TOKYO – THREE MONTHS AGO
Tsan Yohoto sat at the head of the polished mahogany table, fifty-six floors above damp streets packed with evening commuters. The spectacular view over the Tokyo skyline had become shrouded in low cloud and Yohoto noticed the air-conditioning unit clicking off as the boardroom cooled naturally.
Sitting opposite Tsan Yohoto were the ten directors of Yamoura Pharmaceuticals, the third largest drug manufacturer in the world. Yamoura had been a small company after the war but had grown dramatically since the 1970s. Its growth was spearheaded by the brilliance of Tsan Yohoto. Every new product launch and every merger and acquisition promoted by Tsan Yohoto had been successful. He had been the youngest-ever board appointment at the age of thirty-six. He had become chief executive, or daitoryou, at the age of forty-three. To most Japanese, Yamoura Pharmaceuticals meant Tsan Yohoto.
The finance director was droning on about a proposal to take over a small company that had come up with a vaccine for the Asian bird flu. But Tsan Yohoto’s mind had wandered elsewhere – something that happened more frequently these days. He was back with his most vivid memory, one that had been seared into his brain at the age of five.
He was sitting up in front of the swings and his mother was beating his back. Why? His mind spun with shock and pain. He screeched at the hot agony taking over his body. Tsan’s mother Saina, kneeling over her little boy, finally beat out the flames on his red jacket. She pulled her screaming child to her breast as she turned around to look for her seven-year-old twins, a boy and a girl, Kendo and Lita. The sight that assailed her eyes was too much for any person to take in, let alone a young mother. Kendo and Lita’s charred bodies were still on their swing seats, still swinging gently backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, their hands fused with the metal chains. Most of the skin had been burned from their bodies. Their small white teeth shone in a mad smile through the black mess that had replaced their faces. Small yellow flames worked their way lazily through what remained of their hair. Tsan felt his nose and mouth filling up with the smell of roast meat. He felt himself gagging. All was quiet, except for the creak and groan of the chains on the swings. Backwards and forwards.
Saina and Tsan Yohoto lay on the concrete in front of this macabre scene, some five miles from the drop zone. They had been spared the worst of the bomb’s subsidiary fireballs. Tsan hugged his mother tighter. He could hear his mother’s heart pounding wildly, even through her screams and the creak of the swings. Backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards. Backwards and . . .
The image began to fade and Tsan Yohoto realised he was caressing the black and white photograph of Kendo and Lita, which he always carried in his inside jacket pocket. The photograph helped him remember when he had felt really happy. Before the bomb had taken away his family and his very soul. He rubbed his eyes as he found himself slowly becoming aware again of the finance director’s voice, droning towards the end of his long report:
‘And so, I propose that we proceed with the purchase at nine hundred million yen and enter due diligence.’
Around the table a series of nods and grunts granted the approval required and Tsan returned to his daydreaming.
‘Tsan, Tsan, my beautiful boy!’ His mother was holding him tight. He had woken again, screaming, from the regular nightmare.
‘Mother, Mother, I can see the swings,’ he cried.
‘Tsan, Tsan, we must be strong, we must be strong. My beautiful boy.’ She stroked his scarred face and eventually soothed him back to sleep.
After the bomb, Tsan and his mother were taken to the Fujama hospital in Tokyo, where they stayed for four weeks, before they returned to view the wasteland that had been their home city. His mother, a nurse, worked long days treating survivors of the explosion.
Both mother and son had suffered burns to their hands, their backs and to the tops of their heads, but the blackness had flaked away to reveal healthy skin beneath and both were left with just mild scar tissue. Tsan had one distinctive scar, in the shape of an arrow, just below his right temple. Every time he looked in the shaving mirror, his scar reminded him. If he didn’t look away quickly enough, he could smell roast meat.
Tsan Yohoto’s father was dead, his body burned to a crisp in a street near their home, a mile from the park where Saina had taken her children to play. Almost every human and building within a five-mile radius of the drop zone had been obliterated. Conversely, there was a high survival rate in the suburbs, between five and seven miles from the city centre.
‘Aieee, aieee,’ the mournful screaming continued, day after day.
The young mother and son were moved to a dormitory in a converted schoolhouse, near the clinic where Saina Yohoto worked. The school buildings were crammed with survivors, the broken remnants of life in Hiroshima. The adults spent their days sitting around the radio in the corner of the dormitory and the little boy, Tsan Yohoto, listened to their cries of anguish. He did not understand that the war was now over, that Emperor Hirohito had surrendered. But as he listened to the adults, he understood that all the trouble had been caused by ‘the bomb’. ‘The bomb’ had killed Kendo and Lita and his father. ‘The bomb’ had killed the little baby next door. ‘The bomb’ had killed his friend, Mr Horunda, who swept around the swings. ‘The bomb’ had killed them all. ‘The bomb’ had been dropped by the Yankees. And Tsan knew that, one day, when he was big enough, he was going to kill all the Yankees in return.
*
His mother’s decision to return to Hiroshima had cost them dear as, six months later, the government realised that the radiation which saturated the region was damaging the survivors. Within weeks of the bomb, cancerous growths and a plethora of heart-breaking deformities in newborn babies confirmed everyone’s worst fears. Tsan’s mother was ordered by the Atomic Bomb Commission to return to Tokyo, to continue her work with survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. Two years later, following testing, Tsan’s mother knew that her body and that of her son had been affected by the radiation. The fallout had caused an invisible but catastrophic genetic mutation and they were among the tens of thousands with compromised immune systems and at risk of developing leukaemia. For many years Tsan’s mother ensured that they were both checked for any abnormalities. Long after his mother’s retirement, Tsan had availed himself of the facilities of the Yamoura laboratories to continue those checks. His mother had been lucky – she was still healthy at ninety-five years of age. Unfortunately for Tsan Yohoto, his last tests had shown an increase in cancerous cells. Leukaemia would kill him – and probably not too long into his planned retirement.
In Tokyo, Tsan had grown up with his mother’s stories of life at the hospital and the pitiful attempts to treat the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the agony of the daily dressings and the ravages of infection to burnt skin. Tsan wanted to learn more, especially about the great new antibiotic called penicillin, which was helping to save so many lives.
‘Help, help, save me,’ laughed Saina Yohoto, in the sitting room of her Tokyo apartment. It was two years after the bomb. Tsan and his ‘new brother’ Horto had jumped out, growling, from behind the door, wearing masks and pretending to frighten her. Horto had been badly burned at Hiroshima, and all of his family killed. Saina had brought him home from the burns unit to live with her and Tsan. Horto’s mask was real – a thick canvas balaclava, with holes cut for his eyes and for what remained of his nose and lips – which he had to wear on his face, twenty-four hours a day. The aim was to smooth out the scar tissue on Horto’s face. He had a spare one to allow the usual one to be washed, and Tsan wore that one when they were pretending to be monsters.
Tsan loved having Horto in the house. Horto was one year younger than him and he never talked, but he was his best friend. Tsan gave Horto half his toys and his favourite model aeroplane, because Horto had nothing. Horto slept on a mattress on the floor of Tsan’s tiny bedroom but Tsan often let Horto have the bed. Tsan became Horto’s defender, too. He’d put his judo skills to good use with a flurry of kicks and punches to the shocked faces of the many boys stupid enough to mock Horto’s mask.
When Tsan was nine, Horto fell sick and died. For some reason, Tsan couldn’t cry. His mother told him that Horto had contracted cancer from the bomb.
Saina hugged her son, gently stroked the scar on his temple and whispered, ‘Be brave, my son, be brave. We must be strong. Strong for everyone who has died. We who survived must make our lives count.’
Tsan prayed that Horto would be able to find his brother and sister in the afterlife and that Kendo and Lita would look after him there. Once again, the bomb had brought sorrow and pain into their lives. Every night he imagined the time when he would be clever enough to take revenge on the Yankees for dropping the bomb. I will find a way to do it.
*
After he left school, an insatiable interest in chemistry and genetics propelled Tsan Yohoto’s graduation as the top student at the Genetic Engineering Faculty at Tokyo University. Within weeks he had his first job as lab technician, number L-149, at Yamoura Pharmaceuticals, the company which was to become his life.
A shaft of sunlight broke through the cloud and lit up the boardroom. Tsan Yohoto heard the air-conditioning unit recommence its hum. He looked at the faces around the table. These were his most trusted friends and confidantes. He had appointed all of them to the board (after he had cleared out the deadwood), and all shared his intelligence and ambition. Together they had created a multinational giant with over fifty thousand employees and with manufacturing plants, research and development facilities and distribution networks in almost every country in the world.
His closest friend and ally was Lumo Kinotoa, who was seated on his right. Kinotoa had almost matched his rise through Yamoura and had been Tsan Yohoto’s first appointment, as his skikaisha, or chairman. He was known in business circles as the ‘Silver Fox’, because of his shining head of silver hair and his cuteness. The two men had grown close over the years, drawn together by their passion for chemistry, their drive to succeed and their strongest common bond – Lumo Kinotoa’s family had been wiped out at Nagasaki.
‘The suspense is killing us, Tsan,’ said Kinotoa, with a grin.
The board members smiled. They had reached the last item on the agenda – listed as ‘Tsan’s Tsumori’ or ‘Tsan’s Plan’. Now a very fit man in his seventies, of slight build, immaculately groomed and with jet-black hair and wire-rimmed spectacles, Tsan was due to retire in two years. Some months ago, he had advised the board of his wish to head up one last project. This, he said, would mark his retirement in a fitting manner. He had in mind a humanitarian initiative on a grand scale – perfectly appropriate for a healthcare company. The project, he advised, would be loss-making initially, but the PR benefits would be far reaching.
The chairman turned to his left. ‘Tsan,’ he asked, ‘are you ready to tell us of your grand plan? The directors’ bets are on an Ebola-related project!’
Tsan Yohoto smiled. ‘No, Mr Chairman,’ he replied. ‘But please allow me some time on this at next month’s meeting.’
Lumo Kinotoa returned the smile. ‘Certainly, Tsan, of course.’
Lumo Kinotoa was the only other person at that boardroom table who knew what Tsan Yohoto was really planning. And the devastation that those plans would mean for the Americans.