Hanzai Japan: Fantastical, Futuristic Stories of Crime From and About Japan (27 page)

The sailor is turning slowly towards me, swinging his weapon wide. I will not allow him the satisfaction of murdering me too. I aim the scissors at my own neck, ready to—

The sailor falls at my feet.

His companions shriek. They stomp all over his corpse in their stampede out of the theater. There is a red puddle pooling over the bastard’s heart. His gun is cold. The benshi is fine. His bare chest is unmarred. He is still staring at both of us, astounded. But who—

I look up. There is Tokiko, glamorous moll, standing alone fifty feet high on a dark screen, silks pressed, jaw set, pistol in her grip. The smoke from the muzzle of her gun drifts away from the screen and rises to meet the theater ceiling.

He was always cheerful, always hard at work, with thickly muscled, sun-bronzed arms, a man so masculine even other men fell quickly under his spell. We were both outsiders, fugitives from the big-city rat race. I wish my wife and I could’ve gotten to know Tetsuji Okada better, but we kept our distance.

It was my wife’s idea to move to this area, thick with pension hotels, in the foothills outside the village. We managed a bakery that doubled as a café, but after two years I was already growing tired of our sham country life. Everyone, from the pension owners to the man who ran the crafts workshop, was pretending to live like Peter Mayle. The women planted herbs and berries, made jam and wreaths and vegetable-dyed cloth, and went into ecstasies organizing concerts by no-name musicians in the little local auditorium. Yet when autumn came and the tourists disappeared, many of our neighbors went back to Tokyo to make ends meet as cab drivers, factory workers, or bartenders, and routinely mocked the people of the village and their hayseed culture.

Tetsuji Okada was different. He was the only real man among us fugitives from the city. He didn’t live in the alpine foothills with the rest of us. He’d settled in the flatlands where it was sweltering in summer and freezing in winter, built solid relationships with the locals, and managed forty acres of fields and paddies, growing rice, soybeans, and a profusion of vegetables. I was speechless with admiration.

I first encountered him in the lounge of the village hot spring. My wife and our son Hiro, almost four, had been pestering me to take them. Hiro was too excited to sit still, and we’d retired to a corner of the lounge to eat our noodles, hoping to avoid bothering the locals, when Okada invited us to sit with him and his beer-drinking friends. We listened, rapt, as he talked about the joys and frustrations of rural life. He was a straight shooter, yet never anything but modest about his achievements.

“I gave soybeans a go last year, but I just can’t get the hang of it. It’s hard to match what you guys do. You’ve got two thousand years of experience behind you.” He knew how to compliment his friends without flattering them.

The toothless old man sitting next to him shook his head. “Not at all. Your farm is outstanding. You city people are amazing. You’ve almost got it down.” He clapped Okada on the shoulder encouragingly.

“I owe it all to you.” Okada’s bow was modest and dignified. It did me good just to be around him.

That was how our casual friendship started. Now and then we would meet for drinks in the little eatery that served as the village pub. Sometimes he would bring us produce from his fields.

But it was around the third time we sat down for drinks that I noticed his face always took on a wild look when he got into one particular topic.

He was convinced—almost obsessed—that some kind of major food shortage was just around the corner. Whenever the subject turned to farming, his usually sunny expression changed completely. A dark light seemed to shine from his haunted eyes and the words poured out of him as he condemned city people and the way they lived.

“Tetsuji would be nice to be around, except for that whole ‘food crisis’ thing,” my wife remarked with a laugh. I chuckled too—and decided I’d keep our meetings outside the house. It would be better not to have him over. He was entitled to his own opinion, but this fixation of his seemed to border on mania. There was something unsettling about it.

True, I found his bitterness easier to understand when he told me how his decision to move to the country had prompted his wife to divorce him, take their three children and their house in southwest Tokyo, and claim half of his severance pay from the big publishing house where he had worked for twenty-three years.

“City people walk on thin ice every day,” he once said. “Even after the war, when people were starving, we grew more than half the food we needed, yet look how many people died. And how much food does Japan produce now? Less than 40 percent of what we need. Remember in ’72, when America stopped exporting soybeans? Now it’s global warming. Soils all over the planet are being exhausted, and American grain production has to start falling sooner or later. Southeast Asia? They’re paving their farmland over and industrializing as fast as they can. Doesn’t matter what international treaties say. What idiot is going to export food when there’s not enough at home?”

By this point, his eyes would be moist with anxiety.

“Cities are hotbeds of consumption and hedonism, but they don’t create anything essential for life. One day there’ll be no food in the supermarket. Nothing at the 7-Eleven. The first people to get wind of the shortage will run out and buy it all. There will be a panic. Only the ones who can pay the going rate will have food. The government won’t have options. Used to be they could go around Asia with wads of money and buy whatever they wanted. That won’t work next time. There won’t be any countries with food to spare. They won’t sell what they don’t have.”

“Yes, I guess Japan will be in a tough situation by the time my son’s an adult.”

This time I’d been in the neighborhood and dropped by to chat. We were out by his soybean field when he’d mounted his hobbyhorse again, and I didn’t feel like arguing with him on his own turf. I just tried to nod and be agreeable while I waited for my chance to escape.

“No.” Okada gazed out over his fields and shook his head. “It’s coming. Five years, ten at the most. We’re on the brink. Most people are just dancing around at the edge of the abyss. They’re completely oblivious.”

“Uhm-hm. Your edamame are coming in well.” I was desperate to change the subject.

“Edamame? Don’t kid me. Are you telling me you don’t know that crops like edamame and sweet corn are a criminal waste of food? Letting them mature yields far more calories. But no, people want to eat baby soybeans because they taste better. That’s how people eat, without a care in the world. Same thing with corn. Cut the ears off before their time. ‘Oh, it’s so sweet!’ Edamame, baby corn, all that crap. Won’t grow it, won’t eat it.”

We’d reached the stage where it was best for me to just keep my mouth shut. I kept nodding and saying “Uh-hmm, uh-hmm” as I started backing away.

“In the end, there’ll be no soybeans, much less any edamame. The stores will be out of rice. There won’t be any food for tomorrow. And you thought they had it bad in North Korea. I guarantee you, city people will be coming out here to buy food with the money they got from selling their daughters.”

“Right, selling their daughters.” I started to laugh but quickly stopped myself. Okada’s eyes weren’t smiling.

“Listen, how about it? We’re weeding the paddies tomorrow. Why don’t you come? Some friends of mine will be here from Tokyo to help out. They take the future food crisis very seriously. I’ve promised to share my crops with them and nobody else. They take responsibility for their own food supply by weeding the paddies and helping me plant rice. I won’t sell my crops for any amount of money. But friends are different. I’ll set some aside for you too.”

“Thanks,” was all I could say. I left without making any promises. Apparently he not only could see the future, he had disciples too. Just being around him was starting to make me nervous. I didn’t feel like hanging out with a whole group of Okadas.

I got into my old Lexus and drove over the dusty roads to home. On the way I passed an unmanned produce stand, a simple wooden table with a little roof overhead for shade. Bags of vegetables, all priced at a hundred yen, were piled up to attract the tourists. I’d heard local farmers complain that the coin box never held more than 70 or 80 percent of what it was supposed to at the end of the day. Yet they still made more money this way than selling to the supermarkets.

I guess I never thought Japan’s comfortable situation would last forever. Someday people would find themselves hungry once again. Still, why forgo the advantages of a free market to prepare for a day you couldn’t predict with certainty? I didn’t want to leave our life in this beautiful setting, selling the bread my wife baked and brewing coffee for customers, even if the tourist season only lasted for the summer months, and for the other nine months our bread went to feed factory workers.

When I got home, my wife was waiting. She was not happy.

The damn weeds again. Hashimoto’s Bakery was a wooden building with a white-painted terrace out front. The terrace was surrounded by potted herbs, with zucchini, cranberries and blueberries down in front where our Afghan hound, Siesta, liked to play with Hiro. It was a peaceful, idyllic environment, but it wasn’t easy to maintain. Summer was humid and the temperature got up to 30 degrees Celsius, not the ideal climate for an English garden. But I had no choice. The tourists liked it and my wife demanded it.

I went and got the sickle and a plastic bag. Of all the weeds in the yard, I hated kudzu the most. It carpeted the ground and engulfed anything vertical, from power poles to fences. It was a tenacious survivor with leaves of poisonous green and thick, sturdy stalks covered with tiny spines. No matter how much I cut it back, it always returned quickly. At the peak of summer, its sweet-smelling clusters of reddish-purple flowers hung beneath the shade of the leaves and looked rather elegant. But in the summer heat, the fragrance was oppressive, like a matron with too much perfume.

The battle began every spring. Even when I thought I had wiped it out, somehow the kudzu always came advancing back from the woods behind the house and the empty lot between us and the pension next door.

After half an hour of combat I was drenched in sweat. I noticed a customer going inside and decided to give the kudzu a rest for the day.

My hands were itching from handling the leaves and stems. I rolled up my sleeves and washed my hands in the sink behind the counter. But no matter how carefully I washed up, the spines from the stems left painful, itching welts on my hands. Okada once remarked casually that the starch in the roots was edible, but I couldn’t picture digging in the dirt for a few extra calories. The kudzu was working me hard enough as it was.

August ended. The neighborhood went from bustling to sleepy, but the days were hot as ever. The owner of the pension next door went to work in a semiconductor plant. His wife took a part-time job in the restaurant near the little train station.

There was bread, but no buyers. We stopped serving coffee for the season. This was fine with my wife, who now had more time to devote to Hiro and recharge her batteries. Our contract to supply factory cafeterias with bread would start in October.

My battle with the kudzu continued.

I had just finished repainting the terrace and was hacking at the vines creeping up the awning supports when I felt the ground heave beneath me. I almost lost my footing and clung to the kudzu for support, still holding the sickle. My wife came running out of the house holding Hiro.

The shaking seemed to go on forever, though it was probably thirty or forty seconds.

By the time the tremors died away, the house was a disaster. None of the furniture was upended, but all the knickknacks were on the floor, and everything in glass on the kitchen sideboard, from soy sauce and olive oil to my bottle of twenty-year-old single malt whisky, had fallen and shattered. There was hardly anywhere to walk amid the liquid and shards of glass.

We were cleaning up gingerly, worried about aftershocks, when the announcement came over the village loudspeakers. The epicenter of the quake was in western Tokyo. Everyone was urged to take shelter in the community center. People started coming out of the pensions and the crafts workshop and gathering in the lot across the street.

Other than the potter four doors down—who was in tears because a piece he’d planned to enter in a competition had been destroyed—everyone was calm. Mainly we were concerned about the safety of family and friends in Tokyo.

“Are you going to the shelter?” I asked our neighbor.

“No. Don’t see that it’s necessary,” he said drily. He had a point. Other than the mess, the house seemed sound, and we had water and food for a few days at least. I didn’t see any sign of fire. Everything down in the village looked quiet.