Assassination vacation / incomplete notes on trip to Nara, first day
[(This is not a substantial piece of writing. These are notes. I would like to write about Yamagami Tetsuya’s assassination of Abe Shinzo, so I decided to see the place where it happened.)]
[Ticket on the Nozomi late morning. Blasting past fields and factories and unknowable towns along the way lit by shafts of sunlight through rainclouds. If you sit on the left side of the train, you will miss Fuji, but you can see the ocean. The train blasts out of a tunnel, onto a bridge, and for a minute, you are out over a wide, flat valley. The river has dried to a trickle this late in autumn, but they are meant to accommodate the heaviest flooding. And you can see all the way out to the ocean.]
[A couple in their late twenties took the seats beside me. They crack beers and fill the carriage with the smell of wheaty burps.]
[I finish reading Updike’s Terrorist. This was the final completely new work that he completed and maybe the first that I read. An Egyptian-American teen is being lured into a truck bombing plot. The only person that stands in his way is a stock Updike character: the guidance counselor, who is also having sex with his student’s mother. He is an oversexed baby boomer, Jewish, liberal, who finds himself adrift in the polite modern world but capable of connecting to the underclass because of his hardscrabble upbringing. The plot is a law enforcement operation. The guidance counselor convinces him to go on living. A peculiar novel that I wrote off as a failure. Although it doesn’t tell the reader much about the mindset of the young man, it’s a window into a particular coastal liberal outlook as the forever war entered a new phase.]
[At Kyoto, change to the Kintetsu Line for Yamato-Saidaiji. A mostly rural exurban landscape. Occasional clusters of commuter housing. I expected something more dignified. It’s the local train, so it makes each stop. Neat elderly people dressed in shades that match the late autumn landscape. Children in uniform.]
[The station could be anywhere in the country. This is where the two main commuter lines meet. The same chain shops as everywhere else outside Tokyo. Heading for the north exit, I see it right away. This is the spot. From up on these stairs, there’s a clear view of everything. With even a mail order Mannlicher–Carcano, Yamagami Tetsuya couldn’t have missed.]
[Descending, out onto the sidewalk running around the taxi circular, everything is the same. The roadworks visible over Abe Shinzo’s shoulder are still ongoing. The same banners flapping outside the temporary rental office. The place is charged with meaning. Everyone walking by knows what happened here, whether or not there is any memorial.]
[Tattered sheets of A4 paper warning against laying flowers.]
[A man pauses and takes a picture and I take a picture of him taking a picture. Somewhere, a surveillance camera must be recording me.]
[This will all be wiped away. The area was already under development. The Mayor of Nara says there will be a flower bed on the site. This is fitting. After all, it seems that everyone has moved on. It is strange to see Abe appear in old television clips. He hovers like a ghost over all of this. This is the world that he built.]
[In Tokyo Station, there are two markers at the locations of previous assassinations of Prime Ministers. Hara Takashi was stabbed by a railway worker in 1921. The Prime Minister was embroiled in a dispute with the military over the intervention in Siberia. Hamaguchi Osachi was shot in 1931 by a patriotic secret society member. He wanted the military given more leeway for foreign adventures. When Abe went down, early speculation was that he was shot for the same reason. A deranged rightist, who wanted the military freed from its legal restrictions—that has to be it! Or that he was shot for the opposite reason. Someone sick of war crimes denial and pushing the legal envelope for the Self Defense Force. But it was neither.]
[I walk to the north, looking for the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification office. The place is rundown. None of the restaurants and bars that lively up most commuter junctions. None of the sex industry establishment waiting to come alive at night. Pachinko. A few dated department stores, mostly empty.
The map sends me down a damp alley that reeks of fermenting vegetables. It’s actually across the street. I snap a picture and scurry away.
A bit further, I reach farm fields.]
[Backtracking south, I end up on the other side of the station. Pre-bubble state housing projects: gargantuan blocks and low-rise beige stucco Khrushchyovki. Massive institutional buildings. Grocery stores. It could be Tashkent or Vladivostok. Reform came: privatization of state resources, electoral competition meant that a single party wouldn’t be in charge of doling out an existence to the localities, and the economy crumbled. Shock therapy administered by the Bank of Japan and the bureaucrats. This is postsocialist Japan. The birth and crime rates kept low are the difference. If this place produced the young toughs in tracksuits that should rightly be loitering outside, then they have left to torment Shinsaibashi or Namba.]
[I jump in a taxi and point to an address that might have been where Yamagami lived at one time. Poverty falls away. A tidy suburb. Maybe he lived here. Maybe his mother went for golf lessons nearby. It’s not Den-en-chofu. One of the nicer Kanagawa commuter suburbs, at least. Big houses. For Japan, at least. There’s a golf course nearby. I get out and spend a while strolling around. The address is wrong. But feeling the contrast is good.]
[Yes, this is it, these two moments of rupture: from the country itself, from the old order to the new; for Yamagami himself, from comfortable middle-class existence to hell. Yamagami is the entire experiment, writ small.]
[I don’t believe there is much else to discover. I am not on his trail. I am not investigating.]
[Walking east. This is the rest of Japan. This is everything outside of Tokyo and the next three biggest cities. Used car lots. Gas stations. Convenience stores with huge parking lots. To house the employees, two-story apartment blocks that look more like temporary barracks, nestled in between houses owned by the beneficiaries of the old system. Approaching the center, examples of public expenditures. A road converted from asphalt to pinkish red cobblestones. A few streetside tables. But the only thing you might eat there would be onigiri from the 7-11 facing it.]
[Luxury chain hotel. The only place in town that’s not a business hotel with closets for rooms or a ryokan. I can’t bear either option. Another gray cube with a view of more gray cubes. I flip through the channels. I would like to eat a room service cheeseburger and fall asleep under the duvet listening to CNA, but I need to make use of my time. I don’t think there’s anything to discover. But at least, I would like to say I have been here. I cannot write the city off without seeing more. So, I head out again.]
[The shotengai around Kofuku-ji have an atmosphere borrowed from Kyoto or Asakusa. Storefronts selling tat or renting kimonos. A few traditional shops. McDonalds. Temple. Shrine. The veneer of tourist trap is thin. A wrong turn and I am back in the other Japan. Every cool bar turns out to be a hairdresser. Lost and wandering until the streets are empty. I wind up in a cocktail bar. An expensive dive, where I pay too much for Canadian Club and water. The young man sitting to my left is from Denver. Sales, outdoor equipment. The young woman sitting to my right is from Seoul. Social media influencer and online marketing guru. Neither is aware that Abe was killed in this city. I don’t blame them. A three-way conversation drifts to the midterm elections in the United States. For better or worse, I am closer to figuring out Yamagami than I am to figuring out either of these people.]
[I have a dream that I am trying to complete a novel. A man, set on killing himself, has wandered out into the waves. Somewhere in Shonan. He has traveled back in time but it is not any actual date in the past but an idealized 1950s Americana Japan. He longs to return to his own time. The dream within the dream is interrupted by an editor demanding an explanation.]
[Wake up call. Shower. Back out into the city.]