Another blank period goes by. I can feel her silence through the monitor. Like heavy smoke, it creeps in through a corner of the screen and drifts across the floor. I know about these silences of Kumiko’s. I’ve seen them, experienced them any number of times in our life together. She’s holding her breath now, sitting in front of the computer screen with brows knit in total concentration. I reach out for my cup and take a sip of cold coffee. Then, with the empty cup between my hands, I hold my breath and stare at the screen the way Kumiko is doing. The two of us are linked together by the heavy bonds of silence that pass through the wall separating our two worlds. We need each other more than anything, I feel without a doubt.
>I don’t know.
>Well, I DO know.
I set my coffee cup down and type as quickly as I can, as if to catch the fleeting tail of time.
I know this. I know that I want to find my way to where you are—you, the Kumiko who wants me to rescue her. What I do not know yet, unfortunately, is how to get there and what it is that’s waiting for me there. In this whole long time since you left, I’ve lived with a feeling as if I had been thrown into absolute darkness. Slowly but surely, though, I am getting closer to the core, to that place where the core of things is located. I wanted to let you know that. I’m getting closer to where you are, and I intend to get closer still.
I rest my hands on the keyboard and wait for her answer.
>I don’t understand any of this.
Kumiko types this and ends our conversation:
Goodbye.
•
The screen informs me that the other party has left the circuit. Our conversation is finished. Still, I go on staring at the screen, waiting for something to happen. Maybe Kumiko will change her mind and come back on-line. Maybe she’ll think of something she forgot to say. But she does not come back. I give up after twenty minutes. I save the file, then go to the kitchen for a drink of cold water. I empty my mind out for a while, breathing steadily by the refrigerator. A terrible quiet seems to have descended on everything. I feel as if the world is listening for my next thought. But I can’t think of anything. Sorry, but I just can’t think of anything.
I go back to the computer and sit there, carefully rereading our entire exchange on the glowing tube from beginning to end: what I said, what she said, what I said to that, what she said to that. The whole thing is still there on the screen, with a certain graphic intensity. As my eyes follow the rows of characters she has made, I can hear her voice. I can recognize the rise and fall of her voice, the subtle tones and pauses. The cursor on the last line keeps up its blinking with all the regularity of a heartbeat, waiting with bated breath for the next word to be sent. But there is no next word.
After engraving the entire conversation in my mind (having decided I had better not print it out), I click on the box to exit communications mode. I direct the program to leave no record in the operations file, and after checking to be sure that this has been done, I cut the switch. The computer beeps, and the monitor screen goes dead white. The monotonous mechanical drone is swallowed up in the silence of the room, like a vivid dream ripped out by the hand of nothingness.
•
I don’t know how much time has gone by since then. But when I realize where I am, I find myself staring at my hands lying on the table. They bear the marks of having had eyes sharply focused on them for a long time.
“Going bad” is something that happens over a longer period of time.
How long a period of time is that?
Counting Sheep
•
The Thing in the Center of the Circle
A few days after Ushikawa’s first visit, I asked Cinnamon to bring me a newspaper whenever he came to the Residence. It was time for me to begin getting in touch with the reality of the outside world. Try as you might to avoid it, when it was time, they came for you.
Cinnamon nodded, and every day after that he would arrive with three newspapers.
I would look through the papers in the morning after breakfast. I had not bothered with newspapers for such a long time that they now struck me as strange—cold and empty. The stimulating smell of the ink gave me a headache, and the intensely black little gangs of type seemed to stab at my eyes. The layout and the headlines’ type style and the tone of the writing seemed unreal to me. I often had to put the paper down, close my eyes, and release a sigh. It couldn’t have been like this in the old days. Reading a newspaper must have been a far more ordinary experience for me than this. What had changed so much about them? Or rather, what had changed so much about me?
After I had been reading the papers for a while, I was able to achieve a clear understanding of one fact concerning Noboru Wataya: namely, that he was constructing an ever more solid position for himself in society. At the same time that he was conducting an ambitious program of political activity as one of the up-and-coming new members of the House of Representatives, he was constantly making public pronouncements as a magazine columnist and a regular commentator on TV. I would see his name everywhere. For some reason I could not fathom, people were actually listening to his opinions—and with ever increasing enthusiasm. He was brand-new on the political stage, but he was already being celebrated as one of the young politicians from whom great things could be expected. He was named the country’s most popular politician in a poll conducted by a women’s magazine. He was hailed as an activist intellectual, a new type of intelligent politician that had not been seen before.
When I had read as much as I could stand about current events and Noboru Wataya’s prominent place in them, I turned to my growing collection of books on Manchukuo. Cinnamon had been bringing me everything he could find on the subject. Even here, though, I could not escape the shadow of Noboru Wataya. That day it emerged from the pages of a book on logistical problems. Published in 1978, the library copy had been borrowed only once before, when the book was new, and returned almost immediately. Perhaps only acquaintances of Lieutenant Mamiya were interested in logistical problems in Manchukuo.
As early as 1920, according to the author, Japan’s imperial army was looking into the possibility of amassing a huge inventory of winter survival gear in anticipation of all-out war with the Soviets. Equipping the army to fight in bitter cold was viewed as an urgent matter because they lacked the experience of having fought a real battle anyplace with such extreme winter cold as Siberia. If a border dispute led suddenly to a declaration of war against the Soviet Union (which was by no means out of the question in those days), the army was simply unprepared to persevere in a winter campaign. For this reason, a research team was established within the General Staff Office to prepare to fight a hypothetical war with the Soviet Union, the logistics section being charged with investigating the procurement of special winter clothing. In order to grasp what real cold was like, they went to the far northern island of Sakhalin, long a point of dispute with Czarist Russia and then the Soviet Union, and used an actual fighting unit to test insulated boots and coats and underwear. They ran thoroughgoing tests on equipment currently in use by the Soviet Army and on the kind of clothing that Napoleon’s army had used in its Russian campaign, reaching the conclusion that it would be impossible for the Japanese Army to survive a winter in Siberia with its present equipment. They estimated that some two-thirds of the foot soldiers on the front lines would be put out of commission by frostbite. The army’s current survival gear had been manufactured with the somewhat gentler northern China winters in mind, and it was lacking in terms of absolute numbers as well. The research team calculated the number of sheep necessary to manufacture sufficient effective winter clothing to outfit ten divisions (the joke making the rounds of the team then being that they were too busy counting sheep to sleep), and they submitted this in their report, along with estimates of the scale of mechanical equipment that would be needed to process the wool.
The number of sheep on the Japanese home islands was clearly insufficient for fighting an extended war in t
he northern territories against the Soviet Army in the event of economic sanctions or an actual blockade against Japan, and thus it was imperative that Japan secure both a stable supply of wool (and of rabbit and other pelts) in the Manchuria-Mongolia region and the mechanical equipment for processing it, said the report. The man dispatched to make on-the-spot observations in Manchukuo in 1932, immediately after the founding of the puppet regime there, was a young technocrat newly graduated from the Military Staff College with a major in logistics; his name was Yoshitaka Wataya.
Yoshitaka Wataya! This could only have been Noboru’s uncle. There just weren’t that many Watayas in the world, and the name Yoshitaka was the clincher.
His mission was to calculate the time that would be needed before such stable supplies of wool could be secured in Manchukuo. Yoshitaka Wataya seized upon this problem of cold-weather clothing as a model case for modern logistics and carried out an exhaustive numerical analysis.
When he was in Mukden, Yoshitaka Wataya sought an introduction to—and spent the entire night drinking and talking with—Lieutenant General Kanji Ishiwara.
Kanji Ishiwara. Another name I knew well. Noboru Wataya’s uncle had been in touch with Kanji Ishiwara, the ringleader the year before of the staged Chinese attack on Japanese troops known as the “Manchurian Incident,” the event that had enabled Japan to turn Manchuria into Manchukuo—and that later would prove to have been the first act in fifteen years of war.
Ishiwara had toured the continent and become convinced not only that all-out war with the Soviet Union was inevitable but that the key to winning that war lay in strengthening Japan’s logistical position by rapidly industrializing the newly formed empire of Manchukuo and establishing a self-sufficient economy. He presented his case to Yoshitaka Wataya with eloquence and passion. He argued, too, the importance of bringing farmers from Japan to systematize Manchukuo’s farming and cattle industries and to raise the level of their efficiency.
Ishiwara was of the opinion that Japan should not turn Manchukuo into another undisguised Japanese colony, such as Korea or Taiwan, and should instead make Manchukuo a new model Asian nation. In his recognition that Manchukuo would ultimately serve as a logistical base for war against the Soviet Union—and even against the United States and England—Ishiwara was, however, admirably realistic. He believed that Japan was now the only Asian nation with the capability of fighting the coming war against the West (or, as he called it, the “Final War”) and that the other countries had the duty to cooperate with Japan for their own liberation from the West. No other officer in the Imperial Army at that time had Ishiwara’s combination of a profound interest in logistics and great erudition. Most other Japanese officers dismissed logistics as an “effeminate” discipline, believing instead that the proper “Way” for “his majesty’s warriors” was to fight with bold self-abandonment no matter how ill-equipped one might be; that true martial glory lay in conquering a mighty foe when outnumbered and poorly armed. Strike the enemy and advance “too swiftly for supplies to keep up”: that was the path of honor.
To Yoshitaka Wataya, the compleat technocrat, this was utter nonsense. Starting a long-term war without logistical backing was tantamount to suicide, in his view. The Soviets had vastly expanded and modernized their military capability through Stalin’s five-year plan of intensive economic development. The five bloody years of the First World War had destroyed the old world’s values, and mechanized war had revolutionized European thinking with regard to strategy and logistics. Having been stationed for two years in Berlin, Yoshitaka Wataya knew the truth of this with every bone in his body, but the mentality of the greater part of Japan’s military men had not outgrown the intoxication of their victory in the Russo-Japanese War, nearly thirty years before.
Yoshitaka Wataya went home to Japan a devoted admirer of Ishiwara’s arguments, his worldview, and the charismatic personality of the man himself, and their close relationship lasted many years. He often went to visit Ishiwara, even after the distinguished officer had been brought back from Manchuria to take command of the isolated fortress in Maizuru. Yoshitaka Wataya’s precise and meticulous report on sheep farming and wool processing in Manchukuo was submitted to headquarters shortly after he returned to Japan, and it received high praise. With Japan’s painful defeat in the 1939 battle of Nomonhan, however, and the strengthening of U.S. and British economic sanctions, the military began to shift its attention southward, and the activities of the research team waging hypothetical war against the Soviet Union were allowed to peter out. Of course, one factor behind the decision to finish off the battle of Nomonhan quickly in early autumn and not allow it to develop into a full-scale war was the research team’s conclusive report that “we are unable to wage a winter campaign against the Soviet Army given our current state of preparedness.” As soon as the autumn winds began to blow, Imperial Headquarters, in a move unusual for the normally face-obsessed Japanese Army, washed its hands of the fighting and, through diplomatic negotiations, ceded the barren Hulunbuir Steppe to Outer Mongolian and Soviet troops.
In a footnote, the author pointed out that Yoshitaka Wataya had been purged from holding public office by MacArthur’s Occupation after the war and for a time had lived in seclusion in his native Niigata, but he had been persuaded by the Conservative Party to run for office after the purge was lifted and served two terms in the Upper House before changing to the Lower House. A calligraphic scroll of Kanji Ishiwara’s hung on the wall of his office.
I had no idea what kind of Diet member Noboru Wataya’s uncle had been or what he had accomplished as a politician. He did serve as a cabinet minister once, and he seems to have been highly influential with the people of his district, but he never became a leader in national politics. Now his political constituency had been inherited by his nephew, Noboru Wataya.
I put the book away and, folding my arms behind my head, stared out the window in the vague direction of the front gate. Soon the gate would open inward and the Mercedes-Benz would appear, with Cinnamon at the wheel. He would be bringing another “client.” These “clients” and I were joined by the mark on my cheek. Cinnamon’s grandfather (Nutmeg’s father) and I were also joined by the mark on my cheek. Cinnamon’s grandfather and Lieutenant Mamiya were joined by the city of Hsin-ching. Lieutenant Mamiya and the clairvoyant Mr. Honda were joined by their special duties on the Manchurian-Mongolian border, and Kumiko and I had been introduced to Mr. Honda by Noboru Wataya’s family. Lieutenant Mamiya and I were joined by our experiences in our respective wells—his in Mongolia, mine on the property where I was sitting now. Also on this property had once lived an army officer who had commanded troops in China. All of these were linked as in a circle, at the center of which stood prewar Manchuria, continental East Asia, and the short war of 1939 in Nomonhan. But why Kumiko and I should have been drawn into this historical chain of cause and effect I could not comprehend. All of these events had occurred long before Kumiko and I were born.
I sat at Cinnamon’s desk and placed my hands on the keyboard. The feel of my fingers on the keys was still fresh from my conversation with Kumiko. That computer conversation had been monitored by Noboru Wataya, I was sure. He was trying to learn something from it. He certainly hadn’t arranged for us to make contact that way out of the goodness of his heart. He and his men were almost certainly trying to use the access they had gained to Cinnamon’s computer through the communications link in order to learn the secrets of this place. But I was not worried about that. The depths of this computer were the very depths of Cinnamon himself. And they had no way of knowing how incalculably deep that was.
The Signal Turns Red
•
The Long Arm Reaches Out
Cinnamon was not alone when he arrived at nine o’clock the next morning. Beside him in the passenger seat was his mother, Nutmeg Akasaka. She had not been here in over a month. She had arrived with Cinnamon unannounced that time too, had breakfast with me, and left after an hour or so of small tal
k.
Cinnamon hung up his suit coat and, while listening to a Handel Concerto Grosso (for the third day in a row), he went to the kitchen to make tea and toast for his mother, who had not yet eaten breakfast. He always made perfect toast, like something to be used in a commercial. Then, while Cinnamon straightened up the kitchen as usual, Nutmeg and I sat at a small table, drinking tea. She ate only one slice of toast, with a little butter. Outside, a cold, sleety rain was falling. Nutmeg said little, and I said little—a few remarks about the weather. She seemed to have something she wanted to say, though. That much was clear from the look on her face and the way she spoke. She tore off stamp-sized pieces of toast and transported them, one at a time, to her mouth. We looked out at the rain now and then, as if it were our longtime mutual friend.
When Cinnamon had finished with the kitchen and started his cleaning, Nutmeg led me to the “fitting room.” This one had been made to look exactly like the “fitting room” in the Akasaka office. The size and shape were virtually identical. The window here also had two layers of curtains and was gloomy even during the day. The curtains were never open more than ten minutes at a time, while Cinnamon was cleaning the room. There was a leather sofa here, a glass vase, with flowers, on the table, and a tall floor lamp. In the middle of the room stood a large workbench, on which lay a pair of scissors, scraps of cloth, a wooden box stuffed with needles and thread, pencils, a design book (in which a few actual design sketches had been drawn), and several professional tools, the names and purposes of which I did not know. A large full-length mirror hung on the wall, and one corner of the room was partitioned off by a screen for changing. The clients who visited the Residence were always shown to this room.