Tokyo Zero

Cult

Mark Horne
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for em and owen
ONE
Japanese policemen's guns are small and sort of puny. Except when they are shooting at you. Right now, they are shooting at me and my companion and we are running scared. The Policemen's shots are a little tentative, like someone picking chewing gum out of their hair. In fairness to the police, I should mention that we are in Shinjuku station, the world's busiest. Currently it is occupied by... oh, I don't know... 2.5 Lichtensteins. I am on average 4 inches taller than those around me, and a crucial 4 inches to boot, so as I barge through the crowd, hurting everyone, I must remember to crouch. To help me remember this, I visualize two things: the cloth that hangs in front of every drinking establishment in this country and those photos of JFK's autopsy that my father and I discussed over breakfast in 1977.
Running next to me, in full flush of his compact masculinity is Takeshi Honda, ex-military. Now, if I were a Takeshi Honda in a blue suit in these circumstances I would fall to the ground and upon standing be a sheep rather than a wolf and watch events through the TV glaze. However, Honda stays with me, pointing me here and there, grabbing aggressive costumed Japan Railways employees by the forehead and smashing them to pieces, reminding them that it is not the peaked hats of the police that make us run.
We skid past a "Let's Kiosk!" and I have never felt more like accepting its invitation. Yeah, let's kiosk... anything but this.
The man behind the kiosk cannot believe his eyes: the crowds have parted, firstly, and secondly a white man with his face covered in blood and a salaryman with a soul are racing straight at him. If she were not such a traitor he would also see a most aggressively attractive woman neck-to-neck, probably openly armed. But she is gone and I don't know if her beauty will aid or hinder her attempt to stay gone. When this is over, that will be interesting to find out. If I see her on TV or if I never see her again will be how I find out.
"Stop!" cry the cops in English, which I take personally. This makes me turn around. I see that things are over. Somehow they coordinated the station like an army to part and create a long shooting range. They are skidding around a little at their end of the range as they get into position. The floor of this station is necessarily one of the slickest surfaces known to man, polished by several million feet in predictable chaos daily. It is veined in a pattern that would tell the anthropological programs of my father's future much about the recently dead human race. The three policemen are about to shoot, as soon as they can stand, and even if one accidentally takes out the Kiosk man who is cowering behind dried squid in front of us, that still leaves plenty of bullets for me.
The dried squid remind me of the enormous giant squid beneath the oceans, sacs of amazing pressure and death power and darkness who none the less have had no impact on my life.
The kiosk man drops.
TWO
The beginning is in at least four places.
1)Something unknown in my father's life
2)Mother's death at the hands of the Khmer Rouge.
3)When I got entangled with that girl, Claire
4)I somehow met the number-two man in one of those Japanese death cults.
But I choose to begin in the middle of things, or near the end of things. The crisis is when I will get started.
****
I arrived at Narita Airport, Tokyo's airport, on an exceptionally hot August day. I got off the British Airways jet, where they had not announced the temperature on the ground: presumably to prevent a panic amongst those like me who were braving the Tokyo summer for the first time. In retrospect the crew who "goodbyed" me out the door had the looks of parachute instructors rather than smartly dressed waitresses as they bundled me out the door.
So, suddenly I felt terrible. I felt like a victim that could be picked by anyone. I was suddenly weak and confused because of the heat and also unexpectedly illiterate. I followed a long line of people to a place where many things got stamped. It was the 1970s in Narita,