Suzuki
apparently also is in denial.” He paused, massaging his wrist with one hand. “That’s the main issue.
But the incident is the talk of Tenmei.”
“It is?” Munekata said.
“Yes.” Karashima said. He sighed. “You know how it is with the youth these days. Degenerate
behaviour at all times. That’s where they were out, of course. Drinking and flirting with Chinese men
probably. If you ask me, Akira Suzuki needed to discipline his daughter harder. Teach her some
respect for her race, for her nation. For the principles of harmony which guide this troubled state
forward. But anyway. We must deal with this thing, lieutenant, but not too loudly. Do you
understand? Everything is sensitive now. Mr. Suzuki’s personal concerns aside, a plum story about a
Chinese raping a Japanese will mean the White Tigers and the Soga faction in the Diet will have all
they need to stir things up, to make a mess of things, to cry for the restoration of anti-pollution
ordinances and the abrogation of the Hong Kong agreements. Now we in the Kempeitai don’t give a
fig about those agreements, but it is official policy that we wish to see an orderly transition to
whatever will come next. Orderly being the vital term.”
Karashima was looking at his teacup, holding it carefully between both hands. He turned it one
way and then the other. “Personally I don’t care much about democracy, or Chinese people, or what
have you. But a wholesome little Japanese schoolgirl being assaulted by a brutish Chinese
gangster…very distasteful.” His hard eyes found Munekata then, and though the rest of him had
aged since the old days they had not – two small beads set deep, that shone with hidden knowledge
that those below were not worthy of. “Like you,” he said, “I’m a kempei. An agent of state security. I
want there to be harmony. Perfect harmony, you understand. There is not harmony, currently.
Robberies, violence, a spat of dreadful suicides, and worst of all, a rise in racial crime! Now, the
order is from above that there can be no more racial crime in Manchukuo for the next six months.
That’s the order. An impossible task, but there it is.”
Munekata drank too. “So you need me to do something. But quietly.”
Karashima poured himself some more tea. “I’ve ordered the police to suspend the official
investigation. I don’t trust those shiftless bumblers. They’re all Chinese or spiritually Chinese now.
There will be no public action on this case – no public acknowledgement of this case, until it is solved.
But for the sake of Akira Suzuki and his continued friendship with our organisation, it will be solved. I
want you, Lieutenant Munekata, to act in the finest extralegal tradition of our military police, and to
find who did this to one of our girls.” He cleared his throat as if already that had settled it, as if
already Munekata had agreed, which they both knew he would. He sipped his tea. “I want one
specific outcome here, Munekata. I want either the culprit of this crime caught and punished. By us,
not by the law. I want, ideally, this whole thing buried.” His teacup clattered gently against the table.
“Do you understand?”
“I understand, sir.”
Karashima’s expression was solemn, his hands now interlaced before him. “I don’t care how you
do it. I don’t care what you do. I’m assigning you this case because you’re my friend, my trusted
subordinate, a fine policeman – yes, but as well because I know that you are the last of all of us who
I can trust to do their job without being in it for some petty reason. You’re the only person who will
not think in racial terms, Chinese or Japanese or any other. So get to it. You can find this man. You
can bring him to me and he can be dealt with and the Suzuki family will have seen some justice and
my good friend Akira will be becalmed and nobody will have any material for any kind of political
firefight. Because you’ll do it right.”
He wore that ominous half-smile again, the peeking out of something true from behind the
officerly mask: the emergence for a second of the demon which lived in the torture gardens of hell
which even now was sharpening its tools, getting things ready for its next victim. Munekata could
only bow his head in submission. “Yes, sir.” he said.
Karashima then moved, shifting to pick something up from his side, which he then placed upon
the table – a dossier with multiple pieces of paper inside. “I’m aware you probably have these at the
office, but I thought I’d bring them to you. The file on Sachiko Suzuki, and also on her friend Mizuki
Tachibana. Just in case. I’d recommend starting with the Tachibana girl. Follow the trail. Use the old
Munekata magic. I’ve heard good things about your investigative work. Off the books as it may be.
Get to it, lieutenant.”
“Yes, sir.” Munekata said. Karashima gave him some more platitudes, some more politeness, and
then he finished off his tea and with a salute he was dressed again and in the doorway. He nodded
to Munekata and Munekata nodded back, and without so much as a single piece of paperwork or a
single official notification the Kempeitai were gone. The staff car pulled out of his drive and went off,
and he stood by the second-floor window and watched it disappear. And he was left with a mystery.
The two dossiers were still upon the table. He poured himself some more tea and he sat back down
and looked them over. Sachiko Suzuki, daughter of Akira Suzuki, was first.
She was the victim. To him, however, she was only the starting point of a puzzle. She was still
alive and breathing, but she hadn’t told her parents about anything following the outburst that her
mother had reported. Her history was interesting: subversive friends, frequent interracial contact,
many instances of defying authority. People like that never spoke to kempei if they had to. And
Munekata was too old to go in guns blazing these days. He decided that, as a warm-up, checking the
Suzuki family at least wouldn’t be too harmful. They were a decent family, an old family in Ryujin –
darkened by scandal decades ago but still firmly loyal colonial Japanese, shipped in decades ago.
Newcomers to the town, in relative terms, who now regarded themselves as old, the kind of people
labelled in their files as exactly what they were: a single word, RELIABLE, that mitigated all of the
gossip and drama that surrounded them like a miasma.
Society was concerned with those other things, who slept with who and who was double-dealing
with what and who did what to their children – the state was concerned solely with whose side you
were on. That was how it had been before. Now he knew that the police and the army and many
officials and even the Kempeitai and Tokkeitai – army and navy, once at odds but still both, in their
own way, firmly loyal - were fracturing on national and social and political lines, on issues as
immaterial as the language used here or the relationship between this person or that, or worst of all
over questions of government, over who should be allowed to vote on what after when.
Not him. That was Karashima’s logic. Technically speaking he had been born in a small village on
the outskirts of Tokyo – but the man that he was now had been born in Manchukuo after Karashima
had taken him from the streets of Shinkyo, and would surely die here in the aftermath of whatever
would occur in six months, a last flickering remnant of faded Pan-Asianism. His folder, which
someone else would have written up and put into a filing cabinet in an office somewhere else, would
for certain have labelled him with ‘RELIABLE’ too.
Dressed in a shabby suit he wandered out into the hot sun, and after lunch at a ramen bar he
went out and ambled along to the old houses near the temple. He came to the grand old Suzuki
house, another Chinese estate stolen by settlers and in the years since, with the failing fortunes of
its occupants, now caught in a state of permanent decline. For a while he stood there looking at it
and thinking. The sun beat down on him, telling him what to do. A policeman with his assault rifle
waited at the crossing a few dozen metres away.
Eventually Munekata went over to the gate and rang the buzzer. He stood there leant on his stick,
wishing he had a cigarette. Mrs. Suzuki, as worn-out as her home, greeted him at the gate. He had
seen her before at community functions – he had heard stories of her beauty and charm, before her
husband had ruined everything for them. Today there was no charm and no beauty, because people
caught in turmoil had no energy for those superficialities. Munekata bowed to her. “Good afternoon,
ma’am.” he said. “I’m Lieutenant Munekata. I’m from the police.”
“Police?” She chewed her lip, looking out at him from deep within the hollows of her eyes. “I-”
She glanced around at the other houses in the street. “Please, officer, we don’t want to talk to the
police.”
“I would like to ask your daughter some questions about the other night-”
“No.” she said. She was beginning to cry. “No, please leave us alone.”
Munekata touched his moustache with one hand. “It’ll only be for a few minutes-”
“Something terrible has happened to us!” Mrs. Suzuki said in a low, quivering voice. “Let us grieve.
Leave my daughter alone!”
“Sorry to bother you.” he mumbled. “Thank you for your time, Mrs. Suzuki.” The woman, tears
welling up, said nothing more – perhaps saying anything else would have let too much out. She
merely stared at him as he turned and left the street and headed back with his cheeks burning from
the shame of witnessing her weakness. Karashima had been right: go around. But now he had seen
with his own eyes that something had happened, that something had upset Mrs. Suzuki enough for
her to refuse a kempei. There was no more merit in bothering her for now, and he was aware that in
all likelihood she had no idea her estranged husband had asked for a police favour in this affair. So
once he got back home he followed Karashima’s advice.
It was the other case that he focused on, the case of Mizuki Tachibana – a star pupil at Imperial
High School, heir to a lineage of government officials going back to the thirties: not at all the kind of
person to usually venture into Yugongguan. Another heavyweight there - Hiroto Tachibana was a
council member, a fire-eating settler’s rights type. Munekata got out his notepad and he started to
make a plan to deal with his assignment, the job that was not a job, that Karashima had given him
without giving him. Karashima had been right that Munekata didn’t care about Chinese or Japanese,
this race or that. But it was not out of love for Manchukuo or the Empire, or any sense of duty or
honour, but only that he didn’t want to see Chinese and Japanese killing each other, because Hana
was Chinese and he was Japanese. The way forward – as he had been told - was to talk to Mizuki
Tachibana. After that could come everything else.
 4
It was Sunday morning, and Hana was sitting and listening to the argument next door between
Akiyama and her soldier. The soldier was youngish, a Kwantung type from Mukden, one of those
with nothing to do as the great withdrawal began, serving out his term at a posting with the garrison
down the road from here, only a cadet but he had been rich, hailing from what sounded like a first-
generation settler family. Now he was no longer so. I love you, he declared from the corridor, in a
pathetic voice that meant he probably wasn’t lying.
Akiyama’s cold tone came back, delicate as a single spray of the lily perfume she liked to wear
when out on the hunt, and told him that love wasn’t part of it. You have to be able to pay your way,
she told him. Next month, the soldier said, please, I’ll come back with more money next month.
Hana on her bunk had taken her Amstrad’s earphones out and paused the cassette and half-listening
to them went on with her drawing, sketching the side of the instant noodle cup in pencil on her pad,
the pad resting on her bare legs with her feet upon the chair in the corner. It was a very small room,
too small even for her. Just this once can we forget about it, the soldier asked, pleading. Akiyama
laughed, and her laugh was always the most terrible sound in the world. Six months, she said, and
dogs like you will be out of here.
Mrs. Abe came down the hall, heavy-footed, and told the soldier he had to leave. Damn you, he
said, damn all of you! And Hana went on sketching. The soldier was marched out by Mrs. Abe, boots
thudding on wood. Akiyama came to Hana’s room, sliding open the door. She stood there, terribly
beautiful in her yukata, full-chested and wide-hipped and with a face that could fake infantile delight
better than any Hana had ever seen, which made her the most successful at what she did in all of
Ryujin. “Can you believe that piece of shit?” she spat in her nasal, clipped accent.
“I can’t.” Hana said, shading the logo on the noodle cup’s front.
Akiyama let out a sigh and tossed her long hair over her shoulder, sleek shimmering black liquid
that Hana thought about trying to mimic the style of sometimes but never did. “What a waste of my
time.” she said. “Soldiers are just the worst!”
“They’re usually more reliable than that.” Hana replaced her pencil with a thicker one from the
art set, leaning forward. “I read in a novel once that prostitutes and soldiers go well together,
because we’re both living without hope.”
“Bullshit.” Akiyama said. “Typical male egotism. Oh, I’m so sad, let me drown myself in you, you
must be sad too! He was one of those.” She switched to a bitter imitation of a young man’s voice
breathless with lust. “Miss Akiyama, please, just tell me that everything will be okay. I will die for you.
I promise.” She snorted. “Idiot! Why would I want a man who’s going to die for me? What use is that?
How much does being dead pay, huh? I should try to get a banker or something. A businessman. I
used to have a businessman. Did I ever tell you about that?”
“You did.” Hana said. She turned now to shading in the shadow falling on the noodle cup from
above, where the thin material of the curtain blocked the sun from coming into the room. “Yeah.”
Akiyama said. “That was a good time. Anyway, I’m going out to do some shopping this afternoon.
Want to come?”
“No thanks. I have a date.”
Akiyama laughed. “A date! After all this time, you’re finally moving on from that cripple?”
“No, no. Just a friend.”
“Ohh. Oh. That friend, huh?” Akiyama shrugged, flouncing out of the room. “Well, enjoy.” she
called from the corridor.” See you later.”
“Later, Akiyama.” Hana said, wondering why she could never remember Akiyama’s first name.
She spent a few more minutes drawing and relishing the quiet. She pondered it - if Munekata went
broke, would she still hang out with him? If he was unable to keep on giving her the money that
wasn’t quite a payment but wasn’t a gift either, she thought bitterly, she still would. She liked
hurting him too much. The money was good, anyway. It went into a savings account and once a year
she withdrew from it and gave some to one of Yuggongguan’s charitable associations – triads, yes,
alright – and hoped some of that filtered down to the poor. She also hoped it would upset him a
little if she ever told him, which one day she would. It was two o’clock. She got up and went to her
wardrobe, changing into her western-style blouse and skirt and blazer and long lace-up boots, which
she liked because Munekata didn’t, and checked herself in the mirror.
Unlike Akiyama or many of the other girls who earnt their living in Mrs. Abe’s guesthouse she
didn’t disguise herself with make-up, since she knew that Munekata was not interested in that, but
she had her costumes, which she never wore on her off-days, so no one would give her a hard time
for being a soldier’s bitch and also so she could escape a little from the character that earned her
keep. When she wasn’t with Munekata she liked to smile sometimes.
Hitching her bag over her shoulder she went out. Mrs. Abe was in the lobby of the guest house,
doing the accounts, bent over peering through her glasses which were too small for her broad face,
and she said goodbye to Hana and Hana said goodbye to her, as if it really was all so casual. She
proceeded down the path and out of the garden. The day was a mild, pleasant Saturday, only a little
bit too hot, and she had slept well until eleven and there was nothing that needed to be done and so
she had decided to go see Chen Jintian. His house was on the other side of Stone Hill Temple, the
Chrysanthemum Zone, where all the old families of Ryujin, or the settlers who had displaced the real
old families, lived.
The Tachibana family were government but most others were those that made up the
Commercial Group, the inner circle that even Akiyama would have been intimidated to have been
hired by. The Hirose family were antique dealers, and the Oba family ran a shipyard and the Oyamas
controlled machine parts factories elsewhere in the province and the Amaya clan had shares in the
old coal mines up north. There were others she couldn’t remember. Amongst all these old estates,
Chinese houses warped with koi ponds, family shrines, rain shutters and paper screens, alien
architecture stuck onto them like Akiyama’s garish make-up, colonial copies of real Japanese
households with their gardens and ponds and paper walls, only one of them was of interest to her –
the Chen household, that of the only Chinese family in all of Tenmei.
Well, that wasn’t true now. She knew they had trickled in, especially since the end of the anti-
pollution ordinances and the eclipse of the yakuza. There were a small number of wealthy
businessmen and triads, men from the San Lung Tang who had bought their way up the hill here and
there. But the Chen clan were the only true locals left of the pre-Japanese population, the only old
money in town, the only Chinese with wealth who were not tied to the gangsters or the
businessmen or the businessmen who were gangsters. All thanks to him.
The house was bright red compared to the drab brown of the others, and unlike they its style still
remained purely Chinese. Behind the iron gate in the outer wall was a moon gate, and five-toed
dragons indicating imperial favour were cast in metal upon the rooftops. Of course, Japanese also
used dragons – but not like this, on everything, a proclamation of an honour given by the dragon
throne, the ruler of all under heaven. Jintian had explained it to her, that his family had long ago
been met with the approval of the Qing emperors, that they had been some of the first and
wealthiest Han Chinese to move into the Manchu homeland, back when Manchukuo had been part
of the Qing Empire.
Jintian was very proud of his family home, which the Japanese had taken from his father and
which had gained back through selling his soul to the devil, as he had described it to her himself. It
was the only estate that flew the national flag. It was the only estate that had to. Of the two streets
of the Chrysanthemum Zone, one in front of the temple and one behind, the Chen house was on
Vanished Cloud, which was a steep path that went straight up into it, a cul-de-sac culminating in
theirs, the oldest and grandest of all the structures around. Birds chirped in the trees and expensive
foreign cars sat incongruous outside each and every throwback home, even the Chen house with
Jintian’s flashy BMW in the road outside, unworthy of the splendour behind it. She walked alone, too
small for this part of town, too poor and the wrong race, but only the Chen family and Munekata,
that bastard, knew this.
 When she came to the gate she pressed the buzzer and waited. She looked around at the
surrounding gates, the walls put up to keep people like her out. The speaker above the buzzer
clicked. “Who is it?” Auntie Chen asked in her halting Japanese.
“It’s Miss Takamori.” Hana said. She waited there with her hands behind her back.
The speaker clicked again. “Oh?” Miss Takamori?” Auntie Chen immediately switched to
Mandarin swaddled in the heavy erhua accent of a northerner. “Little sister, good morning!” she said.
“Are you here to see my Jintian?”
“Yes.” Hana kept to her Japanese for now. The door buzzed and with a click it unlocked, swinging
inward. “Come in, come in!” Auntie Chen called. Hana did so, going up through the moon gate and
to the main doors, black and garlanded with gold lily patterns. In the garden the koi fish moved
about the pond, the trees lining it – arranged very specifically for the best feng shui possible – green
and brilliant in the summer sun. Above the door a placard stood which in the calligraphy of Chen
Sanmin, the departed patriarch, proclaimed that Heaven blessed the diligent. Auntie Chen opened
the door for her and greeted her warmly with a smile so real it was blinding, a bent-over old lady in
traditional dress, jade bracelets on both arms her hair tied back in a tight bun. “Miss Takamori!” she
said, in Chinese, and now that they were safely inside Hana smiled and replied in her own Mandarin:
“Auntie Chen. Did you have lunch?”
“Yes, yes.” Auntie Chen said. “We ate rice and pork today. Yourself?”
“Oh, I had some ramen.”
She feigned anger, arms crossed. “You need to eat more.” she said. “You’re too thin. A girl your
age should be enjoying life, not worrying about being beautiful. You should be married, in fact!
Children are the greatest joy a woman can have!”
“Sorry, auntie.” Hana took her boots off and slid into her usual pair of slippers Auntie Chen led
her into the living room, where more of Chen Sanmin’s calligraphy was framed upon the walls. There
was already a cup of tea and a kettle waiting for her atop the grand glass-panelled table with the
lion’s feet legs, and she was invited to sit in one of the chairs next to it, while Auntie Chen, after
pouring her some tea, then went to go find her son, disappearing past the cabinets engraved with
images of buddhas and into the next corridor to venture deeper into the labyrinth of the house.
Already at the table, a writing desk on the other side of the room and another moon gate next to it
that led to another garden, Hana was again feeling too small. The Chen house was vast, and its
vastness wasn’t just in its size but in the weight of every object, which seemed to fold it all into itself,
to create a dense space in which the slightest piece of décor had its significance magnified a
thousandfold.
The teacups were marked with beautiful paintings of the forests and lakes of old Anhui province
and on the ceiling the lights were wrapped in coloured glass lampshades and the walls were framed
by red wooden ceiling beams immaculately kept by Auntie Chen’s servants, who moved invisibly
about at this or that hour, who were all locals from Yugongguan who had fallen on hard times. From
the inner garden she heard the gentle sound of running water. In the corner of the room was the
guzheng, which was the only item here that was not haunted by a grandness which exposed her to
habitual shame and insignificance and weakness. That was because it was hers.
She sat and drank her Lu’an melon seed tea. He joined her a few minutes later, coming through
the corridor his mother had gone through. Chen Jintian, wiry and tall and with a handsome,
thoughtful face, his hair combed neatly to one side and his round spectacles loose upon the bridge
of his slender nose, came to her in casual white shirt and beige slacks, gold watch on his wrist and
sandals on his feet. He walked with assurance over to where she sat, his boyish features animated at
once with his delight at her. “Miss Takamori.” he said in crisp Mandarin. He sat at the table with her.
She took the kettle and poured some tea into the second cup in the set, which he took and placed
before him. “Are you well?” he asked.
“I’m a little tired, older brother.” she said. He sipped at his tea. “I was happy that you invited me,
though.”
 “It’s my pleasure.” he said. His pale hands were so slim and petite that they hardly seemed to
belong to a man. He handled even the tea cup with grace. “How’s your mother?” she asked.
Jintian drank. “Oh, you know. Still happy to be here. She was up a while ago preparing this tea for
us. She always gets very excited when you come over.”
“I’m hardly worth it.”
“And yet, so it is. What do you think of the tea?”
“Delicious. As always.” She kept looking at him. He gave her a sheepish smile. “I’ve been thinking,
older brother.” she said.
His laugh was short and splendid, stopping exactly when it needed to. “Oh no.” he said. “What
about?”
“About love.”
“What made you think about that?” She related the story of Akiyama and her soldier customer,
and Jintian as was his habit sat listening with one hand atop the other, polite and patient, not
interrupting once. When she was finished he frowned. “So you don’t understand the soldier’s point
of view.” he said.
Hana shook her head. “No, I do. I know the feeling of losing something you want to keep. I
understand that. But I don’t understand how he could act with so little dignity over it.” She shifted in
her seat. “I’ve never been in love, older brother. I don’t understand what it does to people’s brains.
Why it warps them so. I was just…I was thinking about it. Isn’t it important to keep your self-respect,
if nothing else?”
“Well, if I may.” He drank his tea. “You’re looking at it all wrong.”
“Huh?”
“People’s minds are always warped. From the day we’re born, we’re filled with incorrect
perspectives on things and emotions that don’t match up to their purposes or meanings. It’s all
scrambled from the start. I understand this soldier perfectly. In his grief he only returned to his true
self. Hysteria is the most basic state of nature. That’s what Hobbes said.”
“Who?”
“Oh, some foreigner.” Jintian said. “Anyway. This soldier, he was respecting himself. That person
who he was in that moment – that was him, being true. It might look undignified, but after all, by
being honest, he really was keeping his actual dignity intact. Are you worrying about being in love,
Miss Takamori?”
“What? No, no. I’m worried about people in love. It’s…in my work, you know, we’re like soldiers.
We can’t have feelings. If feelings come along-” She broke off, looking over at the doorway. “Sorry. I
shouldn’t talk about that type of business in this place.”
“It’s fine. Mother is busy with her calligraphy today. Tracing father’s patterns, trying to capture
his style. And you know you can always speak freely here.” She said nothing for several seconds, lost
in her own thoughts. He stood up. “Well, why don’t we make some music, while you’re here? I have
my own feelings to work out. I would appreciate your playing for me.”
“Of course.” she said. They moved to the guzheng and the bamboo love seat facing it, the tea set
placed upon the little table by its side, and this was then how the afternoon went. They drank and
sometimes they talked, but mostly she busied herself with the guzheng and with playing what she
remembered of songs from home, from before all of this, pre-occupation songs that her
grandmother had kept despite everything. She played and he sometimes complimented her and
sometimes he was quiet, thinking, staring into a space between things on the far wall with a serious
but not unhappy expression. She played the first few bars of the Internationale just to tease him and
he reprimanded her but not seriously.
Then with fingers hurting wonderfully she took a break and he read for her some poetry from his
latest work session, lines that would be unpublished, hidden from the censors and from the long arm
of the Kempeitai, beautiful stories about scenes of old Manchuria, of the Qing and their clan and of
the days when Japan had only been an island of dwarf pirates far away and nothing to be worried
about. With a sparse few words he painted a picture for her of the harmonious past, and with the
notes of her music, slow and steady, the natural rhythm of the uneducated expert, she did the same
for him. Compared to this what they discussed in conversation was only animal noise, better than
her bleating with Munekata but only by a little.
She and he had met last year at a triad event down in Yugongguan, the Overseas Chinese Liaison
Office holding a dinner in the Phoenix Pavilion restaurant that, by chance, had brought together he
as the Concordia Association’s representative and she, uncomfortable with it, on a donor’s guest
ticket, both unsure of why they had been there…she had known him, the famous writer, and had
been ready to hate him until he had asked her to pass the sticky pork in Mandarin.
They were different people, from different worlds, but both had both grown up in Manchukuo,
ruled by the Japanese their whole lives. As with all Chinese raised under the guns of the Kwantung
and the Survey Unit their concessions had been automatic and business-like, a deal made with the
enemy in return for a peaceful existence. Chen Jintian, high-born, had saved his family home and his
identity by his work for the Concordia Association’s propaganda department, and Hana, low-born,
descended from communist bandits, had saved herself by accepting the patronage of men.
Neither of them was wholly themselves anymore, and yet here in these moments – although she
was embarrassed to feel something so sincere – it was almost as if the scale of their compromises
linked them, as if each held a fragment of the other, something that each time they came into
contact with it revitalised them, allowed them to keep on going. She had thought it was love once,
or at least if Munekata’s obsessive dependence was how love looked then something resembling
that.
But Chen Jintian had never dated a girl and never would, and that was why Auntie Chen was so
kind to Hana, who came over and pretended for her. They were at this all afternoon, an intercourse
that left her feeling too open, as if she were naked but really naked, as herself, and there was a
fluster to Jintian whenever Auntie Chen came in that seemed to suggest something similar. She
played for him The Festival of Gods and Men, her favourite, and he asked her about how her
drawing was going and she showed him her sketches.
Soon dinnertime approached. Hana decided she had to go, or it was decided for her, for Auntie
Chen had come in at one point and said that Juhua would be home for dinner tonight, and she saw
on Jintian’s face his dismay at this, quickly masked behind his usual aristocratic façade, and they
resumed the conversation they’d been having about the history of the family guzheng and about
Hana’s long-lost guzheng back home – but that had set a deadline, which would be about six, the
time that dinner would be held and the younger brother Chen Juhua would arrive home. Auntie
Chen asked Hana if she wanted to eat with them: “Oh, no.” Hana said, reflexively bowing, a Japanese
affectation she hated herself for, something that sullied the Chen house with its very presence. “I
must go back to work, auntie.” she said.
“They work you too hard down at the community centre.” Auntie Chen said, frowning. She smiled.
“Well, next time, maybe.”
“Yes, certainly.” Jintian was watching her. As six o’clock approached they finished off one more
song. Jintian sat listening in silence. The last few notes of the guzheng died off. Her fingers throbbed
but she felt refuelled by the playing, at peace with herself, and most importantly confident that she
would be able to tolerate Munekata once more. She finished off her tea and said goodbye and thank
you to Auntie Chen, and a thank you to Jintian that almost hurt to give out, so sincerely desperate
did it sound leaving her lips.
He was merciful – he gifted her a polite bow and said that he hoped to see her again soon. Hana
was escorted by Auntie Chen back to the entrance, where she did up her boots and said one final
goodbye to the old lady, and then stepped out into the coolness of neon-lit Ryujin evening. A
government loudspeaker on a propaganda truck in the road was blaring out phrases in Japanese.
“Protect national independence, improve national unity!” it shouted, in the harsh voice she
remembered from the Insurgency, every morning waking up in her village to the same kind of
nonsense paired with the rumble of engines and the clatter of treads.
 The gate ahead of her opened and she saw Chen Juhua pass through it. He was wearing a long
grey overcoat, torn on the shoulders, and beneath that only a vest and a pair of jagged jeans, with
sandals on his bare feet and rings all over his fingers. The scar on his cheek shone. His hair was cut
short, military-style, but the way he moved, slinking along lazily, put her more in mind of a gangster,
or a man who thought he was a gangster. Hana had given money to the San Lung Tang, technically.
She did not know the newer gangs who were moving in now that the triad had left the drugs trade,
and knew enough to know she did not want to. He saw her and imposed upon her a sleazy smile as
he ambled down the path. “Howdy there, little sister.” he said in drawling Mandarin.
She bowed. “Juhua.”
“You’re not staying for dinner?” he said, smirking. He came up to her and beheld her, his eyes
swallowing her whole in that unashamed way that men didn’t often do to those they considered
women, but that they always did to those they considered girls. His gaze lingered on her chest. “I
have work to do.” she said.
“Hard work, I’ll bet.” he said.
“Yes.”
His hand found her shoulder. She flinched but didn’t move. “Well, don’t hurt yourself or anything.”
he said, squeezing her. “Bad for business, hey?” He laughed, letting go. “See you later, butterfly.”
Hana said nothing but rushed past him, hurrying to the gate, and he stood and she felt him watching
her as she opened the gate and slipped through, back into the street and to freedom. “Protect
national independence!” the propaganda van crowed, crawling down the street before her.
“Improve national unity!” But for it she was alone, hands all over her body. She went home. Next
door back at the inn Akiyama was singing to herself some old pop song, I’m A Soldier For Manchukuo
Too!.
Hana wasn’t for Manchukuo but she did consider herself a soldier. She knew that it was true, that
she was fighting for something. She thought it would be a good idea to ask Munekata for even more
money. She picked up the phone on the windowsill and dialled him. There was no reply. She dialled
him again and again there was no reply. Hana put the phone down and listened to Akiyama’s
uncouth singing float out of the window and into the street. She pursed her lips and picked the
phone up again and waited with her hand in her lap. After twelve rings it was answered. “Hello?” A
hard and crabby female voice, speaking pristine Japanese. The housekeeper, Hana thought, tensing
up. “Who is this?” the old woman demanded. “I am Mrs. Tenma. I look after Mr. Munekata’s house
for him, and I can tell you now that he is out.”
Hana swallowed, put on her best Japanese. “My apologies.” she said. “This is…a friend of his. I
assumed he would be home. May I know where he is?”
Mrs. Tenma’s breathing came down the line. “A friend?” she repeated. “What kind of friend? Mr.
Munekata doesn’t keep female company, as far as I know. What are you selling?”
Hana paused a moment. “I’m not selling anything, ma’am. My name is – is Sonoko. I’m a friend of
Mr. Munekata’s, as I said, and-”
“Mr. Munekata is an honourable soldier,” Mrs. Tenma said, “and he does not keep with women.
I’m sure of this. Whoever you are, snooping about, you’d better leave him alone.”
“Please.” Hana said. “I want to talk-”
“I’ve never heard of a Sonoko.” Mrs. Tenma said, “and I speak with Mr. Munekata frequently. I
don’t trust people who call up at strange times of the day and make unusual requests.”
“Please.” Hana said, more aggressive, unable to stop herself, listening to Akiyama’s terrible
singing and this old woman’s harsh aggressive settler tone and dealing with the thought of
Munekata as some kind of, what was it, honourable soldier, and the stiffness of her bed and the
little imperfections of her earlier Cup Noodle drawing…she bit back on what she wanted to say
which was vulgar and furious and entirely in Mandarin. “I don’t know why you have to be so difficult!”
she spat, in Japanese at least.
A long pause followed. The phone was heavy in her grip and next door Akiyama had finished and
was humming to herself with the window open. “Your accent is quite unfamiliar.” Mrs. Tenma said in
a tone as cold as a northern winter. “What did you say your surname was, again?” Hana lowered the
phone to the base and gently put it down. She was still for several seconds as if there was a gun
already pointed at her, as if a man had come in through the doorway in a Survey Unit special attack
suit and was already motioning for her to come with him. But the room was empty and there were
no thunderous footfalls in the corridor but only Akiyama’s aimless noise. Hana tried to shake the
fear from her shoulders, the uncomfortable stiffness of her spine.
She forced herself to focus. Munekata, she thought. Find out what the old bastard is up to. That
would be something else. Tell him to fire his housekeeper. He was a detective sometimes, wasn’t he,
she thought. He told her sometimes about his cases. Perhaps it was so he was busy with one now.
Perhaps he hasn’t abandoned you or told the police about you or given the Kempeitai your real
name which he has known all along. She thought and thought and picked up her sketchpad and
swallowed. Find Munekata, she told herself. And see how stupid you’re being. She told herself that it
would be fine. Akiyama had stopped humming, gone elsewhere. There was only the quiet of midday
and she alone with her wretched thoughts. After a few seconds she got up and went to go do some
detective work of her own.
 5
The worst part was that she almost wasn’t even sure if it had happened. She heard nothing from
Sachiko the next day – the police had come to the Tachibana household and told them not to talk
about the incident at the pier with anyone, and Mizuki’s parents had agreed and Mizuki had no right
to argue back given that she had lied to them and gotten drunk and anyway was only a mere
daughter. She called at the Suzuki house and Mrs. Suzuki, haggard and with thick panda eyes, said
that Sachiko was unfortunately sick.
She isn’t sick, Mizuki wanted to say. She wanted to say it as she forced her way inside the house
and pushed Mrs. Suzuki aside and went to see Sachiko and made sure everything was alright. But
she didn’t say this – and didn’t force her way inside - because perhaps it was true. Sachiko was sick,
although she wasn’t. Several times that day Mizuki caught voices whispering after her, thought she
heard words being shared about her, or about Sachiko, in the quiet in the street or under the
clamour of conversation in the market, but that was all. All that had changed was that Sachiko was
gone.
Even the meeting Mizuki had missed didn’t seem to have mattered, for Minato called her to say
he had delivered her notes to everyone else and it had gone fine, and he didn’t even give her hard
time for it – perhaps, she thought, they knew that she had been involved in the horrible thing that
had occurred at the pier, although really nothing had occurred at the pier or it had but no one
wanted to say but if it had it hadn’t, because nobody wanted to say that it had, so the whole thing
was a black void without beginning or end with a nightmare contained somewhere within that could
never be looked at not even in passing. The nightmare was not happening to her but to Sachiko, and
she could not see clearly from where she stood outside trying to peer in, and her only friend in the
world was alone in the dark.
After a full day of worrying over this she felt to be going mad. Three times she went to the Suzuki
house but on the latter two just like on that night she didn’t do anything but stand outside, and on
the fourth she saw a policeman patrolling with his assault rifle and she didn’t think he was watching
her but he might have been. The picture of the emperor on her bedroom wall even seemed to be
following her, his skinny bespectacled face, liver-spotted and worn-out, gazing down, his watery
eyes, attempting to keep themselves firm and resolute, recording all that she did. She didn’t sleep
much on Saturday night but hid under the covers from heaven’s gaze. When she did fall asleep she
had the centipede nightmare again where she was feeding upon Sachiko’s flesh in some rotten
mountain cave, where Sachiko cried and screamed and Mizuki just went on feeding, chewing at her,
her hundreds of limbs all over Sachiko’s pale flesh, finding and probing and tearing her best friend
apart piece by methodical piece until finally her jaw came down hard upon Sachiko’s beautiful face.
In the morning sweaty all over she got out of bed and dressed in her uniform and went
downstairs. The phone rang and her father got up from the heated table where he’d been reading
the newspaper and answered it and spoke tersely for a few seconds. Mizuki went into the kitchen, to
where the housekeeper Mrs. Wang had left her porridge and fruit on the counter, and took some
sugar from the pot and poured it into the porridge. “Daughter.” her father said. “It’s Miss Suzuki.”
Mizuki didn’t pick up her breakfast but hurried over, to where her father stood by the window. He
handed her the phone. “Hello?” she asked, breathless.
Several seconds passed. “Mizuki.” Sachiko said. She sounded empty, as if someone had lifted her
up and shook her until all that was her had fallen out and clattered loose to the floor lost and useless.
“I’m sorry about Friday.” she said.
“What happened-” Mizuki began.
“I just feel a little sick, that’s all.” Sachiko said, her voice so faint she sounded to be a thousand
miles away. It had to be a lie, Mizuki thought, and yet there it was and she had said it. “I drank too
much on Friday night. I got sick. I’m – I’m just going to take a few days off school. That’s all.”
“Sachiko…”
 Sachiko inhaled. “I’m sorry, Mizu. It was my fault. All of it. You were right. I’m so sorry. Please.
Just…” There was a pause longer than all of history. “I’m just a little sick.”
“Sachiko, that’s not-” Mizuki saw her father stood by the phone, not stern or angry but waiting.
She didn’t finish her sentence. “Alright. See you when you’re better.”
“See you later, Mizu.” The phone went dead. Mizuki excused herself and went to shower – she
needed to clean away the sweat from her nightmare – and dressed in her day clothes and went out
although she didn’t know where she was going. It was Sunday morning and the streets were busy
with students and children who were out of school and she felt the police watching her and she sat
down on a bench with a bottle of soda from a vending machine but the old man sat opposite her
didn’t move and so she did, retreating again to the Suzuki house on the hillside. She stood before it.
What was she going to do? There was no sign of Sachiko behind the windows, no indication of
activity anywhere.
She thought back to her father on Friday night and if he had even really said what she’d thought
he’d said. It might have been true that she had been drunk, and feeling terrible, and caught with a
girl’s foolish hysteria – it might have been nothing at all. The sky seemed to be too bright, the wood
of the houses around her too detailed with intricate patterns and marks and dents and grooves and
the fade that came to old material after enough rainfall. Feeling dizzy she staggered to the temple,
away from the sun which burned her like the iron pillar that had roasted the flesh of the monk sent
to hell for impure thoughts.
The smell of sandalwood came to her as a warm comfort, embracing her, touching her with its
soft odour, telling her she was doing alright. Several old people lingered around the temple
courtyard, moving about after praying to this god or that. Mizuki went straight to the western hall
where a golden statue of thousand-armed Kannon stood flanked on all sides by a host of
bodhisattvas and saints all too in splendid gold, an assembly of figures of the most sublime beauty.
She hurried across the wooden floor, unable to help herself, and hurled herself down before the
goddess of mercy. Clasping her hands together, her knees digging into the leather of the pew, she
bent herself double, muttering om mani padme hum to her, invoking her, begging her for answers to
questions which she herself could scarcely articulate.
The goddess gave her no reply. Mizuki felt as if she was about to burst. Her hand made its way to
her pocket and she found her Swiss Army knife, a Youth Patrol gift that it had become her habit to
take out and about for moments such as this. She took it and extended the blade and stabbed it into
the side of her arm, dragging the blade downward. The pain was relief but too much too fast
because she had made a mistake again. Droplets of blood slithered down her arm. But it felt good
regardless. She bowed her head and repeated that mantra, om mani padme hum, shuddering as a
great weight fell from her shoulders. She saw the bodhisattva’s perfect serene face gazing into her
soul. Now she felt better. “Excuse me, miss?” an old man’s voice intoned from behind her, soft and
pleasant. She put a hand to her fresh wound. “Are you alright?”
“Fine, thank you, sir.” she said, getting up and turning to the monk and bowing, making sure her
cut arm was facing slightly away from him. She hurried out. It had helped as it always did, and the
pain had focused her just as it had focused the imperial and Japanese soldiers who had fought and
died with such bravery and glory and beauty against all of the enemies of Manchukuo – Russians,
Chinese, communists – all those decades ago. She went to a public restroom and cleaned her cut
and bought some plasters from a Seven-Eleven and applied them one over the other then threw
them away after the blood soaked through and then applied two more and this time they held.
When that was done she went outside, took a deep breath and set off home. As she was walking she
realized she was being followed.
He walked a few steps after her, not quite able to catch up, his stick banging on the ground with
every step, and he was tall and wide, built like a soldier gone to seed. His unironed and faded tweed
suit was too tight about the waist and he had an unfashionable moustache that put her in mind of
some kind of strange uncle. He was stiff like a machine and she was thinking of her father looking at
her and of Sachiko’s strained voice over the telephone line. From within the pocket of her jacket she
grabbed the Swiss Army Knife and once more retracted the blade. She walked back towards her
house, past the entrance to Vanished Cloud and down, past the police box where a banner stood
proclaiming the unity of all nationalities with a Chinese policeman with rifle below it looking the
other way. By his irregular footsteps the limping man was still with her.
She turned away from her home and set off back downhill in the general direction of Showa
Avenue. She didn’t remember the name of this street – it was all houses and apartments and small
stores, a German Kaiser Mart on the corner where she and Sachiko had once hung out as little girls.
But it had people and people meant safety. She walked quicker and the tap of his stick upon the
pavement quickened with her. She turned right, going past a turning onto Victory Lane, and turned
left back uphill, heading in the vague direction of the library.
Still the limping man was after her. Her palms were moist and her heart pounded. The town bent
itself towards her, all of the buildings twisted in her direction, the imaginary people all the audience
for this, her grandest failure yet. Nothing was beautiful now. She was on Izanami which was the road
heading to the library, walking briskly to the turn-off to Cherry Blossom, where the government
buildings were. Residential Park No. 4 was to her right, torii gate waiting there welcoming, promising
sanctuary, a cluster of trees and benches beyond it. But Mizuki pushed on, thinking about the library
just ahead, where somehow she would be safe.
“Excuse me!” a hoarse male voice called, friendly enough but still. Mizuki kept on walking. Her
fingers dug into the handle of the knife. “Excuse me, miss!” he called again. She was striding now.
Almost running. But he was still with her, even with his walking stick – she realized his earlier
feebleness had been a ruse because he could keep up with her just fine and now she wondered
about what else might be a ruse and she didn’t trust anything in the world.
It was quiet and a woman was hanging washing out on the second floor of her home and two
boys were playing with a cat in an alleyway and she in the middle of the street was about to face the
wrath of the imperial government which she loved so much and had served so well, and the tears
welled up and just like on Friday, just like before she had betrayed Sachiko, her feelings were an
animal going berserk within her. She was about to start sprinting for her life, to start screaming for
help. “Mizuki Tachibana.” the man said from at her back. His tone was gentle. “Please, try to relax. I
won’t hurt you.” She paused, legs tense as if she was really going to run but she didn’t know if she
could. The fire had died down, the burning stone had cooled off in the cold winter air. “Miss
Tachibana.” he said. “As a loyal subject of both of our brother emperors, I was wondering if you
wouldn’t like to help them out with something.”
Mizuki turned to him. He was surely an army officer or something similar, going by the disciplined
way he stood even with his walking stick, and by the careful authority of his voice – but she thought
now that he wasn’t here to punish her. His smile was warm. He was not that old. The same age as
her father, if not a little younger. She bowed. “I – I’m sorry.” she said. She pushed her fringe out of
her eyes. “My name is Mizuki Tachibana.”
“You have a very formal way of speaking.” he said. “It reminds me of my youth.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“I’m Lieutenant Munekata.” he said. “I’m with the police.”
“The police?” He had the features of a true Japanese and that calmed her. The police, she
thought, were filled with Chinese now, just like that man they had passed coming here, racially
untrustworthy sorts – but he was one of her people and she could trust him. He smiled at her like
her grandfather had used to. “I have been looking for you since yesterday, Miss Tachibana.” he said.
“I wanted to intercept you while you were outdoors, because I want to talk to you about something
quite sensitive that I am not sure your father, frankly, needs to know about.” he said. “It’s to do with
your friend. Sachiko Suzuki.”
They walked a few metres down the road to Residential Park No. 4, a small area of grass and
trees bordered on all sides by drab concrete walls. Munekata went with her at his side and he
walked slowly but firmly. He sat himself down on a bench and gestured for her to join him. She sat
down with him. For a few seconds they remained like this, both slightly crumpled in the heat. Birds
called to one another across the rooftops of the town. He leant on his stick, studied the shrine at the
rear of the park, tiny little thing garlanded with strips of ritual paper. He sighed. “It’s a beautiful little
town, this.” he said. “Don’t you think so?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Although, it’s true that even something beautiful must have an ugly side.” he said. “Duality is an
illusion, but it’s how humans perceive things. There’s good and evil. And evil must be punished
without mercy.”
“Yes, sir.” He wasn’t sat too close to her but he was turned to her and facing her and his stare
was intense but not unkind. Mizuki didn’t know what he meant. “Miss Tachibana,” he said, “on
Friday night there was a certain incident in this town involving your friend Miss Suzuki. Are you
aware of this incident?”
Her heart spasmed. “Yes, sir.”
“Now, we might refer to this incident as something that shouldn’t be publicised.” he said. His
moustache moved slightly on his upper lip as he spoke. “We might say that it will remain off to the
side, as so many evil things must. But with that being said, you are allowed to know that we are
trying to find out the details of this case. Would you like to assist us in this?” He kept saying ‘we’, she
noted, and she thought with a thrill of terror that this and other things – no badge, no ID, pure-
blooded Japanese face, firm tone – that he might not have just been a policeman but from the
Kempeitai itself, which meant he was a hero here to save her. “Yes, sir.” she said.
“Could you tell me what happened that night?” he asked. At first she said nothing. The wound on
her wrist itched. “Not what you told your parents.” he said. “What you experienced that evening,
with Miss Suzuki. That’s all I want to know.”
Mizuki hesitated for a moment. Then: “We- we went to Divine Wine Pier together. At around
seven. We went to a bar there. Called Sunshine.”
“I see.” Munekata wasn’t pushing her. He waited while she thought, trying to remember. Her
hand played with the material of her skirt. “We drank some beer together.” she said. “And then we
had an argument. I wanted to go home. I left her there.”
“Was she alone?”
“She was with some friends. Um, Chinese friends. She said they were friends.”
“What were their names?”
“Um.” Mizuki paused. She remembered that night, the shy girl and the muscled boy, who now
she was sure had been part of it, who must have done it, whatever it was, that which had destroyed
her friend and led to all this. “A boy, named Li Huangqi.” she said. “And a girl, Xu Mei. They were
with her. The boy looked older. He had a tattoo. I think he might have been a degenerate social
element.” She expected him to take out a notebook and note these things down but he merely
nodded. “Alright.” he said. “I might be in touch, Miss Tachibana. I have your phone number.” He
pulled a card from his pocket, plain but for a single phone number. “Take mine, and call it if you
remember anything else. Please remember, it would be preferable to keep this incident quiet for
now. Only we, your family, and the Suzuki family are aware of it currently. For the sake of social
stability, please do your best to keep it that way.” He said it almost pleasantly and yet Mizuki, who
until now had been reassured by his presence, felt a ghostly sort of doubt tug meekly at her soul.
She wondered if what he had just said had been a threat. “Thank you, anyway.” he said. He started
to get up, moving his weight onto the walking stick. “Um, Lieutenant Munekata-?” she asked.
On his feet now Munekata paused. “Yes?”
“Can you tell me?” she said. “What happened to Sachiko, I mean. Nobody has told me except for
what my father said on Friday night, and he barely said anything, and nobody will talk about it now,
not even her, and I need to know or else I’ll lose my mind. Please, sir.” Munekata looked at her. He
brushed at his moustache with a finger.
“Only she knows for sure.” he said. “And she doesn’t wish to talk to either police or her family.
But her initial claim given to the police on that night was that she had been raped.” The starkness of
his words shocked her and seemed even to shock him for a moment, for he leant on his stick,
glancing over at the shrine. Mizuki felt faint. “It is my job to investigate this claim.” he said in that
same calm tone. “I would appreciate your continued assistance on the matter.” He bowed to her.
“Goodbye, Miss Tachibana.”
She returned the bow. “Goodbye.” Munekata from the Kempeitai walked off, much more
confident on his stick now, and Mizuki remained on the bench in the park. She looked to the shrine,
incongruous against its concrete surroundings. An airplane was somewhere high overhead. She
thought about what she had heard, a second confirmation of the news from Friday night now out in
the open, not only a fever-dream moment of horror but a tangible fact, for Mizuki knew that it had
happened and she knew that that man Li Huangqi, the degenerate Chinese, had done it. It shamed
her so much that she wanted to die and she was filled with self-loathing, but the feeling came, as it
had on Friday, back to her, and like everything else it was so much clearer: a part of her was pleased
that Sachiko had been wrong and that she, the girl with the iron blouse, had been right. She was
pleased that the world still turned. Her new wound tickled with pain. And the world still turned.
 6
Munekata took himself back to Kempeitai Headquarters, and after asking Private Sato if the
captain was around – he was not – he went to the filing cabinets in the records room, and there he
looked through the names of all of the registered citizens of the town, which was as exciting a duty
as it had ever been. Once there had been three sets of records – once the Tokkeitai and the Tokko
had competed for space in the Manchukuoan future. But the Kempeitai’s alumni, close to power in
Tokyo, had prevailed – or to hear it another way, the military police had been forced aside in the
home islands and retreated back to their army-dominated homeland to lick their wounds. Now there
was only one keeper of the files in Manchukuo, for what little such an honour was worth.
Thanks to what the Tachibana girl had told him he could skip most of the residents of Tenmei,
who were almost all officially Japanese. That still left roughly eight thousand Chinese names to
search through, and that was only including legal residents, as opposed to the large proportion who,
for criminal reasons or through bureaucratic inertia, had come in to Yugongguan in the expansion of
the slums and settlements and hadn’t made the Kempeitai’s lists. If the names Miss Tachibana had
given him were unregistered there could be no helping it, but there was only one way to make sure.
He enlisted an idle Yagami and they took out the boxes and went through them, sheets upon sheets
of paper, some aged and yellowed and unused in years, so flimsy that it felt an errant breath might
have blown them away. The fan in the records room was broken and the day was hot and so
shirtless he and Yagami pored over file upon file, searching for any names that resembled those
Tachibana had shared with him.
For a long time they worked in silence, accompanied only by the noise of the radio next door
talking about racial unity and brotherhood and then the American-Soviet arms summit and then,
with the usual spiteful glee of state media, a violent incident in the Taiwan Free Area between
Japanese and Chinese residents in Taipei. Munekata found himself thinking about her – that girl,
Mizuki Tachibana. Stocky and glum and not beautiful and, for all that, with a trembling pride to her.
There was something about her that disgusted and terrified him and it was something that he’d once
seen in himself, although he couldn’t put a name to it.
He had noticed the cut on her arm. It had reminded him of the ritual cutting of the dormitories all
those decades ago, the mark of a Survey Unit trooper even before the Survey Unit had become
infamous. He remembered the faint scars upon his own arms, ancient now, that other women had
noticed but Hana had never mentioned, faint marks that could have been from anything but were,
for those who knew, easily recognisable.
They had made a state-published novel about it – That Blazing-Red Scar! Story of a Surveyman At
War! – and it had been a smash hit, adapted into a movie as well, and it had seemed for a while that
the elusive patriotic spirit the government had always been waiting for had arrived, and it had been
promoted constantly, on the sides of buses and on the radio and on the television, at least until the
spate of self-harming incidents amongst settler youth communities had resulted, awkwardly, in at
least one death. He wondered if Tachibana had done it for the same reason: if even now, at the end
of the one-party state and the imperial dictatorship, when all of it really had been for nothing, when
the Survey Unit had been disbanded, if some of those old ideas still lingered, hungry ghosts begging
the living for scraps of belief.
“It sure is hot in here, sir.” Yagami said, interrupting over half an hour of quiet radio chatter. He
wiped his forehead with a cloth. “Ishihara used to complain all the time about it, didn’t he?”
“I remember that.” Munekata said. Ishihara, short and fierce and perpetually drinking, had been
one of the last active kempei, forever driving his subordinates Suda and Nishimura to despair with
his insistence on real policework. He had helped break the yakuza, only to let the triads take over
their business. He had been investigating the drugs trade at one point, and it had made of him an
obsessive who would talk and talk over lunch about the opium dealers, how the state had banned
opium, yes, eventually, but so much of local government and both militaries had been involved in
that business that - he asked it, and nobody had liked him asking it, but he had asked anyway: what
had they all moved onto?
 He had spent innumerable hours in here, fruitlessly working to connect the dots of some case or
another, in every instance tripping over some half-hidden connection to the state or the army or the
gangs or all three. The stress had caused his premature retirement, or at least something everyone
could pretend was that. Munekata recalled him, his coarse settler’s way of speaking, his perpetually
unbuttoned shirt and the rashes he kept complaining about. It had been the heat, he’d always said.
“He must be happy to be back in Japan.” Munekata said. A long pause followed. “Sir?” Yagami asked.
“Yes, sergeant?” Munekata leafed through papers, not looking up.
“What’re you going to do?” Yagami asked. “When more people start to leave, I mean.” Munekata
went on sorting through lists of names: dead people, moved-away people, people who had rotted in
prisons outside the town, real living people, all of them, who today knew nothing of what had come
before but that lingering fear – all of these various kinds of existence, a tapestry of lives, reduced to
the same tedious black-and-white portraits and sterile lists of details. “I’ll keep coming to work.” he
replied. “They’re letting us transfer to Manchukuoan army command if we want, aren’t they? That’s
good enough for me.”
Yagami was quiet for a second. “But the Honesty Commission- I mean, if the Hong Kong
agreements go ahead, the new government will have to-”
“Well,” Munekata said, grunting, “if they want me to keep coming to work after that, I will.” He
closed another box, half-standing so that his bad leg wasn’t under too much pressure, and lifted it
carefully back onto the shelf. His leg registered a complaint anyway, stabbing at him with the old
pain. He wiped his forehead free of sweat. “If they want to throw me in jail or take me to the gallows,
then that’s fine too.”
“I see.” Yagami said. He scratched the back of his head with a great broad hand. The two men
looked at one another across the dust and decay of the records room. “My wife and I are looking to
go before then.” Yagami said. “As I told you.”
“You did.”
“Don’t you think it would be wise to think about something like that too?” he asked. Next door
the radio went on singing. It was discussing now that most terrible economic fact, that this year the
volume of Manchukuo’s trade with the Republic of China was set to surpass the volume of her trade
with the home islands. Professor Shikishima was opining that this would have to be reversed by
forceful Japanese government policy but that Tokyo had become too soft and liberal. What about
the Japanese spirit, he was asking. What about our nation’s soul? Munekata coughed. He turned to
the shelf, going for the next box along. “There’s no reason for me to go back to Japan.” he said.
After another hour of sweat-soaked manual work he found what he was looking for – firstly that
there was no Li Huangqi registered as a resident in any of the Ryujin Kempeitai’s files, and secondly
that there was a Xu Mei, an eighteen-year-old student at Chinese High School No. 3. She lived at 16
Love The Empire Street in Yugongguan and she had in her file a simple remark in block ink, written
by Sergeant Fujiyama, the tea-drinking bureaucrat who had killed himself last year, whose terse style
summed up most of the younger peoples’ entries: UNRELIABLE FAMILY, it said.
Munekata got back up, taking the dossier for himself, and putting his shirt and suit jacket back on
he returned to the office. There was a call for him from Mrs. Tenma, who explained she had just
been contacted by a woman who she suspected was Chinese or Korean or one of those sorts who
had been trying to speak with him. “I told her to go away, of course.” Mrs. Tenma said proudly.
Munekata asked if the woman had given a name and of course the name was not Hana but then
there was no other woman who would call him. He considered trying to reach her from here: but it
was still working hours and anyway the office phone was definitely bugged, some other unit
somewhere else spying on them, just for formality’s sake.
So it was then that after a brief cup of tea at his desk and a pondering over her, as ever, he set off
for Yugongguan, taking a taxi rather than one of the official cars, which nobody who didn’t want to
be hassled in the road used anymore. The driver was Chinese and Munekata addressed him in his
own accented but fine Mandarin and the driver glanced at Munekata, plainly thinking about a
Japanese in smart clothes venturing across Showa and into hell. Munekata gave him a pleasant smile
and the taxi set off.
By now it was the middle of the afternoon and the ramshackle streets were alive with Chinese,
with buyers and sellers and comers and goers. Mandarin chatter washed over him through the taxi’s
open windows as the vehicle crawled down Fortune Street. The bobble-headed Sha Tin on the taxi’s
dashboard bounced with its motion. Soon the car managed to ease itself right onto Love The Empire
Street, which like most areas of Yugongguan out of Fortune was where the dirt began to get
noticeable, crowded rows of rotten old houses sagged and warped by decades upon decades of
existence without maintenance, bars upon windows and beaten and torn government posters and
metal anti-pollution signs – CHINESE RESIDENTIAL ZONE - lining the cracked brickwork of the walls,
no cars but a thick forest of bicycles and motorcycles crowding the pavements. In an empty lot a
man sat on a bench staring into space, his clothes ragged and a beer can in his hand. A tiny shrine to
the buddha was adjacent to an alleyway garlanded with barbed wire, where bags of open refuse
were bundled about one another all leaking onto the stone, their smell thick and awful in the
summer heat. It was here that Munekata peeled himself from the car seat and paid the driver and
let himself out.
Here the quiet swallowed Fortune Street’s noise, making it sound further away than it was. Here
gaps in curtains and shadows behind blinds were suggestions of people peering at him from safety,
speculating to themselves. Over a large part of the empty lot graffiti had been daubed. It was in
Manchu script, which no Japanese and probably almost no Chinese were natively able to read. A
form of code for the young and rebellious, was his understanding. He couldn’t imagine what it said
was very kind. A rusted metal sign next to the alleyway, weeds sprouting beneath the pavement so
high they almost touched it, spelt out that CHINESE RESIDENTS SHOULD REMEMBER: NO
UNHEALTHY THOUGHTS, NO UNHEALTHY ACTIONS. PRESERVE ETHNIC UNITY. He passed this and
counted the numbers scrawled in stencil on the metal doors of the houses, from number two all the
way to twenty.
Next to a ramshackle old electric transformer humming unpleasantly to itself, all stark metal and
concrete, was number sixteen. It was a dying building with its left side sagging and a balustrade on
the first-floor balcony half-fallen away. 1921, proclaimed the stone letters on a sign above the
entrance. There was no yard. Munekata could hear crying from one of the nearby rooms. He walked
up to the metal front door and rapped hard on it, too hard, so that his knuckles stung. Sweat dripped
down the back of his shirt.
Footsteps came from the other side of the door, hurried and light, and after ten seconds with a
creak it swung inward before him, revealing a girl so skinny she put Hana to shame, as pale as the
dead, with a plain face and badly cut, short, slightly greasy hair. She was wearing a tattered school
uniform several sizes too big, with numerous dark stains rudely spread all across the front of the
shirt. It was her eyes, however, that he dwelt upon – how they moved twitchily in their sockets,
scanning him all over, assessing danger. Her hands were neutral at her sides. He affected a slight
smile. “Good afternoon.” he said in Mandarin. “Are your parents in?”
“No.” she said very quickly. “Oh. My – my father is. He’s busy.” Her speech was accented with a
Hunanese twang, at first a little difficult for him to follow. He had catalogued many of China’s myriad
accents and dialects in his head over the years and he knew that Hunanese were tough people. The
communist Mao Zedong, executed after the war but the greatest teacher of bandits everywhere,
had been one of them, and every Hunanese he’d met had carried a strength with them that he had
noticed only tended to emerge when they talked about their red emperor and the faith he’d
preached.
In his experience Hunan meant tough and communist and he looked at this girl before him and he
was not entirely fooled by her age. Her eyes kept finding other targets, moving about irresolutely.
This was a kind of tic, not indicative of much else. When they did linger, as upon his face in those
moments after she had finished speaking, in their focus they held the same kind of strength as so
many other rebels and bandits and terrorists he had met.
 “If your father is busy, that’s no problem.” he said genially. He produced his ID from his jacket
pocket – an ID that said nothing of the Kempeitai and nothing of use, but which had an official stamp
upon it next to his rank and name and so which always impressed the Chinese, who over the
decades had justifiably learned to fear stamps of all kinds. “I’m Lieutenant Munekata, of the police.”
he said. “I wish to talk to Miss Xu Mei. Are you her?” Xu Mei gave a nod so slight it was almost
nothing. “I apologise.” he said. “I don’t mean to intrude. I only wish to talk.” She remained there in
the doorway studying him. He smiled again. “I know it must seem scary, but you can trust me. I have
no reason to be here except to ask questions. Please, can we talk?”
Xu Mei seemed to take a long time to think. She swallowed, the motion of her throat visible
beneath the skin of her neck. Munekata was aware of his Nambu in its holster beneath his jacket,
the steel and the six bullets it contained. He was aware that he was Japanese and she was Chinese.
“Please wait a moment.” she said. She disappeared back behind the door, hurrying along, and after
less than thirty seconds she returned and with a stiff hand bid him inside. The hallway was filthy and
piled with trash and books and other things and the floorboards were warped from water damage.
She led him into a living room where an old wooden table sat in the centre surrounded by decay. An
old fan spluttered to itself on the writing desk in the corner. She sat upon one side of the table,
waiting for him with a dirty glass of something. There was no sign of either parent, mother or father.
On the wall a cracked frame held a scroll that in neat calligraphy spelt out the character for ‘Virtue’.
Munekata sat opposite her, relaxing himself. He rested his stick against the wall. “This is an old
house.” he said. “Lots of virtue in it, indeed.” She said nothing but only stared.
He coughed. “Well. Miss Xu, I want to talk to you about something that happened recently. Do
you know a girl by the name of Sachiko Suzuki? A Japanese girl from Tenmei.” Xu Mei was silent.
“She was involved in something.” Munekata continued. “A certain incident, an embarrassing and
unfortunate one. It occurred in this part of town. I have heard that you were with her on the night of
this incident.” He kept his tone light and his words formal. Xu Mei didn’t move and didn’t speak and
by the quivering but unrelenting hardness of her eyes did not intend, he knew now, to tell him
anything regarding Sachiko Suzuki, no matter how softly he spoke and how much he smiled.
Munekata shifted in his seat, putting his fingers together interlaced. He steeled himself for what
he was about to have to do. “Miss Xu.” he said again, in Japanese this time, his tone military and his
stare as rigid and controlled as hers was quivering and angry. The young people called this way of
speaking Armee Japanisch. “You are party to crimes committed against the principles of ethnic unity
and social harmony which govern our state. If you don’t speak to me of these things, then you are
obstructing the justice of His Imperial Majesty, and I will have no recourse but to take you in for
temporary extra-legal detainment on the grounds of national security.”
At first she remained hard, but then, after a few seconds, her expression faltered and she shrank
back in her chair, touched not in her brain or her reason but her soul, that vital part of her raised in a
world of fear which knew only to hide. Now in the absence of other orders this fragment of her took
command, for survival’s sake reducing itself and she to nothing, all of her defiance melted away so
that before him she was disarmed. “You’re with the Kempeitai.” she whispered.
Munekata did not smirk or nod or titter to confirm this but only leant forward in his seat, an easy
motion she watched with fear carved into her child’s face. “I want to know, Miss Xu, what happened
to her.” he said. “And who Li Huangqi is. Can you tell me that?” A long pause followed. There were
footsteps above. Mei’s hands clutched the trousers of her uniform. She nodded. “Sachiko is my
friend.” she said in Mandarin. “I taught her our language. She was interested in Chinese culture.” He
nodded. “She met up with us for drinks.” Mei was busy breathing. Her eyes went for a moment to
the doorway where her father failed to appear. Munekata waited. “Li Huangqi is just a boy I know.”
she said. “I invited him that night. He comes to this town sometimes, to do work. But he did nothing
to her.”
“Where is he?” Munekata asked.
“He goes to the Red Club.” It wasn’t an answer exactly. But he allowed her it. “He isn’t registered.
You can’t find him. And he didn’t touch her.”
 “So who did?”
“I don’t know. They went to the Red Club. I didn’t. I don’t like clubs. But Li Huangqi went there
with Sachiko Suzuki.” She shook her head, ever so slightly. “He didn’t do it. Whatever happened to
her, it wasn’t him.”
“You know this for sure?”
She met his eyes. “Li Huangqi is a virgin.”
“I see.”
“He’s a tough talker, but not that kind of person.” Her face was rigid and her brow was hard. “I
know you don’t believe me. But I can only tell you what I know.”
“I understand, Miss Xu.” Munekata now returned to his real smile. He spoke in Japanese but his
own Japanese: “I know this isn’t easy. It’s a kind of test, speaking to a kempei. But I won’t pursue
your friend if he isn’t guilty. I’m only interested in justice. In virtue.” He inclined himself towards her,
a kind of sitting bow. “Please, try your best to forgive me.” Her bottom lip moved. The room around
them, this terrible room that was falling in on itself, cracks lining the ceiling, was not right for what
he wanted to convey to her. But the schoolgirl Xu Mei nodded to him.
“Hey!” a slurred voice said. Someone else came into the room, breaking the moment – it was a
man in traditional Chinese clothes, bald and wretched, who staggered forth with a bottle of baijiu in
his hand. He rested in the doorway. His beady eyes found them both. “You.” he said. His Hunanese
accent was even stronger than hers and he mingled his Japanese and Chinese words in kyowa-go
and his voice was smeared with drink. “You’re a cop, right?” he asked.
“Yes.” Munekata replied, in Mandarin.
The man leant in. “You ever find what happened to Liu Er’s wife? No?”
“No.”
His drink-fogged eyes narrowed in contempt. He did resemble his daughter somewhat in that
moment, Munekata thought. “What about Wang Hongxi?” he demanded. “His daughter?”
“Father, please.” Mei said in a low and pathetic voice. She was looking at the table with the
learned intensity of one who had done this often before. Munekata was shamed by his own
presence, by her embarrassment, by his race which had caused all this in the first place. “They
hooked her on heroin, you know?” Mei’s father said. “They wiped her brain out with that stuff,
kidnapped her and forced it into her – then she was a whore for your Japanese army men! It was
one of our boys who did it, though. Who killed her when she tried to go to the community about it.
Another rat trying to stow away on your sinking ship.” He swigged some more of his drink, laughing.
“Didn’t know that, did you? You cops are all the same.” he said. “When one of us gets raped,
murdered, stolen from, you’re busy - but one little Japanese girl feels bad about getting fucked for
the first time – ‘cuz she got fucked by a dirty Chinese – and she tells a story to protect her honour
and hey, you’re here!” He waved the bottle about. “Somehow, it’s important now!”
“I must complete the cases to which I am assigned, sir.” Munekata said.
“And do you assign them? Who does? Someone else, huh? Someone else does everything around
here!” Mei’s father burped. “This whole country is run by someone else, ain’t it?” Mei was trembling
now, like a small animal in pain and fear uncomprehending of why. It was a fear of her father but it
was a fear of him as well and he knew this. Munekata got to his feet. “Yeah, that’s it.” Mei’s father
said. “Get outta here! Fuck your mother’s cunt, you stupid Jap bastard.” ‘Jap’ in English, something
the Americans had started to do in the forties when they hadn’t gotten their war.
Munekata took his stick and walked to the doorway and Mei’s father eyed him, clutching the
bottle so hard his knuckles were white. Munekata felt both Chinese watching him. “I was the son of
a soldier, you know.” Mr. Xu said. “In the – in the war. I saw what you bastards did to our
motherland. I wish the Americans would have done it back to you, given to you what you gave to us,
you dogs! Are you afraid?” He spat. “Afraid of an old drunk like me! Some ‘ethnic harmony’.”
Munekata merely turned to his daughter and bowed. “Thank you for your time, Miss Xu.” he said.
Her father snorted.
 Munekata eased his way through the doorway back into the corridor, and bowed to Mr. Xu as
well, and left them there, easing the door shut on his way out, returning to the grim world of Love
The Empire Street. The old man from before who had been sat in the street now had a needle in his
hand and he was toying with it with scabby, filth-stained fingers. Someone was watching him,
Munekata realized, and he turned to his right and saw a figure – small, feminine – duck out of sight
into a nearby alleyway. He thought of pursuing but did not. There was no point, was there? He hated
being here and he hated what he had done and he hated how the two members of the Xu family had
looked at him. It had all been - as Karashima would have said - distasteful.
Munekata walked on back to Fortune Street. Once he was lost in the crowd there, not a Jap or a
kempei but merely another shuffling body amongst many, he allowed himself to think. It was clear
to him that Xu Mei believed in the innocence of Li Huangqi, whoever he was. It was clear to him as
well that it was true that all of this was based upon the testimony of Sachiko Suzuki, who he hadn’t
even spoken to yet. And behind that was the spectre of Akira Suzuki in distant Jinzhou, a phantom
summoned into Munekata’s peaceful everyday life by Karashima, who was only, as was his duty,
acting in the interests of his organisation and its continued prosperity. Munekata massaged his scalp
with a hand. He had to find the culprit, whether it was Li Huangqi or some other Chinese, or whether
it had been a Japanese visitor, or even if it was only Miss Suzuki herself, who had spread stories to
cover up an embarrassing romance, as Mr. Xu had alleged. But he didn’t believe a Japanese girl,
brought up in a society where the words of others were as sharp as blades, would do so. Was that
only his prejudice speaking?
In the old days it would have been easy. The Suzuki girl could have been made to talk, given half
an hour in a dark room, and her words could have cut through all this vagueness and Munekata
could have gone back to sleep. But change was coming and the Suzuki family, mother and father
both, needed to be happy and the law vaguely followed, even when one was being extralegal, and
the only way he could do this was to skulk around like the dirty private investigator he was.
He went home, sweaty and suddenly tired, thinking of Xu Mei’s trembling and of Mizuki
Tachibana’s wound and of Hana who hated him so. Once back in the living room in his yukata and
with some tea boiling, and with the phone and address book open on the table before him, he called
her. “Yo, old man.” she said. “Are you free tonight?”
“I’m afraid we can’t meet tonight.” he said. “I have work to do.”
Hana was quiet for a very long time. He had never done this to her before as far as he knew. He
waited for her. “Work?” she said in a voice like ice.
“I’m working tonight.” he said.
“Bullshit.” she said, no longer cold but red-hot. “You don’t have another girl, do you?”
“No, Miss Takamori.” he replied, in the voice of a private bowing before the sergeant. “I only
have feelings for you, I promise. But I have urgent work to attend to.” A long pause followed this and
in the silence of it he could sense her anger, a different kind of anger to the usual. It was the first
time in their relationship that he felt himself to have any kind of power over her. “You never have
urgent work.” she said in an accusatory tone.
“I do right now.” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“Idiot.” she said. “It’s fine. I’ll find some other company for the night. A handsome man who
doesn’t come so quick, or something. No problem.” This stung him more than her usual rudeness,
and he was well aware that that had been the intent. Still he only took a second to recover. “I’m
sorry.” he said again. “I’ll see you next week, I promise.”
“I’ll fuck somebody much better than you, you creep.” she spat.
“That’s fine.” he said. “Don’t worry. Sorry again. Goodbye.”
“You bastard.” she said, and she hung up. Munekata put the phone down. He realized he had
forgotten to ask her about Mrs. Tenma. There was no time for that now. He checked the address
book again and found the place Mei had mentioned, the Red Club. It was one of those interminable
cheap places on Divine Wind Pier. The yakuza had vacated it and the triads, perhaps, too. There
were new gangs in Ryujin now. He sipped at his tea. The Buddha was watching him from the corner.
He went upstairs to his wardrobe and prepared to dress to go out on the town.
 7
Munekata left for the Red Club around eight and he was not like himself. After his transfer to the
Survey Unit he’d never done much undercover work – but in those early days as Karashima’s lackey
it had sometimes been necessary, when playing the role of either a kempei or detective, to have
other ways of dressing, other styles that would obscure him, and it was a skill he had never forgotten.
To that end had prepared other outfits for himself, not exactly disguises but things that could make
him look like someone else. Once he had assisted Karashima with a sting in a village on the plains,
dressed as workers with guns under their heavy coats while one of those Christian cults had been
meeting – once it had been a matter of listening in on a communist rally in scruffy radical gear, scarf
and hat and tweed. Tonight was more dramatic: a loose florally patterned shirt beneath a denim
jacket and a pair of faded jeans, to give him the air of the washed-up old Manchukuoan colonial
wheeler and dealer. He tossed a bucket hat on his head and his Junker digital watch on his right wrist
– the settlers of a certain generation loved their German-made digital watches, didn’t they.
Looking at himself in the mirror he saw a shambling tragedy, leant on his stick without dignity or
pride, another middle-aged settler drinking and whoring himself to death now that the glory days of
the wild west Manchurian plains had faded away. He supposed this wasn’t that far from the truth.
He put on too much aftershave and called a taxi to take him to the pier. Now Munekata the
plainclothes kempei was absent – this man, who surely couldn’t have been a policeman, was going
out to visit some exciting and dangerous Chinese places to see what might happen next.
After some thought he put his Nambu into its leather holster beneath his jacket. When the taxi
arrived he sat in the back and wished he was smoking and watched the town go by soaked in oil-
smeared neon. Sunday night was always like this here, a hysterical interval before the working week
began again, where people went out to enjoy one last drink or meal before it was back to the
ceaseless grind of Manchukuo, of fighting off the stagnation that had been bearing down
inescapably upon the whole country since the end of Chiang’s dictatorship and the start of China’s
democratic renaissance, as they were not allowed to call it.
It was a stagnation that Taiwan and Korea’s escape from Japanese economic control had only
deepened. The hysteria of Manchukuo was of endless work and miserable pleasure, all marching
forth fruitlessly to fill the bellies of the old Japanese firms and their aging masters, Kishi’s friends
who had plundered Manchukuo all they could and were now eying the home islands nervously, this
dried-up state-led gangsterism, paired with the wild, directionless growth of the disenfranchised
Chinese masses, the force that day by day was stitching the Empire into a union with the Republic -
all of it together encapsulated now in this frantic interval.
Munekata was not hysterical but calm. He was realising that this was good for him, to escape
from his non-work and to go back into live as he once had. It was a more interesting job than the
petty detective business he had been distracting himself with, and he looked forward to being able
to speak tersely, to stride in without fear, yes, even to scare people, not children perhaps but
gangsters, thugs, disharmonious elements - those who deserved it. He relished all this, and yet
beneath it all as a rotten corpse beneath innocuous soil remained that shame. Was it weakness? His
age, perhaps, was getting to him.
The taxi pulled up at the bottom of Fortune, light and noise all around. He thanked the driver
and disembarked. He stood on Harbour Road as a truck juddered past on its way to the market, the
pavements busy with people enjoying themselves. Chinese and Japanese almost co-existing, going to
their own bars mostly, still regarding each other warily, and there still being far more Chinese than
Japanese: but it was almost like harmony. It would perhaps be the future, he thought, if the country
didn’t fall apart before then. He recalled Xu Mei and her hunted expression and felt a pang of
something oily and heavy in his breast and dismissed it and remembered to pretend to be happy.
The Red Club was at number twenty-five on the pier, far out over the water. He could see
Sunshine, the place where Mizuki Tachibana had mentioned, on his left. It had tempted him to
investigate there as well, and he had notes about it in his head, but for now the Red Club was the
lead to follow. It didn’t bode well for the investigation – just at a glance he could tell it would be one
of those places the Chinese gangs were involved in, an old yakuza stomping ground before the
yakuza had lost the Heaven Body Insurance turf war. If Li Huangqi was really an unregistered and
hung out there then it meant that the story of whatever had happened to Sachiko Suzuki could only
get more complicated. That was why he had brought the Nambu.
He could see the club from here, through the shifting crowd, past the banners and lanterns
strung up from the lampposts that proclaimed yet more ethnic harmony, ethnic harmony forever
until the end of time. It was a plain black building, decorated with little but a small red sign of metal
above the double doors, guarded by two men were letting drifting passers-by inside. Nothing
exceptional about it but that was what made it dangerous. He grunted, tapping his stick on the wood.
“Come on, Sergeant Munekata.” he said under his breath, staring long and hard at the enemy
fortress ahead. “Get to work.”
“Who are you talking to?” a voice asked behind him, low and mocking. He started, turned, saw a
girl there with her hands behind her back and a smug smile on her made-up face. She wore purple
eyeshadow and lipstick and a layer of foundation covered her skin like those first tentative snows of
a Manchurian winter. Her hair was loose and shaggy and she wore a loose-fitting tank top with her
bra straps hanging out, and her skirt was short and her boots were high. He stared at her for a
second. “Old man.” she said, standing upright, hands in the pocket of her jacket. “You okay? Or did
your heart give out on you?”
He went on staring. “…Miss Takamori?”
She scoffed. “I almost didn’t recognise you too. This how you like to dress for other girls, is it?”
Her bow to him was long and sweeping. Several people passing by glanced over dubiously. “Hello,
Munekata.” she said, her voice full of loving venom.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“I found out you weren’t home today.” she said. “So I went to your home and waited there. And
followed you, of course.” she said. “All the way to Love The Empire Street, to your chat with that
little kid in the house there. And then I followed you here.”
“You did all that?” he asked. He thought of the feeling of being watched on Love The Empire
Street, the female shape he had seen – he realized now and felt foolish. If she had been someone
else, someone more dangerous, then it could have been trouble. But she was only dangerous to his
heart. “I needed to check if you really were going to see another girl.” she was saying. “I take my
business very seriously.”
“I didn’t see you.” he lied.
Hana scoffed. “Oh, what’s that?” She sidled up to him, bending over so his eyes were directed
down her tank top and to the pale blue-veined skin of her breasts there which so many times before
he had glimpsed only as silhouettes, promises of nirvana, in the darkness of an anonymous bedroom.
It forced him to avert his eyes like the gentleman he wasn’t. “Did the great detective miss
something?” she said. Munekata stood his ground.
She reared up, folding her arms. “What’s going on, you old fart? Why were you hanging out with
Chinese teenagers in the slums? Why are you here now? This isn’t ‘work’, is it?” This act had the
hallmarks of the woman he saw at the Dragonfly – but Munekata recognised that she really was
angry at him, and that she was not only here asking for money, and that this was almost a genuine
interaction between the two of them. Released from his desire for a moment he was unmoored in
space and time, unable to stop watching her as if she were a thing from another world. He gripped
his walking stick, the crowd pouring by the both of them as they stood there on the curb. “It is work.”
he said. “Policework. It’s too much to share with a nice young lady such as yourself, but I have to go
to one of these clubs and ask questions in order to assist with the solving of a crime.” He was unable
to add to his voice the necessary firmness and when he’d finished he saw that Hana’s eyes had lit up,
that she wasn’t understanding his point. “So this is real work.” she said. “What the hell, hey? You
don’t do real work.”
 “I must admit that it seems hard to believe,” he said, “but I am currently doing real work.” She
moved, grabbing him by the hand, those soft long fingers, artist’s fingers, that he’d gripped so often
in their private make-believe. “Let me come with you.” she said.
“Miss Takamori, I-”
“What, huh?” she snapped. “You think you can just say ‘I have work’ and leave me out here in the
middle of the street? You think I’m that stupid? If you’re looking at other girls, that affects me.
Doesn’t it?” Her voice lowered slightly. “That affects my livelihood. So let me come with you and
then I’ll know I can trust you.”
“No.” he said. “Go home. It’s too dangerous.” Armee Japanisch, the rudest to her he thought he
might have ever been. Hana did not flinch but held onto him, her plain exotic beautiful regular old
eyes swiftly narrowed. “If you don’t let me come with you now,” she said, deathly quiet, “then I’ll
never see you again.” He tensed at this, although only inside – on the outside he wrapped himself up
tight so that all that came out was a sigh, as if he were realising he had forgotten something at home.
But she had caught it and he knew that she knew that there was no way for him to call her bluff. He
thought briefly of the plains, decades ago, and of the gun in his armoured hand and the girl before
him on the white path. The setting sun and the falling sky.
“Alright.” he said. “Alright. Miss Takamori, you can follow me. But I’m going to advise you to stay
close to me at all times. Don’t look at any other man. Don’t talk to anyone. We’re here for a target
who is an unregistered illegal, and it may get serious. Do you understand?” She looked at him with
something alien that was a little like respect, not quite that but at least more than how she normally
viewed him, which he was aware was as shit beneath her heel. She nodded. “Alright.” he said.
“Come with me.”
“Yes, sir!” she barked in her own imitation of Armee Japanisch, snorting, holding onto his arm
almost as if she meant it. As they advanced along the pier as one, she keeping careful and
considerate pace with his staggering three-legged stride, he found himself glad she was here,
because this was really her. The Red Club wasn’t so dangerous - the triads were children who had
always been nothing to the Kempeitai. Gripped by a kind of hysteria – there it was, that Manchukuo
habit – he imagined it would win her over for certain, seeing Munekata the soldier, Munekata the
leader, this new man here, this real man, who didn’t pay for her time with gifts but went in and dealt
with things and took care of business.
It was a violation of all the secret rules they had established and yet there was something in it he
enjoyed, and there was something for her too, he thought – or else she would not have been holding
onto him so tightly, with such a painful sort of grip. They came to the club. Its severe black walls
loomed before them, the neon-lit entryway like a portal presaging the passage from this life to the
next. But it was only a club and she was only a woman. “Did you ever hang out in a place like this
before?” she asked him.
He nodded. “For work.”
“Cheating housewives and whatever.” she said. “Sure.” They advanced together. The doorman
with his cowboy hat and denim suit and the obvious bulge of a holstered weapon beneath his jacket
faced them. The cowboy hats, he noted, were a recent thing, neither yakuza or triads. The doorman
was a dark-skinned Chinese, shirt almost open and sweat shining on his face. He saw Munekata and
saw Hana and nodded, jerking a hand for them to go in. Hana looked to Munekata. “But don’t they
check for weapons?” she asked.
Munekata took a step, leant on his stick. “They already did.” he said. Once they were through the
doors the music rushed in to greet them, a pounding assault of synth-heavy pop, something German
and industrial, and the red lights above that swivelled and turned in their pivots were blinding and
the crowd on the bare metal floor alive and flowing like water. Those on the tables on the platform
to the right were busy with their drinks and dice games but no less chaotic, shouting and hollering
and gesturing all out of sync with one another, a flurry of frantic action all set to fast-forward. A
fluorescent sculpture of a human body dressed in plastic samurai armour burned crimson against
the far wall. Smoke filled the air, both tobacco and otherwise.
 Hana was paused at his back. He stood there upon the threshold. “This doesn’t seem like your
natural environment.” she said or he heard her say just about. He grabbed the head of his walking
stick. “It isn’t.” he said, and he began. He went straight to the bar, rushing there as best he could,
knocked about by dancers and drunkards on all sides but remaining on his feet, feeling his leg
protest at the effort he was forcing out of it. He hobbled there with Hana trailing after him and he
found the nearest free stool, next to a pair of settler businessmen in florid shirts like his who were
busy talking about Korean girls.
He located the barman behind a wall of solid translucent glass. “A whiskey.” he said in Mandarin.
“With ice!” He paid and it was brought to him. He sat with the glass cold in his grip and the music
laying siege to both his eardrums and he missed the Golden Dragonfly all of a sudden.
“Aren’t we here to look for someone?” Hana shouted at him. Munekata, remembering her, told
the barman to get her a Tsingtao. “We are.” he said, shouting back. “This is the plan. Follow it, Miss
Takamori, or please get out.” She stiffened. Her beer arrived and she sipped without much interest
and he drank his whiskey without really feeling it. She drank with him, slowly, and they talked a little
about nothing. He put his hand on her rear and tried to kiss her twice and on all three occasions she
reacted with real disgust, which stung him but was necessary. He ordered his second whiskey. The
music went from track to track – it was so loud and it roared in electronic pain and bounded about
with squealing machine-noises that seemed to intensify the longer he ignored it. Munekata was
focused entirely on what he had to do.
He went over the script in his head and focused on his drink, on keeping it back, and sometimes
when he looked to her he focused on how beautiful she was all made-up, how much it broke his
heart to see her so perfect and yet clearly dressed that way for herself and not for him, and he put
that into the script as well why not.
The bartender was the key, a short Cantonese type who had a scar on his lip, who sometimes
went into the backrooms with certain individuals wearing those tell-tale cowboy hats, some Yanki
styling – he was a messenger for the cowboys who ran the place, who would be his source. The
Kempeitai knew everything, or once had known everything. Now at least they knew enough to guess
at what they didn’t. The music was accompanied now by some kind of vocals, a voice in Mandarin
bounding along to the synth huskily at his back. He wondered if Hana could sing. “Stay here.” he said
to her quietly, speaking Japanese. “Don’t help me.”
“What-?”
He cleared his throat. “Aiyah!” he cried in heavily-accented Mandarin, thick and slurred. “Where
is he, eh? Little sister, that bastard still isn’t here!” The two settlers looked over and then away.
Nobody else noticed – there was music and noise and conversation everywhere. Munekata packed
away more whiskey. “Where is he, little sister?” he shouted.
“I don’t know.” Hana said. He had never heard her speaking Mandarin before and he realized he
enjoyed it, but then he saw the disdain in her expression and the moment was gone and he was his
character again. “Damn that fucker.” he spat. He checked his watch. “He’s usually here. Shit.
Another whiskey!” He was delivered a drink within the minute. He felt Hana watching him, dubious
but for now compliant. Interested perhaps. The bartender was watching him too now but Munekata
went on as before, instead talking to Hana for a short while about the railway, about Japanese
investment, about the man from Longjiang who brought in the best Taiwanese girls, about nonsense
neither of them was interested in. Then at ten past nine, when one song ended and another began,
he resumed. “That turtle’s egg! Fuck his mother’s cunt. He’s not coming, little sister!”
The bartender edged forward. “Sir-”
“God damn it!” He drank his whiskey too quickly and made sure to let some dribble onto his chin.
The bartender was now against the bar. The two settlers looked on and so did several of the
customers at the surrounding tables. The bartender coughed. “Sir.” he said. “If I may ask, who are
you waiting for?”
Munekata leant in, his tie falling into his lap. “Li Huangqi.” he said. “I’m looking for Brother Li!”
The bartender gave nothing away, merely retreating back over the counter. Munekata said a few
more angry things and went back to drinking. He was slightly fired up but nothing more. On an
average night at the Dragonfly by this time he would already have drunk double this. Hana grabbed
him by the sleeve. “Look, old man-” Her expression was curious.
“Wait.” he said in a low voice. Another two minutes passed and the bartender went into the back
and returned with a fresh keg to fit to the beer taps, and a minute after that Munekata felt them
behind him. There were three of them, big men in cowboy hats and zoot suits, all black, and he
turned. “Eh?” The gun was under his jacket and Hana was by his side. “Come with us.” the tallest
said in deep-voiced Mandarin. Munekata’s eyes found Hana and told her to stay put. He clambered
off of his stool and grabbed onto his walking stick. “About damn time.” he said. “I’ve been waiting
here for ages!”
They didn’t allow him to say another word as they shepherded him away from the bar and
through the crowd, past the stage where by now the synth had retreated and a Chinese band was
performing scratchy-guitar love ballads by the neon samurai figure on the far wall. He saw Hana
watching him, her pale face lost amidst a sea of kaleidoscopic shadows. A pair of double doors rose
up out of the noise and swallowed him. The music was muffled, the light reduced to a dingy single
bulb strung up sheepish over his head. The room smelt of rot and the walls were unpainted concrete.
Kegs of beer were piled up here and there, and a rack for coats next to them, and a corridor that
went on past here and presumably around to the bar, to where business was done. Munekata
guessed this area was for something else.
Flanked by the three gigantic men he was pushed into the corner, where a metal chair waited
beneath a rusted, broken-down old air vent which now and then would tragically cough out a second
or so of stale wind that smelt of rust. He was bid to sit down and he did so, the three men facing him.
Their faces were masks half-painted in shadow. The tallest, bearded and with one eye covered by a
patch, cleared his throat. “What do you want with Li Huangqi?” he demanded.
Munekata sighed. He reached into his jacket. The three men tensed. He produced the Nambu,
holding it not aimed at them but firmly in his grip. “I’m from the Kempeitai.” he said in Japanese. The
three all seemed to tense as one, staring at the gun as if hypnotized, as if they were each now
feeling the breath of the serpent warm upon the backs of their necks. He smiled. “Please, bring me Li
Huangqi.” His own breath was warm and rancid with whiskey and he thought for a moment of how it
must have felt for Hana to kiss the mouth that breath like that rolled forth from. But he dismissed
the thought and put it with all the others and sat there with his gun and waited.
The three men exchanged glances. “Go!” the eyepatch said, and the man to his right hurried off
into the darkness. The remaining two then returned their attention to Munekata. One had a police-
issue truncheon – the eyepatch had a knuckle-duster. But neither had a Nambu. Soon there were
footsteps from the corridor. The man who had disappeared returned and with him was someone
else, a youth with a tight bowl haircut and a vest, a moustached face and a tattoo of the Buddha on
his right arm.
He looked strong and mean, with the small features and intense stare of an attack dog, and he
came in unbowed, stood before the other three men and facing Munekata without fear. Munekata
didn’t mind that. He held the Nambu loosely. “You wanted to see me.” Li Huangqi said, in a steady
voice that spoke of violence just held back. “Kempei.” He spat the word out as if it was a piece of bad
meat. In the semi-dark he and his henchmen waited while Munekata, leant on his stick, listened to
the muffled music and thought of Hana. “Excuse me,” he said in an absent-minded tone, “but are
you in charge here? You seem a little young.” The broken vent at his back went on spluttering.
Li Huangqi, broad arms folded, cocked his head. “Is it your business what I’m doing here?”
“Not especially.” Munekata answered. “I’m just curious. Forgive me if the question came out
wrong. I wonder often about these things. We used to have much more authority in this part of
town. Time sure does change things, doesn’t it?”
Li’s eyes narrowed. “You wanted to see me.”
“It’s a personal matter.” Munekata said. “You can send your friends back to their posts if you
don’t want them to hear, but I have some questions for you.”
 “What questions?”
Munekata tensed. “They’re about Sachiko Suzuki.” A change came over Li Huangqi. His stature
shrank, his shoulders tightened. He uncrossed his arms. His three henchmen turned and as they
turned he barked at them. “Get out!” The three stared. “Out!” The eyepatch took the lead,
repeating this to the others, and the three of them in their suits and hats were scurrying away back
into the club. For a moment as the doors were opened the music came drifting in loud and clear,
amateur guitar and beautiful voice singing together of long-lost love. Then but for the strangled
sound of the old vent Li and Munekata were alone again. “My apologies.” Munekata said, switching
to Japanese. “I understand if it’s a sensitive issue.”
Li’s boyish face shifted, a kaleidoscope of angers. “However,” Munekata continued, “I have a job
to do. You must understand, Mr. Li, it’s only a formality. Forgive me, but your name has come up in a
criminal investigation regarding Miss Suzuki.” With both massive fists clenched Li stepped closer to
him. In the clearer light Munekata could see his worn, dark skin, the bulging veins upon his biceps,
and most importantly the cold look in his eyes, which he had seen on so many men during the
Insurgency and also with Hana, in odd moments where she hadn’t been paying attention. It was the
look of the survivor, the most dangerous kind of Chinese. Munekata held onto the Nambu as if his
life depended upon it. “She alleges to have been, ah, molested on Friday night in this very area,” he
explained, “and you were seen in her company on that night. So I wished to speak to you about that
matter.”
Li’s nostrils were flared, his brow furrowed. He stepped even closer. Between them now was less
than half a metre of space. His enormity loomed. “What are you accusing me of?” he asked.
“Nothing, nothing.” Munekata said. “However, I have a job to do. So, please, could you recount
to me the events of that Friday night? If it isn’t too much trouble.” A dangerous moment passed. Li
cracked his knuckles, gazing down upon Munekata with an expression like thunder. Munekata aimed
to be unfazed, sat on his flimsy chair waiting. He heard the slight exhalation and he saw the quiver in
Li’s hard eyes, and he knew that he had at least muddled his way through round one. Li stood still
too close and still taut. The vent went on dying at Munekata’s back.
“I met Sachiko through a girlfriend of mine.” Li said. “She seemed okay, for a Jap.” ‘Jap’ as usual
in English. “We met up a few times. Last time she brought a friend of hers, a real racist piece of shit.
One of your types. This girl spent the whole evening looking down on us, and they had an argument
over it. Sachiko was mad as hell afterwards. She wanted to prove something to herself, I guess, and
she said we should go further. I didn’t want to, but she insisted we go out here.” The corner of his
mouth twitched. “I lost track of her inside. I dunno what happened. I left with my girl later.”
“You left a sixteen-year-old girl alone in a nightclub?” Munekata twisted his wrist, moving the
Nambu around just to remind Li Huangqi that it was there. “How old are you, Mr. Li? If you don’t
mind my asking.”
Li’s scowl was thunderous, like a statue of Guan Yu frozen in a temple hall. Then the anger faded
slightly – he shifted his jaw and exhaled. “Twenty-four.” he said. Munekata thought about this. A
sixteen-year-old, Sachiko, and the eighteen-year-old Xu Mei – ‘a girlfriend of mine’ – had come into
contact with this older man. He made a mental note of it but outwardly only gave a slight nod.
“What’s the matter, huh, kempei?” Li’s fists were tight. “You have some problem with me? What’re
you thinking?”
“Nothing much.”
“I didn’t fucking touch her.” Li spat. “You got it? I didn’t touch Sachiko. Whatever happened there
– someone else did it. I’m not about to tell the whole fucking story to a fucking kempei, but on that
you can trust me. It wasn’t me. Whatever it was.”
“I understand.” Munekata knew he was lying – perhaps not about that, but about something. He
could believe Xu Mei’s characterisation of this man as a virgin, and he believed Li on his denial of the
crime – but something was going on here between the two of them, schoolgirl and gangster, and
that was the most important detail. He had to quickly abandon his speculation because Li then
stepped closer to him. Too close. “Alright.” Li said. “Well, if you’re really a kempei, then you’re
trouble. I don’t know what interest you have in what happened on Friday night, but…I have to warn
you off, you understand.” Munekata’s hand held the gun and yet something was preventing his
finger from touching the trigger, some instinct or a lack of one – he wasn’t used to it, he realized,
and Li had realized it too. “I don’t want to.” Li said. “But I gotta. You understand.”
“Of course, of course.” Munekata said. “I don’t intend to interrupt whatever your operation is. I
only”- a fist interrupted him, Li’s knuckles slammed into his cheek. He recoiled, bounced about, pain
drowning his thoughts in liquid fire. He managed to see it draw back again, that vast and bloodied
club of meat, and he tensed himself just like in training and it still didn’t help any with the next one.
He gasped, his nose ablaze. Blood filled his nostrils and overflowed hot and wet into his mouth.
“Leave it alone, kempei.” Li said. “I’ve got people behind me who even you should be careful about.”
Back to Mandarin now, as the dynamic between them reversed yet again. “So take this as a warning.
If I see you again, they’ll have to get involved. And it won’t just be a few love taps, what they do. It’ll
be the kind of shit you types used do to us.”
With the greatest effort in the world Munekata managed to lift his head. He met Li’s eyes. He
chuckled. “What we used to do to you? With respect, young man-” Li smacked Munekata one more
time, a slap so fierce it echoed, and a punch, and even more blows after that. Munekata’s head
snapped back with each strike, his neck aching and his face numb. Blood dribbled down his chin.
Through a fog of pain he glimpsed the three men from earlier as they surrounded him. “Throw this
Jap out in the street.” Li Huangqi said.
Munekata’s Nambu was taken from him and stuffed back into the holster under his jacket, which
is exactly what he would have done had he beaten up a police officer, he thought approvingly, and
he was lifted up by arms and dragged roughly from his place, taken back out into the club. The noise
hurt his dizzied brain and the colours danced and moved like buddhas of a thousand shades coming
to him at the moment of death. Faces were turned to him and voices raised. He tried to find words
but only blood came out.
Soon they were out in the open air and they were hauling him through the double doors and into
the street. “Come on, you bastard.” one of them said, letting go of him. Munekata saw his moment.
He remembered the old instincts and twisted himself free, drawing a fist, and he slammed it into the
gut of the nearest Chinese and turned to the next. His leg then surrendered and he fell to the pier
onto his side. “Fuck you!” Someone kicked him hard in the chest. His walking stick clattered to the
ground in front of him. “Don’t come back here, Jap.” someone else said.
Munekata could only groan. People passed him by, their shoes on parade before him, and
through the tears blurring his vision he could see leather and he could see sandals and army boots
and dainty girls’ slip-ons and heels. He lay there for a short time or a long time, trying to move but
not really. The night was warm and he was bleeding and dreaming of cold and of winter snow falling
on the plains and a Manchu girl with a fox’s knowing face looking at him from the other end of a rifle.
“Old man?” someone asked, and he thought it was the eyepatch and he swiped at his jacket,
ignoring the pain, trying to get out his Nambu. Hana stood over him pale and beautiful. “What
happened?” she asked. Her arms were upon him and she was helping him up. He gritted his teeth
and forced himself onto his feet, she handing him on his stick which he then almost fell onto. “Told
you.” he rasped. “Dangerous.”
“I-wow. You’re bleeding.” He could smell sweet Hana, her perfume and beneath that the blessed
odour of her sweat. “Come on.” she said. “Let’s get out of here. To a hospital or something.”
“Home.” he said. “I need to get home. I can fix this myself.”
“Sure, whatever. I’ll get you some tissue, or something. Can you stand?”
“I’ll be fine.” He tried to stand and proved himself wrong. Hana held onto him. They were alone
in the middle of the crowd. “Miss Takamori.” he said. “I’m fine.”
“Idiot. I’ll take you home.” She might have gone to a convenience store, bought tissue. She might
have helped him into a taxi. He half-remembered many things. She might have held onto him, gently,
and told him it would be fine by tomorrow. She might have asked him why he had come here,
staring down unafraid at the armoured figure buried in the snow. Munekata tried to think about the
case, to stay in command, to avoid falling into her arms exhausted and bruised. He tried his hardest
to avoid letting her really know him. In the end he remained still against the side of the taxi and
embraced the pain.
 8
Out of ideas she met the foreigner in the middle of the road. It had seemed such an easy thing to
do at first, to help Munekata from the taxi to his house, but she hadn’t reckoned on the old bastard
being so heavy and on herself being so tired and drunk and full of weird adrenaline that was making
her twitchy, and his blood was on her nice tank top and she was thinking about stuff, all kinds of
crazy stuff, about the last time Mrs. Abe had made them do a health check, had taken each girl into
a room and made them get naked and let in the army doctor, for her house was sponsored by the
army, as was everything, and the army doctor, who was not allowed to have sex with the girls he
inspected like they were out in the countryside, had peered at her with lizard eyes as if he had
known and said, disgustingly, you’re the picture of health, Miss Takamori, and she didn’t know why
she was thinking about that but there it was – and Munekata was heavy.
She had gotten him here, buying tissue to mop up the blood and getting the taxi and snarling at
the taxi driver, in angry Mandarin that let him know that it was that kind of business, to keep his big
nose out of it. And now at a random point on Victory Lane it had all drained out of her just like
Munekata’s blood out of his nose drip-drip-dripping onto the tarmac. Mistake one had been to come
here, to follow after him like a puppy. Mistake two had been to let him talk to her in Mandarin.
No - mistake one had been to have been born at all, for her mother had always told her over rice
wine once that if you were Chinese in Manchukuo death was better, honestly, than being another
coolie sucked into their industrial death-machine, and that was why she had almost but not quite
been drowned as an infant. She stood there, swaying under his flabby weight, and spat into the
gutter. Tenmei was vast and hostile around her, the lights a wrathful deity’s thousand burning limbs
reaching out to smash her guts and pull her head off.
Snatches of Japanese drifted over and without her cover - the protection of being Hana Takamori,
who she was not, who was only one name amongst endless names, with as much meaning to her as
a t-shirt she pulled on at the start of the day and took off again at the end of it - she heard the
settler-speak not as idle chatter but as the mutter of soldiers going house-by-house searching for
bandits. She was too warm in her jacket and her sweat was all over her in a way that was
uncomfortably post-coital although nothing much had happened. Frozen in the street, holding the
wounded Munekata close to her, she made a wretched little noise and wished Chen Jintian were
with her. “It’s fine.” Munekata mumbled. “I’m fine, Hana. Just-”
“Excuse me,” a voice said, in an ugly language which wasn’t Japanese at least. She saw someone
she vaguely knew, that large, hairy foreign businessman who lived nearby, the man who, doing some
clandestine customer research, she had spied at The Golden Dragonfly with Munekata before. He
was coming from below in his crumpled t-shirt and jeans, drunk but probably not that drunk. “Mr.
Munekata?” he called in his queer language. “Is that you? Mr. Munekata – Fucking hell!”
“Hello.” she said, hefting Munekata’s weight with her as they wheeled around to face this new
threat. The foreigner was there with them, taking it all in. “What happened?” he asked.
“Don’t know.” she said in English. “Help please.”
“Help?” The foreigner stared. She wanted to say so many hurtful things to him, so many colourful
and angry phrases, and for a moment she searched her phrasebook’s worth of English vocabulary
trying to find them, but in the end she gave up. “Heavy.” she said. The foreigner’s eyes widened. He
came to her, taking Munekata’s other side and half of the burden away from her. Hana sighed,
straightening up a little. Together they hobbled up Victory Lane towards Munekata’s house. The
foreigner’s strained grunting was too close to her.
She had done it with lots of different kinds of men, Chinese and Japanese and Korean and
Mongolian, but never one of these devils. She supposed she hated them, the giants who had
betrayed China in the war by not taking the fight all the way to Tokyo, who had satisfied themselves
by just sternly telling the Japs to withdraw back to their starting lines with ‘Manchukuo’ still in the
hands of the enemy, leaving it unfinished. The white men who had taught the Japanese all their
murderous habits had then washed their hands of the whole affair as if it was something unseemly
they’d become disinterested in, even after that coming back slowly over the years, as the blood
dried, to do their usual, bringing their money and sex all around the prostrate Empire the Japanese
had broken in for them. She looked at him, the foreigner. He did not look at her, as if he were
ashamed.
She and he took Munekata through the gate and up the path and Hana went into his jacket
pocket and found his house keys and unlocked the front door. Fumbling through the dark until the
foreigner found a lightswitch they took Munekata into the bathroom. “Hana, Mr. Burton. I’m fine.”
he muttered, and Hana didn’t pay him any mind.
“Mr. Munekata, it’s alright.” the man named Burton said, rooting through the bathroom cabinet.
He found what looked to be some gauze and disinfectant. They cleaned him up, Hana finding a first
aid kit with a nasal splint inside, and they stuck that onto him as best they could. Munekata watched
them, blinking. “That hurts.” he said when Hana applied the splint, holding his nose together
beneath the material and pressing it firmly into place. She was glad it hurt. He sighed. “Ah, damn it.”
he said. “I really messed up.”
“Looks like you got off easy, mate.” Burton said. “Is that all? A broken nose?”
“Saw they kick.” she said slowly. “In the…front.” Hana already had Munekata’s blood on her
hands. She leant over him, old man in pain on the toilet, and she grabbed his shirt and unbuttoned it.
They saw the bruising on his left pectoral which was already forming an ugly painting of aggressive
yellow and black blotches all fused together. “Hell.” Burton said. He leant in. “Look, Mr. Munekata.”
“Yes, Mr. Burton?” Munekata’s English was decent, Hana thought. Better than hers. That was
what was achievable if you were not cursed by being born Chinese. Covered in sweat and with dried
blood on his face Munekata looked up to the other man. “Does it hurt to breathe?” Burton asked.
“Check now. How do you feel when you breathe in?” Munekata swallowed. He took a few seconds
to do as Burton had instructed, focusing only on himself. After that he sighed. “I feel nothing. But
there is a pain in my chest.”
“When you breathe?”
“Not worse. Just the same.”
“Okay.” Burton almost smiled, his boyish English gentleman’s face aglow with relief – tofu-sellers
knew never to fall in love with foreign gentlemen, an older woman had told her once. “Well, you
might not have any broken ribs then.” he said. “That’s good.”
Munekata relaxed, falling back onto the toilet. “Wonderful.” He winced. “I might sleep now. If it
is permissible.” Now he was speaking in Japanese again. Burton looked from him to Hana and Hana,
at Munekata’s side in that cramped little bathroom, stood with her arms folded as if trying to protect
herself from something. “He wants sleep.” she explained.
“But-” Burton stared. “But – look, what happened here?”
“Policework.” Hana said. She was aware of sounding a little angry with him but that was only
because she was angry with him. “He should go to the doctor.” Burton said.
“No.” Munekata said, now in English. “I shall stay here. Mr. Burton, thank you. My housekeeper –
Mrs. Tenma – she’s very nice – I can call her tomorrow. She can check up on me. Please leave me be.”
“Your housekeeper?” Hana said. “That old bitch? What, you’re gonna have her sew you up with a
needle and thread? I stay.” Hana said. Burton frowned and stood up too, wiping his hands on his
jeans. He took a second, closing his eyes and thinking, and then finding his reflection in the mirror,
trading thoughts with it.
“Alright.” he said eventually. “Well…call me in the morning. Let me know how things turn out.”
Hana and Munekata stayed there in the bathroom, she holding onto him as if he was about to fall
apart, and they listened as Burton made his way back through the corridor and the living room, still
stumbling in that slightly drunk way, and then as the front door slid shut and they were alone. “You
know that foreigner well?” she asked.
“Drinking companion.” Munekata said. “Sometimes.”
“Oh.” she said. “I didn’t know you had friends.”
“Are you not my friend?” he asked pathetically.
 Fuck you, she thought. But she said nothing. He took her hand. “Thank you.” he said. His shirt was
still undone. His stick rested against the tiled wall adjacent to the shower. “Don’t worry, Miss
Takamori.” he said. “Occupational hazard.” The nasal splint rested white and stark over the bridge of
his nose. The gauze stuffed up his nostrils was two clouds darkened by a spreading pattern of murky
crimson leaking in from above. “Can you help me to bed?” he asked.
Fuck you, she thought. “Sure.” she said. They as one creature, drunk and dying, made their way
out of the bathroom, through the living room and up the stairs, past a portrait of the Japanese
emperor on the landing and to the bedroom, to the place where her meal ticket, the reason that she
could still live where so many others of her family had died, was at his most vulnerable, his real inner
sanctum. She could rob him, she supposed, sniff out all the family heirlooms and trinkets a man from
an old home island family might have, or could kill him in his sleep with his family sword – all Japs
had those, she thought – she could gut him with it just for fun, or for revenge for crimes that weren’t
entirely his.
He grunted with each step, eyes fixed firmly ahead. Once they were in the room, Munekata’s tiny
room where his futon lay sad and small on the floor, he let go of her and stood and undressed
himself. Even in the dark she recognised every inch of his aged, sagging body, muscular but not
enough to resist already being slowly dragged down by the years. Once he was in his underwear he
turned to her. His bleary eyes looked her up and down. His chest rose and fell. “You can go.” he said.
“I – I am sorry.”
“I’ll stay.” she said. “I don’t want you to die, or whatever. I take my business seriously. And
tomorrow we’ll go to the doctor.”
Munekata took a long time to reply. “I – very well.”
“Was it good work?” Hana asked.
“Excuse me?”
“I mean, did you learn anything useful? About finding the cheating husband or whatever.”
“I did.”
“Then that’s good. Goodnight, old man.”
“Goodnight, Miss Takamori.” She left him in his bedroom and waited there until she heard him
lower himself onto the futon. The house was then hers. Munekata’s house, where he lived and
breathed and felt sad and got tired and went to the bathroom and sometimes probably pleasured
himself thinking of her. She hated it and yet it gave her something, she realized. Like seeing him at
the pier, like talking to him without being on the clock. It had all the intimacy of her time with Chen
Jintian, and although she loved Chen Jintian so much that she would die for him and she still thought
Munekata was a stupid bastard, she understood that she was very lonely and that it wasn’t good for
the heart to be that way.
In the living room Hana saw his shrine to the Buddha and his shelf of literature that was largely
Buddhist texts and a few patriotic military journals, a few books by Goto Shimpei and other old
imperialists, perfectly politically-correct and tedious, and adjacent to that she saw the desk in the
corner where a sheet of calligraphy was midway through editing. His writing was crude, the Chinese
characters inelegant – it had never seemed to be his kind of hobby. The characters spelt out a
rudimentary sentence: “Flowers in summer, feelings that never die.” A kind of poem, she guessed.
She was quite satisfied at it not being very good.
Reading it and seeing those characters reinforced that other sensation, that strange good and
bad hot and cold feeling in her gut. It was completely untrue that you could ever learn anything of a
man’s character by sleeping with him, she thought, because all that taught you was how he wanted
to be, his vanities and vulnerabilities and how they intertwined to form a papier-mâché effigy of him,
something mounted on a tray and paraded about the village of his soul during one of those
moments when he looked inward, the festival of the self that all men were born to celebrate. Here
in Munekata’s home Hana was aware that she was almost creeping across the slimy dark cold truth
beneath that effigy, that she was on the cusp of knowing who he actually was. She felt troubled at
the possibility. But nevertheless she went on.
 The book half-open on his desk was a Japanese translation of something called Storm of Steel, by
a German, and she supposed that made sense, for the old-fashioned home island Japanese did not
only use German words like most people but were interested grotesquely in their thinking, the ideas
beneath the coal-scuttle helmets, the philosophical dribble of the warrior race that had fought the
whole world to a halt and had used horrifying violence just like the Kwantung had and now, like the
Americans and British, like all the whites, had suddenly decided to become civilized, had betrayed
the Japanese by demanding they enact their violence less obviously.
For decades the Germans had worked to protect Japanese interests against the perfidious
Chinese, whose Kuomintang had funded the insurgencies, and the insidious Soviets, who had
shipped the insurgents arms. Manchukuo had thought the Germans friends, until in the last few
years when they had recognised independent Korea and then endorsed the Taiwan Free Area, and
now they had signed the Hong Kong Accords binding Japan to dismantle the rest of the Empire – did
Munekata have any thoughts on that?
She had never listened to his politics and he, come to think of it, had never given her any, only
pathetic stories about what he’d done in other places and memories of Ryujin and Shinkyo many
years ago, quaint things like the taste of sake here or the marvellous geishas in this town there.
Sometimes Ryujin detective stories, anecdotes about this or that case he had been doing. But never
the war or the government or even, in these strange twilit times, the upcoming withdrawal. Not for
the first time did she ponder this. Usually men loved to talk to captive women about politics, and yet
for all their time together he had never taken the chance. She wondered what that meant about him
– about his politics.
His television screen was layered in dust. On the fridge was a picture of her she’d given him to
mock him and arouse him at once, of her in that splendid purple qipao, which the young artist Oh-
seong had taken for her. She had held onto it to remember him, a nice, calm man with hair down to
his shoulders, a guerilla soldier, surrendered, who had become a photographer of women who had
told her she was beautiful.
He had been a man who she had made love to, not simply sat on top of and wriggled to
completion. It had been a long life, hers, and she had been born a woman, unfortunately, and had
found shelter from the world with many different men of varying quality and racial stock, and now
she was here hurting herself with this one because it felt good to humiliate him, to embarrass him
and ridicule him and take his money anyway. She wondered if the world hadn’t made her a little sick.
Inside the fridge were several beers and some raw fish in the freezer, and a selection of spices
and sauces on a homemade rack over the sink. His cutlery was all neatly organised, chopsticks and
then western knife and fork and then a large knife for cutting meat, and with that a chopping board,
slightly wet from cleaning, resting in the sink. She peered through the kitchen window and saw that
in the garden was a shed. She slipped back into the living room and offered a quick prayer to the
Buddha. In the moonlight it was clear that the shed in the backyard was too clean and too well-kept.
It had to be used for something, she thought.
Once Hana had lied to him. Beneath him holding onto him tight with he inside her, Hana had said
to Keizo Munekata: “I want to know all of you.” A line that she had used with many men before and
one that always worked and that was always false. But now the idea of knowing him intoxicated her,
especially the idea of knowing without him knowing anything in return. It was a safe way to assuage
her loneliness, to understand someone else without being understood. Nobody knew her, not even
Chen Jintian. Nobody in the whole world knew her real name, which had been stolen from her by
the Japanese.
So, she thought, I’ll steal something of yours, you Jap bastard. She turned the outside light on and
a lantern woke up, spilling pale electric glow all over the stone, and she slipped out of the back door
and into the yard. A dog was howling in an adjacent house and there were footsteps and late-night
conversations and the rumble of cars going by on the road. The moon was high above glaring down
with its sinister sightless eye. Hana went to the shed and slid back the bolt on the door. It opened
without a creak, obviously well looked-after, and that was another sign that this was important.
 Hana smiled to herself and pulled the door open wide. The light from the lantern in the yard lit up
the inside and by it she saw a shrine in the corner, with a faded black and white photograph of an
old man, some dead ancestor. The dog nearby was howling, barking to itself high and loud in the
abyss beyond the shed. She took a step inside and looked around. On the left wall was nothing but a
workbench with tools neatly arranged atop it and then there was that shrine - and upon the right
wall she saw something new mounted there on a wooden board and she saw it in all its terrible glory.
At first her brain refused to process what her eyes were seeing. She pieced it together - black
metal armour and black gauntlets and black boots and then finally the mask with the empty
eyeholes, that uncanny imitation of humanity, without features but for those gaping holes, endlessly
staring, the face of a demon from another age shoved rudely into the modern day, a Medieval
implement for killing and fighting, an instrument of terror.
It was the armour and inner frame of a special attack suit. Which meant that her Munekata, her
cash cow, her piggy bank, her stupid, special, useful useless old man, had not just been some
policeman or Kwantung officer or whatever, as she had thought half-listening to his chatter about
Shinkyo years ago, but he had been with the Survey Unit. It meant that he had been a surveyman.
He had been a soldier who had fought in the Second Insurgency who had pacified the plains for the
settlers and carried out the massacres and deportations and who had saved this wretched country
from death just when liberation had been at hand. He had been a surveyman and he might well have
burned down her village himself. Her fists were clenched. All of her was aflame. The enemy stood
pinned to the wall before her, staring down at her and with that blank eyeless stare pushing her on
with an empty question, the only question – where are your papers, it demanded. Why are you here?
There was a sound from her back. A cough. She didn’t move. Her gaze was trapped within the
eyeholes of the special attack suit’s mask and it was from that mask she heard the voice that spoke
next. “Hana.” it said in Munekata’s clipped, tired tone. “Let me explain.”
One hand unclenched. She found a wrench on the workbench and she picked it up.
“Hana-”
“Fuck you!” she spat. In the second after that she had meant to kill him but in the end the blow
only glanced his skull. She twisted about, dropping the wrench, and went for his throat with her
hands and suddenly he had hold of her – not with the crushing grip of a true Survey Unit trooper in
their black nightmare costume but harder and more ruthless with her than her foolish cripple had
ever been, and even though he still wore the splint and had the gauze up his nose and there was a
wild bruise on one cheek and more all over his front, even though he was only in his underwear with
his gut hanging out, even though he had to lean on his stick with his other hand, she discovered now
he was strong enough to pin her arm back and force her onto her heels. Grunting he pushed her
over onto the floor and let go of her and left her there, and sat on the concrete glaring up at him she
now stayed put. Her wrist throbbed where he had grabbed her. “Let’s talk.” he said to her in a level
voice. And so, after a break to get some sake from the kitchen, they settled down in the living room
and talked.
-
He told her about Liaoyang, where the winter had gone on forever. There had been many places
where he could have started: in Japan, before everything, or when he had wandered along to
Manchukuo as a vagrant, or when Karashima had found him in Shinkyo and recommended him,
tough young rootless man lost on the streets, for a nice uniform and a bit of discipline and a job for
the Kempeitai. But he started with Liaoyang in Fengtian province, where the Second Insurgency had
been at its worst. He started with the day they’d sent Arakawa and he and the others to bring order
to a village in the middle of nowhere, the beginning of the end of his time in the Survey Unit.
Our battalion had been shadowing a unit of regular imperial troops on a harmonisation sweep, he
told her. Manchukuo Imperial Army, he’d explained, the conscripts who had shamed themselves so
badly in those years that after the Insurgency the Survey Unit had taken over many of their duties,
which had been the start of the great snowballing of the Unit’s power and prestige, which had ended
up with the men all reassigned or executed and with General Adachihara, their leader, being shoved
into the back of a staff car and posted up north to do some thinking.
But this had been before all that. While the great campaign against Zhou Enlai’s Red Army had
been undertaken in Jilin, the imperial troops of Fengtian, not trusted by their pureblood Japanese
masters, had been sent to do something simple, to ID and harmonize the villages out in the plains,
the kind of duty the Survey Unit aspired to be too good for. A patrol force of the imperial army had
gone to Yellow Dragon River Village deep in Liaoyang, to clear out the degenerate elements and
ensure the anti-pollution ordinances were being followed strictly, with his unit the 201st – he heard
her inhalation at this and noted it but did not react – monitoring them from afar.
That morning Lieutenant Karashima burst into their billet in a ruined town wrecked by shellfire
and napalm, a blackened husk of a family home where the two NCOs shared the solidary remaining
bunk. He woke Arakawa and Munekata, who had been busy recovering from a night of drinking, and
brought them to the command tent on the plains. “The local troops have fucked it again.” Karashima
said over tea upon the plastic table, they both in their uniforms slightly hungover. “Useless rabble.”
he spat. “No better than a militia. They have no idea what they’re doing. The reds have taken over.
They’re resisting the imperials and have killed several of them. This is an insult to the authority of
the state. Once again it’s up to us to stand up for Manchukuo. Squads A and B will move in and
disable the disharmonious elements. Understood?”
“Yes, sir.” he and Arakawa barked. “May the emperor’s reign last ten thousand years!” Which
emperor, Hana asked mockingly from the other side of the table. He told her that it wasn’t
important which one, but for the Survey Unit it had been officially Kangde, ruler of Manchukuo, but
to he and Arakawa who were transfers from the Japanese Kempeitai, loyal men who Karashima had
brought with him, they had always really meant Showa on his throne in Kyoto. Henry Puyi with his
phantom title was of no consequence. Who was Arakawa, she asked. Munekata didn’t answer her
but went on.
They were sent out in two vehicles, his squad – A – in the lead, Karashima in Squad B with
Arakawa. Their Type 57 half-tracks cut through the snow with their diesel engines snarling and
roaring, their armoured walls buffeting twenty-two men against the wind and cold. All were already
in their special attack suits, armoured and masked up with helmets affixed, and all held their Type 49
submachine guns close to their chests, shivering despite the insulating layer beneath the armour,
listening to the rumbling of the half-tracks’ treads and the whine of their wheels as they drove on,
pushing across plains so saturated in endless snowfall that they seemed to belong to nowhere at all.
There were no hills visible in the distance and no towns breaking up the expanse. All was white and
white was all. Both half-tracks had snowploughs and yet the progress they made was still slow and
halting, and Munekata, sergeant, listened to his headset, the radio barely a weight upon his suit’s
back, as garbled reports came in over the emergency band from the imperial troops trapped in
Yellow Dragon River. Their situation was desperate. The rebels had cut them off and surrounded
them in the barracks.
Squad A was to advance from the village’s west side, in the shadow of a vague hump in the earth
known as Bottle Hill, and Squad B from the east, by Yellow Dragon River – in this way they would
take the rebels by surprise and restore order. The two half-tracks diverged upon the trail, to east and
west, and Munekata took up his position upon the vehicle’s cupola, loosening the straps of his mask
and prying it from his face, so that he could use his binoculars to study the vague shape of the village
ahead. With cold slicing his skin and snow falling upon his cheeks he saw ancient stone walls and
rooftops, holes blasted here and there by miscellaneous shellfire, and he saw Bottle Hill and the
frozen pattern of the river, and he saw as well hints of smoke and fire from the village itself, the
continued violent quarrelling of rebels and imperials. He replaced his mask, the metal tight and
harsh. Over his headset he reported: “Squad A. B, report status.”
“Squad B.” Arakawa said. “Moving in.”
“Roger.” he turned to his men. “Prepare to disembark.” Ten masked, helmeted heads nodded
back. “Breaching west wall.” His gauntleted hands grabbed the mounted Sumitomo Type 67 MG.
Now the walls were in view, Bottle Hill at their backs, and the men atop the walls were already
taking aim with ancient rifles. Bullets pinged off of the half-track’s armour. Ahead lay the west gate,
traditional Chinese style, with only a flimsy wooden barricade of furniture and miscellaneous debris
in the way. Munekata raked the top of the village walls with the Sumitomo, the weapon bouncing in
his grip, its frost-dressed body spitting death in short volleys that tore up ancient stone and blasted
men apart in a shower of gunsmoke and gore. The half-track sped up, approaching the gate, its
engine alive with raw hatred. The men all gripped their weapons. With a thunderous howl of fury
the half-track slammed into the barricade, tearing through, and the village was bare before them,
one long street with battered hovels on both sides leading up to the old Qing yamen in the centre
and the modern-style colonial barracks next to it, both now surrounded by formations of men,
ragged figures who were firing into its glass windows and tossing Molotov cocktails and grenades at
its brickwork. The half-track rushed down the street and came to a cacophonous halt on one side of
the barracks, and Squad B’s half-track did the same from the other side. Munekata turned to his men.
“Sweep in. Clear the street. No survivors.”
“Sir!” ten voices called. The half-track’s rear doors swung open and the squad emptied out their
suit hydraulics whirring their submachine guns already firing. The special attack suit’s metal frames,
each one tuned precisely to the wearer’s muscle mass and build, supported them as they went,
absorbing recoil and impacts and letting them fire one handed and run and move at their best – and
if they were hit to keep on going, held up by a second skeleton of steel. That was how the
propaganda hacks had always described it, he said to her. Munekata joined his men, feeling his own
frame tense against his flesh, falling into the centre of the formation and hurrying forward as his
men fanned out, two long arms of one great armoured monster encircling the enemy. As they ran
they fired and their weapons barked out staccato judgements and with each precise barrage they
condemned one poor rebel after another to quick death. The rebels, caught between two mailed
fists, armed only with old bolt-actions or submachine guns, were cut down where they stood, their
blood spraying out in bursts of passionate red, splattering in vivid, random arcs against the snow.
They called out to one another in Mandarin but it was useless before the Survey Unit’s merciless
scythe, their bodies one by one flopping over broken and perforated, collapsing before the bullets in
that embarrassing way bodies always did. Munekata’s men fired with precision and moved swiftly,
the occasional enemy round clanging against their armour but doing nothing, and soon the battle
was over. “Squad A.” he reported. “Clear.”
“Squad B.” from Arakawa in his ear. “Clear.” Karashima stood at the centre of their group,
walking out from Squad B with his high-power autorevolver in hand and his sword sheathed at his
hip. Civilians watched from houses: those who were not brave enough to fight, who would pay the
price later. There would have to be reprisals. That, he told Hana, was how it was done. Hana did not
reply but watched him. Through his mask he looked around at the dead. “Right.” Karashima said.
“Sergeant Munekata, hold the area. Sergeant Arakawa, come with me to the barracks. Let’s see how
many of those useless imperials are left.” Munekata held the area. He turned to his men, to Private
Murata the man from Hokkaido who smoked too much, to Privates Zhang and Sun, the Chinese who
were willing to prove themselves in battle for the promise of urban residential permits, to Private
Cho who had kept his Korean name and still knew a few words, mostly swears, in the old half-extinct
tongue, to Private Yonemori, settler-born in a village near the border with China who came from a
Buddhist family who abhorred violence but felt his national duty was too important, to Corporal
Zamyatin, White Russian, much-abused by his Japanese comrades but who had joined up to prevent
communism from spreading any further and really believed that was what he was doing.
His men. But masked and suited up they were in that moment all the same man, reduced only to
armour and eyes. Munekata ordered Yonemori to cover them from the half-track cupola with the
MG, and for Zamyatin, the second radioman, to take two men to secure the nearby streets, and in
his perfect Japanese the Russian acknowledged the order and they set off, stark all-black figures
against white streets and grey buildings, their assault weapons ready.
 Quiet followed. Munekata could feel eyes upon he and his men from all sides, people huddled
behind windows and doors peering out. “Resistance encountered.” Zamyatin reported over the
radio. A volley of gunfire rose up over the wind. “Targets down. Moving on.” This repeated itself
several times. Munekata’s men were statues, rigid in their disciplined caution. Munekata heard a
whistle from far off. He watched the smoke rise from the half-track’s exhaust, dissipating in the
winter air. He turned his head across the street, to another rattle of death from Zamyatin and
another report in his ear. As he swept his vision back he saw something in one of the houses
opposite. It was a traditional northern-style Chinese house, marked with two door gods over the
entrance, its windows boarded up with wooden slats. He saw the first-floor slats shift, rotating in
their mountings, and he saw the muzzle flash.
It struck him first, a thunder blow against his chest, and then it struck his ears, the crack of a bolt-
action rifle. Without the special attack suit it would have killed him. As it was it was like being
punched in the chest very hard, and he staggered back one step and kept his eye on the window,
where the wooden slats now quickly slammed shut. He had seen it even through the snow, the glare
of reflected light upon a rifle scope. “Sir!” Yonemori called from the half-track. Munekata already
without thinking had raised his weapon and returned fire and his thunderous volley shredded the
wooden slats in an instant. “Sniper!” Private Takada cried.
“Stay calm!” Munekata said. Secure in their armour the men remained as they were. He lowered
his weapon, smoke oozing lazily from the barrel. “That house across the road.” Munekata said.
“Private Yonemori, hold the area. Takeda, Minami, cover me. I’m going to investigate.”
“Yes, sir!” they said as one. The Survey Unit followed one rule no matter what, he explained to
Hana, and it was the reason the surveyman was the hero of all of Manchukuo, and that rule was that
the men above, officers, NCOs, it didn’t matter, always led from the front. Idiotic, Hana said. But the
suit made it possible. He drew his shin-gunto from its sheath and held his submachine gun in the
other, counting that so far he had fired four bullets, and he and Takeda and Minami moved in on the
house. Takeda covered the front – Minami went into the alleyway at the back. As the commanding
sergeant Munekata went to the front door, guarded by its impotent gods, and with a swing from his
booted foot cracked the door apart and with another had broken it off the hinge.
The enemy was a rebel, a communist bandit, and by firing that shot had declared his intent. Now
by kicking in the door Munekata had declared his. The two warriors had taken their positions,
opposing one another upon the field of battle. Inside was dusty and dark. He paused there on the
threshold listening. There was a staircase just ahead. He heard the creak of floorboards from above.
With his sword hand he gestured to Takeda and slipped inside, his boots thudding on wood.
He made his way up the stairs with his weapons ready. He narrowed his eyes, finding everyday
things in the gloom, a mirror on the wall and a scroll opposite it and a cracked glass light fitting over
his head. From the landing there were three more rooms. One faced the street and it was where the
shot must have come from – the others adjacent to it were unimportant. The sniper’s room was
open. He hurried to it with his gun leading the way and he turned the corner and peered in. He saw
the rifle resting on the bed and he saw the holes in the wooden slats his bullets had made. The room
was empty, decorated on the walls but it was too dark to see, and he looked at the rifle. It was an
old weapon, a German Gewehr 43. A creak came from behind. His instincts kicked in and he span
round, the suit’s twenty kilograms of weight nothing to he and his powered frame, and his sword
arm went up with the armour of his right forearm over his unprotected neck and the submachine
gun was thrust forward with his finger upon the trigger – a defensive-offensive stance that no
opponent could break.
Position Twelve in the special attack suit manual, so burned into his brain that he hadn’t even
thought about assuming it. Now he was ready at once to take whatever came, to neutralize
whichever enemy had been about to surprise him.
She was a girl. She watched him with a fox’s face, narrow and hunted, full of hidden cunning, and
she wore ragged fatigues and had long hair tied back and a silver bracelet on her wrist. There were
scars all over her cheeks and neck. He didn’t move, secure in his position, but neither did he fire. She
was nothing compared to the gigantic creature the suit made of him. This was how they had thought
back then, he explained to Hana. He told her that it was a matter of honour, that the Chinese used
child soldiers and women but the Japanese only sent their men to die, as warriors must. So he did
not shoot the girl and so she moved first.
She was upon him and she had the knife, a flash of silver. I don’t know why I didn’t bring the
sword down, Munekata said to Hana. The knife went between the plates of his armour and into his
leg and slashed through the inner layer and with red-hot agony he was forced over, suddenly aware
of himself, of his muscle and flesh and of the weight of the suit now out of his control atop him, the
pressure of the internal frame merciless against his body. He swiped for her but the girl had moved
away and he was collapsing, bleeding from his opened-up leg, and with a tremendous thud he
landed on his side. Now for the first time his eyes found the rest of the room and he saw a dressing
table decorated with painted flowers, a shelf of dolls, a wardrobe with a mirror. He realized that he
was in her bedroom.
She stepped over him, merrily avoiding the reach of his arms. The suit was a boulder on his back
and the mask was crushing his face. She had snatched the Gewehr 43 and hopped up onto the
dresser away from him and she was lugging the heavy wooden rifle around, gripping it like a
professional, the barrel pointed straight at him. There was nothing in her eyes. He had nothing to
give her with his.
Munekata fired. His gun sang its shrill violent song, punching holes in the wall, shattering her
childhood with a burst of lead, and her rifle barked out a violent response, six rounds, five of them
clanging harmlessly against his armour but one not, one striking a gap, the same gap that her knife
had opened. He felt more pain, hotter and brighter than before. Something had been struck by the
bullet and it had broken. The girl moved without a word – not a single one of his rounds had hit her.
She leapt over his useless leaking form and skipped to the doorway. He turned himself after her,
letting go of his gun, reaching out with armoured fingers for the transient thing on the threshold of
the room, she holding the Gewehr close to her chest, barely there, pale and mocking with her animal
expression. Boots thundered on the stairs. The girl ducked out of sight and into the corridor. Takada
was in the room, coming to him, leaning down. “Sir, what happened?” the dark face of the mask
asked him.
“The girl.” Munekata said. He propped himself up against the wall, his leg where she had stabbed
and shot him whimpering with a horrible overwhelming pain. “Where’d she go?”
“Girl?”
“The sniper.”
“I wasn’t looking. Sir, you’re bleeding. I’ll get you some bandages.” Find her, he had meant to say,
he told Hana, but he hadn’t, because it had been worthless. One child in her bedroom with an old
rifle, who had wounded an enemy soldier and escaped to die somewhere out in the plains. What
was the purpose of that? The Second Insurgency was by then already settled into routine, the
communists using their People’s War to probe and pick at Japanese and imperial control in the vast
plains, never getting close to their red horizon. After Yellow Dragon River Village they were sent
elsewhere, to other nowhere-places, to chase ghosts and torment the living. He never did learn what
had happened to the girl.
-
When he was finished telling her most of this he drank the last of his sake and she sat and
watched him. The room was lit only by the glow of the lantern atop the heated table, which made
them both shadow-selves, obscure to one another. Munekata sat there old and bruised and tired
with his shoulders hunched, exhaustion having crept up and claimed him as he had been speaking.
He closed his eyes for a moment, returning perhaps for one last second to that frozen-over winter of
decades before, and then opened them and saw her. He didn’t smile. Hana said nothing. She
swallowed. “I get it now.” she said.
“You do?”
 She smiled sweetly, relishing what she was about to say. “You just want to fuck her, don’t you?”
she asked. Munekata’s face was firm. “Yeah, you wanted to rape her right there on the battlefield.
The girl who broke your leg and got away. You wanted to stick it in her just like you Japs always do
with kids. So you hunted down a Chinese gold-digger with no tits and no ass and you made me take
her place. You pretend I’m her every time you’re about to come.”
Munekata didn’t respond. The provocation had bounced off of him like a dud, she noted,
dissatisfied. “I was twenty-five when I met that girl.” he said. “It was nineteen sixty-nine. I didn’t
retire from the Survey Unit until six years later, when the leg wound she had given me finally
stopped me walking. Incredible luck on her part, don’t you think? To strike twice between the
segments of a special attack suit. Everyone said to me they didn’t believe it. I wasn’t sure I believed it
myself for the longest time. But without a working leg I could no longer lead my unit. I was
transferred back to the Kempeitai, offered a cushy job to keep me busy. The Survey Unit wasn’t
abolished until seventy-nine, when the Kwantung troops disarmed them, handing government back
to the Concordia Association. They came here and asked me, when the Survey Unit was finished, if I
wanted to keep my old special attack suit, which had been in the unit’s storage without me, waiting.
It would be without the motor or hydraulics, of course. A sort of compensation they offered to
many veterans, I understand. In the old samurai tradition. We were all treated well by the state for
our service. There was never a purge, never a judgement for what we had done. The suits were what
the settlers had liked about us. The only thing we had ever liked about ourselves.”
He loosed a long sigh that seemed to release something of his very soul into the air. “Nobody else
had any use for the thing. So I accepted it. I keep it here to remind me.”
Hana regarded him. She scowled, thinking of how good her insult had been and of how little it
had mattered. “To remind you of what?” she spat. The anger was still there burning her and yet now,
she realized, something about him was making it useless, harmless, pouring cold water all over its
heat. She was aware that he was one of the black demons of her childhood and yet he wasn’t,
because those demons had all died off, and all that was left was this pitiful serpent that, defanged
and dying, could only gnaw at her with its sickly gums. But she still wanted to hurt him. She wanted
to hurt him because she realized that he had become a person to her now, and that it was too much
to know people without hurting them. “What can it remind you of, eh?” she said. “Your dazzling
career? Your glory days as a samurai serving his imperial majesty? When you weren’t a useless
cripple whose dick doesn’t work, hanging out in this nowhere-town waiting until your liver gives
out?”
Munekata paused. She couldn’t read the look on his face for a second, the crumpling of his
always-solid brow, the hardening of his eyes so that whatever was there remained locked inside, a
precautionary measure that only made what it was meant to hide more obvious. He was sad, she
realized. “None of those things.” he said. “It reminds me of how I am cursed to be bound to those
bloodstained plains until I die.”
She had nothing to say to that. He put his hand on her shoulder, gently touching her in the dark.
She only flinched a little. “Thank you for listening, Hana.” he said. “Or whoever you really are. Even if
you no longer wish to see me, I’m glad you at least know the truth. I don’t blame if you don’t want to
continue our arrangement any further.” Without another word Munekata got up and went back to
the stairs and back to his bedroom. Hana was once again alone. She took the bottle of sake, what
was left of it, and drank all of it one go. The sake was sweet and yet with bitterness beneath it too,
just like back home.
In the morning when he came downstairs in his yukata she was still there. She had slept on the
floor and her back hurt a little and she was slightly hungover but she would show him none of these
things. “Oh.” she said as she sat up. “Good morning, you old fart.”
“Miss Takamori-”
She stretched, yawning. “I’m still here. And you owe me for last night. Got it?” She wasn’t sure,
but she thought she saw the old man Munekata smile at this, his uncertain, twitching, timid real
smile, that which was not meant for her, which was not for anyone left in this world – a smile which
belonged to her now regardless, which she could forever hold against him. That was bittersweet as
well.
 SECOND: ORIGIN

Haven’t the Japanese humiliated you enough?

- Graffiti written by a servant in the Salt Tax Palace in Manchukuo

9
To keep herself busy she met with Fumie Kondo after school. It was Monday and Sachiko’s desk
had been empty all day and at lunchtime Mizuki had called her house from the payphones in the
school sports ground and gotten no reply. She hadn’t been able to focus: in homeroom Mr.
Hagiwara had rapped hard on her desk with his stick and told her to pay attention, which he never
did for her, for the girl with the iron blouse who was his favourite pupil. On Sunday night she had
dreamt again of centipedes. Her uniform was dirty all day no matter how much the housekeeper
cleaned it and in the shower she had scrubbed herself so hard her skin had turned out raw and red.
Her father had asked her about it and she had said nothing, for there was nothing to say until she
saw Sachiko again, and until then Mizuki would continue to exist and would do her best to continue
existing.
Fumie was good for her – Fumie was not as ideologically correct as she but nevertheless was
another school superstar, in the year above, a wannabe pop singer with childish short hair and a
little girl’s face that all the boys in school loved, and she was always warm and kind and never
refused to help her classmates out. Now she was preparing for her post-graduation military service
with the Kwantung Army, which she was entitled to, as a pure-blooded Japanese going back four
generations with the certificates to prove it.
She would be serving in an entertainment troupe for one of the plains garrison-forts one day, and
for now had one last show coming up, her graduation performance. For the show she would be
dressing up in an old special attack suit replica her military father had had made for her, delivering a
performance in the old kagura form of ritual dancing. She also used this costume for cute pictures
and for publicity for the school and for the local Concordia Association branch, and today she was
doing a photoshoot near the Shinto shrine at Iwami Temple on the hillside and she had asked Mizuki
to help and desperate and drowning Mizuki had agreed.
Dusk had fallen, Ryujin wrapped in a blanket of tired pale orange, the ocean upon the horizon
visible in glimpses through the buildings here and there, ablaze with light, an inferno waiting outside,
and Mizuki had brought her high-quality Leica camera as well as some sandwiches and drinks in a
plastic bag from the convenience store. Fumie was waiting by the shrine, her school uniform folded
up at her feet, the Survey Unit costume with its black cotton fatigues with imitation plastic armour
pieces and helmet and mask already on, although she wore the mask off with it dangling from her
neck so that her pretty face was there wide-eyed and radiant. “Mizuki, you’re here!” she said,
sounding overjoyed. She took Mizuki’s hand. “Thank you so much for this.”
“No problem.” Mizuki said. She squeezed the other girl’s palm. “It’s my pleasure.” They took
pictures with the shrine and its torii as their backdrop. Fumie was cute and pretty in her uniform,
wearing it this way and, gently giving Mizuki commands as to where to stand and which camera
settings to use, making a puppet of her. Fumie could adjust her expression instantly to assume any
kind of mood – she was radiant no matter how she framed herself, adaptable to any situation.
Mizuki knew she did not excel at photographing live subjects but it didn’t matter because Fumie
could intuit exactly what needed to be shot and how to shoot it, and so without thought Mizuki
worked, swallowed whole by the sublime beauty of the military idol, a rosy-cheeked face upon a
poster, a suggestion of the active energy that the all-powerful Empire of Manchukuo surely, surely
still represented, the goosestepping of imperial soldiers of all ethnic groups marching under the
heavenly sovereign’s fluttering banner, the dark beautiful masks of the Survey Unit in their suits on a
harmonisation patrol on the plains purging the communist bandits and being serenaded for it by
grateful villagers. The wisdom of the ancient Japanese spirit overseeing the indefatigable muscle of
the Manchu, the Koreans, the Chinese and the Mongols.
 Mizuki saw her darling Fumie immeasurably vaster than now, projected onto posters dozens of
metres high, blown-up images of Fumie’s eyes, lips, hands, her smile and her frown and the daring
furrowing of her brow, all abstracted pieces of Fumie scattered about the country, hung up on
banners flung from the imperial palace in Shinkyo, on great billboards dotting the highways and
railways built by the Kwantung Army and the South Manchurian Railway Corporation and the
Manchurian Highway Company, those vast, splendid transport routes which Mizuki had written an
article about in primary school and called “the veins through which the blood of the fatherland
flows”. She had gotten ninety-eight out of a hundred for that and her father had bought her ice
cream and taken her to a baseball game for doing so well.
And yet images were fickle, she reflected, as she captured Fumie again and again. Once Sachiko
had shown her a dirty magazine, retrieved from a boy in the year above who had been giving them
out, and on those yellowed crumpled pages she had seen women not preserved in glory like Fumie
now but reduced, dragged down by lustful foreign men into filth and degeneracy, held up like dolls,
pawed at, violated from below, letting mouths suckle baby-like at their chests and letting hands
explore, unfold, expose them from all sides.
She peered through the camera at Fumie’s brilliant face and saw the same things occur, snaking
over the older girl like insects, filthy male things violating Fumie, taking ownership of her, ruining her
perfection. Shifting positions, standing on a bench to get a good shot of Fumie turned looking back
at the camera lips pursed and hips stuck out, she realized that she wasn’t looking at Fumie Kondo at
all but at Sachiko trapped in a Chinese bar with the hands of the degenerates all over her, that beast
Li Huangqi grabbing her from behind, arm around her waist and hand on her left breast, Sachiko as
perfect as Fumie was and just like Fumie enjoying it, enjoying the filth of the world as it rose up and
subsumed her.
“Are those good?” Fumie asked when they were done. Sat in her fake special attack suit now
faintly sweaty she was drinking water from Mizuki’s bag. Mizuki herself had opened up a small can of
Asahi. “Yes.” she said. They shared the bench the both of them tired and aroused. A tension
lingering in the air between them that sent periodic jolts of electricity up Mizuki’s spine, the pulse of
two souls intersecting and parting. It was only that; but it was what it was. “I’ll get them developed
tonight,” she said faux-casually, “and then we can review them tomorrow.”
“Huh? You’re going back to the school?” Fumie sat back, rubbing one leg against the other. “You
know, it can wait.”
“I want to start tonight.” Mizuki said. “Just so in the morning they’ll all have finished. I took a lot
of pictures. Four whole rolls of film.”
“You must really like photography.” Fumie said.
“No, no.” Mizuki said. She played with her fringe, curling a strand of it about her index
finger. ”I’m interested only in beauty.” A long moment passed. Mizuki saw the blush on Fumie’s face
and felt the blush of her own. They got up and walked back down the hillside and Mizuki said
goodbye to Fumie and let her walk home and set off back to the school, where she could stay for a
few more hours before she would have to go home, to her neighbourhood, to the sealed-off Suzuki
house and to her parents who didn’t deserve to be sullied with her sin.
It was a working day and the town was quiet, night above and lit lanterns below, and she made
her way back to the school hurrying quickly in case the police caught her. The school building waited
there for her at the end of Drifting Cloud, a brutalist hunk of grey where a handful of students still
lingered, making their way home from clubs and meetings.
Mizuki slipped in, saying hello to anyone who recognised her (but none of them recognised her
dirty heart), and going not to the dark room the photography club used at all but first to the
courtyard, where Yamamoto sat with his carrier and where she was alone amongst the concrete,
looking up at the tiled rooftops and enjoying the quiet, stood there in semi-darkness. There was a
special activity that week to commemorate Japan’s development of an independent nuclear
deterrent back in the nineteen-fifties (1957 had been the first successful test, she knew) and a
banner had been hung above the courtyard that said NATIONAL INDEPENDENCE, NUCLEAR SWORD
and she looked at it and thought – well, wasn’t this Manchukuo?
Japan had never given Manchukuo nuclear weapons, and so there was nothing really in the
anniversary of Japan’s nuclear program for Manchukuoans to celebrate. Here the truth had been
eroded into a shadow of itself – there were Japanese heroes in their textbooks and Japanese slogans
upon their walls and Japanese histories in their heads, these children of the powerful and wise and
racially superior specimens of the home islands, who did not serve in the mongrel Imperial Army but
in the all-Japanese Kwantung, and yet who still celebrated the Survey Unit, Manchukuo’s own
multiethnic military force.
Who were they, the Japanese of Manchukuo? Who would they be when the Kwantung Army had
to withdraw? What, exactly, was the point of pretty Fumie going into that same army at this time,
months before it would be obliged to begin disappearing itself from history? Mizuki kept on thinking
about things like this, things Sachiko liked to talk about. She dug her nails into her thighs until it
stopped and looked up at Yamamoto and told herself the pride swelling into her chest at the sight of
him was enough.
After that she did go to the dark room, and she took out the negatives and took the chemicals
from the storage cupboard and mixed and washed and did everything herself, working alone in the
glare of the red light and in silence, checking temperatures and measuring liquids, washing and
washing again. She was sweaty all over, the room far too hot, and the stench of chemicals clung to
her even through the mask she was wearing, making her feel like a plastic ghost, a machine-thing
floating sheepishly above an earth that it no longer belonged to. Fumie’s image was strung up all
around her, a hundred transparent Fumies all smiling, mischievous, welcoming, coaxing.
In this wretched state Mizuki could escape from her desire by throwing herself shamefully into it.
It was the perfect cover, for photographs needed to be taken and beauty needed to be seen, and her
parents would never bother her when there was important patriotic work to be done. Mizuki had
not grown up unaware of how disgusting she was, how fundamentally inhuman, and had decided at
some point to steer herself away from anywhere she could do damage – she subsumed her
lustfulness into schoolwork and as well, when it became too much, into images. Fumie’s body parts
had been removed from context, the machinery of her senior’s flesh all on crude display, to be taken
up again and rearranged according to her own liking, as if she were Dr. Frankenstein creating her
very own beautiful monster. She was a person who had given her all to the state, to the emperor,
and to the imperial way, and all that she had for herself was this sickness here.
When Sachiko and she had begun to drift apart this had emerged, this flowering perversion, and
it had been her filthy secret, and now it was all that she had left. She would slit her belly with a
dagger rather than let the world truly know her. She was in love with beauty, and as long as she had
that she would never die even if her blood left her and her entrails were spilled out onto the floor.
The photographs were strung up and she studied them and loved them and there was no danger
they would try to love her back. In this way did the evening go on.
She was busy cleaning up the chemical bath when a knock came at the door. Mizuki flinched,
expecting her parents or Hagiwara or Mr. Munekata who had promised to deliver her justice the
other day – but it was only Mr. Koyama, the old science teacher, who was almost a head shorter
than her. She bowed to him and despite her sweat and her perversion rearranged herself abruptly
into the girl with the iron blouse. The school was dark, the lights almost all off, and it was only the
two of them on the second-floor corridor.
“Miss Tachibana.” he said. “There’s a phone call for you.” She followed him to the reception
office on the ground floor, on the west side of the courtyard, and he left her alone with the plastic
green phone on the receptionist’s desk. She picked it up. “Hello?”
“Hello, you Japanese bitch.” a Chinese girl’s voice said in kyowa-go. Mizuki inhaled. Her eyes
went to the door, the wood between herself and Mr. Koyama waiting on the other side, between
her and the rest of the world. She looked to the glass double doors and the windows as if she would
find the enemy there, or as if the world itself would be waiting outside to listen in. But she was alone.
“Come to the Divine Wind Fish Market.” the voice said. Mizuki realized she knew it. Xu Mei!
Sachiko’s awful friend, Li Huangqi’s companion. “Now.” Mei said. She hung up. Mizuki shouldered
her schoolbag, looking around the reception area once more. The portrait of the emperor on the
wall stared down. There was in her bag a polaroid of Fumie Kondo in her Survey Unit uniform, from
when they had tried the costume out last week, and she took it in her hands and looked at it long
and hard. And she left the room and pretended in front of Mr. Koyama and then left the school and
walked all the way to Showa Avenue. It was a long walk. She kept taking the picture out and looking
at it, and ignoring the darkness outside and the darkness inside and everything else swirling around
everywhere. Focus on beauty, she told herself.
Unlike the last time she had crossed through Showa and into hell, this time it was easy. She knew
where she was going, and she knew that none of this could hurt her because there was nothing left
to hurt, because she was not some lowly pervert but a member of a race that was superior in mind
and body. The Mandarin voices in their animal babble were only that, and the righteousness of her
blood was a talisman that would ward off evil. Her love for the nation was her protection, and she
knew it would be fine as long as she didn’t look back and turn her love into something monstrous.
She walked all the way to Divine Wind and went down Harbour Road, feeling the eyes of the Chinese
on her all the way.
Wielding her divine sword she cut through the evening crowds, the fishermen and merchants
heading home, the scum and riff-raff on their way to the place of Sachiko’s downfall to gloat and
glory over it. Leading away from Divine Wind Pier, Harbour Road overlooked the cliff and the bay
below, the water crowded with old fishing boats, and she listened to the gulls and to the clash of the
waves against the rocks and the rumble of the trucks and cars that kept on going by her. She walked
to the concrete shell of the harbour and soon on her way there she was met by the stench of fish
and the rusted hulk of the market ahead. It was rotten and foul and full of life and death. Great
metal characters spelled out the name, suspended on the traditional Chinese arch over the industrial
ruin of corrugated metal below. Out on the water a navy ship’s searchlight cut through the darkness
as it patrolled the bay.
The ground beneath her was wet all over, splattered with fish guts, fish corpses, shallow puddles
of blood. The security guard at the booth, smoking and slumped forward in his chair, looked at her
with lidded eyes before letting her through, and she hurried on, passing bulky Chinese half-dressed
or in bloody coveralls, studying the vast formations of metal tables filling the market hall, the piles of
bodies of various animals, of parts and pieces of things once alive, the shallow containers filled with
water and struggling tied-together crabs or lobsters or fish or turtles.
The stench was now tremendous and struck her again and again and she swallowed her vomit
and kept going. She heard moving wheels and engines undercut only by the thwack of knives against
chopping blocks as things were hacked apart for tomorrow or for later, a few customers still
lingering, picking out chunks of glistening white meat speckled with blood for the next day. She
walked past a few tables, people looking up at her, this pristine Japanese wearing school clothes
who must have herself stank of outside. Although she was aware of the photograph in her bag,
resting there like a Buddhist charm, she didn’t dare take it out here and infect it with Chinese air.
Coming to a halt next to a table where a man was cutting apart a salmon, his thick brown arms
tense as he swung the bloodied blade down again and again, slicing through flesh and bone with
each heavy blow, she rested against a vending machine which itself was against a metal beam
leading up to the hole-filled ceiling, from which blobs of dark water occasionally dribbled. Mizuki
glimpsed through a ragged gap in the corrugated metal the white of the moon, a smear set against
the merciful enormity of the night sky choked in cloud around it. “You’re fast.” Mei said from her
side.
Mizuki turned and was greeted with that pug-like face, that greasy hair. Today she wore a faded
yellow tracksuit with the zipper undone and her stained t-shirt beneath it and a jade buddha tied
with red string around her neck. The buddha suggested faith, superstition, belief. It suggested
someone who had their own troubles, their own interests, their own way of looking and thinking and
doing. It seemed now as if the Chinese girl was really human.
Mizuki did not fall for this deception and stood fast against the creature here now trying to
deploy it against her. The bags were heavy under Mei’s eyes. Mizuki wondered what she, Mizuki
Tachibana, looked like to Xu Mei – if the cracks showed there too, or if she was still on the outside
the wallflower from that night, despite all the twisted things staining her soul. People around them
went on working. “Hello, Miss Tachibana.” Mei said.
The man at his table went on cutting up the fish, slicing it into its components, removing from it
all evidence that it had ever been alive. “How did you find me?” Mizuki asked. Mei only gave a
miserable smile. Her tired eyes darted down towards the badge on Mizuki’s uniform. “You’re
Sachiko’s friend, aren’t you? Sachiko drank too much one night. She complained about you. Said you
preferred to hang out after school looking at sexy girls in the photography studio rather than being
with her.”
Mizuki blushed. “What-?”
“Follow me, Jap.” Mei said. She turned and went and Mizuki went after her past several more
tables of butchery, out of the market building and into a narrow alleyway, with a wall of rusted-over
sheet metal on the other side and a dirt path between them and a street past that with a sign for the
fishery. Here they were alone, with only the dirt and the distant noise. “What do you want?” Mizuki
asked. Mei turned around and slapped her.
The pain was delicious, just as back in the temple before Kannon. She tasted the blood that
hadn’t come out and for a blissful moment imagined her own future martyrdom, imagined that here
she would be beaten to death by triad thugs. “I figured it out.” Mei said. “Sachiko wouldn’t talk.
Huangqi wouldn’t talk. There’s only one way the Kempeitai could have gotten my name, isn’t there?
You. You squealed to a cop.”
“I did.” Mizuki said.
“Why?” Mei spat this out as if this was an interrogation. But she was no kempei and she was no
Japanese – her eyes had that inferior slant, her skin was the pallid yellow of the Mongoloid - and she
lacked beauty and Mizuki had nothing to fear. Mizuki gathered all her strength. “To make sure your
Untermensch boyfriend gets what he deserves,” she said, “for hurting Sachiko.” A second passed
and there was quiet and Mizuki waited, in awe of her own bravery. Then Mei laughed. It was a sharp
and unhappy sound and it went as clipped and quickly as it had come out of her, the laughter of
someone who was not used to mocking others but had always wanted to try it out. A truck started
to reverse in one of the nearby roads, beeping on and on in blissful ignorance. Mei said something
scornful in Mandarin. Mizuki tightened her fist. “I don’t understand you.” she snapped. “Speak
properly!”
“You’re really as stupid as you look.” Mei said. “Really, really stupid. I didn’t think so at first,
because Sachiko is so smart, but actually she must be stupid too, if she has a best friend like you.”
Mizuki dug her nails into her palm. “Don’t talk about her!”
Mei cocked her head. “Why not? Why shouldn’t I? Isn’t she my friend too? Didn’t I know her just
as well as you do? Didn’t I know her better? Didn’t I see her three or four times a week to help her
learn to speak our language?”
Mizuki inhaled. “Know her better-? She’s Japanese. Someone like you could-”
“You just live in your own little bubble, don’t you, you boot-licker?” Mei had a miserable kind of
triumph about her. She looked exhausted but she was stood tall, like a victorious warrior. “Go to
school, learn some nonsense about how your race did nothing wrong and ours deserved it anyway,
trample over all the coolies on your way back to your Tenmei mansion.” I don’t live in a mansion,
Mizuki was wise enough not to say. Mei frowned at her. “Look, idiot,” she said, quieter, “do you
understand what it means to start chatting to cops, kempei or regular, about people down here in
the slums?”
“I-”
 “You sent that old geezer to my house,” Mei said, “to where my dad lives, and I had to tell him
something, didn’t I? And the next day someone had spray-painted ‘Japanese slut’ on our front door.
That’s what you did to me.” The disgust in Mei’s voice was there but as well fear – Mizuki heard it
and thought of the girls at her own school who led campaigns such as that, who scrawled rude notes
and desecrated lesser students’ desks. She thought of the sacks of dog waste that had been left on
the Suzuki family’s doorstep. She swallowed, holding tight onto her schoolbag. “Well – that’s
horrible.” she offered.
Mei nodded. “Yes. It is.”
“You should tell the police!” Mizuki said. “Get them to ask your neighbours who did it!” Now Mei
stared, the harshness gone from her face. For a second Mizuki thought she had won, that she had
defeated this angry Chinese dog with a simple appeal to the common-sense logic of law-abiding
civilisation. A second later however she saw Mei’s face again and recognised the slightly open mouth
just as it curled into a disbelieving smile, and realized that the other girl was staring not because
Mizuki had made an excellent point but because she had made an absurd one. Mei laughed again,
louder and longer this time, as if in the face of this idiocy she had no other choice. Mizuki’s cheeks
reddened. Her fists were so tight her nails were stabbing into her palms hard enough to draw blood
any minute she hoped. “You really don’t know anything about anything.” Mei said. “How could
Sachiko be your friend? How could you even pretend to care about her? You abandoned her that
night, don’t forget. You left her there with us.”
Mizuki’s chest was full of agony. She was crying but the tears left of their own accord, as if they
were not linked to what the rest of her was feeling. Unbowed she thrust herself at Mei. “I didn’t do
anything except try to save her from you degenerates! You and that…ape!”
“How do you know we did anything?” Mei replied, just as tense. With visible effort she made
herself relax, stiffening, regaining that unhappy smile. “Hey, here’s a question.” she said. “How do
you know it wasn’t a Japanese who attacked her?”
A shard of glass slipped between Mizuki’s ribs. “What?”
“Why does it have to be a Chinese man?” Mei said. “Don’t you know anything about what you
people did here? Don’t you know anything about the Second Insurgency? The war? Nanjing? About
all that?” Her speech carried an unmistakable distortion, the curse of her idiotic accent, but she was
fluent, and her words stung Mizuki hard, even worse than the slap from before. To hear her own
tongue, the beautiful language of poetry and art, mutilated by such crude aggression! “Hey,” Mei
said, “do you know about Harbin? Where they used to take people off the streets and send them to
hospitals they wouldn’t come back from? Did anyone ever tell you not to go out alone or else the
army would kidnap you and cut you open while you were still alive? My mum did. Because of Harbin.”
Mizuki crossed her arms. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” she said.
“You Japanese are devils.” Xu Mei said. “Your men have raped and killed your way across our
motherland like wild beasts.”
“We – if we hadn’t done it, then-”
Mei sneered. “Then what? The Americans would have? The communists would have? Well, they
didn’t, did they? You did.”
“They would have been worse!” Mizuki said, lamely. She swallowed. “And…and anyway,” she
said’, trying to moor herself to the shore once again, “are you saying Li Huangqi didn’t-” The
sentence died there. Mizuki found it too deplorable to voice She swallowed, pulling back from the
abyss.
Mei took a long time to reply, nostrils flared and fists balled up. Then she sighed. “Of course he
didn’t.” She put a hand through her dirty hair, pulling it back. “You idiot. I don’t know…I don’t know
who did that to Sachiko. I have no idea. If I knew – if there was any way I could help without getting
the fucking cops involved, then-” she muttered something under her breath. “Look. Li and I took
Sachiko to the Red Club to cheer her up after you upset her, and we drank too much. I don’t
remember a lot of what happened, but I remember that we lost her inside. Or someone took her.
The next thing I heard was that a Japanese girl had been raped at Divine Wind. I knew it was her.”
She paused for a second. “Of course I felt guilty. Of course I felt horrible. But I know Li didn’t do it.
He looks scary, but – I’m not telling you this because I like you, you idiot – he’s a massive faggot with
girls.” She sniffed, thumbed her nose. “But anyway. Don’t go around trying to get him arrested.
Because you’re only going to hurt the both of us and Sachiko even more. I don’t know – I don’t know
how to fix this. I wish I did. But I don’t. But neither do you.”
With all of this said she seemed to relax, muscles loosening as if something vast had fallen from
her shoulders. She was breathing as if she had been hiking, her face still tight with effort. She looked
at Mizuki with more contempt than anyone ever had before and she spat, actually spat, onto the
wet stone at Mizuki’s feet. “Stay the fuck out of our business, Jap.” Mizuki felt her own anger, felt
the sting of that last word worse than the slap, and swallowed and turned and flounced off, school
shoes clattering, hurrying back into the market. Her father would not have done that but would have
started a fight and she was better than him, would be better than him. She waited there silently
fuming, unobserved by anyone, the workers and merchants now fully invested in clearing up. After
thirty seconds, counting inside her head, she went back to the alleyway.
Xu Mei was now heading the other way and walking back into the street. Mizuki stalked after her,
treading carefully, not too slowly and not too noisily, making herself as invisible as usual. Without
the reputation of being the girl with the iron blouse, the best in class and the daughter of Mr.
Tachibana from the council, she was a girl of average height, a little fat but not remarkably so, with a
dull face and a universal haircut, and she in the gloom could move well enough to go after Mei all
through the fishery alleyways and back to Harbour Road, where she followed from the other side of
the street, hidden behind a row of moving trucks. When those were gone she joined the crowd on
Divine Wind, slipping from one group of bodies to another up to Fortune Street. All of the
Untermenschen babble was noise, and all of the people around her were only shapes. She was a
survey trooper advancing on a communist base and they had no idea she was coming. Finally Mei
turned right, looking around for a moment. Mizuki shrank back. Mei resumed, having spotting
nothing.
She had gone from Fortune Street to some sideroad lined with collapsing shacks that had been
made into rudimentary little eateries, miniature restaurants build out of ruins, garlanded with neon
lights to cover up where walls had collapsed or been propped up with patchwork walls of metal or
plaster, plastic chairs out in the street and barbecue being served from stoves and grills on the
pavements, a cacophony of voices speaking all the dialects of China. Mizuki edged into this, standing
in the dark beneath a lantern that no longer gave out light. She observed Mei waiting agitatedly at
the edge of one of the hovel-bars, hands in the pockets of her tracksuit jacket. Someone inside saw
her and waved and called something in Mandarin. A few seconds later he emerged, Li Huangqi, the
giant in the tank top with the buddha tattoo. Mizuki edged closer, putting a food stall and its wall of
hissing smoke between them. “What do you want, miss?” a man asked her in Mandarin. But she was
listening.
Li Huangqi took Xu Mei’s skinny form in his arms. He seemed to engulf her, to threaten her with
his strength but as well to shelter her, this vulnerable thing now guarded on all sides by his size.
Mizuki thought it would be disgusting to be held that way. She thought of Sachiko who after two
beers had once hugged her in the street. The strange feeling of paralysis that had resulted. “Are you
okay, Little Xu?” Li asked. Mizuki understood that too.
Mei hugged herself against him, pushing closer. “Bastard.” she said. “Bastard, you bastard – I
don’t want to – I didn’t – Sachiko-”
“I’m sorry.” he said. He held onto her and the two of them were together beneath an array of
pink fluorescent lighting, surrounded by drinking and joy on all sides. “I met her.” Mei said. “I told
her.” The rest was too much, too quiet and too fast and complex for Mizuki to follow. Still she
listened. “Hey, miss, do you want dumplings?” the salesman asked. Mizuki said nothing but
continued waiting. The two Chinese on the other side of the food stall remained together, she
looking up to him with an expression of helpless longing so far gone from the arrogant girl in the
alleyway that it seemed wrong for Mizuki to be witnessing it, as if she was catching a sight of some
top-secret documents intended only for the eyes of agents of the state. The thrill of terror she’d felt
at meeting the kempei Munekata. The warmth of Sachiko’s arms around her once in the street. Why
was she thinking of that?
“Can you tell them to stop now?” Mei asked. Mizuki understood that. Then Mei leant in and said
something else and Mizuki almost had it, and the food seller was grunting now, rounding on her, and
she quickly hurried away, moving before either of them noticed her back into the cover of the
turning back onto Fortune Street, ducking behind a parked rickshaw and holding herself there.
Her brain worked to figure it out. We – she had heard wo men, or ‘we’. Then something about
baohu, protection – protecting something or someone. Le, as in the past tense. And another word
she hadn’t grasped. Chen? A name, she realized. Chen something. They were talking about
protecting someone named Chen perhaps, or about protecting something from Chen. But Chen! At
once she had solved the crime. She walked home quickly, hurrying through the night-time crowds,
head bowed, thinking only of Chen. It was true that Li Huangqi was innocent as Mei had said,
because both of them were protecting someone else, were protecting Chen, the real culprit, who
had assaulted Sachiko in the Red Club! She was overcome with joy, so excited that the photograph
of Fumie in her pocket meant nothing, that nothing meant everything, that the boring old town with
its half-empty streets was a vast labyrinth of possibilities.
Mizuki didn’t go home straight away – she went to Victory Lane where the payphones stood and
she used some of her change and took Lieutenant Munekata’s card from her pocket. With her
fingers trembling as they touched the metal of the keypad she entered the number upon it one
careful digit at a time. The street was clear but for her and for the lights on in the houses that
indicated far-off life. But as far as she knew in that moment Mizuki Tachibana was the only living
being in the universe – she and Sachiko, who had once hugged her in the street. The dial tone
promised her the future. “Hello?” Lieutenant Munekata said.
“Sir!” she said. “It’s me. Mizuki Tachibana. I have something important to tell you about the case!”
“Excuse me?” he said. For a moment he sounded too human, the calming inflection his voice had
carried all throughout their first conversation absent. She didn’t like it. She swallowed, relaxed
herself. “Sachiko Suzuki.” she said.
“Oh.” He cleared his throat. “Oh. Continue, please, Miss Tachibana.”
“I met her friends Xu Mei and Li Huangqi tonight,” she said, breathless, “and I eavesdropped on
them, and I heard them mention another name.”
“You eavesdropped on them? Miss Tachibana, where are you now-?”
“They threatened me. They said they were going to hurt me if I talked to you again. But I followed
them after and I heard them say they had to protect someone called Chen. That’s what I heard.”
“Chen?” he asked. He was quiet a moment. “I don’t know who that is. But I’ll look into it. Thank
you, Miss Tachibana.”
“How’s the investigation going, if I may ask, sir?” the question slipped from her before she could
stop it. He was quiet and so was she. She bit her tongue. “They didn’t threaten me, actually.” she
said. “I’m sorry. That was a horrid lie. But they – she – she wanted to tell me someone had
threatened her, Xu Mei. Someone in Yugongguan.”
Munekata gave her no reply. “Never mind that.” he said eventually. “Thank you once more. Good
night.”
“Good night, sir.” she said, and the line went dead. Mizuki was annoyed and happy and sad and
tired and scared at once, and to deal with all of this she took out her picture of Fumie and looked at
it long and hard. Then without thinking she tore it up and she tossed the pieces to the pavement.
She turned away, back to home, back to beautiful Tenmei, and she set off, dreaming, instead of
Fumie’s lying pretty face, of a far darker kind of beauty, of something that lurked within pistol
barrels and within the bellies of tanks, that was metal and screamed at her from inside, that would
come for those who had hurt her friend and drag them down into the abyss. Something like filthy
justice. I understand, my comrade, she said to it, holding onto it tight even as it cut her.
 10
Munekata had long since given up before he met her. Giving up had not meant dying, not for him.
He remembered Takada and Murata had both stabbed themselves, while Zhang had been strung up
from an old tree in the yard of his home. The Korean Cho had shot his mistress and then himself in a
Mukden apartment, while White Russian Zamyatin, foreign to the traditions of the bushido code,
had merely let himself be beaten to death in a bar brawl that by all accounts he could have avoided.
Arakawa had broken Munekata’s heart, nodded to him as if saying goodbye after an evening of
drinks, and stood up and walked out of the cover of the collapsed bridge and to his bloody death
during the Battle of the Muling River, no longer caring as Soviet armour-piercing bullets had torn his
special attack suit apart around him.
The survival rate of the old surveymen was not promising – they had been the elite, the vanguard
of the second wind of the Manchukuoan project, a new army formed out of the best each of all of
the existing military formations but one wholly belonging to Manchukuo, the toughest of Puyi’s
soldiers gifted Japan’s special attack suits and told to hold the line against everyone else at all costs.
This had made them the last true believers during the state’s final gasp of vigour, which even then
had only been a wheeze of rotten gas escaping a long-dead corpse. The Second Insurgency had just
confirmed what everyone had already known, which was that the total empire could subsume,
repress, contain, but never convince, and that they could hold Manchuria but never transform it,
and knowing this, eroded by it, many of them had surrendered long before the sword had cut their
bellies or the bullet had entered their brains.
By the time the Survey Unit had been replaced by the Kwantung, who no longer trusted it and as
well knew the imperial regulars were even less reliable, the generals at the top, seeking to placate
the surveymen, had sought to find them decent postings back in the Japanese Army, the Imperial
Army or the Kempeitai, only to find that in the aftermath of the coup over fifteen percent of its
members had ended up killing themselves. He, having gotten out early, had been lucky. The girl who
had shot him in the leg had saved his life by ejecting him from the unit before the crash, and the
pain he woke up with every day was a reminder to be grateful to her, to hope against hope that she
too had somehow gotten out of there, and to keep on going while everyone else was cut down.
Her divine blessing, however, had not been enough to push him on, only to keep him behind
cover as the gods of wrath whirled their weapons about over his head. He had not wanted to die but
neither had he known what to live for. Karashima, as a reward for his service, had transferred him
back into the Kempeitai and asked him where he’d like to live out the rest of career, in the nominal
role of an intelligence officer, and he had chosen Ryujin, where Arakawa had come from, because he
couldn’t go home and he had never had a settler town of his own. It had been a gesture of sorts, to
get to know a little more about his closest comrade.
Then he had begun the affair with Arakawa’s widow, Mieko, the most miserable experience of his
life, and heartbroken by his cruelty she had moved away and he had ended up in a strange town
doing nothing-jobs for the local Kempeitai branch while politics went on far away, in the capital and
in the bustling cities, and here the old Japanese-Chinese divide went on as usual and he lost lots of
money smoking and drinking and daring karma to try its best.
The Survey Unit had been overthrown – he, already out, had observed it with mild interest, as if
he had heard news of an old friend who had made it into the newspapers for one minor thing or
another. He had started taking on private detective work on the side, using the brain Karashima had
always praised him for to find cheating husbands and spy on teenage sons and daughters, and he
had made a lot of money to go with his hero’s salary and thrown both away with equal abandon.
Karashima, who had as well jumped ship from the sinking Survey Unit by then, had ended up
working at the nearby Japanese naval base in that nebulous capacity ex-surveymen seemed to
always end up occupying, taking over a Tokkeitai position as the navy had retreated from
Manchurian affairs, but anyway the old man had never been a friend, only a mentor, and alone and
adrift Munekata had gotten busy slowly submerging himself. The anti-pollution ordinances had been
repealed, although it hadn’t made any practical difference in those days, for neither Chinese or
Japanese had taken the gesture seriously.
At one point he had begun fixing up his old suit, absent-mindedly carrying out field repairs in the
old way, until it had occurred to him that it would have been very illegal to finish it, and he had
stopped and spent even more time at the Dragonfly instead. It had been a long-term kind of giving
up – a drawn-out collapse that he hadn’t noticed until it was already mostly through with. Even the
Buddha had seemed far away from him then. The altar had been only a formality.
And then he had met Hana Takamori at the Golden Dragonfly one night, a cynical, disinterested,
beautiful enemy, one he could not conquer, and she had saved him, and now she had saved him
again. The final case – that was how he had started to think of it – had been refreshing at first, and
yet beaten bloody by Li Huangqi and lying there and feeling his age in the dark, gauze and splint
affixed and his chest throbbing, he had thought of forgetting it.
Just like Xu Mei’s father had said, worse things happened every day in Yugongguan, let alone out
in the slums surrounding the fortress-towns of the plains or in the depths of Shinkyo or in the
Kwantung Army’s prison camps. The job was only favour for Akira Suzuki who he didn’t know and
didn’t really much care about. He felt some pity for the poor Suzuki girl and yet he also felt some pity
for himself and his broken nose and his hurting ribs and all the rest of it. He was tired and Hana was
right because he was getting old too, and she had found the semi-repaired husk of his special attack
suit and shown him just how futile it all had been, and now he only wanted to lie there and to drink
until something else happened.
And then he came downstairs. “I’m still here.” she said, uncurling herself upon his living room
floor. “And you owe me for last night. Got it?”
“Miss Takamori-”
“Don’t bullshit.” she snapped. “I had to sleep down here waiting for you. Don’t tell me off for it
like you’re some concerned gentleman, you pervert.” After this she paused, looking at him with an
expression he didn’t know and she didn’t know either, he guessed, and they waited there in his
room where he prayed to the Buddha and ate his breakfast. He bowed to her. “I apologise, Miss
Takamori.”
“Apology accepted, asshole.” She pretended to scowl and got up and stood there with her arms
over her chest. “Come on.” she said. “You should go to the doctor. Don’t try to get out of it. I told
you. Keep yourself together.” They went to Dr. Yamaguchi near the town square, who told him that
his ribs weren’t broken just as the foreigner Burton had said, and added that Munekata should
probably be careful trying to do housework in future and avoid ladders as well, and after that he
called Burton to tell him the good news and Hana took him back to his home and made him lunch.
Munekata hated it – everything of him revolted at the idea of his Hana, his perfect spiteful shame,
preparing food for him as if she were only a woman doing him a kindness. It was also true that as the
morning had gone on the pain had really sunk in, and that he really wanted some ramen. So she
cooked for him.
She worked in the kitchen in intense silence, getting the food from the fridge herself, leaving him
there upstairs to work on his writing and his reading and other things. Mostly he thought about her –
how she might have looked when she was cooking, how her hands might have worked with his
kitchen, how her face might have been set when she was concentrating on something but him. It
was indecent and yet he indulged himself. When the food was ready he eased his way downstairs,
feeling his chest and face and everything nag at him, and he sat down and she, wearing the apron
that he usually used to cook for himself, her hair tied back and her face grim with miserable triumph,
pushed the bowl towards him as if it were a punishment. “Eat it.” she said.
So he ate it. “This is delicious.” he told her, and she scoffed and told him he wasn’t getting
anything for that. After lunch Munekata returned to his desk, thinking about the case.
He hadn’t intended to – at no point did he make a real decision to resume investigating what had
happened last Friday to Sachiko Suzuki. His other thoughts, terrible thoughts about Hana and Mieko
whose life he had ruined and the Chinese girl who had shot him in the leg, provoked him to flee from
them, and to flee was to return, as a man lost in a haunted forest, to the starting point, to pondering
the case, and after a while he realized he was thinking about it again and he wondered the reason
for specifically fleeing to this in turn, and he realized that last night had severed something rotten
from his heart.
The question that had come to him in the dark alone in his bed had been a simple interrogative
“Why?”, and he had found no answer, and he had worked out that whyever it was that he was bid to
do this he knew now it was not to impress Hana Takamori, to assert his flagging masculinity, to get
back into action or anything so childish. He no longer needed to – he and she understood one
another now, and there was nothing left to posture about. If she left him she would leave him. He
would solve the case because it needed solving, and because Sachiko Suzuki seemed to have done
nothing wrong except to make friends with some Chinese, and if she had suffered for that then
whoever had made her suffer should now suffer too. Munekata felt at peace, having resolved this.
“I’m sorry, Miss Takamori.” he said to her sat at the heated table. She poured him some bitter tea
from the steaming kettle. “I was too cruel to you.” he said.
Hana grunted. “You okay, old man? You didn’t concuss yourself yesterday, did you?” She made
him take a nap just in case, and then for the first time in a while he dreamt of the plains and artillery
fire and the suit’s restraints harsh against his bare flesh, of a wrestling match between he and
Arakawa, fine young men taut and sweat-soaked battling while the rest of the troop looked on,
cheering and roaring for them in the gloom of the barracks, of Karashima beating him with his bare
hands in training, of the first time he as an officer had raised a hand against a private in the Survey
Unit only to be told gently by Karashima that they were not going to do that kind of thing in this new
outfit. He dreamt of an inferno and woke up soaked through. He lay there under the futon. Hana
was sat by him legs crossed watching him. “You okay?” she asked. He stared up, brain still half in the
past, and his desperate eyes found hers. “Are you sick?” she asked.
He coughed. “I suppose I am.” he said. Downstairs he called the Suzuki family, asking again if
Sachiko would speak to him. Mrs. Suzuki said much the same as before: “My apologies, Mr.
Munekata, but she really can’t talk right now! She needs a month off of school for her illness!” He
went to the living room, where Hana was scribbling something on a piece of paper, and took some
sake from the cupboard and drank it upstairs and sat and thought to himself. Li Huangqi had been a
violent dead end, a man who Munekata was sure hadn’t done the crime, who had still been hiding
something. The real culprit was somewhere else, outside of the Xu Mei-Li Huangqi duo.
He understood it thusly: Sachiko Suzuki had been attacked in the Red Club, long after arguing
with Mizuki Tachibana, and Xu Mei and Li Huangqi had accompanied her there and yet both of them
claimed to not have been there during the act itself, and both were lying about something and he
doubted they were lying about that but he did not know this for certain.
He drank the sake and thought and wrote out his thoughts on the pages of his notebook, which
he hadn’t used for three months, during his last half-interesting private detective case, a Chinese
businessman who had wanted to know what his brother had been doing with a loan given out of
familial kindness, that actually had been used to purchase a sports car which he had used to pick up
Chinese girls at Ryujin Station just outside of town. Munekata had tailed him and found this out and
reported it and gotten paid a lot of money.
How things had unfolded for them after that was unknown to him – the whole narrative had
been discarded as soon as the cheque had cleared. What had all that been? What were all his
savings worth? At various points he had considered giving his entire bank account over to her. Now
he recognised that that was more of the same selfishness that had led him to enjoy her abuse. He
forced himself to focus and he wrote down what he had of the Suzuki case and wrote down what
else he could think of, which wasn’t much. If he could have spoken to Sachiko herself – if only, he
thought. A phantom crime without a victim and with a murky list of suspects, that had only vaguely
any relation to national security and political stability, that had already broken his nose and ruined
his comfortable cruelty towards Hana. And yet it was true, wasn’t it? Evil had to be punished without
mercy.
 When he went down again, to get out another bottle of sake, he saw that she was still sat the
table, still scribbling on paper with one of his pencils. He crossed the room and looked over her
shoulder. She was doodling, not scribbling – sketching out in grey the bare shape of a landscape that
might have been an old-fashioned Chinese village. The pencil scratched upon the paper, which was
also from his desk, marked at the top with FROM THE OFFICE OF THE KEMPEITAI. When she noticed
him she stopped. She had been halfway through filling in the silhouette of a figure stood in an open
doorway looking out onto the village. Munekata wondered who this figure was. “My apologies.” he
said, stepping back.
“You’re always apologizing.” she said. “Typical Japanese. How do you feel, anyway?”
“Somewhat better.” he said.
She frowned. “It’s getting late. As long as I’m making sure you’re not going to die, I might as well
stay a bit longer. What’ll we do for dinner?”
“Please, allow me to prepare something for you.”
She snorted. “What, really?”
“I must insist upon it.”
“You’re still injured.”
“Then please let me assist you.”
“Assist me with what?”
“The cooking.”
Hana lay back, stretching herself out. “Who the fuck said I was going to do any cooking? You’re
very old-fashioned. Let’s go to McDonalds.”
“What?”
“You know, the McDonalds they built on Imperial Road last year. Let’s go there.”
He watched her to see if she was making fun of him. “You mean foreign food?” he asked ten
seconds too late.
Hana sighed. “I mean a hamburger, dummkopf.” She got up. “Come get a Big Mac with me.”
Munekata struggled onto his feet. “Big Mac…?”
She held his wrist and eased him out of the chair. “Idiot.” she said. “Didn’t you ever have a Big
Mac?”
“No.” he said.
“Aiyah.” she said, looking at him with real disdain. “You’ve never had a hamburger at all, have
you?”
“No.” he said. “I don’t eat foreign food.”
“Dumb Jap. What kind of world are you living in? Food is the only thing Americans are good at.
Their ‘soft power’.” She said this in awkward English. Sofuto Powaa. “Come have some with me. It’s
not as good as real Dongbei cuisine, but it’s better than your fucking raw fish bullshit. You’ll like it.”
“Come out?” he asked.
“Yes” she said. “I need to change my clothes. I’m sick of this costume. Then after that we’ll go
have a hamburger. Soft power, and all that. Since I already know you’re not good at hard.” She
paused, watching him. There was no amusement on her thin-lipped face. “Do you get it? Hard? Soft
power?”
Munekata was quiet. “…I understand, Miss Takamori.” he said eventually. He showered and
dressed himself in a casual western suit and she went out as she was, and as it was a pleasant and
not too stuffy late afternoon they walked together to the guesthouse on the east side of Tenmei, not
holding hands or standing too close but side-by-side. It was the same place they had always gone for
their transactions, where he had gone with other women in the dark years after Mieko, where once
Burton had gone with him, lost foreign businessman trying to locate, in this nowhere-town, the
oriental fantasy that had called him here – a shabby three-floor concrete building, with a pleasant
garden of narrow hedges forming multiple barriers between the flower-floor windows and the
outside world, now being maintained by that woman Mrs. Abe. Munekata felt a wave of crackling
shame overcome him as she saw him walking to the gate with Hana under the light of day. He
wondered why. Hadn’t this been what they had been doing all along? Wasn’t this only the truth?
“Wait here.” Hana said. “I’ll be ten minutes or so.” She left him there and he stood facing away
from the guesthouse and all of his memories of sin and dishonour, listening to the sharp sound of
Mrs. Abe’s shears as they cut through the branches of the hedges. From time to time the woman
would grunt as she stood up or bent down again, and her shuffling footfalls against the garden’s
perfect stone pathways were meek and unassuming. He was reminded of his mother, an unpleasant
taste at the bottom of an innocuous bowl of soup.
He hadn’t been back to Japan since his late twenties, he realized. A long time. Too long? But
there was only absence there for him now. His father had been absent from the start, away at war
against the Chinese. Munekata had known nothing of him except for that he was a hero, a man who
came home to ruffle his hair and recite sutras with him at the village temple, and he had died in
service to the Co-Prosperity Sphere and then his mother had moved in with his uncle Takeo, who
had also served in the military – it had seemed to little Keizo, in those angry years after the shameful
retreat from China, that everyone was some kind of soldier, that slogans about NATIONAL HONOUR
shouted by angry men in the street had been everywhere, a hysteria driven by the stain of failure
propelling Japan into a state of evermore-frantic military playacting, for the sake of the Empire. His
uncle had not served in a colonial army but at home in a garrison.
Takeo had been a cruel man with a terrible temper, and that time had been bad. Munekata’s
attention was not drawn to it but to before. His early youth. Red rice on the emperor’s birthday, the
smell of his father’s pipe on those rare visits home, his mother at the village shrine bowed to the
local god bidding little Keizo to bow with her, younger sister Sayumi holding onto his yukata as he
watched the soldiers drill on the village square. All these things had disappeared on the wind.
Sayumi now was in the US working for Mitsubishi, and her Japanese was accented with English – she,
like him, had escaped, only for her escape to be further and her severing of connections even closer
to total. That was Japan, he supposed. Escape or death.
He watched Mrs. Abe. His mother had also had another son with another husband later, and now
as far as he knew she lived in Kyoto, running a girls’ school: Munekata had no interest in
reconnecting with her. He had first left the home islands at eighteen with all kinds of other young
people who had realized that things were stagnating, that the Imperial Rule Assistance Organisation
had no way of fixing the country, of developing, of catching up with Soviet might or German steel or
American dazzle. He had been chasing a chance to make money, fleeing his uncle’s rage and his
father’s shadow, and had written home at first but then never, and had only returned when
Karashima had found him for the Kempeitai, and he had made that one stiff, embarrassing visit back
home at twenty-six, and found nothing he recognised.
His stepbrother had worked in a tired state-run friendship store where the currency was US
dollars, part of some Free Trade Zone that would be shuttered by the authorities soon after, and his
stepbrother had drank too much and his uncle had been drunk as well, the whole time, and his
mother a stranger to him shrunken and pale, and Japan had been a dreary place of endless wooden
houses and military vehicles, the frustrated conclusion to the China war having not just cursed it
with delusions of warrior-state supremacy but also mired it in stagnation, he had realized, frozen the
economy, kept it isolated, alone, out of step even with the accidental multiculturalism of
Manchukuo. To him it had been a strange and bland place, compared to Manchukuo’s cursed blood-
soaked colour.
The misbegotten parody-nation he now was trapped in had felt alive then. Love and lust in
Shinkyo. The feeling of achievement, of freedom, of a world ever-changing, of possibilities
dangerous and beautiful writhing beneath the surface. He supposed that when Karashima had said
he was the only person who even half-believed in Manchukuo that it hadn’t been incorrect. A
nomad clinging to a failed non-home. The only surveyman who had survived the beating the plains
had given him. These and other thoughts swirled about his head as he waited. Mrs. Abe glanced at
him from time to time but said nothing.
 Soon Hana had returned, changed into shorts and a floral man’s shirt, and she took Munekata
with her to McDonald’s. It was built into an old restaurant that he remembered once having made
wonderful takoyaki that now bore the emblem of America, the golden yellow M, blazing in neon
over the traditional façade of tiled rooftops and wooden shutters, the shop window now a small
kiosk for ordering ice cream from. Several children hung around outside, stood against their bicycles
in their stiff grey school uniforms, talking about television and about homework.
Ten years ago the police would have called such behaviour ‘loitering’ and ‘antisocial
disharmonious behaviour’ and reported them for it. Now the policeman across the street by the car
park, although still in uniform with his rifle hanging by its strap over his shoulder, was smoking and
reading a comic book instead of paying attention. Hana went to the paper screen at the entrance
and slid it open for him. Munekata, grimacing, went into McDonald’s.
Inside was overflowing with the discordant noise of too many children, everything plastic and
bright, young staff in yellow uniforms moving from table to table with trays of wrapped-up western
food. It was all fake, all glaringly unreal, overwhelmingly awful. A little Japanese girl went by,
laughing, and she was holding a toy of some horrible Soviet cartoon character, waving it over her
head. Her mother came trooping after her, scowling, telling her not to act like some idiot Chinese.
Hana was there by Munekata’s side, all that he understood. She bid him to sit and he chose a spot by
the window here he could see the street and she went to order for him. He exhaled, slumped in his
seat.
Opposite him against the wall the ghastly figure of a clown stood grinning at him, a statue with a
frozen face of artificial glee, red-haired and white-faced and extending a hand to him with a
hamburger upon it, an offering from west to east. Capitalist degeneracy disguised with a friendly
exterior. Military policeman and garish clown looked at one another in mutual incomprehension.
It was only a few minutes later that she came to the table with two of those plastic trays. On each
was a hamburger in a cardboard box, a box of French fries next to that, and a cup of what they called
Coca-Cola next to that. He eyed it as she placed it before him. “Use your hands.” she said. “Geez, you
don’t look very pleased to see it.” Hana said. “It won’t kill you.”
“Are you sure?” he asked. He opened the box and peered at the hamburger, which resembled
the thing on the displays above the counter only vaguely. “I thought you were Mr. Foreignlover.” she
said, sitting herself down, long legs crossed and to the side. “German books on your shelves and a
foreign drinking buddy. You can even speak English. Pretty good English, too.”
“British English.” he said. “Not that degenerate American tongue.”
“’Degenerate’.” she said, snorting. “You sound like a propaganda hack. Look at this, here. These
Americans have figured out propaganda much better than you Kempeitai Schweinhunden.” She
patted her hamburger box with care. “They’re going to take over, as soon as you and the British and
the Germans all run out of money. They should have but you all clung on. They and the Soviets.
Korea, Taiwan, the Republic, Tsingtao and Hong Kong – they all love communism and capitalism now.
The old emperors are fading ghosts, right? There’ll be no more empires in the future, that’s for sure.”
All of this came with such confidence and pride that he knew at once she believed it but also that
she was doing this, all of this, including McDonald’s, to irritate him on purpose.
It was working. “You can’t talk like that.” he said seriously. “Miss Takamori-”
“What, you think the clown’s wearing a wire?” she said, scoffing. She picked up her sauce packet
and tore it open, spraying crimson ketchup all over her fries. He copied her, less certain, and when
that was done and she had started to eat he reluctantly did the same. He picked up the still-warm
hamburger and stared into it, feeling the grease and oil inside. Finally he took a bite. The flavour of
the sauce hit his tongue, assaulted it, and he chewed and swallowed and looked at the gap in the
hamburger he had made, trying to unravel its secret. Hana was watching him with her elbows on the
table and her chin in her hands. He took another bite, chewing and swallowing quicker. “It isn’t bad.”
he said.
She scoffed. “Oh, come on.”
“It is better than I assumed.”
 “The delicious taste of degeneracy.” she said, giving him a mean little half-smile. He frowned at
her and then at the red and yellow clown. But he finished the hamburger and the fries and the cola
anyway, and enjoyed it, and thanked her for suggesting it. He asked her if she had paid and she said
yes, and he offered to pay her back – Hana told him no, in a firm voice, and he acquiesced to her
without another word. Such was the strangeness of their business relationship now. They ambled
back from McDonalds to his home again.
By now it was approaching the tail-end of the afternoon and the town was coming to life. Lilting
koto music rose from one of the restaurants. Several foreigners were wandering, already drunk, to
Tiger Street, talking excitedly in German. Burton would be at the Dragonfly tonight slurping whiskey
perhaps with those very Germans. Another world. In this place and time Munekata and Hana were
invisible, spirits drifting on the wind that blew in, faintly smelling of the comfort of saltwater and
carrying with it the diesel smell of the Japanese naval patrol boats from the bay. Still they didn’t hold
hands. Lit up by neon her face seemed luminous by his side.
Back home, his injuries already hurting less, he left her to resume her drawing and at his own
desk he worked on his case notes. The quiet was beautiful, her pencil scratching and his pen too, out
of sync with it, two irregular noises that worked as one. The cars in the street and the propaganda
vans and all else was only distraction. They remained in this limbo for an hour or slightly more. The
breaking of it happened as a mutual thing, she putting down her pencil and coming over to him and
he, stiffening, tired and sore, and she put her hands on his shoulders and through the fabric of his
shirt he felt the smoothness of her palms. He tensed and he felt her tension too – this here, this
moment of contact, had with it a feeling of deeper, more honest shamefulness than all that they’d
done prior. “You know, the Honesty Commission is being set up.” she said. “For after the withdrawal.
They’re going to be doing those meetings and trials all over the country. I mean, it’s going to be
theatre, but some of you Jap bastards will have to take the blame for it.”
“Yes.” he said.
“Probably policemen. The civilians will blame you all for doing their dirty work, right? And if
you’re ex-Survey Unit-”
“I will have to confront whatever it is my dossier says about me.” he said finally.
“Don’t you care?”
Munekata thought. “I do care.” he said. “I would like to keep on going to work after they’re done
with me. It would be a waste of resources to take a man who is willing to do his part in reconciliation,
who has no desire to give a grand speech defending himself in the courtroom, and send him to the
gallows or to prison just because he deserves it.”
She moved one hand away in tentative retreat. It remained loose at her side. “So you did things
that could get you killed?” she asked. A sudden injection of ice into her voice. “It was that bad?”
He stayed where he was. “I don’t remember what I did, or why I did it.” he said eventually. “It all
made sense at the time. But I always tried to conduct myself with professionalism. I understand that
given what we were doing, that is hardly a defence. I don’t intend it to be.” A sigh slipped from her.
He sensed that he had given the wrong answer somehow. He turned about and found her, this
beautiful thing who despised him. She was frowning, one finger scratching at the mole on her cheek,
her narrowed eyes watching him with a lazy contempt. “All I know”, he said, “is that to live a whole
life in the service of a cause and then to try to escape from the consequences of that is condemning
yourself to dishonour. I couldn’t live with that. So I’ll take my punishment, Miss Takamori.”
“You know,” she said, casually disdainful, “that talking nobly like that doesn’t mean anything. We
won’t forgive you for it.”
“I know.” he said.
Hana now let go and stepped back. She crossed her arms. “Is that what you wanted from me?”
she said. Her voice was quiet “Punishment? When we played our little games, did it make you feel
better?”
“Not exactly.” he said, unable to look away from her as she was unable to look away from him.
“What you gave me was…disrespect. Because to each other we’re inhuman. Because of that, I
believed you always told me the truth.” A car went past in the street outside. He couldn’t read her
expression – it was as alien to him as ever. Their agreement that had been built on neither
understanding the other, a distance masked by physical closeness and maintained by the
obfuscation of transaction, had run aground. It seemed neither of them knew what to replace it with,
if anything. She swallowed. “So,” she said, “can you explain this case of yours to me, old man?”
He did so, relieved to be offered a means of escape. He explained Sachiko and Mizuki and Li
Huangqi and Xu Mei and all of that, and Karashima and Akira Suzuki, and his very own musings from
earlier that day, and she sat at his heated table and listened, chin in her hands and knees up to her
chest. When he was finished she was quiet, lips pressed tight together, and she got up and went to
the fridge and came back with a can of Asahi. She opened it with a crack and held it up to her mouth
and drank. She wiped her mouth on the back of her hand. “It seems to me like you’re fucked.” she
said.
“Yes, thank you.” he said.
“I know you know it,” she said, “but you don’t really know it. The gossip about that Japanese girl
is all over Yugongguan. All over Tenmei too probably. And nobody is going to share anything with
you, because nobody knows anything – but they know something happened, and there’s no way to
get the truth out from anyone except this Suzuki bastard’s daughter, who doesn’t want to talk, or at
least her mother doesn’t, which is the same basic thing.” She drank. “You’re fucked. Give it up.”
He sighed. “Miss Takamori, if I may, as advice, that’s-”
“I’m not here to give advice.” she said. “A crime where the victim doesn’t want to talk sounds like
a fight you can’t win. You can’t be serious about continuing.” Hana sat back down. She sipped
inelegantly at the can. “I don’t want you to go and get yourself shot too soon or anything. You keep
me in pencils and liquor here. So give up and let’s go for a drink tomorrow. A drink. I want you to tell
me what you did out there. On the plains. That’s my fee this time.” She smiled. He suddenly wanted
to go dancing with her. He wanted to go swimming, he wanted to visit the temple with her hand in
his, he wanted to walk without his stick, he wanted to live it all over again, with her this time. A
series of mad impulses. His wounds hurt and his heart raced.
The phone rang. She gestured to it, indicating consent, and slowly drawing himself up, ridding
himself of the sickness of fantasy, he made his way over to it with stick in hand and answered. It was
the Tachibana girl. Breathless with excitement she told him she had eavesdropped on Xu Mei and Li
Huangqi and that they had mentioned a name: Chen. He thanked her and hung up. For a long time
he thought about what she had said about threats made against Xu Mei. Someone had been rattled,
he thought, by his trip to the Red Club. He thought the girl might not be safe, but then smart
gangsters did not usually risk open violence just to protect their members from this kind of affair.
She would be fine. She would have to be fine. “Chen.” he said. Hana perked up, watching him. “Does
that mean anything to you?” he asked.
She drank more beer. “You were in with the cowboy types the other night, right? That Li Huangqi.
He’s one of those thugs.”
“Yes.”
“The San Lung Tang don’t like them. But they’ve got someone Japanese on their side. They’re
pretty hard to mess with. You idiot.” Slowly she spoke. “I might know a Chen, actually. Chen Juhua.”
“Who?”
“He’s the – I know his brother. But Chen is a shady businessman. Works out of an office on
Harbour Road. Probably, almost definitely in with those guys who’re trying to out-muscle the triads.
I think.”
Munekata sat down with her, grunting with the effort, feeling the pain in his leg and ignoring it.
“’I’ve got people behind me who even you should be careful about.’ That’s what Li Huangqi said to
me. I think you have something there.” He took her hand, felt her soft skin for the first time in his life.
He was aware of the transgression but could not help it. “Do you think this ‘Chen’ might be part of
it?” he asked.
She looked uneasy but did not pull herself free. “He might be.”
 “If he is, I can use him to capture whoever did this to Sachiko Suzuki. To punish him. I’ll find him.
Tomorrow, I’ll find him.”
“You should meet his brother first.” she said. “Tomorrow.”
“His brother?” Munekata asked.
“Chen Jintian.”
“The writer?” For a second he was halted. “That’s…he’s quite famous. Well-connected. Are you
sure?” She was holding onto him now too, the two of them united in this fantasy, in the dream of
the mystery yet to be figured out. He could see it in her – she wanted to solve the case. To resolutely
punish whichever evil had been unleashed upon Sachiko Suzuki, which perhaps she recognised, as a
shadow of the evil, whatever it was, that had been visited upon her in her youth. Which had worn
the armour that hung gutted upon the wall of his shed. “I see that bastard every week.” she said. “I
know it’s him. I’m going to meet with Chen Jintian this week. You can come along. Scope things out.
If Chen Juhua is home, you can find him there. If not-”
He nodded. “I’ll do some policework.” She stayed over that night and they didn’t do anything. It
was a strange kind of unity – not love, he thought, and not hate. Or both at once. With her slim form
curled up in the futon, he on the floor next to it lying there with her presence agitating his bruises
and stirring up his soul, at first he could not sleep, but when he did he slept without dreaming of
anything, good or bad. In the morning Munekata found her absent. He pawed at where she had
been, pathetically, and then got up and dressed himself and found her downstairs. She was leafing
through his calligraphy – his pages of poetry about Mieko, Arakawa’s wife whose heart he had
broken. She was doing so with deliberate ease, in a manner that suggested a provocation. He
feigned annoyance. “What is this?” he asked her.
“Reading your poems.” she said. “I never had you for a lovebird. Who was she?”
He paused at the foot of the stairs. “A shadow of my dearest comrade.” he said. “A man who died
in the war.”
“He died?” she said, a blade thrust at his heart.
Munekata nodded. “He died in the war.”
“How many Chinese did he kill?” she said. A vast pause, vaster than he could understand,
followed. Hana did not look away from him. “I’m going out, anyway.” she said suddenly. “I’ll pick you
up tomorrow. When I go out to see Chen Jintian. You can come with. Good excuse. If Juhua is there,
maybe you can arrest him there and then. I’d love to see the look on his face.”
“I don’t have any evidence.” Munekata said. “Yet.” He tottered into the kitchen and got to work
boiling some water for his tea. Hana flounced across the room. “Did that ever stop you before?” she
asked. He understood that this was also meant to hurt him, a kind of probing. He enjoyed finding
himself hurt. “Where are you going?” he asked.
She hovered at the cusp of the kitchen. Her face seemed to undergo a shift, a softening. Her left
hand brushed gently against her right. “To the bank.” she said finally. “To deposit some of that
money you gave me. I send it to the charitable associations in Yugongguan.” She said this with
import and he judged that it was important. The kettle hummed and whistled. He took out a teacup
from the cupboard. “Well,” he said, “what a stupid waste of good money.”
“You old bastard.” she said. “What the hell does that mean?”
“It goes straight to the triads.” he said. “The San Lung Tang. The child-traffickers who used to sell
all the drugs in town. That’s who you’re funding with my money.”
“You don’t know a fucking thing.” she said. Munekata filled his cup with tea leaves and picked up
the kettle and poured the hot water. She stalked into the kitchen after him. “What do you know
about us Chinese, you fat stupid prick?” she asked, arms crossed. A great sigh left her, her entire
body seeming to deflate. “Nothing.” she said, “You don’t know anything.”
“See you tomorrow.” he said back. Hana went and put her shoes on and left and he stood by the
window and watched her leave. He spent the day resting. In the evening he decided to go out to the
Dragonfly, without her and without Burton, to drink a little by himself and see what happened. He
wondered if he could insult her again, really strike at her as he had today. He had enjoyed it and she
had enjoyed doing it to him too, he thought.
What was wrong with that? He would solve the case and help Sachiko Suzuki, and that would be
good, so why could he not also enjoy causing some pain into the bargain? But then there was
already enough of that going around, he thought. He went out in his grey suit with the tie that was
always too long and the shirt too small for his gut and the jacket with the frayed collar he had never
bothered to get fixed, and he walked to the Dragonfly.
That night was a jazz night. Wang had a negro in playing on a saxophone with Mimi, that short-
haired young woman in the dark dress who had brought her keyboard from Beiping who had to go
home to Yugongguan every night to an apartment she shared with four other Chinese, who, in that
precise kind of guoyu accent Uncle Chiang had taught them which the Japanese had never bothered
with, often sat at the bar and complained loudly about how nobody in this dead-end town ever
knew how to tip properly. Munekata remembered drunkenly trying to approach her after a set, full
of ill intent, but being so drunk it had only come out as a series of questions about how she was
doing and a mumbled comment about how good she was. Because of this she seemed fond of him in
a misguided way and she smiled at him as he came in and sat down at his usual place, lights playing
over his head as they arced in and out of the stage at his back.
Munekata was not here for that, or for her. He was here to drink whiskey until his bruises
stopped hurting, until his confusion went away. The case was there and it would be fine. He felt to
have wasted so much of himself here, in this bar and in this town, and yet now that the spectral
possibility of alternatives had arisen, now that he was aware of other feelings to have except
numbness, he did not know what they meant or to how to firmly grasp them. It was an inversion of
the process that had overcome him when he had been shot in the leg and Arakawa had died and the
Survey Unit had been removed from history – an emergence from darkness into blinding sunlight. So
it was that he could not make Hana Takamori, whoever she was, love him. He thought if they could
only be friends – but what did that mean, for a doomed man to try to make a friend of a woman he
had paid to be inside? The case, he told himself, two whiskies later. Focus on the case.
He was sat there listening to Mimi and her negro play a freewheeling saxophone-piano duet,
watching through lidded eyes the glistening bottles upon the other side of the bar in the cabinet,
when he sensed someone next to him. He turned but it was not her and it was not Burton.
“Lieutenant.” Major Karashima said. He was in civilian clothes, bare head with threadbare grey at
the sides catching the fantastic shimmer of the bar’s lights. “May I get this one for you?”
“Sir-” Munekata began.
Karashima held up a hand. “Never mind all that. I shouldn’t have said ‘lieutenant’, actually. Keizo,
rather. Let’s not bother with formality here.”
“Yes, sir.” Munekata said. Karashima ordered Munekata’s next whiskey and for himself a small
bottle of Hakutsuru Junmai, and they waited there for their drinks while the saxophone went on
playing at their backs. Munekata reached for a cigarette he didn’t have. Karashima, perhaps out of
respect, did not smoke but only sat there stiffly, for now studying then drinks just as Munekata had
been before. What did he see there? Munekata wondered. The two men, inches away from contact,
remained still. Their drinks were delivered by Wang, who in the presence of the senior army man
had gone suddenly rigid himself, as if their stiffness were a spreading contagion.
Karashima poured himself some sake and raised his cup. Munekata raised his own slightly lower.
“To those who have fallen.” Karashima intoned. They toasted. The whiskey was like water now.
Munekata was aware of his own drunkenness, spreading from brain to body, the warmth of his own
cheeks. Karashima sipped at his cup. “I was in the area for a meeting,” he said, “and I remembered
this place. I remembered you made it a habit of hanging out here. I was never sure why, so I thought
I’d take a look. And now I think I understand. This little hive of degeneracy doesn’t feel like our
Manchukuo at all, does it?” He chuckled, returning his gaze to the glasses. “It is a different world
when you leave the barracks. Always has been.”
 Munekata heard Mimi’s squealing from behind him rising up ghostlike, the agony wails of a
phantasm of all the very dead Karashima had just invoked. “A very different world.” he said.
“But then,” Karashima said. “What is ‘Manchukuo’? The very thing you and I have given ourselves
over to. What is it, Keizo?”
“The plains, sir.” Munekata said.
Underneath the music the harsh sound of the chair being turned. Karashima now looked at him
with those hard inscrutable eyes. “You’d say so? Those years of violence?”
“And truth.”
“Whose truth is that?” Karashima asked. “Ours, or theirs?” His face was calm but Munekata knew
the danger that lay beneath. He had seen Karashima beat recruits bloody in the Kempeitai, seen him
not even raise his voice as those unworthy of the service – those whose cruelty had been too
obvious - had been dragged out by armed kempei to be shot and buried in the fields. Had seen him
too in the Survey Unit, in the New Era, following Adachihara’s regulations for discipline, explaining
rather than pummelling. Switching from one to the other as orders had demanded. A man of the
system. And yet Munekata had drank and was tired and did not fear the system. He himself had
been inside of it long enough. “We set out there to write a story, didn’t we?” he said. “The eternal
success of the imperial dream. And they splashed the pages all over with their blood. In the end, it
was so that the Insurgency was ours and theirs.”
“I see.” Karashima said, Sphinx-like. He drank more sake. The music washed over them mournful
and alien, the sound of America, of a tapestry of feelings and notions alien to the two Japanese with
their ancient inherited flatness. But was that so? Mizuki Tachibana was of that ilk, a Japanese as they
were, and yet she was friends with this Sachiko Suzuki, who, from what Munekata had picked up so
far, was friends in turn with the Chinese, defiant of her parents and all those around her – he was
struck again by the notion that he was drowning in time, slipping through history. “Did we ever
achieve the harmony we sought?” he asked Karashima. “That we paid for in bullets and blood and
sweat?”
“We did.” Karashima said. Iron in his tone. He gestured to the bar around them. “That is what this
is, Keizo. Never forget that every glass of whiskey you drink, every pleasant morning walk, every
evening with a beautiful young Chinese woman,” Munekata heard this and his heart felt to spasm, a
pain in his chest as if Karashima had struck him, and the major continued on seemingly without
noticing, “all of it comes from the victories we produced out there. It’s easy to forget, but this is
harmony. That’s our problem. After so long, it all becomes invisible - the fruits of our work, the work
it took to bear this fruit at all. We forget that what we’ve built, if imperfect, is worth something.
What was Manchuria, before we came to it? Only potential. Land wasted by shiftless Chinese.”
With a jerk of his head he gestured to outside. “Did you visit Yugongguan recently? Dirty, yes.
Corrupt, yes. But bustling. No idle farmers are they now! The problem is that’s the Chinese for you.
They’re hardy and diligent and yet without morality, without a need for morality. They don’t know
how to do anything but plough on ahead. They’ll destroy it, if they’re not careful. That’s what the
Survey Unit had to be for, and then when it was too clogged with blood and gore we discarded it.
Now the Kempeitai have kept the peace, under the noses of those civilian dogs. And as for tomorrow?
Well, something will come about.”
Munekata contemplated this. They shared a few seconds of separate quiet. “Sir,” he said over the
saxophone behind them. “What are you doing after the withdrawal?”
Karashima turned to him, again impassive. But for a moment the mask seemed to withdraw, and
he saw his commander’s tired eyes, the wrinkles and lines that crisscrossed his stone-like skin, the
smoothness of his chin where he shaved it perfectly clean every day, the slight sag of that mouth, as
if it had never learned how to properly smile. He realized that the man before him was aging, that
Karashima, his superior, could in fact grow old, that Karashima’s skin was made of flesh and not
metal, as Munekata realized he had always automatically believed.
“Something will come about.” Karashima repeated. “Harmony will be maintained. Systems are
what they are – the Germans have their Ordnung, their Prussian style. The Americans posture about
freedom, playing at cowboy games, but they too have set up checks and balances. The Soviets rule
by the Party. The British keep everything in order through a certain subtlety. One white man for a
hundred Indians. But all put their faith, in the last resort, in a man - the man behind the desk. It is he
who maintains. It is management that achieves enlightenment. All things in their proper place. I have
faith in very little but that. And, of course,” he drank, “you, Keizo.”
Munekata surveyed the suddenly old man and himself felt suddenly young. “Me?”
Karashima nodded. “How’s the investigation going?” he asked, and Munekata’s unease was
dispelled. He understood now what was happening. He sat up in his seat. Wang brought him another
whiskey and he held it and peered into it. “Fine.” he said. “I have leads.”
“Mr. Suzuki is interested.” Karashima said. “And I am too. I heard you had some bother with
certain fellows from the anti-social organisations down by the pier.” Munekata noted the chill in his
master’s voice but did not feel it - he knew this kind of conversation. “I did.” he said. He drank and
allowed himself to be drunk. “It seems it may be one of those types who accosted our victim.” he
said. Karashima drank in turn but did not seem to lose any of his coolness, did not show anything in
his eyes. “Well, be mindful of avoiding any trouble with them, please.” he said. “For your sake and
for the sake of harmony. We both know that these days such organisations are more than the
Kempeitai can handle, if it comes to open violence.”
“I understand, sir.” Munekata said.
“I know you do.” Karashima said. “But, Keizo…if this case turns out to be bigger than we thought,
you must let me know. You must catch this disharmonious element, yes. I have tasked you with this.
If you have to ruffle a few feathers in order to do so, fine. But do not get any closer than you need
to.”
“Yes, sir.” Munekata said, soothed by the end of the façade. Without much more talking they
finished their drinks. Karashima took his leave with a polite goodbye, having paid for both his own
bill and Munekata’s, and Munekata stayed there a while with the last whiskey he had ordered. Mimi
and her negro packed up and went home – the bar thinned out until it was only he and the other
few regulars left. He collected his stick and, leaning on it more than usual, he went out, to where
Tenmei was dignified and quiet around him. Wobbling a little he went back, without Burton, or Hana,
or Arakawa or Mieko, even now without Karashima. A figure alone amidst the darkening streets.
-
“Hey, Akiyama.” Hana said, very drunk.
Akiyama was waiting in the doorway in a flimsy dull grey nightgown, watching with sleepy eyes.
“Hana?” she said quietly. “What…what’s going on?”
“I had a little drink.” Hana said, still very drunk. She lifted up the bottle of erguotou and sipped it
and stepped into Akiyama’s room. It was just as small as her own but was not hers and had the
wardrobe open with several of Akiyama’s flimsy American-style dresses on display and a small make-
up table in the corner crammed into place. It seemed terrible but then everything seemed terrible.
She took two glasses from the little cabinet under the bed and poured one full of erguotou for
herself and one for Akiyama and Akiyama sat on the bed took it looking politely bemused. Hana did
not sit but stood but didn’t mind standing but wobbled a little. “Hana.” Akiyama said in the tone of
one addressing a child. “It’s very late.”
Hana stood and stared at her. Bit down on a Chinese insult. Wanted to return to her beautiful
erhua and then to Akiyama and then to explain all of it. You, you dumb slut, what do you know?
Selling your body every day, for what? What’s your excuse, you cringing Jap? How did you end up
here in this wasteland, ruining yourself for money?
What halted her at first was that she did not want to be caught. What halted her secondly was an
awareness that she didn’t in fact know this, and that there might have been very good reasons
Akiyama was here in the dumps with her. What halted her thirdly was that she wanted another drink.
So she held out her glass. “A toast.” she announced.
“To what?” from Akiyama, who nevertheless raised her glass in turn.
Hana thought. “To the Communist Party!”
 Akiyama laughed. “What?”
“Come on.” Hana said. She thrust her glass upwards. “Long live the Communist Party of
Manchukuo!”
Akiyama copied her after a second. “Um, yeah. Sure.” And they drank up together. Hana wiped
her mouth on the back of her hand. Outside the town was drowsy-quiet. Some floors above
someone was giving someone else a tired pounding, a male voice making muffled faux-female noises.
She looked at Akiyama and Akiyama looked at her.
Akiyama tittered. “Hana, it’s late.” she said again. There was something strange about her at
night, in this state, without her make-up or her hair done, with only a fatigued, unguarded face, with
spots here and there and her hair all in disarray and the way she was sat in her night-garments
showing the slight flab of her belly and the stretchmarks on her thighs.
Hana was touched by this, strangely. She leant against the windowsill. “I wanted to ask you about
something.” she said. Akiyama said nothing but waited, brushing her hair back behind her shoulders
and studying Hana with those splendid eyes, smaller than they looked all made-up but possessing,
Hana thought, a wonderful sincerity which surely was what every day of her work trapped so many
men who never quite escaped it. Or maybe Hana was just drunk. She sighed. “Can I ask you?” she
asked.
“Hana.” Akiyama said. What was her first name? Hana had forgotten. “Are…is everything okay?”
“Where are you from?” Hana asked.
Akiyama blinked. “Oh...Tsurui.”
“Tsurui.” Hana repeated. “Where’s that, huh?”
Akiyama did not reply for a moment. “Well, it’s in Japan.”
“Where?”
“Where what?”
“Where in Japan?”
Akiyama drank. “It’s a little village in Hokkaido.” she said. “Not really notable for anything.”
“Cranes.” Hana said.
“Huh?”
“You’re lying, Akiyama.” Still couldn’t remember her name. Akiyama, Munekata…what was it, she
thought, with her and surnames? Was there anyone she called by their personal name? Except for
Jintian. She chased her drink around the glass and in the end she caught it. “There’s the cranes.” she
said. “Tsurui is famous for the red-crowned crane.”
Now Akiyama really looked at her. The first time in their few years of acquaintance this had ever
happened. The woman from Tsurui frowned. “You…?”
“I saw it on an MTC show.” Hana said. “It’s the ‘Manchurian crane’, isn’t it? Because there’s a lot
of them here too. This show was all about the symbolism of that dumb bird in Chinese and Japanese
art, and how its breeding grounds being in Manchuria meant it was a symbol of China and Japan
together – how it stood for Manchukuo too. That it represented our prized ethnic unity and
harmony.”
She snorted. “But anyway, I was with a friend and he said that was bullshit, because actually they
only breed in the north of Manchukuo, not the whole country, and anyway, there’s more of them in
Hokkaido. And they showed your village in the show.” A quiet followed. Akiyama was watching her,
one hand on her glass too casually. She sipped. Hana now lowered herself onto the bed, sitting down
knees up just as they had used to on the kang back home. She sipped too. “What a beautiful bird,
though.” she said.
“Yeah.” Akiyama said. “You know, I almost never saw them back home. They’re imperial symbols,
right? So the police used to guard them.” Hana stared. “I’m serious.” Akiyama said. “I mean, back in
the sixties, in the Red Chrysanthemum days, radicals used to deface images of the heavenly
sovereign and the imperial family, and with the economy so bad everyone was tense, so our local
government got it into their heads that even the cranes wouldn’t be safe, so there were armed
police units and wire fences around all the crane breeding grounds. Men with guns!” She laughed
and it was the first time Hana had ever heard her sound happy. “Me and my sister, we once tried to
sneak in to see them and we got caught, but luckily we were just kids, so the police didn’t do
anything…we were covered in dirt from trying to crawl under the wire fence.” She shook her head.
“They always used to try to tell us to act like proper Japanese girls! But come on, what the fuck does
that mean? Stupid costumes and proper manners and always covering our mouths when we
laughed…”
She trailed off, drinking. Hana drank with her. The little room didn’t seem as small now. Akiyama
turned to face her. “Do you know why I came out here?” she said. All kinds of terrible retorts came
to Hana. She said none of them but only waited. “Well,” Akiyama resumed, “I was looking for some
way out. Everyone was, right? Anything to avoid dying over there. And I was back in Tsurui visiting
my grandpa’s grave when I saw a red-crowned crane take flight, right over the hills near the temple.
I finally saw one of those stupid birds, Hana, and I thought: why don’t I go to Manchukuo? I thought,
why don’t I go over there? See what kind of work I can get. And I met up with a man, a man who said
he could get people to the colonies even if they didn’t have a work permit. I believed him. I was
stupid.” Her voice trembled. “Oh, he was awful, Hana. A real bastard.”
“I…” Hana began. “I’ve known men like that too. I’m sorry.”
“It was a while ago now.” Akiyama shrugged. “I’m over it. I just wanted to see what it was like
here. I thought it would be interesting. All of us did, back home. We didn’t know about the Survey
Unit or anything like that. We just thought it was where the communists were, and a lot of us…we
kind of admired them.” She looked at her drink.
Hana realized that words were about to come out. I was a communist, she wanted to say, and I
was trafficked too, by lots of bastards who were all their own kind of awful, but also all the same,
somehow, and just like you I sometimes shrug because I know I can’t explain to anyone else in the
world how I feel about myself. She wanted to show Akiyama - whose name she still couldn’t
remember - her red scarf and her Mauser and talk about her mother and her comrades and what
the surveymen had done to her village. She wanted so much to say all of it, feeling ready to burst as
if something had suddenly just inflated too much too quickly inside of her. Hana remained poised
upon the edge of disaster upon the edge of the bed. Akiyama sighed. “Well, how about you?” she
asked. “Where are you from?”
Hana did not speak. She drank the rest of her erguotou and refilled the glass. Akiyama was still
facing her and did not turn away, did not give her a chance. Hana reached into her jacket pocket and
found hard plastic and pulled it out and shoved her ID card in Akiyama’s face. “There.” she said.
Akiyama studied it for a second but then looked over it to Hana with wounded, confused eyes. Hana
looked away. “It says I’m Japanese, doesn’t it?” she said.
“It – it does-”
“Don’t I speak Japanese properly?”
“You do-”
“I do. So leave off already.”
Akiyama’s pretty little lips moved. “Hana, sorry, did I-”
Hana stood. “I’m Japanese.” she said.
Akiyama was quiet. “I believe you.” she said. “Really. I know you’re Japanese. I’m sorry if I said
something wrong. I just, you know, people don’t usually ask me about myself, and-”
“Of course they don’t.” Hana said, arms crossed. “Who wants to know why some idiot decided to
come on over here and make a whore of herself? What, Manchukuo wasn’t what you wanted, was it?
It didn’t live up to your dumb Japanese fantasy about the wild frontier and whatever? Well, I,” she
paused in her anger, snatching her ID back, “I was born here, and it’s what it’s always been, which is
a miserable hellhole. Not that you even know a hundredth of how awful this wasteland is. Fucking
tourist.”
“Hana-” Akiyama began, voice full of hurt. Yes, wasn’t it so, Hana, that you could get people to
open up, that you could start to really know them, and also that you could that way just hurt them
even more? She stormed out of the room she had barged into still holding her erguotou and hurting
herself, thinking of Akiyama who still didn’t have a fucking name, and – yeah, alright – of him, of
Munekata and of the case, of this girl who was a stranger, Sachiko Suzuki, who had been raped in
this very town, probably by one of Hana’s own race, the uncivilized scum, the Chinese, who would
never be anything but that.
She thought of Sachiko Suzuki and whatever had happened to her at Divine Wind and found her
anger was better there. She would think about that, not about Munekata or Akiyama or Jintian and
how she was going to betray him to get to Juhua, how that was perfect, wasn’t it, to betray the arch-
traitor himself…Hana staggered into bed. She lay there in the dark and listened to next door, for
Akiyama’s sobs or shouts. Nothing came. She reached under her bed and found the long thick red
scarf and held it to her face and smelt faintly her mother, from so long ago. And she fell asleep like
this and dreamt of back then and of armoured men with guns shooting all around her as she fled
into the plains.
 11
The first thing Jintian was aware of was warmth, the usual comfort, and with that a rush of fiery
joy, and with that he felt, quickly established, that stab of guilt, of terrible sin that was worthless and
rootless and yet which must have had some worth and some root, for it had once again taken root in
him, as it always did, and after that he felt his cock tremble as flushed with the memory of last night
it pulsed happily, facing half-limp towards the young man’s back. The boy’s name was Shinichi and
he was a soldier with the navy and he had met Jintian at the usual place last night and now they
were here. Jintian remembered Shinichi. He remembered the curve of his spine, the paleness of his
skin, the soft, shameful sound the young man had made at the moment of triumph. Ah, but he
thought to himself, young man?
He wondered about this, about his own faded youth and about his own morality, and about the
beautiful thing lying sleeping there in the bed of the third-floor room of the Anne Inn which was kept
for those like him, which was only a bed and a light and a drawer which always contained condoms
and lubricant. Jintian sat up, moving carefully so that he didn’t wake his bedmate, and retrieved his
buddha from the bedside and put it around his neck, and went to the window and looked out over
the somnolent street below.
It was only eight in the morning according to the digital clock on the wall. Russian-made, he saw.
The Soviets and the British and the Americans and Germans all had their claws into noble
Manchukuo, which once had been dreamt of as the industrial powerhouse of the Co-Prosperity
Sphere. It still technically was a powerhouse, compared to the rest of the Empire at least. But as
Aoba said in his articles, that was very much like being the highest-scoring pupil in a remedial class.
From the window he saw Japanese settlers on their routines, postman and elderly people and
other early risers, some heading to their cars or bicycles, the whole of Tenmei rousing itself to life,
these people in their nice houses heading out under the fluttering of the imperial flag to do their
duties, little figures scuttling about their stolen land unaware anymore that there had ever been a
theft. He saw the perfect blue of the sky and saw in the motion of the flags the gentleness of today’s
breeze, and he closed himself off to all else and enjoyed them in silence, thinking of a time that had
never been. He remembered China and he remembered childhood and he was for a moment at
peace.
Then Shinichi stirred in the bed, turning over, and Jintian, freshly ashamed of himself, stalked
back over to the drawer and collected together his things, his Japanese yukata and his underclothes,
his socks and his sandals and his glasses, and he put them in a pile and left them next to Shinichi
while he went to the adjacent bathroom, a tiny place of immaculate tiles and a too-harsh light above
the mirror above the sink.
He washed himself thoroughly, having fallen asleep the night before without having done so, and
looked at himself in the mirror, his face older than it had been yesterday. Was that grey in his hair?
When that was taken care of and he was dried off he returned to the room and stepped over
Shinichi. Lying there on the bed the younger man almost resembled a corpse, pale and skinny and
still as death. They had lain together and died and death had made it all fine, and perhaps even lent
it some romance.
Jintian was well aware this was nonsense. In real life men didn’t die beautifully, and perverts
didn’t get romance – there was nothing like that beyond the pages of books or the canvases of
paintings, and all that was real was this which would go on forever. He dressed himself slowly and all
the while waited for Shinichi to wake, although it didn’t happen and it never would, because this was
the routine, that the prey always slept on while he, Jintian, was cursed with awareness. When he
was ready he bent down over the other man and kissed him gently on the cheek, leaving him there
in his childish dream-world, where whatever was happening was putting a slight smile on his saintly
face. Jintian left him there and headed downstairs swiftly. He told Mrs. Abe to look after the boy in
204 and Mrs. Abe, stony-faced secret-keeper, gave a curt bow and said nothing, as was the custom
in these affairs. Say nothing, see nothing, hear nothing – the code of the shadow-people.
 In his early twenties he had worked on a collection of poems on this theme once, all written in
the tanka form, mimicking the great poets of Heian Japan. Shadow-Man – a long self-indulgent
ramble, a waste of paper and ink. It had taken him eight months to write and twelve to get
published, and when it had come out he had immediately been taken in by the Concordia Media
Harmonisation Unit and held for eight hours in a windowless cell with no lights. Even so he still liked
to think of himself as a shadow-man, an invisible presence inhabiting the body of a normal human
being as a mischievous fox spirit might pose as a pretty woman. He left the hotel and took a taxi,
having left the BMW back on Vanished Cloud, as was the routine.
He had learned a long time ago that these people, the Japanese, didn’t care about right and
wrong but only about the appearance of right and wrong. It would be fine, he had surmised, if the
whole of Ryujin and even of Manchukuo knew he was a sodomite, as long as he didn’t err too much
and create a situation where they couldn’t deny it in front of anyone else. Leaving his distinctive
foreign car outside the hotel he came to for his needs would have been crossing the line – but
coming and going from that same hotel on foot was just about acceptable. Jintian had never
understood the Japanese except for that, which in his view was their only defining characteristic. His
father had always said that they were a cultureless people, a pirate nation who stole from others
what they couldn’t create for themselves, and that their stealing of Chinese land wouldn’t last, and
that sooner or later history would make them pay. And in a way he supposed his father had been
right, not that it made any difference now. The withdrawal was in six months, wasn’t it? And Jintian
was still here writing for them.
When he got home he snuck in through the servants’ entrance and his mother, although up and
doing her gardening already, pretended not to notice him. Filled with shame he stayed in his room
for some time. He lay there looking at the ceiling and pretending to be pretending to be asleep,
although really he was just looking at the ceiling. Are we no different from them, he wondered, with
our games of politeness, of seeing and not-seeing? Already the Japanese had claimed the Chen
family, had taken them in and swallowed them whole, and what was left of China with them was
only fragments, superficial things like the guzheng in the living room and Chen Sanmin’s ancient half-
illegible calligraphy, signifiers of harmless good-boy China like the dancers they put on stage who
wore the skins of the Koreans and Manchu and Mongols, indicators of culture already strangled at
the root.
He went to the great bookcase, wood painted deep ocean blue and put together by his father
decades before, and picked out a volume of Tang-era poetry and thumbed through it, distracted,
listening to the whole of the house, to the creak of the floorboards as his mother moved, trying to
find – what? A suggestion of comfort. He wished that Hana had taken him up on his offer of lodging,
if only because it would distract from the endless competition between the three of them, Jintian
and Juhua and their tired, wonderful, unstoppable mother, Mrs. Chen, who still persisted in living
normally even in this upside-down country where decades ago they had bombed Chinese villages
and forced the Chinese out into tents and then bombed the tents just to make sure.
A memory that came to him, a year or so ago: Hana had been there at that charity or triad event
at the Phoenix Pavilion restaurant, down in Yugongguan, and she had looked so awkward in her
store-bought too-stiff cheongsam with her hair pinned back by chopsticks, beautiful but
uncomfortable, and she had introduced herself with a Japanese name and he, bored by everyone
else and doing the rounds, had been interested, because he had noticed at once.
He remembered that she had told him she didn’t know why she was there, all she had done was
donate a little bit now and then, she was Japanese, not even Chinese – and he had stupidly asked
her where her money had come from and she had seemed to harden, glaring at him as if to say it’s
none of your fucking business, and later she’d told him over beers that she got it from a Japanese
officer, some idiot who was in love with her, and that she was actually Chinese, by the way. It had
been then that he had fallen in love with her as well, when she had shot him that look of prideful
contempt, that strength which he supposed – wasn’t it true for all men, even faggots – had
reminded him so much of his own mother.
 By mid-morning Jintian felt comfortable enough with going downstairs, and he greeted her in the
courtyard while she was looking over the blooming chrysanthemum there, by the pond in the
western corner. “Ah, good morning.” she said in Mandarin. She was bent over peering into the soil,
rubber gloves over the sleeves of her dress. “Are you well, son? You’re up too late.”
“I was resting.” he said. “Mother, are you sure you’re alright doing this? You can ask me to clean
up the flowerbeds, if you need.”
“No, no. I wouldn’t trust an artist to do it.” She chuckled. “But thank you. I made breakfast for
you. It’s in the dining room. Don’t let it get cold.”
“Thank you.” he said. Juhua was already out on one of his dismal business errands and so Jintian
ate the steamed noodles and beef she had made for him alone at the long glass table under the
taijitu mural on the far wall, a garish but comforting thing which had been brought over from
Shandong by the Chen family over a hundred years before, installed here for good luck at meal time,
after Chen Shanren the great-great-grandfather had nearly choked on a chicken bone during a Mid-
Autumn banquet but been saved by the venerable Uncle Shu.
This would have been a good time to have had Hana here, he thought, which was a thing he
thought too much. His mother liked her, and he liked her, and it would have served as a fine cover
for the both of them if they were married and pretending to be a couple as he’d proposed so many
times. But he knew that she was far too independent to accept his help.
He knew it - Hana was a refugee from a world of nightmares, the uncontrollable chaos of the
plains, and so had become at some point nervous of people she couldn’t control, and she had about
as much power over him as any other woman did, and it was his guess that she couldn’t stand being
too close to him for that reason. That was also why he hated her, or at least sometimes he hated her,
in the same kind of moods when he hated himself: because he knew that he was her exact opposite
and that this put the kind of person he was in stark relief, which was terrible because he knew that
kind of person was a terrible thing to be. He was warmed a little by knowing she would be coming
over today. Thinking of this, and of Shinichi and his taste, Jintian ate breakfast.
He had written something last week, a stupid little thing – inspired by her visit and by her talk of
love. To him love was already something cold and alien, and he had been touched by her question
and had set upon attempting to revisit it. The usual routine: a day without indulging himself, without
men or wine, sat in the study with his notebook upon the grand mahogany desk, looking out of the
iron-barred window down at the street where nothing was happening and listening to his mother’s
footsteps on the floorboards below.
It had sort of been a story about a patriotic young man in high school, whose confused thoughts
over violence and sex had led to perversion and disillusionment, an innocent with a dirty soul who
had been in love with his senior, but largely it had turned out almost like an essay, an extended
rumination on violence and sex shot through with self-loathing and too many graphic, violent
fantasies of the most indulgent kind. In the end it hadn’t been much like that innocent question she
had asked him at all and Jintian had retired the piece, settling down with some sake and pondering
his failure.
This had become the pattern of his artistic life since The Golden Dragonfly. In the worst days of
the post-Insurgency, Survey Unit-led extremism, with Adachihara pushing around the prime minister
in Hsinking, when the anti-pollution ordinances had first been intensified, there had been voices
calling for the eviction of the Chen family, and he had written that novel and he had saved them, and
all of his poetry and prose had since become stranded in a desert of introspective, self-glorifying
nonsense, in which all of his struggles were epic clashes, in which his simple twisted soul and its
perverse needs became a battlefield, a mortal clash deciding the fate of the nation of Chen Jintian.
The shell that resembled him still wrote and published for the good of the Empire, but the real
him that had been so splendidly naked in that earlier work was occupied only with dreams of
annihilation that went nowhere and created nothing. He had worn himself out in his grand gesture
of filial piety and his mind was unable to detach itself from chasing its own phantom. It was a
writer’s block in which words, shorn of all beauty, still flowed from his pen, and he meant none of
them. All of his sincerity now was in the nonsense he wrote for the Concordia Association.
Contrary to what many he knew assumed about him, he hadn’t written The Golden Dragonfly
cynically, and had been sincere – to create art, even art intended commercially, even art aimed at
the guilty consciences of the Japanese settlers as a work of abject flattery, an artist had to mean
what they said. His story of the half-Japanese Popov family and their bar, using it as an example of
the success of multicultural and multi-ethnic Manchukuo, had been written from the heart.
It had been an authentic generational novel of romance, drama, and war in which Manchukuo’s
Russians were well-respected ethnic colour and not labourers the Japanese spat upon, where the
Mukden Incident was a grand liberation and the Second Insurgency the disciplining of a few deluded
villains, the Survey Unit a noble warrior class who had saved the nation from communist anarchy – it
had come from a place of true belief in the rotten ideals of the state that had hounded his father to
an early grave.
Jintian had written it because he had needed to, and he had meant every word of it even though
he had known otherwise, and in the process his heart had jumbled itself up and now he could only
write with sincerity, his wings unfurled, on subjects that held no interest to him, and what he was
interested in came out only as turgid, insincere masturbation, unworthy of publication even without
the verdicts of the censors.
His soul was upside down. It was only with her, with that woman whose body was incompatible
with his dreams, whose rough and jagged sense of her own independence jarred so much with the
man that he had become, that he could feel the potential of something greater. When he was alone,
settled down, it was also true that that potential deserted him as a shadow disappearing at the
luminescence of a lantern. ‘Hana Takamori’ was not her name – she had made the real her disappear,
subsumed beneath layers of half-truth. He knew that he, as the sole benefactor of the Chen family,
would never be able to disappear like that – his shadow-form was painted grandly upon the wall by
the flame of his family, which warmed and yet burned the little boy sat before it alone in the ruins.
Thinking these melancholy things, thinking with distaste about that last piece of writing, he went
to his room and got back to his other work, a letter to be composed to the rest of the council
regarding the drug problem in Yugongguan, which – if the rumours were true – had resulted in yet
another grotesque criminal incident, a young Japanese girl having been shot up with heroin and then
apparently raped. As the only Chinese currently on the council, at least until after independence (but
who knew?), as the head of the only one of the old Chinese families which had survived the anti-
pollution segregation campaigns, the only Chinese cultural figure left that the Japanese would listen
to, he was writing to calm things down.
What he really wanted to say was that he’d bet his entire career on that heroin having come from
a navy unit, as half the sailors or garrison troops he hooked up with were high as kites when they
met with him, and that the old-school triads were now not interested in dirtying their patriotic
credentials by dealing with the Japs in that way. Most likely the drugs had come from some
ambitious Chinese working hand-in-glove with the Japanese military, and most likely it had been a
Japanese soldier who’d fucked that poor girl, because everyone who knew anything about
Yugongguan, unlike the sheltered little snowflakes from the Concordia Association, knew that the
military men were the worst to cross on a bad day down there. He didn’t write that, because his
mother was still downstairs gardening. He was still working on what exactly he should have been
writing when she called upstairs. “Son! Hana is here again!”
He immediately moved from his desk. “I’ll be down in a minute. Please let her in for tea.”
His mother didn’t immediately reply. “Well, she’s here with a man this time.” she said. Jintian
frowned. He changed himself into casual western clothes, a t-shirt and jeans for today, and went
downstairs to greet them at the door, which was where they would be, since his mother never
allowed strangers – especially not Japanese strangers – into the house.
Hana was there at the door, in her floral shirt and denim shorts, with a faint stale alcohol smell to
her and a look of hunted exhaustion in her eyes, leant against the wall with her hands in her pockets
and her hair tied loosely back in a ponytail, and with her was a man just as his mother had said. The
newcomer stood military-stiff with his walking stick, in an ill-fitting, untidy grey suit, his hair short
and an old-fashioned moustache decorating his face, which was aged and sad, with a bruise on one
cheek and a splint over his nose, watching Jintian with an affected looseness that was transparent in
its artificiality, his eyes nothing but coldness, the strange and empty stare of the predator easing its
way towards prey.
Hana bowed. “Older brother.” she said in Mandarin, which meant that this guest also understood
Mandarin, which meant caution. “Sorry, but this is my friend Mr. Munekata. He heard I was coming
to see you today, and he’s heard of your reputation too. He wanted to say hello.”
Jintian studied him. He understood at once the situation, and understood that when Hana had
been asking about love she had been asking about this, and that her Japanese officer she had
bragged about at their first meeting was this man before him. ‘Mr. Munekata’ was too ambiguous a
form of address, he thought, for a person who was accompanying her to someone else’s house. It
was a term that spoke of a wish to conceal. He knew at once that this Munekata was the person that
she existed for – the name Hana Takamori was the persona that was here for him, whoever he was.
Munekata bowed. “Mr. Chen.” he said mildly. “It’s a pleasure. I have read several of your novels
before, and greatly enjoyed them. I’m a regular at the Golden Dragonfly, actually. I knew you lived
here in Ryujin – I’ve been a resident here for some time – but I never really had a chance to meet
you.” Hana looked vaguely uncomfortable. Not too much, for she had a control over her expression
that was as Japanese as her name, but Jintian knew her. He knew he could read her well enough.
Munekata looked around the house. “This is a splendid old house. Do you own the place?”
“My mother owns it.” Jintian said.
“Oh, wonderful. Historic estates like this should stay in the family.” Jintian glanced at Hana, trying
to get her to tell him with her eyes what was going on, but she looked away, apparently finding the
garden fascinating. Beneath his jeans he was too hot suddenly. “Only the two of you here?”
Munekata asked. Jintian felt a bead of sweat on his cheek as it dribbled down his face. He caught an
intensity to Munekata’s expression briefly, a steel that hadn’t been there before, only momentarily –
had he been meant to see it? He cleared his throat. “With my brother.” he said.
“Ah, good.” Munekata said. “An old woman would need more help than only a busy young writer
like yourself. I didn’t know you had a brother, forgive me.” Munekata tapped his stick on the stone.
“Is he an artist, too?”
Jintian waited a second, just a second, before answering. “A businessman.” he said.
“Oh.” Munekata said. “In the fish trade, no doubt.” The sentence was perfectly innocent and yet
Jintian had met enough policemen and officials to know what was going on. He had no idea why it
was going on and yet it was. He sighed, resigning himself to the game. “He works in haulage.” he said.
“A respectable enough job. It brings in money.”
“Nothing wrong with that.” Munekata bowed his head. “I didn’t mean to imply any disrespect.
Anyway. I have taken up enough of your time. Please, Miss Takamori, enjoy your day. I’ll be off.”
“It was a pleasure to meet you.” Jintian said, full of disgust.
Munekata bowed. “Likewise.” he said, with clear contempt. “Enjoy yourselves, young people!”
And he turned and started down the path. Hana and Jintian remained there, frozen in unhappiness,
until Munekata had gone to the gate and clicked it open and disappeared through it, out into the
street where his walking stick could still for a few seconds be heard clacking against the pavement.
“Sorry.” Hana said in Mandarin. “He’s a little overprotective.”
“An ex-policeman?” Jintian asked.
“Yes.” She scowled. “Don’t give me that look. Mr. Munekata is alright. He doesn’t…he’s not like
some others.” He was paused there on the cusp of something. What? Blaming her? He wasn’t sure if
Hana had seen it or not: how Munekata had been asking questions for a purpose, how his innocence
had been feigned, how it had all been leading to something. Jintian’s sense of danger was wriggling
in the back of his skull frantically to itself. He was aware of a situation unfolding around him where
before there had not been one. But all that she had done was bring him here, and by doing so all
that she had really done was work with the Japanese, and there was nothing that he could say to her
about that which wouldn’t be hypocrisy. “Well.” he said, affecting a smile at first and then actually
smiling, seeing her relief at his relieving her. “Let’s go inside and have some tea.”
“Yeah.” she said. “That sounds nice.”
“You could play me some more songs.” he said, which was not what he wanted to say. What he
wanted to say to her was: that man is dangerous, even though you think he isn’t. You should get
away from him now. And yet Chen Jintian, expert survivor and honorary Japanese and twisted
pervert shadow-man, knew he lacked the courage to speak the truth. His mother had already put
out two cups of tea for them.
 12
After meeting with Chen Jintian, who he could tell had seen through him, he left Hana under the
man’s care and ate lunch at home and then, as the morning turned to afternoon, he went to work. It
was a beautiful day, the sun high and proud and the streets lit up in all of their colonial splendour,
borrowed Japanese trappings slapped onto the Chinese house, stood to attention under the sky
above, so that it resembled a little - if you squinted – an echo of the grand project pitched in those
anonymous Tokyo offices back in the twenties.
Munekata was thinking about Chen Jintian – thinking about his character. The questions he had
asked were all things that Hana had told him. His purpose in asking had been the most basic possible:
he had needed to find out if Jintian, brother of haulage owner Chen Juhua, who worked in Divine
Wind and was surrounded by shady stories and people, was an enemy or an ally. Munekata’s
assessment was that he was an enemy.
He knew the story of the Chen clan. They were long-time residents of Ryujin going back to when
it had been called Longshen, one of the many Chinese families set to be evicted after the Insurgency,
saved by the golden child Jintian, propaganda hack for the Concordia Association. His novel about
The Golden Dragonfly had been a caricature of the real bar’s history, sanitized for imperial purposes,
and Munekata had been unable to finish it and it had also been a wild success. With sales inflated by
Concordia members obliged to buy copies it had even knocked That Blazing-Red Scar! Story of a
Surveyman At War! off of the all-time bestsellers’ list for a while. The Japanese liked him, but to the
Chinese Chen Jintian was nothing but a traitor, the worst kind of filth. And Hana, the Ersatz Japanisch,
was close to him. Not in that way: Munekata could already tell that Jintian didn’t have that kind of
relationship with women, although whether this was due to homosexuality or some other defect he
wasn’t sure. But it was easy to tell from his backstory – and this had been confirmed by his cautious
answers about his brother – that Jintian’s primary concern was neither men or women but family.
Someone who had sold out his precious artistry in order to secure his family home would even now
protect that family above all else, no matter what. Munekata knew this.
Chen Jintian was an enemy – Hana Takamori had for now moved into the ‘ally’ column. She was
on his side and she was now involved in the case and there was no way to pull her from it. She would
be safe as long as he could keep her away from the gangs, and if Chen Jintian was incapable of loving
her in the normal way then he plainly loved her all the same, and Munekata was comfortable leaving
her there – also because it would keep Jintian busy while Munekata did what he was currently doing,
which was all he’d ever been taught to do, which was poking a wasp’s nest with a short stick.
Hana had told him that Chen Juhua’s business was Chen Family Haulage, and so he was walking
down to the harbour to Chen Family Haulage to go ask some irritating questions. Gulls squawked
and Chinese voices called to one another. He ambled along, resting on his stick between steps,
aware of himself and of the peace settling in his heart, the lazy serenity of a leaf caught in an
autumn breeze descending to the grass.
He had thought about Karashima’s warning from yesterday, in the quiet hungover hours before
Hana had come to take him to the Chen house. He had decided to ignore it, because it was so that
there was nobody else who could help Sachiko Suzuki but him.
A scooter passed him by frantically beeping and he pressed himself deeper into the hard shoulder.
Trucks and cars trundled by in the other direction. Harbour Road stretched out ahead and beyond
that was the ocean, the stark drop of the cliff tugging at him with insistent fingers of sharp-edged
wind, the navy boats out on patrol atop glistening blue. He had already gone past the fish market
and its stench, and the fishing boats crammed into the water below – here was where the clifftop
evened out into the countryside, a stretch of fields forming out of the edge of Ryujin on his left, and
ahead the far-away shape of the Japanese naval base where once in a game of go he’d almost lost
his walking stick, before drunkenly coming back to the town to meet with Mieko on another routine
tragic rendezvous.
He shook away the phantoms. Between here and there was another building, an old shell of post-
Insurgency prefab utilitarianism, its metal rusted brown and its plastic faded yellow, a motley
structure which he’d never paid much attention to before – and it turned out, looking at the address
Hana had given him, that this was Chen Family Haulage. The sign said so.
There were four run-down Mitsubishi vehicles outside. They were fifties-vintage, probably
capable of little more than short drives to the town, which was now only a shape at Munekata’s back,
all of its mess and contradiction compacted into a heap of buildings upon a hill, the densely-packed
Chinese slums and the maze-like corridors of Tenmei all just suggestions of themselves and nothing
but that. From this angle it was possible to see past the town and towards the train station where he
had years ago disembarked from one of the new diesel services from Shinkyo, where he had first
met Mieko, who had heard he was an old comrade of her husband’s, who had been standing upon
the station platform beneath a wooden Meiji-style rooftop in her swallow-patterned kimono with a
parasol over her shoulder, smiling demurely at the man who would ruin her life. Here in the present
the station was shabby, aged, one of those same diesel locomotives now pulling out of the station
and huffing its way uneasily down the line and out into the plains.
Ahead of him and away from this the naval base jutted out in its concrete glory, sewn into an
outcropping of rock down the road, and beyond that was the lighthouse, long slender thing atop the
highest point on the coastline, which from Ryujin itself was barely visible but at night, from the base,
was a beacon that never turned off. Here the beach was empty and the caves were below out of
sight. The waves came in gently, kissing sand and then letting go. Ragged stone hung over the water,
worn cliff faces ancient and proud, sagging into the ocean and yet still there, battling on, their pale
brownish colour blasted by wind into a glorious kind of misshape. The sun bore down on Munekata.
With his shirt damp he walked up to the chainlink fence around Chen Family Haulage and
approached the gate.
There was no one there on duty and so he slipped in, past a gap in the metal, and wandered
along the outer yard towards the building, which stood with its vinyl walls uneven and faintly stained
by weathering and by time, two floors of offices with a flat rooftop and bars upon all the windows.
The rusted-over sign loomed large here, suspended above the second floor by a series of chains, the
characters spelling out its name half-eaten by crimson rot. In the yard were weeds and debris and
beer cans and several lawn chairs all spread out and an icon to the Earth God on its side in the dirt.
One of the walls was pockmarked with bullet holes. Munekata, taking all this in, aware of his Nambu
and his stick and the splint on his nose and how much it hurt his chest sometimes when he breathed
too deeply, marched up to the filth-stained glass double doors of the entrance and, seeing no
impediment, pulled one open and went in.
The corridor beyond was dirty carpeting and cork bulletin boards on the walls, plastic white faded
and left with a vague yellowish tint, the tiles dirty and the air-conditioner on the wall rattling awfully
to itself, half-working. Amidst all this was a reception desk where a woman was sat leant forward
watching something on the television on her desk, her face made-up and her shirt half-open. She
hadn’t noticed him yet. He came right up to her.
He waited. She turned her head from the television and regarded him with disdain. The audio
came out tinny but he recognised Hiroyuki Tanaka’s deep voice and that meant it was Romance of
the Plains, the only thing in Manchukuo that Japanese and Chinese sometimes agreed upon, which
was that Tanaka’s handsome Kwantung Army soldier battling Korean rebels in the thirties was the
best thing on TV Manchuria. He had never watched it himself. “Good afternoon, ma’am.” he said to
her in Chinese. He bowed.
She, unimpressed, watched the TV screen, where Tanaka was firing at a mob of Russian-faced
communists who had captured a beautiful Manchu woman in a qipao. He was shouting her name.
Hana, Munekata heard, although it hadn’t been that at all. “Good afternoon.” he tried again. “This is
Chen Family Haulage, isn’t it?”
Now the woman tore her eyes away from the television once more, and this time they roamed
the room for a moment before settling reluctantly upon him. “It is.” she said.
“Ah.” he said. “May I ask, is Mr. Chen here today?”
“He isn’t.”
 “Ah. I see.” he said. “Well, are there any other members of the management around? My name is
Munekata. I work for a local company that wishes to place an order with your firm.” He chuckled.
“Well, I’m not very good with telephones, and so on. So I thought it would be prudent to walk here
myself.”
“Mr. Munekata?” She studied him with narrowed eyes. Munekata stood, affecting a warm,
bashful smile. She sighed, and with one hand went to the intercom at her side, the fake jade bracelet
on her skinny wrist wobbling. “Mr. Jiang.” she said. “There’s a customer here to see you.”
Munekata looked around, trying to appear harmless. He tapped his stick on the flooring and
drummed his fingers against its head. “Who?” Mr. Jiang said finally.
“Mr. Munekata, he says.” the receptionist said. His name was warped by the Mandarin
pronunciation, out of place with the words before and after it. Another pause followed. Munekata
smiled at the receptionist and she didn’t smile back. “I don’t know him.” Jiang said in rough erhua.
“But send him in anyway.” With a click he was gone.
Munekata was then sent in, the receptionist gesturing for him to proceed past her and into the
next room, a wide-open recreation room with a pool table, vending machine and a row of arcade
machines, the plastic walls even more battered and a metal industrial staircase before him leading
to a series of walkways above. Crates and boxes lined the perimeter. A fridge with a glass door sat
adjacent and through the glass he saw shelf upon shelf of cold Tsingtao beer. Above his head was a
metal sign that said in stencilled Chinese characters WORKPLACE SAFETY IS NUMBER ONE. The air
tasted stale and the air-conditioner seemed to be broken, and through the light streaming in
through the broken windows he could see that much of the room was smeared in dust.
A front, he thought. He could see the room he was stood in, its purposeless affection of the
empty mannerisms of business. Just how all the gangs liked it, a calculated balance between
concealment and openness. No one who came in here was meant to find it a convincing imitation of
a functioning shipping firm – but it was also vital that this was what it still pretended to be.
A clang of boots on metal came from above, and he looked up to see a figure emerging onto the
walkway, a tall, slim man in a black leather jacket and beneath that a vest and jeans, all torn up, with
his hair a strict buzzcut. His cheeks were sunken and his skin dark, and when he smiled Munekata
saw he had a golden fang tooth on the right-hand side which caught the light and shone set against
the excessive white of the rest of his mouth. He wore a gold chain around his neck and there were
hints of a deep network of black tattoos around his collar and sleeves. “Mr. Munekata!” he said, in a
voice. “Welcome!”
Munekata bowed to him, which was a strange thing to do as the other man was high above him,
and nevertheless as a Japanese he did it anyway and felt foolish and realized at once that this had
been the intent. Already Jiang was bounding down the stairs, his heeled boots echoing as they hit
the metal of each step on the way. He moved quickly, gleefully, with the aggression Munekata had
seen on men who’d been at the front too long, those who were made in such a way where their
nerves went the other direction during battle, embracing the storm instead of recoiling at it. Jiang
grinned, arriving before Munekata, and held out a hand. Munekata stood up and shook with him. His
grip was firm, too firm. “Mr. Jiang.” Munekata said. “I came here to see Mr. Chen.”
“Mr. Chen is away on business right now.” Jiang said, in a slow, careful drawl. He strode past
Munekata to the fridge and opened it and took out a can of Tsingtao. “Would you like a drink?”
“Excuse me, but it’s still early.” Munekata said. The can was tossed at his face. He caught it with
his free hand just about. Jiang laughed, a hyena’s cackle. “I only do business with those who drink
with me.” he said. “Come on.” He took out his own can, opening it with a hiss. He held it up.
“Cheers!”
“Cheers.” Munekata said. He sipped at it, ice-cold, thin beer slithering down his throat. Jiang
sauntered over, resting his palm on the pool table and leaning back, again that grin on his face. “How
can Chen Family Haulage help you, Mr. Munekata?”
“Ah, well.” Munekata said. "I wanted to talk to Mr. Chen, actually.”
“I told you,” Jiang said affably, “he’s away right now.”
 “May I ask when will he be back?”
“Ask, sure. He’s gone to Mukden for work. We’re busy here. But anyway, he wouldn’t want to
talk to you.” Jiang’s fingers tapped the side of the beer. “We don’t talk to police.”
Munekata kept his face still. “Excuse me?” he asked. Jiang drank up lazily with the can raised high,
gulping beer as if Munekata wasn’t there, and then lowering it he picked up one of the balls on the
pool table, the red one, and looked at it for a moment. He tossed it into the air and caught it and
turned it around in his hand. “Isn’t this the standard operating procedure?” he asked, studying the
ball, peering into its bright crimson. “Gain access in some bullshit way, talk genially for a few minutes,
then when we’re nice and close you switch to the Armee Japanisch and scare me? Remind me of my
place in the racial hierarchy and list all the things you could arrest me for and so on. Is that it?”
Munekata sipped at the beer. “My apologies.” he said. “I can tell you’ve dealt with these kinds of
inquiries before.”
“You could say that.” Jiang said. He glanced over. “I’m not a delinquent scared of Kempeitai
ghosts and bad dreams of surveymen, at least.” He tossed the ball up and down again, catching it
this time between finger and thumb, suspending it over the table. He then placed it gently down
upon the green. He looked at Munekata long and hard and his eyes were those of a staring shark.
“Name’s Jiang Guangming.” he said. “Henry Jiang, on my business cards. Mr. Chen and I started
this affair a few years ago, and we’ve gotten shit from cops over it every week since. We made the
mistake of not getting a Japanese to put his name on the legal stuff. Even if they say anti-pollution is
dead and buried, it isn’t really.” He jerked his wrist and the red ball rolled off, heading in a straight
line from where he’d placed it and directly into one of the pockets, where it descended with a thud
and a clunk. The grin that followed didn’t quite go to his eyes. “You’ll understand why we tend to
prefer it if you guys keep to your own.” he said.
“Of course, of course.” Munekata said. “How old are you, anyway, son?”
Jiang didn’t blink. “Twenty-seven just last month.” he said. “A proud graduate of Chinese High
School No. 3. My parents were railroad workers, and although my dad died of injuries sustained at
work in the service of the emperor, I’ve never expressed any subversive ideas or acted in any way to
disturb the harmony of the imperial state. I was in the army for two years, actually, before I quit to
get into business. My document at Kempeitai headquarters says ‘reliable’ on it, probably. You
should’ve checked that before coming here.” He walked back around the table, picking up the white
ball now, scooping it up and tossing it about. “There’s not a thing you can scare a guy like me with,
uncle, so you don’t need to go about acting like a local bigshot. It tends to get nosy government
types hurt these days.” He gestured with the beer can to Munekata’s face. “Looks like you already
learned that lesson though.”
Munekata touched the splint where it rested on the bridge of his nose. He was aware of the
Nambu beneath his jacket. “You’re smart.” he said. “I don’t want to lie to you.” He used Mandarin
now. “I want to ask about Mr. Chen.”
Jiang held the white ball. Looking away from Munekata, at some far-off point on the adjacent
wall, he lifted the white ball up, holding it over his right eye. “Ask, sure.”
“How would you describe his character?”
“His character?” Jiang lowered the ball. He rolled it onto the green and now lazily turned his head
back to Munekata. “He thinks his dick is five inches bigger than it is. Likes girls, paying for them I
mean. Likes the control it gives him. Can’t do business for shit. You know the species. Enforcers.
Dogs of war. Survey Unit types.”
“You’re his business partner?” Munekata asked.
Jiang gave a short nod. “So I know all these things. Better than anyone. But for a dog he has a
good nose. If you’re after him for something obvious you’re looking for the wrong man. He keeps his
head down when he’s told to. As you can probably tell, because he isn’t here today.”
“What do you mean?” Munekata asked.
“I mean,” Jiang said, “that we know there’s been a kempei sniffing around poor little Younger
Brother Li. Li didn’t say why, but I mean, that doesn’t really matter.” Jiang now went back to his beer
for a moment, leaving Munekata there alone. He drank deep and lowered the can and let out a belch.
“If you’re that kempei,” he said, “you’re aware that you might not get to leave these premises
without at least another bruise on you.”
Nothing about his posture or expression had changed. But Munekata sensed the shift in the
conversation, as he had when Li had started speaking Mandarin with him again just before the
beating at the nightclub. Hana wasn’t waiting outside to save him now. The gun remained useless in
its holster. He leant on his stick, saying nothing for a few seconds, drinking from his beer in the same
easy way as Jiang had as if that proved something. “Forgive me.” he said in Japanese. “If the
Kempeitai desires to speak with Chen Juhua it will.”
“Oh, quit the act, uncle.” Jiang said in Mandarin. He moved again, to the opposite side of the
table. He threw his head back and drank and when he was finished he lifted the can up and crushed
it and tossed it aside. “Trust me. For what it’s worth, Brother Chen is my comrade. I object to you
getting yourself involved here.” He leant over the pool table, one hand going close to the cue,
resting as it was parallel with the table’s wall. “If you don’t leave it alone then people could get hurt.
Alright?”
“If I may,” Munekata said in persistent Japanese, “it is a salient fact that assaulting a member of
the Kempeitai is a severe attack on the harmony and dignity of the imperial state.”
Jiang scoffed. “So how come nothing happened when Brother Li beat your ass up, huh?” He
grabbed onto the pool cue. “Chinese, we have solidarity. Brotherhood. You Japanese can’t ever work
together. You’re always fighting each other over who gets to shit on who. Always held back. First you
turned on the boffins in the forties and then you turned on the imperial army and then you turned
on the Survey Unit, and now there’s nothing left but a bunch of useless settlers playing at
government. If you were here on real Kempeitai business, old-fashioned Kempeitai business, then
Brother Chen and Brother Li and I would all be in prison with iron spikes up our asses. We’d have
boiling water down our throats. We’d have been beaten with metal bars and locked in little rooms
with the lights left on all day. All that shit. And Brother Li wouldn’t have been able to fuck your face
up so badly.” After this he went to the fridge and took out another beer and opened it and drank.
Munekata, leaning back just in case, one hand closer to his Nambu than before, rested on his stick
and smiled. He and Jiang remained as they were, neither moving beyond that. The light came in
through the broken windows and the dust swirled about in the air between them. “Well, I suppose
that’s true.” he said eventually. “Tell me. Where were you last Friday night, Mr. Jiang?”
Jiang was calm otherwise. But Munekata observed that his hand tightened as it gripped the pool
cue. “What?”
Munekata remained still. His Nambu was three seconds away. Two seconds to thumb the trigger
and fire. “Just asking.” he said.
“What the fuck did you just say?” Jiang spat. “I was here last Friday. With Brother Chen. None of
your business, anyway, you fucking cop.”
“Here?”
“Doing my fucking job. With Brother Chen. Ask him. Ask the fucking receptionist. Ask-” Jiang
stopped, controlling himself through visible effort. His hand left the pool cue and he swung himself
away from the table. He was closer to Munekata now, almost facing him. Munekata held his tongue
and didn’t smile or mouth off or show any further disrespect or aggression. He only stood. After a
second the last of Jiang’s anger had faded and he edged back to the table. His face was tense.
Munekata bowed. “I’ll leave you now, Mr. Jiang.” he said in Japanese. “As I said, please inform Mr.
Chen of my visit. I would appreciate your co-operation in securing me a meeting with him.”
“Get outta here, kempei.” Jiang said. “You’ll regret this, you know that? Everything costs
something. I’m a self-made man, so I know it. Maybe a machine like you doesn’t. Everything costs
something.”
“Very well.” Munekata said. He turned and walked out, the back of his neck tingling as Jiang
Guangming left his sight, soldier’s instincts screaming, telling him that the enemy was there and
might strike at any second – Li had only hit him, but he was sure that Jiang would be capable of
worse. A thug protecting his master, was Munekata’s impression, and a vicious thug at that. He left
the room successfully, feeling Jiang’s stare upon him, and bowed to the receptionist and thanked her
and left Chen Family Haulage behind, walking back to the town and thinking all the while.
He had four possibilities: the first was Brother Li, Li Huangqi, the youth who had been with
Sachiko and who said he had apparently not done anything, a sentiment expressed by he and Xu Mei
with the utmost guiltiness. The second was this man, Henry Jiang, who careful as he seemed might
well have ended up at the scene, but who was a real criminal, who seemed to have very little to do
with that world of high schoolers and lowly street gangsters. The third was Chen Juhua, the phantom
who Hana already seemed to believe was responsible, who Li and Xu had said they needed to
protect.
And the fourth, always the most likely, was that it had been none of them at all.
Hana had been right about one thing. I need to speak to her, he reflected. Even if he got access to
Sachiko Suzuki – he would now have to do so, he decided, no matter what – it was very likely that
she either wouldn’t tell him or that she might not even remember the identity of the culprit. But he
would know so much more after asking her personally. He would know how she felt. It was what
Karashima had told him was called ‘psychological study’, the art of finding the truth in the
quickening of a pulse or the pause before an answer, a skill needed by the Kempeitai and the Survey
Unit both, as detectives and as soldiers. All of life was in the brain, Karashima had once said. Without
even a glimpse at Sachiko Suzuki’s brain Munekata was still riding in the dark, trying to cross the
water by feeling for the stones. But he did not want to disturb her – he did not want to subject
himself to disturbing her.
He reached Divine Wind and the crossing to Fortune Street and ate dinner there at a ramen place
out in the open, surrounded by Mandarin chatter, thoughts of the case on his mind. He started
home just as evening was crawling out from the overcast sky and descending upon the old wood of
the Chinese quarter, the lanterns and signs all coming on, warming him with their fluorescent
embrace. Passing through the throngs of Chinese on Fortune, moving slowly uphill for his leg’s sake,
he thought he might call Hana when he got home, to tell her of the day’s events, and maybe for
dinner, or drinks at The Golden Dragonfly, maybe even with Mr. Burton, who he hadn’t contacted
since the Red Club incident.
Another idea occurred to him as he walked. He remembered what Mizuki Tachibana had told him
over the phone, about Xu Mei. He remembered dismissing the idea that she was in any danger. But:
everything costs something. He could talk to Mr. Xu. He could put one of the captain’s men on their
house if it came to it. After he was more than halfway up Fortune he changed course, abruptly
heading west into the slum proper. He was aware of the time, the falling night and his vulnerability
as a crippled Japanese in a Chinese town, and yet the Nambu was with him and his leg didn’t yet
hurt that much.
He passed a junkie collapsed in the street, a Chinese man in robes snoring onto himself with the
needle still in his hand, and a dog-seller walking the other way with a pack of mongrels thin and
mean like dried old meat, slavering and spitting and pulling at their ropes. A small open-air market
sold fake jade and garish buddha statues, its ancient radio speakers blasting out in awful quality a
Sichuanese recording of a series of sutras, and metal store signs with Chinese characters glowing
upon them stuck out over the road proud and insistent. His walking stick tapped against the broken
pavement. Dusk was above, the Chinese rooftops dressed in burning crimson, the silhouettes of a
hundred dying houses illuminated against the hot sky.
A woman leant out of a second-floor window, her large body suspended over the rusted air-
conditioner as she grabbed a line of clothing strung out over the street and laboriously hauled it in.
Bicycles rolled by on the road, bells ringing as they jostled for position. Munekata paused at a street
corner, stood under a lantern, reaching into his pocket for a cigarette and stopping himself, for there
weren’t any there. A little boy watched him from a garden, stood in a crumpled adult’s t-shirt
amongst the weeds, staring with wide eyes. Munekata smiled at him and the boy shrank back into
the rotted doorway of the house and disappeared from view. Munekata then turned left and went
down Love the Empire Street, towards the Xu house.
The scene was the same as last time, the metal sign and the empty lot and the old transformer,
the derelict houses in their sad ranks like hungover soldiers struggling with morning reveille. In the
dark with the lanterns only working intermittently it looked mildly better than under the sun’s
forensic gaze. Munekata heard a cry from somewhere ahead. He listened, hand going to his holster
under his jacket. It came again: a short, desperate scream. It was the voice of a teenage girl.
His heart seemed to stop beating. The world seemed to have fallen silent. At once he was
hobbling, forcing himself forward, his stick tapping the pavement and his injured leg doing its best
but not enough, he bobbing back and forth ungainly as he attempted to run, staggering, his
contorted leg muscles already aching. Number 16 was ahead on his left and as he approached,
drawing his gun with his free hand, he heard a crash of breaking wood from inside. The door was
wide open, barely on its hinges. Munekata passed through the gate, his own laboured breathing
thundering in his ears. The dirty hallway of the Xu house lay ahead. He heard it now – the thwack of
something against flesh, the whimpering of the girl with each blow. “Stop!” he called in Mandarin,
out of breath. “Police! Stop, damn you!”
It stopped. He was at the hallway when a figure emerged, rushing at him, a big man with a
balaclava over his head, wearing a vest and jogging pants, who charged, knocking Munekata to one
side with a shove of his arm. In the other hand – Munekata saw, falling against the wall, his balance
lost – he held a long tire iron, coated in slick wet crimson. Munekata got up, tossing the stick aside.
Wobbling he took the Nambu in both hands. “Stop or I shoot!” he cried but the figure was in the
garden and heading to the gate. Munekata pressed his finger against the trigger for the first time in
so many years. A single stark dreadful bang filled the night.
The recoil of the gun was too much for his leg and he collapsed against the wall once more. His
chest was on fire and his leg was trapped in a choking metal cast and still, watching the broad-
shouldered man with the tire iron disappear, he then turned himself to the living room, where a
sound almost like breathing came to him from within. Munekata dragged his protesting leg with him
into the doorway. He saw her there in the middle of the room. The Nambu fell from his grip and
landed with a clatter on the floorboards.
Xu Mei lay in her own blood, her right arm the wrong way and one leg at a horrid angle and her
throat black with bruising and a wide gash opened in her skull where her hairline met her forehead.
Her school uniform had been torn at the front and the thick morass of bruising across her chest,
above and between her breasts, was a kaleidoscope of dark, cruel shades. Two fingers on her left
hand were bent ninety degrees. She was bent double, almost foetal, her hair matted with her own
gore, shaking and groaning, the malfunctioning wheeze of a dying machine.
Her chest still rose and fell. Her hand with its broken fingers moved, trying to grip something,
barely touching the bloodstained wood. Her eyes peered out from a face soaked with crimson and
then, wide and desperate shaking with agony, they found him. She gasped. It sounded as if she was
trying to speak. Her body writhed, attempting to turn to him, and each motion only coaxed from her
another noise of pain as another injury was disturbed. Falling onto her shoulder awkwardly, moving
like a fish taken from the water, she tried to face him. Her lips moved but nothing came from them
but that awful rasp.
He was with her. His hand touched her cheek, trying to remind her of life. “I’m sorry.” he said.
“Miss Xu. I’m so, so sorry.” She moved her broken claw to him. He touched the back of her palm.
“I’m sorry.” He tried to get up again, his leg hating him, and almost fell down next to her. With a
hand on the wall Munekata steadied himself. He saw the phone in the corner of the room and left
Mei there, moving to it as quickly as his leg would let him. The plastic was in his hand and yet not,
weightless, all seeming to float as if reality itself were fracturing. He dialled 110 and stood there.
“Hello?” he said. It was his voice speaking. “Hello, please. This is Lieutenant Keizo Munekata, ID
405426719. An assault on a – on a registered Chinese. Send a car and an ambulance, please. As
quickly as possible. Sixteen Love The Empire Street. Thank you.” He hung up. And he sat with her,
the broken girl, and she looked at him but moaned to herself and he listened, and he waited until
the police and the ambulance came. Everything costs something, Jiang had said. He knew not to
move bodies – he knew not to meddle in crime scenes. But he touched her and told her she would
be fine and he kept saying it right up until they arrived.
 THIRD: CESSATION

When you suffer, I suffer with you. To the end I am close to you.
- Shusaku Endoh

13
Xu Mei was in room fourteen on the first floor of Ryujin Public Hospital No. 2, in Yugongguan on
Harmony Street, and she was hooked up to a machine that was breathing for her and she was
layered in bandages and being fed from a drip, and lying there surrounded by both the machine
keeping her alive and the off-colour whiteness of the hospital room and the flower-patterned
bedsheets they had wrapped her in she seemed much smaller than she had been before, already
swallowed by the consequences of her wounds, which had been the consequences of other actions
taken before, ill thoughts entertained and the sins of previous lives, and that was the teaching of
karma, which Munekata had subscribed to his whole life, insofar as he had subscribed to anything
but violence.
He knew that this was larger, more cosmic, than simple moral cause and effect. The law of karma
did not say that Mei deserved her injuries because of herself, but that this had occurred on a scale so
vast and through a mechanism so abstract that it was impossible to comprehend rationally how it
had happened, how she had become involved in the life of he, Keizo Munekata, and ended up on a
ventilator barely holding on, her young life which had only just begun now already ruined by the
world she had been born into. Karma was not only what resulted from your actions but it was a kind
of fate, larger than one’s own soul. There was no arguing with fate.
He rejected this. He had always understood karma in this way, and yet he saw now that she was
here in the bed beaten half to death and he was sat by her in a plastic chair watching and waiting.
Karma was deserved fate; that was how he had reconciled himself to his actions on the plains, to
Ryujin, to Hana and Mieko, to the ache in his leg and to Manchukuo’s slow death. It jarred with him
too much to say that Mei deserved the terrible fate that had come to her.
All of the truths of the Buddha were meaningless in the face of this. The entirety of his belief
system had been caught on a snag and he dared not pull on it lest the whole thing unravel. She lay
there, her face a blossoming mess of differently-shaded bruises. He went for a cigarette and found
his pocket empty and swore under his breath. It was eight o’clock in the evening and her father still
wasn’t here.
Munekata had met the police and the ambulance at the entrance to the Xu house and had
explained that he was in the midst of a Kempeitai investigation and that the girl’s targeting had been
deliberate, and that he would stay with her and that he would have them shot if they argued,
although that had only been a bluff and they had all known it. He had ridden in the ambulance
beside her and met the doctor and waited all this time while the night staff tried to find Xu Guomeng
to tell him his daughter was in critical condition at the hospital. They had no other family, having
come to Ryujin over a decade ago, leaving grandparents and wife behind somewhere up north near
Harbin in order to find work.
He could imagine it: another case of a family split up by the Chinese urban registration system, a
hard choice and a tearful goodbye. Mei and her father had lived here in squalor for twelve years, the
document from headquarters told him, and now one of them had been attacked and the other had
disappeared. Or maybe, Munekata thought, he was just drunk somewhere. Perhaps he had
forgotten his daughter just as the Japanese had forgotten him.
But there was no hatred for Mei’s father in Munekata’s heart. All that Xu Guomeng had done was
be a negligent father, and that was nothing compared with what he himself had done, which was
bring a wholly different kind of horror down upon the girl’s head, trampling about, destroying
everything, not noticing he had been doing so until it was already too late. Karashima had been right,
he thought, and Mizuki Tachibana had warned him, too, and yet spurred on only by a sense of moral
outrage and a faint lust for the life he’d lived before, when he had been younger, Munekata had
allowed himself to ignore them both. And now he was here.
He kept on watching her and then catching himself and looking away, unable to bear it. Around
nine in the morning there was a phone call and the doctor showed him where the phone was and he
staggered there and answered it. “Hello?”
“Munekata!” Hana said. “I’ve been looking for you. I called at your house and that bitch of a
housekeeper chased me off with a broom, and I didn’t know where you were, so I went to the
Kempeitai office and got my way. Some idiot named Yagami said you were at Public No. 2. What the
hell are you doing at the hospital? Is everything okay?”
“Sorry, Miss Takamori.” he said, eventually.
“How did – how did it go?”
“Fine. It went fine. I must stay here, however. It’s nothing serious. Only, that girl I visited in
Yugongguan, Xu Mei. She got hurt. I’m looking after her.”
“Old man-”
“It’s fine. Please don’t worry. I’m unharmed.”
“Never mind that, you bastard. What happened?”
“It’s fine.” he said again. The hospital corridor was empty. He could smell disinfectant from every
surface, a familiar awful stench. It was probably even the same brand from the field hospitals they’d
used during the Insurgency. From Mei’s room a heart monitor beeped to itself. He heard Hana cough.
“Old man-” she began.
“Hana.” he said. “It’s fine. Please. I will speak to you tomorrow. I apologise.” He hung up then,
before she could answer, and he went back to his watch, sitting there and waiting. The hospital was
almost empty but for the lone nurse who kept coming to check on her and also on him. He prayed
for her – he simply repeated the name of Amitabha Buddha over and over. It was pleading,
mindlessly entreating a god he no longer understood. Arakawa had once said to him: all these old
idols are dead, Keizo. Emperors too. He had hoisted up his submachine gun and gestured with it to
the railroad outside, built by the Southern Manchurian Railway Company half a century ago, the
ancient iron foundation of the state.
This is the only thing we worship now, Arakawa had said. At some point he saw her lying there,
Mei in her bed, and he saw the tubes and the wires and they were centipedes, hordes of many-
limbed demons crawling out from under the bed, too long and thick for nature, their black carapaces
glittering in the light, their mandibles snapping together hungrily as they claimed her, monstrous
things swarming over her, wrapping her in their alien flesh, pressing into her skin with their
hundreds of arms. He was on his feet and he rushed over.
“Get away from her!” he spat. “Stop, or I’ll shoot!” Her face was just about visible beneath the
writhing swarm of centipedes and he saw it and it was the girl, stood over him with her rifle, and he
was suddenly heavy, the metal of the special attack suit pressing him down, forcing him into
immobility, while at last the centipedes broke through the bedsheet and through the bandages and
with a spray of blood and a wet cracking buried their mouths into Mei’s meat and tore her apart
from within.
He jerked up with a denial on his lips, to be greeted by sunlight and with it the face of Major
Karashima who was sat in front of him, a tired old man, balding and wrinkled, wearing a suit and
holding out for him a paper cup filled with coffee. “Munekata.” Karashima said. Munekata looked
about.
He saw Mei in her bed, by the beep of the heart monitor still alive, unmolested by demons. He
saw himself in his own crumpled suit and he was still sat in that same plastic chair. In the light of day
the hospital room was even grimmer than at night, its white even more stained and miserable, and
he noticed now that beyond the moth-eaten curtains there were iron bars upon the windows. A
poster marked with a crude blown-up black and white picture of the emperor proclaimed FIVE
RACES IN HARMONY from the corkboard on the far wall. Munekata blinked. He took the coffee from
Karashima and held it up to his mouth and drank, ignoring the burn. The clock on the wall said it was
ten past eleven. “Sir.” he said, his voice a husk. “Thank you.”
Karashima smiled. “It’s no problem.” He looked to the bed. “Doctor Kurosawa tells me that –
whatever else – she’ll live. A lot of bruising and breakage. He wants to keep her under for now. At
least her blood’s still mostly within her. They still couldn’t find her father, but she’s not on her way
to meet with Yama just yet.” He stopped and let out a frail sigh. “Are you okay?”
“Sir. I’m fine.”
“Come on.” Karashima looked to the door, which was closed. “You can relax. I’m asking you a
question, lieutenant. I looked at the statement you gave to the police last night. It seems apparent
that you are shaken.”
“…Somewhat.” Munekata sipped at his coffee.
Karashima’s hat was on his lap. He played with it, one liver-spotted hand dancing over the fabric.
“Let me be frank.” he said. “I think there’s little else we can do, regrettably, about this Sachiko
Suzuki situation.”
Munekata said nothing for a second. His face, he knew, would give little away. “Sir?”
“You said in your statement you believed a certain local businessman, Mr. Jiang Guangming, to
be responsible for ordering an attack on Miss Xu Mei’s life, owing to certain information she had
given you in the course of your current investigation. His group – well, he’s not with the San Lung
Tang– believed her to be working for you. They have fired a warning shot. That is what you believe.”
“That’s correct.”
Karashima drummed his fingers against the top of his hat. “There is nothing tying Jiang
Guangming to this attack. That’s how they’d do it. I believe you, you know. About Jiang. I also believe
that your investigation is taking you too far into sinister territory.” He frowned. “It’s as I feared the
other day, when we spoke at the bar. Things are getting dangerous. Already we have the problem of
the Suzuki girl, and now this Xu Mei as well. I sent you to resolve a horrid crime and now another
one has occurred. There’s already advocates from the fringes of the Concordia association –
Nakanishi types – getting riled up about the spate of attacks on Chinese by settlers in the eastern
plains, and White Tiger splinter groups getting angry right back at them. Every little bit of news of
fresh violence is explosive these days. Now Soga and his Shinkyo dogs haven’t picked up on the
scandal here yet, but they will, if things continue to escalate.” He paused and watched Munekata
and Munekata remembered when he had been a sergeant and Karashima a lieutenant and they had
been like father and son.
“Look.” Karashima said. “Whoever this is, if they’re behind the Suzuki assault and now this,
they’re very determined to cover up what they did. And if you keep pushing, who knows what could
happen next? Forgive me. I know it isn’t your fault. I know I sent you down this road. But I doubt that
the situation can be resolved to our benefit now. We need to maintain harmony, first and foremost.
This is not harmonious. I will tell Mr. Suzuki whatever I can think of, and we shall forget this matter.”
After finishing his speech Karashima looked down at his own hands, allowing Munekata a
moment alone. He drank the coffee which still burned his tongue. Mei’s heart monitor went on with
its beeping, its machine-copy of life, Ersatz-life, like the shell of the special attack suit or the golden
image of the Buddha, like the false thing upon the second-hand altar he had bought at the Hirose
store, a statue that only resembled superficially the pure light of Amitabha which now was anyway
hidden from his view. All he could see was the scarred girl down the sights of his gun. He took his
walking stick from where it had been resting against the wall. “Sir.” he said. “I beg for your
forgiveness. In Shinkyo you taught me that evil must be punished without mercy.”
Karashima’s face was stone. There was the old tightening of the corners of his mouth. “I did.”
Munekata moved from the plastic chair, struggling to his feet, all of his weight upon the stick for
a moment before the rest of him started itself up, the machine spluttering on once more, rumbling
into its own Ersatz-life. “Keizo.” Karashima was still sat down. He held onto his hat. Munekata didn’t
face him but faced Xu Mei, in her hospital bed, and looked at her and didn’t allow himself to look
away.
 “It would be perverse to attempt to discipline someone whose current situation is my own fault.”
Karashima said. “A grave dishonour. I would advise you to desist, regardless. I would advise you to
stop before anyone else gets hurt. If I call by the Kempeitai offices and I hear any more about some
new gang atrocity, and if this can be connected in any way to what has befallen Sachiko Suzuki - if
this escalates even further, then I unfortunately will be unable to protect you from the
consequences. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir.” Munekata said. Mei lay there, eyes closed and her mouth inverted in a faint grimace,
even in her half-alive twilight sleep tense and unhappy. He hobbled out of the hospital room and left,
saying goodbye to the doctor and leaving his phone number and asking the doctor to tell him the
moment she was awake, and he went outside and hailed a taxi to his home.
Once there he prayed to the Buddha and bowed to the emperor and then took a long shower,
washing himself clean, and he changed his clothes and bowed to the Buddha again and went to the
shed in the yard. The special attack suit was still there on the wall waiting. Was that his god? The
steel of the suit, the steel of the gun, of the thundering engines of the South Manchurian Railway
Corporation, the titans which roared across the railroads that crisscrossed Manchukuo like veins
across a body. Or was it, as he had felt in the hospital, that all gods were equally false, and that force
was the only real ruling principle of existence? That was the truth, perhaps, that Manchukuo wanted
him to believe, although the pitiful sight of Mei in her hospital bed had forced him to reject this just
as she had forced him to reject the facile Buddhism of his life so far. What did he believe?
Useless musings. He rolled the sleeves of his shirt up and he got to work. The first task was
unfastening the straps on the right leg and sliding the covering down. Then he worked on the screws
that held the armour in place, and pulled each out in turn, each clattering on the wood and rolling
off to the side. It was heavy in his hands and he placed it gently upon the floor. The frame was visible,
a steel skeleton for an alien creature, metal thickened with hydraulics and wires that chased
themselves around the loops and lines of the frame, designed to fit perfectly around the calf of one
Keizo Munekata.
He detached the fastenings and removed the frame, pulling it free with a tug, and he looked at it.
He unscrewed the hydraulics and the wiring so that all was left was plain steel. He took off his shoe
and his sock and rolled up the right leg of his trousers. Fixing it in place hurt. Tightening the bolts
hurt more. Munekata didn’t allow himself to cry out. He attached it to his leg and pulled down the
trouser sleeve over it and then tentatively got to his feet. The pain was sharp and instant, needles
pressing against his flesh. He stood up and he tried to walk. It worked mostly. He stumbled and he
fell but the metal kept him up and it bolstered his feeble flesh and that was enough. He grimaced at
how it felt and when he was done he returned to the house, fetching a tablet of painkillers from the
drawer in the kitchen. He drowned one with a glass of water and stood in the kitchen and stood
there a long time.
He called Hana next and updated her, reassuring her that he was fine, that he didn’t need any
help, and that nothing much had happened. She had come back from some business in Yugongguan
and now was at home, taking it easy. Good, he said. Neither of them mentioned meeting up. So be it,
he thought. He packed his things together and set off for the Suzuki household. He took a taxi, still
feeling his leg beneath him, the suit’s leg frame section uncomfortable and untrustworthy.
He had done this trick before on leave, after the girl but before it had become too painful even to
pretend – many of them had, using pieces of their suits to hold their broken bodies upright, unable
to admit it was so. Now it was much more difficult. But walking was enough. He strode to the taxi
when it arrived and clambered in and told the Chinese to take him up to Vanished Cloud. While the
taxi drove on he leant against the window looking out at the Japanese buildings and the Japanese
people, the hillside charm of old Tenmei and below, looming, Yugongguan with its arches and
phoenixes rising wounded out of a sea of decay and filth and grime and rotten metal choking the life
out of what was visible of what had once been China. Banners and posters with the imperial colours
speckled the town, limp and faded in the windless summer midday.
 The taxi stopped on Vanished Cloud. Munekata paid the fare and then twenty-five yuan more,
and got out and looked around at the street, at the ruin of the Suzuki house. Last time he had been
here he had slunk away, shamed by his conduct in front of Mrs. Suzuki, singed by the embers of her
embarrassment, dishonoured by the prospect of confronting reality – now the stakes were too high
to talk about honour. The day was warm. He hadn’t brought his Nambu and that didn’t matter. His
leg nagged him, betrayed by his indifference. He cleared his throat. “Come on, sergeant.” he said.
“Get to work.”
“Talking to yourself again?” Hana said. He turned and she was there, faintly smug. “For a
policeman you’re very easy to follow.” she said. Today she wore simple clothes, a grey jacket and
skirt as if she were an office worker, and it matched well with his shabby suit. “Another taxi?” he
asked.
Hana shook her head. “No, no. After our phone call I went out and waited on the corner of
Friendship Street to see if you were heading past, since you always take a taxi when you’re in a bad
mood.”
“Do I?” he asked.
“You do.” she said.
I didn’t see you.” he said.
“Were you looking for me?” she asked.
“I suppose not.” he said.
“So?” she said. “What happened last night?”
He glanced at the Suzuki house with its tattered wood, at the dirt all over the path to the front
door. “Xu Mei was attacked.” he said. She waited. He told her everything else – about Henry Jiang
and the missing Chen Juhua, about what Jiang had told him, about finding Mei all broken. Hana’s
expression was impassive. She screwed her face up in an expression, some kind of concern. “Are you
okay?” she asked.
Munekata did not know the answer to this question. It was too vast – it was nothing and
everything, the unbreakable skin of the ox-headed giant that guarded the gates of hell. He frowned
and realized she was looking at him and he tried not to frown. “If I may say so,” he said, “that
question is inappropriate. Miss Xu is the one who suffered. And now Miss Suzuki will still be
suffering.”
“So you’re going in?”
“Yes. By whatever means necessary. I can no longer afford to tiptoe around. That man Jiang has
declared a war.” He turned to move.
She scoffed. “What, by yourself? If you’re going to talk to this Japanese girl then allow me to help.
Maybe together we won’t make her cry.”
Munekata waited a very long time. She looked up at him imploring but not pleading. “Very well,
Miss Takamori.” he said. “But you must not get any more involved than this.” He started to walk to
the Suzuki gate, she now in step next to him. “Yes, sir.” she said. “By the way, where’s your stick?”
He didn’t answer but pressed the doorbell and waited with her. A propaganda van started by on the
next street, blaring out its message in staccato shrieks of meaningless words. Hana glanced up at
him and he pretended not to notice. The door to the house gave a nervous creak as it opened and
she emerged, Mrs. Suzuki, as tired as last time, her kimono crumpled and her hair ragged, the bags
under her eyes even darker. She saw him and at first stood there like a frightened animal spying a
predator. After a few seconds she came to the gate with careful, unsteady steps. He bowed to her.
“Mrs. Suzuki.” he said.
Mrs. Suzuki stared. “You’re that policeman.”
“Lieutenant Munekata. This is my – deputy, Sergeant Takamori.” Hana bowed. “We’d like to
speak with your daughter.”
At once Mrs. Suzuki went rigid, the fixed form of the doll taking over, porcelain creeping across
her flesh and swallowing all of her whole in one instant. “I already told you.” she said in clipped,
recited tones. “We don’t want to talk to anyone.”
 “Mrs. Suzuki.” he said, beginning his Armee Japanisch. Hana coughed next to him and he cut
himself off, their eyes meeting, hers asking him a question and he answering. “We’re from the Public
Health Squad.” she said.
“Public Health Squad?” Mrs. Suzuki asked.
Hana nodded. “We’re a new unit tasked with upholding citizens’ mental health and wellbeing
during this difficult time. I’m sorry, but our information indicates that your daughter is one of several
subjects of vicious rumours around the community that have appeared in the last week. We’re doing
an outreach program to assist young people struggling with emotional problems that might lead to
unpatriotic actions, homosexuality, race-mixing, and other symptoms of social degeneracy, and also
to combat rumours and gossip that harm social stability. Could we speak to her, please?”
Munekata tried not to stare. It was Hana in body but not in manner – another woman, with pitch-
perfect official Japanese and the posture and pose of a propaganda poster darling, had stepped into
her skin. She smiled the most suitable smile at Mrs. Suzuki, a mask of state-sanctioned kindness. “If
you allow us to briefly interview her, once we have the facts in hand we can begin to harshly punish
anyone who spreads malicious rumours about your family. For your daughter’s sake.”
“Malicious rumours?” Mrs. Suzuki repeated. Hana gave an earnest nod. The tired woman’s face,
as hopeless as ever, lightened at least a little. She seemed to be human again. “You could…we want
to send her back to school. We want to protect her.”
“That’s our wish as well.” Hana said. “Please, Mrs. Suzuki.” Mrs. Suzuki chewed her bottom lip.
She looked back at the house. There was a stain upon the left breast of her kimono, a faint thing
which lingered. She swallowed. “Very well. I – I will go prepare her for you. Please wait here, officers.”
She then abruptly turned from them and back into the house, trotting along on her sandals and
slipping back inside. He and Hana watched the door. Finally, after centuries, he turned to her.
“Public Health Squad?” he asked.
Hana’s eyes were fixed upon the door. “You know, old man,” she said, “people always just need
to be told what they want to hear. The hard part of life isn’t giving them it – it’s figuring out what it is.
Most people hide their feelings pretty well, especially you Japanisch. That’s why you’re so powerful.
But even Japanisch waver sometimes. All you have to do to survive in this country is find those
people who are wavering, who can’t stand the dead fucking place that is Yamato society and are
about to crack, and offer, in your humble, harmless Chinese way, to tell them that it will all be okay.”
A slight smirk, triumphant and unconscious, was upon her face. “She doesn’t care all that much
about her daughter, to be honest. But she cares a lot about her reputation. Even if she doubts the
idea of the Public Health Squad, she wants to believe that we can make it all normal again. So she’ll
break her high-and-mighty ‘leave my family alone’ act as long as you offer her what she wants. And
we can get what we want too.”
He stared at her. “You’re an intimidating woman.”
She spat into the grass. “You people made me this way.” Soon Mrs. Suzuki came back to meet
them, returning to the other side of the gate. She looked at Hana and then at Munekata more
dubiously, and then pressed the gate release. It swung inward with an electric whine. She led them
into the house, past the overgrown garden and past the door with its rusty hinges that squeaked as
she opened it. Inside was not what he had expected. He had assumed he would find dirt and neglect
and mess, the usual debris of a life half-lived. Instead it seemed that Mrs. Suzuki had decided to
make the house spotless, to clean and clean forever, so that the floorboards were immaculate and
the shelves were without a speck of dust, and the wall hangings were properly angled and the gold
leaf light fittings sparkled.
He pictured the phantom figure of Akira Suzuki, who had set him on this quest from afar,
shuffling about these splendid halls on the night or day before his exile, already outcast. A splendid
home with an absent master. He thought that perhaps that might have been the point. Her home’s
tasteful furnishings, in their classic western-traditional hybrid style, by their cleanliness, referred to
some ideal moment that had gone, the pristine state of an imaginary past.
 Through all of this Mrs. Suzuki stepped nervously, leading he and Hana up the stairs and to the
first bedroom on the first floor. She paused before the paper screen. “Sachiko.” she said to it. “Dear.
The police are here to see you.” There was no reply. Munekata could make out a shadow sat
slumped on the bed beyond, etched on the paper by the sunlight coming in through the window.
Mrs. Suzuki watched them with hopeless eyes. Munekata went first, taking the door and sliding it
open, and he and Hana stepped inside.
The room was filled with degeneracy. Posters of American and Reich rockstars and foreign
movies and actors lined the walls, without any Japanese characters in sight. Over the bed was Bruce
Lee, star of the Nationalist cinema scene a decade or so ago, in the poster for Rise of the Dragon,
defiant and furious, scowling at the viewer against a backdrop of bestial-faced Manchukuoan
soldiers rushing after him to their doom. The bookshelf was all in English or Chinese – on the old
desk with its lotus-patterned headboard there was a textbook that when he glanced at it was written
in both Chinese characters and Wade-Giles romanisation, translating every character one by one.
Schoolbooks and pieces of paper sat in disarray on the floor, some patterned with what he
recognised as Chinese nationalist and anti-Japanese slogans slashed in jagged writing.
The remains of countless instant meals sat in the corner, a perverse work of art made of them,
trays with bits of food and dirty cutlery crowded with empty Cup Noodles into a vast, tottering
sculpture, an ode to despair. There was a television in a wooden cabinet by the window with a
German VHS player below. On the unmade bed in the corner was a stuffed toy of Hakkoichiu Inu,
canine mascot of the imperial state, worn and old – the only thing that indicated that this was the
room of a settler-citizen of Manchukuo. Even the portrait of the emperor was covered up with paper
taped over him – below that, on her shelf, was a framed image of Sachiko Suzuki and of a girl that he
recognised as Mizuki Tachibana, with both of them a few years younger than they were now, and
another of her with Mrs. Suzuki and a man, slender moustache and narrow head, who must have
been Akira, her father.
Amidst all this was Sachiko Suzuki herself, the most important person in the world, wrapped in
her bedsheet and sat on the mattress by the open window and looking at the two of them.
With her dyed hair and her t-shirt and her slashed jeans she did not resemble any kind of
harmonious Japanese youth. Perhaps it was a style inherited from the Prussian Neue Jung or the
Cantonese “Smash Blue” clubs. But all of the confidence suggested by that costume was absent. The
person before Hana and Munekata just then was not a rebel, just then, and also was not the person
from that old picture with Miss Tachibana – she was a phantom, an absent presence, her expression
a loose impression of a face, her posture unaware of itself.
Munekata cleared his throat. He bowed to her. “Sachiko Suzuki.” he said. “Hello. I am Lieutenant
Keizo Munekata. You can call me Mr. Munekata, if you’d like. This is my deputy, Sergeant Takamori.
We’re here from the police.” Sachiko Suzuki didn’t move. She had not bowed back and now gave no
sign of recognising him save for that she was looking at him. But she stared without anything behind
her eyes. He thought about what to say next, aware that he perhaps had been running from this,
from her and what had been done to her, aware of himself as a criminal, of sorts, feeling strangely
guilty, as if he were responsible for the fate of this girl he had never met. Now that he was here with
her he did not know how to proceed.
“Miss Suzuki.” Hana said. “I like your posters.”
“You do?” Sachiko asked flatly.
Hana nodded. “Yes.” She pointed to one of the posters, a green object similar to an egg on a
black background. “Is that that American movie? ‘Alien’?” She said the title in English, a word
Munekata knew but could not connect with. Sachiko nodded too, slower and more carefully. Hana
took a second step into the room. “It’s an illegal movie, you know.” Hana said. Sachiko didn’t laugh
but her expression softened ever so slightly after a second. “But I’ve seen it like five times. I had a
friend who burned it onto one of those tapes so we could watch it on a player, like you have. I know
it’s politically incorrect, but I couldn’t help it. I should throw myself in jail for that. Don’t you think?”
 “You should.” Sachiko said. “You and your friend. You fascists.” Munekata tensed upon hearing
that word. The communists had liked it, had always shouted it in their suicide attacks, had spat it at
him in interrogations. Hana merely laughed. “Wir sing Faschisten, ist das richtig? But we’re not all
fascists. Or anyway, I don’t think I am.”
“Who are you?” Sachiko asked.
Hana approached the bed. “I’m someone who wants to help you, Miss Suzuki.” Sachiko seemed
to tremble. “With your forgiveness,” Hana said, “may we ask you some unpleasant questions?”
“You want to talk about Friday.” Sachiko had sealed herself off again. She sat with her hands tight,
resting rigid against her thighs. “Mum explained it to me.”
“We want to help you.” Hana said.
“Why?” Sachiko’s voice was iron. “Because people keep talking about the Japanese girl who got
drunk and let herself get fucked by a Chinese? Is it a ‘political crime’, what happened to me? Is it all
about ethnic harmony? National security? Is that it?” Hana’s mouth was slightly open, as if she were
ready to speak, and yet no words came out.
Munekata cleared his throat. “No.” he said. “Or rather, Miss Suzuki, I do not wish to lie to you.
We are here for official reasons.” He sensed the mother behind the paper screen, sensed her leave
with silent, tragic footsteps. Then when he was sure they were alone he continued. “However, our
interest in this situation is not due to that. I have spoken to your friends Li Huangqi, Mizuki
Tachibana, and Xu Mei.” He paused. “Miss Xu is currently in intensive care, owing to injuries
sustained during an attack on her home.”
Now Sachiko’s eyes found him at last. “What?”
“She was attacked because she spoke to me about you.” Munekata said. He frowned. “Miss
Suzuki, we are in over our heads. We attempted to avoid talking to you directly and now a tragedy
has occurred. If things are to be righted now, we must ask for your assistance.” He lowered his head
to her. “Please.” he said. “I ask for your assistance.” Sachiko was quiet for an agonising amount of
time, eyes down. They waited as two awkward figures trapped there, stood beneath the dust mutes
floating in the air, those tiny specks of dirt lit up by the sunlight rushing in. Birdsong came from
outside, a thousand miles away, mingled with the harsh bark of the propaganda van’s speakers. On
the wall the frozen faces of all of the superstars and actors and singers looked on.
Sachiko sighed. “I don’t remember.” she said. She remained there on the bed with her eyes
looking nowhere at all. “I went out with them.” she said. “I argued with Mizuki. Li mentioned the
Red Club. I wanted to go. I wanted to hurt Mizuki. I don’t know what I wanted. I argued with him and
I told him to take me there and we went there. They…we drank. I remember a man with a gold tooth.
And some others. Mei fell asleep. She had drunk too much. Li…Li was there, but he disappeared. He
asked me if I was okay. I said I was. He said he would come back for me. He took her home. He didn’t
come back for me. I was offered something by one of them. They gave it to me. In a needle. I felt…I
don’t remember anything clear. But a man was holding me down, whispering to me. The first time.”
Munekata felt his frown deepen and tried to hide it. He focused only on she and on the facts behind
her desolation. There was no misery left in her voice, no self-pity. “I was confused.” she continued.
“My body didn’t seem to work. I was scared, because nothing was moving. I cried out and he left me
alone. We were in a room somewhere, under a harsh light. I could hear music somewhere. Not club
music. They had put me on a sofa. The walls were plaster. My friends were all gone. I asked about Li
but he wasn’t there.” She stopped talking. The silence was cloying, the heavy weight of absence that
haunted a funeral altar. “What happened next?” Munekata asked.
Sachiko seemed to remember that she had to blink, the motion of her eyes coming to her
unnaturally, her chest rising and falling beneath her t-shirt. “Another man came in.” she said.
“Another man?”
“Heavier.” she said. “His breath was warm. He kissed me. I didn’t stop it. Maybe I could have but I
didn’t feel like I could. I thought this was okay but then I realized I really didn’t want it. He was older.
He put his hand down my pants and started to put his fingers in me. He moved them back and forth
over and over and put his other hand under my t-shirt and squeezed my right nipple until it hurt. I
made a noise. He kept on kissing me. I couldn’t breathe. He lifted my shirt up and pulled down my
shorts. He asked me if I liked it. I think I said no. He laughed at me and then he kissed me again. He
pulled my legs apart and then he stuck his penis inside me and he took my virginity. It hurt a lot. I
didn’t like it I wanted him to stop and I felt like I was being stabbed and I looked and there was no
one there to help me. I remember his teeth. He smiled so much the whole time. Kept grinning. When
he finished he came inside me and kissed me long and hard and bit my tongue. Then he left.” She
had spoken all this in the same flat tone. Finally she looked up at them. Her expression was dull.
Munekata swallowed. Next to him Hana was trembling and trying hard not to show it, her hands
tucked suddenly inside the pockets of her jacket. “How did you escape?” he asked.
“They threw me out.” Sachiko said. “I think they thought I had been unconscious. They were all
noisy. Maybe they were high as well. The man took me and tossed me into the grass. He left me
there with my clothes all messy and my blood and his – his stuff between my legs. It was night and it
was cold. I walked back along Harbour Road. Someone asked me if I was okay. I told them I had been
raped. I realised that I had been raped. I screamed. I don’t remember anything else.” She closed her
eyes for a second and he knew that she was back there, that all of it was within her and would never
leave.
When she opened them again her expression was calm. Next to him Hana was tight-lipped. “Is
that all?” Sachiko asked in a mild voice. Hana moved forward before Munekata could speak and she
reached out and she had put her hand on Sachiko’s shoulder. “I promise you, Miss Suzuki. We’re
going to destroy him for you.”
“Why?” Sachiko said. They stared at her. “What would it achieve?” She gave them a half-cracked
smile. “I let him do it, didn’t I? Everyone told me that I was going to fail just like my father. Everyone
told me I was going to fuck up. And I did. I betrayed Mizuki, and my family, and myself, and-” She
was quiet for a long time. “I should just die, shouldn’t I?”
“No.” Hana took Sachiko’s hands and held them. She and Sachiko were apart from Munekata
now, in their own engagement, both of them locked together. “If you die, you let the world get away
with it.” Hana said. “You’re hurt, right? You’re bleeding, right?” Sachiko gave a slight nod. “So bleed.
Let it hurt. But as long as you’re still here at the end of it all, you win. You beat that bastard just by
surviving. One day you’ll laugh again. One day you’ll enjoy watching a movie or going for a walk or
seeing a friend. The wound will still itch. It’ll still be there. But one day it won’t hurt as much. Do you
understand me?”
Sachiko’s nod was firmer the second time, by a little. “That’s how you win.” Hana said. “You just
have to survive.” She inhaled and then exhaled and left the bed. Sachiko turned away, looking to the
window. Hana looked to Munekata. “Old man.” she said. Her face was as he had never seen it before,
her real anger, so hot it burned him even from here even though he wasn’t its target. “Old man.” she
said again. “Whoever he is, we’re going to gut that bastard like a fish. Or you are.” She crossed her
arms. “You can do a bit of violence for a good cause for once, can’t you?”
Munekata could not face her. He turned away. “Miss Suzuki.” he said. Shivering, her cheeks
shimmering with the faintest traces of two parallel trails of tears, she waited. She was still looking
out of the window, at a town that did not look back. “I told you.” he said. “I believe in honesty. We
are not from any ‘Public Health Squad’. I am a member of the Kempeitai.” Sachiko now watched him,
without surprise but not with contempt. Framed by the sunlight her eyes red and her face wet she
nevertheless held herself firm. There was a sliver there of what might have been her real self, which
until now had been stolen away from her. Munekata cleared his throat. “I have been told to find
who assaulted you not as a political directive but as a personal favour. To your father.”
She tensed as if shocked. “My father.” she repeated. “To protect his fucking reputation-”
“I do not know what he has done, or your mother has done.” Munekata said. “I do not really
understand what has happened to you. I am only a man, and a soldier. I believe your parents both
love you, in their imperfect way. I believe your friends Xu Mei, Li Huangqi and Mizuki Tachibana love
you, even if they have let you down. I do not know these things for certain. All I do know is that
those who are good might endure terrible pains but even so, in the end, those who are evil will still
be punished. And I will prove this to you.”
Sachiko watched him. “How?”
Munekata frowned. “I am going to find him and bring him to justice. I am going to show you that
even in this rotten world there is hope, so that you can go on living, as my partner said. If I may.” He
bowed. “I ask for your permission to do so.” Sachiko, unblinking and pale, her posture sunken and
her expression tinged with exhaustion, regarded him. He held his bow. Slowly she gave a final nod.
“Thank you, Miss Suzuki.” he said. He stood up.
They left her there, barricaded in her room with the debris of her innocence. They reassured Mrs.
Suzuki that it would all be fine. And they went outside, into the morning, where everything was
normal and there were children playing in the street as their parents looked on smiling, where birds
went on singing and cars going past in the road, where Munekata’s leg throbbed with the unfamiliar
pain of the special attack suit’s leg frame.
The both of them, veterans of traumas both alien to the other, two people from elsewhere who
had washed up here in this peaceful remnant of a non-existent world, were faced abruptly – he
knew it by her silence – with the pasts they had left behind. They walked down Vanished Cloud and
stopped there, first he then her. “What’s your plan?” she asked him calmly, studying the propaganda
poster opposite. The sun shone down on them. “To uh, destroy him, I mean. And which ‘him’,
anyway? Did you solve the case, detective?”
Munekata suddenly enjoyed the pain in his leg, understanding it now. He felt as if he was out for
drinks with an old friend, someone he hadn’t seen for the longest time, and the years had all fallen
away and they were both young again. With every throb of discomfort he was closer to the light of
the Buddha. I’m going back to headquarters.” he said. “To look at an old case file.”
“And then?” she asked.
There were dark clouds above coming in from the sea. For now the sky was still blue, but only for
now. He allowed himself to feel that anticipation once more, the anticipation of the hunter waking
up and smelling prey, that same rush that had come to him outside the Red Club. Now, however, his
cause was righteous. His body was made of steel. “Everything costs something.” he said almost to
himself. He set off walking down the street. After a second he heard Hana’s footfalls behind him,
following.
 14
Tonight was Ryo, who was his favourite. Jintian had begun a routine with him, the young
conscript from the Imperial Navy, and that itself was taboo, an association that was almost a real
relationship, that almost meant they knew each other – but the routine’s nature ensured that they
were kept apart, writer and sailor, and that the game was played out between two characters who
were safe in their unreality. Jintian was merely ‘master’. Ryo, small and slender, was Kyoko.
He was of that generation of Japanese troops, the soldiers of peacetime who always ended up
muscular enough to lift a rifle at inspection but inevitably wiry, reduced by the paltry rations and
austere lifestyle of the Heavenly Sovereign’s holy warriors, isolated figures bored and lonely, raised
on a home islands diet of Mishima and Okubo novels with their barely-restrained homosexual
degeneracy, out here looking for something interesting – Jintian had given him it, or liked to think he
had.
They met at a dark inn called the Golden Chamber on Fortune Street, which was not golden and
had never fixed the air conditioning, and Ryo brought the outfit with him in his case from the
barracks. It was a girl’s sailor-style school uniform but not really. It was fetishistic mimicry, a parody
of the essence of Japanese youth and innocence, which Jintian had grown over his years of
traitorous existence to despise for its falseness, its hypocrisy, its absurd facsimile of a youthfulness
which had never existed. His usual mildness kept this intense hatred hidden, and he found it could
only come out through arousal, and Ryo-as-Kyoko filled him with a passion worse and more beautiful
than any of the others had, and so they had met six times before now, against all of his own rules.
Within the gloom of the lantern on the wall was Kyoko, bent over for him. The bedroom was
small and modest and the wallpaper was peeling. In the faint light Kyoko’s lithe frame was almost
female, hovering somewhere between life and death, a purgatorial beauty killed, preserved in its
unnatural form at climax. He looked back over his shoulder at Jintian, tiny pencil skirt barely
concealing the firm, soft flesh of his buttocks. His face was flushed red and waiting.
He wore girls’ underwear, black and lacy, another cartoonish imitation – that was how Jintian
liked it. Jintian, a man possessed, naked and unveiled in this obscure nook hidden away from the
whole of the Earth, fully himself, got up from the bed and went to grab Kyoko from behind. He
grasped the other man’s cock, sticking rudely out of the black lace so that it brushed against the
fabric of the skirt, and massaged it with his fingers, pressing hard but gently against the head with
his thumb. The cock twitched with anticipation. “Is something the matter, master?” Kyoko asked,
breathlessly feminine. Jintian said nothing in reply but got to his grim work.
When they were finished and were together sweaty and empty they lay side by side on the
creaking wooden bed. For a long time there was the usual blessed quiet, people in the street outside,
the wind rattling the hotel’s wretched windows in their frames. Then Ryo spoke. “Why don’t you
ever let me shoot up?”
Abruptly, listening to the man’s real voice, Jintian found his illusory world shattered. He was no
great artist drowning here in luxurious sin. He was a traitor and a dog who preyed on junkie soldiers
in a squalid nowhere-town in a rotting empire. He sighed and held onto Ryo tighter than before.
They had turned the lights off and so both had become only sound and touch but mostly touch, their
wet, hot flesh intermingled. “It isn’t my business what you do in your own free time.” Jintian said.
“However, that kind of thing is completely unacceptable here.”
Ryo sighed too. “You’d like it. It makes what we just did feel even better.”
Jintian stiffened. “Better?”
“Ah. Mr. Chen, I didn’t mean it like that…”
He sat up. “I know how you meant it, you bastard.”
Ryo tried to stroke him. “Mr. Chen-”
Jintian brushed him off. “Don’t Mr. Chen me, you little faggot.” he spat. “Get out of here.”
“What?” Ryo said. His hurt was palpable and Jintian relished it. “Why?”
“Because I said so.” Jintian said. “Because if you don’t I might I feel the urge to let slip about the
rumours of sodomy in the Japanese garrison at our next council meeting.” He stayed there. Ryo
slowly and sulkily got out of the bed, his beautiful slim body a shadow of temptation, and went to
shower and was busy there for much longer than he needed to be. Jintian spent that time still lying
there, his own come all down his front, thinking. He was thinking of his own cruelty, of the mood
that kept driving him to fuck a man dressed as a woman.
It had flared up again after meeting that man Munekata, and especially after seeing Hana with
him. Afterwards she had played the guzheng for him. They had spent almost the whole day together
in their usual leisurely way, and he had finally understood that because Hana could not ever ascend
to heaven with someone as twisted as he, she was now ready to fall into hell instead. Not happily.
He knew that this Munekata figure did not make her happy, and that she would cling to him as he
fell partially - but not only - to ensure he went where he belonged. He, Jintian, her countryman and
soulmate, was only a comfort to her, and she couldn’t abide comfort. He supposed it was only what
he would have done, if he had ever found someone who tormented him so.
And his mood had become dark because of this, because he was a degenerate creature who
couldn’t even compete with a crippled old Jap, and it had brought back memories of school, of
military service, of his first lustful glance at a boy changing in the showers, of his desperate attempt
at making love to the real Kyoko, who his mother had wished him to marry as a means to infiltrate
Japanese society, who he and Juhua had had to dishonour with a targeted campaign of rumour and
gossip afterwards. Sweat in the dark – a sinking feeling in his chest. Her body beneath him, petite
and pale and perfect and inspiring nothing, her flesh obliging, her loving eyes turned up to him,
willing him on.
When Ryo returned, wet and clean, Jintian merely sat in silence waiting for him to go. The
younger man turned away and dressed in his fatigues and shot a reproachful look at Jintian before
slipping out. He had left his schoolgirl costume this time – an ending, was it? Jintian couldn’t believe
that anything ever ended. He cleaned himself up and then packed the costume into his case, dressed
in western business clothes with his hat pulled low over his head, and he slipped out of the Golden
Chamber onto the intersection with Harbour Road, tonight busy with the usual crowds, all dressed
up in neon reflected back at the sky by the puddles. It had rained in the afternoon, while he had
been cooped up at home listening to his mother’s brush against the paper in his father’s empty
study, thinking awfully of how much he had wanted Ryo. Now all that had gone it seemed so childish
to have ever been excited for it.
He lingered at the intersection, bodies brushing past, and he wondered. The plan had been to
stay over at the Golden Chamber but now he could not, and so he would have to go home, full of a
searing shame even his mother might not be able to ignore. He would make up some story, which
would be more unbelievable even than nothing, but would show at least that he cared for her
enough to attempt to lie.
He set off back up Fortune Street or tried to. A hand was on his shoulder all of a sudden, firm and
familiar, bold in its closeness. He turned and saw Juhua there, in his army coat with his scarred cheek
and his fierce eyes. A wolf emerged from the crowd to pounce upon him. “Yo, bro.” Juhua said. “I’m
back. Let’s talk.”
They went to a bar on Fortune, an open-air dapaidang in the Hong Kong style, with fresh seafood
and plastic chairs and tanks of fish and crustaceans staring out oblivious. Tonight it throbbed with
life and so it was possible for the Chen brothers to take a small table near the street, where scooters
and bicycles and throngs of people moved in an endless blur and where the noise was impossible to
overcome. Juhua ordered a pair of beers and a plate of boiled shrimp and sat there back to the
world looking hard at Jintian, waiting for him to start.
Chen Juhua, who Jintian knew was smarter and better than himself: his name, ‘Juhua’, the
Chinese for chrysanthemum, designed to curry favour with the Japanese, an indication of his divine
purpose, sent into the army with grand designs in mind. He had been conceived for officer school,
for promotion and success and with them social or martial glory. But the pressure had been too
much and older, stupider, twisted Jintian had achieved glory instead, purely by accident, and so now
here they were. “I can explain.” Jintian began.
 Juhua smirked, leaning back on his stool. “Can you?” he said. “I want to tell you something first.
You know, I always thought you and that Takamori chick were sweet. It was kind of my dream – well,
let’s say my fantasy – to steal her from you. To seduce her or something. Really hurt you with that.
You’re always smarter and cooler than me, but I thought hey, maybe if she really liked my dick I
could at least have beaten you at something. Of course, I knew it was impossible, because you’re the
golden boy, but I secretly hoped. Now, though…” He swiped at his beer bottle and picked it up and
drank long and hard, slamming it down again on the table. “I feel like I finally know you, bro.”
“Is this mockery?” Jintian asked.
Juhua shook his head. “No. I’m leading in to something. I want you to know me too.” He folded
his arms. “I had a few guys follow you tonight. Wanted to know which side you were on. Nothing
personal. It just pays to be careful. Turns out you’re not on anyone’s side yet.”
“Side?” Jintian tried to sound like his father, tried to imbue his words with the natural dismissive
tone of the old scholar-official. He was aware that he had failed. But he kept up the voice regardless.
“What are you talking about, little brother?”
Juhua sighed. “Look. After the Kwantung Army leaves, what’s your game plan? Do you ever think
about that?”
“I do.” Jintian lied.
Juhua leant forward, one elbow thrust onto the table. “So? What’s gonna happen to the Chen
family once the Chinese are on top, eh? Regime propagandists and thugs and traitors to the Chinese
people that we are.” An auntie brought them their shrimp as well as two plates and some dipping
sauce. Juha launched into his at once, energetically peeling the first shrimp with his hands and teeth,
leaving shredded shell all over his plate. “I don’t know.” Jintian said after a while. “It – I’m respected
in artistic circles. In the capital, I mean. It won’t be that bleak.”
“Ah.” Juhua said, swallowing the naked shrimp whole. “How do you know? Wouldn’t it be good
to save up just in case? To make sure the Chen family isn’t just depending on you and your books for
survival?” He picked up another shrimp and began to peel it. Jintian frowned. He drank beer,
watching his brother work at taking the second animal apart and then eat it with the same speed as
the first, eating it in one go and moving onto the next without pause. “What did you do?” he asked.
“Me and Henry have been getting bigger these days. We have enforcers out there now, through
that big lug Li Huangqi, we have contacts all over – we’re moving under the noses of the old men in
the triads. The San Lung Tang are finished.”
“Yes.” Jintian said tersely. “I’ve heard about that. You’re just as stupid as the Li boy, if you think
you can do business in Yugongguan without the other anti-social organisations shutting you down.”
“We’ve got friends in high places.” Juhua said.
“A few bribed naval infantrymen don’t count as friends-”
“Nah.” Juhua said. “It’s bigger than that now, bro. A certain customer’s got stuff coming into
Ryujin. Dangerous stuff. Illegal stuff. He’s been paying a lot to get it moved in. He needs reliable men.
Not proper triad types with their old-fashioned Chinese patriotism, who’ll cut out the drugs trade as
soon as the Party tells ‘em to. Businessmen.” He grinned. “Like me and Henry.”
“Stuff?” Jintian said. “You don’t mean…?”
“Product.” Juhua said.
“You idiot.” Jintian hissed. But Juhua remained there unbothered. “The police will-”
“Screw the police. Screw the triads. I told you. We have friends. Japanese friends.” Juhua said.
“Come on. This is a solid operation. Risk-free, almost.” Jintian was thinking of Ryo and his question
about shooting up, about the council deliberating over the vice problem in their endless pointless
meetings which he had long since stopped attending, about that lurid story of the schoolgirl being
drugged up and raped in Yugongguan which still hadn’t disappeared. “You can’t be serious.” he said.
“Of course I’m serious.” Juhua’s smirk fell away. He leant forward. “Look, do you think you’re the
only son of the Chen family allowed to sell his soul to protect us? I’ve made a fortune on this. I am
making a fortune. I’m keeping our family secure.” Jintian wanted to castigate him – wanted to attack
him for his immorality, his selfishness, his disregard for the lives of others. He did not. He drank beer
and peeled a shrimp and ate it. Fortune Street continued, its noise and activity endless and self-
perpetuating, the pulse of a heart that beat without guilt, that lived without sin. Juhua scratched at
his chin. “So now we’re even with each other.” he said. “I know your thing, and you know mine. Now
we can really get talking.”
“What do you mean?”
“I said this operation was almost risk-free. Something’s come up.”
“What’s that?” Jintian asked. His brother’s face was alien suddenly. There was no little smirk, no
lazy haughtiness to his eyes. He appeared to be considering something very carefully. Caught by this
Jintian had to move closer, edging his plastic stool towards the table. His brother took a long drink of
beer. “There’s a Kempeitai agent snooping around.” Juhua said.
Jintian pictured him, stiff middle-aged Munekata with his fake politeness stood next to Hana in
his dull old man’s suit leaning on his stick. “What?” he asked.
Juhua nodded. “Some geezer has been asking weird questions. First to Li, now to Henry. Tracking
them down. He’s been hanging out in one of our clubs. He even went to our office and asked for me.
Made it clear he was military police and tried to throw his weight around. The boys didn’t give him
anything. He’s even been trying to get one of Li’s girls to turn snitch. That trail’s gone cold now, but…”
“Why,” Jintian began, and he looked around at the other tables, where no one appeared to be
listening, “why would the Kempeitai want to involve themselves in a drug-related affair? The
Japanese are wed to the drugs trade here.”
“Who knows? Some power struggle or whatever. Maybe someone in the Kempeitai wants to
start up the old triad networks and they’d like us out of the way. Maybe they want to pressure us
into giving them a cut. They’re corrupt as hell, just like the army and the navy, like all Japanese
bastards – but whoever this corrupt Japanese bastard is, he’s not on our side. But I know who’s on
his.” Jintian quickly drank up. Juhua gave him a sharp little nod. “You know too, right?”
Jintian blinked, slowly and unsteadily, as if he had been struck and was still trying to comprehend
the blow. “He’s Hana’s customer.” he said.
Juhua nodded. “Exactly. Looks like your little sister is a government spy.”
“No.” This came out too quickly. Jintian was aware he had no proof of this, no argument against it,
and yet as soon as Juhua had voiced the idea he recoiled from it, this attack on his very soul. “No.”
he said again, calmer. “Hana is no spy. But she is working with him. Or being used by him. She – she
has some kind of complex relationship with that man. Something bonds them beyond what she and I
could ever share.” He wasn’t speaking to Juhua anymore, he realized. He focused on the street, eyes
not seeing the people passing by. He saw Hana and he saw Munekata and he saw them together and
he apart from them. He saw Hana’s fingers upon the guzheng.
Once after dinner she had kissed him and he had found it unbearable, he lips scalding his cheek.
He was very still, like a spider sat in its web. Juhua was watching him, he was aware. While he sat
staring into space his brother’s eyes were upon him, tight with something – was it concern? He
didn’t know what was happening, only that he was here and that man – the other man – was there.
“Well.” Juhua said eventually. “Whatever it is, it means she’s the enemy. You got that?”
“The enemy?”
“Of the Chen family. Regardless of the reason for it, she led that asshole to our house. Henry shut
down the cop’s last lead on us, but – well, we don’t know if that’s serious yet, with your bitch. She
could be doing other things for him – she could be trying to get dirt on us from you. Lucky for us
you’re a faggot, but still. She’s not with us, bro. She’s with him. I know you won’t want her hurt, but
we have to do something, don’t we?”
Jintian did not agree. He could not agree, not yet. He sipped his beer. “So what’s your point, Little
Juhua? What do you want?”
“One more thing.” Juhua said. “Do you know who he is?”
“He’s just some old soldier.” Jintian said.
Juhua smirked but it wasn’t really a smirk but a kind of funeral resignation, the mirth of the
wretched. “No, no.” he said. “He’s not. I did some research, asked around. Keizo Munekata, that’s
the bastard’s name. Not exactly a famous name, but some people around here were curious too.
They’d looked into him and they’d figured it out. It’s not public record, part of the amnesty after the
coup – but that old geezer was once with the Geographical Survey and Internal Security Unit.” Jintian
now looked at his brother properly again. Juhua was sweating, a bead of it dripping down from his
shaved scalp to his brow and then slowly like a slug rolling down onto the side of his face. “The
bastard’s a surveyman.” Juhua said. “And not just a surveyman. He was in the 201st Battalion. The
Death Battalion, as they called it in the service.”
“Oh.” Jintian finished his drink as quickly as he could. A phantom warmth embraced him from
below and still he felt cold. He felt the fear that was always there now behind him closer than ever
before, peering over his shoulder, its icy breath in his ear. “Those were the ‘Orochi Soldiers’, right?”
he asked. “Are you joking? There’s no way. They’re all supposed to be dead. Aren’t they?”
Juhua shrugged. “I guess not.” Images from the television during that brief period where the
censors had failed, and after that from leaked internal Concordia documents, from underground
newspapers, came to Jintian, unwanted – the armoured demons of the Survey Unit battered by the
mournful fury of the falling snow, stood unbothered with their swords and submachine guns,
towering over mounds of butchered Chinese, red staining the pure white.
A surveyman with his sword to the cheek of a communist, grinning, his cursed mask loose around
his neck. The burnt-out wreckage of Soviet vehicles lining one of Manchukuo’s glorious highways,
monuments to failure, charred bodies tumbling out of wooden houses set ablaze by Survey Unit helo
sweeps, collapsing into the blizzard like broken old toys, black and ruined. A surveymen with a
communist banner, bright red fabric with characters proclaiming that Mao Zedong Thought would
save China, two at either side holding them up to the camera as a trophy while nearby tied-up
Chinese, bloodied and beaten and wearing the placid countenances of the doomed, held themselves
still. The parade in Manzhouli after the retaking of the western provinces, armoured boots
thundering on Soviet-style boulevards. The endless rumbling of suit motors and half-track engines.
Jintian knew all of it. He knew that mask better than he knew his own face. “And this man is after
you.” he said.
Juhua nodded. “If we try anything, we’re fucked. Whoever’s got him onto our trail, he isn’t giving
up. He wants to sniff out this business we’re in, I’m sure. And we’ve beat him, threatened him…he’s
a machine, just like his reputation. And if he figures us out he’ll bring the family down too.” He
paused, letting this hang in the air.
With a screech of chairs a table of older Chinese behind them got up. They were laughing and
talking, calling for a waitress to come give them the bill. They were all older, all clad in unkempt
traditional clothes, the generation that had grown up during the worst of the Japanese oppression,
back in the forties, who had been slaves to the Kwantung, dogs to be worked to death for the glory
of the Empire.
Now they enjoyed themselves and they laughed and talked, and they were here alive, with eyes
to see and hearts to feel with. Was it that simple? Did the fear stop one day? He couldn’t imagine it.
The spectre of discovery that had haunted him all his life, the Power that was inevitably to hunt him
down – now it had a name, a form that he could find within his memory, one that he could properly
despise. That of Keizo Munekata. “But he has one weakness.” Juhua looked up from his food. Jintian
was aware that it was he who had spoken and not his brother. He looked at his hand, the one still
holding the beer, the slender fingers and pale skin, unmarked by manual labour, by hardship or by
strife. “Her.” Jintian said.
Juhua slowly broke out into a smirk, reinflating. “You’re getting it, bro.” He picked up his beer and
raised it. Jintian obliged him, clanging their bottles together hard, his own raised above his brother’s.
They drank. “Not yet.” Juhua said, wiping his mouth. “And we won’t hurt her. I promise you, man.
But-” The party of old people were leaving now, trundling out into the stream of bodies on the
pavement, still talking, still happy, still alive. What sacrifices had they made? Jintian wondered. What
compromises were there that had stained their souls grey? “I mean,” Juhua was saying, “we’ll see.
We’ll see if this Munekata bastard gives up after last night. But if he doesn’t…”
 “Then I’ll do whatever I can to help keep our family safe.” Jintian said. Juhua looked at him for a
long time, expression hard again. Another table came in, young men from the street, toughs in
denim with tattoos. Some of Juhua’s men, maybe, Jintian thought. Juhua laughed. “You really do talk
like a Jap! All indirect and shit. But that’s good enough for me. I trust you, bro.”
“Thank you.” Jintian said. A waitress came to him, asking if they wanted another two beers. At
first his instinct was to say no, to end this business and to go home to his mother and her home and
to his own sinful thoughts and only that – but he found himself ordering two more even before
Juhua could speak, and when that was done he faced his brother honestly. “Do you hate me, Juhua?”
he asked.
Juhua blinked. He laughed again. “I do, you fucking perfect goody-two-shoes son of a bitch. Shut
up and eat some shrimp before they go cold.” So they ate and drank, an alliance having been formed,
and everything else forgotten. Not really forgotten, since there was nowhere else for old feelings to
go, but put aside, because Jintian realized that they were the same, that all along this had been the
objective, the shared goal of both of the Chen brothers as passed down to them by Chen Sanmin
before them, nurtured by their mother until it blossomed into today, into this partnership: the
imperative action was to keep the Chen family safe. Anything was worth that, he thought, drinking
deep. Even Hana Takamori.
 15
Mizuki dreamt only of centipedes – of vast squirming hordes of them, of caves where the walls
writhed with a hundred million tiny limbs, a thousand twisted bodies glistening, intertwining,
battling for space upon the stone, so many of them that each had no beginning and no end so that
all seemed to be one vast being, a tide of inhuman monstrosity bearing down upon her and yet she
had not fled but only stood there looking up, hearing their chittering, the infighting of all of the
gathered filth of hell as they swarmed across every surface, moving onto the floor after her, their
mandibles reaching hungrily, and she grinned and opened her arms and welcomed this swarm as it
came upon her, as they the dirtiest and darkest creatures of all of existence feasted upon her, their
tickling jaws prying at her flesh and tearing through her skin and forcing themselves, an endless mass,
deep inside of her and eating her from within.
She woke at her desk, earphones in and Walkman in front of her still turned on, although the
tape had long since finished. Her body longed for it – longed for the kiss of evil. She could see herself
and see her hands and her fingers and she felt the skin stretched over muscle, the blood pulsing
through her veins, the nerve endings all stood to attention. An idea occurred to her – buying a knife,
or taking one from downstairs, and holding her hand out on the desk and then layer by layer slicing
it apart to see what was inside. Her hope was to find insects there, to find that they had already
eaten her and that now they moved her skin from the inside, puppeting the corpse of Mizuki
Tachibana around Ryujin. She would be blameless, if that were the case.
And yet.
Today was Wednesday. It was four in the morning and she was awake and she felt as if she hadn’t
slept at all. Her body was outside of her. The lanterns in the street had just come on, saviours
battling against the fading night, and but for the odd car all she could hear was the gentle sound of
the street cleaners working. She pictured the coolies, silent and downtrodden, meandering about
the pavements with their rakes and bin bags, sweeping up debris and mess and filth, soon to retreat
back to their Yugongguan hovels as the real residents of Ryujin woke up and went to work. The
emperor watched from the wall. She got up and went to him and looked up and he said nothing,
Puyi in silence there, already old in the photograph but not so old and feeble as he was now, on
those rare occasions they dared to show him quivering and shaking through state meetings on the
news. His expression had always been so stupid – that was what it was, she realized.
She had before now mistaken it for a kind of imperial detachment, a grace, his gaze far-off and
abstract, focused on matters of nation and dynasty. She had spent all this time filling in his empty,
inscrutable face with all kinds of ideas. In fact, the emperor was an idiot, and the vacant look on his
face really was only a vacancy. He loved boys and beat his servants and was hopelessly addicted to
opium. Sachiko had told her all this before. Maybe he had been high when they took this picture.
Suddenly his face had turned – his tired, small eyes were upon her. Mizuki blinked. The portrait
was then back to its usual passivity. She slapped herself, trying to wake up, and when that didn’t
work she crept downstairs and went to her schoolbag and took out the box of chocolates she had
bought and she tucked them under her arm and she went back up to her room and she ate all of
them one by one, trying to finish the homework she hadn’t yet done.
It was history homework and the question she was stuck on was simple. When the American
white supremacists and the Soviet communist thugs held back from further attacking our holy
empire in the wake of the tactical retreat from the Republic of China, why did they do so?
There were three options: A) Because of their stunted white imaginations, endemic amongst such
an ape-like breed, which rendered them unable to outsmart the superiority of Asian civilisation, B)
Because the victory of our samurai warriors against China destroyed the morale of the homosexual,
Jewish gangster capitalists who controlled the interventionist factions of the American government
and the Soviet clique, or C) Because the Americans and Soviets both saw the preservation of Asian-
ruled Asia as a block against the other side claiming it for themselves.
The correct answer was A, because B was incorrect in that the glorious victories against China had
been won but had been undermined by communist perfidy, which was why independent China
existed today, and because C implied that the Americans and Soviets were smart enough to engage
in that kind of power politics, when in fact they, democrats and communists, without a heavenly
sovereign to guide them, were lowly animals like dogs, united only by base racial solidarity against
the yellow peoples, whose intellect and purity of mind terrified them. The correct answer was A. And
yet she couldn’t bring herself to circle it. She had no evidence that it any of it was true and no
alternative facts to replace the old expired truths with and suddenly the idea of talking about these
things now disgusted her. What did she know about Chiang Kai-shek? What was America to her?
None of it meant anything, none of it came from anywhere she knew but only from TV and books
and her teachers and parents had taught her and what Sachiko had said and all of it was melting,
liquid she couldn’t catch in her hands. It stank of nonsense, the whole thing, dreams made up by
other people and foisted upon her.
She wished that the world would leave her alone and that she could hide herself in some tiny
dark crevice where things like empires and sovereignties and races could not touch her. She was
there thinking about what to write for an hour, the sun coming up and life coming in intermittent
sounds from the street outside, and she started and came back to life and saw that all she had
written on her homework book was the phrase death to the Japanese invaders.
She stared at it and stared at it some more. After a few minutes she ripped the page out of her
book and tore it up and put it all in the bin. A shiver came over her as she imagined it: her mother
finding the scraps in the rubbish, legible enough, and in sorrow and misery reporting them to the
school who might call the Kempeitai, who would bring her in and ask her why she had written death
to the Japanese invaders, why she had decided to try to inflame ethnic tensions and disrupt national
unity, when she had decided to turn against the imperial family and the state, whether she was a
member of any anti-social separatist organisations and so on. They would tie her up and beat her. It
would be him, that Munekata, who did it, still a kindly Japanese gentleman as he took the stick to
her back. She didn’t know these things but she did. Shivering with fear she went to the bin and took
the scraps of paper out and ate them one by one.
Her father rapped on the door frame and her heart spasmed in her chest. “Daughter!” he called.
“Time to get up! School in one hour.”
Mizuki swallowed the last of the paper. “Yes, father.” But she had already decided she wasn’t
going to school. She dressed herself in her school clothes and ate her breakfast while her father held
forth on politics to her and she nodded agreement to each point. Yes, father, the Chinese won’t be
able to govern by themselves, they’ll need Concordia Association members to help, yes, father, it is a
dreadful society they’ve created down the road, full of drugs and vice, yes, father, the rest of those
bastards at the council are being far too accommodating with them, yes, the Soviets and Germans
and Americans are all pigs, and so on.
Mizuki wasn’t listening. She was thinking of Xu Mei asking her: “How do you know it wasn’t a
Japanese who attacked her?” And asking then: How do you know the Japanese won at Shanghai?
How do you know the emperor is good and ethnic unity is paramount? How do you know that
Nanjing is propaganda and the communists were killing babies and butchering settler families before
the surveymen stopped them? She knew nothing and had no one, not even Sachiko, who had been
learning Chinese and had been so desperate for her friendship who she had ignored until it was too
late which now it was. “What do you think, daughter?” her father asked her as she picked at her tofu.
“Oh.” she said. “I agree.” He looked at her but said nothing else. After eating she went to the
door, slipping on her shoes. “Daughter, wait.” her father said, happening to be on his way upstairs.
She paused, the door open and the birdsong drifting in, accompanied by the murmuring voices of
their neighbours talking in the garden next door. “Where’s your schoolbag?” he asked.
“Oh.” she said. “I left it upstairs. I haven’t packed it.”
“Why not?”
Words died in her throat. He watched her, rock-faced old man, his features taut with quiet fury.
“I’m not going to school today.” she said. She pushed her fringe out of her eyes. “I don’t need it.”
 His scowl hardened. As so many times before he was transformed into a terrifying demon, and
then he moved towards her with his brow bent into a furious line, bearing down upon her to eat her
flesh and gnaw her bones. “What?” he demanded.
“Goodbye, father.” she said, skipping out of the house.
“Sachiko, get back here!” But his roar was quieter than usual. In fact it had barely been a growl.
She heard the neighbours talking and saw his eyes flicker to the garden, past her, and figured it out,
and it was so facile she wanted to laugh.
The old man was afraid of the neighbours! It made sense of everything. He always kept himself
stoic until she had crossed the line, and never outside, and he always struck her where no one would
be able to notice. Her father, the government’s number one man in Ryujin, was afraid of something
– of being seen for what he really was. “Goodbye, father.” she said again, and she turned and left
him there in the house and hurried down the path. A strange joy overtook her. She was exhausted
and felt as if she were barely alive and Sachiko was still not talking to her but she had stood up to
her father, a thing so momentous she hadn’t even known she’d wanted to do it or that it had even
been possible. The whole day – the whole world – belonged to her now. Later there would surely be
a beating, a very bad one, but for now she was free, and so she decided to walk up to the town
square and to look around. There was some spare change in her blazer pocket: maybe, she thought
with a thrill, she’d buy herself an ice cream.
She went the long way, ambling all around Tenmei, taking in the sights and the sounds. She saw
the blazing propaganda posters in the morning sun and the guards proud and fierce at their posts
and the lovely Japanese children being escorted to school. She saw the pristine streets and the Meiji-
style houses and the banner strung up declaring that ETHNIC UNITY IS THE FIRST PRIORITY OF OUR
NATION. She saw the White Lily movie theatre where they were showing some new Hollywood
movies, some degenerate American pictures alongside the usual Japanese imports and Manchuria
Movie Group productions. She saw the men from the Shinto office, priests and maidens in robes and
costumes marching up to the temple to offer prayers for a wedding, chanting all the while. She saw
it all anew, this beautiful town.
Multi-coloured balloons hung in the sky and they proclaimed that the wise decisions of the
Concordia association had to be implemented resolutely, characters printed on stark white banners
suspended from the balloons’ undersides declaring the eternity of the Manchukuoan ideal. Under
their divine gaze she made her way to Five Races Square, where the government buildings and
offices were, and she strode with purpose past all that and to the western side to old Miyazaki’s ice
cream shop, with its European façade and its six different cones in the window. She and Sachiko had
come here often as girls. She set off there light and easy, feeling that it would be fine. If she could
stand up to her father then she could do anything.
On her walk to the ice cream shop Mizuki noticed that a scene was unfolding outside the town
hall. She saw the Japanese and Manchukuoan flags and she saw two of the regular army’s guards
with their assault rifles had moved past the iron fence that protected the hall from the people. They
were now standing by the gate and there was a man on his knees before them. Mizuki edged
towards this, curious, and there were other people gathering carefully at the perimeter of the
square itself with, she gathered, much the same idea, a trickle of people turning generally into a
flood, spilling into the space at the edge of the square.
The two guards looked about, at this slow and hesitant crowd forming, and then they turned back
to the man. “You can’t come in here.” one said in kyowa-go. The man lifted his head. He was
shabbily dressed in traditional Chinese male attire, bald and stooped, his face red and his eyes
watery. He coughed. “Please, sir, leave.” the other guard said. The man started to sob. He threw his
arms up. “Aren’t I a citizen?” he demanded. Mizuki heard him speaking Mandarin. He pounded his
chest with a fist. “Please leave? I’m a citizen of the Empire of Manchukuo, and you’re asking me to
leave? Go fuck your mother, you traitors!”
The exchanged glances. “Sir.” the second said, switching to Mandarin. “Please go home. We can’t
do anything to help you. This office is not open to the public.” Now there were even more onlookers,
people emerging from shops and storefronts and diverting themselves from errands, a loose ring of
observers formed around the town hall all being careful not to appear too interested. The man on
his knees clenched his fists. He hiccupped, trying to get up and failing. “You can’t do anything? I
know he’s in there! That bastard Kitazawa. I know he’s hiding from me!” She had to strain to
understand him but she could understand his anger without effort. She and the crowd together felt
it – they all waited, watching.
“Sir. This office is not open to the public.” the guard repeated, raising his assault rifle. The man
stared at it and then he laughed. “You’re going to shoot me?” he said. “Here, in front of all these
people? Go on! I’m already dead!”
“Who are you, old man?” one of the crowd called in Japanese. The Chinese turned, aware now of
his audience. His smile was broken. “Who?” he repeated. “Who? I’m Xu Guomeng, and I am a father
without a daughter!” The two guards tensed, both with weapons raised but with their fingers not
upon the triggers. Xu Guomeng stood up now and staggered about. His wild eyes took all of them in.
“Don’t you have families? Don’t even the Japs have loved ones? My daughter-” he tripped and fell to
the grass. “My Mei!” He sobbed, hands grasping the soil. “You bastards don’t care! Your police aren’t
doing anything! What’s the point? Why do you even exist? Someone hurt my daughter – the whole
world is burning down, and you people up here just go on living!”
“Sir-” one of the guards said.
Xu Guomeng spat at him, a yellowed blob of saliva bursting uselessly against the concrete. “To
hell with you!” he snarled.
Mizuki moved closer to him. “Sir!” she said. “Excuse me.” He turned and saw her. His eyes were
wild – his face moved of its own accord. Even from here now she could smell the heavy stench of
rice wine. “Who are you?” he asked.
“My name is Mizuki Tachibana.” she said in meek, unsteady kyowa-go. “Is your daughter Xu Mei?”
Her triumphant mood from earlier had dissolved. She was again afraid, again thinking of justice
hunting her down. Xu Guomeng nodded. “Yes. My beautiful daughter!”
“What happened to her?” she demanded. There was the sound of a car moving quickly, a frantic
engine. The crowd was looking elsewhere. She heard the whistle and the march of boots in unison.
Xu Guomeng stared. “What?”
“What happened to her?”
“Why do you care? What is it to you? The life of a thousand Chinese is worth that of one
Japanese!” They were coming now, blowing their whistles. “What happened to her?” Mizuki
snapped in Armee Japanisch. The man flinched. He saw them, brown shirts and batons, coming for
him, chanting to themselves in one voice – maintain ethnic unity at all costs! – as they swarmed over
the square. “She was beaten.” he said, in a tone of defeat. “She was beaten up by gangsters. By that
swine boyfriend of hers. They beat her, and she’s in the hospital, and these Japs won’t even-”
Then Xu Guomeng was taken from her as the police officers rushed him, two knocking him over
and the others forming a perimeter, keeping up their chanting. There was no crowd now and soon
she was caught, pushed back by a policeman’s burly hand, shoved rudely out of the square and back
onto the street, while the police grabbed Xu Guomeng and hauled him up and clubbed him over and
over.
She heard his drunken laughter disappear beneath a flurry of thwacking impacts, plastic on flesh,
and she turned and walked to the ice cream shop and went inside and bought herself a vanilla cone.
The whistles were still blowing and the shouting went on, a terrible beast having torn off its mask for
a moment as it pounced upon its prey, and the old man Miyazaki, stooped and grey-haired with his
little moustache, was trembling as he glanced outside, but Mizuki stood and waited and when the
ice cream came she paid for it and sat down by the window and licked away.
Soon quiet had returned to the square. Xu Guomeng was gone and so were the police, as if they
had never been there at all. The ice cream on her tongue was so cold it stung almost. One more
question occurred to her, too late. Which hospital was it that his daughter had ended up at? She
realized that was her fate now, the karma she had to follow. She had decided to take a day off
school so that she could find Xu Mei, who had been hurt because of her, although she hadn’t known
this when she had made the decision.
It was the hand of Buddha, she thought. Karma in action. She supposed that it was wrong to think
of him, actually, and that she should at this critical moment have thought of the emperor in his
palace, he who owed his might to his brotherly heavenly sovereign in Kyoto, ruler of the Japanese
nation who had blessed Manchukuo with Yamato spirit to steer it correctly towards harmonious
development. But she didn’t know. Really Mizuki didn’t know anything, except for that she had to
find Xu Mei. After her ice cream she set off into Yugongguan.
She walked there, although it took about twenty minutes and the morning was rapidly turning to
noon, a hot, unforgiving day which made her sweat through her uniform. Mizuki didn’t mind – she
embraced the discomfort, envisaging one of hell’s torturers pouring boiling water over her,
reminding her of her sins in a booming voice, and she went on with purpose. The sights and sounds
of the Chinese ghetto were there and she was within them, thinking of Mei, of the anger and scorn
in her voice the last time they’d met. It was true that she, Mizuki, was fearful of passion, and that
she trembled before it and couldn’t stand when others displayed it – she had hated Xu Mei just as
she’d hated Sachiko, and she had been happy when Sachiko had been attacked and she had given
Mei a heavy shove off the cliff edge, hadn’t she, by contacting Munekata again.
Freed by this realisation she was able to drift, as a kite loosed from its string, through the gate of
hell, wandering to Ryujin Public Hospital No. 2., on Harmony Street, which even with the anti-
pollution ordinances gone was usually where they treated Chinese, her father said, because they
were degenerate people who would somehow cheat the real medical staff in the Tenmei hospitals.
She didn’t think she’d ever seen her father speak to a Chinese who hadn’t been serving him. She
didn’t think she herself ever had ever done so, until Xu Mei, who she had then gotten sent here.
The hospital was noisy and crowded with Chinese queuing up and demanding things of hapless
nurses, armed guards on patrol by the gates scowling at the rabble swamping the grounds, which
Mizuki now became part of, joining the looseness of the queue beneath the gaze of a row of
propaganda posters. The fans inside the main hall were broken and the number of bodies meant
that the heat was magnified, and men sat around shirtless, slathered in sweat, a thick mugginess
clinging to every surface, to every pore of her skin.
She waited there behind a trio of elderly Chinese, with a screaming little girl cradled by her
mother at her back. The stench of hot flesh mingled with antiseptic was covered up by choking
incense dotted in holders along the benches, which were crowded with other people waiting. There
was a portrait of Kannon on the wall, framed in glass, resplendent in her golden-hued glory, her face
gifting mercy to all.
Mizuki saw it and felt the cut on her wrist which now had hardened into a scar. There were other
cuts above it, slighter and thinner, more expertly made. More mistakes. She was Japanese and she
knew it and she felt for a wild moment they all knew it but then she looked about and no one was
looking at her and nobody seemed to care. She wanted to tell them: alright, I’m a Jap, aren’t I? So
where’s my punishment? When are you going to come for me? Isn’t that what I deserve? She
begged, pleaded with them to notice her. But everyone just sat around sweating.
The queue went on for half an hour, shuffling forward at odd intervals. Several people dropped
out, muttering angrily in Mandarin – at one point a man tried to storm in straight to the inquiries
desk, only to be caught by the crowd and forced back, people spitting and cursing him as they
shoved him out into the courtyard, where the Chinese guards caught him and beat him to the dirt
just as the police had beaten down Xu Guomeng.
It was the same muffled soundtrack of grunts and the thwack of plastic on flesh, the same
atmosphere of feigned indifference from everyone else. For a moment she was back there and it
was even the same situation, and she was about to step out of the queue almost, going to rescue Mr.
Xu: but then this had passed. Mr. Xu was here and there. The people around here were Chinese and
Japanese, or Chinese turning into Japanese, forced into some rusted, nightmarish machine which
twisted one form into the other.
 Mizuki wondered about her own mental state but only vaguely. Her brain felt to be stewing in its
own juices, cooked up at a street restaurant. Soon she was at the front of the inquiry desk, a long
line behind her and ahead, behind the faded, fungal-smelling wood of the desk, a tired woman with
a mottled face and wild hair, studying her with supreme disinterest. “Can I help you?” she asked in
Mandarin.
“Xu Mei!” Mizuki said, almost shouted. “I mean – I’m a schoolfriend of Xu Mei, who I heard was in
the hospital here.”
The woman seemed to take a second to translate this. “Xu Mei?” she asked.
Mizuki nodded, hair falling loose into her face. “Yes.” The woman turned away, bending down
and with agonizing slowness studying what might have been a patient list. Mizuki almost shook apart
on the spot, waiting anxiously. The woman turned back. “She’s in room fourteen.” she said. “First
floor.”
“Thank you.” Mizuki said, and she slipped out of the queue and up the stairs. There was wetness
on the floor and there were inert bodies lying on rows of chairs outside hospital rooms. She eased
past people waiting to see their families, people arguing with doctors, nurses rushing back and forth,
and wandered along in her invisible way until she had found room fourteen. From the outside it was
the same as rooms thirteen and fifteen – a perfectly normal wooden door with a glass window in the
centre, with a row of seats outside and a poster proclaiming ethnic unity next to it. Mizuki hesitated,
stood a metre away, fists balled up and knees shaking. Whatever energy had kept her going since
the square spluttered now and began to fade. Her tank was almost empty. She exhaled. Unclenching
one hand she managed to find the scar on her wrist and she touched it tenderly, breathing in and
out.
As she stepped towards the door it opened and a man came out in a suit. He was a stiff, older
man, with liver spots on his face. He saw her. He held his hat in his hands and his head was hairless
and smooth. “Ah.” he said in pleasant Japanese, bowing. “A friend of Miss Xu’s, I presume?”
She returned the bow. “Yes, sir.” His own bow had been pristine – his manner was perfect. He
was an imperial, she realized, an official or an ex-soldier or something similar, and not a rough
colonial settler but a true-blooded Japanese, born and raised in the home islands just like her
grandparents had been. The usual twinge of respect for these veterans of the cause was there, but
with it too was something else now, something that had infected her that wriggled about inside her
with a terrible fury at the sight of a man like this. She thought of Xu Mei in the room beyond. “You
heard she was injured?” the man asked, nothing in his tone indicate any feelings on the matter but
polite interest.
“Yes.” she said. “We’re – she was helping me learn Chinese.”
“Ah.” he said. “Are you also a friend of Miss Sachiko Suzuki’s?”
“I – yes. We studied together.”
The man’s face altered, shifting into sincere upset. “My apologies.” he said. “It is…a rough time to
be young, in this country.” he said. “That two such tragedies should strike you in such close
succession is difficult. Please, find solace in your friendship with Miss Xu being a splendid example of
our sovereign’s will that all his subject races find peace together.”
“May the emperor reign for ten thousand years.” she replied solemnly.
The stranger regarded her. “You were born here, miss?”
“Yes, sir.” Mizuki said.
“An honour. I was born in Japan.” He sighed, as if remembering something. “When I came here,
after the war with China, there really was nothing. This town was only those few old houses of
Tenmei on the hillside, fallen into disrepair, occupied by…well, if I may be so impolite, by families
who did not know how to utilise them. It was barren. We had to work endlessly – while the Chinese
built, we soldiers stood guard, and our planners planned, our officials organised, our writers
scribbled. The whole nation was put together by men smarter than us military types. All we had to
do was protect them. But we carried out this small, critical role, and we played our part in building
peace, in building a nation to be proud of.” The old soldier tutted. “Now, to see violence return once
more…the Chinese are an inferior civilisation, but they have their place in our Empire. They do not
deserve to be treated in this terrible way.” He caught her with his small eyes. “I hope that one day
there will be no more violence like this. That we will have true harmony.”
“I-” Mizuki said, “Me too, sir.”
The old man smiled. “Please, call me Mr. Karashima.” he said.
“Mr. Karashima.” she said.
“I am a soldier here in Ryujin. Did you ever speak to any soldiers before, miss?” The question had
a strange edge to it. Mizuki hesitated. “I – my grandfather was a soldier.” she offered.
He smiled again. It was not a real smile, she saw. “A hero, no doubt.” he said. “Well. I won’t keep
you. Wish Miss Xu well for me, please.” With that he stepped past her and went down the corridor,
walking perfectly to the stairs and disappearing. She watched him go and when he was gone she
found herself letting out a breath.
Then she went into room fourteen herself, going in through the door he’d left open, and she saw
Xu Mei again. The girl lay in her bed, hooked up to machines and half-consumed by bandages, her
eyes shut tight. Her face had lost all its hostility, all its anger. Mizuki approached her with caution, as
if stepping towards a god in an altar. She stood before Mei’s bed. The machine – one of the
machines – beeped every few seconds, telling her that Mei was still alive. On her way in she had
closed the door and so the two of them were alone, the last two girls in the world.
Mizuki approached the bed, each step an ordeal, her feet weighing thousands of tons. What was
visible of Mei’s skin was all bruised and one arm and one leg were in thick casts, and in several
places Mizuki saw that blood was seeping through her bandages. The bandages around her skull
were the heaviest-looking and her hair had been partially shaved off to accommodate them. She was
a half-made girl; less than she had ever been before, reduced to this by Mizuki. Below and outside
were voices, the world ongoing, but in here was only this. The dust was frozen in the air – the
sunlight was frozen upon the wall, cast by the faintness of the curtains in a narrow beam. She
exhaled. “I’m sorry, Miss Xu.” she said.
The words were there now. They were suspended in the air between them, hanging there naked
and small and empty. “I’m really sorry.” she said. “I know this is my fault, even if I don’t know
anything else. My actions have resulted in this. It was because I hated you so much. Everything you
said to me was so full of honesty, so sincere, that it was all I could do to despise it, to despise the
person who gave me it. I don’t think I’ve ever been sincere. All that’s in my head is what other
people have told me, which I believed because it made them love me. Or did it? I can’t understand
anything anymore, because of Sachiko and because of you. You won, you know? You – you bitch.”
Her voice cracked. “What am I saying? Why am I so selfish? I – I’m sorry. I want to apologize to
you a thousand times, and a thousand times after that.” She bowed her head. Her tears fell onto the
tiled floor and she hated them, hated that she had broken here, that she was so self-obsessed that
she was defiling Xu Mei’s suffering with her own. “I wish to throw myself into hell for your sake,” she
mumbled, “to leap into burning flames until my skin is melted from my bones. I will die for you, Xu
Mei! I’ll die right here for you! Please, let me do it!” She had the knife in her hand. When it had
gotten there? The blade was sharp although it hadn’t cut her yet.
She raised it to her throat and looked the other girl in the eye, although Mei’s eyes were shut
tight as if they would never open again. Perhaps that was justice. Perhaps it all was justice.
“Oh, stupid Miss Tachibana.” the wet voice of a centipede said in Mizuki’s ear. She trembled and
held onto the knife. The centipede laughed. “What are you doing, acting like some character from a
play? You think you can treat everyone else like this, ruining their lives by your hysteria, and then
keep on as if you’re a tragic heroine?”
“I don’t ruin people’s lives.” she said.
“Oh, yes you do.” the centipede said. “You always do. In fact, you need to. You need to ruin
things for people, or they won’t notice you. Do you think Sachiko would have clung to you if you
hadn’t acted like she was some kind of burden, if you hadn’t convinced her she had done something
wrong? You need to hurt people because you know you’re so average it’s painful, a hollow shell,
only a blouse and a list of test scores, and you know that if you stop hurting them they’ll forget you,
you’ll disappear, you’ll fade away. Better to be a devil than a nobody! Better to be hated than
unloved! Does anyone love you, really? Does anyone care? Your own father, even! Does he care
about the thing that crawled out of his wife one wretched day all those years ago?”
“Shut up!” she spat. She pushed the knife into herself. The centipede laughed. With a wet crack
of bone Mei split open and it emerged, insectoid thing crawling out into the open from the ruin of Xu
Mei’s chest, a glistening wreck, its limbs all twitching and wriggling with delight. “What’s the matter?”
It crawled over Mei, coming up to her, its carapace shimmering in the sunlight. Its beady eyes
watched Mizuki and didn’t stop. “Are you upset, Miss Tachibana? Are you mad about something?
What can you be mad about? Even despite your sinfulness, didn’t you lead a charmed life until now?
Aren’t you just someone who blinded herself to the evils of this world, someone who’s only now just
decided to try to open her eyes just a little bit? What right do you have to be upset? What right do
you have to glimpse a fragment of reality and then decide you want to die? You selfish bitch!”
“I’ll die if I want to.” Mizuki proclaimed.
The centipede grinned. “Oh! So brave, so strong. Look at you, little warrior. So do it then. Kill
yourself. Let it all out. Blossom into a flower of death. Drown Xu Mei in your hatred, just like you’ve
drowned everything else. Isn’t that why you came here? ‘Daughter of Local Official In Hospital
Suicide’! Nobody will care about this Chinese slut and everyone will care about you, just like some
hero from the war. Like your grandfather. That’s why you want to die.” The centipede snickered. Its
mandibles touched her cheek, wiping away her tears. “Go ahead. Give me your blood.” She stepped
back. It came after her, swaying, its head bobbing from side to side. The metal stung her neck. Blood
dripped down her uniform. The centipede leapt, knocking her back, its bulk pressed against her front,
its arms grabbing at her, groping her all over. Its mandibles were around her skull. “Do it!”
“I-”
It licked at her cheek with a man’s rough tongue. Her shoes scraped against the floor and her
hand hurt holding on the plastic and she couldn’t think, couldn’t see anything but the centipede’s
awful face, laughing at her and mocking her and telling her the beautiful truth. Its rancid breath
kissed her face. “Do it!”
“I-”
A hand grabbed her wrist. She slashed to her right with the knife, hitting nothing, and a force
shoved her shoulder hard and she was bowled over onto the floor – the impact never came.
Something had caught her. He held onto her, having grabbed her roughly by the arm, and then he
forced her up. It was Li Huangqi. He wore a tracksuit covering his tattoo and his face was worn and
tired and yet he held her there. “Are you okay?” he asked her in his ugly kyowa-go. The knife had
fallen from her grip at some point. She blinked, swallowed, remembering that she was alive.
“You’re bleeding.” he said. He let go of her and after a second of shaking she found her balance
and stood there, alone. She picked up her knife and wiped the blood away and stuffed it into her
pocket. Xu Mei was in the hospital bed and the propaganda poster was on the wall and the sunlight
was still shining. Li ignored her for a second, going up to Mei, checking her. He turned back. “Were
you trying to kill yourself, idiot? With a toy knife like that?” He again glanced at Mei and then to her.
“You didn’t do anything, did you? To Mei.”
“I-” she said, but she stopped. Her neck hurt and she put a hand to it and felt the wound, felt the
blood still trickling out. Li was upon her now, his bulk as huge as ever and yet strangely diminished.
Not strangely – she had heard their conversation near the fish market. She grasped at least that
much. His thick arms were limp at his sides. “Why are you here?” he asked.
“I came to see her.” Mizuki managed. “To – to say sorry.”
“Sorry?”
“I did this to her. I told the policeman about her.”
Li tensed. “That rat Munekata?” he asked. “You – led him to Mei?”
Mizuki paused, afraid. But she was aware of herself. “Yes.” she said. “I eavesdropped on you two
and I heard the name ‘Chen’ and I gave it to Mr. Munekata and then – and now this has happened.
It’s my fault.” She bowed her head, waiting. Nothing happened. Li turned, sighed. His expression was
miserable. “Is it?” His ramshackle Japanese words shook with feeling. “It wasn’t Munekata that did
this. It wasn’t you. It was those bastards. Chen and Jiang. I did what they told me. I lied for their
asses. I even got Mei to warn you off. And – and this is their reward.” He shivered, fists tightening.
“Jap bitch. Do you know, she was still in school. A kid like you. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t right at all.
But I loved her. I loved her. I know I’m wrong, but I love her. And I never told her how I felt. I treated
her like trash. I got her involved in all this. I made her confront you. And I asked her – Sachiko
wanted to come out with us – I suggested the Red Club, y’know. And Mei was drunk, and I was drunk,
and she was really uncomfortable, when we went out – I ran away with her. I fucking left Sachiko
with them. I didn’t think they’d do anything like that to her, but…it was my fault. All of it.” He
stopped. “Fuck.” he said. She looked at him, in his rough, angry face, and he at her. They were alone
together in that moment, she and he and their failure. Xu Mei’s heart monitor kept on beeping.
What now?” she asked. He stomped over to the hospital bed, his heavy boots thudding on the
flooring. At the last second he paused, turning back to her. “You shouldn’t waste your time here.” he
said in a small voice.
“What?”
“We’ve ruined everything.” he said. “This happening to Mei? What happened to Sachiko? It’s
because of me. You too. We’re both bad people, you and I. Both of us don’t deserve anything. But –
but you know what, idiot? Sachiko loves you. I don’t know why, but she does. She’s not in this dump
hooked up to a bunch of machines. It’s not too late. Even if she doesn’t want to talk, she’s there.
Don’t you love her too, hey? Fucking do something worthwhile with your life. Something good.” He
snorted to himself. “Go to her, already. Don’t be such a wallflower.”
‘Go to her’. The sentence remained in the air, a lingering shadow. Mizuki heard it. Her brain
processed what it meant. After a few seconds, staring at him, at Xu Mei, at the two of them together,
she stood up straight. She nodded. “Yes.” She bowed deeply to him. “I will. Thank you.” And she left
Li there with his Mei, with his sadness, and she went to find her own. She was aware of being sweat-
soaked, of being exhausted, of the coffee from this morning now having run out. The staff in the
lobby let her go and the guards watched her walk by. Through all of this she was untouchable. The
cut on her neck had stopped bleeding but there was still blood on her shirt. She went outside,
ignoring it all. The sun shone bright and the sky was blue. Mei was in the hospital and nothing would
change that. Mizuki was responsible and nothing would change that. Maybe, though, if there was
something she could change-
She used the last of her money to take a taxi out of Yugongguan and up into Tenmei, up towards
heaven. There was no need to clean herself. She saw no need to improve. After all this time, after
everything, she was fine being dirty. The town passed her by. She saw a propaganda poster and it
was only a poster, images on paper, as meaningless to her as schoolwork or her father or the word
‘centipede’. Fragments of some other life, some other Mizuki Tachibana who had hidden herself
from the world in a dark crevice, avoiding even the possibility of rescue, who now had been replaced
by this new creature that was her, stood blinking disoriented in the light of a brand-new world.
The taxi rumbled on, Chinese driver smoking and its engine singing to itself, crawling up the
slopes and over Showa and into her childhood, which now was these dismal, sad places, this
throwback world to a state the home islands themselves probably had never really known – it was
all nonsense, she knew, and she had always known. She sat back, thinking of Mei and of Sachiko. The
taxi took her to Vanished Cloud and she thanked the driver and got out. The Suzuki household was
right there, shabby and faded sat in its permanent, comfortable melancholy.
She brushed off the sleeves of her uniform and walked up to the gate. The street was empty.
Mizuki stood there, where so long ago all she had felt was fear and shame and resentment. Now she
did not know what she felt at all. She rang the bell. A voice answered and she was sure now that this
was justice, or karma, or whatever else it was that the Buddha had explained, that which heaven
granted mortals and that now existed for her in this one wonderful moment. It wasn’t Mrs. Suzuki
who had answered or some Kempeitai agent waiting or a vicious centipede demon ready to eat her
but – her voice timid and cracked and yet unmistakable – it was Sachiko. “Hello?” Sachiko had asked.
“Who is it?”
Mizuki held herself, preparing for a moment. Seconds crawled by. Somewhere in an adjacent
street a propaganda truck went along, singing in its machine-voice about ethnic harmony and unity.
“Sachiko.” she said finally. “I’m coming to see you now.”
 16
He watched her lean towards the young man in the cowboy hat and suit and put her hand
sneakily on his crotch, and then as the young man froze, stuck there at the bar in the Red Club under
the neon lights, suddenly powerless at Hana’s perfect assault – she was such a good actress, he saw
– she lifted her painted lips to his ear and whispered something to him. I want you, in Mandarin,
maybe, then presumably the line, let’s go outside – over the music Munekata could hardly hear.
From his side of the bar in his grey western suit and ugly purple shirt he watched but didn’t,
keeping his attention on his whiskey but not really. He glanced over to see her leading the target
along, their eyes meeting through a hundred shadows and moving bodies. He waited ten seconds,
listening to the percussion thud away intertwined with the snaking undercurrent of the synth, and
then set off after them. Easing his way through the crowd he slipped out into the street, catching the
last hint of her bare legs rounding the corner to the gap between the Red Club and the next bar,
where the lanterns didn’t quite reach. He passed the bouncers and fiddled with his trousers, moving
like he was about to lose control of his bladder. And he rushed to the alleyway.
The cowboy was there with her. The both of them shadows within shadows. Munekata crept up
on them. He drew his Nambu from his shoulder bag where it sat next to the camera and the
binoculars. She had put herself against the concrete of the wall so that the cowboy couldn’t see.
Munekata was with them now, so close he could hear the wetness of their lips together, the
cowboy’s fogged-over brain making him mumble absurdities to her. Munekata raised the gun to the
side of the cowboy’s head. He clicked back the safety. The cowboy froze. His hands were still on her,
crudely mid-paw at her blouse, the top four buttons all undone. He stared at her and she at him and
her expression was unrepentant. “Hello.” Munekata said. “Mr. Miyazawa.”
Ogai Miyazawa - a local nobody on the books for two charges of drug-running, ejected from the
Golden Brotherhood triad, known to the Kempeitai. “Away from the girl.” Munekata said. Miyazawa
moved from her, allowing her to remove her back from the wall. She stepped away. Her buttons
were still undone and she was watching Miyazawa with a kind of triumph sketched onto her face. A
few metres from them the pier went on, people talking and laughing in drunken voices, but here
there was peace. Munekata’s gun remained at the cowboy’s temple. “You work with Chen Juhua.”
he said.
Miyazawa shook. “Yeah. I do. But I don’t know anything. Look, are you that crazy kempei-? I don’t
know anything, old man. Honest.”
“You know the boss.” Munekata said. “Chen. You’re on his payroll. And you’re at this pier every
night. You are involved in the drug business.”
Miyazawa was sweating. “That’s – I don’t know anything about that. We’re just drinking buddies.”
Munekata pressed the gun hard into his head. “At least give me a better lie, or I’ll shoot.”
“He’ll do it.” Hana said. “Right through that pretty face of yours, you black society punk.”
“I didn’t-”
“All over the concrete.” Hana said.
“No more chances, Miyazawa.” Munekata said. “Where do they do their business?”
Miyazawa was sweating. “I don’t-”
Munekata now leant into him. “The heroin. Where do they pick it up?”
The cowboy wet himself, pants all dark and dripping suddenly. “There’s a truck.” he said. “Pier
four. Near the fish market. I – I don’t know, old man. Someone goes there to collect it.”
“When?” Munekata growled.
“Tonight!” Miyazawa said. Munekata and Hana exchanged a glance. “Tonight, I swear. Twice a
week at the moment. Two deliveries. One is tonight. Around ten. At the pier. I don’t know anything
else!”
“I believe you.” Munekata said. He smacked Miyazawa in the nose with the pistol and shoved him
over, so that he landed with a splash in the puddle, lying there spread-eagled. But he was still
conscious – he looked up at Munekata and Hana with wide eyes, crimson trickling down his chin. His
cowboy hat had fallen loose and floated upside down beside him in the water. Munekata put a foot
on his leg and held it there, respectable old gentleman’s handmade leather shoe ready to crack bone.
“Mr. Miyazawa.” he said, leaning down. “If you wish to escape this affair unscathed, I would
recommend that you go home and wait for several days to recover from this injury. Whatever occurs
in those days will pass by without touching you. If, however, you emerge from your home during
that period, and involve yourself in what occurs, then we will find out. And whatever happens to
myself or my partner after that, the organisation will be sure to involve itself in cleaning up loose
ends. Please, for your own sake, ensure that you do not make yourself one of them. Do you
understand me?”
Miyazawa nodded, slowly, from the depths of what Munekata recognised as a state of shock, that
grace period where none of it was actual and the real world seemed to be underwater, after the
shell had landed but before the bodies had been identified. “Good.” Munekata said. He moved his
foot. He put the Nambu back into his bag. Then he bowed to the man in the puddle. “Take care of
yourself.”
“We’ll be going.” Hana said, stepping over him, her boot hitting him in the side on the way. They
left him there, in the filthy water with his hat beside him, and quickly let the crowd of Divine Wind
take them. They were washed up at Fortune Street at the start of the pier, the lanterns overhead
and the banners sparkling, all sorts of people between here and there and nobody obviously on their
trail. From by his side Hana let out a breath. “Wow.” she said, snorting. “Wow, no wonder you guys
enjoy it so much!”
He went into his pocket for a smoke and found nothing. “You’re making fun of my work.” he said.
“Yes.” she said. “Don’t you think it’s so dumb? This game of ‘I’m tougher than you, grr’, and
whatever?”
“It is. But it’s the world we made.”
“Well, let’s hope it gets unmade quickly. That was fun. Let’s get a drink!”
He checked his watch. “It’s eight-thirty. I have an hour and a half.”
She rounded on him. “You have an hour and a half? We have an hour and a half. I’m going with
you.”
“I don’t want to put you in danger.”
“Oh, like making me kiss that gross Jap wasn’t danger?”
“Hana.” he said, firmly. It had been her idea, he wanted to say but didn’t. Cars went by on the
road, headlights illuminating the both of them every few seconds, he in his suit and she in her
honeypot outfit unfittingly sexy. His leg throbbed at him and told him – pleaded with him - to take
off the frame that was choking it to death. She sighed, taking out a cigarette of her own and lighting
it, and blew smoke high into the air, a trail of it reaching up to kiss the blossoming moon. The smell
of it was an agonising temptation. “Are those Golden Bat?” he asked. She nodded. “You should be
careful.” he said. “Those are sometimes laced with heroin.”
“Not the ones I get.” she said. “Imports. I’m not stupid, Munekata. I’m a survivor.” They looked at
one another. “You pay for my drink, alright?” she ordered. They went into a nearby bar on Fortune
Street, across that invisible boundary so that it was an all-Chinese place, muffled and smoky and
dark, a thousand cigarettes and a hundred rattling dice games, tables laid out like an old west saloon
but dressed all over in plastic dragons and phoenixes, the chairs lime green and several of the fans
broken. She ordered a type of erguotou he hadn’t heard of. He, with work to do later, opted simply
for a whiskey. They found a table near the toilets, the only place free, in a spot too cramped and too
full of horrible fragrant tobacco smoke, so that they could see nothing but each other. Her face
floated ghostly before him. The rest of her was only a loose impression beyond. She lifted up her
glass. “Well, old man.” she said. Here’s to us. Lieutenant Munekata and Sergeant Takamori.”
He did the same. “To us.” They drank together. He put his glass down, having sipped, and she
after drinking most of her erguotou in one slammed hers onto the table, coughing. “Fuck!” she said.
“That’s good. That’s like home. Did I ever tell you about home, old man?”
“No.”
 She crossed her arms for a moment. “I’m not going to!” she said. “Home is my place. Not yours.
But I’ll tell you that we were all communists. That I am a communist.” She grabbed his hand and
forced it into the shape of a gun and put it to her forehead. “That you should kill me.” Her eyes
didn’t waver. “Go on.” she said. “Shoot.”
Munekata pulled his hand free. “Miss Takamori, excuse me, but that is in poor taste.”
“No, it isn’t.” She went back to her drink. “I will tell you something. Not about where I come from.
But do you remember when we first met?” She smiled at him just as she had then. The moment was
carved deep into his memory. A night at The Golden Dragonfly like any other, with at his usual seat
he ready to dive into his whiskey. “You came up to me.” he said. A weight was there in his voice he
hadn’t intended.
He found himself still half in that long-expired moment – the smoke in the air, the roar of the
crowd, and all of it descending into nothing as she sat next to him, in her leopard-print jacket and
floral shirt, jean shorts and battered trainers. “You said to me: ‘Yo, geezer. Do you have a smoke?’.”
She nodded. “And I said,” he remembered it perfectly, the tone he’d spoken in, the dead voice of a
nobody ready to keep on drinking forever, “’I don’t smoke.’” He paused, relishing the phantom
sensations of yesterday, the emotion what she’d said next had given to him: hope? Something like
that. Interest in the world. “And you said, ‘alright, alright. Gimme a drink, then.’ And you smiled at
me just like that.”
Hana drank her erguotou. She was leant forward arm on the table, her face rapt. “Like what?”
Munekata loosed a long, exhausted sigh. He thought. “Like…like you knew everything that was
going on in the world, and in my head, and you understood how foolish it all was. I…I find it difficult
to express.” He drank his whiskey and it stung him. “Do you know the story of Angulimala, the
murderer?” he asked. She shook her head. “It’s a Buddhist parable. A man was sent on a pointless
errand of murder by his teacher, to collect human fingers. He killed many people and took their
fingers on this order, until he was no more than a bandit, a base animal – his very name meant
‘finger necklace’. He met the Buddha, Shakyamuni, however, and he was saved. This savage, violent
man, drifting lost in the world of murder and death, was saved only by a meeting with the poor
Shakyamuni, in his robe with his shaved head.” They were sat in quietude, Hana listening carefully.
He drank up. “I felt that you robbed me of all of my obsessions, as Shakyamuni did to Angulimala.
With only a smile.”
He waited as she watched him. She took her glass and drank again and put it down on the table,
and her lips twisted and her eyes lit up and she giggled, her hair falling into her eyes. She wiped it
aside with a hand. “Oh, man.” she said. “Come on. Let me tell you what I was gonna say, alright? You
got all sweet on me and you fucked it up. I was gonna tell you that when we met, I was gonna
blackmail you.”
Munekata felt the pain in his leg suddenly. Its dull and constant throb. “What?”
She met him without shame. “I was low on cash. Hadn’t had a good mark in a while. My whole
plan was to you know, find a respectable government gentleman, which people told me that man
with the bad moustache at the bar was, and then to fuck you, get you all naked, and then take some
pictures. I’d just gotten shot of some other client and I was getting tired of that kind of game, and I
had a little disposable camera in my bag – one of those British ones – and I was gonna make you
expose yourself with, like, maybe with my panties in your face, or something, or sucking on my toes
or whatever. And that would have been such a sweet deal! A noble Japanese officer exposed visiting
a Chinese prostitute. I thought you were married. You know? I thought that I could have asked for
half of your salary a month, no questions asked, as long as those pictures existed. I could have
enjoyed the rest of my life with that money, doing nothing but drawing and hanging out here with
my fake ID and my fake Japanese name, with nobody ever knowing anything about me.” Now she
faltered. He saw it in the slight downturn of her lips. “That was my plan.” she said.
“So why didn’t you do it?” he asked. The conversations of everyone else went on around them,
blissfully unaware. Hana smiled miserably. “You weren’t married.”
“That’s all?”
 “That’s all.” she said. “And anyway, after a while I kind of enjoyed the game. It was nice to feel
wanted by someone I hated. It was like a kind of power.”
“Hated?”
“Well,” she said, rolling her eyes away into the crowd around them, “we know each other now.
The game’s all ruined. I don’t know what happens next.”
“We could keep on knowing each other.” he said.
“Fuck off, you old fart. You’re a decade older than me.” Another pause. She, Chinese, speaking
Japanese bluntly and rudely like a Chinese would, obscuring herself with a Japanese name, and he, a
Japanese who felt nothing about Japan, who would sooner or later die here in this Ersatz-place, this
country that was not real, that had no soul, that was as far from ideas of harmony or righteousness
or the Way as was possible. Creatures assembled by history. The old bushido notion came to him,
that he would love for himself to end his life on the ground before her, his guts spilled out onto the
cold soil, steaming in the winter air.
Romantic delusions of youth. She was shaped by violence and he was shaped by the arrogance
that had created that violence. Hana leant forward with her elbow on the table. She smiled and now
there was shyness to her, a shyness that was not the Hana he had known that he had created for
himself. It repelled and seduced him at once. “I don’t want to blackmail you for money now.” she
said. “It’s too late for that. Anyway, drink up.” They were there for the rest of the hour, she with her
baijiu and he with whiskey, and after the first twenty minutes she was drunk and he had never seen
her drunk before.
She cursed him and his country, and she told him jumbled-up things about her past, nothing that
meant anything to him but that plainly meant much to her – her friend or relative who she only
called ‘my older sister’, her memory of eating with her family in their living room, wearing a qipao
and going for a walk in the town square at festival time under the red lanterns. She talked of leaving
Fengtian, although without any context, leaving him to wonder if it had been a choice or if she had
been chased out by soldiers or by police action or by bandits or by poverty or violence, or by any of
the other million things that forced Chinese to up and move because of the whims of the state and
the settlers it served. She had mentioned being a communist earlier and now she mentioned it again,
singing ‘The Internationale’ in Mandarin for him until he told her to shush because even today there
were people sensitive to such things.
She didn’t want to shut up, she told him – she wanted to sing, she said, and she wanted to keep
on singing. “Nobody ever told you to shut up, did they?” she said, wobbling, angry at him but not
only at him. “Nobody ever told Lieutenant Munekata he had to shut his mouth if he wanted to stay
alive. How does that old number of yours go, huh? The Survey Unit Anthem.” She started to sing
again, in a rousing masculine voice. “Marching through hell, the dogs of war taste blood.” She
scowled. “What did you people ever know about hell? Cosy in your armoured suits, all the bullets
bouncing off. Telling people like me to shut up or else you’d open fire. You prick - I’m tired of
shutting up. I’m so tired of speaking this fucking dogshit language, acting like one of you dogshit
people.” She stopped, a shrunken thing amidst smoke and light, regarding not him but suddenly the
back of her hand, as if the honesty of what she’d just said now had shocked even her. She looked
away from it, snorted at him. “That’s why we can’t keep knowing each other. Because in six months I
won’t have to shut up anymore. It’ll be Jahr null.”
“I don’t care.” he said. “Miss Takamori, you can sing all the red songs you want. You can use your
real name. You can do whatever you want.”
She was red-faced. “You Japanese aren’t going to let us. The people you know, the world you
know…you think this handover, this independence, this great revolution, is going to happen without
a fight? The Kempeitai, the Kwantung Army, the Chinese collaborators, the settler families with their
glorious Japanese blood spilled against the Russians a hundred years ago bullshit…they won’t accept
us. Already the soldiers are muttering about these things.”
“It isn’t important what they mutter.” he said. “History has moved on without them.”
 “They believe they are history.” she said. “Do you know why the Survey Unit was abolished,
anyway?”
He searched her crimson face for the answer she wanted and he couldn’t find it. “Well,” he began,
“because of the Adachihara scandal, wasn’t it? I believe there was a memorandum indicating that
certain units under the influence of the general were plotting to-”
She shook her head. “Nah. It wasn’t really about that. Don’t you get what the Survey Unit was? It
was multicultural. There were war criminals of every race under one banner. And unlike the Imperial
Army, it was competent. Well-run. Good at suppressing us commies and ordering the Chinese back
to work and keeping the mines open and the factory floors bustling and the neon lights humming. It
was Manchukuo! The real thing. Ethnic solidarity. In a fucked-up way. But the Japanese couldn’t
even allow that. They didn’t own it, do you understand? They didn’t want anything here to exist that
they couldn’t control, even a little.”
She sighed. “The Japanese wouldn’t let their own trained dogs exercise any independence. Why
would they give the rest of us coolies something like that? The war is going to start up again. Your
war.” She slumped forward, resting on one elbow, her hair loose in her face as it was after sex.
Through lidded eyes she told him the truth. “Let’s be realistic. Me and you. We’re strangers. I don’t
have to hide anymore, next month. I can be a communist, and Chinese. Myself. If – when – the war
resumes, you’re going to have to betray everything you’ve ever known or done just to keep talking
to me. You know that, right? If you hang out with me – the person I’d like to be - you’re going to
dishonour yourself for a woman who hates you, whose company you pay for, whose real name you
don’t even know. Isn’t that pathetic?”
Munekata sipped at his whiskey for too long, hiding himself behind it. Finally he placed the glass
down. “I would like to know your real name.” he said, trembling.
Hana paused. Her face was unreadable. “I can’t give you it.”
“I understand.” he said.
She seemed to shrink before him. “I know you do.” Her glass was empty and she looked at it,
noticing it for the first time in a few minutes. “I think I’ll go home now. I’m a little tipsy.”
“I can escort you.”
“No. I mean, no, thank you. I’ll be fine. You have work to do.” It was as if her own feelings had
burned her out. She sloped off of the chair, standing. “I’ll be fine.”
“I must insist, Miss Takamori-”
“Keizo.” she said sharply. She leant over him with her brow furrowed. “When you’re finished
being a hero, come over to my place. Bring some more booze with you. The expensive kind. Let’s
keep on learning about each other. I want to hear your war stories. You didn’t tell me them last time.
If you want to know me, you have to tell me. You have to tell me everything you’ve done. Everything.
Do you understand?” He stared, unsure of what to say. She didn’t look away. “And stay safe, you got
that?” Finally he nodded. She put her hand against his, a tentative, sheepish gesture, as confused as
her expression. It was warm, suggesting much but saying little. Then she was gone, hurrying quickly
into the crowd before he could stop her and dissolving into other bodies.
He coughed, feeling sensation return. His other hand was on his leg under the table and as she
had touched him it had been gripping his thigh so tight it hurt. He could see her in the street, rushing
home with that same urgency, that same anxiety that had so gripped him. He muttered the name of
the Buddha and checked his watch and found that she had been right. It was time to work. He had
his Nambu and his leg brace and his life, and that was all he needed in this moment. Afterwards
would be afterwards. For now there was the hunt. He finished his drink too and got up and
shouldered his bag and left for a stroll down Harbour Road, towards pier four and his prey.
The name of Ogai Miyazawa had been in the records room, which he’d returned to after their trip
to the Suzuki place. It had been buried amidst a plethora of old drug-related files from the
investigation started but abandoned by Lieutenant Ishihara, the squat, sweating sake drinker who
had retired early. These drug-related files had mentioned nothing of Jiang Guangming or Li Huangqi
but did mention Chen Juhua as someone with ambitions to displace the old triads, to take advantage
of the gaps in the market opened by the collapse of the yakuza.
Miyazawa’s name had been in there twice and from there Munekata had found his personal file,
which as befitting a DISHARMONIOUS ELEMENT was pages long, detailing his habits, ancestry, vices,
sexual habits and key relationships. Now he, Munekata, had the tail of this heroin shipping operation,
which was the means by which he could punish Jiang Guangming. Karashima had ordered him to
focus only on pleasing Akira Suzuki – he understood now that there was no way to do this, that
victory could only be grasped by leaping into the tiger’s jaws.
It had come to him when he had been in the room with Hana and with Sachiko Suzuki. He had
understood what Li Huangqi had been lying about, what had made Xu Mei tell him that Li was a
virgin to clear his name – that Li had been there and had given her up. Li had abandoned her for his
girlfriend, probably himself drunk and out of his mind, and had left Sachiko with strange men who
had taken advantage of her. He was tremendously guilty – but not of the crime. And that the crime
itself had taken place outside of the pier area was the key. Munekata had overlooked this possibility,
blinded by his prejudices. His mistake had been assuming the assault had happened at the Red Club,
in the harbour, in the Chinese part of town.
That was what being Japanese had conditioned him to believe, that such things were common in
the vice of Yugongguan. He had focused on the club and those who had been there, Li and Xu. But
Sachiko Suzuki had told him about the place where she had been taken and about being thrown
outside into the grass, about walking along Harbour Road. Jiang claimed to have been with Chen
Juhua that night, and he was sure that wasn’t a lie, that the two of them had been at the same
lamentable event. As to which one had actually committed the act, Munekata was sure the key lay in
one detail, that Sachiko had remembered that one of them had had a gold tooth, which Jiang had
and Chen Juhua did not. Why had she remembered the gold tooth exactly? If her memory of that
night was so poor, then the tooth must have had some impact on her. He kissed me long and hard,
she had said. He had smiled so much.
This was all nothing but intuition, which Munekata knew was not enough. Jiang did have a
Kempeitai file – it was as spotless, as he’d suggested. He was a shadow, only present at all from the
shady business that Chen and Li and Miyazawa were involved in. Munekata knew that he had no
evidence, that the logic he had followed through Sachiko’s story would not be enough for Karashima.
Drugs, however – that would give the major enough of an excuse to bring in a firing squad.
Munekata had a disposable camera in his bag and he hoped he would find Jiang at the drop-off
tonight. That was his plan.
He and Hana weren’t so different after all, he supposed.
So it was that as an old man on an evening walk he wandered along past the fish market, only five
or ten minutes from the pier, not as far out as Chen Family Haulage but enough so that the sound of
the endless party was muted, replaced by the bustle of machinery and the drunken voices of tired
sailors and harbour crew working through the evening. He descended the cliffside road to the
entrance, to the broken old sign and the guardhouse now at sea level.
There were six piers, long shapes dressed in darkness, crowded with trucks obscure in the
descending gloom. Workmen moved on piers one and two. Three was occupied by a navy patrol
boat. His watch told him it was now five to ten. The waves lapped against the shore. He walked up to
the concrete superstructure, striding past the night guard in his booth, and slipped in between truck
after truck, his shoes slipping upon the wet tarmac. Dockhands saw him and he slipped effortlessly
into a tipsy stagger, mumbling in Mandarin, and they looked away.
Each pier was framed by old Chinese brick warehouses which shrouded them in shadow, and
each one had on the right-hand side an alleyway between warehouses in which it was possible to
hide only metres from the pier itself. That would do, he thought. A truck came in and then came out.
He squatted in the nearest alleyway, Nambu in his jacket pocket and camera in his hand and the
binoculars still around his neck. The vast ocean was dark to one side of the docks, distant lighthouse
a pinprick, the boats moving on the horizon barely visible. He waited there, everything stinking of
brine and of rot, and he listened to the buoy bells singing in their lonely way and the tired
complaints of the workmen who moved haltingly around the darkening streets, the waves that still
came up and lapped at the harbour walls from below, gentle but insistent. His watch said one
minute to ten. He lapped at his forehead with his sleeve and it came back dark with sweat.
At ten there was a rumble from afar and he saw a truck coming down the street and easing its
way onto the pier. He stayed where he was, checking it through the binoculars as it came under the
pier’s muted lights. It was a Mitsubishi, khaki-coloured. It pulled up on the pier with its headlights
staring out into the void, engine mumbling to itself. A figure disembarked from the right-hand cabin
door, away from him, and walked out in front of the truck. They were in military fatigues, with a
Type 81-S assault rifle, the kind issued to naval garrison troops.
Munekata couldn’t see the uniform properly. He assumed it was also navy garrison-issue, which
meant not only was Jiang and Chen’s business being conducted with military assent but that it had
enough clout for the military to send its own men as errand boys. Sweat trickled down the back of
his neck. Wait for me, Hana, he thought. He inched closer, peering at the truck, searching for
markings he could use to track it. Was it safe to leave cover and try to check the license plate? As he
was pondering this another figure emerged from the docks. They walked over at a casual pace, in
coat and trousers. He saw once they hit the light of the pier that it was Jiang Guangming. Jiang
sloped up with his hands in his pockets. The soldier turned to him. “Evening.” Jiang said with
exaggerated friendly Mandarin. “You’re new. Where’s Kaneda?”
“It’s all in the truck.” the soldier said. His speech was gruff and weighed down by a heavy
Japanese accent. “Check.”
Jiang gestured to it. Another figure emerged from the gloom, a broad man in a cowboy hat and a
white vest, carrying a crude old hunting shotgun. Chen Juhua? No, Munekata thought – hired muscle,
at a glance a Korean. It was clear that this new element in Ryujin’s crime scene really was a
multiethnic venture. The newcomer clambered into the rear of the truck, presumably checking
inventory, leaving Jiang and the soldier alone in the dim light. Munekata could see them – he could
see Jiang’s gold tooth as he smiled. “Lotta haul this week.” Jiang said coolly. “Your boss is too
generous.” The soldier did not reply. “Is he scared, because of that cop hanging about? Trying to
offload it all on us as soon as possible?” Jiang pretended to scowl. “Hey. You got a problem, Jap?”
“No.” the soldier said, with clear difficulty. He looked out to the water. “No problem.”
“Good.”
The other man leant out of the rear of the truck. “All here, boss.” he said in kyowa-go.
“Take it. We’ll leave the private here to his evening.” He returned to the truck. “Got a date later,
soldier?”
“Get out of here.” the soldier spat. “Coolie.” The other man emerged with two duffel bags, one
under each arm. “One second.” Jiang said. Munekata watched, waiting. Suddenly something sharp
and small was pressed against his back. A gun barrel. Jiang glanced over at where he was hidden and
saw Munekata there and there was a gleam in his eye. “First,” he said, voice full of savage glee, “we
have to deal with your comrade.”
“Move.” the man behind him with the gun against his back said, and Munekata moved, standing
up and leaving the alleyway. He was marched down the street and to the pier and the truck. Jiang
watched and as Munekata was brought close he gave a warm, narrow smile. “Mr. Munekata.” he
said. The soldier looked from Munekata to Jiang. “It’s good to see you again.”
“Drop the gun.” the voice at his back said. He did so, letting the Nambu clatter to the ground. The
truck’s idle engine went on grumbling and the sea hit the shore and the buoys went on with their
lonely ritual clanging. “Who the hell is this?” the soldier demanded in Japanese.
“Lieutenant Keizo Munekata, Kempeitai.” Munekata said. “I’m doing my job, private.” It was a
naval garrison uniform after all, he saw – and this man, youthful and grim-faced, was just the kind of
fanatical settler that Hana had warned him about. A thug who’d chosen the Kwantung Army after an
education at a proper segregated settler school, a true believer who would perhaps have gone to
Korea but now that the fighting was over was stuck here, running errands with gangsters for some
obscure criminal purpose that even the Kempeitai hadn’t known about.
Or at least, that Munekata’s office hadn’t known about. Ishihara had come close, perhaps – but it
was all too late now. The soldier raised his rifle and the vested man with the shotgun also aimed his
weapon at Munekata for good measure and the main with the pistol in Munekata’s back kept it
there and yet Jiang, the boss, remained unarmed and unaggressive, a genial expression on his face.
“While you were enjoying yourself with your girlfriend, Miyazawa came to me.” he explained. “Of
course he did. C’mon. You’re not that scary, you know. Maybe a decade ago you were probably used
to putting the fear of God into nobodies like us, but not anymore. Triads, yakuza, politicians, even
the secret police – power’s flowed out from you bastards to us. The next generation of proud
Manchukuoans.”
He reached out with one hand and touched Munekata’s cheek. Munekata did not flinch. Jiang’s
fingers were hard with calluses and dark with scars. “Oh,” he said, withdrawing. “Actually, I don’t
think you’re even here with the Kempeitai, are you? You’ve worried my boys with the spectre of a
Kempeitai investigation, but then if you were here as a kempei, then why would you have enlisted
the help of some dumb whore to use as bait? That’s not really the Kempeitai’s style, is it?”
Munekata stared. “You-”
“I got busy asking questions and getting answers.” Jiang said. “I thought you might keep at it,
even after we got that kid who was squealing on us for you. I didn’t believe that would make you
stop, so I made sure to do my own intelligence gathering.” He stood in front of Munekata, looking
him up and down with a thin sneer, arms crossed. “Your leg looks better now, at least. Danger’s
good for the soul, ain’t it?” He turned back to the soldier. “Don’t worry. This is nothing to do with
you. This man might be Japanese, but he’s not with anyone who matters.” He gestured with a wave.
“Get out of here. You never saw him, right?”
The soldier met Munekata’s eyes. “Right.” he said slowly.
“May the emperor reign for ten thousand years.” Munekata said in a low voice. The soldier
however went back to the car, clambering into the cabin, and gunned the engine. Jiang, the vest, the
man with the gun and Munekata watched it go, retreating back to the dock road and out of sight, its
headlights gradually disappearing around a corner and then the rest of its bulk with them. Munekata
was grabbed and turned to face the three of them – the vest and Jiang and the other man, a short,
balding Chinese in shorts and flip-flops carrying an old American M911 pistol. The two others stood
back with their weapons ready, while Jiang contented himself with waiting about a metre away,
hands now behind his back, eying Munekata as if he were some kind of interesting animal.
There were no more rumbling engines, no more voices. The buoys’ bells out in the water seemed
to be the only sound in the world. “My instincts tell me to kill you.” Jiang said. “I know your type.
Hopeless cases from the dying regime –substance abusers, perverts, degenerate elements – out on a
limb, with nothing to lose, chasing one last high. Trying to get their dicks hard one last time. You’re
on a vendetta here, aren’t you? Maybe you were friends with that Ishihara. Something like that. I’m
not going to kill you yet. But I’m still going to enjoy myself before you die.”
Munekata studied Jiang’s easy face, the cruelty of his lackadaisical expression. “Why is the
military working with you?” he asked.
“What?” Jiang was wearing fingerless gloves of dark old leather and now he raised one hand and
he flexed his fingers. He jabbed a thumb at Munekata. “You’re interrogating me?”
“I want to know.”
“I thought you’d have figured out something like that anyway.” He scoffed. “Aren’t you the great
detective? A new era. Equal government for all. The official withdrawal of the Kwantung Army, the
Kempeitai, and the ‘military advisors’ who still try to tell the Concordia Association what to do.
They’re on their own next year, those settler fossils, they and their pissant little imperial army, which
is barely loyal, anyway, against a whole country of Chinese and Koreans and Mongols and Manchu
and whatever who’ll all be allowed to vote them out. Now, that really would be a terrible situation
for you Japanese.”
 Munekata thought about this. He thought about Ishihara, about the triads and the Chinese and
the look of sullen contempt on Xu Mei’s face. “What do you mean?”
Jiang grinned. “Come on, Sherlock. Don’t you think it’d be terrible, if those Untermenschen were
given the vote? Think of the Kwantung and the Navy! Think of the businessmen in the home islands
zaibatsu, all sore they might have to compete with logs, human toilets, slave labourers, whatever!
But now, if there’s a drug crisis here and there, well, isn’t that a perfect example of why the Chinese
shouldn’t be allowed to govern themselves? The kind of thing a smart politician could whip up fear
with?” He shrugged. “I mean, that’s my guess. I’m a lowly street thug - whatever the military’s goal is,
I don’t know and I don’t care. Anyway, here we are. Is that the answer you wanted? Did you solve
the mystery, lieutenant? Or do you want revenge for something?”
Jiang patted his thighs with his hands. “I gave you my theory. So c’mon. Tell me. Give me your
motivation. Give me your tragic past. Before we get to the fun part.” He crossed his arms, expectant.
“C’mon, tell me what your deal is.”
“Sachiko Suzuki.” Munekata answered. At once Jiang’s smirk was gone. He remained in his pose,
still waiting, but all of the joy had drained from his face. “Actually,” Munekata said, staring straight
at him, “I don’t know anything about your business, or your drugs, or you.” Behind Jiang the other
men exchanged a glance. Munekata raised the sword above his head, over his defenceless foe. “I’m
here to punish the man who raped Sachiko Suzuki.” he said.
Jiang’s face was iron. He uncrossed his arms. He strode over to Munekata and hit him. The blow
came with the heavy inevitability of a speeding truck far-off then suddenly close, a fist slamming into
the space below Munekata’s eye. Pain exploded in his cheek. He staggered back, crippled leg barely
holding within the brace. Jiang came after him, his boot speeding through the air and hitting
Munekata in the gut. Munekata doubled over, winded, to find a hand on his head and a knee
thrusting up towards him. It cracked against his skull and he was flung back, everything a blur, and
the pain was omnipresent. He landed sprawled out on the concrete staring up at the sky and lay
there breathing. Jiang appeared over him, staring down, mouth half-open in an animal snarl. His gold
tooth gleamed in the dark. “Go fuck your mother, you stupid kempei.”
“Boss.” the vested man said. Jiang turned back, snarling. “Boss, we should go.”
“Right.” He was sweating. He spat at Munekata, a blob of phlegm landing with a splat on
Munekata’s front. “You say that name to me again and I’ll kill you twice as slow. It wasn’t like that.
Whatever you think happened between us, it’s our fucking business.”
Munekata lay there. “You hurt her.” he said. “You drugged her.”
Jiang was tense all over. But then he paused. The two clenched fists did not quite retain their
tightness. “She came onto me.” he said. “Look.”
“You raped her.” Munekata said.
Jiang glared at him. “She – I couldn’t have. She was asking for it. She wanted it.”
Munekata remained still. “No. She didn’t.”
Now the tautness resumed. Jiang leant down. “Oh yeah? You know that, do you, you fucking cop?
Where’d you get all this bravado from, huh, you fucking Jap faggot?”
Munekata smiled. “Out on the plains.” he said. He moved or tried to.
“You’re some kind of hero, then?” Jiang said. He loomed over Munekata ready to strike. “What’s
in it for you, huh? Why the fuck do you care about what happened between me and Suzuki?” The
buoys clanged and there was the sound of an engine again, now only a single vehicle smaller than a
truck coming closer from afar. His own doom, he supposed. He looked up at Jiang’s thuggish face
with its buzzcut and dark skin and wretched deep-set eyes, and at the sky beyond with all its
glittering stars, another world full of shimmering possibility hidden beyond all the ugliness of this
one. “Evil must be punished without mercy,” he tried to say, and the boot was upon his face before
he had even finished the sentence.
 17
Hana wasn’t actually that drunk but she felt it, and she was sick with anticipation and as well she
was wondering also what she had done wrong, to end up living so wretched a life. She thought of
her parents who had given her a gun when she had been a child – five, or eight, or some other age –
and told her that with a gun it was possible to liberate the whole country and that that would be her
duty, that one day all of Manchukuo would stand up by itself, and it would rejoin the motherland
and all Chinese would live together in peace. An argument that had once happened between her
and Ma Zhengming, her old neighbour from Yugongguan when she’d first come into town, before
she’d made her way to Mrs. Abe – how’s it feel, hiding like that, being all nice and cosy with the Jap
bastards? Feels like money, you stupid cunt! She was lost in herself, trapped within the past that had
suddenly re-emerged coming in through a leak sprung in her vessel, history that had surged in
without warning so that now she felt like she was drowning in it. And all because of the old man and
because she had decided to be happy.
She wondered if that was what happiness was, if it was simply reaching a point of surrender. A
lifetime of dealing with everything and of refusing to trust or love or care about anyone, even herself,
and now she was exhausted and he was something that she enjoyed, that brought her some kind of
feeling. She would let him close enough to know her but not to know her really, she would taunt him
forever and make fun of him and hate him and mock him and belittle him. She would hear about all
the innocents he had killed and the crimes he had committed and he would beg her for forgiveness
and she would never ever forgive him. And yet-
“What a thing to betray the noble cause of communism for.” she said to herself, a little drunk
after all. Waiting for him in her underwear, not her usual no-effort to hell with you but purple, lacey,
the kind of thing that she had bought a few years ago for a date but never worn because she didn’t
date, because she was tired and full of anger at all these people, at all the people in the world. She
lay there on her bed imagining it. Wobbly, useless Munekata, the melted, scarred, crippled last
vestige of her enemy, kissing her and holding her like a lover and not like the owner of a product or
the purchaser of a service. She imagined his worn hands, imagined her own hands on his scarred
flesh – scarred? Where did all those scars come from?
How many of her comrades, how many Chinese, had he killed with his sword and gun and his fists,
and how many had he spread out on the ground and split open and tortured and wounded? Too
much, she told herself. Forget it, she told herself. But she was thinking and she couldn’t help it
because she was alone and dependent on someone else and she didn’t know how to do that. There
were plenty of escape routes – she had pictures of him, actually, taken while he’d slept, so blackmail
might still have been an option. And the others: she could take a train and disappear, or she could
stab him in his sleep and in some vague way get revenge for her slaughtered comrades, or choke
him to death and cut off his dick for fun, or she could just go back to asking for money and making
him hate her and once more live in that comfortable place of knowing no one and caring about
nothing.
But she did care, didn’t she? She cared about Sachiko Suzuki, useless Japanese kid who didn’t
deserve it, who had looked at she and Munekata in that specific way, who had worn the same empty
face as all those other sisters of Hana’s who had gotten into ugly situations with soldiers or gangsters
out there – she cared about the Chinese here in Ryujin, who she had put a considerable amount of
money towards, at first only as a kind of pettiness, to funnel Munekata’s cash towards the Chinese,
then, realising that he was no fanatic but only a loser, she had begun to think of enjoying it, of
helping those little people down there, who still lived honestly.
She cared about Chen Jintian, who did not live honestly, who had tried to connect with her in a
small and perversely honest way, who now she had betrayed a little. But caring for Munekata was
different. She was not sure she could bring herself to do it even though she was, quite obviously,
beginning to. Her mother would not have approved – would have slapped her and told her to focus
only on the revolution, on final victory.
 Hana lay back and sipped at her erguotou. It was an old bottle from years ago which she had
bought for the night she would kill herself, when they reinstituted the anti-pollution ordinances and
drove her out once more, when the crackdown inevitably came. She had planned to die when that
happened. Instead it hadn’t and the anti-pollution ordinances had remained repealed and she was
here and the Japanese were there and like liquids in a jar these two things were bound to meld if
things kept on stumbling forward in this way. Did she want that? “Stupid questions.” she told herself,
in her mother’s voice. “Always asking stupid questions.”
Next door Akiyama was back with her soldier, telling him how handsome he was and how good it
felt. Hana hoped she’d shut up by the time Munekata got here. She was overcome by a sudden
feeling of mediocrity, an awareness of how insufficient this was, even for him. Please come to the
hotel I squat in with all my prostitute friends and drink with me in my tiny room and talk about war
crimes with me and don’t worry, just try to ignore the sounds of my neighbour pretending to have
an orgasm. After everything, this was her grand declaration of humanity! She went to under the bed
and found the old Mauser, the gun she’d taken from the family home. She held it in her hands.
Shooting Munekata and then herself was always an option, another type of grand declaration. Dying
gloriously as a good martyr should.
The gun was heavy in her hands. She cleaned it twice a month, stripping it bare and oiling each
part and then reloading it and placing it back beneath the mattress. Once angry and drunk and
thinking of how it felt to have that bastard that fucking bastard coloniser inside of her his horrible
filthy fucking cock using her she’d gone down to the beach below the town and aimed it at the
endless horizon of dark water that was the rest of her life ahead of her and fired it and the recoil had
nearly broken her wrist.
The idea had always been using it against any of them, the bastard colonisers, and making her
mark upon their world, reminding them of reality. They were so isolated on their settler-farms and in
their settler-towns, unaware of the mountains of corpses their prosperity rested upon, or perhaps
aware but, in that typical imperialist way, incapable of addressing it – they’re scared, she thought.
They’re scared of what we’ll do to them. And the Chinese are excited, nervous but apprehensive at a
world of unfolding possibilities, and Munekata isn’t scared and I’m not excited and neither of us can
really conceive of anything better or worse than this.
Next month the government would begin to lift restrictions on Chinese moving to settler districts.
It would be true that she could then apply to actually live in Ryujin under her real name, which now
she didn’t use even when she was down the road with the Chinese, who except for the Chen family
all took her as a kindly Japanese Samaritan – it was true that this was good, that she sensed that this
was good, and yet she wondered: what would happen to Hana Takamori? Hana had never stabbed
anyone, had never seen a dead body. Hana had not watched the Survey Unit fire their guns into
corpses until they were nothing but crimson slurry. Hana was a person. The thing that had become
Hana was only a blood-soaked revenant, the remainder of a finished war, wandering all over
Manchukuo looking for peace. The best thing would have been for things to stay as they were.
Manchukuo would exist unjustly forever, built on death, and Hana and Munekata would stay as
pathetic client and useless whore and they could then go on in that way until the Soviets or Germans
dropped a missile on them. Her fingers held the gun, caressing its surface.
The harsh sound of her telephone ringing roused her. She turned to it, cheap plastic thing on the
windowsill, and lifted it up. “Hello?”
“Miss Takamori.” It was Jintian. His voice was heavy with strain. It carried some kind of
exhaustion that was dragging it down that was new. She didn’t trust things that were new. “Are you
busy?” he asked.
Hana thought long and hard about this for two seconds. “I mean – I might be, later.” she said.
“I’m not doing anything right now.”
“Good.” Jintian said. “I wonder, could we meet tonight?”
“Meet?” she repeated. “Forgive me, but it’s very late.”
 “I know, I know. But…it’s quite serious.” That strangeness to his voice again. “Can we meet?” he
asked.
“Where?”
“How about at the temple? I need to talk to you. It’s about my brother.” Hana waited a second.
She lifted up the Mauser with her free hand, aiming it forward. Her index finger curled around the
trigger. “Hana?” he said.
“Very well.” she said, tightening her finger and blowing an imaginary hole into the wall. “I’ll see
you there in fifteen minutes.”
“Thank you.” Jintian said. “I’m sorry…sorry for the inconvenience. Goodbye.”
“Goodbye.” she said, and he hung up. Going to her wardrobe she dressed herself in casual
clothes, a t-shirt and jeans, and over that she put her jacket, her mother’s old army jacket from
Fengtian, a little torn and a little crumpled and a little burnt here and there, held together with
stitching on the right sleeve, with pale patches marking where all the communist insignia had been
torn away. Over that was the long red scarf, moth-eaten and faded, that they had given her as a girl.
Designed for a man – on her small frame it was like the red the Japanese swaddled their tiny Dizang
statues with.
She put the Mauser inside the jacket. Finally she took her silver chain and put it around her neck
and she tied her hair back and went for her long lace-up boots. Checking the mirror she looked
tougher than she felt but that was fine. She drank a shot of erguotou. “Long live the Communist
Party of Manchukuo.” she mumbled to herself. And she made the decision to maybe go get involved
in something violent. Akiyama was finished next door. Immersed in post-transactional quiet. Hana
lingered there, wondering about saying something. Then she did not and she went outside.
The danger of the outfit weighed down on her. It was almost midnight and the streets were close
to empty up here in Tenmei, where respectable Japanese had to work the next day. There were still
late-night sentries and she was still wearing a costume that resembled – that was – the style of the
old Second Insurgency reds. She walked uphill past a propaganda banner, smiling children
representing Manchukuo and Japan playing on the sunlit plains, both with unnatural expressions and
dead black eyes. A sentry saw her and peered over but then went back to studying the barrel of his
gun. Another was asleep, sat in a folding chair on the pavement with his head down and his rifle at
his side. Hana stood there for a second beneath a row of lanterns. The neon signage at his back
dwarfed the sentry, an advertisement in a shop window for Viagra with a cartoon of Superman next
to him, great big idiot white man with a mighty grin. The soldier sat there slumped over, the helmet
covering his face.
She felt the Mauser in her pocket, its weight. Her hand slipped around it. On its own she started
practicing holding it. In the end she moved on, trekking towards Stone Hill Temple. The temple was
there now shadowed against the night sky with its lights turned off and the surrounding houses all
silent. Mrs. Suzuki and Sachiko would be in bed, or getting ready for bed. Akiyama would be washing
a customer’s love for her out from between her legs. Munekata would have finished his grim work
and he would be heading to her place to come tell her about war crimes perhaps she hoped. She
suspected that Chen Jintian would not actually be waiting for her at Stone Hill Temple.
You assumed it would be possible to trap someone who’s survived from Fengtian to here, she
thought, from Insurgency territory to peaceful Ryujin. Pampered middle-class bastard you are,
Jintian, you’ve underestimated the level of paranoia I operate at. It was possible that she was being
too paranoid. It was possible that it was all fine, that she would look absurd dressed in her dumb
costume and carrying a gun. But her brain told her otherwise. The old man, she thought. That’s my
only worry, even though I hate to admit it. If the old man is in trouble, if you’ve killed him off before
I can have my fun-
The temple was before her now. Its great wooden doors were open. They should not have been.
She kept her finger loose but close to the trigger - don’t shoot anyone by mistake, her mother had
taught her. She went through the doors, to find the courtyard lanterns lit and the stone bare and
empty. The doors to the prayer hall were open. Hana scanned the walkways, the wooden pillars, the
gaps between the bonsai trees. She took a step and then another, holding the pistol to her side,
angled away, so that it might not be visible to whoever was here for her. Not Jintian, she told herself.
Flames crackled from within the lanterns. Through the doorway of the northern prayer hall the
vague shadows of buddhas waited for her just beyond sight. Somewhere else in the town a dog went
on barking. Hana stepped out fully into the courtyard.
Nothing else happened. The night continued outside of the temple walls, heedless of her
pretensions, its heavy quiet suffocating all around her. Her eyes found each of the pillars, the dark
places of the walkways bordering the courtyard where nothing was waiting. Hana approached the
prayer hall. Her boots were silent against the stone. She peered through the lattice on the wall and
into the prayer hall and glimpsed the buddhas in their many forms, the vagueness of pillars and
altars illuminated by a light that came from braziers in the corners. It was too gloomy to see
anything beyond that. She took a step towards the open doors. The smell of lit sandalwood incense
came out to her, fresh and familiar. Pray to Papa Marx, her mother told her, for the victory of our
comrades out on the plains.
He was waiting inside the prayer hall. He was stood there with two other men beneath the
buddhas. Through the lattice he saw her. “Yo, Hana.” he said. He leant out from one of the pillars.
He beckoned her in. “Happy you came.” Through the lattice she saw him. Chen Juhua was in his
ripped coat and his jeans and geta, holding in his right hand a long machete. He stood angled slightly
towards her – just as she was to him – so that the weapon was only semi-visible, so that someone
less careful than she might have assumed it was nothing at all. But she was careful. She moved her
trigger finger closer to ready. “Come in here.” Juhua said. “We’ve got to talk.”
“Where’s Jintian?” she asked. The other two men were only silhouettes. They were bigger than
her but she couldn’t tell if they were armed. Juhua sighed. “That’s just it. He called you here, but I’m
the one who needs to talk. I know you wouldn’t have come if I’d have asked, so I roped him into this.
Please forgive him, okay?” The crackling of flames. The quiet of the temple all around them. “We
need to talk about Keizo Munekata.” Juhua said.
Hana remained where she was. “You know him?”
He nodded. She saw him glance at one of the other men. “He’s not a good guy, little sister. I know
you think you know otherwise, but that cop isn’t just a cop. He was with the Death Battalion. The
201st. He’s a butcher.”
She forced a brevity into her tone. “Yeah, but that was then.” she said. “Now he’s harmless. A
dried-up old turd. You didn’t call me out here just to talk about that, right?”
“Come in here, already.” he said. “We can talk then.”
“Why the temple, anyway?” she said. “Isn’t this place supposed to be closed?” One of the other
two men moved, setting off through the columns to work his way around to her. She gripped the
Mauser. Juhua was stood near the centre of the room, beneath the stern gaze of the Buddha on his
plinth, and there he waited for her. She smelt the incense and recalled hiding in caves from Survey
Unit artillery a long time ago. The threat now was on her right and he was trying to stay in the
shadows. He came out of the prayer hall for her, a broad Korean in a suit and cowboy hat, holding
his iron club at his side, and as he loomed, reaching forward, Hana levelled the Mauser. The man
stopped and stared. He was less than a metre from her. “Hana?” Juhua asked. “What’s wrong?”
“Boss.” the man said in Mandarin. “She’s got a gun.” Within the lattice she saw the smirk
disappear from Juhua’s face and before he could think of another move she stepped out from cover
with the Mauser in both hands thrust at him and at the other man alternately. Juhua stared at her
and at it and took a slow, clumsy step back towards the prayer hall’s altar. The third man, another
large-shouldered thug with muscle and weapon – a police baton – did likewise. The Korean with the
club joined his comrades and all three of them now watched her with unhappy nervous eyes. Juhua
scowled. “You’re adorable, little sister.” he said. “Like always.”
“You wanted to talk?” she said. Her hands were shaking. Guns weren’t her – they didn’t belong.
She wondered if she could even fire it really. “What’s the matter with Keizo Munekata, Juhua?” she
asked.
 He had his free hand clenched. “Look.” he said. “This is above you. You understand? This is more
important than whoever’s cock you have inside you at any given time. We’re talking business.”
“So am I.” she said. “Give him back, or I’ll kill you.” Juhua’s eyes narrowed. He held the machete
still, blade catching the dim light from above. He moved, starting towards her at a run, marching on
with his shoulders tense and his face fierce, and she aimed the gun and put her finger to the trigger
and already he was there, his free hand on her wrist. He yanked her close, twisting her around, and
shoved her into the centre of the room. The Mauser fell from her hand and clattered to the stone as
she almost toppled over, banging hip-first into an altar, all of Juhua’s weight and strength pressed
down upon her. He still had hold of her wrist and he held on so tight that it hurt. He stared into her
eyes, his face a cruel mask. “Well, well.” he said. Beads of sweat dribbled down his face. “Look at
you. Tough bitch that you are. I like the outfit, by the way.”
The other two men moved in, standing either side with their weapons ready. He let go of her and
shoved her back. His grip still upon her wrist. The Mauser lay a metre away useless on the floor. He
raised the machete and held it to her face and within its steel she saw herself, her piggish, stubborn
expression, the face of a woman who had never been a woman.
He squeezed her. “If you had fired that gun,” he snarled, “the whole of the Ryujin Police would
have been here to investigate, and they would have found only you, the Chinese bitch pretending to
be a Jap, trespassing on state property in the middle of the night. That’s why we’re here.” He
grunted. “Even if you tried to make a scene we were going to win. You’re dangerous. My brother
knows it. I know it. You and your Japanese master are trouble for everyone. So for everyone’s
benefit we’re going to take both of you in right now, and find out who you’re working for, and keep
the family safe. No matter what. Understood?”
Hana winced from the pain of her arm, as it was pressed so hard it felt as if the bone might snap.
But she thought of what her mother would do. She kept up her stare. Her own eyes meeting her
there within the metal. “Fuck you, you traitorous piece of shit.”
He moved the blade forward, to her cheek. Its sharpness stung but she did not flinch. “You’ve got
a mouth on you.” he said from behind it. “Spending all your time servicing the Jap’s tired body and
my brother’s tired ego, living like a cockroach off of those two government-approved losers, and
you’re calling me a traitor?” The golden presence of Buddha was in her periphery, a serene and
beautiful image in the centre of the prayer hall. She ignored it and she looked not at the gods and
saints there but at he, Chen Juhua, and as well it was Chen Jintian, the cumulative face of the Chen
family, prosperous and proud and pathetic all nuzzled up close to the Concordia and the Kwantung,
the Japanese and the enemy.
She twisted herself to one side so that his grip was for a moment slackened as he was caught off-
guard, and then she moved forward and swung her knee into his groin. He gasped, pulling her arm
roughly and jerking it the wrong way, and she flung herself at him and cracked her elbow into his jaw
and grabbed his hand, tugging at the machete. He tripped, staggering, colliding with the same altar
she had hit earlier, and the machete was free and she had it and she didn’t have time to use it
properly but she had time - his hands now lunging for her throat - to bring it in a horizontal cut
across his chest. “Fuck!” he cried. The blood sprayed out, his vest and jacket sliced open. He hurried
away. “Get her!” he cried, clutching at his wound. “Fucking get her!”
But this was what she knew. Eight years ago, in a village on the plains – two Japanese soldiers
who had paid for the Chinese slut to service them and hadn’t bothered to check her bag. One officer
with an artery cut and his accomplice stabbed to death. A broken arm and a bruise under her eye
that hadn’t gone down for months. Worth it, she had surmised afterwards. The man with the club
came for her. Use the weapon right, her mother had said. Let them give you a target. He swung the
club underarm at her face and she lashed out, catching his wrist with the steel and slicing it deep. He
dropped his weapon with a clatter and clutched at the long thread of silken crimson now unspooling
from his fresh new orifice. Go for the parts that hurt, her mother had said. She raised the machete
and swung it so the blade tore through his face. He howled and his hands at once were over his eyes,
splattered with blood, and then he fell back, doubled over and groaning.
 A hot blossoming pain came from her shoulder as the heavy metal of the police baton came
down hard. She twisted about, dodging the second strike but not the third, the baton smacking into
her cheek and splitting the skin. Hana staggered out of the way and kicked and by chance hit
something. The last man grunted in pain. She and he faced one another. His cowboy hat was so low
it was almost over his eyes. He lunged and she ducked and he kicked her in the thigh and she took it
as she had taken so much else and he grabbed at her throat and squeezed tight one hand digging
into her flesh thick male fingers pressing down crushing her windpipe. Hana spat at him and with
both hands jammed the machete hard into his leg deep enough to feel it judder in her grip as it
scraped against bone. He let go of her. Now with both hands she grabbed the machete again. She
wrenched it free of his thigh with a thick spurt of blood. He collapsed.
It hurt. Panting Hana turned to the Buddha. She bowed to him. “Sorry.” she gasped. “Namo
Amitabha.”
“Slut!” Chen Juhua said, through gritted teeth. He was resting against one of the nearby
bodhisattva statues. His bloody handprints were smeared all over its side. “Goddamn it.” he said.
“That fucking hurts.”
“Where is he?” she said. She shook the machete and splashed blood across the temple stone.
Juhua spat out half a tooth and a dribble of blood and saliva. “You think you’re going to be able to
save him?” he grunted. “Go in with that knife and kill ‘em all? Look around you. A lonely
unregistered Chinese found trespassing in a Japanese temple. Blood everywhere. This isn’t a good
look. From now on it’s getting fucked in a Kwantung prison until you kill yourself, you communist
bandit.” He grinned and his teeth were red. “The sentries will be on their way. You won’t make it
halfway down the street.”
Hana ignored all this. She walked up to him. “We asked around, too.” he said through ragged
breaths. “That auntie of yours, with a bit of pressure, will be more than willing to let everyone know
you’re a fucking illegal. And you’ve been giving money to anti-social criminal organisations in
Yugongguan, you know? You’re less than nothing. There’s no happy ending for you now.”
Hana studied him there. He gasped and bled all down himself. She felt her own blood dribble
down her cheek. A hot and comforting wetness. She stepped closer. He watched her. She raised the
machete, held the blade before his face. “Chen Juhua.” she said, and it wasn’t Hana Takemori’s voice
at all. It was the voice of the other woman, the nameless woman whose thick erhua accent slurred
all her words together. She held him there with her stare. “If you don’t help me rescue Keizo
Munekata,” she said, “then I’m going to destroy you.”
He laughed. “What?”
“I’ll destroy you. Liquidate your whole family.” she said. “All of you. No matter what it is they do
to me. Whatever is left will find my way to your doorstep, wherever you are. I’ll spend the rest of my
life striving to exterminate the entire Chen lineage, no matter how many years it takes me, or how
much distance you put between us. Even if they take out my eyes and cut out my tongue and hack
off my legs, I’ll hop after you. If they do my arms next, if they hurt me so bad I’m nothing but a
bleeding worm, I’ll crawl over you in your sleep and choke you with my own blood if I have to.”
“What-”
She tapped his face with the machete’s blade. “I will burn down your ancestral home and kill you
and your brother and your mother as slowly as I want. I’ll track down anyone else related to the
Chen clan of Longshen, and do the same to them as many times as it takes, for as long as it takes,
until there’s nothing left. That is what I will do. I promise. Unless you help me.”
Juhua stared. “Help you?”
“Get me out of here.” she said. “Tell me where they are.”
The expression on his face was not only hatred. He coughed and his spittle was crimson. He put a
hand to his chest, as if feeling it for the first time. “What the fuck are you going to do if I don’t?”
“I don’t know.” she said. “I have no idea what I’ll do if you win, if you and your thugs stop me. But
if you win it’ll only be for today - in a year, in ten years, in fifty years. Who knows?”
“You’re – you’re serious?”
 She nodded. “I made it this far.”
He studied her anew, blood seeping through his fingers. “Who the hell are you, anyway?” Hana
stood up, holding onto his machete. She went to where the Mauser lay on the floor of the prayer
hall and picked it up. Putting the machete through the belt loop of her trousers she held onto the
gun and she went back to Chen Juhua and looked at him and he at her. The flames in the lanterns
crackled. “I’m just some Chinese bitch pretending to be a Jap.” she said.
He got up from the statue and told the one of his henchmen still able to walk – the one whose leg
she had cut – to help the other with his maimed face, to get to the usual hospital, and that he, Juhua,
would cover the cost. He himself met the police officer at the gate and told him to forget about it,
and the officer – Japanese - saw her and saw the blood but merely went back and told his men to
come and help him clean up. With that resolved Juhua then took her to his home. He didn’t want to
but she did have a gun. The town was quiet. There was something brewing. She could see signs
going up here and there across Yugongguan. She peered at them in the dark, the gun always at
Juhua’s back. “What are they doing tonight?” she asked.
“I don’t know.” he said. “The triads said something about a demonstration. A show. I don’t know,
little sister.”
She stabbed the Mauser into the small of his back. “Don’t fucking call me that.” she snapped.
They approached the Chen household, walking in past Jintian’s BMW, and she stood behind him
while he rang the doorbell at the gate. Mrs. Chen came out to greet them in her nightgown. First she
saw her son’s bloody front and gasped and then she saw Hana, dressed like a red and speckled red
too, and then the gun and the blade. “What’s going on, Miss Takamori?” she asked.
Juhua bowed his head. “Mother. Please forgive me. I made a terrible mistake.” The politeness in
his tone was alien to Hana but, she thought, not fake. “Where’s your other son, Mrs. Chen?” she
asked, gently but firmly.
Mrs. Chen frowned. She let out a quiet sigh, so slight that Hana almost missed it. “I – I’ll go get
him.” she said. She hurried back into the house. Hana waited with Juhua and Juhua did not look at
her and she kept on trying to make him, trying to catch him with his eyes. Men, she had realized,
never liked to look at things for too long. The exception was Munekata, who stared so stupidly at her,
with an idiot’s fascination. She fingered the trigger of the gun and dreamt of revenge. Soon Jintian
was brought out, also dressed for bed, Mrs. Chen stood behind him as if she wished to shelter from
the whole affair. When he saw her he went slack for a moment, mouth trembling.
He looked away. “Hana-” She was marching up the path with her gun in hand past Juhua and up
to the doorway, and Mrs. Chen whimpered and Jintian stood there limp and useless like a puppet,
pale-faced, his hands at his side unmoving, even now nothing coming to his defence, and Hana rose
up before him.
A tightness came over her. Her fingers which had plucked the strings of the guzheng for him so
often before now tensed. Twitching they formed a fist. She drew her hand back and she looked into
his eyes and he still couldn’t properly meet hers and with a noise of irritation she slammed her fist
into his face. He fell. “Son!” Mrs. Chen held him, keeping him upright. He shrugged her off, facing
Hana with blood streaming down his chin all the way from his nose. “You’re a coward, Chen Jintian.”
Hana said.
Now he kept his eyes on her. “I know that.” he said. She cocked the Mauser. Mrs. Chen moved,
making a noise, but Jintian held her back. “It isn’t just about being a traitor.” Hana said. “I’m not
concerned about big political things like that. We’re all traitors. But you’re not even a traitor who
can accept it. Wallowing in misery. You can’t even enjoy yourself.” She spat. “That annoys the hell
out of me.”
“Hana.” Juhua said. “I told him to bait you. It was my fucking idea, alright? I got him into this.
Shoot me.” Neither Jintian or Hana acknowledged him. She raised the gun. “Miss Takamori.” Mrs.
Chen said suddenly, and before Jintian could stop her she had barged past, standing between Hana
and her son. In her nightgown, old and shrunken, she faced Hana with a grave expression, one hand
clutching the jade bracelet on the opposite wrist. Hana wavered, the gun not quite aimed at her but
not quite lowered either. “If my sons have wronged you,” Mrs. Chen said, “then it is my
responsibility to correct this situation. Leave the matter of their discipline to me.”
“Mrs. Chen-”
Mrs. Chen remained steady, facing the gun barrel without hesitation. “I will help you in any way
you require.” she said. “Any way I can.” Hana recognised something there – the toughness of
someone who had been out on the plains. She had that look to her, that fearlessness in the face of
death that her useless children utterly lacked – they who had both already been defeated just by a
single Mauser. Hana lowered the gun. She thought. “Juhua.” she said.
“What?” Juhua said. Flinching in just the same way as his brother did, at unwanted intrusions.
Two little boys scared shitless of ghosts. “Where is he?” she asked.
“Brother Jiang took Munekata to the farm.” he said. “It’s a place for…that kind of business.
Imperial Gold Farm, a mile or so out of town down Cherry Blossom Road, just before the turn onto
Highway Five. You can’t get there on foot.”
“Right.” She met Mrs. Chen’s unmoving gaze. “I want your son’s car, auntie. Can I take it?” Jintian
almost spoke but didn’t. Mrs. Chen nodded. “I probably won’t bring it back.” Hana said.
“Miss Takamori.” Jintian said. “Hana. What are you planning? Look, I am sorry. I’m sorry. That
doesn’t matter. My brother’s stupid friends – they’re going to kill that man no matter what. If you
get involved they’ll kill you too. It isn’t worth it. We can protect you.” He waited there for her,
handsome blank face, as if any of this meant anything. Hana sighed. She moved towards him and he,
the man she had almost been in love with, flinched at her approach. Just like his brother. His blood
dripped down his splendid sleeping robes. “You’re a cuckold.” she said. “Always have been.” She
turned to Juhua, who at least remained steady, bleeding from his chest wound but firm on his feet,
eying her with contempt but something else that might have been respect. In the evening dimness
he was already a corpse. “Did you do it, Juhua?” she asked.
“Do what?” he said.
Hana narrowed her eyes. “Did you rape Sachiko Suzuki?” she asked. Mrs. Chen inhaled. Juhua
himself seemed to shake for a moment. He stared at her and inhaled and exhaled and clenched a fist
and unclenched. He took a while to compose himself, his chest rising and falling. His vest was soaked
through with blood. “What?” he asked.
“Did you rape her?”
“What the fuck does that have to do with anything?”
“Isn’t that why you tried to kill me?”
He frowned. “What? No, no. You and that cop. You’re trying to expose the drugs thing-”
“Drugs?” Mrs. Chen said tersely. “What about drugs?”
Jintian sighed. “Juhua, you fucking idiot.”
“Sachiko.” Hana spat. The Chen family all looked to her. “Did you rape Sachiko Suzuki?”
“No.” Juhua said. “She came along with us to our offices, to a party kind of thing.” His eyes turned
to his mother and then away. “I tried to have sex with her. Briefly. Sure. I didn’t know she was a
schoolgirl. I didn’t know she was high off her ass. Jiang went in afterwards. He tossed her out into
the street. Left her to walk home like that. I tried to argue but, man, he’s scary-”
She raised the Mauser. “Are you trying to absolve yourself?”
“No.” He looked to his mother, past Hana and Jintian and only at Mrs. Chen, his arms at his sides
and his expression not his own, or not, at least, that of the Juhua that Hana knew. “I’m not. I’ve done
a lot of bad things with Jiang. In the last few years. But I kind of have standards. You stupid bitch. All
of this for a Japanese cop. Jiang isn’t some punk. He won’t be so easy. He’s…he’s not like you or me.”
“I’m nothing like you.” she said. Then back to Mrs. Chen: “Auntie. Tell your son to get the keys.”
So Auntie Chen told Jintian to get the keys and he, miserable in posture and expression, retreated
into the house and came back with them and gave them to her, and she said nothing to him but held
onto them and thanked Mrs. Chen and went to the gate and slipped through. She went to the BMW
and unlocked it and clambered inside. They were all three of them watching her from the garden,
the Chen family home behind them like a looming evil, dwarfing the three of them with its age and
splendour.
It was Chen Jintian’s face she saw – she saw his misery, his wretched self on full display, the true
enormity of his sorrow at losing her, at failing to protect his family, and at the crimes he had now
made himself an accessory to, and even then, even all that, manifested itself as only a slight, slender
sort of frown. She understood it now. All that was left of him really was only a shadow.
Hana turned away and put the keys into the ignition. She hadn’t driven anything in a long time –
no licence, technically – but then she also hadn’t stabbed anyone for even longer and that had
worked out well enough. Nevertheless before she put her foot to the accelerator she muttered a
brief prayer to Comrade Mao Zedong. First time in years for that too. Her reflection in the mirror
found her, her eyes with the old hardness. She drove off, leaving the Chen family behind, and
headed out to definitely go get involved in something violent. She was thinking of the plains, of the
roar of the wind and the rumble of Survey Unit half-tracks moving across the fields. She was thinking
of death.
 18
He remembered an incident in the Insurgency, or half-remembered it – gunfire, snow, wind, his
suit cracked open by a surprise red mortar barrage, a sudden attack from the temple grounds at the
rear of the village. No survivors – firing wildly into the buildings, cutting down women, children, the
elderly, anyone who the communists were hiding behind. It was a job and that was all it was.
Arakawa grabbing him, hauling him to one side as Soviet-made artillery cannons blew the village
apart. His mask loose and his helmet blown off of his head, the freezing air stinging his exposed skin.
They were in the temple grounds, the village god having fallen riddled with bullets and the air alive
with fire. Are you there, Munekata? Munekata! Himself shaken awake. Smoke everywhere – hard to
breathe. Counter-barrages from their guns and replies from the communists, a pitched battle,
always the Red Army’s weakness, the rumble of their tanks, their artillery firing, our tanks, our guns,
their red banners torn and twisted. Arakawa pulled him up. Move!
Another explosion. Now only Munekata, the earth around him churned up. Their own shells or
the enemy’s. The street was ablaze and he could feel nothing but only watch and listen, on his feet
and yet not present at all. He stepped forward as light as air, while from a burning house two
charred bodies ran, stumbling and tripping and falling over and lying there and not moving again
even as the flames danced in victory over their blackened forms.
Screams. He held onto his gun desperately. Where was Arakawa? The drone of engines. From
somewhere bombers came. His suit tight about him and he had put his dented buckled mask back
on it and its steel was clinging to his face. That armour! The suit, the surveyman, the demon of war,
fingers clenching the dirt, smashing imagined foes, red bastards, Chinese scum – his suit was broken
open by a bullet and he looked down at the chasm of his chest armour and he was surprised to find
that all along there had been nothing inside but air.
He was awake. “Good morning, darling.” Jiang Guangming said lazily from above. The room was
rusted metal and hard concrete, somewhere beneath somewhere else long and wide and with
Munekata in the centre, sprawled out on the wet damp ground with a thousand pain-fires flaring all
across the ruin of his body and his wrists bound in rope.
Jiang stood over him, holding something in one hand. Munekata turned onto his side. He winced.
Jiang smirked, gold tooth gleaming in the dingy glow of the halogen light, and crouched down low,
resting whatever it was he held over one shoulder. With two fingers he found Munekata’s cheek. His
fingertips were hard and cold to the touch like the tips of bullets in Manchurian winter. They traced
a circle there and then descended downwards, towards his chin, and he felt the other man’s fingers
tickle his neck and drift then to his collar, where they were gentle against his clavicle, caressing him.
Munekata lay there stiff, hands at his sides, in too much pain to fight back. “What’s the matter?”
Jiang said. “I thought you were a surveyman. Didn’t you have a lot of fags in that outfit? A lot of
lonely men out there on the plains, sweaty and stinking from those heavy suits, all high on booze
and opium…must have been full of ass-fucking degeneracy. Right?”
Munekata stared at him. Jiang pulled his fingers away. He lowered the thing from his shoulder
and prodded Munekata with it. It was an old and splintered baseball bat. Dark stains ran down one
side. “On your knees.” he said. He stood. He gestured for Munekata to get up. Munekata grunted
and began to move, feeling the brace on his leg digging in, feeling all his wounds and aches complain
at him. With Jiang watching he got to his knees, and all of his weight came to rest upon his bad leg
and the agony of it made him grit his teeth. Jiang stood over him looming. “I heard you boys were all
perverts.” he said. “So come on, then. Munekata. Show me that Japanese spirit of yours.” He rested
the bat on the wall and put his hands to his belt. Munekata watched as he began to unfasten it.
“What-?”
“What?” Jiang repeated. He let go of the unfastened belt and got to work on the buttons of his
jeans. “What do you mean, what? Don’t you know what this is?” Now he unbuttoned and he tugged
down his underpants and his cock slipped out with a little wobble, slim thing sticking out of a tuft of
thick pubic hair, and it was semi-erect and as Munekata stared at it he saw it stiffen and unfurl,
standing up, proud and honest. The swollen head was now bulging, twitching as it reached out
towards its prey. Munekata struggled with the rope about his wrists and the material was old and
rotten and he almost had it but then he was being watched. With one hand Jiang picked the baseball
bat up again. Munekata wrenched his eyes up, to the other man’s face, to his cruel little smirk. “If
you use your teeth, I’ll crack your skull open.” he said. Munekata was silent. Jiang shoved his cock
closer. He put the side of the bat to Munekata’s skull. The wood was hard and cold. His cock
shuddered. “Go on, then.” Jiang said.
Munekata stared at it. He remembered the barracks at Red River, the warm-up exercises. He was
thinking of Arakawa and of Kempeitai hazing rituals. Wasn’t it so, he thought, that this was fair? The
entire edifice they had constructed was one in which the men at the top had their cocks sucked by
the men at the bottom. Now it was that his kind had had their day, and that a new breed of superior
was stepping into view, half-obscured by the brilliant light of the collapsing sun.
He realized that nothing would change once the Kwantung were gone, because their successors
were already in place, ready to switch tracks. And of course old Kishi, that grotesque gangster who
had drafted Manchukuo’s first Five-Year Plan, that pervert and criminal collaborator who Karashima
had once met for dinner, would have had a heart attack to have seen it – that certain of the Chinese,
who he had said were like dogs, by now were well-trained enough to win promotion to managing
this wretched machine themselves, and for sure would be able to run it the same way.
I’m going to kill this man, he thought. His wrists strained against the rope which now was almost
loose enough. But for now it was not and he was wounded and tired and feeling his leg about to
come apart beneath the weight of the rest of him. And so he leant himself forward, pushing himself
towards Jiang’s cock. The rich, spicy stench of old sweat radiated from it. The cock waited for him
and he, thinking of the past, gulped. He stiffly opened his mouth. The tip of it brushed against his lips
hot and furious.
Jiang laughed. He pulled back. “Hell!” he said. “You were really going to, weren’t you, Jap? Fuck
me!” He stuffed his cock back into his trousers, buttoned them and tied the belt. The grin on his face
was wide and real and he laughed like a child. “Buncha freaks, aren’t you?” Munekata remained
there. Jiang laughed again. “Are you hard down there, then? Is that what’s going on? You’re turned
on by it, you faggot!” He tapped the bat against the wall and held it in both hands. “Well, nice to see
one of your kind be honest for once. That’s what I hate about most of you.” Munekata remained still
as Jiang circled him, a wolf prowling. The head of the baseball bat came to rest tenderly against the
side of Munekata’s head. “All your pretensions.” Jiang said from behind him. “All your play-acting.
Japanese spirit, my ass. You’re the same as us gangsters, but you just don’t admit it.”
“I agree.” Munekata said softly. Remembering the sound of his own voice. His eyes were fixed on
the far wall, the double doors locked tight, stained with grime and rust, a faded poster there to the
right of the doors displaying the three brothers of China, Japan and Manchukuo. He did not look
away from it. Heard his own breathing in his ears and heard Jiang spit. “You agree, do you?” Jiang
asked from behind him.
“We…we made animals of you.” Munekata said. “And of ourselves.”
Jiang snorted. “Poor you. Don’t give me that ‘both sides’ shit, c’mon, man. You didn’t suffer.
You’re fine in your nice little towns and your settler-forts, rich of off our labour. All the blood has
dried and you don’t have to worry about it. It’s history. Nobody’s going to ask you to do anything
about it now, are they? So no, you’re not suffering. None of you are.”
“Our suffering is spiritual.” Munekata said. “But you’re right. It doesn’t compare.” Jiang stroked
him with the baseball bat. Munekata felt splinters poke into the skin of his scalp. “Suffering upon
suffering upon suffering.” Jiang said. “That’s Manchukuo. Fields watered with coolie blood. And yet
you’ve decided to draw a line, haven’t you? For some reason you’ve picked up this idea that of all
the fucked-up shit that goes in in this country, what I did to – what happened to the Suzuki chick -
was too much. That I’m too much, that I deserve punishment.” Jiang moved the bat again, perhaps
to swing it forward. Munekata had no way of knowing without turning his head. “There’s way worse
men out there.” Jiang said in a low voice. “A lot of ‘em are your kind. Why go after me, huh, for one
little – one little mistake?”
“A mistake?” Munekata asked. He could still smell the other man’s cock – could still feel all his old
pains. He realized now, with the certainty of one blessed by sudden enlightenment, that he would
not get to kill Jiang Guangming. “How convenient.” he muttered. The poster on the wall was still and
silent. “How convenient that you can categorize it like that. Hide it away in a folder labelled
‘mistakes’ with all the others. Place it somewhere out of sight.”
“I haven’t fucking done that.” Jiang snapped. “Don’t talk about things you know nothing about. I
feel bad for that girl, that everybody’s gossiping about it, that someone like you got involved. I do.
But she’ll get over it. We all get over things here. That’s Manchukuo, ain’t it?”
“Get over what?” Munekata said.
Jiang was quiet for a moment. “You don’t know a thing about us. It was her – she was there, you-”
“Mr. Jiang.” Munekata said. He was aware now that he could not pull against the rope enough –
it was about to give way, its strands coming apart - without making it obvious. He forced out a rusty
chuckle. “I have no interest in this. I have no interest in how you feel. I have no interest in how your
crime fits into any larger moral framework, or how it reflects upon me, or you, anything more
complex than the simple facts. The fact is that you have done evil. And you deserve justice.”
Jiang was quiet for a few moments. “Well, congrats.” he said. “Here’s your fucking justice,
policeman.” Munekata heard the bat whooshing as it was drawn back and still resisted the
temptation to turn, to move, to fight it off. He remained with the three brothers of wartime
propaganda lore upon the wall, the infant forms of China, Japan and Manchukuo with their painted-
on smiles, their soft features and empty black eyes. He read the characters to their right - UPHOLD
PEACE, RESTORE DIGNITY. He thought of Arakawa.
He thought of Arakawa’s wife Mieko in his arms, of himself in his uniform back in the academy, of
the surveyman, the blazing scar on his arm that first time. Arakawa watching at the blood flowing
from Munekata’s wrist, clasping hold of his hand, fingers interlaced. Their blood together
intermingling and a sacred pact being signed. That was it, wasn’t it? One did not dishonour oneself.
Even to the end. He did not close his eyes but kept them there, on the three brothers and the slogan.
In the corner, almost ashamed of itself, there was the flag of Manchukuo in miniature. He waited.
A crash came from outside. Breaking wood and cracking glass. Jiang stepped past Munekata
suddenly, bat in hand. “What the hell was that?” he asked. He went to the doors and with the bat
shouldered he stooped forward to unlock them, and at the last second he half-turned back to
Munekata who remained on his knees. “I’ll be back for you.” he said. From above, as distant as that
first crash, came raised voices. Munekata got up. He clenched his fists and pulled and pulled and let
the pain became all that he knew. The rope weakened. With a dry snap it gave way. “Hey.” Jiang said,
poised on the room’s threshold. “What’s this now?”
He stood, thinking of flames, of distant plains and of the suit around his flesh. “Hey.” Jiang said.
Munekata grunted. His wrists sang in a red-hot language of new problems, of burns and scars. He
flexed his fingers and he took a step. Agony shot through him. His knee on fire. He took another step.
Jiang raised the bat. “Hey, don’t you try it-” Munekata charged forward, running or stumbling. The
bat tapped his shoulder, Jiang’s swing too abrupt, and Munekata struck where it would hurt the
most, stabbing a swift fist into Jiang’s gut. Jiang’s grip weakened and then, holding up a forearm to
block the next attack Munekata grabbed the bat and wrenched it free.
He twisted it about and slammed it forward. Jiang grunted as he was knocked over. Munekata fell
with him. The impact shook his bones and Jiang was trying to get up, lashing out. Munekata raised
his forearms and took the blows, panic-blows, and shoved the end of the bat into Jiang’s nose with a
crack. With both hands he swung it to one side and with all his strength swiped it horizontally into
the other man’s jaw. Jiang’s head snapped back and he fell onto his side. Blood blossomed from his
forehead.
With one hand on the wall Munekata stood. He managed to hold the bat out at the fallen
gangster and keep it there. Jiang did not move but only stared. Blood streamed from his head and a
bruise was welling on his forehead. His chest rose and fell. “I’ll be back for you.” Munekata said. The
door had already been unlocked, key still in the latch, and he took it and went through and closed it
and locked it from the other side. Now in a steep concrete corridor, still damp and dark, he paused
for a second, remembering how to breathe. That old kempei trick Arakawa had taught him – the
knives that went in with each inhalation were only knives, and the razor-wire wrapped around his
leg was only wire. There were deep red marks about his wrists. He still had the bat and with it in
hand he set off up the stairs and to the distant glow of the halogen bulb several dozen steps away
which was the light of the Buddha bearing down on him. He paused to catch his breath. He repeated
the Name to himself. He kept going.
Munekata reached the landing. Facing him there was a short entryway of corroded metal and
concrete, and another door, half-open. Voices came from beyond and now were joined by gunfire,
sporadic bursts of automatic weapons, the precarious rattle of the Type 150 SMG about to crack
open its own casing as its cheap parts were used past breaking point, for you were never supposed
to use the Type 150 full-auto for more than a few seconds – soldiers knew that and gangsters tended
not to. The door squealed as he pushed it and he was greeted from the other side by the sight of a
farm courtyard, wooden buildings and houses and piles of shit and a pen of panicking chickens, ugly
white things squawking about as a row of men with submachine guns stood on one side of the
adjacent farmhouse.
Lit by blazing floodlights the men were busy firing at a car that had come careening in through
the fence, which now lay there immobile surrounded by dirt and mud and pieces of broken fence. Its
beautiful chrome finish, its grandiose suggestion of wealth, was scratched and beaten and
pockmarked with bullet holes. Sparks and the clanging sound of impacts and the worried clucking of
the hens filled the night. Munekata noticed the car was a BMW. He also noticed that one of the men
was nearby, guarding the corridor he was just then emerging from, but that the man’s attention was
only on the car.
“Who is it?” one of them called, another gangster. None of them had seen – Munekata had – that
the car was empty, that it had been rolled through their wall at top speed with no one inside,
probably exactly for this purpose. By who? But that was a problem for later.
For now he found the man close to him, who held his SMG close but didn’t fire, and he struck him
hard with the bat and broke his skull and splattered blood across the courtyard as the man’s body
fell like an old log, tumbling to the ground. The gun clattered to the floor with him. Munekata saw
them see this – he dove for the gun, scraping his unprotected knee against concrete. The Type 150
leapt into his embrace and he clutched it tight, feeling its familiar touch.
The other six gangsters were in sight. Just as in training he squeezed a round off at each, not even
a volley, flicking the sights from one body to the next – non-fatal shots, aimed away from the vitals.
With each bark and each impudent buck of the gun a target fell, each in turn punctured somewhere,
through their arm or leg or collar. Bullets tore apart the concrete around him and yet he stayed still
and counted twelve left in the magazine and the third target had been hit in the hand, blood
splashing across his front rudely, but still, grunting in pain, he held his weapon and tried to aim it.
Munekata shot him in the side and watched him fall.
Another, scrambling up, hand over the sucking hole in his leg, tried to hurry over with knife in
hand. “You piece of shit!” he gasped. Munekata shot him again, in the other leg, and he tripped and
landed hard on the concrete. All six of them lay there groaning and gasping. Blood shone in the glow
of the floodlights. Chastened, the chickens now chattered quietly amongst themselves. Munekata
ignored his feelings and got up, sweeping the Type 150 around the yard and finding himself the last
man standing. “Fuck, fuck!” one of the stricken gangsters opined, cowboy hat askew. Munekata
hobbled over to the break in the fence and scanned ahead for danger.
A sound came from behind, a quiet footstep, female. He turned with his gun raised and saw Hana
and saw the gun barrel he was aiming at her and saw her narrow eyes mocking him with their
intensity as they always did, which he had missed. “Not talking to yourself anymore, huh?” she said
in a ravaged voice.
 “Hana.” he said. She smiled. Blood leaked its way down her face from a deep graze on her scalp
and her cheek was swollen by vivid bruising. “That’s the third time I’ve saved you.” she said. She
wore a military coat and held a Mauser pistol and she had a red scarf tied about her neck going all
the way down her front and the rich smell of Moutai was heavy on her breath. Munekata stared at
her. “I saved you back this time.” he said.
“So we’re three to one.” Hana said. “Big deal. Come on.” She grunted and fell over and he caught
her and his bad leg even with the brace he had taken from his suit buckled and they almost fell
together but for she moving her other leg and keeping them upright. His arms were around her.
They both quickly separated. They stood a fair distance apart. “You did this.” he said. She nodded.
She was breathing heavily. “Why?” he asked.
“To save you.” she said. “The Chen brothers…they tried to kidnap me. I think. I took Chen Juhua’s
car. Didn’t kill him. Maybe I should have. Jumped out of it. Hurt a little. Can you kiss me? I’m drunk.”
She giggled. “Drank some in the car.”
For a few seconds, forever, they stared at one another. Injured men lay there moaning and
complaining all around. “You know,” he said suddenly, “we were all drunk in the plains. The
surveymen. Before every deployment. Drunk or high on something. Some units took meth, I think.
But at Karashima’s insistence, we in the Orochi Soldiers had to stay away from that. Instead we
drank. When we could. Chinese rice wine. Were you communists drunk too?”
“Yeah.” she said. “You fascists made me start drinking at twelve. I drank a bottle of erguotou and
went out with my grandma’s old rifle and I shot one of you in the leg one morning and you lay there
in the dirt at the edge of the village and you moaned like a little girl until you died. But you’d raped
one of my aunties the night before, so I guess you deserved it.” Hana paused. “Man, what a life.” She
ran a hand over her face and it was as if she had wiped something clean. She was with him then as
she had never been with him before, no mockery or irony or anything but that, the same energy she
had carried with her when listening to Sachiko Suzuki. Now it was aimed at him instead, the energy
of the communist Chinese woman, the survivor, who all along he had cruelly and selfishly assumed
had only been a mere agent of his own karma. “Where is he?” she asked him. “Jiang.”
So it was that Munekata took her past the injured gangsters and to the door. The building around
it was concrete and mean and honest. He checked the corridor and she went first with her Mauser,
the red scarf flung over her shoulder. Munekata could only follow. He heard her boots on the
concrete and saw her small unsoldierly shape in its red costume pass under the halogen, shadows
flung about the walls by her hurry, by the tapping of her boots as she went. Limping he went in her
wake. When she reached the bottom she waited for him, and upon his landing she took the key
which was still in the lock and turned it.
With the Mauser ready she entered and Jiang was there. He was ready, stood waiting to strike
with a long knife he’d drawn from somewhere, and he was confronted with Munekata and his gun
too behind her and he paused, bruised and bleeding. All of the pomp of his gangster costume was
now framed absurdly against the reality of him, this wounded thing held captive. His mouth moved.
“Policeman-”
Hana shot him in the thigh. The bang rang out, filling Munekata’s ears, and following it was
Jiang’s roar of pain and the red blossoming through the denim of his jeans, and then his doubling-
over and falling as he collapsed back onto the ground. Smoke rose from the barrel of the gun, which
she stared at as if she had only just noticed it was in her hands. He lay there grunting. Munekata’s
brain spasmed in his skull. “Hana.” he said, touching her side with one hand tentatively, and she
turned, the gun in her trembling grip pointed straight at him. After two seconds she lowered it. Her
eyes were wide. “I – I was aiming for his cock.” she said. Her tone was nearly apologetic.
“Fuck!” Jiang cried out in Mandarin. “Fuck your mother, you stupid bitch! What the fuck was that
for?”
“You know what it was for.” Munekata said.
 “But anyway.” Hana sighed and lowered the Mauser. She rubbed the wrist of one hand with the
other. “I’m sorry.” she said to Jiang. “I’m really sorry. I meant to shoot your cock off. It was going to
be symbolic.”
“Fuck!” Jiang held onto his leaking thigh.
“You knew I wasn’t Japanese.” she said in Mandarin. Jiang paused in his agony. He saw her and
Munekata caught the strange serenity of his expression and understood it, and saw Hana’s equally
relaxed, distant face, and realized what was about to happen. Breathing deeply he could only watch.
“Juhua mentioned it at the temple, when he tried to kidnap me. So you know. Maybe it’s obvious,
actually.” Hana said. “Maybe everyone knows. But the thing is, after so long I don’t really feel
Chinese either.” She fingered the gun. “I suppose I’m not that different from Brother Chen, when
you think about it.”
“Hana-” Munekata began to say. There was a bang. Jiang’s head jerked back with his skull
suddenly opened. The inside of him was splashed over the wall. He fell still there as if he were only
reclining. His blood touched the concrete. After a few seconds it began to expand outward from the
cracked eggshell of his head like a slow-motion two-dimensional explosion. His eyes remained as
they had been, staring but now at nothing, all the light within them blown out.
Hana shivered and then threw up. Munekata beheld it, the noise and the sight of it, and the sight
afterwards of her holding herself as if she was the one who had taken the bullet. The red scarf
almost covered her face for a moment. With a quivering hand she pushed it aside. “That’s our duty
to Miss Suzuki discharged.” she said, wiping her mouth.
“Hana.” he said.
“Yeah?” she said.
“You didn’t have to do that.” he said.
She turned away. “Nobody has to do anything, do they?” He hobbled around her and she turned
her head and he put his hand on her shoulder. Now she met his eyes. For a moment they stood over
Jiang’s corpse in the dismal concrete basement, listening to nothing. Then together they went back
outside. The gangsters still lay about. Several of them had moved, crawling away. One sat on his rear
cradling his wounded leg. Chickens hopped about in their pen, unaware of death. The wounded men
looked over as the two of them emerged. Moving slowly and with halting steps, as if she felt herself
to be dreaming, Hana led the way, helping Munekata as they stepped over and past the injured and
going back to the BMW, where smoke still rose from the bullet holes blasted into its side.
Munekata leant on the car while she opened the door and checked the interior. The sound of the
engine starting, a little strained but functional, rose up and filled the whole world. Hana clambered
in. “Come on, old man.” Her voice had that stiffness to it, the rigidity that he knew came from effort.
But it was not the voice of the shattered newcomer to violence holding themselves together, the
quivering soul which saw no end in sight and could not conceive of ends or of beginnings. He
recognised that this woman, who was not really Hana Takamori, had turned a corner. The great
winter of her being perhaps was beginning to thaw, he hoped. He did not know. His body hurt and
he was tired and he wondered what would come next. He wanted to wash his mouth out.
Sitting beside her in the black BMW, broken glass of the window to his right, he let the plush
leather of the seat reassure him. Hana, eyes on the road and nowhere else, started to drive,
headlights cutting through the dark on the other side of the smashed fence, illuminating the road
and the endless Manchurian plains beyond. “What now?” he asked her. She manoeuvred the broken
car out of the farmyard and back up towards the road. He sat there, no longer her customer and
never her lover, a stranger now to her and to himself. As the car rumbled on the shadows spawned
by the interplay of the midnight black with the glow of the streetlights cast her in purgatorial semi-
darkness, golden light passing over her face every few seconds and then departing, and all the while
she frowned, brow furrowed, something almost sullen there, and yet not, for this was the face that
he had been stung by so often and yet it was also her own, the truth of her. “What are you staring
at?” she asked at one point. He didn’t reply but only reached into his jacket for a cigarette and once
more found nothing.
 After a half-hour she stopped the car, driving it into a ditch by the side of the road and leaving it
there surrounded by tall grass. She bid him to get out and walk and so they did, and they walked for
ten minutes in the warm early morning nothing, trudging along by the roadside neither speaking nor
listening. Fields and hills stretched out forever on the other side. They were marked by long
propaganda billboards, the ultimate imperial insult to the ancestral land of the Manchu. Great
Manchukuoan flags and slogans proclaimed all the usual things, vast and stark effigies of paint and
plaster besmirching the ancient plains.
They came to a roadside motel after that and there was a Chinese clerk asleep behind the desk
who Hana woke up with harsh Mandarin. The room stank and was too small. It had cost only sixty
yuan and she showing the clerk her bloodied face and then the Mauser. She washed herself first in
the tiny bathroom. He lay there on the futon listening to running water, feeling his bruises and being
faintly amused. The motel was called The Golden Dragonfly just like Chen Jintian’s novel, just like the
bar. With a sharp regret he suddenly missed it. He missed his usual seat and his morning routine and
drinking with Burton and with her, and buying glass after glass of whiskey, and slowly dying every
day. He wished he had not done any of this. It stung him. He looked at the window and saw a
bruised old face with a bad moustache. His own face. He forgot the wish as quickly as he had made it.
When she was done she came out naked and dripping. The towel was about her shoulders. “Your
turn.” she said. She went to the dressing table crammed up near the barred window, leaning down
to inspect her fresh cut and her new bruise in the mirror. While she was busy he undressed and took
off the special attack suit’s leg brace and felt his leg tremble with the release of it, and then he went
to wash, tossing his bloody, sweaty clothes onto the grime-dressed tiles and stepping into the
shower.
The hot water hurt him, a thousand sharp blades from a thousand black demons stabbing his
flesh at once. He washed with care, wondering about it, in what ways the methods of a Chinese
washing themselves would differ. Japanese, so it went, were renowned for their cleanliness, their
obsession with avoiding filth, and he remembered his mother warning him before he left for
Manchukuo. She had told him not to touch any of them or else the dirt might come off on him. He
washed his mouth out very thoroughly and spat into the water and watched his spittle circle the
drain and disappear.
Once he was dried and washed he returned to the hotel room. Hana was there casually nude, all
of her, her small body and her marks and scars laid out upon the futon. The paper lampshade over
the light in the corner cast the whole room in soft uncomfortable red. Outside a car went past, a
lonely roar rising then falling on the road. He had put the leg brace on the chair in the corner and he
saw she had moved it and examined it too. As he entered she turned onto her flank and looked
down at his leg. “Fuck.” she said. Leaning over the edge of the futon with one outstretched hand she
explored it, the mess of his knee. All over the flesh was thick with purple and black bruises.
“Does…does that hurt?” she asked.
“Yes.” he said.
“Can you walk?”
“Yes. I will be fine.”
“It doesn’t, uh, look fine.”
“Bruises always go down.”
“Do they?” she asked. He looked away at the bars over the window. Another car sped by on the
road, the howling engines of a heavy military vehicle. It came and went with the impotent fury of the
Kwantung, forever rushing from fire to fire. “I know what that is.” she said. “That’s from the suit.”
“Yes.” he said.
“You’re supposed to wear a padded layer between them. So the pressure from the exoskeleton
doesn’t-”
“Yes. I couldn’t do that with only a single segment.”
“You’ve been wearing it since what happened to Xu Mei.” she said. “Ever since then, when you
were walking normally…”
 “That’s correct.” he said. A long quiet followed. Hana lay there naked and he stood naked and
together they were naked. Finally she laughed. Her face did not show this amusement. “What an
idiot.” she said. She pulled back and sat up on the bed. Both of them were swallowed by the crimson
light, reduced only to shadows sketched in the blood of Henry Jiang. “You’ve done some really
horrible things to me, you know.” she said. “I hated you, after I found out about that suit of yours. I
mean, I really hated you. I still do. You sick, ugly bastard. My pride as a Chinese woman, my pride as
a communist, my body, all given over to the man who might have burned down my village, to one of
Puyi and Hirohito’s fascist dogs.” She sighed. “But I wonder. What was the point of all that stuff we
did before then? Well, I enjoyed it. It was twisted but I had fun. I don’t think I can do it anymore. I
don’t remember who I was supposed to be after all this. What I was going to do in Year Zero. I don’t
know if there’s anything. I don’t know what I was supposed to be looking forward to.”
“You-” he began.
“Shut up.” she said. “But - hey, do you remember Sachiko Suzuki?” He remained silent. Hana was
somewhere else, beyond him. She peered into the red light and saw whatever she was seeing. “How
she looked at us, when we said we’d get that bastard.” she said. “That’s what I always wanted.
Someone I could look at like that. Someone to come in and shoot up the bad guys and save me. I
always wanted a hero. Or that girl did. Whoever I was before. And…I guess they’re going to come
after us for this. But I’m glad we did what we did.”
“As am I.” he said.
Hana didn’t reply for a long time. “You said you wanted something from me – honesty.” she said
eventually. She stood and she hugged him. Her front was warm against his. Her chest pressed
against him. Her small arms encircled his idiotic bulk. He did not feel any arousal. “Well I guess here
it is.” she said. Her voice was close to him. “You exist. And I exist too. I don’t need to know your war
stories now, you know. I’m certain about it. There’s no point. We can’t move forward, the two of us.
Not in that way. But we can understand one another. Is that fair?”
Munekata thought for a moment. She had pulled away and now her phantom eyes, apart from
the rest of her, watched him in the bloodstained dark. “Yes.” he said. “I believe so.”
Hana sighed. She let go and lay down on the futon away from him, turning onto her side. Her
back was there before him. “Come to bed, anyway, you old fart.” she mumbled. He did so, joining
her on the futon. Inches away from him she was still warm, the heat radiating off of her. He lay
facing away from her. Their backs were touching. The light burned. He heard her move, felt her
softness nearby. “Despite everything I just said, I’ll forgive you anyway.” she said. “No hard feelings.”
“Why?” he said, after a long pause.
“Don’t be a cuckold.” she said. And from time to time a car would go past in the world beyond.
Eventually he fell asleep, aware of her at his side.
Once a man named Karashima had called him into an office in Shinkyo and asked him, well, Keizo,
there’s this new outfit they’re putting together in the Imperial Army. They say it could do what the
Kwantung can’t. They say it could bring some harmony to this country. Are you in? But she was next
to him and she whimpered in her sleep and he only slept a little, through this. He tasted Jiang
Guangming’s cock and tasted the gunpowder hangover of ammunition expended after he and
Arakawa had cleared out a village. He tasted her kiss, given honestly. The way she had never kissed
him before and now never would.
In the morning he was awoken by his leg. The pain was worse than ever. With that was the
awareness of something else: a presence beyond the plastic walls of the motel, something new and
terrible waiting there in the open air. He got up, leaving her there under the sheets. He held onto
the wall and moved himself to the window. He did not know what it was but he knew it was there.
The room smelt of sweat and blood and cheap shampoo. He heard an idling engine. Going to the
bars he leant forward and he saw there beyond them a trio of military half-tracks parked outside on
the edge of the road, at the gate to the abyssal plains. He saw the threatening grey silhouettes of
predators waiting outside the burrow. He frowned. “Hana.” he said.
She stirred. “Old man. What-?”
 “Get dressed.” he said. “Remain here.”
“What’s happening?”
“Stay here.” he said in Armee Japanisch. Hana’s eyes were hard, her mouth a scowl. She gave him
a brisk nod. He dressed himself quickly, pain pushed aside. As he was putting his shirt on he saw
more silhouettes emerging from the half-tracks and crowding around the motel. He slipped his shoes
on, ignoring the leg brace, forcing himself to stand on his knee. They were converging on the doors
now. Munekata saw Hana pulling her clothes on and their eyes met and he forced himself away and
with great effort he hobbled outside, closing the door on her. He met the soldiers in the lobby. The
Chinese man from last night was cowering behind his desk. They were wearing naval garrison
uniforms, the uniforms of Ryujin’s protectors. Their guns were readied. Young faces without feeling.
Had his own face once looked like that? He assumed it must have. He counted four men and more
outside falling into formation around the motel – every exit and entrance being covered in one
sweep, gun barrels closing off each avenue of escape. It was how he would have done it. “What is
this?” he said to them.
The men in the lobby stared. One jerked his weapon at the doors, through which the morning
light came in, soft and calm. Narrowing his eyes Munekata staggered unevenly into it, his knee
protesting with each step, his hand finding purchase on the doorframe as he eased himself outside.
He was aware that he was leaving her to them – aware that he had no other choice. He knew
someone at the naval garrison was in with Jiang’s drug-smuggling operation, and that he and Hana
would have to pay for last night. He had thought they would have more time – not to flee, maybe,
but at least for her to get away. Instead now he had gotten her caught. But it was close, wasn’t it,
the handover? Wasn’t the future already here? The unfairness of it stung almost as much as his
wounds. He had left his leg brace with her. He hoped more than anything that they wouldn’t touch
her. Couldn’t imagine otherwise.
The morning air was cold and he could see the highway stretching on forever into the fertile
depths of Manchukuo and the soldiers were all focused upon him and the three great half-tricks spat
diesel smoke up into the clear blue sky. “Lieutenant.” Major Karashima said, a note of sadness in his
voice. “What have you done?”
Munekata found him there amongst the wall of rifles. He watched as Karashima approached slow
and calm in his dress uniform, cap and jacket and cape, and came to a stop shortly before where
Munekata was leant against the doorframe. Karashima stood stiffly with his hands behind his back.
“Do you know what I’m thinking of?” he said. He was small with all of those young soldiers and
heavy vehicles at his back. “I remember, long ago, when we had to deal with those reds who had
taken over that mining complex. They were going to dynamite it. We were stretched thin – when we
were not? – and I only had your squad available. And I asked you to deal with it. And you…well, do
you remember how you did so?”
“I blew the nearby dam. Flooded the mine.” Munekata said. “Killed them all.”
Karashima chuckled. “Yes. That was always your methodology, Keizo. Extreme violence. You were
a weapon to be flung at the enemy. A dangerous figure, without home or heart – everything
subsumed into the job. A human bomb. I wondered if you were the right person for the Suzuki
favour. Probably you weren’t. I should have thought about it harder. But I assumed you were loyal,
at least. Now I see that you were not.”
“I don’t understand-”
“I do not like those men you killed. I found their actions distasteful. I should have done something
myself. A lack of communication. Regrettable. We might say that the Chinese I had picked for this
assumed you were after them for one thing, and I had set you upon them for another. If only Henry
Jiang could have been dealt with in some other way – well, now what’s done is done. A disaster. A
mistake. A terrible mistake.”
“Sir.” Munekata said. “What do you mean?”
“Operation Shattered Jewel.” Karashima said. He sighed. “We have been collaborating. The
Kwantung and the navy. The Kempeitai and what’s left of the old Tokkeitai too. An unprecedented
union. Restarting the drugs trade in Ryujin. Heroin smuggled in through Henry Jiang’s upstart gang,
in order to create a problem that justified political continuity and to discredit the Chinese in this
strategically-useful port town.” He paused, as if unable to find the words. “This was my operation,
Keizo.”
Munekata stared at his mentor, his father, his superior. “What?” he managed to ask. “Why?”
“To lead to a situation where the Japanese community could more easily retain political control
post-independence, of course. To keep things harmonious.” Karashima sniffed. “You were supposed
to catch the rapist. Not do whatever it was that you did last night. I blame myself, really. I thought – I
didn’t know it was Jiang who touched that silly student. By the time I had an inkling…well, I told you
to stop. When it was clear you would not I thought I could at least trust you to restrain yourself. And
now here we are. Shattered Jewel really is all in pieces. I have worked for years to ensure army-navy
unity in this town, to keep the Chinese leashed to drugs and vice. I have worked to prepare as many
contingencies as was possible for the end of the world. Now – you wouldn’t believe the phone calls
I’ve had from both sides of the military this morning. They’re at loggerheads once again. My
harmony is in tatters.”
“Sir,” Munekata managed, “I didn’t know-”
Karashima took his cap off. He rubbed his scalp with one hand. “Of course not! You’re a war hero,
aren’t you? A good man. Tired of violence and of the burden of control. Out of the game. We would
never bother you with something dirty like that.” He sighed. The guns of his men were still held
steady. The thick diesel stench of the half-tracks’ engines stung Munekata’s nostrils. “Drugs destroy
communities.” Karashima said. “They ruin lives. They stir things up – they hurt the reputations of
those politicians who can’t control them. By creating a problem the new rulers of Ryujin won’t be
able to manage, to gift them one last mess before we leave, we are sapping their strength, in order
to give the settlers a fighting chance at maintaining harmony without us. Or we were. You cut off the
whole head of the thing last night. Jiang and his cowboys were essential. The yakuza are diminished
– the triads won’t touch the idea, not now when they’re riddled with communist infiltrators. We
needed the newcomers, the Jiang and Chen group. Now we’re going to need to work very hard to
start something like it up again. With new middlemen. Not to mention calming down the navy and
the army.”
“Sir-”
Karashima’s expression was one of mild dismay. “I told you if you overstepped in any way on this
one, I would be unable to protect you from the consequences.” he said. “And yet our years of
comradeship count for too much, Keizo. I can’t bring myself to punish you as I should. Of course,
there will be consequences. But we’ll handle the worst of it for you, at least.” A cry came from
behind. Munekata turned to see the four soldiers leaving the motel, two of them each grabbing
Hana, hauling her roughly forward. She was half-dressed in underwear and t-shirt and her scarf was
loose and untied about her neck but she had no shoes or jacket or trousers and her hair was wild
and she was fighting with them, struggling to no avail against the two pairs of arms that pinned her
in place. “Fuck you! Fucking – get off!” Mandarin swearing, thick erhua. His heart was frantic in his
chest. He turned back to the impassive Karashima. “Sir-” he began. “Sir, please.” He heard the
pathetic tenor of his own voice. “Please.”
They dragged Hana out into the dirt and shoved her forward onto all fours in the grass, before
Karashima and Munekata. The soldiers all remained at the ready. She sat up and looked with furious
eyes over her shoulder at him. Then she seemed to relax. She was calm, he saw. It was as if
something she had long been waiting for had, after an unprecedented delay, finally arrived. “Old
man.” she said. It was in her Japanese voice for a moment. The voice of his Hana Takamori. He
realized he had never learned her real name. She turned her face away from him and back to them,
the wall of Japanese with rifles and machines and uniforms, and she got to her feet and stood there
before them. With her head held high she did not look away. Her hair danced in the breeze. Her
mouth opened. “Long live the Communist Party-”
 They shot her in the head. She fell with a spray of blood and landed hard on the ground. One of
the soldiers had done it with his rifle and smoke rose up from the barrel and dissipated into the air
and the soldier wore nothing on his face but disinterest. Karashima glanced down at the corpse and
his nostrils wrinkled in momentary distaste and then he cleared his throat.
“Well, there we go.” he said. “Now the culprit behind last night’s violence has been caught. A red
throwback with a grudge.” Sound filled the air, a relentless droning like the hum of a thousand
airplane engines. “You, Lieutenant Munekata, are going to have to take some time off – turns out
this communist bandit seduced you, as Chinese women are wont to do – but clearly you had nothing
to do with her unconscionable vendetta against her gangster clients.” Karashima frowned. “Keizo,
now, what’s with that look?” Munekata did not know how he looked. He could not feel his own face.
He saw her there and the blood leaking out and the pale skin of her exposed half-naked body. He
stared at it and could not stop. Karashima had stepped in front of him, blocking her from his view,
and yet the major wasn’t really there and neither were the guns and half-tracks or his own flesh, all
of it melting into air. He wasn’t sure if he was still alive. “Lieutenant.” Karashima said. A hand on his
shoulder. “Come on. Keizo, we had to. Do you think she could have kept quiet? Do you think she
could have been made to? You know it really. Stop with that hangdog expression. We’ve both lost
more over the years. You’re an officer in the heavenly sovereign’s army. You’re an honourable
gentleman. You’re Japanese. Aren’t you worth more than her?”
Munekata found Karashima’s eyes and looked there. He saw himself reflected in the depths of
the other man’s pupils, his grey face bruised and battered. “We have to preserve harmony.”
Karashima intoned. “You know this.” Munekata seized up with a sudden sensation – a yawning abyss
opening up in the pit of his stomach, a freezing touch at the base of his spine – and he moved and he
toppled over into the grass and he was with her, touching her flank. She was already beginning to
cool. The bullet had smashed through her temple and out of the back of her head and made a gaping
concavity of the top of her skull, a thick morass of brain matter and blood matting her tattered hair.
Beneath this her face, bloodied, was intact. Her eyes were still open. He held her. He wrapped
himself around her, arms feeling her, trying to push her into him, trying to find something anything
there of her that still lingered. Her hot blood kissed his hands where he touched her. His face
pressed against her red scarf. She did not move except for where he moved her. Munekata screwed
his eyes shut and lay there in the dirt with Hana. None of them disturbed him for some time.
 FOURTH: PATH

As far as our own desire is concerned, we do not want to fight even for a single day. However, if
circumstances force us to fight, we can fight to the finish.
- Mao Zedong

19
“Come on.” she once said. “You’re not serious, are you?”
“I am.” he had said.
She had looked at him and burst out laughing. “What?” she said.
“I just wondered if you might-”
“Fuck off.” she said. “What is this, teenage date night? I don’t want to have dinner with you, you
fat old shit. I want a drink before we get down to business. That’s all.”
“Very well.” he said. Something in his tone seemed to catch her then. She looked at him,
expression softening. There was only a girl there, a woman he had power over, and for a terrible
second he knew it. “Look.” she said in a low voice. “It’s easier if we do it that way, isn’t it? I don’t
want to know you and you don’t want to know me – I mean, you don’t really want to know me, do
you? You want what you want. So let’s just keep it simple.”
“I understand.” he said.
“Do you?” She leant forward. It was the first time she had ever touched him outside of the
bedroom, her fingers brushing for a moment against his. Both of them silhouetted in the dark of
Tiger Street in the minutes before the neon came on. “Let’s just make each other feel better, okay?”
she said. “You give me money, I give you…you know. None of that other stuff. That’s all.”
He was woken up by the pain in his leg worse than ever. It was the afternoon and he had come
upstairs to take a nap and now he here was awake and he had not done anything for two days but
eat and drink and go to the bathroom. He had a bottle of whiskey next to the futon and he picked it
up and swigged and with a wince turned onto his side. His bruised leg was an angry mess. His stick
was there but he did not use it and instead dragged himself up on his own and went to the balcony.
The two Kwantung soldiers were still there with their rifles. It was not officially house arrest but it
wasn’t anything else.
He swigged more whiskey and hobbled his way downstairs, past the portrait of the emperor.
Below it was as it had ever been, if dirtier – he had dismissed Mrs. Tenma and told her not to come
back and she had refused and they had argued and he had not answered any of the phone calls that
had followed. Hana’s picture posing in her qipao remained pinned to the fridge. He hated it, hated
that he only had this single image, this tacky piece of colonial fetishism, this ugly artificial thing he
had tried to create out of her. But he couldn’t take it down but also feeling unable to leave it up he
had now begun averting his eyes from the fridge, in some futile display of – what? Remembrance?
She had not been his Hana and who she had been he had merely glimpsed in passing, had fallen
into a painful kind of love with. His heart ached but not for what he had lost, for he no longer existed,
but for her, for the person he had known briefly after Jiang’s death and the termination of her
potential. He could not escape from knowing that the moment when she would have been able to
cease being Hana Takamori had been so close and that she had missed it. She had said she hadn’t
known what to do after Year Zero – but he was sure, terribly sure, that it would have been
something better. Munekata sat down at the table and sipped yesterday’s cold tea. He did not know
what else there was for him to do.
He was aware of the portrait of the emperor watching him. He staggered back over to it and
looked up and he looked away again. There was no point in anger. It had been anger that had guided
him here. Propelled forward by his contempt for himself he had lurched down this path, guided by
years upon years of indifference to his own fate, secure in the knowledge that it was only his own
future that he decided…and yet this had been false. Hana had chosen for herself what to do and she
had chosen to intertwine herself with him and for all of that she had faced the truth of things and
died before it. And she had shown him it when she had said she was tired of shutting up. And he had
not realized what she had meant but now he did. He understood that the worst things he had done
had not been with guns or swords to bodies on the battlefield but had been things he had never
even noticed he had been doing. Dinnertime came and Munekata did not eat but remained sitting
there, feeling the ache in his leg. He sipped at his whiskey.
There was a knock at the door. Munekata ignored it. It came again, three or four times.
Munekata remained sat down in the dark. “Mr. Munekata!” a voice called. It was the voice of the
young girl Mizuki Tachibana with the scar on her wrist. Sachiko Suzuki’s friend. Slowly he got up and
went to answer the door. She was there upon the threshold and she looked a little better than she
had last. There were bags beneath her eyes but she had tied her hair back and revealed by the
absence of her fringe were her eyes themselves, which still held light. She bowed to him. “Mr.
Munekata.” she said.
“Miss Tachibana.” he said. He returned the gesture, bowing slightly in response. It felt to be so
alien all of a sudden – the games they played, those of his race, whose homes were built out of skulls.
“How are you doing?” he asked.
She gave a half-smile. “I’m…I’m fine.”
“Do you want to come in for tea?” He did not want to serve her tea but he was going to. He knew
that he had to, to keep himself intact. He turned on the lights and led her down the hall and into the
living room. She slipped off her shoes and followed him and sat at the table and waited as he went
to the cupboard and took out the tea leaves and put them into the kettle and put the kettle to boil
and got out two cups. The curtains were still closed and the light from his lamp burned in the corner.
She was too small there, in a room that had suddenly become too big. When the tea was done
Munekata put the kettle and the two cups upon a tray and tried to pick the tray up but his leg had a
spasm and suddenly could not hold beneath him. He clenched his teeth and forced it to. With halting
steps he came to the table and put the tea down and sat with her.
She blew at her cup and then took a slow sip. “It’s good.” she said.
“Thank you.” he said. They drank in silence in the dark. Minutes passed in this way. Munekata
realized that Hana’s death had not removed him from this world yet. Mizuki could see him and talk
to him and hear him. But he did not believe it. She put her cup down.
“I wanted to thank you.” she said. “For what you did for Sachiko.” Munekata did not speak but
took refuge in the quiet. Mizuki stopped talking too, as if her own words had intimidated her. She
returned to drinking. His eyes went to that knotted, ugly scar, resting there upon the wrist of her
right arm, only intermittently obscured by her sleeve. “Everyone knows what happened.” she said
eventually. “That someone from the police took out the cowboy gangsters from Divine Wind. Killed
their boss with a gun. And that one of the gangsters was the man who did that awful thing to
Sachiko.”
“I merely discharged my duty to Miss Suzuki.” he said. His voice was less than he had meant it to
be.
“Nevertheless.” Mizuki said. He noticed they both had the same way of speaking, stilted, as if
neither really meant anything they said. Cloaking their feelings in absurd linguistic games, looping
words in great circles around whatever the meaning of the discussion was. He hated it as he had
always hated it. “She’s grateful.” Mizuki said. “We both are. To you and…well, Sachiko said you had a
friend when you came to see her. A friend who made a promise to her that you would destroy him.
A woman who wanted to save her. I wanted to ask you if you could tell us where she is. Sachiko
wants to see her again.”
“She’s gone.” Munekata said. Mizuki stared. She had nothing to say, he could see – a good
Japanese girl like her was not equipped for this kind of confrontation, for the cold reality of life and
death. It brought him sorrow to see her crumple, to spy the wilting that went on beneath her mask,
but as well a kind of shameful spiteful joy, because she too was Japanese like him and she too
deserved it. But after a second Mizuki sighed. She adjusted the hem of her school skirt and took a
short sip from her tea. When she put the cup down it was with excessive force and the sound filled
the emptiness of his house from top to bottom.
“Why did they do it?” she asked, trembling as the question left her. Munekata stared at her
miserable, unflinching expression. He saw buried within her a far-off flame, flickering and feeble,
that he did not want to imagine could survive in this wretched wind. And yet he could observe that
so far it had. He could not show his happiness at this. He who was frozen over in the blizzard could
only watch the flame’s distant dance. But he could give her an answer. “Because they had no reason
not to.” he said.
“I’m sorry.” she said softly. “She was Chinese, wasn’t she?”
“Yes.”
“Li Huangqi told me something. We met him the other day. He came to see us. He’s out of the
gang, now. He – he didn’t – Mr. Munekata, it was because of me that Xu Mei-”
“No it wasn’t.” he said firmly.
She had been about to cry, he noticed. Now she paused. “We saw him.” she said. “At the hospital.
We went to go see Mei. And he told us that…there’s word someone is trying to recruit people he
knows. For drug-running. He thinks it’s the military. He says they’re already trying to replace the
people you and she dealt with.” She paused after saying this. Munekata watched her trembling lips.
“Why are we like this, Mr. Munekata?” she asked. Now he had nothing to say. He only drank his tea.
She did likewise. When her cup was empty he leant forward and filled it for her. They continued until
most of the tea had been drunk.
Mizuki got up and Munekata went with her to the door. Neither of them spoke. Then at the last
second Munekata coughed. “Miss Tachibana.” he said. She paused. In the street behind her beyond
the curtains the two soldiers were still on guard duty. She had not seen them, he imagined. There
was so much even now she did not see. But that flame still flickered. “Her name…I don’t know her
name.” he said. “Her real name. But she told me she was Hana. Please tell Miss Suzuki that Hana
would not want her to give up.”
“I-” Mizuki swallowed. She looked at him and he wondered – it was that Japanese curse again,
that mask for a face – what it was she was thinking. Then she smiled. “I will, Mr. Munekata. Thank
you so much. For everything. For…saving Sachiko.” She bowed again. Munekata returned the bow,
deeper. She blushed at this. He merely smiled and let her go, and stayed there in the doorway
watching her walk the path down to the road and past the two soldiers, who regarded her warily.
Then she was gone. He went back inside. The picture of Hana was still upon the fridge and she was in
her qipao wearing her scowl. Munekata then went to the shed.
The special attack suit’s armour was still upon the wall all in pieces, the empty eyeholes of its
mask staring into him. He took them down one by one. It was as simple as fitting together a child’s
toy. The pieces of the frame slotted together into arms, legs, torso, head, the bolts easy for one who
knew how temperamental they could be, the armour heavy but not too heavy as he sat at the chair
in the shed and worked to assemble the component parts of what had once been his real self. He
put shoulder plates to arm plates. He drilled and bolted and sometimes soldered together what had
once been apart. He worked with patience and sweat and with the clicking and moving of metal and
he worked long into the night. By ten it was done and the assembled segments of his body lay about
him like fossils from some ancient age. Only one was missing: the leg piece he had left in the motel
outside the town. That was alright. Munekata went back to the house and he went to bed, and he
dreamt of what else he might need tomorrow.
He dreamt of her. Hana was there in her red army jacket and scarf and she was waiting for him
amidst a burned-out village. Somewhere on the plains. The houses smouldered, ancient Chinese
architecture blackened and broken, a great ancestral hall reduced to fragmented walls and collapsed
roof at their backs. The snow fell all around them but still embers went on burning amongst the
wooden ruins. He knew this village. Here he had-
 “Hey, old man.” she said. She took his hand. It was all gone from her, all the damage the years
before him and the years with him had scarred her with. She turned and looked at the village arch
which was as black and ugly as everything else. “Don’t get distracted.”
“Distracted?” His voice was far away. He didn’t know if he had said this. He didn’t know if it was
Hana or Xu Mei who was half-dead or the girl who had crippled him or dear Mieko who he had
betrayed. Hana pushed her hair out of her eyes. “Yeah.” she said. “Don’t you remember what you
are? I know it’s been a real long time. Years upon years upon years of distraction.” Was she speaking
Mandarin or Japanese? He didn’t know. The Manchurian village was a husk. There were bodies
amidst the dark. Her eyes would not leave him. “I remember.” he said.
His hands could not touch her suddenly. They passed through him. “That’s good.” she said.
“That’s very good. So tell me. What are you?”
“I-.” he began. He could not finish.
She smiled. “A devil in human form.” she said. “Yamata no Orochi. The last remaining head of the
great snake.”
“I-”, he began, “I no longer wish to see any more violence…forgive me. I cannot do it.”
She turned her head, looking back at the black husk of the village. “You don’t owe me an apology,
you old fart. You don’t owe me anything. Your duty is only to yourself. Don’t beg other people for
forgiveness or bother them with questions about what you should do next. Do what you would like
to do…follow your heart.” Now she looked back at him, her fox-like features full of mischief. “Maybe
if any of you bastards had ever checked in with your hearts, instead of shutting up and going ahead
with what you told yourselves was proper and honourable, you wouldn’t have ended up building
such a shabby, miserable prison for yourselves.”
The village was disappearing now. The snow had begun to intensify, wiping it away, burying its
horror beneath sheer whiteness. And she was fading with it – he was losing her, her presence
disappearing beneath the deluge. He ached all over. The pain rose and rose as she disappeared, as
she was wiped from existence, lost to China, to all but his fragmentary memory. Yet he dared not
raise his hand to find her. She simply wore that smile – not the mocking smile of the girl but her own,
a real smile, as sad an expression as anything he’d ever seen. She smiled and smiled and then she
was gone. And he woke up and the pain was real. And so he cleared his throat and got back to work.
That afternoon, after spending a good few hours more working on the suit’s mechanisms, oiling
the joints and fixing up some of the wiring and pouring in hydraulic fluid from the tank in the
cupboard next to his father’s altar, he went for a walk in the pale midday sun. The two guards
outside came up to him as he hobbled upon his stick down the garden path and into the street. He
was dressed in his most crumpled and dark western-style suit and he had not shaved or trimmed his
moustache and the bandage still pressing into his nose was dirty with sweat and grime. He looked
terrible, he knew. “Excuse me, sir,” one of the guards said in that mechanical tone, “we’re here for
your own protection. You should stay inside-”
Munekata swigged at his whiskey bottle. “Damn fools! Protection from what, eh?”
He and his companion exchanged glances. “We, uh, weren’t told. But our orders were-”
“Orders?” Munekata swayed on his stick. “What orders, huh?”
“From Major Karashima’s office, sir.” the second guard said.
“The devil with Karashima!” Munekata spat. “Look, do you know who I am?”
“No, sir.” the first guard said.
“I’m Keizo Munekata! I was a surveyman, damn it all! And I’ll make your life hell if you don’t let
me go wet my whistle, you understand?” He splashed his whiskey about theatrically – hopefully not
too theatrically. Both of them exchanged glances again. The first guard cleared his throat. “You want
to go…and drink?”
Munekata gave a vigorous nod. “To The Golden Dragonfly! And if you try to stop me, I’ll call the
major and have you strung up as traitors to the Empire of Manchukuo!” The two guards stared at
him, neither willing to speak. He leant forward. “Or…or, you see, gentlemen, we could simply forget
all of this. The major is concerned for my health, you see. But I’m fine! And if anyone asks about you,
I’ll simply tell them that I was fine, and that the major was overreacting…we’re old friends, y’see.”
The two guards one more time looked at one another. Beneath his helmet the second guard
scratched at his face. “We could go and get some tea.” he said slowly.
“We could.” the first guard said.
Munekata stood. “Yes. You well could. You could well go and get some tea until later in the
afternoon, when I will be back in my home without incident and pleasantly drunk, and no longer
willing to make any trouble for you by coming out and harassing you like this. Wouldn’t that be
better for everyone?” Several minutes later he was walking up Cherry Blossom Lane in peace, both
guards having agreed, without saying so, to look the other way as he sauntered off with his whiskey
in hand. Independence was coming and there was little pay and no glory in doing guard jobs for the
dying Empire – neither man had been willing to deal with him and now here he was.
It was as Hana had said: find the people who were wavering. And there were so many waverers
now, and even someone like Karashima who was not a waverer would forever be dependent upon
those who were. Munekata walked up to Five Races Square. Once he had trod these streets in his
uniform, enjoying the automatic respect of the settlers, unaware of the evil he was. Now they
regarded him with averted eyes. Now he felt free at last.
He went to Government Building No. 4, Kempeitai headquarters with its two half-tracks with
their unused 40mm cannons. The day was quiet and the roads empty. Tenmei felt sullen, as if
aggrieved by his impending betrayal. Munekata thought, so be it. He had loved Ryujin over the years
but never here, never specifically the Japanese quarter, this mausoleum for an imperial dream that
had died decades before, that had perished in the killing fields of the plains under Survey Unit guns.
His guns. He sauntered inside. Sato was reading his newspaper by the entrance. “Morning, sir.” he
said, sitting up.
“Good morning, private.” Munekata said. Sato was already back at his newspaper. Munekata
went in. He saw the special attack suit in the glass case in the lobby and he hobbled up to it. It was
not his suit. He did not feel anything now. Leaning on his stick he looked into the empty eyeholes of
the mask. A sharp footfall from the other side of the room alerted him and he saw Miyuki and
Yagami stood there in the doorway in uniform with field caps and armbands and swords at their
waists. They were watching him. “Sir.” Yagami said. “What are you doing?”
Munekata turned to them. “What are you doing?” he asked.
“There’s – there’s been an alert.” Yagami said. “We’re holding the fort. Until the others get back
from the naval base. Sir, didn’t you-?” He blinked. “What are you doing?” he repeated.
Munekata cleared his throat. “I am going to take a piece of this special attack suit.”
“Why?” Miyuki asked. Both had their sidearms holstered for now. Munekata studied the glass
case again, looked for the lock that kept it closed. He found it halfway up the front and noted it,
unable to do anything more – he didn’t have a key. He sniffed. “If I tell you, then I suppose you’ll
have to report it to Captain Tonegawa.” he said.
“He’s dead, sir.” Yagami said.
“What?”
“He was assassinated last night.” Miyuki said. Her slim hands played with one another over the
front of her uniform. “Somebody broke into his house. Shot him six times in the chest and slit his
throat with a sword.”
Munekata snorted. “Of course. Snakes in a tied-up sack. They’re already going after one another.”
He looked up at the special attack suit. “Well,” he said slowly, “I suppose that makes me the ranking
officer of this branch, doesn’t it?”
“It does, sir.” Yagami said.
“So,” Munekata said, “if I order you to open this case and give me the right leg frame segment,
and then I take it away, and all throughout I neglect to explain to you why I’m doing so, then you as
good soldiers will have to follow my orders, and therefore will not be held personally accountable
for whatever follows.” A long pause followed. They did not affirm what he had said but did not deny
it either. “Open the case and give me the right leg frame segment, Sergeant Yagami.” Munekata said.
“Request permission to speak freely, sir.” Yagami said.
“Denied, sergeant.” Munekata said. “Open the case.”
“Who are you going to fight?” Miyuki asked. Yagami flinched and then she did too, as if startled
by how startled he was by her insubordination. Munekata smiled. “The enemy, private.” he said.
Miyuki’s face seemed to crack. She was visibly furious with him – she was about to weep, her
brow hard and her mouth crumpled and her eyes damp and trembling. This expression was terribly
ugly but it was the truth. “Who’s our enemy?” she demanded. “We aren’t at war, are we? Wasn’t
that – isn’t that what all of this is about? We have peace. All the…the guns, the prisons, the…didn’t
we do all of that to keep the peace? Why do you have to start fighting again, sir? What was the point
of any of this, if it was always just going to end in more bloodshed anyway?”
Munekata thought for a moment. “There was no point to it, private. None at all.” Miyuki turned
away, clearly unable to look at him. Yagami stared, as if that was all he could do. “That’s treason, sir.”
he said.
“I suppose it is.” Munekata said. “I should arrest myself for it. Open the case.” Yagami fetched the
key from his belt and went to the case and opened it, and Munekata watched as Yagami beckoned
for Miyuki to help him, and when she didn’t he barked at her and slapped her and ordered her to,
and grunting and straining the two of them unfastened the special attack suit’s right leg segments
and detached the frame. Munekata heard the radio in the other room, and he heard in a robotic
voice thick with static some imperial officer relaying orders: all units stay vigilant, wait for further
information, do not act without clarification from above. The prerecorded internal Kempeitai
communication – he knew this – to be broadcast in case of public instability. Yagami came to him
and handed him the right leg frame segment. “Here you go, sir.” he said. He searched Munekata’s
face. “You really won’t be coming back to Japan, will you?”
They had gone fishing before, by the docks. An afternoon of laziness, beer and occasional
conversation. Munekata held onto that memory for a moment. He exhaled. “I’m going back to
where I belong.” he said. “To the plains. It’s up to people like you and Miyuki to take the story of our
folly to the home islands. To tell everyone how pointless everything we did out here was.”
“Was it really?” Yagami asked. Pleaded. Miyuki, too, watched Munekata with a desperate
expression. “Was all of it such a waste?” she begged.
Munekata took the metal in hand. It was heavy. Reassuring. “Only if we refuse to learn from it.”
he said. “Dismissed, Sergeant Yagami and Private Ishida.” On his way back down Cherry Blossom
Lane he stopped at a liquor store and bought an expensive bottle of whiskey, and in the street he
took the bottle out of its box and drank some and tossed the rest away and placed the segment of
special attack suit inside the box. It was a clear and pleasant day now, Tenmei as it had always been,
as peaceful and harmonious on the outside as a polished piece of jade, a sublime work of art to be
enjoyed by onlookers.
Munekata took his box home past the two guards outside his house and fitted the leg segment to
his suit and then got to work restoring the internal motor of the frame, which was supposed to be
deactivated, since after all they had given him the suit back as a trophy, not to be used, and they had
broken every part of his true self before doing so. Over the years he had worked upon fixing it, and
he had done some work this morning, and now there was only the wiring to repair. He took off his
jacket and shirt and bent over on his wounded knee and with solder and tape he then subsequently
repaired it, over a few hours, accompanied only by his thoughts and the pale glow of the shed light
and the harsh buzz of the soldering iron and the flowing sweat upon his bare flesh. With this done
he offered prayers to his father and to the Buddha. He had made a plan – as evening fell upon the
town and the lights turned on – to get past the guards again, only to find that they were gone. He
thought of Miyuki’s news about Captain Tonegawa and wondered.
 Watching the street from the living room he called a Jinzhou number that had been easy enough
to find. He sat down at the heated table with a glass of whiskey. The phone rang and rang. “Hello?”
the voice on the other end of the line said. “This is Akira Suzuki. Who is calling?”
“Mr. Suzuki.” Munekata said. “This is Lieutenant Keizo Munekata, of the Ryujin Kempeitai.” A
pause followed. “Oh.” Suzuki said. “You’re…you’re the man Major Karashima put on my daughter’s
case?”
“Yes.” Munekata said.
“Well.” Suzuki said. His voice carried a pure home islands accent, of the kind that Munekata
found he could no longer stand. “I must thank you, lieutenant. I have heard…well, Major Karashima
mentioned that you had resolved things. That you dealt with the man responsible for shaming my
daughter.”
“I did.” Munekata said. He only had one thing to ask and so he asked it. “Have you seen her?”
“Excuse me?” Suzuki said.
“Forgive me, but I only wondered if you had seen her since her ordeal.”
“Oh.” Suzuki said. “Oh, no. Well, it’s regrettable, but her mother doesn’t much want me around
at the moment.”
Munekata drank. “But surely, Mr. Suzuki, after such a horrendous incident…”
“Ah.” Suzuki said. “Well, I’ve been very busy. It’s alright, lieutenant. The stain on our honour, as I
said, has been removed.” Munekata thought about the way Hana had looked during Sachiko’s
retelling of her assault. He thought of Sachiko’s monotone voice, she in her bedroom dwarfed by
everything. “Your honour.” he repeated. “I see. Well, I was happy to be of service, Mr. Suzuki.”
“Of course, of course.” Suzuki said. “I’m grateful to you. Now, if you didn’t have anything else-”
“Mr. Suzuki.” Munekata said. He inhaled and exhaled. “You do not deserve your daughter.”
“What?” Suzuki asked. “What is the meaning of that, lieutenant? What are you saying?”
“You do not deserve her.” he said. “And I hope when the Chinese take back Jinzhou they hang
you from a lamppost.” He hung up. It was his intent to move out at around eight, and now it was six,
and so he called Burton and asked him to come over. In the meantime he worked on compiling his
case notes, everything from his initial investigation of Mizuki Tachibana to Jiang Guangming and now
some additional material on Operation Shattered Jewel, taking the skeleton of what he had scribbled
down before and adding details and meaning and hindsight to every moment, so that it would
suffice as a real document.
When Burton called in shirt and jeans Munekata in his yukata welcomed him in, and Burton with
his English politeness allowed himself to be guided to the living room and served a stiff glass of gin
and tonic. They toasted to the health of the British king. Munekata thought the English in their way
were the same, with their maniacal loneliness driving them to look away from the very horrors it
pushed them to. That was what bound he and the foreigner together. They drank.
Eventually after several long sips of gin Burton seemed to look at him properly, to see the
wounds and the age and the sadness perhaps, and Munekata saw the foreigner’s face – even an
English face gave away secrets carelessly – and the gradual onset of first concern and then courage.
He leant forward over the heated table. “…Mr. Munekata.” he said. “I know it’s rude. But I have to
ask…what the hell happened to you? What’s going on here? There’s all kinds of dirty rumours
coming and going at the Dragonfly. Talk about a big struggle in the military that’s going to hit the
export business hard.” He paused a second, working himself up to something. “And…where’s that
lady friend of yours? I would have thought, in times like these-”
Munekata met his blue eyes. “Hana is gone. There is an operation run by the Kempeitai funnelling
drugs into Ryujin, in order to cooperate with gangsters out of Ryujin Naval Base to undermine the
Chinese community here. It has collapsed. The fuss you’re hearing about is likely the fallout. They’ll
be blaming each other, trying to find scapegoats, coming to blows in meeting rooms. I know this
because Major Karashima, my superior, is part of the operation. And it was he who…dealt with
Hana.”
 Burton stared. He took another long sip of his gin. “God. You’re serious.” Munekata shifted,
taking the notebook at his side and with both hands presenting it to Burton, who regarded it
seriously, as Munekata had known he would. “These are my notes.” Munekata said. “If you yourself
cannot read the Japanese, John, then you must get it to someone who does. Tonight I am going to
finish things, and afterwards it is very likely the army will search my home for any documents such as
this. I wish for you to take it. Perhaps there would be something in it of use to anyone trying to
navigate whatever Ryujin and Manchukuo will look like tomorrow.”
“Sure.” Burton said. “Aye. Look, you’re not planning on, I dunno, dying, are you?” Munekata had
his own drink. It was erguotou from a bottle he had been brought from Hana’s room at Mrs. Abe’s
guesthouse, which along with her other belongings a young lady, surnamed Akiyama, had brought to
him. A friend of Hana’s, he had assumed. She had said she didn’t know but he had been the only
person she could think of and that was terrible, wasn’t it, but it was better than nothing. You knew
her, Akiyama had explained. Munekata had wanted to ask her so many questions but had not. He
had only been polite and kept up his mask.
He drank the erguotou and relished the taste. “I will not die.” he said. “But I will not come back to
here, no. Consider what I am about to do a sort of resignation.”
“So I won’t see you again?” Burton too was pleading, just as Yagami had been. So much had come
to rest upon Munekata’s shoulders – the cares of so many others, weights which he had failed to
notice piling up over the years he’d been here. But the only one of those dependencies he cared
about – the only person who could have dissuaded him from drawing his sword – was missing and
would never return. He drank up. “Never say never, Mr. Burton.” he said. “Let us finish our drinks
first.” So they drank, and spoke as they had in all their years of drinking together, of nothing much
but the world. It grew closer to eight. The topic turned to their first meeting, all those years ago:
“What was that song?” Munekata asked. “When we first began to talk. I was very drunk. At the
Dragonfly.”
“It’s A Long Way to Tipperary.” Burton said. “That was it.”
Munekata cleared his throat, sipping from his cup of sake. “It was British, wasn’t it?”
“Aye.”
“About a homesick young man, far from his family.” Munekata said. “And I told you I liked English
songs. And you said my English was good. And I said…”
Burton cleared his throat. “You said, ‘I am…how do you say it? Semi-retired. A man needs a
hobby. I seldom can practice, however’. Just like that. A little stilted.”
Munekata smiled. “You remember.”
“Hell, sure I do.” Burton said. Munekata looked at the clock. It was almost eight. He steeled
himself and regarded the other man, the foreigner. “I must go.” Munekata said. “If you – if you see
the others at the Dragonfly. Brother Wang or Mimi. Tell them I will miss them.”
Burton, red-faced from gin, nodded. “I will.” He then hugged Munekata and wished him the best
in stumbling Japanese. Munekata saw the foreigner off, watched him disappear into the night with
the case notes. A spy, he hoped. He had always suspected as much, but had always enjoyed the
other man’s company anyway, not really caring. Perhaps Burton had accidently confirmed it by
taking Munekata’s notes so readily. Well, he thought, what of it? If the British or Americans or
whoever the foreigner really worked for got something out of them, then it would be another blow
against Manchukuo, and that would be good enough. Munekata turned away, bid Burton a final
silent goodbye. And then he went back to the shed and to his suit.
There was little left to think about. He looked the fully-assembled special attack suit up and down,
checked the joints and the joins in the armour and the wiring in the motor and the hinges on the
new leg segment and he slid the battery into its casing. He checked the hydraulics and oiled the new
leg joint. It was ready for him now. Munekata stripped off and slipped into his old layer, the suit of
cloth and leather that protected his bare limbs from the metal of the frame, pulling it tight against
his skin and sliding the hood up over his head. He put the photograph of Hana into the breast pocket.
 Then dressed in this ugly one-piece outfit he clambered inside the suit proper, opening it up at
the major seams and then closing it segment by segment over himself, a tedious and slightly difficult
job when done by a single man – in the plains there had always been help from comrades when
suiting up, but now there were no more comrades left. The final head of the snake, as Hana had said.
Hadn’t she? The frame was too tight for his middle-aged shape and the new right knee segment
pushed against his bruised battered old leg too hard. These irritations were obliterated by the
comfort of it, the psychological barrier that was erected as soon his flesh realized where it was being
entombed. It was a feeling like coming home.
He fastened up one leg and then the other and one arm and then the other, and with clicking
metal fingers he did the same to his chest. He sat up and then stood, feeling the frame all over
himself. It was a feeling of life, of pain and constriction and pent-up fury, a spring wound taut. He
was not quite there yet - the mask was not yet over his face. First he picked up the talisman that
would carry him to his revenge. This talisman he himself had taken from her corpse, before the
Kempeitai had spirited the body itself away to bury somewhere anonymous with countless others of
her countrymen. He had fought against them in this but had been only a wounded exhausted cripple
and so without much effort they had ripped her from him.
But he had kept her red scarf. With armoured hands now he took it and tied it around his neck.
He took the helmet and tied it over his head. And he at last slid the mask of the surveyman over his
face and thumbed the power button on. The suit’s engine hummed to life. Keizo Munekata
disappeared from this world – and all that was left now was the devil he had always been. An
armoured giant cast in black, looming over all. This was where following his heart had led him –
would have led him all along, if only he could have been honest with himself. He went out into
Ryujin.
-
A dream that came to Jintian as he lay there half-awake in his bed, unable to speak to or look at
either his mother or his brother. He was dreaming in a semi-formed way of his muse, of his darling
Hana. He had last seen her watching him as he had stood there on the doorstep, regarding him with
the truth at last, the most wonderful gift anyone had ever given him. She had spoken venomous
words to him but they had been feeble, not even containing one hundredth of the contempt of her
expression. She alone of all of them – his heartbroken mother, his jealous brother, the boys he
fucked and the old Japanese bureaucrats who pretended to respect him – had loved the real essence
of Chen Jintian, and because of that when he had betrayed her she had come to hate him with a
loathing more real than any of the others’ phantom feelings. He still had a heart deep down, and the
shadow had not quite replaced all that was true of himself, and he knew this because of the bliss he
felt at glimpsing the honest contempt of her expression in those final moments.
So he dreamt of her but in his dream it was all as it should have been. They sat together in the
living room with she at the guzheng while he reclined upon the sofa, lying back as her delicate
fingers made for him a vision of old China, of elegant houses and snow-filled plains, of the old
Middle Kingdom in a world before Japanese or empires or tanks and bombs and guns, before he had
been compromised. He could not see her face but only her hands, the motions of those nimble
fingers. He lay back and read through his father’s calligraphy and listened to her song, felt it within
himself, was aware of a long-diminished beauty which all things had once possessed.
He knew that he too had once been a part of that great universal beauty, and shared in it, but
now was only a husk, this shape like a man that moved and breathed and lusted like a man but
which could no longer find that fragment of the eternal…his flailed, panicked motions only pulled
him deeper, made waves in the water that attracted terrible creatures, sharks coming for him from
the depths…did he welcome them? But death was for those who had freedom, who had found a
solution to their troubles, who knew, no matter where they were or who they had come from, that
they had options.
His own life was tied up in the lives of others and he wished, desperately begged heaven, that it
would not be so, and that was what her contemptuous face had been, the freedom he had longed
for, finally, and he was now not obligated to pretend to be anyone but had liberated himself with his
own cowardice, and now could disappear forever into the arms of however many men as he wanted.
She came to kiss him then, her frown his whole world, his hand reaching down of its own accord to
wrap itself around her cock and her hand finding his own – he was nude, and so was she – and their
bodies pressed together, cock against cock, warm and…do you know how it feels, you unbroken
people, to really connect like that? Do you know how it feels to know someone so well because you
have no choice, to meet furtively and passionately, with the rawness that came from sharing the
same miserable hiding place, your bodies entangled because there was no room for even one of you,
let alone two…the feeling of another’s breath upon the nape of your neck, their form defined by
where it met your own, by nothing else, a sharing that went beyond words…he was sucking Hana’s
cock, he realized, just as he’d always wanted to.
Jintian awoke. He had lost his feeling of joy, it slithering away along with his dream, with his
fumbled memories of her. He had an erection and first without thinking groped about for Kyoko or
some other form, grasping for any kind of flesh. Then he remembered his mother and his brother
and what had happened earlier, and he sat up and took the sake bottle by his bed and drank a little.
He dressed himself in robes and went through the silent house, listening in an idle way for signs of
his mother being somewhere.
He assumed she was in her room doing calligraphy. He found himself unable to care – so it was
that he had done terrible things and deserved punishment, but he was not sure it was to be
delivered by his mother’s hands, for already she had endured decades of punishment in the name of
family and so had sworn off of even giving punishment out to others, had sworn off hatred and
violence. Only Hana could do it. Jintian craved to be reminded of what he was by the only person
who understood why he had become like this. When she came for him and swore him off forever he
would obtain closure, and then he would disappear into the heroin dens of Yugongguan, he would
fuck his way into hell. Perhaps it would bring poetry back to him, and perhaps he would die an artist.
He walked in his sandals to the garden and the koi pond there, going outside into the evening
heat and standing there with a packet of cigarettes, Minguo, the Chinese brand, and a lighter and as
well his bottle of sake. Beyond the moon gate and the real gate was the street where Juhua’s men
were on patrol. For their own safety, it was said. Trouble with the military, Juhua had said, before
disappearing somewhere else to do whatever it was he was doing. Jintian had no interest in it. He
spied the silhouette of a gunman moving past the bars of the gate, walking with a rifle in hand.
Wasn’t this remarkable, he thought, that armed gangsters were upon the streets of Tenmei itself?
Juhua had been shaken up by something a day or so ago, and had been visited here, in the Chen
house, by military men who had forced their way in, and now he had disappeared and his goons had
come on motorbikes to stand guard in the street as now they were doing.
Jintian did not know what had happened that night. The Kempeitai had apparently wiped out the
Jiang group, who they had previously funded, for some reason, and now there was almost civil war
between they and the Kwantung Army and the Imperial Navy over this. He knew that Keizo
Munekata had been involved, and Hana too, and he hadn’t heard a word about either of them – or
from them – since. That sinister major, Karashima, had been saying it was the fault of a Chinese spy,
and the navy refused to buy it and thought the kempei were trying to cut them out of the heroin
smuggling, and the army remained in the middle but sullen and not trusting of either, and there was
talk of some communist agitation occurring in the ghetto below.
Who cared, he thought? It was so that Manchukuo was over and they were all already finished,
and yet even at this late hour they didn’t seem to realise it. Was he superior, he wondered, in
knowing he was doomed, in admitting as much? But Hana, for all her fear and hatred and spite, for
all she lived in a reckless, doomed way, had never admitted this to him or anyone else, and perhaps
that had been it.
The deluded settler Manchukuoans, if there really were such people, were too scared to face
themselves, and he who had admitted it was no different, but she was someone who had admitted
it and yet refused to let it finish there. Fine, alright, Hana’s very existence said, her long trail of
compromises in the name of survival; she had said to him, with her defiant pride, that yes, it was all
fucked, but. He thought that she believed, even in some frail and halting way, in tomorrow…
These and other notions haunted him as he drank by the pond, watching the beautiful gold-silver-
orange shapes of the fish move dimly through the water, as unaware of human feelings as humans
were unaware of the joy of drifting endlessly through nowhere. He raised a cigarette, grasping it
between those fingers that so longed for Hana’s cock, and watched the slim shape of the moon
above, in its untarnished white sheen as pure as a newborn baby. It was in this moment that he
heard a noise from the street – a grunt of pain silenced halfway through itself, as if someone had
been struck with enough force to knock them out, or kill them.
A morbid second impression. At first he did not stir, contemplating the cigarette. He went to light
it. Then he heard a shout: “What the hell are-” And a heavy thud, and the clattering of metal upon
tarmac. He started in his chair, leaning over towards the gate as if it would reveal everything to him.
It only showed darkness. Jintian listened carefully and reflected on the absurdity of human beings,
who were poetic and abstract about life and death until it came to stare them in the face. And he
reflected upon the shallowness of his own feelings, for although he had told himself he had
abandoned his concern for his family, it was now as danger loomed that he found himself thinking
first and foremost of his mother inside, and that he would do whatever he needed to in order to
ensure her survival.
He heard heavy footfalls in the street. A soldier, then – but only one? Jintian wished he had a gun,
or – stupid thought, full of loathing – that Juhua was here. He had half a mind to go find him but
then didn’t. His heart pounded in his chest. The faint whining of mechanical joints, the hum of a
machine. Then he saw the figure emerge, silhouetted through the circle of the moon gate, visible
through the bars of the gate beyond, and he felt to be going mad.
It was the hulking armoured shape of a survey trooper, the mythological enemy of all Chinese in
Manchukuo, the unmistakable silhouette of a form the fear of which was woven into his very soul.
The figure stood there and they held now the weapon that before one of Juhua’s flunkies had
carried, a Type 77 Arisaka assault rifle, in one hand. The figure approached the gate. Jintian stared as
if hypnotised. He saw the terrifying dark mask and rounded helmet and the bulky shape of the
armour plating and now saw as well the creature had a red scarf tied around its neck which hung
loose about its chest, like a war trophy. He had seen that scarf before. Once when drunk she had
come over and put it into his hands and insisted – made him feel it – and said it was hers, that it was
her, all of her, and he had only said, stupidly, well, you can hardly bring a thing like that in here. He
stared. “Hana-?”
“Open the gate.” the surveyman commanded, in rough male Armee Japanisch.
Jintian flinched. “Look.” he said in Japanese. “Whoever you are. If you’re going to harm my
family-”
“No.” the surveyman said. “I want to speak to you.” Jintian stared. Slowly he got up and he
approached the gate as if dreaming, feeling himself already dead. He could see the surveyman
watching through the holes of the mask with cold, calm eyes, the only thing of him visible which was
not dark steel. He paused before the gate, a flimsy thing of metal between the two of them. The
Survey trooper was not actually taller than him but the armour made him so – it magnified
everything about him, narrowed everything else into only myriad feeble subjects facing the eternal
object. He cleared his throat. “What do you want?”
“To talk.” The surveyman was not aiming the rifle at him. Jintian thought, with a strange calmness,
that the apparition didn’t mean him harm. He steeled himself and unlocked the gate. The giant
advanced upon him and he backed up into the garden, towards the pond, and there the two of them
stood outside the house in the moonlight. Jintian held absurdly onto his unlit cigarette. “Nobody else
will be able to tell you.” the surveyman said, staring into the koi pond. “So I thought I would.” It was
a flat voice in which he spoke. A desolate voice, a vein emptied of all that had once made it rich.
“She’s dead.”
 Jintian’s grip on the cigarette tightened so hard it broke between his fingers, dribbling tobacco
onto the floor. He looked at the armoured figure and tried to discern the truth, or tried to find any
way to disprove it. “How?” he asked eventually.
“The Kempeitai killed her.” the surveyman said. “They shot her in the head. They buried her
somewhere in the countryside near here. I don’t know exactly where.”
“You’re lying.” Jintian said.
“No.” the surveyman said. Jintian forgot the armour and the gun and everything else. He thought
of his brother for a moment, Juhua’s insistence upon the plan. Taking Hana into custody, that was
what he had said. At least until that bastard Munekata had been dealt with. He advanced upon the
Survey trooper with his fists tight. “The Kempeitai killed her.” he repeated, voice quivering. “Isn’t
that such delightful phrasing? Bullshit. Fucking bullshit. Say it properly, why don’t you? ‘We killed
her’. You killed her. Didn’t you?”
Those dead eyes seemed to waver. “No.”
Jintian bore down on him. “You did. I don’t mean you pulled the trigger, but – she wouldn’t have
done any of it if not for you. She wouldn’t have gotten my brother’s attention and everything would
have been fine. She would have been fine. Like me, perhaps. A miserable survivor, perhaps. But she
would be alive. She would be alive if you hadn’t fucked everything up. Isn’t that right, Keizo
Munekata?”
Munekata did not reply for a moment. “That’s right.” he said. Jintian stared at him. He recognised
those eyes now. He knew that he was still in danger, that he was small and frail and did not know
how to fight or kill or use a gun and that Munekata was a surveyman, a soldier, a trained murderer.
But Jintian knew in that moment he possessed the power to crush Keizo Munekata as surely as if he
was the man in the special attack suit instead.
“They buried her out there?” he asked. Munekata nodded, just barely. He was rigid as a statue –
or a machine waiting to be activated. This was all that was left of the older man he had met the
other day. Jintian did not envy whoever would face this machine that surely would turn on soon, the
darkness that would take over when it reached the destination he had donned his armour for. “You
think I can find her for you?” Jintian asked.
“No.” Munekata replied. “Not for my sake. Perhaps for yours, to some extent. But do it for her.
She doesn’t deserve-” – Jintian caught the brief slip of his monotone there, the rising fury barely
suppressed – “-to die like that. To be another – another body out there beneath the plains.”
Jintian felt his anger slipping away, or his anger at this man-machine, at least. He was tired and
was aware that he had helped to kill the only person who had ever understood him and that the
country was dying. He was aware that Munekata was trapped here with both of these facts too.
“None of them did.” he said quietly.
“I am aware.” Munekata said. Jintian turned away from the demon. Looking into the koi pond he
saw the moon’s purity reflected there, an image of an image. “I’ll do my best.” he muttered. “When
– whatever is going on here dies down a little. I promise you that.”
“You don’t need to.” the giant said. “I tell you for your own sake. I know you loved her too.”
Love. This word unstuck something within him. “Alright.” he said. “I did love her. I do. And you –
you killed her, the woman you loved, and maybe you’ve killed others, maybe you kill everyone you
love like that. Well, I betray them. All of them. All under the pretence of doing it for my family, I’ve
betrayed everything I’ve ever cared about – and actually it was all just to keep myself alive. Just to
keep my filthy presence upon this Earth, so I could indulge myself in all the selfish pleasure I wanted.
I betrayed Hana. It isn’t your fault that she’s dead – not only your fault. I did this too.”
He rounded on the armoured form of Keizo Munekata, of he who had helped to ruin everything.
“So why don’t you kill me, surveyman?” he demanded. “Why don’t you bury me too? All of us here
in this stinking fake country of liars and do-gooders and criminals and martyrs. Just as you and she
dragged one another down – drag Manchukuo down with you all the way into hell. And start here.”
He grasped the barrel of the assault rifle and lifted it up, pressing it against his front. Munekata
stared at him but did not touch the trigger. Jintian held it there, daring him. Finally Munekata forced
the gun aside. “No.” He turned away, his armour clanking, his joints alive with mechanical sound.
“Do it yourself, if you want.”
“If I want?” Jintian demanded. He heard his own voice crack. “What do I know about that? What
do I know about anything? How the hell am I supposed to know who I am, what I want?” Munekata
had begun to walk away but now at this he paused. He turned back and reached out past Jintian to
the side of his chair, where the pack of cigarettes waited, and with one armoured hand he took the
pack and stuffed it into one of the suit’s pouches. He did the same with the cigarette lighter. Then he
turned away again. But he looked back over his shoulder at Jintian. “Do what you would like to do.”
he grunted, and he left the garden and walked down the path and out of the gate and into the street.
His great metal footfalls echoed all the while.
There came from the street the sound of struggle. A short while later Jintian heard the rumble of
an engine. A motorbike engine, he realized. The engine sound rose and rose and then he saw the
bike speed past, a great armoured figure riding it, and then it faded and once more he was alone.
And Hana was dead.
After a few minutes – or perhaps longer – Juhua came from the street into the garden. “Bro,” he
said in a weak voice, sounding as wretched as Jintian felt, “what – what was that? Was that gunfire?
Where – is it safe?”
“It’s safe.” Jintian said. Juhua came fully into the garden. The two brothers stood together by the
koi pond. Juhua sighed, running a hand through his hair, looking out at the street. “What – hey, did
they kill my boys? Are we in trouble? What-” Jintian interrupted this by turning to his brother and
punching him as hard as he could in the face. Sting of his knuckles and Juhua’s confused pained yelp.
He’d realized at the last second, or barely realized it at all consciously until it had actually been
happening – that was what he would have liked to have done for a very long time. And the hot blood
upon his knuckles felt good.
 20
Mizuki had gone to see Sachiko yesterday evening, just after dinner, leaving her father and
mother in their miserable quiet. There had been a call from Sachiko’s father about some matter and
Sachiko’s mother had heard it and then put the phone down and gone out drinking and not come
back, having ended up staying with Sachiko’s aunt on the other side of town. Mizuki had rushed over
and told her friend what the old detective had said about the girl who had helped her, whose name
had been Hana. They had hugged.
Sachiko’s room was the same. The house was the same. Too much else had changed, and the
familiar nature of their surroundings – the posters on the walls, the Suzuki household, this town
which never altered its form no matter what, which was always just an eternal shell, empty within –
was annoying to the both of them, and Mizuki knew that they were both irritated, both miserable,
both sharing this wretched place that needed, somehow, to change with the world around it, and
this shared misery made her feel much better. It was as if she had been drowning and had emerged
above water at the last moment, her lungs filled with air, and it was true that what was upon the
surface was terrible and foul. But it was better than drowning.
They didn’t do much but sat and talked a little, and sometimes held hands. Mizuki had kissed her
once, in that first meeting, and felt Sachiko go rigid in her grip.
She had slept over that night, too close. Their bodies electric beneath the blanket neither quite
touching. Now a day later as night came close again Sachiko was playing an American pop song on
her Walkman, the both of them sharing an earbud each and partaking of screechy vocals and heavy
guitars and words neither really understood, and their fingers were tentatively interwoven. Mizuki
lay upon the floor with her legs stretched out and Sachiko upon the bed, half-dressed and wrapped
in her sheets. Mizuki had never met this Hana who both Mr. Munekata and Sachiko had been
marked by so deeply, but she could observe the loss and feel, abstractly, its enormous weight.
She felt herself as if she were in mourning. The girl with the iron blouse she had once been had
died in these last weeks and there was no more iron left in her, but Manchukuo had been made in
iron too, built up out of it, sewn together by the iron stitches of the South Manchurian Railway
Company, and that iron had promised all of them that it would eventually have been worth it,
convinced every Japanese there had been a future there in its depths. Now in the end it had only
turned out to in fact be nothing but cold dead metal through and through.
She didn’t know anything about anything but she knew the terrible freedom, the yawning,
exhilarating sensation in her chest, that came not just from having skipped school and taunted her
father about it and from having kissed a girl and having written death to the Japanese invaders on
her homework but from – what? Something more fundamental. The collapse of the state, perhaps.
She felt when she brushed against Sachiko’s fingers that all such things were possible. Her father had
not spoken to her since she’d come home after that day, but his sullen mood had filled the house
like a poison gas leaking out from some underground rupture, and he had snapped at her mother in
every conversation, and engaged in long phone calls consisting entirely of tense and muttered
political language.
Mizuki began to understand the process of falling apart and its liberatory element, the terror
which Sachiko had told her the foreign communist degenerate Marx had said – when the time came
– those responsible would not apologise for. As she and Sachiko went through the whole tape of
songs Mizuki with a pencil doodled abstract shapes in her homework book, secure in the knowledge
that she would never go to school again, which was true for now in the same way everything else
was true.
The tape ran out. They remained as they were, surrounded by sudden quiet and empty cola
bottles and a few crushed cans of beer. “Hey.” Sachiko said eventually. Mizuki looked to her.
Sachiko’s fingers played with hers. “I want to ask you something.” Mizuki waited. Sachiko – tired,
greasy-haired, exhausted, pale half-formed Sachiko, as beautiful as any propaganda darling or
uniformed servant of Empire and State – gave a feeble smile. “Are you still a virgin?” she asked.
Mizuki stared. “What?”
 “I thought so.” Sachiko said. “That’s okay. I’m not making fun. But I wanted to know something
about you, something you didn’t want to tell me. And now I do.”
“I don’t understand.”
Sachiko was lying down on her front, legs in the air. She took Mizuki’s hand in both of hers and
touched it softly, caressing her palm and her fingers with careful motions that made Mizuki’s
stomach dance, made her brain lose contact with itself. “I know that you’re sorry for what you did.
You’re willing to give me anything, aren’t you, Mizuki?”
“Of course!” Mizuki barked in almost Armee Japanisch.
“But not yourself.” Sachiko said. “You don’t want me to know how weak you are, do you?”
“I don’t-”
Sachiko caressed her cheek. “Let’s watch a movie.” So they did. Sachiko found the Mondlicht
video tape player her father had bought her for her birthday two years ago – and found her tape
collection, ten titles in all in a wicker basket under her bed. There was Alien and Bruce Lee in Rise of
the Dragon, and Greer’s Musik from the Reich, all illegal imports, and then at the end was a copy of
the Koji Wakamatsu adaptation of That Blazing-Red Scar! Story of a Surveyman at War, one of the
few official Manchukuoan tape releases. It was this – in its cheap white plastic case, blown-up image
of the poster with its surveyman striking a pose against a garish background – that Sachiko went for.
Mizuki said nothing but wondered. Sachiko took the tape and popped open the case of the player
and hooked it up to her television, and she positioned herself now sat against the side of the bed
next to Mizuki, so that they were touching all over, and together they watched the movie.
She had seen it so many times it was almost as if now she wasn’t even watching it, as if the action
playing out on the screen was happening in front of her with the comfortable certainty of sun setting
at the end of the day. Sonny Chiba played the titular surveyman, Yukio Handa, a trooper out on the
plains during the Insurgency at some unspecified point, a newcomer in his brand-new special attack
suit, inducted into the brutal realities of communist terrorism by Captain Kazuma, whose gruff
attitude belied a love of the motherland, represented by the scene where he breaks down drinking
and talks of his farm out in the plains and his wife and son there. She knew the thrilling action scenes,
the beautiful establishing shots of Manchukuoan villages, the poetic dialogue – it was all etched into
her heart. They watched Yukio Handa hurl himself to the snow, blasting rifle fire into communist
formations, aware now he had to shoot even though they were using child soldiers, weeping as he
gave not only his flesh but his morality, his soul, his very being, for emperor and motherland. Sachiko
held onto her and she gasped.
As Sachiko pressed two fingers between her legs and put a hand to her chest, fingers exploring,
Mizuki kept her eyes upon the screen, upon Yukio Handa raising his sword as the communist
assassin leapt at him from the village ruins. Her heart beat faster and faster. Sachiko’s hand cupping
her left breast. Sachiko’s lips brushing against her neck. A pain between her legs. She looked at
Sachiko and Sachiko did not look back. Those two fingers moved inward without warning. They
retreated and she let out a frail moan. She felt a gentle motion being exerted upon her, a back and
forth that was hot and kind and vast and terrible. She did not know what was being done to her
except Sachiko was grim-faced doing it, was treating this in some way as a punishment. It was not
that but Mizuki didn’t know what it was.
She wanted to reciprocate but didn’t know how. She thought as Sachiko licked her, what is this
degenerate behaviour? Her father had told her that homosexuals were a kind of western affectation,
and briefly she was scared. She tried to touch Sachiko’s breasts and they were small and hard
beneath her t-shirt. “That’s good, Mizu.” Sachiko whispered, over the wet sounds that came,
shamefully, from between Mizuki’s legs, from beneath her underwear. Once or twice she told
Sachiko to stop and Sachiko did not stop. Yukio retrieved his gun from the ruin of the half-track and
turned upon the communist woman who had helped him so far, who had betrayed his unit to a Red
ambush. He did not show mercy. Neither did Sachiko.
At the end of the movie Yukio, shot six times by communist guns, drew himself up, leaking blood
from his wounds in tremendous gory detail. There in his battered special attack suit, silhouetted
against the rising sun, framed by glory, he drew his katana and with a roar charged the communist
lines. Fade to black. Sachiko’s fingers went down to the knuckle, deeper than anything, right into
Mizuki’s very soul. Mizuki made a weird little noise and tensed and felt her heart dribble out of her
mouth. Sachiko laughed. “Are you okay, Mizuki?”
“No.” Mizuki said. Her voice trembled. “I don’t understand. I don’t understand any of this. What
did you want-”
Sachiko leant into her, gently and overwhelmingly. “I want you to stop being afraid of me.” she
whispered.
“I’m trying.” Mizuki said.
Sachiko kissed her. “No, you aren’t.” She withdrew her fingers and got up. Mizuki watched as she
then walked to the drawer by the bed. “Mizuki, look at this.” she said, sliding it open.
Mizuki continued to watch her. “You should wash your hand…”
“Why?” Sachiko said. “I like being dirty. Here.” She pulled something from inside the drawer and
held it aloft, and in the dusky sunlight coming in through the window shutters Mizuki saw it was an
old piece of wood. Something like a tablet. Sachiko held it out to her. Mizuki took it and looked at it.
It listed a name, a birthdate – the twelfth of June, nineteen thirty-seven – and an address in Ryujin
down in Yugongguan, and the name of a headman and the relationship of the cardholder to them,
listed as ‘relative’. It was an old wooden ID card, she realized, the kind that had been introduced
after the war and then replaced with plastic even before Mizuki’s parents had been born. The name
was Chinese. She saw the ethnic category: Manchu. She frowned. “Sachiko, what is-?”
“This is my grandmother’s ID.” Sachiko said. Mizuki stared at her. Sachiko gave a faint smile that
was a little like her old self. “A lot of Manchu people changed their names to Chinese ones after the
fall of the Qing, did you know that? And gave up any Manchu language they still knew. There was so
much violence against Manchu people back then. Actually the Manchu people, who this country is
named after, they’ve been disappearing even before the Japanese took over. But my great-
grandmother passed it down to my grandmother, who grew up speaking a bit of Manchu. My great-
grandma married a Chinese man. My grandmother married a Japanese settler. And my mother
married into the great Suzuki family of Ryujin. And I don’t know a single word of that old language.
Isn’t that something?” Mizuki imagined it then: that slightly different tint to her skin, her eyes
narrower. She didn’t look like a Manchu, even a quarter-breed. Textbooks and posters and racial
science classes had told Mizuki what Manchu were and they were not this. But she had never met
one. “Do you know what we did to them, Mizuki?” Sachiko asked.
“We killed them.” Mizuki heard herself say. Why not? After what Munekata had said about the
death of the woman named Hana, after what Mei had said about Nanjing and the war…why was it
not possible for all or most of the Manchu to have killed in secret, in some vast murderous campaign
without parallel in history? But Sachiko shook her head. “Mei and Huangqi and the others laughed
when I said that. We didn’t kill the Manchu on purpose. We just let them go. We set up a society
where there were only disadvantages to not being like us, a society rigged for us to win and for them
to lose, and we broke the educated ones with the pressures of this, and pushed aside, segregated,
enslaved the others, the workers and farmers who were too many to assimilate…and the other odd
groups, the minorities? They were wiped off the map by our indifference. They’re museum exhibits
now. Fodder for posters about ethnic unity, costumes to dress up in, objects to be admired…the real
survivors are too poor and too weak, too hurt, to be anything like what we pretend they are. That’s
what we wanted anyway. My grandma lived to be seventy-six. She wasn’t shot in the head or
imprisoned or beaten up by anyone. But she was a victim too. They all were. Don’t you get it?”
Sachiko held her hands and her fingers were slick with Mizuki’s shame and it hurt a little and her
face was close and her expression was worse than anything else and Mizuki thought she finally had
learned something now. She had an idea of what had driven her friend to embrace Chinese culture,
to go out drinking, to lie back and give up on school, on the future, on their friendship as well. She
took Sachiko’s hands. “I…I understand, Sachiko.” she said, hoping she wasn’t lying.
 “So don’t give me anything.” Sachiko pleaded, squeezing her fingers. “Don’t treat me like a victim
anymore. I don’t want to be a victim. When you’re acting like I’m something broken, like you have to
be careful around me - don’t give me this pathetic kind of surrender, then, alright? I never want to
live in that paper world of guilt and honour – the kind that stole my grandmother’s language - ever
again. I’m not someone for you to live in fear of. You don’t owe me anything. If I hurt you then tell
me to stop. If I do something wrong, slap me as hard as you can. If I say that I love you, say it back.”
“I love you.” Mizuki said.
Sachiko frowned at her. “Idiot.” she said quietly. “I love you too.” The sun went down outside and
the evening continued. Mizuki held onto Sachiko and peered at her half out of love and half trying to
find the non-Japanese within her – trying still to map real life onto what she knew about racial
categories. There was nothing of the state-approved version of the Manchu there, she thought,
while Sachiko peered up at her. There was only a face which had nothing to it except what it was.
That was enough for now, she thought, and she touched that beautiful tired honest face with her
hand and felt its warmth. They put on another movie and this time Mizuki barely watched it at all.
It was eight o’clock when they heard a car pulling up outside. Mizuki dressed herself, seeing
through the blinds her father thundering down the path in his crumpled official’s suit with his pork
pie hat tight atop his head. Sachiko dressed faster – together they went through the house as her
father pounded his fist upon the door. “Daughter!” he shouted. “Daughter, I know you’re here!”
Mizuki trembled, stood before the door as it shook upon its hinges, thudding with each impact,
filling the sad old Suzuki house with its fury, rousing the shadows and stirring up the dust, a
thundering looming before them. Sachiko touched her arm and nodded to her. With a shaking hand
Mizuki opened the door. “Mr. Tachibana.” Sachiko said. Mizuki’s father stared, his face going from
one girl to the other. “There’s no need to make so much noise.”
“You be quiet, you…you slut!” he snapped, and he reached in to grab Mizuki by the arm. Mizuki
ducked back and her father’s hand found nothing. His eyes bulged. “Daughter, you need to come
with me.” he said. “Now.”
“Why?” Mizuki said quickly. Her father seemed not to have heard her. He ground his lips together
and clenched his fists and stared. “What?” he demanded.
“Why do I have to come with you, father?” she said. Her voice was so weak and yet it was her
own and her father did not strike her for it. He only swallowed, tight all over as if from the effort of
pushing something terrible deep down inside himself. “Because I said so.” he said. And then: “I want
to talk to you. About everything.”
“You can talk here.” Sachiko said. Mizuki’s father’s eyes again swelled in their sockets. His face
was going red, or redder. Mizuki could smell it, familiar acid on his breath – he had been drinking.
She stepped forward. “I’ll go with you, father.” she said. Sachiko opened her mouth and Mizuki
turned and gave her a look and Sachiko did not speak. Mizuki turned back to her father, who
watched bewildered. “I’m coming back here. Afterwards. Is that permissible, father?”
“I- yes. Very well.” He adjusted his hat. “I will wait by the car for you.” And he turned, coat
fluttering, and marched back down the path with just as much purpose as he’d marched up it. A
ridiculous gesture, she thought, putting on the air of victory when he’d just been defeated. She
kissed Sachiko on the cheek. “I’ll see you later.” she said.
“Don’t do this.” Sachiko said. “Don’t…I’m worried he’ll hurt you.”
Mizuki turned, smiled. “He already has.” she said. “There’s nothing else he can do to me.”
“Come on. What if he…what if he’s going to…”
“Kill me?” Mizuki said. Sachiko nodded. “He doesn’t love me enough for that. I’ll see you later.”
She hugged Sachiko tight, the greatest feeling in the world warming her flesh, and then let go,
pulling herself free, and she forced herself not to look back as she went down the path and out of
the garden of the Suzuki household towards the dark shape of her father’s car, waiting there with he
in the driver’s seat. She opened the door and clambered inside and sat down, her crumpled, sweat-
bathed clothes thin against the seat’s hard leather. Her father gunned the engine and they were on
the road, rumbling along. Mizuki kept her head down. She thought about the last few hours. She
thought about Sachiko and about war and life and death and that portrait on her wall, the emperor
of Manchukuo, senile old man presiding over a terrible void, a hole in reality. And the other emperor,
the Japanese one, the son of Showa the soldiers had placed upon the throne? The living god of all
Japanese who was a god to the Manchukuoan brethren as a father was to a second sibling? Who had
let his children create the country which had done all these things?
A god as cruel as that should go to hell, she thought. Her father looked at her as they turned
down onto Showa Avenue briefly, turning up onto Cherry Blossom Lane. She saw Yugongguan and
made a noise of surprise, unable to help herself, for now she saw it ablaze.
She saw those ramshackle rooftops and narrow streets and they were crowded with banners, red
and white, republican and communist flags, slogans spelling out things that were usually better not
said, forbidden phrases such as LONG LIVE THE THREE PRINCIPLES OF THE PEOPLE, THE CHINESE
PEOPLE WILL STAND UP, INDEPENDENT MANCHURIA FOREVER, MANCHU LAND FOR MANCHU
PEOPLE, WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE, NO MORE WAR, NO MORE OCCUPATION, MANCHURIA IS
CHINESE LAND. Amidst them, the fluttering lengths of cloth and paper that were garlanded across
the rooftops of the old poor town was a phrase she knew like an old friend: DEATH TO THE
JAPANESE INVADERS.
There were no neon lights on tonight – the streets of Yugongguan themselves were almost empty.
But the banners said enough. She saw a vast tinderbox below her and as the car turned away from
Showa she saw the soldiers lining the road, armed men with weapons at barricades. The Chinese and
Japanese parts of town were split down the middle, sandbags and flashlights turned down towards
the sea, the unsmiling men in khaki at intervals along the middle of the road, backed up by rumbling
monsters, half-tracks with mounted guns, and she heard through the glass of the car orders being
barked in stern Armee Japanisch voices.
Then they were going up Cherry Blossom and all of that other world fell away, leaving them
surrounded by the stern Japanese buildings all frozen in – not terror, she thought at first, not in
these orderly streets, but she realized that the effect of the obfuscating manner of the settlers was
only to obfuscate, and that yes it was terror, they were afraid, these houses stood rigid with
anticipation, these pavements lay there taut with a nameless, overwhelming tension. It’s coming, it’s
coming, said the psychic message transmitted through each cold structure, each unloving and
unloved segment of the neurotic whole. An awareness of fragility.
A mutual awareness – the Chinese had put up their banners and the Japanese had not stormed in
and torn them down but barricaded themselves inside, trapped themselves within their decrepit old
comfort rather than face the wilderness honestly. These people from soldiers to civilians to officers
to officials like her father all were terrified of those just down the road, who were no longer terrified
of them back. I am not scared, she told herself as the car crawled into the town square, past
searchlights and monstrous half-tracks and yet more barricades, but it was not true. She was more
scared than she had ever been in her life.
The car came to a halt. Five Races Square was alive with soldiers swarming about in their
uniforms and helmets and voices calling and rumbling vehicles. Mizuki looked at her father. “What
are we doing here?”
Her father did not look back but stared at the glass of the windscreen, past the Buddha hanging
from the rearview mirror, at a fixed point in nowhere. “There’s someone who wants to speak to you.”
he said.
“Who?” she asked. Her father did not reply. She gripped her skirt with her hands. “Who is it who
wants to speak to m-”
“Daughter!” he father snapped. She flinched, falling back into that old familiar groove. She was
not strong and he was and she could not stand up to him. He did not strike her but simply stared at
the glass of the car window, eyes hard. “He will ask you some questions.” he said. “You must tell him
the truth. You must.” The fear filled her veins like ice but she saw as well that he was also fearful,
that something had changed. He was not scared of the Chinese right now, or even of her, but of the
same thing she was. Which was –
 “Father.” she said in a quiet voice, leaning across to gently touch his right arm, that which he had
hurt her so many times before. “Who is it? What’s happening?”
Her father turned his head stiffly and found her. He was drained – his face hung from his skull like
the loose tatters of a dirigible’s burst envelope fluttering in the breeze, long after the steel wreckage
within had crashed roaring back down to earth. “Kempeitai.” he said. Mizuki remembered how she’d
felt when she’d noticed Keizo Munekata had been following her. For the first time in her life a
sudden and perverse sense of solidarity with her father came over her. She realized that it was his
arrogance and ambition that had made him an official in the Concordia Association, but that it was
not only these things that kept him there but something else too. She wondered how many times he
had felt like this, how often he had noticed it, the slithering of the system around his neck and limbs,
the emergence of a great invisible creature that smelt guilt on him and came forth from its cave to
investigate, probing his flesh, searching for the mark that would give him away, a mark only it could
see that he himself had had no idea even existed, had not imagined before now. Her father would be
forced to boil in agonising heat by the jailers of hell until he saw the light. And now so would she.
He was scared of that too, Mizuki thought. He sat there paralysed by his fear. He did not want to
give her to them. She took his hand again. Hard skin wet to the touch with perspiration. “It’s okay.”
she said. “Let’s go.” He said nothing but then finally moved himself from the car seat, and he
reached forward and pulled the key from the ignition. The car stopped and the absence of its
rumbling engine created a new kind of awkward quiet. He sighed. “Let’s go.” he repeated, as if she
hadn’t said it, and he got out of the car and Mizuki, with no other choice, followed him. Outside it
was warm and bright and the soldiers were setting up positions around Building No. 4, sandbags and
machine guns and barbed wire. It was here that he went and she went with him. His hunched shape,
black coat flowing as he moved, advanced into the glare of the lights outside the building. Mizuki
stood close to him. She wanted to touch his hand again but didn’t.
There were two Japanese guards outside the entrance with rifles with bayonets fixed, their faces
shadowed beneath their helmets. Mizuki’s father showed them his ID card and waved her along with
him. Inside the western-style building they passed the lobby, where a special attack suit waited in a
glass case like a museum exhibit, and went up the winding staircase to the first floor. There were
soldiers everywhere, looking at maps and arguing in quiet voices, smoking in rooms she half-
glimpsed.
They proceeded down the corridor to another, a wide chamber with open double doors and
beyond that a table laid with maps, a radio broadcasting some kind of military instruction. There
were more guards and, on the wall, a Japanese flag and the flag of Manchukuo and the portraits of
the two emperors. The air was heavy with smoke and stank of alcohol. She heard words on the
telephone: Special Attack Suit Platoon 17 from the Jinzhou Military Region is sending a squad, is it?
So we’re at that stage already? It was in this room her father stopped, and she saw rising from the
wooden chair at the far end of the table a man in neat officers’ fatigues she recognised – it was the
man she had met outside of Mei’s hospital room, the balding old soldier who had talked with her
who had told her to call him Mr. Karashima. He rose, giving a polite bow to them both. “Mr.
Tachibana.” he said in that refined home islands accent.
“Major.” her father said stiffly. The major moved with equal stiffness around the table, past
subordinates discussing things. He smiled. “It is good to see you again.” he said. “I hope you are not
too distressed by recent events.”
“I will speak honestly.” her father said. “I am somewhat distressed, major.” He then closed his
mouth quickly as if trying to stop himself from saying something else, and patted Mizuki hard on the
shoulder. “This is my daughter. Mizuki.”
Karashima peered at her. His eyes were dark and empty. “We’ve met before. Hello, Mizuki. I’m
currently in charge of security in Ryujin. I wish to talk to you. Is it okay?”
“Yes.” she lied.
“Good.” he said. He looked about the dark unhappy room. “Let us go somewhere else.” He then
walked with his precise steps out into the corridor and led them to another room, opening a slightly
scratched mahogany door. Inside was a wooden table and two plastic chairs and a large window
covered up with bars. He clicked on the light and upon the cracked walls bugs scattered. The room
smelt of stale air and old cigarettes. “In here.” he said to Mizuki. “Please.” She did not look at her
father just as she hadn’t looked at Sachiko and she slipped inside, finding her way to the plastic chair
on one side and sitting. Major Karashima glanced at her father. “Please wait outside, Mr. Tachibana.”
She saw her father’s throat pulse. Saw his usual anger, saw it raised in her defence for the first
time ever. She saw it flicker and splutter and surrender before the man from the Kempeitai. He gave
a nod. “Of course.” he said. Karashima gently closed the door on him and it clicked into place. Then
he turned to her and sat down. Across from her he was genial, his smooth face calm. His gloved
hands rested upon the old wood. One moved to his side and pulled something free and lifted it up
onto the table’s surface. It was a heavy revolver, an enormous creature of chrome-coloured metal.
The stock was marked with an imperial chrysanthemum. Mizuki saw her own face as a contorted
reflection within its steel.
“I don’t much enjoy having to carry a weapon on my person.” Karashima said in a low voice. It
was subtle but the tone of it had hardened. Mizuki gripped her thigh with her hand until it hurt.
“Perhaps it wouldn’t even be useful if the moment came.” he said. “But as little as I enjoy this kind of
tool, I do find its presence a comfort. I would prefer not to need it.”
“Why do you need a gun?” she asked. The fear was there but it was he bringing it down upon her,
he who had scared off her father, who had – she didn’t even know what he must have done, this
man, to so many others. But Mizuki had been scared of Xu Mei and Li Huangqi and of Munekata and
of Sachiko too. Karashima sighed. He took the gigantic handcannon off of the table and slipped it
into a holster at his waist. “Because these are dangerous times, Miss Tachibana.” he replied. “There
are many serpents lurking in our fair motherland. The situation lacks harmony.”
“The Chinese?” she said.
Karashima’s eyes remained still. “Oh?”
“They…they have banners outside their homes tonight. Political slogans.”
“Ah.” he said. He did not shrug but it was there in his tone. “A simple gesture of protest, begun
by troublesome communist infiltrators over some matter or another. That can be contained. With
the unity of the imperial state, all problems can be made to vanish. We do somewhat lack unity right
now, it’s true. But that isn’t anything you can help me with.” He leant forward, one arm upon the
other. “I know you have been involved in an investigation being undertaken by a friend of mine.
Keizo Munekata. I know you visited him yesterday.”
Mizuki heard herself inhale. She looked at this thin, liver-spotted old man and at his slight smile.
She swallowed. Karashima’s left hand played with the right. He sniffed. “We might say that my old
comrade has become somewhat disturbed in recent days.” he said. “Grieving over a tragic but
unavoidable loss, unable to understand the kindness contained within the cruelty of that loss. We
might say he has stolen military property and disappeared somewhere into Ryujin, and that his
intentions are unclear but that they could well involve attacks on military or government personal at
this sensitive and highly volatile time. We might say it is very important to find him.” The major
peered at her, head bowed. The room was bright and she was hot and the smell of old smoke was
stuck to her nostrils. “Can you help us with this, Miss Tachibana?”
Mizuki’s fingers scraped against the skin beneath her skirt. Then they stopped. She felt the pain
and pushed it away, told herself it was only an annoyance, like the bite of an insect in the summer
heat or the whine of a flock of cicadas from a nearby wood. There was no reason for her to be
hurting herself right now. “You’re afraid of him.” she said. “You’re not scared of the Chinese at all.
You think they’re nothing. But…Mr. Munekata scares you, doesn’t he?”
“What do you mean?” Karashima’s tone was level. Mizuki heard the threat behind it. She noticed
how he was watching her now, really watching her. “The state…the state is scared by those signs.
My father is scared by it all.” she said. “But not you. You don’t think the Chinese here are worth
anything. Even now. But he’s out there and you’ve brought me here. You’re scared he’s coming for
you, aren’t you? You’re not paying attention to the people of this town at all. You’re only thinking
about that sad man whose little happiness you crushed.” Karashima waited for her. “Excuse me, but
I think you’re scared of the wrong thing, Major Karashima.”
The major was quiet. He sat back in his chair. His eyes found her. He had one hand upon the table
and his thumb moved up and down the material, slowly brushing against it as one might gently
caress the hand of a lover. He slid the great revolver out of the holster and then back inside. Then he
got up from the chair and went to the door and locked it. The sound of the lock clicking was loud.
Mizuki imagined her father on the other side of the door hearing it. She imagined that was the intent.
Karashima then returned to the chair. He interlaced his fingers. “I want you to understand
something, Miss Tachibana.” he said in a quiet voice. Mizuki shrank back in her seat. “I am not
scared of Keizo Munekata. I am scared of what he is but one small part of – the great disorder you
witnessed brewing in Yugongguan, the threat that lurks in the air in the wake of what my old
comrade has done. I am scared of disharmony, of disorder, of all that will rise like raw sewage
through the overflowing gutters of this town and choke to death you and everyone else who lives
here, blissfully unaware of the mortal danger bubbling and frothing beneath the earth beneath your
feet every single day.”
He sighed but did not relent. “Well, ‘unaware’ – let us say you know. Let us say that you are
fearful deep down, that you have some sense of the danger you’re in. But you don’t really. The very
knowledge of it is hidden by us from you. The true danger, Miss Tachibana. A danger which you, with
only your, forgive me, paltry awareness of the affairs of myself and Keizo Munekata, can hardly
grasp. I understand that you feel yourself to have endured much in recent weeks with your friend
Sachiko Suzuki’s unfortunate ordeal, a sensation that has empowered you to air your feelings so
honestly in front of someone like me – you perhaps feel that you are in some sense no longer the
loyal daughter of the town’s most capable official but something more, and will no longer be
confined by the rules of our society as to etiquette, manner, and the consequences of one’s actions.”
He paused. His mouth twisted downwards into a frown. “This is untrue. You are less than before.
You are almost nothing. You by your actions and your unfortunate attitude are now, if I may be bold,
only another small and regrettable element of the disharmonious presence which threatens us all,
which I have to deal with in order to right things and return us all to a situation of relative stability in
which life can continue to be, if not perfect, then perfectly adequate for the maximal number of
people possible. You are a bump on the road before we can return to such a situation. That,
speaking honestly, is all that you are.”
Mizuki did not look want to look at him anymore but his hard old eyes did not let her escape. She
trembled and tried to grip her legs and failed, her fingers too sweaty to find purchase. “I-”
“You have been absent from school for several days.” Karashima continued. “You are an associate
of known disharmonious elements and criminals, and may well be in violation of the 1967 Anti-
Homosexual Activity Ordinance in conjunction with said persons. We also know you are a user and
distributer of illegal drugs, in possession of banned political texts circulated by anti-ethnic unity
activists and communist agitators, and are potentially party to acts of severe political corruption on
the part of your father and his secondary business holdings with certain companies operating in
Ryujin Harbour. Perhaps it is true you have even prostituted yourself for money with foreign men.”
His stood up suddenly, knocking his chair back. His face was furious, perfectly calm. “I want you to
understand that all of these things can be true, or untrue, the moment we decide they are.” He
stalked around the table and came up behind her and put his hands down hard upon her shoulders.
His old fingers dug into her skin, massaged her, felt her. It was similar to how Sachiko had touched
her but it was wrong. “I want you to understand, Miss Tachibana, that you have absolutely no
recourse other than to give me what I want.” His fingers traced circles upon her collar. He bent down,
reaching one hand further towards her. She felt it then, the touch of a hand against her right breast.
Something within her shattered. “I’m sorry.” she said quickly. He withdrew. Mizuki bowed her
head. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I – I didn’t mean to.” She dug her hands into her thighs, tried to tear
through her skirt and her skin both, tried to make herself hurt. “I didn’t do anything! I went to his
house, and I talked to him – we drank tea. I wasn’t doing anything. We talked about his friend Hana,
and – I told him there were stories they were trying to recruit new, new gangsters in Yugongguan,
and – they were stories, I didn’t – I don’t know what Mr. Munekata is going to do. I don’t know
where he is, I don’t know anything. Nobody tells me anything. I don’t know.” She slumped in her
seat. He was opposite her now, back in his chair as if nothing had happened. Through her tears he
was a shifting blur but she could hear the satisfaction in his voice as he spoke. “What did Munekata
say to you?” he asked.
“He said his friend Hana was gone.” she said, and there was a slimy kind of pleasure in the
surrender. Karashima leant forward. “How did he seem?” he asked.
“He seemed sad.”
“He said nothing to you of his intentions?”
“N…no.”
“Did he have parts pertaining to a Survey Unit special attack suit in his house, or did he talk about
his special attack suit, or did you notice anything related to it during your visit?”
“I don’t know. No. No.”
“If I ask you, Miss Tachibana, as to your impression of Mr. Munekata’s intentions, given what you
now know and given your earlier meeting with him, what would you say?”
“I think he wants to kill you.” she said finally. Karashima was still frowning. I didn’t tell him what
he wanted, Mizuki realized, and that was something of a relief, that she hadn’t betrayed Munekata
in any meaningful way. But she had been utterly ready to. The tears were hot and sticky on her
cheeks. Karashima gave a short nod. “Very well. I might be able to let you go then, Miss Tachibana.
But I would ask one more thing of you.” She waited, already sure she would agree to whatever it is
he suggested. He sat back. “If Keizo Munekata attempts to contact you again, you must also tell your
father. And he will tell us. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir.” she said. She wiped the damp from her face and her eyes and saw him there, once
again with his gentle features set in what might have been a look of mild concern. She swallowed. “I-
I’m sorry. I…can you leave me alone now? I won’t – I’ll do what you want.”
“I can leave you alone,” Karashima said, “when all of this is resolved. I have called in some
support. I will ensure Keizo is stopped. Until then, Miss Tachibana, you are as much a part of this as
any of us. But you may return to your father now. And remember what I have asked of you.” It was
as if a mask had been replaced. The old man came to her and as she stood pulled her chair back for
her, and walked her to the door and unlocked it before allowing her to step outside into the corridor
– she had forgotten the corridor entirely, for a moment thinking that dismal room had become the
whole world – and to her father. He did not rush to her but stood near the stairs looking as nervous
as she felt, an expression of ruin upon his face. “Mr. Tachibana.” Karashima announced. He looked
from Mizuki to her father and nodded. “You may go.” There was nothing else but that.
Mizuki and her father proceeded back the way they had come, down the stairs and through the
lobby – she glanced at the special attack suit in its case and thought of Fumie so long ago, and of
everything Karashima had just said. They went out into the square, past soldiers and vehicles and
guns, both sweaty and ragged in the glare of the floodlight, neither daring to look at one another for
too long as they returned to the car parked where he had left it all that time ago, a decade or so ago.
They embarked, he starting the car and driving out of the square. She held her hands and looked
down at her lap. He drove down Cherry Blossom and towards Showa, eyes on the road. There were
still soldiers and banners and all was as it had been. As he eased the car away from this onto Showa
he made a noise that was strangled and feeble. “Daughter.” he said, eyes on the road still. “I wanted
to tell you. Your application was accepted.”
“Application?” she repeated.
Her father gave a stiff nod. “Yes. For the Concordia Association.”
“Oh.” she said. An application submitted before Sachiko had been assaulted – her one great hope
in those days, when the girl with the iron blouse had been about to lose her best friend and had not
understood why, when the only hope of a future had seemed to be within that same establishment
that had taken her father and to which Karashima and other monsters like him all belonged. Her
application, as an adult, to join the ruling party of the whole country. With robotic motions he
opened the glove compartment and took an envelope and handed it to her. She opened it and read.
She closed it. The car was returning now into the upper reaches of Tenmei, back towards Sachiko’s
house. Her father was keeping his word.
He parked the car outside of the Suzuki home where the lights were on in Sachiko’s bedroom and
nowhere else. Mizuki shook at the thought of going back, from this nightmare to that strange
dreaming place where things could be better and could also be worse. “Father.” Mizuki said. She
held the letter up and it was heavy in her grip. It seemed to be slick with something, the oily blood of
the beast. He watched it, enthralled. Mizuki understood this to be power. It was what he had held
over her until recently, what Karashima had reminded her of so cruelly. It was what she had selfishly
tried to concede to Sachiko. In this moment it was her own.
She put her other hand to the letter. Her father watched. “D-death to the Japanese invaders.”
she muttered.
And she felt her fingers press tight upon the paper and heard it rip and watched along with her
father as it happened there before the both of them, the tearing up of the letter into first two then
four then eight then many more pieces and the scattering of those pieces, like rice thrown at a
wedding, all across the inside of her father’s expensive car. The words had left her in a cowering
tone and her hands shook and she burned inside thinking of her betrayal of Keizo Munekata.
Mizuki’s father cleared his throat. “Get out.” he said. “Ungrateful brat.” And she did get out and she
was glad to do it, even though her legs too were quivering and she felt sick with guilt and terror and
all kinds of awful things. Mizuki understood at last that this was how it would have to be. She
understood that she had learned nothing from what had happened to Mei, from what had happened
to Sachiko, from what had happened to Munekata and the woman named Hana.
Clambering out of the car she let the night air touch her skin, let it liberate her from Major
Karashima’s clammy touch. There were searchlights upon the sky and voices and clamour from
somewhere else. There always would be. Below the town above the Chinese rooftops the ocean
glittered as a vast black mass. Her face was still sticky with dried tears. “Is this alright?” the
centipede asked in its guttural voice. It wrapped itself around her, its hundred legs scuttling across
her body. “Is this really what you want?” Its slobbering maw hovered inches from her face.
“You’re not going to be able to get rid of me.” it said. “You’re going to have to live with this for
the rest of your life. All of this.” It tickled at her skin, nipped at her flesh. “You can revert, if you
want.” She heard now something else in its savage tone, something sad buried beneath that thick
malicious growl. “There will always be more violence for you to lust over. More orders for you to
follow. More lies for you to tell yourself. I don’t mean that as a pejorative. They’re beautiful lies.
You’ll enjoy them. You don’t have to do this.” Mizuki put a hand to its hard carapace. She stroked
the centipede as it hovered there around her clinging to her with its sharp limbs. A tight embrace, a
choking grip – but she could also understand it as a kind of hug. Stood in the middle of the street
Mizuki hugged herself as hard as she could.
She went up the path to the door and knocked on it. There were footsteps on the other side and
within a minute Sachiko was there and hugging her as well, squeezing her hard, kissing her cheek.
“Mizuki!” she said. “Mizuki, you came back! I was so worried-”
“Worried about you.” the centipede said. “You have to go on like this, you know? Responsibility
doesn’t end just because you’ve surrendered. This is the real kind of surrender, not your stupid
fantasy play-acting. You have to make things right!”
“Shut up.” Mizuki said. She hugged Sachiko tighter. Sachiko pressed into her. “I think tonight we
should go to Yugongguan.”
“What?” Sachiko said. “Why?”
“I don’t know.” Mizuki sighed. “I saw there were…there were some signs there. Protest signs.”
“Protests?”
“Some kind of disturbance. I think if we go we can…” She trailed off. What could they do? Two
Japanese girls amidst the Chinese, at the centre of a gathering storm, two creatures only made of
flimsy paper already torn and punctured, that the slightest wind might tear apart…the impulse had
seemed so clear and pure and now it was muddied. Again she had lost track of what she wanted, let
go of the thread that had been guiding her forward. At the last moment she had fallen into the
centipede’s grip once more. But Sachiko – short, unladylike, unbeautiful, annoying, troublemaking
Sachiko looked up and gifted her that one thing, that single shimmering smile. She squeezed Mizuki’s
hand. “But fuck it.” Sachiko said. “We can’t stay here. Right?”
Mizuki nodded. “Right.” So they packed their bags, a satchel each, and left a note for Sachiko’s
mother just in case, and went out into the night to go find the guns of the army and slip by them.
There was a centipede with them, slithering alongside them in the shadows, but only Mizuki could
see it.
 21
Ears ringing from the explosion Munekata staggered upright feeling the suit press against his
flesh the stab of pain from where it had been forced against him by a rush of pressure the sensation
of the weight of his rifle in his left hand and the blurred flickering ahead of orange light – flame, he
realized. They had started a fire. He staggered about and wobbled, the world yawning and shifting,
and with one hand found a brick wall and did not fall over. But vomit was on his tongue and the rich
stench of scorched flesh teased his nostrils. He spat and the spit stuck to the inside of his mask. The
radio operator, he thought, someone had to help the radio operator – he remembered that he was
the radio operator. It was on his back, another weight. He surveyed the scene, the bombed-out
house and the old village and the wasteland beyond that wreathed in endless funeral snow. He
unhooked the transmitter from his backpack and with his trembling other hand tried to find the
frequency for the lieutenant with the other. His hand failed once and then twice. “Fuck.” he said.
“Fuck!” Arakawa laughed at him over the bar last night. Scared little Keizo, eh? Don’t worry, combat
isn’t a fuss. You’ll do fine as long as you leave your heart out of it. Munekata kicked out at something
dark only to see it was the head of Private Oda and it echoed as it bounced across the stone. Finally
his hand found the dial and he twisted it to the frequency he knew better than anything, that he’d
drilled into himself, the exact degree of a twist that went to where it needed to, and he hit the talk
button and then – “HQ!” he said, trying not to sound as scared as he was. Corpses lay everywhere
and blood was splashed across the plains. “HQ!” someone said. “This is Sergeant Munekata. There
was – an improvised explosive device. Section 1 has been wiped out. Awaiting orders.”
“Orders stand.” Lieutenant Karashima said. “Check for survivors. Continue to objective.”
“Sir,” Munekata choked, “sir, there’s nobody here, I can’t, I-”
“Get a hold of yourself.” Karashima snapped.
“Sir-” Munekata heard the weakness of his own voice, the tremor within it, and was aware for a
moment of his own fragility. “Sergeant.” Karashima said. “You can move, can’t you? You’re alive,
aren’t you? There will be others like you. Trapped, scared. You need to help them. If you can find
them – if they can find you – you’ll be alright.” A moment of softness crept into the older man’s
voice. “I trust you. Continue to the objective. Come on, Sergeant Munekata. Get to work.” Munekata
blinked, gripping himself hard through the gauntlets of his suit until it hurt. He left the wall and
stood upright and looked about and sighed, thinking of nothing, and stepped forward. “Yes, sir.” He
thumbed the talk button off. A cough came from his left. It was Arakawa, buried under two other
bodies. “Fucking-” he began, and Munekata fell to his side at once. He lay there on his back, mask
displaced, his boyish face caked in blood. “It hurts, man.” he said. Munekata touched his cheek.
Arakawa’s eyes found him. “Hurts.” he said.
Munekata touched him again. “It’ll be okay. Can you move?”
Arakawa grunted. He strained himself, sitting up. “Yeah.” His right arm found his rifle discarded
by his side. His left replaced his mask. Their eyes met, the two men as one. “Let’s go, then.”
Munekata said.
“Got it, sarge.” Arakawa said after a second. And they went.
His leg hurt. Beneath him the bike’s frame juddered and on his back the suit’s motor rumbled and
ahead the road rushed by. He was focused upon the pain of it. He had been wearing the suit for less
than two hours and already it was causing him trouble. With his battered right leg as the vanguard,
but the rest of his body not that far behind, his flesh was revolting against the prison he had tricked
it into entering. He bore on into darkness with the bike’s headlight cutting a path, although but for a
few military vehicles the road out of Ryujin leading to the highway was empty.
He suspected an order barring civilian traffic. He suspected much was unfolding in the town now.
It was none of his concern. The bike was a Suzuki Katana, gaudy civilian thing sleek and silver and
with an engine that roared, rocketing him across the vast landscape of the highway and the
surrounding fields with such speed that even through the suit he could feel the wind tearing at him.
He arced onto Ring Road 2, before the road onto the highway where Hana had been shot, and
turned back from the plains in their vast glory and towards the harbour.
 That was where he knew Karashima had retreated to. He had followed them as they had left Five
Races Square, tailing the convoy from behind in the dark across the plains, riding with his own
headlights out and the sound of his engine muffled by the cacophony of Karashima’s party with half-
tracks either side of the staff car, confident in his karma as the bike rumbled across the road about a
hundred metres. Now the convoy had gone ahead straight into the naval base, the only place this
road went. It would be a trap, perhaps. Munekata had the Type 77 Arisaka assault rifle from the thug
outside of the Chen house strapped to his back and he had the suit no matter how much it hurt him
and he had Hana’s scarf billowing behind him as he went. He passed another military truck and a
half-track with guns manned and moved as a blur past them onto the Imperial Navy Avenue, past
chainlink fences and ragged fields. The concrete shape of the base lay before him far away at the
edge of the land, the glittering sea a darkness beyond. Between here and there were the farmers’
fields and the final perimeter fence, with its large metal KEEP OUT sign and its checkpoint where a
guard stood outside a wooden booth smoking.
Munekata killed the bike and rode it gently to the side of the road. He lowered it to the earth and
left it. He crouched through the fields to the right of the checkpoint, where the guard was now
studying the road with his torch cutting through the gloom. Munekata was upon him within a
minute, rising up to grab the young soldier by the face with a gauntlet. The soldier choked out a
sound. Munekata let go and before he could cry out hit him with the rifle butt and caught him as he
fell. He carried the unconscious man – bleeding from his forehead, a boy in a naval uniform with a
gauntness to his face – to the checkpoint booth. He gently laid him down there.
Standing up he surveyed his future: in silhouette the rows of warehouses of the harbour with
light spilling out here and there, small shacks dotting the road between, and then the administrative
complex itself and next to that the docks, where the silent forms of great boats waited there
beneath the churned-up inkblot sky, leviathans sleeping in funeral stillness. A half-track sat in the
dirt by the nearest building, where a soldier was pissing into the adjacent field, not paying attention.
He heard chatter faintly from ahead, saw shadows patrolling the roads between the warehouses. He
saw routes and tactical options and means to ends. Hana’s scarf blew in the breeze at his back.
The great snake, Yamata no Orochi, rolled forth into the night.
He went down the road and through the side of the fields, the hiss of the suit’s parts gentle from
all sides. He came to the half-track. The nearest guard, gun strapped over one shoulder, saw the
metal creature emerging from the darkness and cried out – but the Arisaka was in Munekata’s grip
and a trio of bullets burst the soldier open, blood spraying across the concrete. The kick of the
weapon and the roar of its song were good. Voices called out within the warehouses and they too
were good, heralds of impending victory. The enemy came for him, waving torches and wielding
guns. It all was good.
A klaxon split the night sky, the howl of a furious machine-devil, the industrial ogre emerging
from the depths of its cave. Munekata was clambering up the rungs on the half-track’s side and to
the turret where the Sumitomo Type 67 MG sat in the cupola. The naval infantrymen now were
spilling out into the road between the warehouses, frantic, a great frightened beast reared up on its
haunches, unable to focus on the shadow of the hunter moving through the undergrowth around it.
Finally they saw him as he stood upon the half-track, assault rifle returned to its strap, and he
with a grunt and with the suit’s strength detached the MG from its mounting and hefted it up in
both hands and took aim. He found fifteen bodies ahead. Bullets pinged off of the special attack
suit’s armour, convexities redirecting each with a spark and a metallic noise. One slammed into the
bridge of his nose and he felt it through the mask as a rough prod with a hard finger. But he had the
majority of the enemy now between the crosshairs.
Munekata squeezed the trigger. The Sumitomo sang, belching fire. A roaring arc of lead scythed
through the men between the warehouses, cutting down body after body, they twisting around,
calling out, and some replying in frantic salvos which clanged off of his armour as he took their
assault and punished them for it with the ever-rumbling cannon, which whump-whump-whump took
off arms and legs, punched holes in flesh, broke skulls and faces and torsos open, sliced off limbs. His
bones shook with each jolt of recoil and his arms throbbed with the gun’s weight and his leg nagged
at him with short sharp protestations. But it was so that they fell and he stood. The Sumitomo was
out of ammo suddenly. Beneath the klaxon wounded men cried out and sobbed. He took the Arisaka
and leapt from the half-track, landing amongst the dead and dying. More targets came from the
fields, bullets lighting up the night around him, and he turned and gunned them down as they came
stupidly in his wake.
Then: an explosion, a thunderous eruption from one of the warehouses. A ball of flame filled the
sky. He felt the heat come in a sickly wave, almost bowling him over. The shouts of other men, of
soldiers in all directions. The second explosion was bigger. He saw the tears in the wood of the
warehouse walls and realized his shots had been more erratic than he’d meant. He could hear the
snap and pop of ammunition cooking off from the curtain of fire ahead.
A third explosion shook the base and he was already gone, slipped into darkness beneath the
flames. The siren had shut off and all he heard were the shouting soldiers, the myriad noises of the
naval infantry sweeping the places he wasn’t, even the whirring of his suit only a faint tremble
beneath the convulsions overtaking the enemy. He hurried on with the Arisaka clutched tight, away
from the blazing warehouses and towards the severe concrete form of the admin building, ringed
with soldiers now stood waiting at sandbags outside, embraced by layers of barbed wire, the glare of
the floodlights bearing down.
They opened up as soon as he approached. Five men in the uniforms of the navy with helmets
and rifles, the administrative building with its wide glass windows and sheer grey walls at their backs.
The special attack suit had been designed for much more than this and so as it shook about him
under the fury of the enemy’s guns the frame held him steady, and so he returned fire with careful
precision, downing each of the men with a round to the chest, counting in his head as he did so.
More bullets came from behind, pinging against his back. He hurt but it was not the fresh sting of an
armour rupture.
Munekata was inside the admin building now, behind lit up by flames. He passed desks and
offices, propaganda murals alone under pale electric light. He went up the stairs to the first floor.
The corridor here was lined with relics – old samurai armour in display cases, flanking him, their
lacquered faces staring in empty judgement. He came to the end of the corridor, to Karashima’s
office. It was unlit and quiet. There were classics upon the shelves and a portrait of the twin
emperors on white horses. This was his master’s lair. This was an empty room and he was alone
within it. For a few seconds Munekata stood still. Felt his heart pound.
Gunfire ripped apart the windows, chasing him. He heard the roar of engines. Karashima was not
here and there were more of them coming, more men and machines and guns, and lights burned
outside and the flames licked at the sky, spreading ever-further, and the man he had come for was
not here. He stood in the centre of the office in front of Karashima’s desk in his heavy battered
dented armour, hurting. Then came the grenade, a dark shape sailing up through the broken window.
Munekata hurled himself back into the corridor. The room erupted, heat washing over him.
Munekata stumbled away towards the stairwell.
And then he turned and saw the giant in the shadows and saw the Type 49 submachine gun’s
black muzzle and the glimmer of the sword’s silver and he raised his weapon and fired and the giant
fired at the same time, Type 49’s whine meeting the Arisaka’s heavy bark, and both he and the
enemy were peppered with ineffectual pieces of metal. Munekata’s eyes widened. He saw the other
suit approach, armoured boots heavy on the plastic floor. It was not black like the Survey Unit but by
the meagre glow of the floodlights outside he saw its khaki pattern, the colour of dull brown. The
ground was littered with bullets casings.
“Hello, Keizo Munekata.” the giant said. The stripes on his special attack suit said he was a
lieutenant as well. He cracked his neck. “Traitor.” he growled. His eyes were shadows within the
holes of his mask. He raised the Type 49 and held the sword back. “In the Kwantung Army, we
looked up to you guys. Once. You were our heroes. You saved Japanese lives out here. But now the
last of you has gone rogue. You’re out here fighting for the commies.” A young voice trembling with
pent-up energy. “My name is Inoue.” he said. “I’ll kill you for dishonouring the Survey Unit, you
degenerate piece of shit.” The mask shifted and he saw the eyes now and they were wild and he
realized that he was facing an addict. Meth, he had told Hana. The men inside the suits had always
been drunk on something.
He realized that this was all so pathetic and tiresome, so unworthy – he turned and saw the men
rushing up the stairs after him and loosed a barrage of shots from the Arisaka, knocking them back.
He knew that fundamentally it was not satisfying to live in this way, to scurry about the depths of
this moribund empire which was defended only by addicts and perverts just like himself. He faced
the enemy special attack suit, his mirror, and watched as its wearer, Lieutenant Inoue of the
Kwantung Army, shifted into Position Twelve from the manual. Inoue’s sword arm was up to protect
his neck and his Type 49 thrust forward. It was Munekata’s own favoured position. He emptied the
Arisaka at the men trying again up the stairs and tossed it down after their crumbling bloodied
bodies and faced the enemy with his fists, Position Four. The inert suits of old samurai armour lined
the corridor, silent ancestors watching in empty disapproval.
The foe waited – there had been very little suit versus suit combat in the Insurgency. The doctrine
was to use a melee weapon to strike at the gaps in the armour just like the girl had, with the Type 49
offering suppressing fire. That was how it was supposed to work, he remembered. Outside there
were more shouts and more rumbles of incoming danger but Munekata was only here, in the dark
corridor of the first-floor admin building, and the only other object in the whole world was his
opponent, who now shifted into Position Thirteen and charged. Munekata met him as he came.
Inoue was broader and taller and his bulkier suit was a Mark V. Its hydraulics worked faster. His
sword clanged against Munekata’s armour and Munekata struck out and missed and the other man
kicked at his shin and Munekata felt the impact, felt his bones vibrate with it. The silver of the sword
tip rushed forth out of the dark like a hissing snake. It hit the metal again. Munekata batted the
blade away and he and Inoue separated.
They faced one another. Munekata could hear a percussion in his ears. He had taken two attacks
and both had not found an opening. He could not be lucky forever, he knew. Inoue put his gun down
and held his sword with both hands. Position Six. With the great whirring of his suit he charged,
boots thundering down the corridor, and Munekata caught him with both hands and grit his teeth,
his own suit groaning with the impact, and he felt the sword stab at his right shoulder seam and
heard the deafening crash of impact right next to his ear. He grabbed the Surveyman by the waist
and twisted and the enemy’s own force was turned against him and Munekata let go and watched
Inoue slam into one of the suits of armour with a crash of breaking wood and shattered glass.
Munekata turned to face him, suit whining. Inoue managed to do likewise, stumbling about clumsily.
“You,” he gasped, “you fucking communist, Chinese-fucking, you,” he raised his sword in a tight grip.
Beneath the mask his eyes blazed. “Fight like a man!”
Munekata felt the tension in his right shoulder. Now he attacked and he met the blade head-on,
and there was naught between the two men but the grunt of exertion and the clash of steel, the
rush of blood and the heat of pain, his agonized gasp – they parted, panting. Inoue was still. His body
was taut with a silent ecstasy. But he gripped his sword. He grunted. Munekata’s left gauntlet was
stiff. The sword had come close again. He surmised there would only be one more strike. Two men.
Their hearts pounding as one. Their eyes locked.
Inoue readied himself. Munekata adjusted Hana’s scarf around his neck. He clenched his fists
again, hunched his shoulders like a boxer. The suit trusted him – he trusted it. Inoue came for him
once more. He was faster, much faster. But now his blood was up and he was furious and his stab
with the sword for Munekata’s left side was too powerful and it carried him with it and at once
Munekata had ducked, weaved. His steel fists slammed, one-two-three clang-clang-CLANG, into the
other man’s facemask, and Inoue’s head snapped back, and Munekata felt the sword clang against
his shoulder meaninglessly-
that was it, wasn’t it? Arakawa had said once that the techniques in the manual were only loose
guidelines, like laws, and anyone depending on them would have no idea what to do when the laws
inevitably failed them. The child in the special attack suit named Inoue was held back by the sword
he now didn’t have a position for and he, Munekata, had his hands free and with one he reached for
the sword and held it by the blade and yanked it from the enemy’s hands, twisting it about in his
own grip. Inoue stared wild-eyed. Munekata readied the sword with both hands. With a lunge and a
roar of the suit’s engine he stabbed forward and drove the blade deep into Inoue’s torso, angled so
just so it slipped through a seam in the armour and out of the other side.
Now the other man like a broken puppet dropped onto his rear, landing hard, and he lay there
and Munekata was on his feet feeling the sting from his knuckles but otherwise alive. He leant down
to finish the enemy off. From the right came a gauntlet swinging towards him. Munekata blocked
but the blow was not aimed at him. It struck Inoue’s own chestplate and with a groan the metal gave
as it was ripped away. Beneath was a frame and padding and a snaking tube of red – a wire. Stuck to
it was a small blob of beige material that he realized was plastic explosive. The self-destruct
mechanism. That was how Yonemori had died. “May the emperor reign for ten thousand years!”
Inoue roared. Munekata threw himself aside a second too late.
He was bounced across the concrete and landed hard on his back. The air was black ash and dust
and pieces of charred wall and ruined furniture. He heard cries from the stairwell – the soldiers there
had been advancing once more and now lay about covered in the shrapnel, the shower of burning
metal that had failed to pierce his suit – his trembling hands noted it – but which hadn’t had any
trouble with them. He blinked, feeling blood trickle down his face beneath his mask. It wasn’t much
worse than what he had been feeling before. He checked his arms and legs and nothing was broken
but his left arm gauntlet was smashed, the frame stuck in place and his fingers unmoving. Cursing
Munekata pried the emergency release switch and slid it away, his normal human hand suddenly
incongruously visible attached to the firm steel of the rest of the arm.
He staggered through the smoke and ash to the dead Inoue to find Inoue was not dead but lay
there still breathing. It was not a good kind of breathing. He was resting against the wall of the
building slumped over, his chest a glistening open mess and his legs shredded and his arms broken.
All of him was fused with the melted metal of his armour. His mask was the only part of him not
ruptured and even then it was torn down the centre, the metal cracked open. Munekata saw his
smooth-shaven chin and his boyish mouth lips slick with sweat and blood and the quivering motions
they made as he tried to speak, as he came face to face for the first and final time with death itself.
Munekata was not interested in this. He checked Inoue’s thigh armour and found two magazines
for the Type 49, and found the gun and the sword a short distance away fortunately undamaged. He
muttered a prayer of thanks to Amida Buddha and took them for himself, along with the two
magazines. He worked to unfasten the man’s remaining intact gauntlet and slid it over his own. The
frame pieces slotted ungainly together, khaki gauntlet unfitting against the black of the rest of the
suit. The dying man’s eyes met his. “Where is he?” Munekata demanded. “The major.”
“Why-?” Inoue gasped.
“Because I defeated you.” Munekata said. “I won.” He paused because it hurt too much in his
chest. He coughed. “Tell me where he is, and die like a man.”
Inoue eyes were wide. He shook. “It’s too late.” he said. “Too late. The major will have gotten
away. My comrades will kill you. Kill you.”
“Your comrades will die.” Munekata said. “Just as I will. You should not have come here. You
could have gotten away. You could have lived. Why – why did you come?”
“Had to.” Inoue spat. Blood splattered down his ruined front. The stench of burnt flesh rose up
from him in thick waves. “Our honour. Our nation’s honour.”
“Honour got me nowhere.” Munekata said. “Nor you. Idiot. You could have gotten out. Why-”
Inoue coughed. “I will go to Yasukuni. I will be remembered. You. You traitor.”
“Who have I betrayed?” Munekata asked.
“You know.” Inoue said. “You’ll always know. It will haunt you into your next life.” The man
named Lieutenant Inoue died.
 Munekata turned away. With a thunder of footfalls more of them came, more uniforms and guns
rushing at him up the stairs through the fading smoke, shadows whose rounds were already
bouncing off of his armour. Dents and bruises but nothing more. Four of them were in khaki special
attack suits, whirring and thudding as they led the attack all in Position Twelve. Inoue’s comrades.
The rule was that the men above – officers, NCOs, it didn’t matter - always led from the front.
Hana had been right. It was idiotic.
The suit troopers advanced towards him first and the other infantry after them. Munekata faced
them. He raised the Type 49 and the sword at once as he had been trained to do. He assumed
Position Eight, for overwhelming odds. And he marched straight into the enemy.
Sense returned later. A staggered resurrection – first was the smoke, the ash of the burning
buildings in his lungs. The throb of all his wounds and of the suit slowly crushing his aged flesh,
grinding his bones together and wearing on his battered muscle. The stench of cordite and of fire
and of death all intermingled into the worst odour in the world, hard and crusty in the nostrils. His
left gauntlet – the one taken from the man upstairs – was too tight but he could stand it. His
machine pistol was out of ammunition but he was currently replacing the spent magazine with one
picked up from a body at his feet. The air was grey and faded and there were flames behind and
ahead. He strode out of the admin building or what was left of it, that small area which was not
buried in corpses or blasted apart by explosives and gunfire. A husk of a place which Karashima had
sent a borrowed suit unit into in order to stop him. Newer suits, fresher bodies, greater bloodlust.
And yet he was still standing and they were not.
Was he standing here, though really? He moved through a blood-soaked haze. Once he had been
fresh-faced twenty-year-old Keizo Munekata, a bum mooching off of the streets of Shinkyo, a
vagabond known to the local police, who recommended him to the Japanese, to that strange
already-balding man from the Kempeitai, Karashima…in those days Manchukuo had really existed,
and the railways had gone places and the plains had not yet been awash with blood, and ‘racial
harmony’ had existed, or was it, perhaps, Munekata, only your own imagination feeding you this?
Drifting haze of memories.
Chinese girls who were not like Japanese women who were always so stiff and formal, out of
reach, demanding you fit in here or there in the social hierarchy, but these Chinese girls, for some
reason they always seemed to really like you quite a lot, a world where in the dark places of the city
the rotten rulebook of the mother country seemed to have dissolved and nobody cared who was
loving what, or how you stood, or where your family had come from…for young Keizo of nowhere,
born to a family marked by the uncleanliness of disorder, Manchukuo had seemed somewhere, a
place to be, its intelligentsia fascist, to be sure, but alive, White Russians and Chinese exiles and the
fanatics of the Black Dragons, tinged at the edges with the lingering presence of technocratic
socialists, fools who had wanted it all to work since the turn of the century, and you, little Keizo,
slithered through all this with violence and anger, and kissed a Chinese woman a long time before
Hana, without knowing really what that meant.
The fantasies of youth which, languishing in a police cell, he had given up in an instant to find the
belonging of the Kempeitai and the Survey Unit, those pseudo-families. You’re always so awkward,
Arakawa had said. They’d been hanging out at a bar on leave, the two of them only, strange
moments of intimacy here and there between beers and cigarettes and women. Awkward?
Munekata had asked. Arakawa had laughed his little laugh.
It’s like…the only time I ever see any light in your eyes is when they’re looking at me from the
other side of a mask.
A naval infantryman loomed out of the smoke and fire, shouting as he lunged for Munekata with
his rifle, emptying the entire magazine into the special attack suit crying out with his face a mask of
miserable fury, and Munekata raised the submachine gun and fired once in reply and blasted him
over, hole punched in his arm, and then stabbed the sword into his chest. Blood was flicked from the
calligrapher’s brush and across Munekata’s front. The soldier gasped and died. Munekata yanked the
sword free and watched him fall with a thud to the gore-soaked ground.
 “Come on, old man,” Hana said from behind him, “is this really what gets you off?”
Lieutenant Karashima smiling at him in that dingy Shinkyo prison. “You’ve got the spirit of a
warrior, young man. I can tell.”
Munekata the killer stomped forward towards the shipyards. The children in the special attack
suits had died easier than their master. He was alone now.
If Karashima was fleeing there was only one other road out of the naval base. The road by the
docks. That, then, was where he would go – he did not decide to go but only went, pursuing a
change of objective. Orders from the top. Great concrete walls stretched out ahead, topped by the
watchtowers which were lonely black outcrops against the twinkling sky. Behind the warehouses
burned and ahead the docks were alive with motion – the faint sound of massed footfalls, shouted
commands and conversations.
He heard that they believed they were under attack by reds, that insurgents had struck and there
was no help coming from the army in Ryujin or anywhere else. Panicked voices. So it was that he
didn’t go towards the checkpoints into the dockyards, then, but went the other way, towards what
he knew were the tunnels that connected everywhere important via labyrinthine dark passages
spiderwebbing the foundations of the base. He’d never been inside them but he knew them,
because he had been here before, invited by Karashima for drinks and dinner and old fake memories,
and he had always paid attention to these things, because he was a hunter and environments were
always everywhere to be known and studied and used.
It was there he retreated now, following the path of the base’s layout – past each block of
warehouses there was a tunnel – and finding the nearest, a metal door set in the concrete flanked
by sandbags with 04 stencilled on the side in white. He would not know his way once inside, but that
was a problem for once he was inside. He clanged a fist hard on the door and when a nervous soldier
came to let him in Munekata broke his neck and stuffed him in the guardpost and, peering into the
dim gloom of the tunnel, musty air and rusted pipes and bare halogen bulbs set glowering in the
ceiling, he saw no danger ahead. They were still shouting for him beyond.
He eased the steel door shut and allowed himself to disappear, lightening his tread and heading
into the tunnels, carefully proceeding through the maze by always tacking towards the direction of
the docks. There were men here and there but he slowed his movements to quiet the suit’s
hydraulics and let them pass, ducking away at the first sound of boots echoing from in front or
behind – the black of the suit melted into the shadows of the corridors, and in silence he waited and
watched as they came back and forth in their panicked way, the bastard remnants of what had once
been a navy, which had once been part of a military, which had once been the cursed sword of a
terrible empire. Now there were only boys scared and unused to battle, nobodies who dreamt
uneasily of the retribution karma had prepared for them.
Once he would have said it was the hand of Buddha that decided who was punished and who was
not, but the fate of Xu Mei had told him otherwise, and then the fate of Hana, and now all he knew
was that any death that served his objective was good, and any that did not was unnecessary. He
was not angry but cold inside as he had once been before.
When she had tried to strike him after finding his armour Munekata had felt that same sensation
with her, that first time his real instincts had returned since being crippled by the girl. He knew she
had meant to kill him in her surprise and hate and outrage and he knew that for a beautiful instant
he had meant to kill her as well.
“What the hell is going on?” one soldier said to another while he, the armoured killing machine,
waited cramped in the adjacent corridor pressed against the pipes. “I dunno,” the second said in a
slurred voice, “something about commies.” His metal hands against sword hilt and submachine gun
grip. He was under the docks now, somewhere near – following the signage – a sector numbered 07.
Now he needed to get out. He could taste blood as it dribbled down from a wound somewhere on
his face. He waited for the two voices to leave and then stepped out into the electric light. There! A
fork in the path and one way was labelled EXIT 07. The other was labelled armoury and cells.
Munekata hesitated, peering at both.
 There was only one magazine left for the Type 49 and it was loaded and after that he would be
naked. He took the other route down, away from EXIT 07 and into a sloping stairwell heading further
into the earth, listening carefully with his weapons readied. At the bottom it evened out into a long
straight passage and beyond an iron door, which he eased open with only a creak. He then heard
voices. Two more soldiers, one coughing and the other asking him to shut the hell up. “I’m shaking.”
the coughing soldier said. “I’m really sick.”
“You’re not sick.” the second said. “You’re suffering from withdrawal. That’s all. You fucking
junkie.”
“Don’t you,” he coughed, spluttered, retched, “I’m dying. There’s an epidemic-”
“There’s an epidemic, alright. Of hopeless addicts. I hate this. if the Kempeitai needs drugs for the
Chinese, why do we need to be involved? It’s poisoning idiots like you.”
“Take that back!” the first soldier said, coughing. It was then that Munekata slid into view. He
fired twice and both men, the sick man at the table and the officer stood up, were jerked back,
crashing to the ground. Their blood decorated the walls. A poster was plastered over the mouldy
concrete and it said SUBVERSION IS EVERYWHERE, REMAIN VIGILANT. They had been partway
through a game of go and all the pieces were now splattered with crimson. Munekata saw past that
a steel door – a key on the desk – and a sign that told him this was the armoury.
He unlocked the door and within saw two Type 49s and a selection of magazines and some as
well for the Type 77 assault rifle, and a sheath for a sword and leather strap, and on the desk in the
corner beneath a row of American pornographic images was the enormous black metal shape of a
Heer M3 machine gun, belt-fed monster with its fat barrel thrust upwards and a long bandolier of
7.62x51mm rounds at its side. He sheathed the sword and took the great M3, heavier by several
kilos than the Sumitomo he’d used earlier, and with the suit whirring with the effort held it in one
hand.
Munekata knew he had already reached his limit. He knew that one man could not take on an
entire naval base. That had never been his intent. He was here to find Karashima. To bring upon him
some revenge for the death of Hana Takamori. And to puncture that self-righteousness which had
made it no burden for him to kill her.
“And your own self-righteousness, too.” a withered, wretched voice said in his ear. It was the
voice of a thousand crawling centipedes, a creature formed from filth and darkness, that sounded a
little like Arakawa. It laughed at him. “Do you know what a real victory here would look like? Give up
and go home. Honour your dead privately. Escape from this world of blood and dust. But here you
are. Preparing for noble sacrifice, perfect annihilation. All you’re going to prove is that you’re just as
bad as they are.”
“If that’s what he wants,” the girl said, “then let him have it. Isn’t that the truth? He cannot help
what he is.”
“He could have.” the centipede said. “So many times before. But it’s too late now. He needs to
know this. He needs to be aware of the futility of all of this. She is dead.”
“And he is not.” the girl said. “So please. Allow him to finish.”
The centipede scoffed. “I’m not disallowing anything. I’m only pointing out the obvious. If you,
old boy, want to march to your noble death just like all the other millions of souls swallowed by this
grand imperial endeavour, then go ahead. But know what it means. Which is nothing at all.”
He hefted the gun up onto one shoulder and holstered the Type 49 as a sidearm and left the
armoury and saw there the sign that pointed the other way to the one he’d come, which said CELLS.
After a few seconds Munekata went that way. His boots were heavy on the old stone. His suit’s
whine was louder with each step. The aged engine protesting against so much effort. More
propaganda posters lined the walls either side. He marched on, observing the wires along the ceiling,
the heavy iron pipes snaking in and out, the security desk with its lone pistol and pack of cigarettes
left there. There was an enormous metal door and he could see no key. He raised his boot and
kicked at it with all his strength and the suit’s weight and the door bent. The hard crude bang of the
impact rang out, filling the passage.
 Munekata tried again and now the door came loose with an enormous crash, slamming down
onto the concrete floor beyond. He waited several seconds to see if men with guns came running.
They did not. He advanced beyond with the M3 ready, its weight straining his arm but not too much.
Now the pain came again, the agony of the suit sharp and vibrant all over, which was here in the last
to kill him as it had always been meant to. He rounded a corner and came to another door and a
mounted machine gun position and a security desk with rows of buttons upon it and a dark glass
screen. Once again it was all unmanned. There was another heavy iron door and Munekata eased it
open, a horrid rusted groan filling the corridor. He slipped through. And then he came to the cells.
The room was long and dark, with four on each side, iron bars and concrete walls, and in each cell
were figures shadowed and obscure who turned to him as he entered, an audience of harrowed
faces and starved bodies wrapped in torn, ragged clothes. Their grey, careful expressions were
captured in the light let in by his arrival, which spilled feebly in around the enormity of his armoured
bulk. He counted something like twenty or thirty of them, some crowded together others alone,
some men and some women and some children, some old and some young. At the end of the
corridor was another door set deep into the wall. He knew what was behind that door.
He went towards it anyway, slow heavy clunking step after slow heavy clunking step, the eyes of
every occupant of the cells upon him, the silence thick and viscous hanging there in the space
between he and they. He walked to the door and kicked it open and the metal swung inward and he
saw there what he had been expecting. There was a small chamber with a chair akin to those used in
a doctor’s or dentist’s office, old and stained all over. There was a tray of implements of metal at its
side and that too was overrun with rust and blood. A Manchukuoan flag hung from the wall next to a
Japanese one, sinister twins in the gloom. Munekata surveyed it. He turned and closed the door
behind him. The crowd waited, expectant. He cleared his throat and the motion hurt. “I will come
back.” he said in a scratched and hoarse voice. He stomped back past the cells and past the spectral
faces of the prisoners.
Munekata returned to the desk with the MG position and found the buttons there. They were
door release switches for the cells. He slammed his metal fist into them. From the next room came a
cacophony of metallic wheezes as all six of the cell doors were forced open at once. He stomped
back into the cells and he saw them there still waiting although the doors remained open. An older
woman with grey hair and Chinese face in worn skirt and jacket stared at him – he remembered the
charts from his training, the posters of his youth identifying the Ethnic Features of Manchukuo. He
remembered how logical it had all seemed back then. She had a long wound upon her forehead
crudely stitched shut, a jagged line held together with a thread of dirty string. “Why don’t you go?”
he asked.
The question was for all of them but it was the old lady who answered. “Go where?” she asked in
Mandarin.
“Away.” he said. “The doors are open.”
“Who the fuck are you?” a man demanded.
Munekata straightened up. “I’m a soldier.”
“A Japanese?” the old lady asked. Her wrinkles were thick and layered and her eyes seemed to be
shrunken into her skull. He nodded. “Why?” she asked.
“Because you don’t deserve to be here.” he said.
A younger girl stepped forward. For a moment he saw for a moment Hana’s mocking face. “How
do you know that?” she asked. She had less wrinkles and fairer skin but looked just as exhausted and
there was a wide ugly bruise all along her chest until it disappeared into her crumpled blue dress.
“How do you know we don’t deserve it, huh, Jap?” A chorus of feeble but furious mumbling followed
her. Munekata remained where he was. “I don’t.” he said. “I am not here to save you. But if you
follow the tunnel out of here you will find the armoury, where there are several weapons. Give them
to your most capable and shoot any Japanese you see. Head out and away from the sea. Right now
the enemy is in disarray. If you move quickly and act ruthlessly you may make it to the plains.”
 The Chinese faces surveyed him. The old lady frowned. She gave a short nod and stepped
towards the door. The others watched her. Munekata stepped aside to let her past. Once she was
out of the cell she looked to the others and gave that same curt nod, and slowly one by one they
began to follow. Munekata remained to one side as they did so. He did not look at them and they
did not look at him, as if he in his black armour was only part of the darkness itself. The rabble of
prisoners was soon all in the corridor and they spoke in low excited voices of escape, freedom, what
if it was a trap, and the old lady told them all to shut up and led them on. He listened to the feet on
concrete until they were faded and until he was alone again.
He lifted up the machine gun and slowly went after them back to the fork in the tunnels. They
were gone and he couldn’t hear the echoes of their feet and he made himself forget about them and
turned to the other path, the one that led to EXIT 07. “Don’t want to remember Arakawa’s wife, eh?”
Hana said in his ear. “You didn’t tell me about that one. You didn’t tell anyone. What was her name?”
He stomped onward in the semidark with the machine gun ready, up the stairs towards the iron
door at their apex. “Say it with me.” she said, giggling. “Mieko Arakawa. Do you remember Mieko
Arakawa, Mune?”
“Go away.” he mumbled.
“Do you remember the touch of her lips on yours, the warmth of her flesh? Her favourite floral
dress? The curl of her hair? Do you remember how you made her cry? How she knew it was only a
game to you, that you were using her to remind yourself of him? Do you remember what she said to
you, the last time you and she met? Do you remember, sergeant?”
“’I’ll always know who you are’.” he said as he continued his ascent. The mask pressed into his
flesh choked him as a great monster embracing him killing him with love. Hana nodded. “Exactly.
You disappointed your mother and sister by leaving and you lost to the girl and you drove Mieko
away and got Xu Mei beaten up and now you’ve gotten me killed. Gee, but you’re not very good
with women, are you, Mune?”
“I saved Sachiko.” he said.
“No.” she said. “The woman you knew as Hana Takamori saved Sachiko. And she died for it.” But
that was not true either – she had died, he recalled, but they had killed her. Karashima had killed her.
Munekata was at the door now. He tried it and found it unlocked. With one hand – the other arm
bearing the weight of the M3 – Munekata shoved it open, the groaning of the hinges loud and
terrible. But there was no one waiting on the other side and no death incoming just yet. He was
alone still – and he was now on the other side of the checkpoints, in the dockyard, a great Imperial
Navy vessel waiting there before him half-cast in the glare of the floodlights a great gunmetal
leviathan floating on black water in its concrete cage. Akamatsu was its name. A destroyer from the
North Pacific Group. Its cannons stuck out inert towards the midnight sky. At its stern a naval ensign
hung limply. There was no Manchukuoan ensign.
He stared up at the ship, impotent chained beast stuck in its pen. Blind and silent she waited
there for a war that would never come, for a future that would leave her here or in some dockyard
back home, sitting idle until she rusted. There was peace now, after all. The waves lapped against
her side. Beyond the dockyard walls there was gunfire and shouting and the rumble of engines.
Munekata walked the length of the ship towards the stern, his metal boots pounding on the wooden
decking. Beyond it were the great armoured doors that led to the storerooms, piles of crates and
tarpaulin scattered across the concrete, lit by burning floodlights above. A crane hung over the
water like an anxious old woman, winch suspended just above one of the ship’s aft guns. Above the
ship was a long white and red banner, upon which jagged characters spelt out the phrase RESIST
COMMUNISM, PRESERVE JAPANESE INTERESTS.
Munekata remained alone in the dock, with no guards to stop him or soldiers shooting at him or
even any sign of Karashima. That in itself served as proof of something. He stomped over to the
doors to the storage area and stared up at them. They were slightly ajar, their enormous metal
forms bent at a forty-five-degree angle, and beyond he could see only the burning of the emergency
lights overhead. He put both hands to the M3 now. “You know you can’t retreat from this, right?”
Hana asked. Her voice was barbed but not unkind. “It’s death from now on. For this whole rotten
country. And it isn’t like you can go anywhere else, is it? We’re all stuck in Manchuria until we die.
Until you end it, old man. Orochi soldier – Orochi killer – do your job, why don’t you?” She tittered.
“Come on, Sergeant Munekata.”
Munekata went into the storage area. The lights throbbed with an electric buzz, brightness
descending from above – floodlights upon the ceiling struts, their radiance bearing down upon him
and the great concrete floor and the supply crates and spare parts and other debris, abandoned mid-
use, making the whole chamber a frozen tableau of military labour, all stuck in place waiting for the
endless grinding processes of imperial rule to resume. A Type 98 scout car was parked ready to go at
the far end of the chamber, the shutters leading out to freedom half-open, stuck there in purgatory.
Looming over this, dwarfing it, were grand flags hanging from the catwalk overhead – Japanese red
and white and Manchukuoan yellow alternating like stripes on a vast resting serpent. The lair of the
true beast. And the beast was there ahead – a figure stood by the scout car waiting for him amidst
the shadows just out of reach of the light. It was Karashima in his old uniform, his simple Survey Unit
dress fatigues, with a peaked cap marked with a single gold star. He was packing something into the
car. He saw Munekata advancing and he turned and stood, hands behind his back.
They were less than a metre apart now. The chamber was empty but for them. Karashima stood
silhouetted against the flags, a man dwarfed by symbols. His tired eyes held onto Munekata. “Keizo.”
he said in a low voice. “Isn’t it time you stopped?” Munekata did not reply. A glue of sweat and
blood held the mask to his face. He held onto the M3, its enormous dark metal thrust towards the
enemy. Karashima was still before him. “In a way, it's pleasing.” he said. “To see you almost as you
once were. You almost resemble the soldier I made you into. Those pups here never stood a chance.
I knew as much, of course. I know what you came here for. You are here for me, not them. I drew
you out here to save as many of them as I could. To keep you out of Ryujin, away from that mess
over there. To protect our crumbling harmony from your tantrum. To stop you from spilling any
more blood in the name of a futile grudge.”
Munekata said nothing. Karashima frowned and rubbed his nose with one hand, sniffing. “You
killed her.” he said. “You. Not I. You are a killer, Keizo. It’s what you do. Death surrounds you. If she
had mattered so much to you, then you would have pushed her away. Not pulled her down with
you.” He shook his head. “And yet here you stand anyway, heedless of the facts. My lieutenant
wouldn’t have done this. So really, you are not my soldier. Not the man I made.” His voice rose
slightly. A tremble there, or Munekata had imagined it. “Who are you, you inhuman thing?”
Karashima demanded. “What is this red scarf around your neck? The Keizo Munekata I knew has
passed away into the same maelstrom which has destroyed Manchukuo. Which killed Arakawa, and
Murata and Zhang and Zamyatin and all the rest already, and soon will kill me, his oldest comrade.”
He paused. “Although you disgrace yourself, ghost of Keizo Munekata, I ask you to grant me one last
favour. For the sake of our love.”
Munekata lifted up the M3. He took it and the Type 49 and lowered them carefully onto the
concrete. Not breaking his stare with Karashima he then drew the sword from the sheath and held it
before him in both hands. Position Sixteen, the executioner’s stance. As an armoured demon he
loomed over the old man, who stood calmly, hands still behind his back. “Harmony, Keizo.”
Karashima said. “That’s what Manchukuo was supposed to represent. You know that. You know – all
that we shed blood for. I came out here at sixteen and I have served my whole life to try to realize
that grand dream. A failed ideal is still an ideal. What is it you turn your back on us for? Some dead
woman? Another corpse?”
Munekata still held his sword up, his arms quivering. Karashima surveyed the weapon without
fear. He glanced over at the waiting scout car. “We could have – accomplished so much here.” he
said. “Once. With men like you and Arakawa we almost made it work. The Survey Unit almost built
paradise. But in the end disorder overcame. And it’s as I said to the Tachibana girl – you are only one
small part of it. A devilish spirit wearing the skin of the strongest man I have ever known.”
 Tachibana, Karashima had said. Mizuki Tachibana. Munekata pictured that nervous figure before
Karashima, before the yawning evil of the Kempeitai. Interrogation cells and fists slammed on tables
and the shadows of torture devices. Munekata’s armoured fingers gripped the sword’s hilt, his
unarmed opponent stood waiting. He thought of Mizuki Tachibana and Chen Jintian, of Arakawa and
Mieko and so many others, so many lives lived in the shadow of the beast. He thought of broken Xu
Mei in her hospital bed – and Hana, whose scarf he wore. His spent muscles tensed and he swung
the sword down towards Karashima’s unprotected neck.
A shot heavy like the crack of thunder. Sharp pain in his chest. The holster on Karashima’s hip –
the smoking autorevolver now in the major’s hands, revealed like a magician’s trick, its heavy
gunmetal barrel gleaming in the light. Warmth spreading across Munekata’s breast like a blossoming
flower. He grunted. His sword clattered to the ground. “I am sorry, old friend.” Karashima said. His
finger depressed the autorevolver’s trigger and held it and it barked four times and four armour-
piercing slugs burrowed into the front of Munekata’s suit. “We sought to become men on those
plains.” Karashima said. “To live with honour. To try to hold Manchukuo against the chaos, to
maintain harmony, so that one day it could fulfil its potential and benefit all of mankind. What I have
learned, over the years, is that honour and harmony are not compatible. So it is that I do this. So it is
that I do all the things I do, that I will continue to do, for you, and for them, and for myself.” His eyes
were without feeling. “Do you understand?”
Munekata had ignored the holster, missed it, stupidly – Karashima stood there with the revolver
still in hand. He frowned, studying Munekata as the blood pooled through the suit’s armour and
began to drip down onto the concrete. A sigh slipped past his lips. He was, Munekata remembered
now, an old man. “The best of us.” Karashima said. “The most fearsome of us. The most beautiful of
us. And here you are. Here you end. It is much less than you deserve. What is the highest principle,
Keizo? It is that evil must be punished without mercy. Evil knows this. Evil flees from this, from itself.”
He took aim with the gun once more, now at Munekata’s head. “But evil – we both know – cannot
ever truly become good.”
Munekata stood quivering. His fingers twitched, tensed, tightened. He put his hand to the bloody
patch upon his front, smeared his fingers in crimson. “Keizo.” Karashima said. “You must accept it.
This is over. Please-”
“Shut up!” Munekata snapped. He flung his arm forward and splashed his blood straight at
Karashima’s face and into his eyes. Karashima hand upon his face trying to wipe it away at once saw
Munekata approaching him and raised the gun and fired and missed. Munekata’s armoured gauntlet
plunged forth with all the might of the suit and struck him and cracked bone and tore skin.
Karashima staggered away. The gun clattered on the floor. His nose was broken and bloody and one
of his eyes was screwed shut and weeping crimson. Munekata hit him again. He cried out in animal
pain and tried to step away and Munekata hit him a third time, another steel fist slammed into his
face, bending and buckling and cracking apart. Karashima collapsed, falling onto his back with a
gentle thud. Karashima lay there staring up. Munekata rounded on him with fists clenched.
The pain in his knee rose and rose suddenly.
It exploded. Munekata was on fire. He gasped out loud. The agony leapt up at him in ambush,
taking him over, every nerve ending in his leg screaming. He wobbled and fell onto his other knee,
dripping his own blood from the chest and Karashima’s from the knuckles of his gauntlets. Both men
moaned and coughed and breathed, trapped in stalemate beneath the silent imperial flags.
Munekata spied his dropped sword within arm’s reach. His leg flooded with vivid furious suffering at
the slightest weight and he could not move. Karashima was frozen on his back staring with his good
eye. A gash in his forehead glistened dark and wet and fresh. Munekata grit his teeth and reached
out, his clumsy metal fingers grasping at the sword’s hilt. He missed once and twice, tears in his eyes,
and then he had it and he had pulled it close to him. He remained there for several seconds, a
shuddering wreck.
 Karashima looked to him from within the depths of his ruined face. “What now, Keizo?” the
major asked in a voice choked with pain, gummy and full of blood. He gave a wet gurgle of a laugh.
“You win. You have lashed out. You have hurt me as I hurt you. What happens now, then?”
“Juzo.” Munekata said slowly. His leg screeched at him for his betrayal, its tattered and torn
muscle sending blazing signals of thought-obliterating sensation to his skull. He could see – if he
dared to glance down – yet more blood now seeping through the right knee of his suit, where
something vital had burst under the pressure.
“Juzo Karashima.” he said. “You,” he faltered, his head light, the pain drowning out everything
else. He stabbed the sword at the concrete blade-down like a kind of crutch and tried to lift himself
towards the enemy. He spluttered, his whole brain on fire, trying to focus, to find his father there, a
blurred vision the shape of Karashima dissolving before him, his suit filling with stinking warmth,
bladder giving way as all of him was strained towards this singular purpose, “she,” he managed, “she
was going to,” and the sword slipped from his grip and he reached out for Karashima with one hand.
His leg gave final judgement in one last needle-sharp spasm. Munekata stumbled and exhaled and
toppled over and did not get up. On his side he looked up and he saw the twin flags still taking up
most of the wall and the idle scout car and Karashima still breathing but broken and above it all the
glare of the light – the light of Amida Buddha once more. His eyes closed and for a blissful moment
everything was quiet. The suit pressed against him from outside like a cage wrapped around his flesh.
There was an ache in his leg and that was the last thing he knew.
 22
The council had assembled and it was all pointless. Jintian hurt from where his brother had
beaten him, the black eye and the bruised shoulder and the cut on his forehead, and he sat there in
the grand meeting room of the town hall in his traditional Chinese shirt and trousers, not listening as
Kitazawa talked about – what? Riots, martial law, the Chinese Problem, and so on, and so on. The
meeting room was broad and decorated on all its walls with landscape scenes of Manchukuo’s
glorious countryside and of glorious co-operation with the Kwantung Army and glorious Survey Unit
troopers in special attack suits descending gloriously on communist positions upon the plains. It was
all done in that exaggerated aesthetic idiocy, Yamazaki-style, which he knew was only really a crude
melding of Soviet socialist realism with the particularly flat and unreal look of late Meiji Japanese art.
He was studying it closely, because there wasn’t much else to do.
The flags were limp upon their poles and the varnished wooden tabletop shone in the too-bright
glow from the chandelier and nobody really was listening to the stretched-out leathery creature
named Kitazawa as he expounded upon the need for force. Kondo with her horn-rimmed glasses sat
arms crossed, a stray spot of rice upon the lapel of her oversized suit. Wearing a toad-faced look of
ignorance Anno clutched a flask of whiskey, his navy-blue tie crooked against his yellow shirt.
Sakamoto’s angular face remained severe, his military fatigues creased, as he studied the female
Kempeitai guard in the corner of the room whose chest was too big for her jacket. Tsuda pretended
to read the papers in front of him as Kitazawa’s wheezing voice droned on, his youthful features
pressed into what he thought concentration looked like. He was the only one of them with an ironed
shirt. Jintian noticed these things. He noticed all of them, these wretched people who would decide
the fate of the town.
Kitazawa went on. There had been a communist attack on the naval base and the Kwantung Army
in conjunction with the Japanese Navy was declaring the Manchukuo Imperial Army unfit to
maintain order and the Kempeitai was saying none of them could keep the peace and in Yugongguan
the Chinese, the rowdy noisy stupid idiot dangerous Chinese, were holding a rally about some thing
or another and the Imperial troops were just standing there and not doing anything and – Kitazawa
was concluding now, trying to rouse his ailing voice into a storm – could we please act resolutely and
preserve ethnic harmony with a vote from the present council members? Two – Kurimoto and Oshii
- had already fled town. Tachibana was at home and claimed he was ill with something. Jintian didn’t
believe it.
“Aye.” Kondo said in her dry voice. “I vote for disrupting the political subversion occurring in that
part of town.”
“Aye.” Anno said, drinking.
Sakamoto paused for a moment. He licked his lips. “Aye.”
Tsuda looked at his superiors and at the flags and at his own hands. “…Aye.” Now all eyes were
upon he, Chen Jintian, who was not supposed to be here, who still hurt all over, who had never been
thrashed as hard as that, who was still wincing every other second, who had seen Munekata, that
monster in human form, tell him that Hana was dead and then disappear to go kill someone else
instead of him. He sighed. As ever he was ready to give his aye, to nod off some other thing. But he
could hear something. What was that? it was almost as if he could hear the faint, plaintive notes of a
guzheng being plucked somewhere nearby.
Go away! he hold her, gripping his thigh. Tsuda looked at him with concern. You’re dead! But she
wasn’t dead even though she was dead. She was right there and she was so beautiful, because he
had made her into a martyr because that’s how fucking Japanese he was, how deeply this nonsense
– their nonsense – had sunk into his soul. She was so splendid now that she was dead. Had
Munekata shot her himself?
Jintian didn’t believe that. But worked so well, didn’t it, a perfectly romantic image, the conflicted
Japanese secret policeman and the hidden Chinese communist survivor he was in love with, who he
was forced to kill by his own hand. Unlikely. But their strange bond – whatever it had been, love or
hate or something inbetween, wasn’t that literary, Tiantian? – had left him jealous. He who was still
here and still ready to speak before this council of idiots who were waiting for his aye. On the wall
the black figures in their special attack suits were bearing down upon him. “Nay.” he heard himself
say.
The other councillors all looked at him. Kitazawa. whose slicked-back hair and tweed jacket were
the style of a decade ago, who had taken over during the Insurgency and never vacated office and
still was sure he would be re-elected after independence, stared the hardest, leaning on one skinny
arm with his elbow on the table, his features trying to approximate stern disapproval. “Mr. Chen,”
he said, “what do you mean, nay?”
“I mean that I am exercising my right as a council member.” Jintian said. “Nay.”
“A council member-!” Kitazawa spat. “You have missed almost every council session this year,
and now at this perilous moment you come to upset things!”
“Mr. Chen,” Kondo said gently, “procedure dictates that we reach a consensus before acting.
Please reconsider your vote or we will have to begin again.”
Anno drank. “You may be a big-shot writer, Mr. Chen, but we do things properly here in
government!” Sakamoto glanced at the kempei guarding the door and this time not at her breasts
but her face, conveying something with his narrowed eyes. She returned his stare with the same
resolute military exterior. Tsuda remained quiet, studying his hands. A silence settled over the
meeting room, punctuated with shouted orders outside, undercut by the rumble of military engines
in the square.
“I stand by my choice.” Jintian said. The Japanese all watched him. “I don’t believe it would be
helpful to intervene with force against the Chinese community. Let’s be honest. I don’t believe we
can shoot our way out of this. Not with all the guns of the Kwantung Army.”
Anno drank and took out his flask and filled it up. “Nobody’s saying shooting, Mr. Chen-”
“Then what?” Jintian snapped. “What do you mean by ‘disrupting political subversion’? Merely
beating, arresting, torturing? Blaring sirens and driving down the streets in half-tracks? Is that what
we’re voting to do? Well, I vote ‘nay’. I told you – it won’t work. We are dealing with a prairie fire
here, and all you want to do is throw petrol at it.”
“Mr. Chen.” Kondo said. “If you wish to propose a debate over introducing new measures to deal
with the anti-social disturbances, that is an entirely separate topic of discussion. We will have to call
another meeting.”
“C’mon.” Anno said. “Even if we all agree with you, it won’t make any difference to what the
Kwantung do…” He glanced at the kempei by the door. The woman had a strange face, tightly-
pinched, and didn’t move enough as people looked at her. She was like a statue, or a stagehand in a
play, a phantom presence pitched in all black so that the audience could pretend not to notice her.
Sakamoto was firm and did not speak. “We can defer sending in our men.” Jintian said. “Delay
imperial and police action. Wait until the Kwantung Army is forced to act openly. At least give people
a chance to come to their senses.” The wall of faces did not yield. He realized that this was it - all his
years of compromise and barter and abasement had led to here and now. After everything this was
where his precious influence as the voice of Ryujin’s Chinese community had left him. He laughed.
“Alright.” he said, hands up. “I’ll abstain. Do as you will.”
“What do you mean?” Kitazawa asked, leant forward with such force he seemed ready to leap
over the table claws out. “Do as you will? Are you too good for us now, eh, Chinaman?”
A pain in his head. Anger. Jintian had already felt too much pain for today. He was still trapped in
the moment after he had punched Juhua and Juhua had pummelled him there in the garden until
their mother had come in, screaming, to tear the two of them apart. It had taught them that he was
not yet a shadow, not truly, because shadows did not bleed. Shadows did not feel what he had felt
looking at Juhua’s furious face, slightly bruised, the tears welling in his brother’s eyes. What the fuck
was that for? what the fuck is wrong with you, bro?
For Hana Takamori, you fucking piece of shit turtle’s egg traitor, Jintian had said, and spat at him.
All their fury at one another then unloaded – the brother who had saved the family being pounded
into the dirt by the brother who had tried to save the family, whose criminal enterprises were
bringing down the town council itself in their unravelling. But who was he to judge? Jintian’s own
careful years of credit-building with the terrible dwarf pirates had now all amounted to nothing too.
“Pathetic.” he said aloud.
Kitazawa growled. “Pathetic? Us? What are you talking about? We’re trying to maintain harmony
here! We’re law and order!” He reached into his jacket and pulled out his councillor’s ID badge and
waved it in Jintian’s face. “We’re authority itself! The last thing we are is pathetic!” Kondo and Anno
and Sakamoto and Tsuda were all watching their leader carefully, with that typical Japanese
blandness upon their faces, their masks up at the first sign of trouble. Suddenly Jintian was very tired
of masks. “You’re right.” he said. “We are authority. Thank you very much for that reminder, Mr.
Kitazawa. I’ll be going now. I abstain. Pass whatever vote it is you feel necessary. That was my
meaning.” He stood, brushing dust off of the front of his Chinese shirt with one hand, and he
surveyed their empty faces. “Goodnight, everyone.”
In the corridor he checked his watch. It was half past eleven now. Very late. On the way here in
the BMW he had seen the crowds of Yugongguan and the banners and the soldiers on Showa
Avenue, the imperial troops and police both Chinese and Japanese who had no real idea what was
happening and no interest in risking their lives against the great mass of others, the disloyal, noisy,
trouble-making Chinese who were strangers in their own country…the only ones who would have
the stomach to fight back would be the Kwantung and its brothers, who knew they had built this
abomination, paid for all of it in Japanese blood, against Russia and Chiang, their birthright, these
vast plains and the wealth they brought in. What was the use in pretending, even after the abolition
of the anti-pollution ordinances, that you and they even shared the same space?
But when Chiang’s regime had executed Mao Zedong, a kind of lashing out for being forced to
swallow the loss of the northeast, Mao had been quoted, perhaps apocryphally, as saying to his
guards that one day the Chinese people would stand up…Chiang had died, so they said, plotting
ways to get ‘Manchukuo’ back, living until his last day in frustration at the impotent half-peace
imposed on him by the whites. Jintian wondered about what Mao had said. With the Americans and
Germans and British no longer caring much, and post-Chiang China and decolonising Japan coming
to uncomfortable accord, and the Soviets still funding their insurgents, who was there left now who
was on the side of the Manchurian settlers? Who would stand up for these idiots as history came
crashing down around them?
“Mr. Chen.” Tsuda said. Jintian saw the younger councillor was with him in the hall, bowing. He
bowed back. Tsuda’s face was nervous. His long hair flopped onto his forehead. “I wanted to ask
you.” he said. “What is it you’re going to do now?”
Jintian didn’t know exactly what to say. He took a cigarette from his jacket and lit it. “I’m going to
Chinatown.” he said.
“To do what?” Tsuda asked. He had handsome features, boyish, without the corrupting hardness
military service inflicted upon so many of Ryujin’s young Japanese men. His pale skin indicated he
didn’t get out much. No tough plains settler here. He had delicate scholar’s hands that were then
loose at his sides, a casual affectation belied by the tightness of his jaw. Jintian shrugged. “I don’t
know.” he said. “To do something. Someone has to. And it’s like that old fart Kitazawa said – aren’t
we authority itself? You can report me, if you want.”
Tsuda swallowed. “I want to come with you.”
Jintian puffed smoke at the wall, the florid tapestry of faux-Manchu kitsch there – the great Qing
emperor Qianlong, Puyi’s mighty ancestor, receiving courtiers in distant Beijing. “Why?” he asked.
“Someone has to do something.” Tsuda answered. So Jintian didn’t tell him not to come but
didn’t stop him from following, as he strode out of the town hall, past the kempei on guard and
through the square brimming with military metal, floodlights and men in uniform and trucks and
half-tracks and even in silhouette a tank, great long-barrelled monster lurking at the edge of the light
as if ashamed of itself. There were flags and banners and uniforms of all types, a mixture of
Manchukuoan and Japanese colours and styles. No order had prevailed yet. If there had only been
the old might of the Survey Unit in charge then Jintian knew that Ryujin would have been doomed.
But instead this mishmash of different forces, Kwantung and Kempeitai and navy and Chinese-
majority imperial military and police forces, all unsure of whose jurisdiction prevailed, leaving the
matter for now in the useless hands of the council – this meant that there was still a chance that
violence could be staved off. He wondered about this, getting into the BMW and inviting Tsuda to
take the passenger seat, pulling out of the square and down the road towards Showa. What had
happened behind the scenes? And what was happening down below? Why had the Chinese come
out tonight, of all nights? What were the San Lung Tang up to, letting something like this happen?
Kitazawa had mentioned a communist strike on the naval base. Jintian put his cigarette out and
drove through the sullen silent town, Tenmei in all its modest, tasteful Japanese glory, curtains
drawn and blinds pulled shut and not a soul out on the street who wasn’t in a uniform. The car’s
engine rumbled on. Tsuda sat looking at the varnished wood of the dashboard, seeming
uncomfortable sat upon leather. They came to Showa, where the whole street was occupied by an
enormous military cordon, parked half-tracks and rows of imperial soldiers with guns thrust down
towards Yugongguan. In the Chinese town earlier tonight the lights had been out and the streets
silent, but now the whole of the ghetto was brilliant and busy. He saw the banners and heard the
raised voices of a dozen different Chinese dialects. He drove the BMW onto the corner of the street
and parked it. “You won’t get to enjoy anything like this if you stick with me.” he said to Tsuda. “We
could even be arrested. This is the end of your political career, Mr. Tsuda.”
“That’s fine.” Tsuda said. “Actually, Mr. Chen. I don’t know if there’ll even be any politics to have
a career in by the end of the week.”
Jintian killed the engine. “Well, let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.” He got out of the car and he
and Tsuda were met at once by a man with the rank of sergeant upon his lapel, in imperial fatigues
with his Type 77 slung loose over his shoulder. “Excuse me,” the sergeant said, behind him rows of
other Chinese singing in Mandarin, a rendition of the old Republican anthem. Jintian saw KMT flags
and Qing flags and communist flags and banners saying all kinds of illegal things. The Chinese faces
were young and old and some were brave and some fearful, studying the men with guns – but so
many were singing or trying to sing. “Excuse me.” the sergeant repeated. “This is a military operation.
Please-”
Jintian watched the Chinese crowd. He picked his council ID from his pocket. “Council business,
sergeant.” he said.
“The council?” the sergeant said, glancing at Tsuda for affirmation. Tsuda nodded. “Oh, thank
goodness. So we have orders, then? Permission, that is.”
“I want to speak to them.” Jintian said. The sergeant stared. “Get me a loudspeaker.” He was
handed one, heavy old metal, and with Tsuda at his side he crossed the cordon of soldiers around
their wooden barricades, walking over the road to the other side of Showa, where protestors had
occupied all of the shopfronts and the pavements and he could see, below, had hoisted banners
above the rooftops of Yugongguan. Children watched from Chinese windows, old men and women
peered from the narrow alleyways. Upfront were mostly students and young adults, gangster-types
who hung about the bars and the kids from the overcrowded middle schools and the young men
who worked at the harbour and the girls who helped their parents in the market, some in traditional
dress, some in western clothes, a few in various kinds of shabby uniform.
They reached the end of the anthem and someone sat atop a parked car started a new chant,
“Destroy the Japanese, restore the Party” based on an old chengyu, and several kids in leather
jackets were holding up a banner that said CHINESE AND JAPANESE ARE BOTH MANCHURIANS in
English and several old men in threadbare uniforms, imperial uniforms in the 1950s pattern, were
sat down near the largest banner, which simply said REMEMBER 1931. One of them bounced a baby
up and down on his knee in time with the music. Jintian took it all in and realized the protest had
swelled up from the streets and forced its way here, its vanguard spilling out onto Showa Avenue
and up through the other narrow Chinese roads, hemmed in by the imperial soldiers and their rifles
but not really contained. It would take either concession or brutality to do that.
 With the Japanese guns at his back and the Chinese crowd ahead he stepped forward. He was
stood almost at the centre of Showa, in the middle of the street. Tsuda was by his side. The crowd
went on chanting and then broke down into an interchangeable mixture of cheering and jeering.
Slurs aimed at the imperial soldiers – anti-Japanese slurs aimed at Chinese in Japanese uniforms -
rose up here and there. Jintian’s bruises hurt and he was sweating in his traditional clothes. He
raised the loudspeaker.
“Everyone!” he said in Mandarin. The crowd was still noisy, still chattering, pulsing with the
carnival-life of the oppressed who had found a moment of freedom. “Everyone!” he tried again.
Tsuda waited next to him. A decent man, he thought – a kind man. Don’t fall in love with him,
dummy, was what Hana would have said. Jintian cleared his throat. “Everyone! I am Chen Jintian!”
Now there was quiet. Not silence. But he had attracted attention. Several people cried “traitor!” at
him and he stood there and took it all in, the eyes turned to him, interested or hateful or even
curious, his countrymen who had lived in reality while all along he had been dreaming.
“I am Chen Jintian!” he repeated. “You know me, maybe. I am here as a representative of the
Ryujin Town Council. I am a writer. An artist. I am Chinese!” He was aware of the guns behind him,
the hapless imperial soldiers, the Japanese and with them the Kempeitai somewhere a black demon
lurking. He stepped forward, raising an arm to the crowd. “And I am a coward! I am a wretched,
weak, foolish man! We all are. We hoped we could – I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that
we tried our best. Too late, but – we have failed you, we – Japanese, Chinese – who thought we
could manage this, that we could make it work. You need to listen to me!”
His voice was scratched and wobbling and not his own. The crowd watched him intently all of
them like participants in some infernal panel, the King of Hell’s own jury come to see which way the
second son of the Chen clan would fall. “Whatever is coming, do not be afraid!” he called. “The great
failure – our failure – is not yours! You people, the people of this Manchukuo, sons and daughters of
the Yellow Emperor – you are not doomed! These are your lands, your lives! Whatever comes next,
do not falter – I wish I could have seen it before now, just once, in all these years. Your smiles, your
laughter. I wish things could have worked. But we have failed you. We have failed you. I am sorry!”
He passed the loudspeaker to Tsuda and hurled himself before the crowd, knees on the tarmac, and
he bowed his head to them, pressing it to the road once and then twice and then three times and
then remaining there. Tears streamed down his cheeks. Silence filled Showa Avenue.
Slowly Jintian raised his head. He saw the crowd’s expression, a singular look – hundreds of eyes
upon him not with contempt, the contempt he had always assumed they would hold in this moment,
but pity, sorrow, misery, anger, a kind of love. An arm had his shoulder and at first he thought it was
the military but in fact it was Tsuda, who hauled him to his feet. “Mr. Chen,” he said in a quiet voice,
“are you okay?”
“I’m sorry.” Jintian sniffed. “I – that was deplorable. I shouldn’t-”
Tsuda held onto him. It was nice to be held. “I think somebody needed to say it.” he said. Jintian
wiped away his tears and saw them, the people, and heard shouts now of encouragement – “Don’t
cry, brother!”, “You’re welcome here!”, “Come stand with us, brother!” – and others still of traitor,
bastard, turtle’s egg, etc., and he saw as well a pair of faces he recognised as Japanese. With a group
of young people there were two girls holding hands, one with short, dyed hair and boyish clothes,
the other classically long-haired and tall, a model student, and they were with the Chinese boys and
girls around them as if it didn’t matter, and they looked to him and he to them.
He could not go and stand with the Yugongguan Chinese, not yet. He stood up straight and felt
himself lighter than before, not happy but not whatever he had been until now. With Tsuda he
turned from the crowd and retreated back into the line of imperial soldiers, who had of course
understood every word he’d said – the kempei and Kwantung who were doubtlessly lurking nearby
might not have – and who regarded him warily as he returned. He handed the loudspeaker back to
the sergeant. The sergeant took it as if it had been soaked in piss. “You’re really Councillor Chen?”
he asked.
“Yes.” Jintian said. “I am.”
 “That was official council language?” the sergeant asked. There was a touch of wonder in his
voice. Tsuda cleared his throat. “The council wants to maintain order. No violence. I understand how
difficult that is, but…”
“We’ll do our best, sir.” the sergeant said. Tsuda and Jintian retreated back to the BMW watched
by the imperial soldiers, not with hostility but not with kindness either. A world caught between
extremes, Jintian thought. Nobody knew what would happen now. “Do you think…?” Tsuda began,
but seemed to catch the words on their way out and kill them before them left. Jintian liked that. He
thought he liked this man. “What do we do?” Tsuda asked instead of the other, stupider question.
Jintian took another cigarette from his jacket. He looked out at the Japanese guns and the Chinese
crowd beyond who were beginning again to sing. He looked at Tsuda’s youthful face. “We wait and
see.” he said.
 23
Munekata lay on his back for a very long time and for much of it he was out cold, dreaming of Her,
all the hers that he had failed in his life, and for the rest he was aware of people looking down at him,
voices and faces that refused to come together into place, purpose or intent. It was only he and his
lurid thoughts. He had failed to die at so many moments where he should’ve and he was still here
and that was that. His face ached and his knee too, even more, and he lay there hemmed in by these
and various other pains. The pain of failure was the strongest. He had failed at the last gasp even at
killing Karashima, at carrying out the one function that once had been his finest. A broken-down
machine incapable of output. They had pried the special attack suit off of him and he had woken for
part of it, felt hands all over him, a crowbar pressed beneath the steel and used to pull it away from
the inner layer piece by piece.
They had placed all of the buckled, bent, damaged scraps of the suit in a pile and he had seen it
and seen then the frame removed and felt himself suddenly free, in horrid agony, all of his battered,
ruined flesh no longer forced together. Two of Karashima’s bullets had penetrated the armour and
broken the inner layer and gone into his chest and he was bruised all across his arms and legs and
the splint over his nose had broken and they had taken it away and his right leg was wrapped in an
immensity of bandages but he had seen it, in one of those fleeting moments of consciousness. He
had seen the burst ruin of his right knee where it seemed the pressure of the suit and of moving so
much in the suit had pressed the metal into the joint until it had popped free, something stark and
white snapping out through the skin.
He lay upon the kang, the bed-stove of a traditional Manchu house somewhere, and the air was
dusty and all about the rest of the room was the flotsam and jetsam of old China, Qing landscapes
and piled-up calligraphy scrolls and volumes of poetry and writing, the classics of Confucius and
Mencius and Laozi and so on decorating an enormous walnut finish bookshelf by the doorway,
marked with dragons snaking their way up the wall and back. The light above had shades of glass
decorated with scenes of Daoist sages coming down from the heavens.
Through the open window, which had no glass, he could sometimes hear conversation in
Mandarin and sometimes snatches of someone playing a guzheng, which filled his emptiness with a
cold sorrow too overwhelming to accept. Sometimes a preteen girl wearing a COCA-COLA t-shirt and
a pair of jeans would come in and she would give him water from a plastic bottle and serve him
some hot congee in a bowl, and change his dressings and wipe sweat from his forehead.
She was dark and had eyes that could not look at him and she did not speak. He lay there and felt
her hands as she cleaned his wounds and was aware of nothing, haunted by phantom memories of
others. Other times he sensed her as he drifted near the edge, or in moments after waking or just
before sleeping, and he knew she would touch him and feed him and keep him alive but did not
question or mind it. He was a machine being maintained and sooner or later they – whoever had set
her to the task – would need him to pay this service back. He accepted it as he accepted her holding
the spoon out and he opening his mouth and she feeding him congee as if he were an infant.
Perhaps it was so that he was. He had been born again, maybe, and this was his new life, neither
the Keizo Munekata from the home islands who had abandoned his family or the Keizo Munekata
raised in the Kempeitai and the Survey Unit by old man Karashima. His body felt weak and
treacherous beneath him. In his worst moments when the pain from his wounds flared up his brain
had no room for anything, and he could only lie there and grunt occasionally, completely vulnerable
to anyone who wanted to finish him off. Such was the way all soldiers had to end, he supposed.
They had put the special attack suit’s mask atop the pile of armoured pieces and sometimes he
turned his head and watched it and saw nothing there he understood anymore. The dark-skinned
girl who fed him, always in that COCA-COLA tee, continued to avert her eyes when he saw her, and
he was delighted at this, for now he understood that she did not know exactly what he was, and
with that weight lifted from him he realized he did not know either.
 He was there for days or weeks. Sometimes he heard a scratchy old radio playing communist
songs. Other times outside there were conversations and sometimes there were conversations in
the room when he was drifting between worlds, and he did not listen much but understood by the
urgent voices of men and women that he was in a village somewhere else, deep enough into the
plains to be rural, somewhere stomped all over in the Insurgency perhaps.
They called one another ‘comrade’ instead of usual familial terms and they were talking hushed
and serious about what was happening in Shinkyo and across the province, the details of which he
was both uninterested in and unable quite to hear, as their speech drifted from Mandarin to what
he thought was Manchu, which, he remembered from another life, was a common trick to avoid
Kempeitai eavesdroppers. He had somehow fallen into the hands of communists. Well, he thought,
so be it. He hoped they had taken care of Hana’s scarf.
It was daytime, or he thought so by the sun coming in through the window and the sounds of
laughter outside, the clucking of hens and the pounding of feet on dirt. Munekata had begun to
improve: he lay on the kang no longer quite in agony all the time, his knee immobile but quietened.
His belly was full of congee, for the girl had just been in an hour or three ago and he was on his back
thinking about Meiko Arakawa. The two of them in the house Arakawa had bought with his earnings
on a surveyman’s salary, with the view from the upstairs bedroom of the ramshackle rooftops of
Yugongguan and beyond that the glistening blue ocean which went on forever, dotted here and
there with the ships of the Imperial Navy, intruders upon the perfection of heaven.
He made love to her on the futon there with the paper screens open so they could taste the sea
air and listen to the gulls and the clamour of the streets below. Mieko wore her blue swallow
kimono and he did not ever fully undress her until the final moments, both of them sweaty and filthy,
she only begging him, over and over, to give it to her, provoking him almost. Every time afterwards
there would be guilt, for Arakawa’s photograph was downstairs on the altar in the living room. But
that came about ten or fifteen minutes later. At first there was only peace. He would hold her to his
chest and she would stroke his belly with her painted fingernails and her long legs would nestle
against his and her slender feet, white and pristine, would seem to float suspended over the
floorboards, gently moving back and forth as she then kissed his neck, never his face, and told him
quietly that there would be no hard feelings between them no matter what.
Someone else came in now, not the girl with the COCA-COLA t-shirt but a child, just as tanned but
half the height, her hair tied up in pigtails and her trousers shabby and her t-shirt pale red and torn
at the shoulder. She waddled up to him as he lay there on his side now on the kang and she stared at
him with wide eyes. Munekata stared back. The girl had a metal bracelet on one wrist and she
played with it now and kept on looking at him. Then she lifted her head and turned to the doorway
and cried out. “Mama!” she said. “The Jap is looking at me!” Then she ran out.
Munekata grunted and for the first time in perhaps three weeks – he wasn’t sure – he sat up,
feeling the strain of his flesh as it was forced back to life. Resting on his palms he leant back. He was
unable to cross his legs and so dangled them off of the side of the kang like a child. The little girl
came back in and now she had brought a woman with her who Munekata assumed was mama. This
woman was short-haired like a man and wore jeans and a faded t-shirt with an army jacket over it, a
red scarf tied about her right arm. She was tall and too thin and had the scowling disposition of a
schoolteacher, an impression reinforced by the rimless glasses perched nervously on the edge of her
sharp nose. KODAK 1985, her t-shirt proclaimed. Her skinny arms were folded over her chest. Deep,
ugly scars ran in looping patterns up and down them. The girl stood behind her and pointed at
Munekata again and again. “Jap! Jap!”
The woman grabbed her wrist. “Xuehua, stop it. He is our guest.” Her Mandarin was not heavily
accented – it lacked the nasal sound of erhua. Her impression of her as someone of education or
authority was reinforced by this, and by her stiff posture and her severe but not cruel gaze and he
thought perhaps he would not be shot today, at least not by her. The girl named Xuehua shrank back.
Now the woman approached him. Her eyes were especially narrow and the slender lenses of the
glasses only made them narrower, as if she was already disdainful of him. Perhaps she was. He didn’t
think he could blame her for it. “You’re awake.” she said in Japanese.
“Please, speak in Mandarin.” he said. “I don’t want to give you any trouble.”
Her expression didn’t shift. “Do you know where you are?” she asked, in Mandarin now.
“I know this is a red base.” he said.
“And you’re a surveyman.” she said. Xuehua watched him from behind her legs, eyes wide.
Munekata only nodded. The woman frowned. He noticed now that she was closer that although her
hair was short at the front and side she had tied it at the back into a long queue, similar to those the
Han had been forced to wear under the Qing dynasty, a tail of shimmering dark hair that went all the
way to her waist. Freckles dotted her cheeks and they moved as she smiled now, although it wasn’t
a real smile. It vanished at once, as if ashamed of itself. Munekata only sat there with his legs out
over the edge of the kang. He waited for her judgement. She adjusted her glasses. Xuehua peered
round her legs at him. “My name is Cai Yinglie.” she said. “I am the Party official in charge of the
South Cave Village Soviet. You were put in my care by a detachment of ours that found you bleeding
out at the naval base near Ryujin.”
Munekata felt the throb of his knee. “Soviet? There aren’t any soviets in southern Manchukuo.”
“Mama, he speaks Chinese!” Xuehua said. Yinglie stroked her daughter’s head with one hand but
her eyes remained fixed on him. “You were in the Insurgency.” she said. “When did you get out?”
“Years ago. Before the coup.”
“Retired?”
“Transferred.”
“So you don’t know anything?” she said. Munekata was sat up properly now even despite how it
made his leg protest. He rested his palms on the kang’s side, felt the rough wood against his fingers.
He breathed in and breathed out and relished how the hurt was only a bark instead of a howl.
Outside people were talking in hushed voices – about this, perhaps. “I hope you can forgive me for
speaking so directly,” he said, “but I know that we destroyed it back in the sixties. Your movement, I
mean.”
Yinglie nodded. “Yes. You did. And what do you think the children who crawled out of the ruins of
those villages you destroyed did next? They dug the movement out of the ash, wiped their tears
away, and got back to work.” Now she did allow herself a genuine smirk. “Some of them want to
hang you, you know. Including my other daughter, Xuebai.” He recalled now the girl in the COCA-
COLA t-shirt who had looked after him so coldly and now he understood. “But I don’t want to.”
Yinglie said. “Because of what Auntie Yu told us.” She pursed her lips, adjusted her glasses. “You
saved her, Auntie Yu said.”
“Auntie Yu?” he asked.
“She was our representative from the central committee. But the coastal patrol boats picked her
up on the way to a rendezvous with the man from the Kuomintang, for another shipment of arms,
and they kept her at Ryujin – we were going to break her out, and when our forces got there…the
base was on fire and the Japanese had already been shot at. And she and the other prisoners of the
Jap navy were already free. And we found you, half-dead, inside.”
“Just me?” he asked, thinking of Karashima. Yinglie nodded. He frowned. “Where is-”
“She’s gone back to the plains.” Yinglie said. “To report in. And she told us to give you her thanks.
But we don’t owe you any more than that.”
“So you won’t kill me.” he said.
“I don’t decide on that.” she said. “We vote today. On what to do with the surveyman.”
Munekata considered this. “I would prefer it,” he said, “if you just shot me. The old way of doing
things.”
Yinglie scowled. “The point of our movement is to do it better than you. That was the mistake my
parents’ generation made. We will treat even the worst of you fairly. If the committee votes for it,
you’ll be allowed to live. I promise.”
 “I see.” he said. He lay back down on the kang with his head against the pillow. Xuehua watched
him and he for a moment watched her and then he turned over on his side so that he was facing the
wall. He heard Yinglie’s footfalls on the wood and lay there and closed his eyes. When he turned
around later the little girl, Xuehua, was still there. She was staring at him. “Hello.” he tried. She
yelped and giggled and scurried away across the room and into the doorway and out, calling for her
mama all the while. The other girl – Xuebai – fed him as usual and now he noticed what he had taken
for shyness was in fact hostility, that she hated him, that she was trembling with loathing as she
made him slurp up his congee and held the bottle up for him to drink from and put the pan beneath
him for him to relieve himself into and cleaned him up with a rag and left him, all the time avoiding
his eyes and not saying a word. “Look,” he tried, as she was leaving, “I know you hate me. I
understand.”
Xuebai paused there and turned and glared at him. “No.” she said. “You don’t.” And she left. The
day went on and soon he heard more voices outside in that Mandarin-Manchu pidgin, heavier voices,
male voices, and he heard the murmur of activity, speculation, discussion. Munekata supposed this
was the committee she had mentioned. He lay there on his kang and tried to remember Hana’s face,
her voice. It had all gone from him but that terrible image of her in the qipao, which had been ironic,
he was sure, a mockery, and yet which he had used to make an idol out of her all the same, and
though it was gone forever now – blasted apart by one of Karashima’s bullets as it had penetrated
the suit’s layer - it remained in his head, like an eclipse of the sun blocking out all that was real.
The cheap material of the qipao and how it squeezed her body into a postcard eroticism that
existed in opposition to the real her, the faint shadow which he had glimpsed now and then during
his abuse of her and then finally in her glorious, terrible end which had destroyed the illusion and
then perished itself, burning up in seconds. It haunted him. He could find Mieko’s real self within the
swirling morass of his memories, and his mother’s and Xu Mei’s, but not Hana’s, the soul behind the
only face he ever wished to see again. There was little the communists could do to him compared to
that – but then again he knew enough stories, and had seen the bodies of other surveymen and
imperial soldiers often enough, to wonder at the folly of this thought.
Men in drab brown fatigues came in, unsmiling peasant faces, and they brought him faded denim
worker’s clothes to put on over his dirty underpants, and when he was dressed in these and a pair of
loose-fitting sandals they helped him onto a crutch and he was guided out through the doorway into
the rest of the house, which as with his room was cluttered with Chinese detritus. They passed by
the courtyard and over it was hung a red banner which proclaimed DEMOCRACY AND EQUALITY FOR
ALL RACES. He was pushed outside into the dusky air, which smelt of dust and grease and faintly the
farmyard stench of nightsoil. Lanterns were lit upon all of the houses of the village and the central
square was busy with Chinese faces. He struggled upon his new crutch and as he stumbled one of
the soldiers caught him and helped him up. He was brought into the evening and the villagers all
watched him, young and old, dirty and clean, all in those brownish fatigues and all with the same
hardness beat into them.
Beneath their army caps men and women both – except the very old – seemed to wear their hair
in Qing-style queues like Yinglie did. She was with a selection of others, broader, stronger, more
confident men, who waited in a group of nine near the house’s gate. He supposed they were the
village committee. Their expressions were not gleeful or savage but calm, watching him impassively.
Two of them were skinny men with glasses, academics he guessed, and one was a heavy-set miner’s
type and another, with bushy brows and no queue, carried a Mauser pistol at his waist. Yinglie with
her schoolteacher’s slender authority did not seem to fit in, but then in such a group everyone at
once fit in and didn’t.
Munekata leant on his crutch by the gate, the overgrown weeds of the house’s garden tickling his
ankles. He supposed that this was what they meant by communism. The bushy-browed men
gestured to Yinglie and she with her two daughters by her side stepped forward. The villagers were
quiet, respectful. “Comrades!” she called. “The village committee has decided! In the name of the
people, our armed detachment under Comrade Sergeant Zhou,” she looked to the bushy-browed
man and he smiled and was greeted with a few cheers from the crowd, “has brought a class enemy,
a settler-soldier of the Japanese militarists, into our midst, captured during the action to liberate our
comrades from the imperialist base at Ryujin.” She did not speak with great passion but also without
the tedium of the Soviet leaders in their endless speeches. It was a clipped, matter-of-fact style of
delivery that still had the crowd rapt.
He was not the centre of attention, he realized. He was not receiving the kind of vitriol he had
always expected they would give a surveyman. The communists did not point guns at him and had
only greeted him with at worst coldness, not violence. He wondered at this. Yinglie cleared her
throat. “We have deliberated long and hard over how to treat this class enemy.” she said. “It is true
that as the flowers of revolution blossom across the province and elsewhere, to hesitate would
mean defeat. But Chairman Mao,” small, hoarse cries of Ten thousand years! from the back of the
crowd, “once asked us who were our enemies, and who were our friends, and said this question was
of first importance for the revolution. He told us to unite with real friends in order to attack real
enemies. This man here, despite his uniform, has aided us in liberating our comrades.”
“He’s a Jap!” one man shouted from the crowd, a burly half-naked man with Mongol features. No
cheers joined him but Munekata saw several faces shift at this. He sensed that it had been a good
point to make. Yinglie did not react with anger at the interruption but smiled at it, indulgently, and
again cleared her throat. “And do we have Japanese comrades out here?” she asked. “Isn’t our own
Oba Japanese?” One of the two men in glasses gave a slight bow and Munekata saw now that he
was, that he had a Japanese face even though he was wearing communist costume. “We trust
Japanese who are willing to reform themselves and serve the people.” Yinglie said. “On that basis,
according to the principles of Mao Zedong Thought and Marxism-Leninism, we declare that the
surveyman shall not be harmed while he is with us, but treated as a guest, and, depending on his
performance, even welcome to join us.”
The crowd was quiet, sullen in places but not protesting. He supposed this was that famous
discipline. Then Yinglie seemed to be transformed for a moment, still a skinny, slightly aged
communist schoolteacher, but as if struck by lightning she stiffened, a spasm overcoming her flesh,
and she threw her fist into the air, a flimsy thing on the end of a pale slender arm, and she cried out
“Long live the Communist Party of Manchukuo!” and her voice was full of a passion so raw he felt
ashamed to witness to it, and the crowd all responded in kind, and then she began to sing the first
verse of the Internationale just as Hana had in that Ryujin bar, and the crowd sang with her,
disharmonious and broken and lilting, but for all that strangely unified, strangely almost beautiful.
Munekata leant on his crutch and listened as the people who had decided not to kill him sang for the
workers of the world. When they were done he was taken back into the house. Dressed in the dusty
denims, which smelt of oil and cigarettes, he was bid to rest on the edge of the kang and he did so,
until Yinglie came in and stood there over him. Neither he or she were more relaxed despite the
judgement having been passed. She folded her arms over her chest. “You have to learn to live like us,
you understand.” she said.
“That’s fine.” he said. “Only one thing.”
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Tell your daughter Xuebai,” he said, “that she does not have to look after me, if she doesn’t
want to.” And at this Yinglie almost seemed to smile. Munekata was allowed to hobble about the
village from then on. He was not put on a work detail but he was required to attend lessons which
were given by the Japanese professor, Oba, who taught him about Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong
Thought and the history of Manchukuo according to the Communist Party. Oba had a reedy voice
and insisted on speaking in Mandarin, which made him harder to understand than necessary, and he
sprinkled his speech with Marxist jargon Munekata only partially followed.
Even with all that he found himself sat forward, listening attentively, for the duration of each
session, and by the charts Oba shared and the information given he learned that the villages they
had burned and terrorised and the endless bombs they had dropped and shells fired, the half-track
patrols through the wastes and the punishment detachments of the last escalatory years had all only
been slim needles piercing the vast flesh of the plains, never broad enough to find the enemy in full,
and those moments of triumph when they had forced the communists into open battle had been
deliberate sacrifices to force Survey Unit attention on one point while at all the others the
communists rested, rearmed, obscured themselves and returned to work.
And as the efforts to force the communists to a final battle, to wring conventional victory from an
unconventional war, all failed, that was when the punishment detachments came to the forefront,
and the more violence the surveymen used the more the villages fought back, until in the end the
pacification had been achieved only by wholescale repression. It had not felt like victory then and
now he knew for certain it had not been, and understood the people around him and how they likely
held themselves back by not hanging him.
This offered him a kind of security. He began to hobble about the village by himself, and soon
their standoffishness became acceptance. It was said of him that he had saved Auntie Yu, hadn’t he,
and anyway he was a good student and he didn’t cause any trouble, and he ate his congee and drank
his water and was always polite to everyone, especially little Xuehua who had taken to following him
around, calling “Uncle! Uncle!” and giggling when he pretended not to see her, when he looked
around with exaggerated confusion and scratched his head and shrugged until she waved her hands
in front of him and he pretended to be surprised.
South Cave Village’s dusty old houses were built around a hill that rested near the square, next to
a Japanese colonial office which now was decorated with revolutionary slogans, and next to that was
a bar where sometimes he would indulge himself with a small flask of rice wine in the evenings,
watching the children run about and listening to the old men play go and chat to one another,
ignoring him for the most part until one invited him to come join them. He had not played go in
many years and he lost every time, but the Chinese uncles humoured the Japanese cripple and
laughed with him and gave him smokes, which he took just to be polite but also because he had
really missed it. By the end of the first week he almost felt to be one of them, although he knew this
was only illusory. He could walk through the narrow streets of the village and listen to the Chinese
talk to one another and feel the cool wind blow in from the plains beyond the ancient walls and find
there in that moment a kind of peace. So the first week went, and the second much like it, and the
third the same way.
He was billeted in the house he’d woke up in, which was the house of the Cai family, Yinglie and
her two daughters and her mother and father, two tanned, quiet old people in traditional dress who
tended to stay at home and listen to the radio, which he remembered hearing during his
convalescence. There was no father for the two girls. Munekata did not ask about this or talk much
to any of them. He took his food and drink and laid himself down upon the kang in the living room
and waited until his aching leg let him sleep. Once or twice he saw Yinglie wander through the room,
thinking him asleep. She would go outside into the courtyard and look up at the sky there through
the open roof and then come back through a few minutes later.
She worked at the Party office most days and her mother got up and wandered about cleaning
the house, sometimes with Xuebai and Xuehua helping her. Munekata wore the denim and the
sandals he had been given on the day of his salvation, with Hana’s scarf which they had returned to
him tucked into the top pocket, and he hadn’t shaved since the day Karashima had put him on the
Suzuki job and now he was apparently growing a beard, his moustache swallowed up by a mess of
black hairs across his face speckled liberally with grey.
Soon he did not need the crutch and was given one of Grandpa Cai’s sticks. The old man grinned
at this, showing his brown teeth and saying something in mumbled dialect. “He says it suits you.”
Yinglie translated, and Munekata thanked the old man in Mandarin and bowed, and Grandpa Cai hit
him with his fan. “No more Japanese!” he said in Mandarin, laughing.
They had called him ‘Uncle Jap’ at first and now after three weeks they called him comrade and
after four weeks they referred to him in third-person – when he overheard – by his Japanese name,
ungainly when pushed out through thick erhua accents. Without much else to do but study but now
with his leg more functional he began to ask Yinglie how he could help out around the village, and
she gave him the job of observing the militia, which he took to be a kind of busywork but was
grateful for all the same.
It was a tired Saturday afternoon. The plains were baked in late summer heat and in the square
before the old Japanese colonial office the men and boys practiced their drill, in their brown
uniforms with their skin tanned dark, sweating as they practiced marching with their Arisaka rifles.
He saw their discipline and the fierceness of their expressions or perhaps singular expression, the
spirit of martial unity that had come once to him on parade with the others of the unit - Hachiman, it
seemed, had deserted the colonisers and come to the colonised. These men did not decorate their
uniforms with red scarves or armbands, and when they called and responded with revolutionary
slogans their tone was iron.
They regarded him with more scorn than the others, because he imagined several of them had
signed up to fight men like him, but they did not disturb him, and when they were finished one man
came and asked him if he had been the bandit they had heard about who had stormed the Ryujin
naval base. He said yes and the man gave him a clenched-fist salute. “Thank you, comrade!” he said.
“For your hard work for the cause of the revolution!” And Munekata only stared and wondered at
the cruel sense of humour karma seemed to have.
He went back to the Cai estate after this. Sat in his denim he had sweated too much and now in
the bare-chested fashion of the Chinese men with the jacket around his waist he hobbled upon his
stick through the village amidst the descending dark, that heavy, brilliant crimson dusk that came
only here, in the midst of nothing, at the centre of nowhere, that kissed the Chinese rooftops and
arches and wiped away their dirt and age and made of them splendid suggestions of history. It was
harder to walk now – it hurt with every step. He returned to the estate and went in through the
front yard to the doors as was his habit, moving quietly. He could not hear Xuehua or Xuebai or the
Cai elders and their radio. The taste of dust was stuck to his tongue. He went to the door and did not
call out for fear of disturbing anyone – aware of himself as perpetual guest, as one who had only just
escaped the hangman – but eased it open and snuck inside. The room was dark, all the
miscellaneous Chinese objects cast in shadow as the red sun came in through the windows and only
just illuminated the kang beneath, where she was sitting.
Munekata tried to sneak past her. “Mr. Munekata.” she said. She rested against the wall, legs
close to her, a bottle in one hand. Her hair was down and he had never seen her with her hair down
before, all of it cascading in one wild stream down her front. In the light of dusk she seemed
unearthly. “Miss Cai.” he said. “I apologise, if I’m intruding.”
“You talk like a Japanese.” she said. “Even in Mandarin.” She had taken off her army jacket and
the KODAK t-shirt was crumpled up and damp with sweat. She drank from her bottle. “Mother and
father usually take the girls out once a month. Out into the fields to do some work. To play in the
stream and go out and sleep beneath the stars. To teach them that the plains can be beautiful. That
kind of thing. I prefer to stay at home. To drink, and to forget. Everyone needs a night off.”
“I was unaware.” he said. “I apologise. I can come back later, if you’re busy.”
She turned her head to him slowly, as if discovering him anew. “I’m not busy.” she said. “I’m
drinking.”
“I – I see.” he said. She turned all of her to him. She rested her elbows upon her knees, shook the
bottle about and watched him, framed against the redness of the sunset at her back. “Do you, Mr.
Munekata?” Her voice carried a certain type of hostility – the kind of thing he had expected to
encounter all along. But it seemed out of place, coming now, after these weeks and from this
woman who had saved him from execution. She leant forward. “I wanted you to come back at this
time.” she said. “That’s why I told you to watch the soldiers. What did you think?”
He thought. “They were professional. Serious. Capable.”
She laughed. “They’re good. For kids. But you’re being too polite. Those guns are old, and they’re
good on the parade ground. They’ve never dealt with anything worse than drunk comrades and bad
weather. The central committee has the real guns. Comrade Zhou and his boys were the rearguard
in the mission where we found you. They didn’t capture you. They stumbled across you after the
Japanese had already pulled out. It was a carefully-planned operation, you see. Far beyond our
authority. We had our agents in Ryujin create a diversion. We went to the San Lung Tang. They
chose to allow it. A protest. To help tie up the garrison.”
“In Ryujin?” he asked.
“Yes. Well, I mean…it’s a tinderbox, isn’t it? Any ghetto is. There was an incident there. I don’t
know the details. Something happened and we talked to the triads and we sent in an organisation
team. It all blew up. A single spark that became a prairie fire.”
“What happened there?” he asked.
She frowned. “I don’t know exactly. That was not my brief. We are at war. But it exploded. The
whole town. There were protests.”
“Peaceful protests?” he asked.
“I think so.” she said.
“I see.” he said.
Yinglie sighed. “The others went in first for Auntie Yu and took her away, and we came in and
took what was left of you, and now here we are again with ancient rifles and nothing else but
political work and drill - and sneaky prayers to the old gods when they don’t think Comrade Zhou is
watching. That’s what stands between this village and the bootheels of the army and the settlers.”
She was quiet. “There’s trouble. A military encampment near Military Highway 17A. At Red Tree
Village. We’re supposed to be getting new guns, but with the Japanese sending out patrols from
there…” she trailed off.
Munekata didn’t know what to say to this so he only stood there leant on his stick, feeling again
the new-old ache in his knee. Yinglie drank. “I saw you in my nightmares.” she said. “In that suit of
yours.” She motioned to the pile of armour in the corner of the room, where it had been moved. The
mask still sat atop it staring with empty eyes. “Or perhaps I only saw the suit.” Her glasses had
slipped down her nose and she looked over them at him. “Who are you, Munekata?”
“I’m a former member of the 201st Battalion of the Survey Unit.” he said. “A soldier. A war
criminal.”
“No.” she said. “That’s who you were. But I was a wife once, and I worked for the railway. Now I
have a police bounty on my head. I meant now. Who are you now?” She did not look away from him
and for the longest time did not blink and he stood over her leant on his stick feeling tired and
hurting and yet for all that not feeling anything at all. The house was dark now, the red light of
sunset having passed them both by. Munekata coughed. “Well,” he began, “Miss Cai,” and she leant
up and kissed him gently upon the lips. Her breath was thick with the smell of baijiu. The frame of
her glasses pushed against his face. “My parents go out with the girls for so long on purpose.” she
mumbled. She pulled back, drank her wine. “This is for stress relief. You understand, I’m very
stressed.”
“I understand.” he said. Her hands touched his. “But, Miss Cai-”
Yinglie kissed him again. She took her glasses off, put them to one side. “You can call me Yingying.
For now.”
“I-” thoughts of Hana and Mieko, treacherous phantoms of other tastes and touches, haunted
him all over. He trembled and Yinglie held him steady. Why had Hana forgiven him, in the end? He
still did not understand that last moment between them, that night they had lain in silence together
no longer cold server and patron using one another, or tired perpetrator and furious victim finding
some dark consolation in their intertwining. He did not know what they had been then but only that
she had forgiven him. Yinglie touched his sweaty chest, tenderly ran her fingers across all the scars
there, the fresh ones borne of the bullet wounds Karashima had given him with the stitches only just
removed.
She found the hard flesh of the ancient scars on his arms where he had cut himself in the Survey
Unit, the knotted tissue of the ancient stab wound from Shinkyo, and then as she pulled his jeans
down she explored the ruin of his knee which still was swabbed in bandages. It hurt as she touched
him there but he did not mind. Her hair tickled his bare skin. “You’re all scars.” she whispered.
“There has to be a person under here, somewhere. From before they cut you up like this.” He put
the stick aside and was guided to the kang where he sat with her. Tentatively, hands shaking as if he
were a boy again, Munekata reached out for her. He touched her shoulders and she made a curious
noise, an interested noise. She kissed him again. She took her t-shirt off and now they were both
half-naked in the dark.
Outside there were firecrackers – there were children playing in the square, voices high and
gleeful. In the obscure gloom of the Cai house she eased him onto his back on the kang. His hands
explored her as she had him. It ached all over. He was tired. But he did not wish, as he had before
with Hana, that he could have been younger, that life could have gone otherwise, that it could have
been a different him here and now – he was aware that it was the him that was here that was
experiencing this, and there was no chance of anything else ever having happened. Yinglie pressed
her slim warmth to him, her sagging, wonderful breasts squashed up against his front, her scarred
abdomen brushing against him, her legs with their slight flab against his. His underwear was slid
away. Teasing hands found him there and he grunted in alarm at his own passion, at how it felt to
want someone else without reserve. She laughed, at him but not in malice. “First,” she said, sitting
up, clambering over him with care, placing her crotch near his face and running her hands through
his hair as if he were a child, “you do something for me.” And so he did. Her fingers gripped her skull
and she made gentle sounds of contentment.
When after this she lay down and she guided him into her from behind it was strangely peaceful,
desire without violence. She was older than him - he realized this anew - and she was crude in how
she told him to move and lie and after two children she was not taut as the older soldiers had always
said the best women were but then, he thought vaguely, watching her luminous form above him,
why did that have to be so? Why had any of what he’d ever learned been such impeachable gospel?
He reached forward, across her arched back, and felt her long hair wet with perspiration against
his fingertips and he grasped her hips with his rough hands and moved with her, in a quiet sort of
dance. The kang creaked beneath them. He thrust – he made her whimper. Cause and effect played
out. Munekata acted, was not acted upon. There would be consequences, decisions to answer for.
He knew this for the first time in his life. In this slow, gentle way they danced until the heat rose
within him and he finished inside her with only a sigh. She looked back at him and said nothing. The
sweet quiet enveloped the both of them.
For a while they lay together there on the kang sweaty and without thought. Munekata relished
his own absence. She redrew his scars, traced them through the contours of his flesh. “I didn’t get
you pardoned,” she said, “because I wanted to do this with you.”
“I know.” he said. In Mandarin, he realized. He hadn’t spoken Japanese for weeks. She was on her
side looking at him, her legs curled about his, the throbbing of his knee beneath the bandages
somehow logical, a counterpoint to the modest joy her warm presence brought to him. “I didn’t do it
because of what you did at the base either.” she said.
“Why then?” he asked.
Yinglie stared at him. Her eyes did not hold any hidden contempt, but he realized now that
Hana’s hadn’t either. She had hated him, but it had been a hidden, complicated feeling, something
true and painful, that had never breached the surface until those last few terrifying days. He realized
that the supposed open contempt he had found everywhere had only been his own, and he had
used this as an excuse all along.
“I helped you because I used to work in an office for the Southern Manchurian Railway Company.”
Yinglie said. “I saw a lot of trains. Soldiers, labourers. Prisoners. I saw people who would never come
back after getting on this or that wagon, people who were on their feet but already dead, people
shunted about the plains like cattle, from prison camp to prison camp, from garrison to garrison. The
innards of a whole machine designed only to eat up human lives. But I never quit – I never even
thought about coming back here to find the Party – until my husband was killed by them. He was a
photographer, you see. And he liked so much to take pictures of birds out on the plains. And one day
a group of settlers found him out near their village, which they’d taken in the 1930s, and they
accused him of spying for the communists, and they beat him until he was bloody on the ground and
broke his camera on his head. He died in the hospital. And I took my daughters and I came here.” He
held onto her.
All the while she maintained eye contact, as if there was something maintained between them
that only existed as long as it held, as if this moment, here and now, was conditional solely upon
such a thing remaining. “Did I only do that because I had lost something?” she asked him. “Was I
only being selfish, by betraying the system when it hurt me and not before? All the villagers here,
when the army had the men for it, lived under constant surveillance, the Party buried underground.
They risked death to re-establish it. When the Japanese lightened the cordon and I came stumbling
through they found me my parents and accepted me without a care. What was I, compared to that
strength, that selflessness? But after I was settled in, after I got into my duties – I realized that none
of that mattered.”
She stroked the scars on his wrist. “We have to accept it all. What we did and what we didn’t do.
Or else we’ll break. And when I saw you, Keizo, I knew you had been broken. That you had bent
inward until you had snapped. And that was why you’d attacked the Ryujin naval base on your brave
little suicide mission in that awful metal suit. That’s why you’re here.” He could not reply to her but
could only give her his scarred old hands. They held onto one another, without any more words left.
At some point in the night in his arms she was crying to herself, half-awake, and he held onto her
and let her tears dribble down her face and onto his chest.
In the morning they washed one another and dressed and greeted grandma and grandpa and
Xuehua and Xuebai. Xuehua came and hugged her mother and Yinglie lifted her up and kissed her. “I
saw a wolf!” Xuehua was saying. “I saw a wolf and it was big and scary and grandpa had his gun and
it was just watching us and it was so big and pretty!”
“Grandpa didn’t have his gun.” Xuebai said. “It was your toy gun.” She looked to Munekata and
then away. “But it was nice.” she said. “To see a wolf. They’re not so scary once you’re used to them.”
“Now, then,” Yinglie’s mother said, “come have breakfast with us, comrade!” So it was that they
ate, as in the kitchen she and Yinglie prepared rice noodles, soybean milk, deep-fried dough sticks,
and tofu pudding, with the two girls getting in the way, Xuehua playing with her toy, an AK-47 made
of wood, shooting fascists hidden everywhere. Yinglie’s father sat and sipped at his tea at the grand
old dinner table, above which on the wall was a great absence, a bare wall where something had
once been mounted. They ate and it was delicious. Her father asked Munekata if he would like to
come out fishing sometime, at the stream near the edge of the village. The tea was oolong just as he
liked it and they ate listening to Xuebai explain how she was going to go out today and spend her
Sunday looking for crickets in the old Wang house. And after breakfast the two elders retired to their
radio room and Xuebai went out, waving goodbye to her mother and sister and Munekata. And
Munekata went to go get his suit.
She lingered in the doorway leant against the frame. Her hair was tied up again and her glasses
firm upon the bridge of her nose. There was a silver spot upon the frame between the lenses he saw,
as if she had touched it so much as to rub the black colouring clean off. “Normally, a gentleman at
least gives an excuse before he leaves.” she said.
“I didn’t want to cause any trouble.” he said. He was on the floor resting on his good leg putting
the frame back together, snapping the armour into place over it. Yinglie came over and began to
help him, crouched down at his side with her long queue over her shoulder, frowning as she figured
out which part of the deathly armour fitted to which other part. They did this in silence for several
minutes. As he fitted one of the dented, beaten chest pieces to the frame – the hole from one of
Karashima’s rounds still in its front – he had to lean on his other leg, and the weight and the pain
was too much and he buckled and she caught him. He lay there in her arms. “Are you coming back?”
she asked.
He paused. “I would like to.”
“Where are you going?”
“Military Highway 17A.” he answered. “Red Tree Village.”
 Her eyes narrowed. “Why?”
“To help.” he said. Yinglie did not say anything but came over and helped him, easing him back
onto his good leg. “You need to be careful.” she said. “If you really have to go, you can take one of
our bikes. But you have to return it. Do you understand?”
“I do.” he said. “Thank you.” They snapped the chest piece into place and then the legs, the
thighs and boots. Soon the demon was there before them stretched out, lacking only the mask. The
armour was buckled all over, the black paint scratched off in great gouges to reveal the plain, ugly
gunmetal grey beneath. “Can you fight?” she asked him, helping him to his feet as they stood over it.
She helped him over to the kang where last night they had made love and they sat there together,
he slightly hunched and she stood straight, taller than him, studying him through the lenses of her
glasses. In the other room Grandpa Cai was singing an old song and Xuehua trying and failing to join
in, mumbling through lyrics she didn’t know loudly and with gusto.
“The technology behind the special attack suit was designed by an Austrian doctor after the Great
War.” Munekata said. “It wasn’t originally built for war. It was for medicine. To help disabled people
retain the use of their limbs. When we used them out on the plains, there were sometimes soldiers
who could barely use their arms and legs outside of battle, dependent on their suits. When things
were particularly intense, it was possible for soldiers to be engaged in frontline combat while
completely crippled. We called those people hungry ghosts. They usually died out there in suicide
charges, aware there would be nothing left for them the next time they took their suits off.”
“Is that what you want?” she asked. “Is this about redemption through death? One of those
Japanese things?”
“No.” he said. “I’m not Japanese.”
“You are.” she said. “You always will be. You can’t escape that. But you can’t let it devour you,
either. Right?”
“Yes, comrade.” he said. At this she smiled, a slow, easy sort of smile, as if she had been
expecting him to say this. She helped him up and helped him to undress, carefully and gently, and let
her fingers linger over his hard, wounded skin as she went. Her eyes sometimes flickered to this
wound or that. She was seeing all of him in the light of day for the first time, as a person and not a
prisoner, he realized. He remembered the awkwardness of Hana finding him like this, that day after
she had discovered the suit in his shed. Yinglie did not mind him noticing her glances, and he did not
feel he minded either. When the layer was upon him they then got him into the suit and latched it
up over him. The tightness of old returned. He felt his leg throb at once. He turned the suit on and it
hummed. The first step hurt and the second too. It was fine, he learned, if he kept the leg straight,
limping a little, and if he kept away from too much frantic movement. He would have to be at peace
from now on, even in combat. He would have to find a way to do such a thing.
The mask was about his neck and the hood pulled up over his head. He stood there in her living
room, absurd and monstrous. “Almost finished.” Yinglie said. She went to his denim jacket and
fished out the red scarf from his pocket and she affixed it about his neck. It hung there limp and
tattered. They put his civilian clothes into a leather backpack and rested it over his shoulders. So it
was that he was ready. “We listen to the Japanese military radio sometimes.” she said. “They talk
about you, you know.”
“What do they say?”
“They say the communists have stolen special attack suits and marked them with red scarves.
They say we are using them in a campaign of terror and slaughter against Japanese settlers.” At this
Munekata felt himself smile. He did not replace the mask but shouldered a bag with his denim
clothes and his sandals in and walked out with Yinglie, out of the house while the girls were busy
with her parents, and as he crossed the village square there were eyes upon him. A voice he knew as
the Japanese communist, Oda, called to him. “Give ‘em hell, comrade!” And others too, calling on
him to add oil, wishing him luck, asking where he was going.
With she at his side he walked in his cumbersome way to the northern road, which was a dirt trail
leading through the long fields that stretched on forever. There was a shack there where an old man
with a Mosin-Nagant rifle on his lap guarded several vehicles, a Soviet BA-64 armoured car and an
American Jeep and there, dusty and ancient and coated in mud, a Japanese Type 97 motorbike. It
was this that he waded over to. The plains beckoned on the other side of the village walls, endless
and enormous, stretches of undulating hillside and unbroken horizon, crops dancing in the breeze,
specks of concrete and wood here and there representing outposts of humanity. But all he saw was
her. “It has two tanks of petrol.” she said, hands behind her back. “If you follow the road north from
here you should make it to Military Highway 17A. And if you follow that you’ll find them.” She
brought him an old AK rifle, slipped it into his enormous hands. He pulled the strap over his
armoured chest. “What are you going to do?” she asked. “A campaign of terror and slaughter?
Massacres? More violence? The Survey Unit specialty?”
“I’m going to make them think about the idea.” he said. “That it might this time happen to them.”
Yinglie studied him. “You bring that bike back, do you understand?”
“I understand.” he said. The old man with the rifle looked the other way. Munekata raised an
armoured hand to her shoulder and did not touch it but held it there. “Thank you, Comrade Yinglie.”
he said. She slipped the keys into his hand. Outside of the village on the distant highway there were
fluttering banners stories high, great bright yellow Manchukuoan flags. She stepped away and stood
there and he saw the hurt in her eyes and saw her hug herself. He sat down upon the Type 97 and
started the bike up and with a rheumatic wheeze the engine came to life, the exhaust spluttering
fumes. It juddered beneath him, telling him what to do.
He slipped the mask over his face. “I will come back.” he said. “I swear.” She said nothing but
watched him. Munekata gunned the engine and slid forward, wobbling, unsteady, but then
straightened out as the bike hit the dirt path, and then he was gone from South Cave Village and the
communists and the woman who now watched him go. His heart hurt but it was good. He was on
the plains anew.
-
He rode for a day, stopping and opening the suit to piss into various fields now and then,
following the topography until he got to the highway, where the great Manchukuoan flags fluttered,
and dwarfed by them he rode the bike along a barren road, passed now and then by intermittent
army trucks or cars which did not stop for him, and he eased the bike into the car park of a motel
that was not the motel Hana had been killed outside of but that might have resembled it. He had left
his money and his ID and all those things in his home in Ryujin and so he stomped inside in his
armour with his gun and the Japanese behind the counter quivered and shrank back and he said,
from behind his mask, that he wanted a room for the night. The room was on the second floor and
Munekata went in and opened the suit and clambered out of his inner layer and laid himself down
on the bed. There was a portrait of Puyi on the wall and he stared at it, at those eyes he was
nominally sworn to serve. The eyes of an idiot, he thought.
Munekata slept. He dreamt of her. In the morning he strapped himself into the suit again and
went outside to the lobby, where there were three soldiers waiting for him, imperial army by their
uniforms. They raised their rifles and he, with his mask down and his gun out of his hands, dangling
by his hip, with Hana’s scarf about his neck, surveyed them. The boy behind the reception desk
cowered. “Halt!” the tallest of the soldiers barked. All three were ethnically Chinese but the
command had been in kyowa-go. Munekata looked from the tallest – Sergeant Chan Wumin, by his
uniform – to the others, Private Wong Heishu and Private Xi Baoguo. “You’re under arrest, Keizo
Munekata,” Sergeant Chan said, boyish features set in sweaty triumph, his Ersatz-Japanisch
moustache quivering, “for crimes against the imperial state!”
“I refuse.” Munekata said in Mandarin.
Sergeant Chan glowered. “What?”
“I refuse. You won’t arrest me.” Munekata said.
“Yes I will.” Sergeant Chan said.
“No, you won’t.” Munekata said. Chan looked to his colleagues and they to him. He sighed and
stepped forward with his rifle ready. “You’re under arrest.” he said again. Munekata hit him in the
face less hard than he had hit Karashima but with enough force and enough armour to knock the
other man flat onto the plastic flooring of the motel reception. The other two turned but Munekata
caught Private Wong’s rifle and ripped it away and slammed it into Private Xi’s cheek, bowling him
over. Xi and Chan remained down, groaning and swearing. Wong looked at Munekata and at the
special attack suit and swallowed and slowly lowered himself to the ground to join them. Munekata
unloaded each of their rifles and put the magazines into his bag and went to the reception desk and
the man who’d called the police on him shrank back. “Money.” Munekata said, and he got it, a
bundle of notes that came to about two thousand yuan. He put his mask up and went out to the bike,
past the military car parked next to it, and he got on board and went back to the highway.
At the next motel Munekata used some of the cash he’d taken from the last, and with his suit
clumsily covered with an overcoat he’d found at an abandoned military outpost – concrete and
wood and imperial insignia in the middle of the plains, nobody there but he and his bike – he paid
for an expensive room with a double bed and guaranteed no cockroaches, and took himself there
and pried off the suit and showered, changed his bandages and put his clothes on and went out into
the town, which by the sign at the entrance was known as White River Village.
There were Chinese houses with Japanese facades and a bar and several restaurants and an
imperial office and as well a tavern. In the denims and sandals and with the walking stick Yinglie’s
father had given him he wandered there and let it be known he wanted a drink. The lights were low
and the bar was wood and the bartender was a Chinese who looked about before speaking. Two
girls kept looking over at him from the other side of the bar, silhouettes in the gloom. They too wore
their hair in long queues. Munekata drank two glasses of whiskey, relishing the feeling of only denim
on his bare skin, his freedom from metal. He limped slowly and painfully back to his motel and slept.
In the morning he returned to the suit and rode on.
He checked the map at a picnic table that afternoon, out near some great national park the
Japanese had assembled from the countryside, crowded with trees that did not grow here, the
plains marked by an interruption of forestry that had come from nowhere. Munekata looked at the
paper map he had gotten from the gift shop, just to check. Red Tree Village was a day away. There
would be violence there. He folded the map up and lowered his mask and ducked as an imperial-
marked helicopter went by overhead, not looking for him but looking somewhere for someone. He
got back on the bike and resumed, soaring by the endless propaganda displays, the railroads, the
criss-crossing highways, the fluttering imperial banners. He stopped for petrol at a station on the
roadside and paid with crumpled notes.
The plains were vast and the towns were only objects within them, engulfed on all sides. He
passed several of them that were marked by the high walls and military observation towers of
settler-forts, with their Japanese names on stark concrete signate a short distance outside. The
paramilitary vehicles on the road with their mounted guns watched him go by but did not open fire.
With the wind rushing through his mask he recalled what Hana had said about how the settler
families would never accept the Chinese.
He rode on. The trees rose in their enormity from forests and the breeze made long fields of wild
grass dance, the ancient stomping grounds of Manchu horsemen now only home to he and his iron
steed. The sun bore down and the wind howled and the plains in their enormity loomed, an ocean of
grassland, yawning, undulating, shifting about him as he went, as his bike rumbled along the great
highways and the propaganda banners and billboards that marked it – but the highway was only a
slender bridge above an abyss, and he saw the plains and felt them pressing in from all sides.
This land was not Manchukuo. It was not the land of the Manchu - it had abandoned them in the
later Qing, when the Han Chinese had been allowed in, when the ancestors of the Jurchen tribes had
been displaced, the plains finding them ultimately unworthy. The Japanese had come to claim the
land from the Chinese and found themselves judged in turn by Tengger, the Mongol spirit of life
itself, which now was beholden to no tribe, not the old Manchu or the Chinese migrants or the
Japanese settlers…tomorrow, when the day that Hana would never see arrived, Tengger’s approval
would be to play for once more, and the battles that would ensue would drown his lands in yet more
oceans of blood, and once the blood had seeped into the soil and the bodies had decayed and the
survivors had settled down to whatever awaited them – after all that the plains would continue to
be. And he would be with them.
When the sun was coming down he stopped for the night by an abandoned military outpost,
barbed wire and prefabricated walls and faded posters stuck up on wooden boards outside. By his
map Red Tree was a few hundred metres away and clambering up onto the second floor of the
building he could spy it – could spy sandbags and guns and two parked half-tracks. His suit would
have power for five or six more hours. He had another battery in the bag. He had four magazines for
his AK. The soldiers who had fled had taken all the guns and the ammunition but had left the water
in the kettle and he came in and drank it and used the toilet and stripped out of the suit and laid
himself down on one of the empty bunks and slept. His dream was of her. “You have to keep going.”
she said. “Do you know that? Do you know what it means?”
“It means I can’t expect forgiveness.” he replied. They were naked and yet in formal clothes,
readying themselves for a dance. He did not have a stick and he did. She shook her head. “No, no.
You’re looking at it so simply. Such a small perspective. Only centred around yourself. Look at the
suit. The one from the office.” He saw the special attack suit in its case. He recalled Miyuki asking
him what the point of any of it had been. “It means,” he tried again, “that I am Angulimala, the
bandit redeemed by the Buddha.”
“You didn’t finish that story.” she said. “When you told it last. Or you left out a detail, didn’t you?
The most important detail.”
“I did.”
“What did you omit?”
“That…Angulimala, the murderer, as he walks along begging for alms, is pelted with debris by the
villagers he has robbed and whose families he has slain. That he is beaten and attacked. That the
Buddha, the compassionate one, allows this to happen. Because it is the murderer’s karma.”
“And what does Angulimala do?” she asked. “What does he do, when the crowd assaults him?
Does he welcome them? Does he provoke them to do worse? Does he beg for forgiveness from
those he has wronged?”
Munekata flexed an armoured hand. He felt the mask cold against his face. “He returns to the
monastery, with a bleeding head, a torn robe, and a broken bowl. And he goes out again the next
day to beg for alms.”
She kissed his metal cheek. “You should have told her that part.” He reached out for her but she
was already gone. In the morning he returned to the suit and to the bike and he rode on to Red Tree
Village.
 EPILOGUE: VANISHED INTO THE CLOUDS

Mei had been awake for a week. At first she had been confined to the bed, barely able to move,
aware only of grubby tiles and the doctor named Kurosawa who hovered like a bird of ill omen over
her, who came in and replaced drips and asked her stupid questions, and aware as well of the
picture of Puyi with FIVE RACES IN HARMONY on the wall, which she hated more than anything. The
hate woke her up.
She hated Kurosawa, who was perfectly polite and who spoke to her in Mandarin and who
seemed only to care that she got better, and she hated the room and she hated the town and she
hated the pain that came from her wounds, which were healing. Soon she would be able to walk but
for now it still hurt to flex her fingers. On her fourth day she managed to speak. Her father was there,
in his filthy Chinese robes. He held her hand and he sat by her and she saw him and she swallowed
and she forced herself. “Father.” she said. His face was as she had never seen it before.
Her father brought her a Buddha necklace and he told her he had quit drinking. He told her he
hadn’t drank for weeks, since the police had hauled him in at Five Races Square, and he kissed her
cheek and held onto her. “That’s alright now.” he said when she, her voice a croaking mess, asked
what had happened with the police. “It’s all over.”
She wanted to ask what this meant – she wanted to ask about so much. But her head was light
and she still was full of pain. Huangqi came in next, and he was quiet and he could not look at her
properly. He held her less-injured hand and he held it with a new tenderness. So much was new. Mei
did not know anything – she asked Huangqi, this towering sadness shaped like her old boyfriend, and
Huangqi said that the gang was gone – Chen Juhua had skipped town and Henry Jiang had been shot
and killed, and all the drugs had dried up. The Japanese military had gotten scared by all the protests,
he said. She had asked: what protests?
She began to sense the real meaning behind what her father had said, that things were alright
now. She didn’t know if that was true or not. There was a whole town outside of this hospital room –
a place called Ryujin or Longshen, where she had grown up, where she had gone to school, where
she had lived her life. She did not know this place now, and her father and Huangqi also did not
know how to introduce it to her, how to explain the shift which had occurred while she had been
otherwise occupied. On the fifth day she ate food herself, some rice and beef Dr. Kurosawa brought,
and it was the greatest thing she’d ever tasted. Her father had brought her some of her books and
she sat and read the beaten-up old volume of Lu Xun that had come from him and every word was
so vibrant and cutting and beautiful and mocking and tragic. Sometimes she cried. Sometimes she
still hated all of them, even her father who was here most hours, who did not smell of drink, who
looked at her as if she were a crime he had committed. Mei realized that night, after arguing with
him and sending him out into the corridor, where she knew he would be waiting, that she was
waiting too, that it was not her father or Huangqi who could help her out of this purgatory but only
one person in the whole world, who was not yet here.
The next day was a Saturday. She ate an apple, sat up on bed with a ragged copy of Mao’s
collected works on her lap, open at the essay On Contradiction. She had stared when her father had
brought that one in and she had asked if it was safe and her father, her father, had smiled at her and
said that now it would be, that there was nothing to fear anymore, that Councillors Chen and Tsuda
– the only members of the whole council who hadn’t fled with the Kempeitai after the protests –
were handling things well. What protests, she asked again. Her father once more did not know how
to explain it. She was in bed eating her apple when there was a new knock at the door. Mei sat up in
her bed.
Her father knocked quietly, a gentle tap, hesitant and afraid of itself – Dr. Kurosawa knocked
firmly, considerate of her needs but also busy, with other patients to see. She had had the drip
pulled from her arm that morning. This new knock she already recognised, its insistence, its heavy
significance. “Come in.” she croaked. They came in. First was Sachiko, who she had failed so, who
she had condemned, who she had betrayed – and with Sachiko, sheepish and too large, was Mizuki
Tachibana. Mei felt her blood simmer and her expression harden, and by her awkward flinch in
response Mizuki caught this – Sachiko had to pull Mizuki into the room with her, where the two girls,
dyed-hair and t-shirt and jeans versus long dark hair and stiff orthodox school uniform, waited
before the hospital bed, stood rigid, like pilgrims who had arrived at their destination after a long
and difficult journey.
Silence filled the room. A faint smell of disinfectant – the beep of a heart monitor. Mei bit at her
apple. “Mei.” Mizuki Tachibana said in a quivering voice. She threw herself to the floor, head
touching the tiles. Mei saw Sachiko roll her eyes. “Xu Mei!” Mizuki cried from below. “I’m so sorry!
I’m so sorry for betraying you! Please – please find it in your heart to-”
“Yeah, whatever.” Mei said. She looked to Sachiko. “You really fell in love with someone like this?”
she asked in Mandarin.
“Yes, she did.” Mizuki said from the floor, in trembling Mandarin. Mei stared at her. Mizuki did
not look away this time. Her eyes quivered with tears. “She’s going to learn Chinese with me, older
sister.” Sachiko said. “I’m sorry too. I do like her. I know she got you hurt. She told me. I can’t help it.”
“Never mind.” Mei said eventually. Mizuki got up, looked from one person to the other, blinking,
clearly having used up her Chinese. Mei coughed. Then, she decided to speak kyowa-go, because,
she thought, she really was too tired to keep up with all that had gone before. “Hey, Mizuki.” she
said. Mizuki flinched. “Do you love her, then?” Mizuki gave a stiff nod. “If you make her happy, I can
accept you. But if you ever fuck it up-” Mei raised her trembling fingers, those on her left hand,
wrapped tight in bandages, “-I’ll do this right back to you. Understand, bitch?” The heart monitor
went on beeping. “I understand.” Mizuki said eventually. She bowed. “I will make her happy.”
Sachiko, Mei observed, was blushing. “Fuck’s sake.” she said. “We’re not – we’re just hanging out,
you understand?”
“I understand.” Mei said. Sachiko had brought her rucksack and she delivered to Mei her brush
and ink and several of her calligraphy books and they looked over Sachiko’s writing together and
practiced a little. Mizuki sat slightly away from the bed, fists tight, and Mei called her over, this girl
who had wronged her, and asked her if she could write anything decently. Mizuki with a wobbling
hand took the brush and scrawled out something on the page, beneath Sachiko’s elegant writing and
Mei’s own intricate strokes – it was not pretty and she splashed ink all across the paper but it was
legible there. DEATH TO THE JAPANESE INVADERS, it said. Mei laughed. “Tryhard.”
“I-I mean it!” Mizuki squeaked. “I was – I saw this written on a sign. During the protests.”
Mei looked to Sachiko. “What were they like?” she asked. Sachiko told her everything – the
scenes at Showa Avenue, the songs, the apology from Councillor Chen, the gradual retreat of the
soldiers. Elections the next week. Now the new council was half-Chinese, and an uneasy peace
remained – but the Kempeitai offices were empty, and the major who had been selling heroin
through the gang Li had been in, some hawk named Karashima, was hiding and wounded in Hsinking.
“Someone leaked it to the press.” Sachiko explained. “They didn’t have any choice after that. They
had the Suzuki family after their heads, and the other old farts on the council were panicking too,
and the whole thing…I don’t know. It collapsed. They’re all gone now.”
“The settlers?” Mei asked. Mizuki glanced away.
Sachiko shook her head. “The army types. The worst of them are gone, but not all of them. And
the police that’re left…but you should come up to Tenmei sometime.”
“There’s a good ramen bar there.” Mizuki said, trying to smile.
“Lamian.” Mei corrected. “What about that bastard cop who got me in here?” Memories of some
old man, fat and sinister. A figure who had threatened her, who had been there when she had been
beaten for some reason. “Munekata.” Mizuki said. “He wasn’t so bad.”
Sachiko sighed. “He disappeared too. And the girl…there was a girl with him. Hana. Mei, you
would have liked her.”
“Hana?” Mei asked.
“She was Chinese.” Mizuki said. “He told me that.”
 “She saved me, Mei.” Sachiko said softly. Mei looked at them, at their mutual sincerity. She did
not know any Hana, and she only had contempt for that man, the police officer who had started all
of this – a contempt that, unlike her feelings for Mizuki, had no need to be moderated. But she could
not tell them this. She could not besmirch Sachiko’s memory of Hana, whoever Hana was, or had
been. There were so many complexities to life, so many things that never seemed to make any sense,
and there was so much history, and weight, and pain.
She hurt all over. She did not know if she could befriend Mizuki Tachibana, or if she could see Li
Huangqi the same as before, or if she would ever stop fearing her father when he inevitably came in
one day stinking of booze again. She did know it would not be as simple as this – that there would be
more blood, and more justice, and that one day she might have to see these two Japanese girls as
enemies. Sachiko was watching her closely. She sighed. “Alright.” she said. “Well, before we get into
any of that stuff, maybe you can bring me some of those fancy Tenmei noodles, Tachibana.”
Mizuki smiled, for real this time. She bowed her head. “Of course!”
“Anything else, little sister?” Sachiko asked. Mei paused. She thought for a long time. The picture
of Puyi and the words FIVE RACES IN HARMONY hung from the wall, pale and faded in the sunlight.
Then Mei propped herself up on her pillow and took them both in with a frown. She looked at
Sachiko for a long time.
“Can I have a hug?” she asked. And Sachiko came close and hugged her, and it was a stooped hug,
clumsy and uneven, and Sachiko always hugged too tight, was always doing too much, and she
stirred up some of Mei’s bruises with her grip, with her awkward uncertain hands. Mei squeezed her
back, no matter how much it hurt. She felt the tears come. She heard Sachiko make a noise that
might have been a sob. And the two girls hugged there in the hospital room, Chinese and Japanese,
and that was all.