They kidnapped someone who worked for the oil drilling company CUUA, and I played a major role in procuring his ransom. Among the members of the group were many farmers who had been chased from their villages. By kidnapping this man, they got the profit they had expected to earn farming. While it was an empty way to earn money, if you considered those people’s livelihood, getting that money was urgent.
Kejaf, as I will call the man who had spoken to me in English, seemed to have a strong body and the willpower not to budge under any circumstances, but he was only nineteen. He hadn’t been born there. He had once belonged to another armed group in a distant country. When he was young, that other armed group had attacked his village and kidnapped him. To prevent him from trying to run, they forced young Kejaf to sin.
“They pointed a gun at me and told me to attack a girl from my village. They said if I didn’t attack her, they’d kill me. She was my childhood friend. My village was burning. I raped that fourteen-year-old girl, with a gun pointed at my back. Many men held her down and stripped her. They had already taken her virginity, and there was blood dripping from between her legs. The scars from having her clitoris removed opened up . . . I was crying the whole time. They made it so I couldn’t go back to my village. ‘If you keep doing this,’ their leader told me, ‘if you keep doing this, it will become easy. This, your first sin, eventually you won’t even be able to think it a sin.’ I’ve killed many people. And the more I kill, the more my past sins feel like nothing.”
“Evil” there was not the same as the “evil” in delicate, developed countries. It was more extreme, and uncaring. It existed in that space where the only temporary solace was to be found in the leaves of coca and khat.
But that armed group was destroyed by an American air raid, and Kejaf was left alone. That, he told me, was when he met the teacher. “We don’t rape women. We don’t mutilate their genitals. Sex is a gift from the gods. It can’t be forced. I thought I was saved. If I believed in the teacher, and the gods, I could go to another world. A world without suffering. What should I call it in English? Maybe heaven, I guess?”
Was Kejaf at peace with these horrible experiences in this country where too many people died? No. The people here were all easily hurt, and suffered under the burden of their pasts. If he were diagnosed by a delicate Japanese psychiatrist, the doctor would probably say he suffered from multiple psychological disorders. But the reality of his world wouldn’t allow that. Though he sat right next to death, though he endured much suffering, he had to constantly think about living. And Kejaf had completely lost his sense of empathy. He might have given it up on his own. If he hadn’t, he wouldn’t have been able to go on living. “I’m going to die soon anyway,” he often said. As if that were the only thing that would save him from his sins. “But I really wanted to be a tour guide. To show the weak and delicate Westerners the greatness of nature in Africa.”
Kejaf was very intelligent. He seemed to have picked up English quickly from the teacher’s lessons. But even that sort of knowledge didn’t make him indispensable.
I became a member of that group, but I never participated in the kidnappings. They probably decided that a yellow person like myself, with none of the strength of these local ex-farmers, wouldn’t be helpful. “When the time comes,” the teacher said, “when the time comes, you will work for me, Starved One.”
The teacher called me Starved One. When I heard those words, I knew the meaning of the connection I’d felt between us when he saved my life. I hadn’t told anyone there about my experience starving. But the teacher must have sensed it somehow. He hadn’t saved me because I was Japanese. He hadn’t seen me as Yusuke Takahara, like it said on my passport. To him, I was the Starved One. A person who had experienced starvation. He didn’t look at my outer layers, but my roots. I, the Starved One, was tied to the teacher. No, not to the teacher, but to his rebellion against starvation. My roots, my very being, were tied to these actions in this flow of history.
I spent every day in the village where their hideout was. One could call it house arrest. Sometimes I was sent to what they called “town” to go shopping. It was a dried-out road with a collection of stalls for trading. I was often surprised at the freedom they gave me. Just in case, Kejaf would remind me not to run away. “If you try to run, you’ll be shot in the back, even in town.” I didn’t believe that; there was no one in the group skilled enough with a gun to shoot me down. If I was going to run, this was the moment. There were even dirty taxis passing right before my eyes. If I got in one and went to the city, I could get home. I could get back to the NGO. But I watched the taxis pass by. Why? Was it because I thought there would be other, better opportunities? Was that really the only reason I didn’t run?
It came to be my turn for the villagers to watch me have sex. That day, the teacher was in the village. It was a rite of passage to have him observe me having sex. That said, not everyone from the village came. There were fewer than twenty people, and the whole thing had the roughness of a spectator sport about it, like they were watching a fight. Next to the bonfire was an enormous woman. I undressed, surrounded on all sides by villagers, and faced her. The men all laughed at my ridiculous naked body, my top half tanned, and my lower half pale and weak. I had only ever slept with Japanese women before. The sex I’d had was all so delicate. We’d whisper to each other on a clean bed, exchange gentle caresses, and I’d slowly remove her bra and panties. Outdoors, with my first foreign woman, being watched by all these villagers, I couldn’t get it up. The villagers never laughed at my impotence. They just saw me as a foreigner who, sadly, hadn’t been blessed with the gods’ graces. Smiling, the teacher comforted me. “The day he works together with us,” he said, “this delicate Japanese man will transform into one of us.”
And then that day was decided. We would carry out a terrible attack.
15
We’d go to a neighboring country and plant car bombs we’d detonate remotely with cell phones. That was our mission.
As a Japanese man, no one would expect me to be involved with an attack like that. The teacher thought that even if something unexpected happened, I would be able to get away.
“Even though you Japanese have those kamikazes in your past, you’re thought to be the safest people in the world. Starved One, your passport will serve us well.”
But I didn’t understand the purpose of our attack. There was an international military force stationed in that neighboring country. “It’s an act of resistance against them,” said the teacher. “As long as they refuse to leave, we will keep attacking. They’re here to extract resources from the poor.”
I still didn’t understand. “But civilians will die.”
The teacher looked at me with a strange expression on his beautiful face, then finally gave me a slight nod. “They do not believe in R.”
I still didn’t understand. “Maybe not now. But they could become believers through your teachings. What about that? Will the gods grant us the right to kill possible future believers?”
The teacher examined me as if I were some rare, foreign hamster. “The civilians will certainly make a noble sacrifice,” he said. “After their death, they will travel to that other world in the name of R. They will be elevated to the level of believers. They’ll go to what you call heaven.”
I had nothing to say in response.
“Starved One,” he said, “if you die in this holy war, you will become a war hero in heaven. You can become exactly the person you want to be. You will fulfill all the desires you couldn’t in this world.”
The teacher didn’t just say I could be a hero of war. He also used the metaphor of Yasukuni. He probably didn’t know much about Yasukuni, the imperial Shinto shrine that commemorates the souls of all who have fallen in the service of Japan. It was erected in Tokyo in 1869 as Shokon Shrine, and since 1879, when it received official recognition from the state and its name was changed t
o Yasukuni, “Pacifying the Nation,” it was caught up in all of the wars our government started. During the Second World War, Japanese soldiers were told that if they died, they would be enshrined at Yasukuni as heroes. Their spirits would become deities, kami. It was part of a religion that worshipped the country and the emperor, a god in human form. One could call it a superreligion that sucked in all the nation’s citizens. During the war, special festivals were regularly held at Yasukuni Shrine. The relatives of dead soldiers were invited to Tokyo, and were overcome by the spectacle of their sons becoming gods. They were moved as they witnessed the solemn act of the emperor worshipping their own child or husband, and after returning home, they were celebrated as “Honorable Relatives.” Declaring dead soldiers as not just heroes but as gods not only served to give conscripted soldiers courage, but also helped recruit new soldiers. Yasukuni Shrine did more than its part for the religion that made war possible. But that was long ago. Japanese people now may outwardly swear their loyalty to the country, but inside they’re not at all moved by that sort of system.
Did I start researching the strange origins of R because of my fear of being involved in an act of terrorism? A few days earlier another armed organization, with a hideout in a village about fifty kilometers from our own, was slaughtered by the government’s military—really just citizens hired by the government, mercenaries. Those soldiers tracked down other armed resistance groups and killed them with their highly efficient weapons and raped the women in the villages that hid them. I had witnessed it. There was none of the violence you’d see in manga, the sort of things a Japanese person would immediately think up, like plucking out eyes, or ripping flesh with pliers, or skinning alive. It was much sloppier. They cut off heads. It was considered manly to be able to get the head off in one blow, so they never brought the sword down on the neck more than once. When they failed, it was horrible for the victim. However, they showed no mercy. They would blame the victim for flinching, and they’d watch hatefully, full of rage as blood poured forth from mouths and slashed necks. The bodies, sitting, looked like electric teapots with lids that pop open with the press of a button.
I imagined having my neck slashed. That moment where my whole life would end so savagely. I thought of my life, saved by the teacher. And the people who would die from our bombs. And also, heaven.
The basis of R’s teachings was a single collection of songs that had been passed down orally. Because of religious suppression, the original book had been lost. Three hundred years ago, someone made another attempt to put the traditions down in writing. However, no one could verify whether the contents of that second book were accurate.
So what was known for certain about the religion’s founding tenets? Had it always contained a concept of heaven? Who could possibly say that the heaven the teacher described wasn’t just the invention of some contemporary scribe, or a manipulating leader? What if a tribal leader told his villagers they’d go to heaven if they died so he could recruit them to be soldiers? What if this religion was started to fit the needs of those ancient villages—to make war possible, to make soldiers not fear death? And does being old make a doctrine the truth? Where is the proof of this faith? The believers who had passed it down were moved by the songs. What if that just meant the text was an ancient literary masterpiece?
I cautiously voiced my doubts to Kejaf. He looked at me with eyes full of rage. “You dare profane the gods? This is an ancient text of this land!” His anger was natural. People believe in religion because they want to.
I had a dream about the world being flipped upside down. A vast stretch of sand became an unfortunate sky, and dry, brittle trees stretched downward. My neck was slashed, and my head hung down my back. A thin bit of skin held it there. I tried to cry out, but nothing would leave my mouth, since my head was no longer connected to my body. I looked out over the earth, now an empty sky with trees growing upside down. When I woke up, I had lost my sense of balance. I was full of fear. Was I lying down, or hanging from something? Besides my loss of balance, my heart was also beating terribly fast.
I was growing weaker. I found the word “invocation” scratched into the wall in English. I thought Kejaf had tried to cast a spell for me, to save me. But Kejaf told me he didn’t know what I was talking about. “It’s probably a miracle from god,” he said. He was trying to encourage me. The next day, those letters were carved even deeper into the wall. I tried to be thankful and to hold on to Kejaf’s kindness, but I also thought this might have been a plot of the teacher’s. Maybe he was trying to show me a childish miracle, to encourage the Japanese man scared of the holy war, to send me words directly from god. Could I fall for such a stupid miracle? I was mad. But ultimately my anger wasn’t over this childish ruse, but rather over the teacher’s demand that I participate in his holy war. It resembled a child’s anger toward the father who abandoned him. The letters grew deeper, and I felt my anger was about to reach its limit. I didn’t have the courage to tell the teacher, so I talked to Kejaf again. Kejaf looked at me with fearful eyes. “You’re the one writing on the wall,” he said. “You get up in the middle of the night. You always look oddly calm.”
I thought I finally understood what was happening to me.
On the day of our final meeting before carrying out our attack, there was a dirty white car parked outside. It was the car that carried me to this village. I felt it was a cruel coincidence of fate that it was a Japanese-made car. “When we end this holy war, you will stop being a delicate Japanese man,” the teacher said. “You will become like us. You will change from the Starved One to an agent. You will no longer be disturbed by all the phenomena life shows you.”
The holy war would be carried out by two units. The first unit was in charge of planting car bombs. We would detonate them throughout the city to show our resistance to the multinational armies stationed there. The second unit would attack the town’s police department. How crude, I thought. This was too ill-planned and reckless to risk my life for. But YG didn’t have the power to attack the army directly. The teacher called it resistance. “We are not aiming for victory. We are just setting the stage for future generations.” The teacher’s words had grown more and more trite.
I tried to tell Kejaf what I thought. I was in the first group with the relatively easier task, and he was in the second. He was going to take a gun and attack the police station. He would probably be shot within a few seconds when the state military came charging in. At first I thought it was strange that the teacher would waste a talented man like Kejaf, who could speak English, that way. But a few days before the plan was announced, I learned that there was another man who could speak English who was close to the teacher. That also worried me. Was there any meaning to this holy war?
“I’m happy,” Kejaf said. “Someone as useless as me can become a hero in the name of the great R. I can go to heaven a hero. I, who raped my childhood friend, will be purified. My dead mother will rejoice!”
“Don’t you want to be a tour guide? Can you really die for this?”
Kejaf looked at me strangely. His face was so innocent. I remembered then that he was only nineteen.
“What are you saying? I will be a tour guide in heaven.”
To begin from the ending, I ran away. Two days before the attack I walked out of the village. I entered a barren forest, got lost, and tried to cross some mountains. In the mountains I saw countless dead bodies. I wasn’t sure if those people had been attacked by bandits or armed fighters, but I imagined myself among them in the near future. Some had collapsed, hanging their heads in shame, and others were splayed out as if they were dancing. The rotting women, naked, their hair hanging, had certainly been raped. I wondered if they had been raped before they rotted and became so ugly. Would I see more corpses once I was out of the mountains? I thought no matter how far I traveled, no matter where I was, there’d be corpses in all shapes. The world turned upside down. The dried-out earth becam
e the sky, and from there the smell of the bodies, stacked like a sort of supple feast, rose up. Luckily, those who found me after I collapsed were kind farmers. They carried me to some sort of hospital, then something like a police station, and finally a white man wearing a suit appeared. I learned then that dozens of people had died from car bombs in that neighboring country, and that the armed fighters who attacked the police station had all been shot down in a matter of minutes. This man, who must have been an international aid worker, didn’t try to ask me where their hideout was, as if he didn’t want to get involved with me. But that was strange. They were an armed resistance. Why didn’t he try to locate their hideout?
What I learned afterward was depressing. The teacher had said our attack would be a resistance to force the international military out, but the military had already planned to leave in two weeks. The teacher was involved with a munitions company and a certain government, and had been asked by both organizations to carry out the attack.
For that munitions company, the withdrawal would mean they’d lose work, and their company’s profits would drop. But what would happen if there was a terrorist attack? The military wouldn’t be able to leave. However, they tried to paint a more humanitarian picture of their motives, saying that if the military force left, the area would grow more violent. “Now is not the time for us to pull out,” the people working for the nearly bankrupt munitions company told themselves. “If we sacrifice a few soldiers by pushing back the withdrawal, we can save even more lives.”