‘I was stabbed in February 1972.’
We were standing on a snow-covered field, on the cusp of a shallow irrigation gully in which lay the twisted corpse of a woman, when Kohana uttered these memorable words.
I was so shocked, I didn’t know what to say, and therefore settled for a callow kind of commiseration. ‘Kohana—good Lord, I’m sorry…’
‘Um, Wolram, that’s not me. I didn’t say I died. In case it slipped your mind, I lived to be a hundred. But I was stabbed in the back, in the metaphoric sense as much as the literal.’
It took me a few shakes of a lamb’s tail to process what she implied, and as my tardy grey matter refined it, Kohana rested on her haunches, using a stick to poke at the body in the ditch.
‘Not a time I’m proud of. This is Michiko. Michiko, this is Wolram.’
Michiko remained speechless, and I did not have a thing to say.
The woman’s face was difficult to see because of the way in which she lay, but I presumed she’d been dead a few hours. I’m hardly an expert. She was young, perhaps in her early twenties, and looked relatively pretty.
‘She was beaten to death for being too negative,’ Kohana said. ‘One person’s negativity is another man’s realism. Michiko cottoned on early that we were going about things the wrong way.’
‘Do you mind if I ask which things?’
‘All of it.’
Not the kind of answer I was counting on. ‘Then who did this?’
‘Very stupid people. Friends of mine and hers.’
I waited, in vain, for an expanded response. ‘Why?’ I pressed on.
Kohana stood up straight, and flung away the stick. For my part, I shifted from one foot to the other. It was bitterly cold here. The extremes in temperature really were going to be the death of me.
‘Seriously? I don’t understand the whys. Michiko didn’t deserve to die like this. She was a decent woman.’
‘That word “decent” always concerns me.’
‘Well, yes, she had her flaws—and who doesn’t? For one thing, she was overly naïve and trusting.’
‘Something neither of us has to worry about.’
‘Undoubtedly.’
‘Anyway, back to you—you said you were attacked too.’
‘Mmm.’
She was keeping a million things close to her chest this time. I felt like I was deep-sea fishing without the proper tackle. ‘And so your infraction was…?’
‘Not negativity—I kept mine hidden, but I wasn’t cautious elsewhere.’
‘Go on.’
‘My crime was getting caught kissing a boy.’
‘Oh, that old one.’ I was perilously close to laughter. ‘One of your jealous lovers, I expect?’
Insofar as Kohana was concerned, this was bound to happen sooner or later.
‘Actually, no. It was another woman—and no, she wasn’t in love with me.’
‘Of course, you slept with her husband, then?’
‘Wolram, what kind of awful opinion do you have of me? God.’
Kohana looked up for a time, at a slate-grey sky. An apology was on my lips, but she spoke first.
‘More snow is on its way.’
‘You remember that?’
‘No, I can tell. Can’t you? Look at those clouds.’
‘I’m an Australian. It rarely snowed there, and never where I lived. When I look up, all I see are clouds; no special messages.’
‘That’s a shame. It’s one of the few things my father taught me.’
‘I’m chuffed to hear the old geezer came in useful for something.’
‘Surprising, isn’t it? I’m not sure why it mattered to him.’
I rubbed my hands together. They were stiff, chilled to the bone.
‘I swear I’m going to end up with frostbite. Might we get back to the reason we’re here, if there is one—apart from showing me corpses and intimating at a dangerous romantic interlude?’
‘Okay.’ Kohana fiddled with her sleeve. ‘Ten other members of our group, not counting Michiko and me, were killed for equally trivial reasons. Cleaning a gun incorrectly, wearing too much makeup, that kind of nonsense.’
‘Your group? What group?’
‘I’ll get to that. You think it’s cold today? The temperature drops below zero in the evening. Most of the people I talked about were tied to trees and froze to death overnight. It was all part of a power play by our hypocritical, increasingly paranoid leaders, Seibei and Ushitora. Within days, they reduced the membership by half.’
There was an astringent taste in my mouth. I felt like spitting it straight out, but refrained.
‘Seriously disturbed men, I take it.’
‘Actually, a seriously disturbed man and woman. Ushitora Hiroko was nicknamed “Oni-babaa”—Devil Bitch. Rumour had it she was barren, and she had the foetus torn out of one of her peers because she was jealous.’
‘This insane woman was your leader? What kind of group are we discussing here? Some bizarre off-campus club? A cult?’
‘No, don’t fuss; it wasn’t a club or a cult. And to be honest, this might have been scuttlebutt about the pregnancy, like I said. I have no idea if it’s true. Aside from that, Hiroko is the one who knifed me, straight after she discovered me in the middle of the smooch I mentioned. I wasn’t devoting equal ardour to the revolution.’
Kohana pointed across the frozen farmland, and I followed her index finger.
‘There I am, over there,’ she said, ‘scurrying for help.’ I saw a distant figure, staggering along a narrow road. ‘I’d been stabbed in the back, right between one of my dragon’s eyes, and left for dead too.’
‘Ahh—so that explains the split head on your tattoo.’
‘On the dot. I told you I’d get around to the telling of the tale.’
‘Well. Let’s look at the positives. You move spritely for someone so recently employed as a pin-cushion.’
‘Yep, I’m impressed too—though, let me tell you, the experience is far more enjoyable from this perspective. It was either run for help, or lie down, feel sorry for myself, bleed to death or die from exposure. I was lucky the knife bounced off my shoulder blade, but there was enough blood to make Hiroko think she’d done a good job.’
‘Where are we?’
‘In the southern Japanese Alps, not far from a secretive training camp for the newly formed and short-lived Rengō Sekigun—known as the United Red Army.’
‘Red Army?’ I stared at her. ‘Communists?’
‘Communists.’
‘You?’
‘I know, I know—it sounds passé now, and you can laugh if you want to, but our passions ran high in the late ’60s. Not just here, but in Europe. In three former fascist countries—Japan, Germany and Italy—communism was a captivating backlash against the psychotic right-wing antics of our parents.’
‘You joined the Communist Party? I thought only quixotic dimwits joined those outfits. It’s just like co-opting oneself to a cult.’
‘This wasn’t a cult.’
‘Split the difference.’
Kohana blew out a cloud of condensation. ‘You’re from a different generation. You don’t understand what we went through, or what we saw around us, and I’m not going to stand here in the cold, arguing politics. How old were you in 1972?’
‘Seven.’
‘I think a seven-year-old might find it difficult to relate.’
‘You were old enough to know better, Kohana.’
‘I was—I’ll give you that. And while our German and Italian brethren rallied against the imperialist state, which we hoped to do, here in Japan we killed our comrades. It wasn’t the ideals that went astray; the people we’d elected as our leaders went mad. I sometimes think the “United” part of the group’s name was a facetious addition.’
‘Why on earth did you hook up with these people?’
‘What can I say? I was infatuated with a man.’
Again, I felt like laughing, only it was getting beyond the joke. ‘What a surprising turn of events. Well, you did warn me—you mentioned you were stabbed for kissing someone.’
‘Don’t be angry.’
‘I’m not angry. “Depressed” would be a better word for it. What about the person on the receiving end of the peck? Who the Devil was it this time?’
‘Kunio Yamadera.’
‘Oh, how many infatuations do we have now? I swear I’ve lost count.’
‘This was different.’
‘Of course it was.’
Kohana hadn’t cottoned on to my impatience.
‘He was like the Japanese Che Guevara,’ she said in a breathy voice, as if I cared, ‘except he wasn’t caught, and there’s no iconic image of him to screen-print onto T-shirts. But he was such a charismatic man for his age! He was outspoken and reactionary, and after we started sleeping together, he convinced me to join him as a member of the Red Army Faction, which later became the United Red Army.’
‘How old was this man?’
‘Twenty-three when we first met.’
‘And you?’
The lady lost some of her sentimental sparkle, just as I intended.
‘Forty.’
‘How long did the fling last?’
‘For two years—up until I received the nip in the back.’
I’ll tell you, often I felt like throwing up my arms, to leave all this idiocy behind me. Yet every time I looked at my companion, and those eyes, I gave it one more shot. ‘All right. You say this mad woman punished you by stabbing you in the back. What was Yamadera’s punishment?’
‘He was far too important to “The Cause”. Hiroko let him off scot-free.’
‘But he jumped to your defence, of course, endangering himself in the process.’ Yes, I was baiting, but could not reel myself in.
‘Not at all. He walked away and left me to her.’
‘You do pick them,’ I muttered.
We wandered across the field, watching the distant figure stagger to a farmhouse and begin pounding on the door.
‘Quite a fist she has there,’ I said.
‘The same fist I would have used on Kunio’s skull if I’d ever seen him again.’
‘You said this Yamadera fellow was never captured?’
‘Yes—and no.’
‘Well, which is it?’
‘In actual fact, he was caught later this same month, after holding a woman hostage for ten days at a resort near Mount Asama. He even shot a police officer. But a couple of years later, his mates in the Japanese Red Army—a different faction—took more than fifty hostages from the American and Swedish embassies in Malaysia, and Kunio was released as part of an exchange.’
‘Be serious.’
‘Then? He vanished. Hearsay popped up in the media that he’d been spotted in Russia, Thailand, China, the Philippines. But he was never captured again.’
‘Well, what happened to your two mad tyrants?—What were their names?’
‘Seibei and Ushitora.’
‘Seibei and Ushitora.’
‘Some justice there. They both died in jail.’
The farmhouse door had opened and closed, and this world’s Kohana was obviously inside. They would be calling an ambulance, or the police. Probably both. I would.
‘What about you? If you were so involved with these killers, a member of the club so to speak, wouldn’t the police have had an interest in you as well?’
Kohana looked at me with an expression so blastedly sweet and innocent, I actually lost my train of thought.
‘I played dumb,’ she said, and then she winked. ‘Shhh, say nothing. Not really all that difficult for me, I know.’
‘I wasn’t—’
‘It’s far better for me to get in first than to leave the door wide open for your cruel barbs.’
The angelic façade dropped in an instant, and she poked me in the ribs.
I tried not to squirm.
‘So I was all tears, sugar-sweet smiles, and silly, when they interviewed me. I gave the police the information they wanted, they took pity, and left me to recover in the hospital—no charges laid.’
‘How do you get away with it?’
‘Well, in this case, I didn’t actually do anything wrong.’
‘You were socializing with terrorists.’
‘It was an error of judgment.’
‘I don’t think judgment entered into the equation.’
‘See what I mean? Cruel.’ Kohana shook her head. ‘When I was recovering in the hospital, I had a visitor who brought me flowers every day. Plumerias, better known as frangipanis.’
‘Oh God,’ I groaned, ‘not another Romeo.’
Finally, we were thrust indoors, in the middle of a whitewashed ward, where Kohana’s bed was separated from the five others by plastic curtains. She didn’t look at all poorly for a woman who had been stabbed.
A small young man, with bad posture, wearing a forgettable black suit and a characterless dark tie, had just finished bowing to her, and handed over a bunch of white flowers—each one with a ring of rich yellow towards the centre.
The fellow was timid, bespectacled, and a couple of centimetres shorter than me. So much for a potential inamorato. I could warm to this walkover.
‘His name was Toshiro,’ Kohana said from over on the hospital bed, just as she sniffed the flowers. ‘He was Kunio’s younger brother. Toshiro was twenty-two then, and he would become the head of a famous Japanese electronics firm by the age of thirty-eight. You would never have known he was a Yamadera, if you compared him to his infamous sibling. Toshiro hated Kunio. He blamed him for their father’s suicide.’
She smiled faintly.
‘I never thought I’d end up marrying the man.’