Tokyo Year Zero

*

I hate the countryside. He walks behind me. I hate the countryside. Back down the slope. I hate the countryside. Back to the truck. I hate the countryside. Ishida walks behind me. I hate the countryside. Ishida says nothing. I hate the countryside. I say nothing. I hate the countryside. Tachibana says nothing. I hate the countryside …

I hate the countryside. I hate the country-folk –

By these ditches. In this terrible place …

There is nothing else to say.

*

Down the side of another mountain and into a valley, we follow the signs for Kanuma, a river to our right and a railway line to our left –

Lines of people making their way back towards the station …

‘Local people call it the Scavenging Line these days,’ shouts Chief Tachibana from the back of the truck. ‘Because the only people who ever use the trains on that line now are city people from Tokyo, up here to scavenge after our rice and our sweet potatoes…’

Lines of people with their supplies on their backs …

‘They’ve turned them into freight trains,’ agrees the driver. ‘No panes of glass in the windows, old boards for doors…’

Lines of people with their backs bent double …

‘Difficult to tell what’s human and what’s luggage…’

Lines of people under the setting sun …

‘The early morning trains are the worst, packed…’

Lines of people all reduced to this …

‘Infested as well, with fleas and with lice…’

Lines of people, beaten to this …

And on and on they drone, on and on about city-folk; how it was city-folk who had brought all these problems onto Japan, how it was all the fault of city-folk, but now city-folk demand and expect the country-folk to help them and look after them when it was city-folk who had brought this mess on Japan, the city-folk who got us into this mess, and on and on they drone, on and on about city-folk –

I hate the countryside and I hate the country-folk …

But I’m not listening to them. I am looking out for Kanuma police station. They are looking out for us too. The Kanuma police –

They are waiting for us. They are waiting for me …

They are watching for us. They are listening out for the sound of Tachibana’s battered old mountain truck coming through the town towards their quaint old rural police station –

We are here. I am here …

The driver pulls up right outside the pristine police station, right outside the eight pristine police officers who have lined up in the sinking sun to greet us, to bow, to salute and welcome us to Kanuma police station. Detective Ishida and I bow back and salute and thank them and then we follow Chief Tachibana up the clean little steps and into his police station where two officers behind the front desk bow and salute and welcome us again to their station –

‘I have a telegram from Tokyo for a Detective Ishida,’ announces one of the two men. Ishida quickly steps forward –

I curse! I curse! I curse! I curse! I curse! I curse!

Ishida takes the telegram from the officer behind the desk. Ishida steps to one side to open and read the telegram –

My heart is pounding. My heart is pounding …

But Tachibana is taking me down the side of the front desk, leaving Ishida to his telegram, and leading me along a corridor to his office, telling me the local history of Kanuma –

I curse him! I curse him! I curse him!

Police Chief Tachibana sitting me down and promising me tea, searching for the other files, the other dead women he feels might have been murdered by Kodaira Yoshio –

Other women, other deaths …

There is a soft knock on the door now as Detective Ishida steps into the room, excusing himself –

Eyes blank, eyes dead …

‘Here we are,’ says Chief Tachibana, handing me two thin files across his desk. ‘In the face of any initial evidence to the contrary both these deaths were originally recorded as ikidaore, accidental deaths due to injury or disease, mainly because of the deterioration of the corpses. But, to be honest, I’ve always felt that there might have been more to their deaths than simple accident or disease and now, with this Kodaira suspect you have in Tokyo…’

I open the top file as he speaks, Ishikawa Yori…

‘Thirty years old and the wife of a tailor, Ishikawa was an evacuee living at Imaichimachi, Kami Tsuga-gun. She was last seen on the twenty-second of June last year, waiting for a train at Shin-Tochigi station and then travelling on a bus from Tochigi station to Manako station, which is near to where her body was found. We believe that Ishikawa died some time towards the end of June last year but her body was not discovered until…’

‘The tenth of September,’ I read –

‘Yes, the tenth of September,’ continues Chief Tachibana. ‘Thank you. An old farmer had gone up into the woods at Manako-mura to pick leaves to smoke as a tobacco substitute and that’s when he found the body, or the skeleton as it was by that time…’

‘But it was never treated as murder?’ asks Ishida.

‘Difficult,’ says Tachibana. ‘Because of the state of the body and also, of course, there are many animals in these woods.’

I pick up the second file. There is no name on this second file. I hold up the second file. I ask Tachibana, ‘And this one?’

‘Even more difficult,’ says Tachibana. ‘The owner of a small mountain at Kiyosu-mura, again this is Kami Tsuga-gun, he’d gone up onto the slopes to prune away some of the branches around his cypress trees and he came upon a perfect skeleton. This was only last month and we think the body may have been there for over a year.’

I ask, ‘Did you find out anything else about the body?’

‘Yes,’ says Tachibana. ‘The autopsy was conducted in Utsunomiya and although we were unable to determine the exact cause of death we do believe it to have been the body a young woman aged approximately twenty to twenty-five years…’

‘But again you had it listed as ikidaore?’

‘Yes,’ he says again. ‘Ikidaore.’

‘Why?’ I ask him. ‘You find many such bodies, do you?’

Tachibana nods. Tachibana says, ‘In the last three or four years, yes. Older people particularly, they come out here from Tokyo to scavenge and they get lost in the woods. They have never been out here before. In the summer, some simply collapse of exhaustion. Others, in the winter, lose their way and freeze in the night…’

‘But these two weren’t old,’ says Ishida. ‘You often get young women walking in your woods, dropping down dead, do you?’

‘They were younger, yes,’ says Tachibana. ‘But we do get younger ones, but for different reasons. Only two days ago, for example, in some other woods, we found the body of a twenty-three or twenty-five-year-old woman. Dead about one month and animals had been there but we know it wasn’t murder. It was suicide.’

‘How do you know?’ asks Ishida. ‘If animals…’

‘Well, this one had at least left us a suicide note.’

‘What did it say?’ I ask. ‘This suicide note?’

‘That she had lost all her relatives during the war. That she was completely alone. That she saw no point in living any more –

‘She was from Tokyo too,’ he says. ‘Mitaka.’