Beautiful Star, page 13
‘I’m alive. What do you think you’re up to? You ugly, oafish student. I can’t see you ever grabbing yourself a woman and getting her pregnant.’
Three days later, Fumiko was murdered at home. Splashes of blood were found all over the small neck and limbs of the doll she had been working on. A few drops even reached the petals and leaves of the cyclamen pot placed in the decorative alcove. Her mother fainted at the sight, and died almost immediately. The culprit was caught straight away. He was a road labourer, without any regular employment. The newspaper headline spoke of a crime of passion.
After it happened, Kurita had a nervous breakdown that persisted for ages. Physically, he gradually improved, and about one year after the incident he, along with Haguro and the barber, saw flying saucers in the rose garden on the mountain top.
Sone was in the habit of going for a walk and a packed lunch with his children on a Sunday. They had already visited most of the places that interested them, so now they tended to hang around the university campus a lot, only a stone’s throw from where they lived. One advantage was that there was nothing to spend money on around there.
The family consisted of two boys, in Years One and Three of elementary school, and a girl in Year Five. Plus Sone and Hideko, his petite, modest wife. Their elder daughter was in the second year of middle school. This was how the barber’s family lined up on their day of rest as they brazened their way through the north gate of the highest institute of learning and walked along the broad path dotted with old pine trees. They used to have lunch on a bench in the sports ground which gave them a view of students playing baseball.
The eldest daughter was very self-conscious about these walks, and she hated being made to carry unwieldy baggage. She would bring up the rear, grudgingly, at some distance behind. Even when they began eating, she never dug in with her chopsticks, instead remaining glued to the magazines she had brought along. These publications were invariably large, richly coloured entertainment magazines, and she would slowly turn each page very deliberately.
Sone sat down next to her and, even though he knew she would disapprove, put his arms round her from behind to rest his chin on her shoulder. He pored over each page, all the time making a chewing sound in her ear.
Garish colour photographs. Young people dressed in loud shirts, dancing and prancing about, embracing each other under artificial cherry trees, doing the twist. The boys’ hair exemplified ‘the most vulgar and subversive style’ that Sone’s boss had warned him against when he was an apprentice. ‘These guys spend shedloads of dough. They’ve been spoilt rotten by society, they eat whatever they fancy and wear what they like. They have fun all night, drive around in sports cars above their means, and know as many girls as there are stars in the sky. And they’re just eighteen years old!’
The daughter’s dreamy gaze and the father’s look of righteous indignation focused, in parallel, on the faces of the pop stars, dressed in their red-and-yellow shirts. Sone knew all their names by heart: Henry Niimura, Jō Asano, Dicky Yamada, Susumu Tori. A bunch of impertinent youngsters with weird names. The fact that Sone remembered what they were called made them more famous than they actually were. They cast a gaudy light over Sone’s glittering dream world.
He should just line up the whole lot of them in his barber’s chair and slit their windpipes. Their racket would disappear from the face of the Earth, and silence would hold sway as if the planet were dead. In other words, elegance would reign supreme. That would be the moment when the Earth might turn into a beautiful star, and people might revert to ‘the refined, moderate hairstyle of a typical gentleman’ that followed established hairdressing aesthetics.
‘That Henry Niimura started off at the Tokyo Home for Juvenile Delinquents in Nerima. He was an inveterate petty thief.’ Sone pointed to the photograph of the wan youth that his daughter was eyeing with conspicuous enthusiasm. The youth’s smiling white teeth resembled a plaster of Paris tooth mould.
‘Liar! I just don’t believe you!’ she said, brushing aside her father with her shoulder.
‘It’s true, you know. It’s spelt out in black and white in the weekly magazines that adults read. Everything they write in those magazines is true. Hmm. After he left the home, a fifty-year-old woman took him under her wing, and he gets by as her toyboy …’
‘Hey!’ His wife interrupted him with a plaintive cry. ‘What are you doing, talking to children about things like that?’
Sone turned around and looked intently at his small wife. Just then, Sone felt as if his plump body had abruptly floated up into the sky. There he was, clothed in the comfy silky clouds of early spring, looking down at his own family. This family was the only one worth saving among all humanity.
Hideko had been pretty when she was young, notwithstanding her pug nose, but she was already forty and her constant doleful frowning had destroyed her looks. Hideko loved her husband with all her heart. There was something about her love for him that resembled the unadulterated affection a child might have for old bent nails and receipts stored in a little box.
Hideko seemed conscious that her husband harboured an exceptional degree of jealousy and hatred, and she was aware that his affections were focused on anyone but her. But, like every banal housewife who tolerates the husband’s harmless pastimes, like cultivating bonsai or a mania for baseball, she bore no grudge. Hideko always seemed too busy for Sone to have the opportunity to speak to her. She had mountains of housework to do, and in the barber’s shop her job was to toss well-wrung hot towels towards Sone and his apprentice when they were at work.
On top of that, all the children wore sweaters hand-knitted by Hideko in red, yellow and other primary colours. Piles of snot and homework to deal with …
‘At least I put food on the table for them.’ Sone, the extraterrestrial, felt pleased with himself. ‘So, it’s my responsibility to save them by taking them with me when mankind is on the verge of being wiped out.’
Viewed from on high, the family looked rather like small scraps of multicoloured yarn. The world still had no idea how important they were. There was nothing at all ‘famous’ about them.
The two youngest said they had had enough. They were bored by the students playing a half-hearted game of baseball in front of them. And they immediately ran off towards the semi-circular terrace of the central auditorium.
This auditorium was an old European-style building, with Spanish wings spreading out to the left and right. Slate roof tiles combined into precisely overlapping blue scales, and a complex, beautiful wooden façade rose above the terrace. Where the north transept of the building cast its shadow, slushy remnants of melting snow gleamed.
It looked like the two boys had suddenly stumbled, but in fact they were squabbling over some pine branches that had fallen onto the path. They started a sword fight with their improvised weapons on the terrace bathed in the pale light.
Sone was completely absorbed in the scene. On just such a lovely Sunday as this, the rich, the famous, movie actors and pop stars will all be obliterated in an instant. Members of happy, lovable, smug petit-bourgeois families – the whole lot – will be struck by malicious rays of light unleashed onto the world. Every one of them, without exception, will fall in agony like skittles.
The children were fighting with ‘swords’ that were nothing more than misshapen, brittle old branches. But their child’s minds had invested them with the illusion of the real thing. The branches that they brandished above their small heads had turned into towering blades, catching the reflection of the gloomy early spring sky. Silver blades soaring into the heavens.
‘Anything can become a lethal weapon!’ thought Sone, in a fit of dizzying joy. He was a barber, and fully aware of the thinness of the human skin.
When they thought about it, the three had achieved precisely nothing during the past year. At the time of the Berlin Crisis, they were all thrilled in the knowledge that the world was about to meet its end, to such an extent that Sone made his doubtful wife cook some celebratory red-bean rice and send it to the Haguro household. But the crisis was over before they knew it. The constellation Cygnus, which had sat proudly at its zenith from summer to autumn, retreated to the edges of the northern horizon at the same time that the world crisis was resolved. The same thing happened to their own 61 Cygni and its invisible planet.
One evening the previous summer, the three had climbed Sendai Castle and with some difficulty managed to make out their native star in the neighbourhood of the Milky Way. Haguro pointed it out to the other two using a telescope he had borrowed from the university.
Though an unremarkable sixth-magnitude star, it stands out as the first star whose distance from Earth was successfully measured, by the German astronomer Friedrich Bessel in 1838. The distance, of eleven light-years, makes it the fourth closest of the stars visible to the naked eye. Haguro explained to them that 61 Cygni was a binary star, and he had no doubt that an invisible planet was in orbit around one of those stars. The planet that all three of them came from. It was not until 1942 that the existence of astronomical objects equivalent to planets outside the solar system could be proven.
Identifying the star through the telescope lens drove all three of them crazy. They felt suddenly divorced from their everyday forms, as if they were transformed into complex monsters with eight stomachs and five pairs of lungs. All their internal gears felt out of joint, all harmony was lost, a mechanical rumbling arose in their digestive tracts, everything grew distant from them, and they seemed to have been thrown into the cold void of space. They instinctively reached out to each other, but their hands on that midsummer night were as cold as ice.
It was then that Haguro had said: ‘War will begin very soon.’
But on this day, six months later, Haguro was obliged to repeat the same words, laced with disappointment.
‘War will begin very soon. Whatever happens, it is inevitable.’
One evening, a few days after the Rose Garden meeting, the three met up in a beer hall in Higashi Ichiban-cho and hit upon the idea of going shopping for some bargains at the nearby Fujisaki department store. They had reached a childish decision after several rounds of beer, and they hurried excitedly to put their new plan into practice.
Haguro had suggested that they each think of an implement to buy that could destroy the world, on a budget of less than one hundred yen.
They were not fans of department stores. They all hated the idea of consumption, they had an aversion to the coquetry of all material things, and they had no time for the promise of eternal human life proffered through such physical objects. Whenever a rice bowl at home was broken and needed to be replaced, cheap bowls in the same style were always on display at the tableware counter, thus preserving the veneer of eternal life. If a broom became frayed, a replacement awaited. Such objects signified utter contempt for everything that Haguro and his companions stood for.
Haguro went first. He visited the kitchenware counter to buy a small screwdriver for ninety yen.
‘Damn it!’ exclaimed Sone, holding his hand to his forehead. He had intended to go for the same thing.
Next, Kurita went to the pharmacy counter and asked for some sulphuric acid. Such an eccentric request made Assistant Professor Haguro uneasy, and he slipped away behind the backs of his companions to the cosmetics counter, where he closely examined the expressed milk bottles that women used. When the lady assistant asked Kurita the reason for the acid, he brazened it out, saying it was for industrial purposes. He purchased a 500-gram bottle for eighty yen. Sidling up to Haguro, who had fled the scene, Kurita put his mouth to his ear and said, ‘I’m going to fling this lot in the world’s face.’
Now it was Sone’s turn. He took the other two on a tour of the counters, racking his brains before buying some nutcrackers for exactly one hundred yen.
After the thrill of their shopping spree, they left the department store with happy looks on their faces. The passers-by under the street lighting suddenly appeared more ephemeral, like shadows on a revolving magic lantern.
‘These poor suckers won’t be around for much longer.’ The drink had lubricated Kurita’s tongue. ‘I’d like to see the expression on their faces when they wise up. Eh, Professor?’
‘That’ll knock them for six.’ Sone spoke up in place of Haguro, who just frowned. He had a suitable cliché on hand for any cataclysm. ‘Knock ’em for six, poor devils.’
The office girl carrying a handbag with the fashionable phrase NO PARKING written in large print. A spruce, young salaryman self-consciously sporting his spring coat. Students dressed in unfamiliar suits. Children being dragged along by their mothers. All of them steadfastly marked by the shadow of death. Everyone looked as if they had unwittingly joined a death cult, and now strutted around with a badge, displaying a brilliant star of destruction, pinned to their breasts.
‘Let’s take a taxi. It’s on me. How about going to Sendai Castle? We’ve actually gone and bought these things, so why not try them out?’ said young Kurita, emboldened. Never ones for putting a damper on things, his two older companions exchanged silent glances and acquiesced.
‘Sendai Castle! Sendai Castle! Take us to the rundown castle!’ exclaimed Kurita, his large frame rolling in the small taxi. The driver was used to this kind of drunken whimsy. He careered up the sharp pitch-black slope overgrown with tall spear-shaped cedars, flinging pebbles against the tree roots and scattering wild headlamp beams between the trees and into the night sky.
Sone held the department-store item, still in its wrapping paper, firmly in his sweaty hands. Quite a while had passed since he made his purchase, but he remained intoxicated by his own ingenuity.
‘That’s a pretty smart idea, to use nutcrackers to crush the Earth. That makes me the winner. No one else could have come up with that on the spot.’
Nevertheless, he was beginning to sober up, and as they passed below the starry sky and the lower beam of the huge, looming Torii Gate at the Gokoku Shrine war memorial came into view, his body tensed with the kind of invigorating vanity experienced by one about to participate in some major cosmic enterprise.
The nights were still a bit chilly, and the castle’s inner bailey was deserted. The doors of the tea shop were closed, and noticeboards dotted along the public path that alluded to the Great Hall remains and the Noh stage were clearly silhouetted in the dark. The top of the majestic Shochu Tower, showing off the castle to its advantage, caught the rays of the sinking crescent moon. The gigantic copper eagle atop the tower spread its wings, bearing a malign dignity that spoke of night.
The three sat in a row on the viewing platform with their backs to the hackneyed, rotund, hoary statue of the castle founder, Masamune Date, and listened as the night wind passed through the conifers. Sendai at night was laid out fully below them. The Hirose River meandered darkly in front of the town, and neon signs flickered restlessly among the countless lights in the downtown buildings that spread beyond the station between Hirose and Aoba avenues. The Pacific horizon, due east of the city, was blotted out by nebulous lights that bled into the mist.
Now completely sober, the three gazed absent-mindedly at the town in which they had grown up. A putrid accumulation of bygone days and conventions. Its sparkling blanket of lights resembled luminescent fungi spurting across the body of a gigantic fish. Here, writ large, was the human world they had formerly inhabited. The sooty lights around the tower of the red-tiled courthouse near the Hyojo-gawara Bridge. Lights dotted among the dark cluster of buildings at T University. Parallel lines of fluorescent lights in the Higashi Ichiban-cho district. A mass of neon spinning into every corner of the sky above … The more abundant the light, the lonelier it all became. The occasional hoarse hoot of a car horn. Everything else fell securely into the normal pattern of dark night. Above them, in the eastern part of the starry night, thinly veiled in cloud, spread the calm outlines of Virgo and the Herdsman.
‘War will begin very soon.’ Haguro’s gripe never changed. ‘Not one of those troublesome lights will remain. And when that happens, all the stars in the sky will fall in relief upon the Earth.’
Haguro’s loneliness was rooted in every one of those human lights before them. He somehow had an innate belief in human suffering, but now that he had been expelled from that particular human world, now that the location of suffering was becoming clearer to him by the day, now that he was no longer human, he found himself living cheek by jowl with suffering. His condition would need to be remedied sooner or later, and that was exactly what was going to happen. In other words, human beings and their world were going to perish. In that way, his compassionate heart would find salvation!
‘We can expect a sudden outbreak of war any moment now. With one push of the remote-control button, anti-ballistic missiles, Nike-Zeus as well as solid-fuel ICBMs, and Minuteman missiles will blast off at 23,000 kilometres per hour. Not a single person will have time to escape … There will be no time to suffer. They have suffered too much already, so that is a good thing.’
Haguro appeared to be speaking to himself.
‘So, what can we do to make it happen as soon as possible?’ There was still something of the student in the way Kurita spoke.
‘The general conclusion I have reached is that we ought to oppose the peace movement. After all, look at the way they do things, with their endless demos and signatures, and their dependence on numbers and groups. We are hardly going to incorporate people like that into a war movement. Because the coming nuclear war will arise not from mutual hatred between groups, but from a completely unconnected individual whim, from some confusion or “unfortunate” coincidence.
‘Do you see what I am saying? The age of the masses is over. Contemporary history is all ostensibly about standardization. But its most terrifying secret is actually the fact that the age of the masses is no more.
