Before the disaster, during the summer, when Oana and I were staying in a cottage at the Hirano-ya Bessō in Kamakura, over the eaves of our room were trails of wisteria, and between the leaves we could see some purple flowers here and there; to see wisteria blooming in August seemed like something from a chronicle. But not only this, looking out at the garden from the window in the bathroom there were Japanese roses blooming, too. Moreover, and stranger still, in the pond of the garden of Komachien, their irises and lotuses were all in full bloom, too …
Thinking of the wisteria, the roses and the irises all blooming in August, I came to believe nature must have gone mad. And every time I saw someone, I spoke of a cataclysmic convulsion of nature occurring now, changing the heavens and moving the earth …
Yet no one took me seriously; Masao Kume just smirked at me, mocked me, and said, ‘You are just making Kan Kikuchi even more nervous.’
Oana and I arrived back in Tokyo on August 25, and the Great Earthquake happened eight days later; now Kume greatly respects my prediction: ‘Before, I’ d simply wanted to argue against you as a pose. But, in fact, your prediction has come true.’
Yet if I’m honest, I must confess I did not believe my own prediction.
Nature is cruelly indifferent towards humanity. The earthquake did not differentiate between proletarian and bourgeoisie, the good and the bad; it’s just as Turgenev wrote in his poems –
In the eyes of nature, humans are no different from insects …
*
After the disaster, on the way back to Tabata, passing through Iriya, under a tangle of scorched electric lines, beside streetcars burnt in their tracks, Ryūnosuke suddenly heard the voice of a child by the side of the road, the child playing in the rubble, the child singing, My Old Kentucky Home …
In a trice, the song of this child overcame the spirit of negation which had gripped and overwhelmed Ryūnosuke: Yes, thought Ryūnosuke, there will always be those who say that art is excess and surplus to our existence. And it is true, when your head is on fire, you do not think how best to represent the flames. Just as when you take a piss or have a shit, you maybe don’t think of Rembrandt or Goethe. Yet surely what makes humans human is always this excess and this surplus we create, which gives us our dignity, which helps us to transcend and to sing a song no quake or fire can ever destroy …
But then, approaching Nippori, Ryūnosuke fell in step with a policeman. As the two men walked, Ryūnosuke questioned the policeman at length about the earthquake, about the fires and about the various rumours of crimes and insurrection that seemed to still fall from every passing mouth, hanging in the air with the smoke and the odour of death, that stench of rotting apricots.
The policeman, impressed perhaps by Ryūnosuke’s helmet, was talkative but confessed that while he knew many had been accused of malicious or revolutionary acts, he himself had seen no evidence of any such deeds.
Just outside Nippori station, Ryūnosuke and the policeman came across the body of a man tied to a pole, his head beaten in, his body horribly mutilated, with a sign around his neck which declared he was both a Korean and an arsonist. The man must have died by inches, and even now, perhaps hours after his slow death, as Ryūnosuke and the policeman stood before him, another passer-by approached to whack the corpse with a rolled-up parasol. This passer-by now turned to Ryūnosuke and the policeman; he thanked them for their good work, bowed and then sauntered off, swinging his now-bloody parasol as he went. The policeman shook his head; he urged Ryūnosuke to take care, bade him farewell, and then walked on.
After the disaster, in the twilight, Ryūnosuke remained transfixed before the body of the Korean, the ground beneath him still rising and falling. And as Ryūnosuke stared at the body of the Korean, at all the bodies of the dead, as he stared across this city of rubble, across this city of smoke, everywhere he saw gears and wheels, translucent against the earth, luminous against the sky, turning and spinning, grinding and screaming.
Now four crows landed on two adjacent tilted, twisted poles. They stared first at the corpse, then at Ryūnosuke –
Ryūnosuke took off his helmet, Ryūnosuke bowed his head. The biggest crow lifted its bloody beak heavenwards and cawed once, twice, a third time, and then a fourth.
After the disaster, the official record stated that the Great Kantō Earthquake had had a magnitude of 7.9 on the Richter scale, that it had started at 11:58 a.m. on September 1, 1923, and had stopped after four minutes.
Ryūnosuke did not believe the official record. Ryūnosuke believed the earthquake had not stopped, would never stop. Ryūnosuke knew the disaster was still-to-come.
*
All who bear the name of socialist, whether a Bolshevik or not, appear to be considered a threat. Especially at the time of the recent Great Earthquake, many seem to have been cursed this way. But, if we are speaking of socialists, Charlie Chaplin is a socialist, too. If we are to persecute socialists, shouldn’t we persecute Charlie Chaplin as well, then? Imagine that Chaplin was killed by a military police lieutenant. Imagine that, while doing his duck-walk, all of a sudden he was stabbed to death. No one who has gazed at
