12.02 Airport

The van arrives with none other than my old pal Terahara behind the wheel.

The guard and I get into the back seat, the sliding door is shut, and off we go.

Customs has their offices on the first floor of the international terminal of Fukuoka Airport. As I’m led through the halls, escorted by a phalanx of cops and guards, people scurry out of the way. For all they know, I could be a killer, a rapist, a mad dog.

I hold my head high. At times of great mortification, all you really can do is make a big show of how nothing bothers you. Bow your head in shame and you’ll appear all the more wretched.

Under my breath, however, I’m chanting, Hail Mary, full of grace . . . Hail Mary, full of grace . . . Hail Mary.

They take me to a large room, packed with many of the same people who raided my apartment a lifetime ago. There’s Windbreaker, and, of course, that smelly loser Kojima. Nakata is present, too.

Right off the bat, Nakata tells me he has a note that he’d like me to copy down and sign. The note says the phone call to my cousin will be made to “establish my innocence or guilt”.

Guilt. I swallow hard. That’s not a word I want to hear right now.

The guard, who has accompanied me from the cell to the airport, undoes one of the cuffs, freeing my right hand. I sit down at a table and begin copying the note.

Then, for God knows what reason, Nakata changes his fickle little mind, scratches out the bit about innocence and guilt and writes: “establish the facts”. He gives me a fresh sheet of paper and tells me to copy the revised sentence down the note exactly as it is.

“With the scratched out words too?” I ask.

“No, copy down everything but the scratched out words.”

“What about this bit,” I say pointing to the paper.

Nakata whisks the paper away from me, reads through it, then makes some more scratches, another notation, and tells me to write it as it is now.

“Without the scratch marks.”

“Without the scratch marks. Just the words.”

“Just the words, right,” I say, copying the note down.

The guard standing behind me, my leash in his hand, looks over my shoulder, and says, “Ooh, nice handwriting.”

Windbreaker comments that my handwriting is better than Nakata’s, causing everyone but Nakata to chuckle.

When I’m finished, I sign the note and affix my fingerprint to it.

We then move to another table where a telephone has been connected to portable digital recorder. A clock on the wall says it’s ten.

I ask Nakata what time they told my cousin I would be calling. Seven in the evening is the answer. Kojima pulls out a shabby looking plastic time zone converter the size of a business card from an old wallet. He adjusts the dial to ten o’clock our time then points to its D.C. equivalent: seven p.m.

Buffoon.

“It’s not seven p.m. in D.C., it’s eight,” I tell him.

“Eight?”

“Daylight-saving time.”

The idiot stands there stupefied, mouthing “dayright-o sabingu taimu“, eyes rolled up into head as if he were running his fingers through a dusty file in his brain to find the word.

“Summer time,” I offer.

“Oops!”

“Kojima!” Nakata shouts.

If you would like to continue reading No.6, kindly visit Amazon.

© Aonghas Crowe, 2010. All rights reserved. No unauthorized duplication of any kind.

注意：この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

The complete version of No. 6 is now available for a variety of devices and computers at Amazon’s Kindle store.

The first installment of No. 6 can be found here:

Read more from Aonghas Crowe here.

12.01 Dark Clouds

Ah fuck, just what I need.

The temperature dipped last night and now I’m coming down with a cold. I cough up a ball of phlegm in the morning.

That’s the least of my problems though.

I’m starting to worry about what Naila might say when, no if, we are able to speak to one another.

Talk about nerves: I’ve got a goddamn flock of butterflies fluttering in my stomach.

After breakfast and a sorely needed bath and shave, a guard in his fifties comes to the cell to fetch me. He’s wearing a short-sleeved, red and blue plaid shirt that is tucked neatly into regulation pants and a black leather belt with the telltale wisteria emblem of the Justice Ministry on the belt buckle.

He leads me to the same dressing room where the yakuza and I did the Full Monty yesterday. I change my battered slippers for another pair that don’t quite fit. The guard then pulls out an extra-large navy windbreaker from a locker. He tells me to put it on and stuff my hands into the pockets. When I do slip them in, I’m surprised to find that they aren’t pockets at all, but holes. Lifting the front of the jacket up to expose my hands, he slaps on a pair of handcuffs. He proceeds to wrap the rope around my waist twice and ties a knot at in the small of my back.

Trust me, you never can get used to this humiliation.

The guard gets a call on his cell phone. The minivan that will be taking us to the airport is stuck in traffic, so the guard brings me to another room where I’m told to sit and wait. In the meantime, I go over all the things I’ll ask my cousin.

Rémy, you cannot fuck this up.

I offer up another rosary just in case there’s anyone up there listening and to rid my mind off of all the worries clouding it.

© Aonghas Crowe, 2010. All rights reserved. No unauthorized duplication of any kind.

注意：この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

The complete version of No. 6 is now available for a variety of devices and computers at Amazon’s Kindle store.

The first installment of No. 6 can be found here:

Read more from Aonghas Crowe here.

 

11.10 Evening News

Back in the cell, Gilligan comes round with dinner: fried horse mackerel with the tail fin still attached, cucumber and spaghetti salad, barley rice, and miso soup. It looks like something a cat might happily dine on.

Meow!

*

At five in the evening the final inspection of the day is carried out.

“Cell number twenty-four!” the guard barks.

“Number Six!” I bark back.

“Ho!” he says moving on to my neighbor. “Cell number twenty-five!”

When the inspection is over I sit back against the sticky wall and watch the rain fall outside. Harder and harder it falls, punctuated by the occasional clap of distant thunder.

A guard passes by with a slip of paper that needs my fingerprint. I stick my finger into the gummy ink, and mark the appropriate boxes. He removes the top sheet, gives me the duplicate and leaves, not uttering a single word.

The slip of paper tells me that the incommunicado order will lifted from ten tomorrow morning until noon.

Two measly hours!

Israeli children writing messages on bombs to be droped on Lebanese civilians

The loudspeaker crackles to life. “NHK Evening News,” the announcer begins. “Lebanon. More than two hundred Lebanese have died, including nine children killed in an air raid in the southern town of Aytaroun. The Red Crescent Society condemns Israel’s attack on a medical and relief convoy in Lebanon . . . ”

Fucking Israelis.

“Oh, manager of the Fukuoka Softbank Hawks, has undergone an operation to remove his stomach after being diagnosed with early stages of stomach cancer. The cancer had spread to one lymph node, which was also removed. He is expected to make a full recovery and leave the hospital within ten days.”

Continuing: “South Korea and Japan agreed Tuesday to cooperate in efforts to curb falling birthrates. South Korea’s fertility rate in two-thousand and five was one-point-o-eight, the lowest on record and far below the two-point-one needed to maintain the population. Japan’s fertility rate dropped to one-point-two-five births per woman in the same year, the lowest since the government began keeping track.”

More: “Two Japanese high school students have won gold medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad in Slovenia. Japan finished seventh over all, the highest ever for a Japanese team. The two, Yuta Ohashi and Masaki Watanabe, both seventeen years old, are second year students at Komaba High School in Tsukuba.”

The news report finishes with a weather forecast and a warning for heavy showers, thunder, and possible flooding.

When the news is over, the god of the squawk box changes the channel to RKB where a baseball game between the Softbank Hawks and archrivals Seibu Lions is just starting.

 

*

© Aonghas Crowe, 2010. All rights reserved. No unauthorized duplication of any kind.

注意：この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

No. 6 is now available on Kindle.

The first installment of No. 6 can be found here:

Read more from Aonghas Crowe here:

11.09 Nambu

Before sending me back to my cell, Ozawa informs me that he won’t be joining me the airport tomorrow; he’ll be at gun practice.

“Gun practice?” I say. “Well, I’ll be. What do you carry?”

“A New Nambu M-Sixty Minebea thirty-eight.”

“That’s a revolver, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“No automatics, then.”

“Nah.”

“Do you always carry a gun?”

“Not always, no,” Ozawa says.

“There’s something that I’ve been wondering about,” I say.

“Shoot.”

“When you, um, paid me that friendly visit Thursday morning . . . ”

“Yeah?”

“I didn’t notice anyone carrying a gun. Were any of you armed?”

“No.”

“Not a single one of you?”

“None of us had a gun,” Ozawa says as if it is the most natural thing in the world not to “pack heat” during a drug raid.

“Amazing,” I say. “I can’t imagine there are many countries where the police raid an apartment unarmed. Definitely not in the U.S. There, it’s usually, shoot first, shoot second, shoot several more times for effect, and if the suspect is still breathing, give him a pummeling for not cooperating, and then, only then, start asking questions. They rush into homes, guns cocked, ready to shoot if someone so much as farts.”

“We take other precautions.”

“Oh? Such as?”

“Numbers.”

“Strength in numbers, right,” I say. “Another things that surprised me was how many police were involved in the raid. I mean, you just guys kept piling in, one right after the other. I counted thirteen.”

My lucky number.

“We had fifteen men enter the premises with us, plus another four waiting outside by the exits of your building.”

“Man oh man,” I say, shaking my head with disbelief. “Is it normal to bring so many guys with you on a raid?”

“Nah, but, then, we didn’t know what to expect, to tell you the truth.”

“Better safe, than sorry.”

“Yeah.”

“So, what’s the point in having a gun at all?” I ask. “I’ve heard that cops who fire their weapons on the line of duty are often reprimanded. Just pointing a loaded gun at someone is enough to get you in the doghouse, right?”

“Yeah.”

“So have you?”

“Have I what?”

“Have you ever drawn your weapon at a suspect?”

“Never.”

“Seems silly to me to carry a gun when you’re not allowed to use it.”

“Times have changed,” Ozawa says.

“What has?”

“The policy towards firing your weapon.”

“So, you can fire your weapon?”

“If there’s no other option, yes.”

“No other option? Surely, there’s always another option.”

“There was an incident just the other day,” Nakata says. “Two scumbags, high on amphetamines, stole a car. An officer trying to stop them got mowed down. Another officer managed to get off a couple of shots off, killing the driver. The passenger got away.”

“Like I said,” Ozawa says, “times have changed.”

“Sheesh, sounds like it.”

“Crimes that were unthinkable when I joined the squad, happen all the time now.”

“I had no idea.”

 

*

© Aonghas Crowe, 2010. All rights reserved. No unauthorized duplication of any kind.

注意：この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

No. 6 is now available on Kindle.

The first installment of No. 6 can be found here:

Read more from Aonghas Crowe here:

 

11.08 Sushi

“Living in Japan has it’s own problems, though,” I say.

“Oh?” says Ozawa

“Well, for one, no matter how well I speak the language, no matter how high I climb up the ladder, I will always be a gaijin and being a gaijin comes with its own handicaps.”

“What kind?”

“There is still a lot of discrimination here, sorry to say. It’s hard to rent an apartment without a guarantor.”

Nakata cuts in to say that Japanese have to jump through the same hoops.

“I know, I know. But, trust me: it is harder for us.” The hoops we have to jump through are smaller and on fire. “On the ranking of undesirable tenants, gaijin fall somewhere between call girls and former yakuza.”

The two of them snicker. As national civil service personnel they can well afford to laugh: few men are as coddled as the smug little public servant in Japan. Realtors and creditors rub their sweaty palms with anticipation when a prospective client mentions he is a civil servant. Financing? More than available. Credit is approved as a matter of course, and lickety-split the deal is done and you’ve got a rabbit hutch you can call home.

Years ago when I was searching for another apartment to rent as an office, some landlords wouldn’t even let me in to see the goddamn property. Many who did were remarkably candid in telling me they would not rent to gaijin. Period. Well, fuck you, too.

“That’s just the beginning of it,” I say. “Some restaurants, bars, hotels, you name it, won’t even serve foreigners.”

Two half-sympathetic nods.

“In this day and age, in a country which considers itself modern, that’s extraordinary and you Japanese ought to be more ashamed of it. Gaijin are treated today the way blacks in the American South used to be treated.”

“Oh, come on,” Nakata protests.

“Now, now, Nakata-san. To be honest, those kinds of things don’t really bother me. I’m just a guest here, after all. I don’t expect anyone to change just to accommodate me. Besides, with all the foreigners now making Japan their home, and the number of children with mixed parentage increasing those attitudes are eventually going to soften.”

Ozawa nods his tan head. The man is as brown as a nut and yet here he is spending another day with me indoors. Makes you wonder if he goes to a tanning salon on his day off.

“That said, there is still something that just drives me up the wall.”

“What’s that?” Ozawa asks.

“Well, whenever I walk into a restaurant or shop for the first time there is this tension that is so thick you can slice ‘n’ dice it: the staff’s eyes widen, their bodies stiffen. It’s what you’d expect a small critter to do if it was cornered by, say, a rotweiler. In their heads, I imagine, there must be a tempest of contradictory thoughts: escape while I’ve got the chance, beat the gaijin off with a wooden sword, pretend not to see him . . . “

The two of them are chuckling.

“I’m glad you’re enjoying this, but as God–wherever the hell you are–is my witness, I am telling you I have to put up with this day in and day out . . .”

“They’re just nervous because they don’t speak English,” Nakata says.

“Uh, there’s a bit more to it than that,” I say. “I speak Japanese. My pronunciation might not be perfect . . . ”

Nakata tells me that it is.

“Think you can make a fool of me?” I shoot back, eliciting embarrassed giggling from the customs official. “I know what my Japanese sounds like.”

“It really is good,” Ozawa says.

“Thank you.”

Outside the window the sky great dark clouds are billowing up in the sky.

Tut, tut, looks like rain, Christopher Robins.

Even if my Japanese were as good as the two claim, people here still look at me as if a dog has stood up on its hind legs and barked konnichiwa. Their brains are so addled they can’t reconcile two seemingly contradictory stimuli: one, seeing the gaijin before them and, two, hearing Japanese.

And what drives me up the fucking wall is the insipid conversations inflicted on you once you’ve established that you do indeed understand Japanese. They’ll ask you if you’ve been in Japan long, whether you can eat sushi, eat with chopsticks, or even whether you find the town you’re in to be livable. How many times have I had to answer these questions? Too goddamn many. I’ve fucking had it with small talk.

Nakata asks me if I like sushi.

 

 

*

© Aonghas Crowe, 2010. All rights reserved. No unauthorized duplication of any kind.

注意：この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

No. 6 is now available on Kindle.

The first installment of No. 6 can be found here:

Read more from Aonghas Crowe here:

 

11.07 Gray

It suddenly dawns on Ozawa that we are all here in this interrogation room for reasons other than to bullshit; he changes the topic of conversation and walks me through tomorrow’s routine.

“You’ll be taken to the airport early tomorrow morning,” he says.

“Why the airport,” I ask.

“We haven’t got the equipment to make the call here at the jail,” Ozawa replies.

“Equipment? How’s about a phone?”

“Recording equipment, smartarse. We need to record the conversation.”

“Can’t you just record the conversation on a cell phone?”

“You can do that?” Nakata asks with amazement.

“Yes,” I say. “Well, at least on mine you can.”

“Boy, what’ll they think of next,” Nakata says with a cluck of his tongue.

“Skype.”

“What?”

“Skype is what they thought up next,” I say. “It’s free software that allows for free computer-to-computer video conferencing.”

“Free?” Ozawa interjects crustily. “How do they make any money?”

“Beats me,” I say.

“Okay, okay, okay,” Ozawa, says, trying to lasso the conversation. “A phone”, he says, “a land line will be set up at the customs office at the airport. You’ll make the call at ten in the morning.”

“Will my cousin be expecting the call?”

“She will,” he answered. “Ms. Stern has agreed to cooperate with us.”

I don’t know if I should stand up and rejoice or shit my pants.

“When you talk to her,” Ozawa continues, “try not to be angry. We need her to talk.”

“I’ll do what I can,” I say.

“Great.”

Ozawa sits back and, yawning loudly, stretches his arms high above his head.

That’s it? They came all this way just to tell me to make nice with my cousin when I call?

I can’t believe the two would take time out of their busy schedules just for this, and, yet, we spend the next hour or so prattling away like three buddies in a Starbucks. Mind you, I am not complaining–anything’s better than sitting cross-legged on a sponge in that miserable, little cell–I just can’t understand what all the urgency in putting me behind bars was when the “interrogations” would end up being so pedestrian.

With his head against the wall, Ozawa asks if I find Fukuoka a livable place.

I confess! I did it! I did it!

“Everyone’s always asking me that,” I reply with a sigh, “and I never quite know how to answer.”

“It’s a simple question,” he says.

“It is, yes, but I often get the impression that people really don’t want to know what I feel about the place. Rather, they’re just prodding me into telling them what a wonderful city Fukuoka is. Is Fukuoka a good city? Yes, quite. It’s clean, and by clean I don’t mean beautiful because like most Japanese cities it isn’t. Frankly speaking, it’s ugly, but it is clean.”

“I never noticed,” Ozawa says.

Sadly, the drug enforcement agent is telling the truth.

In Tokyo, there’s a famous bridge, called the Nihonbashi (lit. Japan Bridge) that crosses a river of the same name.

The original wooden Nihonbashi, which features prominently in ukiyo-e prints was constructed in 1603. The stone bridge spanning the river today was built in 1911 and is representative of the architecture of the Meiji Era, which was heavily influenced by British design.

A popular sightseeing spot for Japanese today, many Japanese visiting the capital from the provinces have their picture taken at the bridge, which is considered the center of Tôkyô, and the point of reference used when measuring the distance from the city.

Until the 1960s, Mt. Fuji was still visible from the bridge. Any view you might want to enjoy today, however, has been blighted by an expressway that passes overhead.

I brought the eyesore to the attention of a middle-aged woman who was showing me some snapshots from a recent trip to Tokyo.

“This would have been a beautiful view,” I said, “if the Ministry in charge of roads hadn’t ruined it by constructing this ugly highway.”

She was surprised to hear that. Focused so intently on the bridge itself, lost in myopic nostalgia, she hadn’t even given a thought to the highway and the noisy traffic roaring ahead.

But that’s the way it is with the Japanese. They can find a dandelion in a dunghill and consider its beauty worthy of a haiku. The unthinking acceptance of concrete as progress has allowed the government to pave over the country creating a monster of modernity.

And Japanese will tell you that they haven’t noticed.

A city like Fukuoka is only moderately better. Without any semblance of an overall plan, though, it has become an architectural free-for-all, left to the capricious collusion of greedy property developers, landowners, and unthinking bureaucrats.

But, yes, Fukuoka is clean. I’ll hand it that. There’s no litter in the streets, hardly any graffiti on the walls. The Japanese tend to respect public property, other people’s property, which is something American and European youth might consider emulating before they spray, scratch, or scrawl their name on a wall like a mongrel marking it’s territory with piss.

“The food is good, too,” I say. “You can duck under the noren curtain of just about any restaurant in my neighborhood of Daimyô and be fairly certain of getting a reasonably priced meal that will knock your socks off.”

“Got that right,” Ozawa says, closing his eyes and imagining, I suspect, a big bowl of Hakata tonkotsu (pork bone) ramen.

“Now, Ozawa-san, if you’re asking me whether it’s easy for a foreigner to live in this town, then you’re asking the wrong guy.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because I’ve been out of place my whole life. I don’t know what it’s like to feel at home.”

“Oh?” he says, straightening up.

“Ever since I was a kid,” I tell him, “I’ve been going back to my father’s hometown of Avignon, near the south of France. I speak the language all right, not perfect of course, but I manage, and have a French name. You’d think I’d be able to kick back and enjoy myself there. The local French, though, they take one look at my face and see an Arab. If I tell them, that I’m not Arab, that I’m half Lebanese, the tension eases up a bit, but not a whole lot. They don’t consider me half-French, they see me as being Lebanese. And, well, if you’re half French, you’re half of nothing and half of nothing is nothing, after all.”

“Remarkable,” says Nakata, leaning forward and propping his pudgy mug up in the palm of his left hand. “I had no idea it was like that there.”

“In America it’s not much different. Even though I was born there and spent most of my life there. I’ve never managed to fit in.”

“Why not?” Ozawa asks.

“Beats me! America’s supposed to be a country of immigrants, people coming from every corner on the earth, many only two or three generations earlier. You’d think that with all that rich culture pouring into the U.S., the country would have this rich cultural heritage and celebrate their roots more. Your average American, however, couldn’t care less about what is happening outside the country. The ignorance is pervasive and entrenched.”

“Really?” Ozawa shakes his head with disbelief.

“Honest,” I say. “There was something I read a few years back. An overwhelming number of Americans supported attacking Iraq. I don’t remember what the exact number was, but it was outrageously high. Scandalously high when you consider the war was based on bald-faced lies.”

“Aren’t they all?” Nakata says.

“Yeah, they usually are,” I have to admit. “There’s a saying in English: the first casualty of war is the truth. It has been especially true with this second war with Iraq. Anyways, back to what I was saying . . . Even though most Americans were gung-ho about gittin’ Saddam Hussein, a survey found that your average American patriot couldn’t even locate Iraq on a world map.”

The shoulders of my two interrogators jiggle up and down, their chests spasm.

“Fortunately,” Ozawa says barely able to contain himself, “the U.S. has those smart bombs, otherwise they’d be bombing Fukuoka by mistake.”

The two of them bursts out laughing, and I might be joining them if only those bombs really were smart. How many Iraqi civilians have been blown apart by these so-called smart bombs. How many otherwise ordinary Arabs have been inspired to commit terrorist acts by all the innocent murdered by the touted pin-point accuracy of these not so smart bombs?

“After the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center,” I say, “things have gone from bad to worse in the U.S. for anyone of Middle-eastern descent.”

“How so?” Nakata says.

“Well, for one, just looking Arab is enough to earn you all kinds of grief. Right after nine-eleven, some ignorant redneck shot and killed an Indian Sikh because he mistook him for an Arab.”

“I heard about that,” Nakata says.

“It’s also a hassle at airports,” I say. “The customs and immigrations officials in the U.S. aren’t as sophisticated as they are here, Nakata-san.”

The Customs official grows an inch.

“Show the authorities your American passport,” I continue, “and, they’ll examine it as it were a forgery. Once they’re satisfied that the passport is legitimate, they then turn their suspicions to all the stamps, jumping out of the pages, like little jihadiis waving red flags–Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, U.A.E., Qatar, Malaysia. They can’t imagine why someone in their right mind would ever want to travel to an Islamic country. Having a French name hasn’t helped either: the French have been personae non gratae since their opposition to the war.”

“Interesting,” says Ozawa. “I always thought that America was more tolerant of different races. What is it called, the ‘melting pan’, something like that?”

“No, no, that’s not it. It’s called the ‘melting frypan’,” says Nakata confidently.

“Guys, guys, it’s the ‘melting pot’.”

“That’s right,” Ozawa says, looking the world up on his electronic dictionary. “Meru-tingu potto. Ah hah, there you are!”

Melting pot, smelting pot.

“You know how when you mix all kinds of paints and end up with a muddy gray?” I ask.

“Yeah?”

“Well, that’s what America is.”

God help me, I’m starting to sound like my father.

 

 

*

© Aonghas Crowe, 2010. All rights reserved. No unauthorized duplication of any kind.

注意：この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

No. 6 is now available on Kindle.

The first installment of No. 6 can be found here:

Read more from Aonghas Crowe here:

 

11.06 Burakumin

In the afternoon, I’m summoned to the interrogation room where Nakata and Ozawa are waiting for me.

Both of them are in an easy, light-hearted mood today. The desk is free of notebook computers; there are no heavy bags filled with thick folders of evidence on the floor.

Ozawa is slouched comfortably in his seat, tanned fingers locked behind his head.

“What was the name of that Korean restaurant you mentioned last week?” he asks.

“Kanyô,” I say, taking my usual seat, still bolted to the floor.

“Where was that again?”

“It’s in Taihaku Machi, a rough neighborhood near the Chidori Bridge.”

“Taihaku Machi?”

“Along the Mikasa River, across from Chiyo Machi.”

“Chiyo? Ugh!” he says grimacing. “Why is it that all the good Korean restaurants have to be located in the shittiest part of town?”

Nakata asks me if I know what Eta is. I shrug.

Ozawa tries to look it up in his electronic dictionary, but can’t find it.

“Figures,” he grumbles.

“How do you write it,” I ask.

Ozawa scribbles the following two kanji in his notebook: 穢多 The first character, 穢, he says, can be read as kitanai and means filthy. It can also be read as kegare. Finding the entry, Ozawa spins his dictionary around to show me that kegare means impurity, stain, sin, and disgrace. The other, more common character, 多, pronounced ta, or ôi, means plenty, or many. So, eta, connotes something that is abundantly filthy or impure.

Then it hits me that the eta Nakata is alluding to is yet another word that editors of Japanese-English dictionaries conveniently omit: buraku-min.

The Buraku-min (lit. hamlet people) were a class of outcasts in feudal Japan who lived in secluded hamlets outside of populated areas where they engaged in occupations considered to be vitiated with death and impurity such as butchering, leather working, grave-digging, tanning and executions.

For the Shintô who believed that cleanliness was truly next to godliness, those who habitually killed animals or committed otherwise heinous acts were considered to be contaminated by the spiritual filth of their acts and thereby evil themselves. As this impurity was believed to be hereditary, Buraku-min were restricted from living outside their designated hamlets and not allowed to marry ordinary people. In some cases they were even forced to wear special costumes, footwear, and identifying marks.

The Emancipation Edict of 1871 intended to eradicate the institutionalized discrimination and the former outcasts were formally recognized as citizens. However, thanks to family registries, known as koseki, which are assiduously kept by officials in every Japanese city, town and village, it was easy to identify who was Buraku-min from their ancestral home, and discrimination against them continued.

Shortly after coming to Japan, the wife of a company president once confided to me that she and her husband might be willing let his daughter, God forbid, marry an ethnic Korean, but would never countenance her marrying a Buraku-min. He would never hire one, either.

“Never? Regardless of the person’s talent?” I asked.

“The damage to the image of my husband’s company would be far greater than any benefit such an employee could ever bring.”

And that’s how it goes in this sophisticated democracy: you can still be discriminated against just because your great-great-great grandfather had a shitty job.

Today there are some four thousand five hundred Dôwa Chiku, or former Buraku communities that were designated by the government in the late sixties for the so-called assimilation projects. Over the next three decades, housing projects and cultural facilities were constructed, and infrastructure improved in the dowa chiku to raise the standard of living of the residents of those areas.

There are an estimated two million descendents of Buraku-min in Japan today, most of whom live in the western part of the country, particularly in the Kansai area around Osaka, and in Fukuoka Prefecture.

“Chiyo’s a Dôwa Chiku,” Nakata says. “Crawling with Eta.”

“I know,” I say.

“You do?”

The fact was first brought to my attention many years ago when I was searching for an apartment. A kindly old woman I had just met was all too eager to help me. She pulled out a map of the city from her handbag and, without elaborating, began crossing out “undesirable places”, many of them located along the rivers. When I asked why, she said: “Trust me, you don’t want to live there.” And so I did, finding a cheap one-room apartment in one of the tonier areas near Ôhori Park.

“Those people are nothing but trouble,” Nakata says. “Riffraff the lot of them.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

He leans forward, resting his rotund chest against the desk. “There were a lot of Eta in my hometown when I was young. Nothing, but trouble. If you ever got in a fight with one these Eta bastards, the next thing you know, you’re surrounded by a group of them. Sneaky guttersnipes.”

The thought of Nakata as a chubby little kid in glasses getting the snot beaten out of him by a gang of Buraku boys almost causes a laugh to percolate out of me.

“Surely not all of them?” I say.

“Yes, all of them,” Nakata replies and sits back, brushing his wimpy salt and pepper mustache with his fingers.

Ozawa asks if I’ve heard of the Yamaguchi Gumi.

“The yakuza gang?”

“Yeah. Biggest crime syndicate in Japan. It’s mostly comprised of these Eta scum.”

“Most yakuza gangs are,” says Nakata.

“I had no idea,” I say.

“Nothing but trouble,” Nakata says again.

“Say, what’s the deal with the girls working the food stalls at the festivals,” I ask. “I’ve heard they’re run by the yakuza.”

“They are. The girls are Eta bitches,” Nakata replies.

“Pretty damn cute bitches,” I say.

Dregs of Japanese society or not, quite a few of the young girls working at festivals are knockouts.

After fifteen years, Japan can still be an enigmatic country. One thing I’ve never been quite able to figure out is why the best-born Japanese girls are so homely. The ugly daughters of good families, I call them. And, at the risk of being stabbed by some right wing nut, I must add that at the top of that ignoble list of repellent bluebloods is Princess Nori who only last year managed to find a suitably humdrum partner at the ripe age of thirty-five.

“Cute they are,” says Ozawa snickering. “Cute they are. Every evening in Chiyo you’ll see small armies of the chicks all dolled up hopping into taxis. Off to Nakasû. Shoot the breeze with one of them and some yakuza prick will strut on up and start breakin’ your balls as if you were hitting on his woman. That’s when the badge comes in handy, of course. Hee-hee.”

“I wouldn’t go near one of those girls with a barge-pole,” Nakata pipes in.

As if the man has to beat the girls away with a stick.

“There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you,” I say.

“Shoot,” says 0zawa.

“A lot of the guys in the joint here, and last week at the jail at the Prefectural Police Headquarters, for that matter, are obviously yakuza.”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t get it.”

“Don’t get what?”

“In the States, there is, among so many crime syndicates, the Cosa Nostra, the Sicilian Mafia, right? You know, The Godfather, and all that. Well, these guys used to bend over backwards to deny that the Mafia even existed. Here in Japan, though, the yakuza advertise their criminal activity with missing pinkies, lapel pins, and bodies covered in tattoos.”

It borders on the absurd. If cops were seriously interested in taking a bite out of crime, the first thing they ought to do is clamp down on these shady characters. The police, of course, will counter that they aren’t in the business of preventing crime: they can’t make any arrests until a crime had been committed. Which begs the question of why someone like me has to molder away in a stinking cell.

“The ones who strut and swagger,” Ozawa says, “are good-for-nothing punks. All bluster and no brawl. They kick up a fuss because they don’t have the balls to actually do anything. No, the yakuza you really have to watch out for are the quiet ones, the ones who never raise their voices, or show their tattoos. Those bastards will whack a person at the drop of a hat.”

“Better get a hat with a strap then.”

© Aonghas Crowe, 2010. All rights reserved. No unauthorized duplication of any kind.

注意：この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

The complete version of No. 6 is now available for a variety of devices and computers at Amazon’s Kindle store.

The first installment of No. 6 can be found here:

Read more from Aonghas Crowe here.

 

11.05 Tats

The bus pulls up to the gate of the jail. When it opens we rumble on through, veering sharply to the left and passing a pathetic little ornamental garden with savagely cropped pines. The bus stops before a large garage door, weathered and rusting. A faded sign reminds the driver to turn off the engine.

As soon as the engine is cut, the garage door rises, groaning and complaining all the way up.

A guard standing behind the driver draws the curtain between the two of them and the rest of us, closing the only peephole to the outside world we have had during the journey.

The engine is starts up and we move forward into a darkened area, where the engine is cut again. As the shutter closes behind us, the bus darkens, hope dims.

A few moments later, the shutter in front of the bus opens. The driver turns the ignition. The engine sputters irritably, a shudder moves through the bus, and we begin to edge forward.

When the bus has come to a stop, the door is opened and the prisoners start to waddle out with their guards following close behind.

The guards corral the eight of us into a small room, where an old carpet is rolled out onto the concrete floor. One by one the handcuffs are removed.

The others know the routine from here: they step out of their rubber slippers and onto the carpet where they begin stripping down to their birthday suits.

The man standing butt-naked next to me has a tattoo of the bodhisattva (guânyîn) Kannon, Goddess of Mercy covering the whole of his back. Only a moment earlier, he was wearing a simple gray Asics track suit and sneakers, dressed like a typical middle-aged family man would be on his day off. Now he’s glaring at the young guard before him, hands tightened in a white fist, ready to show no mercy if provoked into a fight.

Another man near me has a giant indigo carp being wrestled from the waves by a blood red demon. The massive tattoo covers every inch of skin from his breast, up and over his shoulders, down his back and over his arse to his thighs.

He drops his boxer shorts and I can see that he has been naughty with his genitalia.

Of the eight men who hobbled out of the bus and into that room, only the skin of broken-down old man and myself is not suitably illustrated. Standing next to these illustrated men, their bodies covered with an armor of ink, I can’t help but feel utterly naked, like Adam clutching a handful of fig leaves.

© Aonghas Crowe, 2010. All rights reserved. No unauthorized duplication of any kind.

注意：この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

No. 6 is now available on Kindle.

The first installment of No. 6 can be found here:

Read more from Aonghas Crowe here:

 

11.04 Dogs

At the beginning of spring, when the chill of winter has lifted and the cherry blossoms have been blown away, the long slender branches of the willow trees along Meiji Dori begin to put forth leaves. By July, the trees are full and the branches stretch all the way down to the sidewalk forming a gently arching canopy of lush green.

And that’s how it is today.

Thanks to last night’s rain, it’s not nearly as muggy today as it was yesterday. Office ladies and salarymen eat their lunches outside on concrete benches below the willows. Housewives walk their dogs along the moat surrounding the stone fortifications of the castle.

A yellow van, parked near an intersection, is selling bentô. Office workers in short-sleeved button down shirts, road construction laborers in hard hats and reflector strips over their chests, and OLs in their navy uniforms have queued up to buy lunch.

The bus stops at a red light.

Two high school girls in their sailor uniforms cover their mouths as they laugh. A young couple is waiting for the signal to change. Their hands clasped, they look very much in love.

The world beyond the dark curtains, metal grill, and reinforced tinted glass of the police bus is undeniably beautiful. How many of the people outside know it? It’s a cliché, I know, but true even so, that you don’t really appreciate what you’ve got until you’ve lost it.

I wonder, too, if the people outside the bus have any idea what a pack of miserable stray dogs, tails tucked between their legs, are now being hauled back to the pound. You’d think that at least one of us would bark or bay or howl, but no, not a single one lets out so much as a little whimper.

© Aonghas Crowe, 2010. All rights reserved. No unauthorized duplication of any kind.

注意：この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

No. 6 is now available on Kindle.

The first installment of No. 6 can be found here:

Read more from Aonghas Crowe here:

 

11.03 Do Not Pass Go!

The prosecutor is dressed more casually than when I first met her a over a week ago. Today she’s wearing an unflattering yellow blouse with a frilly collar, several fashion cycles out of date. Her long brown hair is done up in a bun giving her the look of an undersexed librarian.

Not that I would win any beauty contests myself looking and smelling the way I do.

“Have you gotten used to jail?” the prosecutor asks.

“Only an animal could ever get used to a place like that,” I say. If the chair weren’t bolted to the floor, I might chuck it at the bitch.

“I’m lifting the incommunicado order. We’re going to let you leave jail for a short trip. Tomorrow morning you’ll be taken to the airport where we’d like you to call your cousin. The conversation will be recorded. Will you do that?”

Do I have a choice?

“Yes,” I say. “Anything to help clear this matter up.”

And that’s that. The guard puts the handcuffs back on me and leads me out of her office, down two flights of stairs and back to where the police bus is waiting.

*

As I’m the only one being transported in the bus now, the curtain is left open, providing me a tunnel view out the front of the bus.

We’re so close to my apartment. I know every nook and cranny of this neighborhood, know it like the back of my hand. I look at my hands. Seeing them cuffed is something I may never get used to. It’s as if they aren’t my hands anymore. This is, however, my neighborhood.

Behind the Prosecutor’s Office is my favorite liquor store, Bon. It’s already open for business and a customer is coming out, shopping bag filled with spirits. If alcohol were also prohibited by the whimsies of law, then Bon would be little more than a crack house, and the customer slinking out the door, a junkie.

*

We turn right onto Meiji Dôri and continue on through the Akasaka Gate Intersection, each corner of which has been staked out by an American multinational prospectors: Starbucks, Kinko’s, McDonald’s and Subway. The area used to form part of the eastern half of the Kuroda Han castle grounds. Hardly a century earlier it would have been unthinkable for barbarians like Americans to set foot on, let alone lease, land as sacred as this. So much for tradition. Everything has its price and now I call the intersection “Little America”.

The bus makes an unexpected left into the driveway of the courthouse.

Good god, I hope this doesn’t mean another chat with a judge.

Nobody, least of whom the guard sitting with a zen-like stillness besides me, seems very eager to tell me what is going on. Throughout this whole ordeal, I’ve felt like a drowning man clutching at straws, bits of information, hints, and clues that might augur well for my miserable situation, only to be disappointed again and again and again.

Does returning to the courthouse like this mean things are finally going my way? Is the judge going to review my case? Will he make the pragmatic decision that, in light of the absence of evidence against me, he’s got no choice but to let me go?

I know I haven’t got a snowball’s chance in hell, but offer up a Hail Mary all the same.

“Hail Mary, full of grace . . . ” I mumble under my breath, my hands clasped together in a pitiful exhibition of faith.

The bus crosses the moat and drives around to the rear of the building, where it goes down a narrow ramp and stops.

I’m ordered to get up, so I get up. I’m ordered to follow the guard, so I follow the guard.

He marches me into the building, through a hall and past two locked doors where he dumps me into a filthy holding pen. Removing the handcuffs, he tells me to wait.

Wait for what?

I plop down on the bench and pick up one of the manga stacked in a neat little pile on the bench and start reading to try to get my mind off of my predicament.

It’s hard to distract yourself, though, when the facts are screaming for your attention. The noisiest of which is the fact that virtually all of those arrested spend over six days in jail and a little over half of those are kept behind bars for the full twenty to twenty-three days.

Still, I am heartened in some measure by what my lawyer had told me yesterday: “Prosecutor’s are basically a timid bunch. They won’t indict someone unless they’re certain of winning.”

I offer up another Hail Mary for the wobbly-kneed cowards who swagger in the halls of the Prosecutor’s Office. “May they fail to locate their spines. Hail Mary, full of grace . . .”

*

After some thirty minutes of pious devotion in that narrow, windowless cell, I turn my attention back to the tidy stack of the manga Oishinbo. The comic book, as far as I can tell, seems to be devoted to a group of anally retentive gourmets and their bland adventures. The stories are peppered here and there with tediously didactic tips, recipes and other trivia aimed at enhancing your dining experience.

For example, Vietnamese style spring rolls can’t be considered authentic unless you add fresh mint. It must be fresh. First you take the spring roll, place it on a leaf of sunny lettuce, add a sprig of peppermint and coriander, then roll it all up and dip it in nyoknam sauce. The manga then explains that nyoknam sauce is made by pickling small fish in salt and letting it ferment until a kind of soy sauce is produced.

Speaking of being pickled, I wonder if they’ve forgotten about me.

A guard finally comes round and unlocks the door. He places the slippers at the entrance and gestures for me to step out. The handcuffs and leash are secured and we head out to a hall where we wait before a door. A number of rules posted on it.

Don’t talk to the others.

Don’t touch the others.

The others?

Before long, a motley crew of men, shackled and sullen, form two lines before the door. When the door opens and we’re marched out to the bus.

I’m ordered to sit at the very back again and keep my trap shut. A guard takes the seat to the left of mine and gives the leash a good firm tug. The next prisoner gets on board, sits down before me in the next row. He is followed by a minder of his own who takes the seat to his left. The procedure is repeated until the eighth and last prisoner, an old decrepit man hobbles onto the bus and sits down. Each prisoner had his own personal guard sitting on his left such that we now form two parallel, yet incongruous lines: one consisting of those entrusted with maintaining the rules, another with those suspected of having broken them. The bus jerks forward, heads and shoulders rock from side to side.

When the bus turns left onto Meiji Dôri, there is a collective sigh from the row of men on the right. That left-hand turn can only mean one thing: we’re all being trundled right back to the jail without passing Go!

 

*

© Aonghas Crowe, 2010. All rights reserved. No unauthorized duplication of any kind.

注意：この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

No. 6 is now available on Kindle.

The first installment of No. 6 can be found here:

Read more from Aonghas Crowe here:

 

11.02 Oof!

In the morning shortly following breakfast there’s an announcement that due to the rain the outdoor exercises have been cancelled. It’s the first time that I hear anything resembling recreation takes place behind bars.

I would have appreciated being told earlier that I could get out of this goddamned cell even if all I had to look forward was a game of dodge ball with yakuza thugs.

The radio exercises have just started up when a guard comes to the window and tells me to get ready to leave. I was hoping I’d be able to take a shower before seeing the prosecutor, but no such luck. I’ve taken on the patina of a hobo. There’s three days’ growth on my face and my hair is flecked with dandruff. Even dressed in a fresh shirt I still look and smell like death warmed over.

The guard unlocks the door, slides it open and lets me out. I follow him down the corridor, up a flight of stairs, down another corridor towards Cell Block B where we pass through a door, go down another flight of stairs and through a door that brings us outside to an enclosed parking area. A medium-sized bus with a bluish gray border along the bottom half and metal grating over its windows is waiting.

The guard leads me into another building where handcuffs are clamped around my wrists and a rope is tied around my waist. He gives me a new pair of rubber slippers to wear, and off we go, passing by the room where a week and a half earlier I was forced to strip down and prove to my darling Bubbles that I had neither been naughty with my genitalia nor hidden any jewels up my bung hole.

*

The guard and I board the bus and sit in the very back row. He orders me to take the seat on the right next to a curtained window. The guard sits down just to the left of me, holding onto the rope. A curtain dividing the rows is drawn such that the rest of the bus is no longer visible to me.

The bus rocks gently from side to side as other passengers climb on board. If I am not mistaken, I may have heard a woman’s voice. Yes, there it is again. It is a woman’s voice, deep and husky.

I can’t believe I haven’t seen a woman for more than a week and a half.

Hunger more than anything, has me imagining a woman in her late twenties, a hard-drinking, chain-smoking, hostess with a nice rack.

What’s a good woman like you doing in a place like this? What’s a good man like me, for that matter, doing here?

Meeting in a shithole like this, two hapless souls like us are bound to hit it off. It’s destiny.

Me and you, darling. Me and you.

The bus lurches forward, makes a sharp turn left that has the guard leaning in on my kidney, and comes to an abrupt stop. An awful racket is kicked up; sounding like a rusty, old steel shutter is being forced opened. When the noise stops, the bus moves forward, inch by slow inch. The racket that was coming from the front of the bus now comes from behind us. When it is closed and the inside of the bus has darkened, the sound of another garage door opening can be heard, coming from in front of the bus. We must be in a lock of sorts. Like a barge moving between two levels of water, we are aparently proceeding through different layers of freedom.

The bus pulls out of the lock and navigates a number of sharp turns then comes to a stop. The driver mumbles something which is followed by a mechanized whirl, the rattle of metal.

Must be the main gate to the prison.

For the first time in over a week I’m outside the jail.

If only there wasn’t this damn curtain blocking the view.

*

Curtains, or no, I can pretty much guess where we are along our journey, judging by the turns and stops the bus makes. Living as long as I have in this city and having walked, driven, or biked most of the roads of these wards, I probably know the town better than the guards who are escorting us.

What would happen if we were caught in a serious traffic accident? Would I be able to escape? Where would I go? Would I be able to run away, hands cuffed and tied about my waist? Would sweetheart sitting up there in the front of the bus be able to overpower her own minder and break free with me?

We could hide in a darkened alley until the sirens of patrol cars faded away. There we’d look lovingly into each others’ eyes and say, all the hardships, all the mistakes we had made had all lead up to this moment and would kiss. When night fell we could flee to the countryside, spend the night in an old abandoned farmhouse. I’d lie down on the tatami and she would mount me, her ponderous breasts slapping against my face . . .

*

The bus comes to a halt, the engine is cut. There’s movement and murmurs coming from the front of the bus. The guard tells me to hold my horses. When all is apparently clear, the guard and I make our way down the middle aisle and alight from the bus. Stepping off, I look ahead and see two women, a guard and her charge, waiting by the door.

Oh!

The female prisoner is much older and heavier than I imagined. As the door opens, she turns around and gives me a look that would give children nightmares.

 

 

*

© Aonghas Crowe, 2010. All rights reserved. No unauthorized duplication of any kind.

注意：この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

No. 6 is now available on Kindle.

The first installment of No. 6 can be found here:

Read more from Aonghas Crowe here:

 

11.01 Goro-goro

After spending most of yesterday in that air-conditioned interrogation room, the cell felt even muggier than before, as if the steam was being pumped directly into my cell.

As I read, sweat dribbled down my brow, trickled between my eyebrows and down the ridge of my nose to the tip where it collected before gravity pulled it down onto the pages of Little House in the Big Woods.

*

A guard tapped on the window shortly after dinner. He was carrying another sashiire receipt that required my fingerprint.

Azami had apparently visited the jail again bringing several more pairs of boxer shorts, five to be exact: two black, two gray, and one white pair with red and blue stripes.

If this was the answer to my prayers the night before, why, the Lord does indeed work in mysterious ways.

Gilligan also paid me visit in the evening to deliver the pens and notebooks I had ordered a week earlier. I had almost given up on them ever arriving, but now that they had, I started writing down everything that had happened over the past few weeks.

*

Lebanon featured at the top of last night’s headlines on NHK again. It was the fifth day since fighting began. The sea and air blockade of the country and aerial bombing of targets throughout Lebanon continued. Hezbollah was responding with more rocket attacks, hitting a railroad depot and killing eight workers near Haifa.

“Nice shot.”

*

Evening brought little reprieve from the humidity. There had been a light breeze in the afternoon, but as soon as the sun had set and the walls of the jail had darkened, the wind petered out completely. The air, heavy and rank, reduced all of us jailbirds to supine indolence.

As I lay on the futon in my sweaty prison underwear fanning myself silly with the uchiwa, I caught the sound of distant rumbling. As it grew near, the air filled with the acrid smell of ozone. The jail was illuminated with a bright flash of lightning and a few seconds later came thunder roared menacingly. Lightning struck again, this time even closer, causing the lights to dim, windows to rattle and inmates to howl with excitement. A few minutes later, the rain started to fall, heavy drops striking the dry ground like bullets. Another flash of lightning and the heavens were torn open.

By morning the deluge had eased off, giving way to a cool drizzle. The courtyard, however, now resembled a flooded rice paddy, ready for the planting.

_____________________________________________________

注意：この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

© Aonghas Crowe, 2010. All rights reserved.

10.14 Heinous

Once the testimony is printed up, Ozawa tells me to read through it and sign it.

“Take your time,” he says. “If there’s anything you don’t understand, you can use my dictionary here or ask Kojima-san.”

Kojima sits up in his chair. Palms on thighs, the tips of his fingers fidget excitedly.

“Y-yes, y-yes,” the useless interpreter chimes in. “If there’s anything y-you don’t understand, p-please ask me.”

“Thank you. I will.” You fucking moron.

I go over the testimony and am disappointed to learn that after over a week in jail, and many hours of interrogation the damn thing reads pretty much like the report Ozawa and Nakata drew up last Monday and presented to the Prosecutor.

This time, however, there is more detail about the nature of the so-called crime which has been committed. One line in particular stands out: “This is a heinous crime in which the drugs had been cleverly and deliberately hidden to avoid detention by Customs.”

Oh boy. Sign this and I tie the very knot they’ll hang me with.

“Do I really have to sign this?” I ask.

It’s a legitimate question, and, yet, Nakata freaks out as if I couldn’t have asked anything more unreasonable. “Of course you have to!” he shouts. “This is what you’ve been telling us this whole week! Have you been lying?”

“Nakata-san . . . ”

“Boncoeur! Just sign it!”

“How do you expect me sign something if I don’t agree with it one-hundred percent?”

“You’re wasting our time, Boncoeur!”

“Nakata-san, this says here that this was a, this was a . . . a heinous crime, that the drugs were cleverly and deliberately hidden to avoid detection by Customs. How on earth am I supposed to know that? I wasn’t the one who put the package together . . . ”

“You saw how they were hidden . . . ”

“Yes, and I’ve agreed that they were hidden, and I would agree cleverly so. But, deliberately to avoid detection by Customs? A heinous crime? I’ve said this so many times already I really don’t need to remind you, but I didn’t have contact with my cousin for a year or more, so there’s no way for me to tell what her intentions were.”

The Customs man looks like he’s going to go postal on me when Ozawa raises his hand.

“We can rewrite that,” he says calmly. “If that’s the only sticking point, we can rewrite it. Suppose we change that one line, would you object then? Let’s say we change it to, uh, “The drugs had been hidden. If they had been done so with the intention of avoiding detention by Customs, then a serious crime has been committed.”

This new wording is only slightly less offensive than the original, but at least it gives me some wiggle room.

*

As the revised police report is being printed up, I ask what I consider to be a fair question: “When are you guys going to let me go?”

Nakata looks up over the monitor of his notebook computer and says, “Just a little longer.”

“Just a little longer? What does that mean?”

Ozawa explains that it isn’t for them to decide: the prosecutor has the last word on how long someone is kept detained.

“We have to submit this report to the prosecutor by this afternoon. And then, you’ll have a meeting with her tomorrow morning.”

“She’s coming here?”

“No, you’re going there,” Ozawa replies.

After signing the paper and affixing my fingerprint beside my name, I’m escorted back to the cell.

_____________________________________________________

No. 6 is now available on Kindle.

注意：この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

© Aonghas Crowe, 2010. All rights reserved. No unauthorized duplication of any kind.

The first installment of No.6 can be found here:

Read more from Aonghas Crowe here:

10:13 Catholic

An hour or so later as they’re printing up the testimony on a small portable printer Nakata asks me something that catches me off guard:

“Boncoeur, you’re Catholic, aren’t you?”

We touched upon religion briefly last Sunday at the Drug Enforcement Agency’s office in Hakata when they asked about my family background. That feels like a lifetime ago.

“Why do you want to know?” I ask.

“C’mon, just tell me. You’re Catholic, right?”

“Well, it’s not as simple as that . . . ”

“Yes or no? Catholic or not Catholic?” he snaps irritably.

What the hell is Nakata getting at?

“My father is Catholic, yes, but my mother is Maronite, which, I suppose, you could say is almost the same thing, but . . . ”

*

Unlike my older brother and sisters who were born in Beirut and baptized at the same Maronite church that my mother, her mother, and countless generations before them had also received the sacraments at, I was born in the U.S. and christened at St. Charbel Catholic Church in Portland, Oregon.

My old man, a Frenchman through and through, was devoutly secularist. My mother’s own religious sentiments, on the other hand, had grown more conservative as her family’s involvement in the Kataeb Party in Lebanon, and subsequently the Civil War there, deepened. It was my mother then, with my old man’s hen-pecked acquiescence, who called the shots when it came to her children’s pietistic inculcation.

Baptized shortly after birth, I had my first confession and communion when I was eight, and was confirmed at the age of fifteen, making an unequivocal declaration of beliefs precisely at a time when my attitude towards the Faith had already begun slipping.

At the time, Lebanon was being ripped apart in a civil war that had pitted Lebanon’s different religious factions against each other–Christians against Shia Muslims, Druze against Sunni Muslims–and reduced “the Paris of the Middle East” to rubble. It seemed arrogant, if not foolhardy, of me to believe that we Maronites were right and everyone else was dead wrong, especially when we weren’t behaving like the good Christians Jesus had reputedly entreated us to act. Turn the other cheek? Over my fucking dead body!

My Confirmation came and went, the Archbishop who presided over the sacrament never the wiser that the pious olive-skinned boy before him had grave doubts about all this Christian hocus-pocus he was professing to believe in. My faith had more holes in it than Swiss cheese.

Shortly thereafter, I took off for France where I studied for a year and a half at my old man’s insistence. I hadn’t wanted to go at first–Lebanon and her Troubles held me in greater fascination–but, after the Israeli invasion of 1982, the situation in Lebanon had gone from bad to worse. Even Summerland, a popular resort off the Corniche Beirut had been bombed beyond all recognition by Israeli jets only weeks after my family and I had stayed there. Most of my cousins were whisked away to safer havens, many of the to New England or Europe, aunts and uncles joining them later once they had secured their homes.

History, I was learning at that young age, was rich with irony: the so-called “Chosen Ones” were creating yet another Diaspora. First, the Palestinians, and now the Lebanese.

In France my religious skepticism found a warm hearth welcoming it. There I learned it was indeed arrogant to assume that Catholics, and us Maronites, had a monopoly on righteousness and that the fires of hell were stoked by the souls of the remaining five billion heathens on earth. What was religion anyways, but a hopeful stab in the dark at the Truth. For all the good Catholics knew, the guesses of the Hindus, the Buddhists, the Baha’is, the Taoists, the Animists, the Voodooists, or what have you, might have been just as valid as, or, gasp, more so, than their own.

After years of cynicism and exposure to faiths vastly different from the ones I had been raised with, I have come to embrace with far more enthusiasm both the pantheism of Shinto and godlessness of Buddhism than I had ever did my native faith.

Nevertheless, in moments of greatest torment where did I turn to? The rosary.

To say that I had found Jesus in jail is to miss the point. I was praying the rosary several times a day as a drowning man might clutch at straws. I would have also supplicated myself in the direction of Mecca or beseeched Kannon, the Buddhist Goddess of Mercy, had I only known the proper way to do so. Any superstition would have suited me just fine so long as it allowed me to get my mind off of my fears for five blessed minutes.

I prayed the only way I knew how: the way I had learned as a child. And slowly the gears of my long neglected faith groaned into motion.

“Our Father . . . Our Father,” I began. “Hallowed be Thy name. What the fuck am I saying? Oh, sorry about the language, there, God . . . Right! Our Father, who art in Heaven, Hallowed be Thy name. Blessed art Thou amongst women and . . . Woa!. . . Um . . . Our Father, who art in Heaven. Hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven. Yes! Give us this day our daily bread . . . ” And so on and so forth.

I prayed the rosary to get my mind off of my worries and for the extremely slim and discouraging odds that the Almighty was a compassionate and all-forgiving god when the evidence around me pointed towards one who was either an aggressively sadistic bastard or frigidly aloof, indifferent to the horrible suffering most people on this dying planet are expected to reverently endure.

*

“Boncoeur, it’s a simple question: Are you a Catholic? Yes or no?” Nakata says again.

“Y-yes . . .” As Catholic as I suppose a man who hasn’t had a drop of liquor in twenty years still believes himself to be an alcoholic. “Yes, I am Catholic.”

“And Catholics believe it’s a sin to tell a lie.”

Ah, so that’s what the man is getting at.

“There are exceptions, of course, but . . . um, yes, basically yes, it is a sin to tell a lie.”

“And if you commit a sin, you’ll be punished by God?”

“Uh . . . y-yes.”

“So, you’ve been telling us the truth this whole time?”

“Yes, yes, of course. I wouldn’t think of doing otherwise,” I say, adding another shovelful of lies to the slagheap of lies and half-truths they’ve already mined out of me.

“Thank you.”

Are my pants on fire yet?

 

© Aonghas Crowe, 2010. All rights reserved. No unauthorized duplication of any kind.

注意：この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

The first installment of No.6 can be found here.

No. 6 is now available on Kindle.

10:12 Wrapping Up

With the humidity and no clean underwear to change into, I’ve really started to stink, a sour funk rising from my t-shirt. I give the shirt a whiff and . . . “Oof!“

Talk about a punch in the nose!

I take off the t-shirt and dump it in the sink and scrub it down with one of the half bars of soap, then do the same with my body, wiping my armpits and chest with a soapy wet hand towel.

“Number Six!”

“Huh?”

“What the hell are you doing?” a guard yells through the small front window.

“I was just . . . ”

“Washing up time is before lights out!”

“Sorry.”

“Hurry up and get dressed, then,” he says unlocking the door to my cell. “Shirabe.”

I dry off and put on a relatively fresh t-shirt and the standard gray over shirt over it, making sure to tuck in the tails into the gray shorts. As I step down and out of my cell, I possess as much dignity as a homeless man caught in a sudden downpour.

*

An extra chair has been brought into the interrogation room and placed in the narrow space between the desks and the left side of the room. Kojima, the incompetent translator from Customs, is sitting in it, grinning from ear to ear.

“How are you doing?” he asks, pummeling me with that nasty breath of his.

“Lovely, just lovely. And you?”

“Fine, thank you, and you?”

Ugh.

Ozawa asks about lunch.

“Same old, same old: barley tea, barley rice, again.”

“That’s it?”

“That, and some brown gunk resembling curry.”

Nakata looks up from his notebook computer and says he loves curry.

“Ooh, not this curry, you wouldn’t,” I reply.

Nakata and Ozawa spend the next hour busily typing up their reports on their respective notebook computers. In all our meetings, I’ve never seen the two so busy. According to Adachi, everything the cops and I have discussed over the past week has to be summarized, printed up and signed by me by the eighth day of detention. The document will then be submitted to the prosecutor.

Every now and then, one of them stops typing, and asks me to clarify something.

“Naila’s you’re cousin from your mother’s side, right?”

“Yes, she’s the oldest daughter of my mother’s youngest sister.”

“Thanks.”

And after lobbing a few of these soft balls, they pitch a slider: What did you ask your cousin to send?

I repeat exactly what I have already told them many times over that I had, neither specifically nor implicitly, requested Naila to send me anything.

They return to typing up their notes.

As they busy themselves with their reports, I look at my fingernails. For all the mad filing I’ve been doing against the concrete floor near the toilet in my cell, I’ve still managed to grow a set of claws that would make any hot-blooded carnivore proud.

“It’s probably useless asking, but one of you guys wouldn’t happen to have a nail clipper on you?”

I take it as a no when they all laugh.

_____________________________________________________

注意：この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

© Aonghas Crowe, 2010. All rights reserved.