Hanzai Japan: Fantastical, Futuristic Stories of Crime From and About Japan (29 page)

I pictured them speeding in their four-wheel-drive jeep past lines of people trudging antlike along the roads, finally crashing through underbrush and fording streams to get here.

“Sorry, no idea.” I avoided making eye contact. I was about to get in the car when I glanced at the Jeep and froze. There were splotches of rust red on the bumper and around the mudguards. It looked like they’d hit someone.

I swung round and stared at the stranger. He was an ordinary-looking man in his mid-thirties, wearing a white polo shirt. Just a middle-class consumer buying a piece of the outdoor life with an expensive off-road vehicle. I wondered what kind of hell he’d witnessed and what crimes he’d committed to get here.

The child in the car smiled at me.

On the way home, I passed a few more off-road vehicles with Tokyo license plates: Hachioji, Nerima, Shinagawa. They’d made it to safety ahead of the walkers and were racing around trying to secure food for themselves.

The same scenes kept playing out in shops and along the roadside: people pleading to buy food and being refused. I stopped to watch one exchange at the edge of an irrigation ditch.

“You’ve got lots of food. We drove a hundred and fifty kilometers to get away from Tokyo. We’ve been through a terrible experience. Can’t you give us one ear of corn?”

Another car pulled up. People got out and joined in badgering the farmer. “Don’t you have any human feelings at all?”

The sunburned old man just glared at them. Finally he turned his back, muttered “Go away,” and returned to pulling weeds at the edge of the ditch.

A bit farther down the road, the same thing was happening at Okada’s farm.

“Go away. I’ve got no rice or beans or corn for you. I don’t care how much money you throw at me. You never had to come to a place like this, did you? You could go to 7-Eleven and buy what you needed, twenty-four hours a day. Convenience stores were made for people like you. You don’t belong here. Nothing at the store? Then sit and wait till the food comes. They have deliveries all the time. Isn’t that how the system works?”

He laughed in their faces. I’d never seen him so ecstatic.

The whole thing was nauseating. I started to drive off, but Okada waved me over. I stopped and leaned out the window. He leaned in and whispered to me.

“It looks like there’s no food to be had, pretty much anywhere. The population of Kofu and Takasaki has quadrupled. The refugees are pretty much eating their way through everything.”

“Aren’t any supplies coming in?”

“The government’s paralyzed. Food can’t get through from Osaka because the roads are destroyed, or full of people trying to get out. Supplies from outside Japan are coming soon, but it could be months before people can put the food in their mouths. By then they’ll be starving.”

His expression had changed completely. It was warm and friendly. “If you run out of food, just let me know. I don’t have much, but you’re a friend.”

“Thank you.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say. I was disgusted and drove away quickly.

Toward evening a Mercedes stopped in front of the bakery. Soon there was a hesitant knock at the door. A women in her twenties with expensively styled hair was standing there with two small children. She held out a Thermos and asked for water.

I asked where she had come from. She told me she lived in Kofu and had fled her apartment. I was surprised; Kofu wasn’t in the disaster zone. Her husband had been in Tokyo on business, and after waiting five days she had finally run out of food. By then the stores were empty.

She thought she might find someone who would sell her food if she drove west. And so she had finally ended up all the way out here.

“But you must’ve had something in the house. No rice? No instant noodles?”

She shook her head. There was a convenience store on the first floor of her building. The only thing she had ever bothered to stock up on was snacks for the kids.

She didn’t ask me to bake for her. Her pleas for food must have been refused tens, maybe hundreds of times already. When I handed her the Thermos full of water, she thanked me and turned to go.

“You can rest here for a moment, if you want.” I pointed to the coffee area.

My wife poked me in the back.

“Don’t. She’ll never leave. And there’ll be more like her. You can’t make a habit of inviting strangers into the house.”

My wife, who a few days ago was wallowing in the world of Kenji Miyazawa and Peter Mayle, had suddenly become a flinty realist. I was appalled.

The woman sat her children down under the big larch tree in the front yard. They shared the water and started munching on little cookies.

As I looked closer, I doubted my eyes. The “cookies” were dog kibble. It must have been the only thing they could find in the stores after five days.

I hurried back into the shop. Two of my wife’s butter rolls were left over from yesterday’s batch. She was preoccupied helping our son change his sweaty T-shirt. I grabbed the rolls, went into the garden and pressed them into the woman’s hand.

She looked like she was going to cry. “I’m so sorry,” she said, and drew a thousand-yen bill from her purse.

“You don’t need to pay me.”

“You’re so kind. At least some people are still human.”

I went inside. My wife stood by the window, staring out coldly. “Next it’ll be some old man or woman. You’ll feed them too, I suppose.”

I didn’t answer. If none of this had happened, I never would’ve discovered what my wife was really like. I could have gone on loving her in blissful ignorance.

The next morning the woman and her children were gone. They had probably headed for Nagano in search of food. The village was filling up with people. Every household seemed to be sheltering family and friends who had survived the trek from Tokyo. There were many others with nowhere to stay.

For miles around, in fields or on farmhouse doorsteps, refugees were flashing wads of cash and still being turned away. Strangers were gradually taking over the village, squatting in the grounds of the village shrine, sheltering in the co-op warehouse, or commandeering space at the village hot spring.

Three of Okada’s friends finally arrived too. He’d told me he was expecting to shelter twenty or so people from eight households, assuming they all made it through.

True to his word, he had a sack of soybeans ready when I dropped by.

“It’s nothing much. I’m still an apprentice farmer,” he said awkwardly as he gave it to me. I felt abashed and grateful. My family had nothing but bread to eat.

“Three women came this morning. They must’ve been in their thirties. Wanted me to sell them some corn. They offered to trade me a necklace and a bag, some fashion-house brand. Of course I said no. Finally one of them actually said ‘How about me?’ I almost told her to go look in a mirror, but then I felt sorry for them. So I took all three of their designer bags and gave them some rice.”

I was relieved to hear this. Okada actually had some compassion after all.

“But I didn’t give them anything to put it in. I told them to hold out their hands, and I filled them with rice. You should’ve seen them panic. Finally they had to put it on the ground, take off their tops, pick up every grain and wrap them up. Then they went off in their bras. I don’t know how they planned to cook that rice, but I wish you could’ve seen them down on the ground, picking it up with their tits spilling out.”

“Take it.” I thrust the bag of beans at him. I felt like a coward for even thinking about depending on a man like him for food.

“Whaat?” He gaped with surprise. “What’s wrong? What did I say?”

“I’ll starve before I take food from you.”

Before he could answer, we heard the roar of a car revving its motor. We both looked around, but the road was empty.

It took a few seconds to realize that the noise was coming from Okada’s field, beyond the tall corn. There was a sound of crashing stalks before the huge grill guard of an SUV heaved into view and stopped. I turned instinctively and ran.

“You idiots! What are you doing?” Okada shouted.

The car spun its tires against the fallen corn and lurched toward him. The grill guard struck him with a sickening sound. His body vaulted up onto the hood and over the roof, corkscrewed through the air and plunged headfirst into the tomato patch.

I screamed and covered my face. Okada was tough. He groaned and tried to rise up.

The SUV backed up. Trembling like a fool, I half-hid behind a tree and tried to memorize the license number, thinking they were going to run. But the car made straight for Okada. Its huge tires threw up sprays of soft black earth, crushing the eggplants and tomatoes and pumpkins as it rolled over him and backed up again, spattered with tomatoes and something else that was a deeper red.

Okada’s body was half-entombed in the dirt, but he was still groaning.

The car stopped. Four young men in suits leaped out. They started ripping ears of corn clumsily off the nearest stalks and pitching them into the back of the car.

One of Okada’s friends came running out of the house. The men jumped in the car, gunned it again and went for him. I heard the man scream as he somersaulted through the air and landed in an irrigation ditch. After that he didn’t move.

Their next move was calm and deliberate. They drove across the field to Okada’s storage shed, removed all the rice, soybeans, and whatever else they could lay their hands on, loaded it quickly into the car, and drove off. It was all over in a few minutes.

They probably hadn’t had a plan. At first they must have tried to buy food, but after failing too many times, they’d decided to use their car as a weapon. At first they were only after food that was ready to be harvested, but after killing one person, killing the next one who tried to interfere was easy. After that they’d have no qualms about stealing anything they could.

But at what price? Okada’s lifeless body lay amid the flattened remains of his garden. What had he died for? His unshakable faith in the coming food crisis had found its ultimate vindication, but his beloved crops—for which he had given up his family, his Tokyo home, his social standing, and nearly all his money—had been ground into the dirt, and he had been robbed not only of them, but of his life.

I retrieved Okada’s final gift of soybeans and raced to the police box, five minutes away. The little hut was locked and dark. In the last few days the village seemed to have filled with strangers. With trouble breaking out all over, I could hardly expect to find the officer relaxing in his chair. No, there was more than trouble. We were descending into lawlessness. The police, the armed forces, the government, they were all floundering. Japan’s command and control systems had broken down completely.

The soybeans were missing when I got back to the car. I’d been in such a hurry to find a policeman, I’d left the key in the ignition. The car was untouched; the bag in the front seat was the only thing missing. I clucked my tongue in frustration and turned toward home, feeling helpless.

As I emerged from the village I almost ran over a young man in a T-shirt who sprinted in front of me. I slammed on the brakes and saw a farmer in hot pursuit, brandishing a hoe. The youth was clutching an entire soybean plant. The farmer caught up to him and started beating him with the hoe.

When I arrived home, the metal shutters were down. I’d never closed them before, even outside business hours. I went through the back and found my wife clutching Hiro. She was nearly apoplectic.

“Somebody tried to get in here. They heard you were giving out bread.” She glared at me with moist eyes that flashed with panic and fear and anger. “You knew this would happen if you helped one of them.”

“What happened?”

My wife drew our Afghan hound close and stroked his long, slender neck.

“Siesta is a better protector than you are.” She showed me the pot on the stove. It was filled with soup and flour dumplings. “This is dinner. I can’t bake anymore, they’ll smell it. I don’t want those people to come back.”

I couldn’t ignore the sense of dread rising in the back of my mind. Another incident like this and we might have to flee. But we had nowhere to go. If we left, we would be refugees too. We had enough food to survive for the time being, but we’d be very vulnerable if we couldn’t use the car. All this time I’d been thinking about food without realizing that our local filling station might run out of gas at any time.

I rushed back to the car. I had to get the tank filled.

On the way, I passed a family squatting by their car at the edge of a drainage ditch, peering at the tires. They would have driven over rubble and debris to get here, and even the toughest all-terrain tire is not immune to punctures, but all four of their tires were blown.

When I got down out of the foothills, I saw a farmer in a broad-brimmed straw hat by the roadside, biting her lower lip. The black earth of the field behind her was crisscrossed with tire trails. Her vegetables had been pulled out by the roots.

I saw the same thing in other fields. Okada had warned everyone that a food crisis was coming, but he thought the cities would be vulnerable, that people with farmland in the countryside would be safe. I sighed.