Fracture Page 11

  His near neighbor wrote about the lessons the world could learn from the nuclear tragedy. About respect for the victims. The dignity of the survivors. Ōe promoted these ideas with the best of intentions. The problem was that Yoshie himself felt very far from embodying those supposed lessons. He had no sense of being ennobled by everything he’d experienced or lost. All he retained, with brutal clarity, was the fear, the harm, the anger, the shame.

  Soon after that article appeared, Me offered him a transfer and a promotion. In spite of his increasingly formal commitment to Violet, whom he pictured as his future wife, he accepted without hesitation. They would find a solution together. No distance could defeat them. He cleared out his apartment and moved straight to New York.

  FOR SOME TIME NOW, Mr. Watanabe’s sex life might be described as passive, although he prefers to think of himself as an enthusiastic voyeur. Contrary to what he believed in his youth, this seems to him less a renunciation than a refinement: where energy is lacking, there is more subtlety to finding pleasure. The ability not to do, he senses, is the greatest attribute of potency.

  As his vigor declines (without, he is surprised to note, his desire waning in equal measure), Watanabe has discovered that masturbation is a mental exercise. A reflex more closely associated with fixations than with the showiness of orgasm. This is why he now masturbates visually, without having to touch himself.

  His sexuality has survived its extinction. Every spectator enjoys apocalypse, providing it takes place far away. Distance enables people to become excited about things that would be difficult to look at up close. In that respect, Watanabe decides, the citizen and the pornographer concur.

  As he learned when he started studying Spanish, eschatology and scatology can be united by the very same word. Physiology and finality. The innermost depths of the body, and what lies beyond death. Perhaps that is why old people understand sex better than anyone: they are aware of their own finiteness.

  The true voyeur believes that their act is as radical as any other, that daring isn’t about taking part, but about watching to the end. We are profoundly fascinated by what in some sense we fear. That explains our obsession with sex and why we so seldom engage in it. We are—he concludes as he opens his favorite porn site—degenerates by omission.

  Mr. Watanabe is intrigued by the increasing numbers of sōshoku danshi, or herbivores, who renounce sex and embrace playful celibacy. Timid, delicate men who refuse to compete in the physical arena. As if the financial bubble and the business of virility were bursting simultaneously.

  According to the statistics he has read, as many as fifty percent of single Japanese people under thirty-five are virgins, and the percentage keeps rising. At this rate, based on the predicted number of births and deaths, researchers are fairly accurately able to pinpoint Japan’s extinction. Which should take place on August 16, 3766. On the 1,821st anniversary, Watanabe calculates, of their surrender to the Allies.

  As physical contact decreases, the number of sex products continues to grow; a sort of platonic libido. The natural corollary of this type of consumerism, he deduces, would be its self-annihilation. A capitalism without customers.

  His former colleagues remain at the opposite end of the market. Many of them continue to exhibit a tireless enthusiasm for prostitutes. More than offending his principles, this has never succeeded in arousing him. The transaction removes uncertainty, which is the very thing that drives his desire. In fact, close to his house is the Kabukichō district, where nightclubs and love hotels abound. More than a few of his acquaintances go there to ease, as he understands it, what men of his generation call loneliness.

  Working with loneliness, taking the absence of the other for granted, is more attractive to him than avoiding it. Among the selection of toys on offer these days, packages containing used underwear most draw his attention. Many include a photograph of their previous owner, of the body they once encircled. You can also buy shoes that have obviously already been worn. In some cases they are more expensive than a new pair. The object’s past life is revered, as in kintsugi.

  Since he has become old—since others started to label him as such—he feels a profound sense of disquiet when he goes out in spring, as he does now, and observes the young people. Not on account of the painful chasm between them and himself. But because he suspects that many of their blossoming bodies will fade without ever being sufficiently caressed. By the time they understand, it will be too late, they’ll be over on his side. The side that watches with melancholic envy as the next young bodies go by.

  In the books and films he comes across, Mr. Watanabe rarely identifies with the urges of the characters his age, who seem desperate for a final coitus. His body has reacted to old age differently. Even if he no longer feels the old impulse, his curiosity is still alive. It remains alert in his body, searching constantly for something undefined.

  In contrast to some of his fetishist friends, erotic films exasperate him. Their omissions strike him as not only supremely inept—each shot being the victim of a laughable insistence on concealment—but also deeply mistaken. The notion of seeing everything is unachievable. Whatever is revealed, it will leave us with the sensation that we could have seen something else. In this sense, erotic cinema is sustained by the fallacy that merely showing copulation signifies the end of concealment.

  As the years go by, Mr. Watanabe believes he has found a kind of purity in porn, which releases him from the tyranny of self-contemplation, and which allows him to abandon himself to a lascivious otherness, to a desire that is devoid of a leading ego. The ritual begins with choosing how he will arouse himself, the superior pleasure of organizing his pleasure.

  Naturally, not just anything will satisfy him. He has never much liked Japan’s porn industry. Having experienced different pornographic tastes in foreign countries, he has become aware of the limitations of the national tradition. In it, fantasy seems to advance in only one direction: stalking, assault, domination, submission, outraged moans, and, in general, a sad sense of awkwardness. As for the censorship of genitals, he admits that he is changing his mind about it. What he once considered absurd prudishness now seems to him an ingenious way of renewing mystery.

  After the indie enthusiasm of the genre’s early days, Watanabe lost interest in X-rated films, unmoved by silicone implants and glass vibrators. As the texture of the images changed, so did his idea of flesh. The unabashed folds of the seventies. The celebration of color in the eighties. The pretentious flashiness of the nineties. The insipid productivity of the twenty-first century.

  Growing disillusioned with the industry, he developed the habit of watching the films without sound. This turned everything into a parody: the provocative looks, the lovers’ gestures, the to-and-fro of their bodies. Without voices, the images lacked substance. That was how he discovered that pornography is a musical genre.

  In his view, the remote control didn’t help with the education of the audience either. The possibility of fast-forwarding the image impoverished desire. Skipping parts of the experience precluded those transitions that encouraged everything else. The pause button introduced another aberration, as each instant ceased to be ephemeral. He concedes, nevertheless, that the rewind button is sublime. Its sole function is to reproduce the obsessions of our memory.

  The plots in X-rated movies have never convinced him. The idiotic scripts are apt to nullify their own aim, leaving both those who wanted a story and those who didn’t equally dissatisfied. Sex scenes without context frustrate him even more. For him, without a character there’s no identity, and without an identity there’s no desire.

  With the advent of internet porn, amateur home videos—where there is no pretense of a story and people’s real identities are the starting point—fulfilled many of his requirements. But only when he discovered home webcams, with their radical slowness and uncertainty, did Mr. Watanabe reach the peak of voyeurism.

  * * *

  During the past few weeks, the ground u
nder people’s feet has been shakier than ever. Each tiny echo of the March earthquake has turned fear into a question of one’s politics: being afraid is now a matter of whether you trust the state. Outside in the street, Watanabe notices people exchanging suspicious looks. Are you trusting or doubtful? Patriotic or not?

  As far as he can remember, this is the second time Japan has had to question its own identity, the version of the country which it tells to itself. In some of the places where he has lived, in the Spanish-speaking world in particular, people live in a state of permanent suspicion and frantic self-flagellation. This impulse, which he initially considered a weakness, now strikes him as a strength.

  Mr. Watanabe keeps himself informed, or confused, by reading half the world’s press. He is watching an information battle unfold. It’s nebulous at first, and then he starts to see it more clearly. He thinks he has identified a Franco-German alliance with alarmist tendencies. The forecasts from these countries are usually bleaker, which makes them a useful alternative source. A large part of their diplomatic corps has shut down its embassies, canceled flights, or moved to the west of Tokyo.

  He also detects an Anglo-Hispanic alliance, which has attempted to preserve some measure of normalcy and is more circumspect in its news coverage. That, or these countries are just more accepting of the government’s versions. Although in theory their embassies are still active, a number of diplomats have left as a precaution. Among the most illustrious contradictions is the advice given to his citizens by the president of the United States, the country that is providing the biggest disaster relief effort: to remain at least eighty kilometers from the nuclear power plant.

  There are also journalistic factions within each of these alliances. Alongside coverage that seeks to be impartial, it isn’t hard to find articles lobbying for multinational energy companies: optimistic assessments of the damage, refutations of reports run by independent sources, debunking antinuclear arguments with the help of biased government data. For the time being, while the shock is still fresh in people’s minds, it’s possible that the former will hold out; in the long run, the latter will prevail. Within a few years, Watanabe predicts, vast investments will be made to publicize the reconstruction of what has been destroyed.

  Social media, another kind of universal wave that Watanabe insists on ignoring, has inflated the extremes. It’s able to knock down any official secret, as well as spread false alarms. The most diverse tweets have begun to appear in newspapers, ranging from bold denunciations to apocalyptic ravings. The newspapers must have their reasons, he imagines, although he doesn’t even quite understand how Twitter works.

  Instead of gaijin, Watanabe has heard some of his neighbors refer to foreigners as flyjin, considering how swiftly they’ve flown away. Every immigrant who flees Japan is deserting a land that has never assimilated them. It goes without saying that foreigners will always be deemed outsiders here, regardless of how long they have lived in the country. Watanabe thinks that this is both a limitation and an advantage. Ultimately, there is no greater hospitality than when a country, instead of forcing you to fit in, allows you to remain a foreigner.

  He can’t understand why the word gaijin—literally “outside person”—has replaced in common parlance the somewhat rhetorical but more precise gaikokujin: “person from a foreign country.” The second doesn’t prevent someone from joining the inside of a different country. Yet again, a binary culture dividing reality into inside and outside. Mr. Watanabe wonders where people who occupy both spaces, or neither, would fit into these categories. Where he would fit. He wonders what to call an island within an island.

  Of course, one could also use the faintly comical term gaijin-san. Mr. Foreigner. It wouldn’t bother him in the slightest to be called that.

  * * *

  Since Fukushima, another tsunami has been unleashed: that of global fear. And another explosion: that of money fleeing.

  The German chancellor, Watanabe learns as he sips his first drink at the Somewhere, has ordered the deferral of a law extending the life of the oldest power plants. A Swiss minister is to block plans to construct further ones. Spanish ecologists are demanding that the power station in the Garonne be closed. Its reactor, identical to those at Fukushima, went into service the same year and was manufactured by the same company. The Chilean government has been forced to justify an agreement with the United States for the training of nuclear power plant personnel. For its part, Washington has decided to carry out safety checks on all its nuclear installations.

  All measures taken in response to the accident—and to stabilize the Japanese economy—have won the backing of the International Monetary Fund. Given his career as a business executive, Mr. Watanabe is aware of where decisions are made and what the priorities are. He isn’t surprised that the expert responsible for the decontamination of Chernobyl has criticized the International Atomic Energy Agency’s lack of independence.

  What does surprise him is that, according to the Chernobyl expert, the third reactor at Fukushima uses a dangerous mixture of uranium oxide and plutonium. Sixty-four kilos of uranium in Hiroshima, Watanabe recites mechanically. Six of plutonium in Nagasaki.

  And in spite of these precedents, he thinks as John spins his second drink, successive governments have continued to foster the nuclear energy industry. They have blessed it with laws, budgets, communiqués, portrayed it as essential to the country’s growth. Doing so serves a network of different interests, but it is also, reflects Watanabe, a defense mechanism. A refusal to remember. As if, by ignoring what happened in the past, its consequences would be less damaging.

  He sucks the tiny bit of ice holding out at the bottom of his glass. He polishes it with the tip of his tongue, a shiver is tattooed on the roof of his mouth. John is watching him out of the corner of his eye, checking to see if he needs to be topped off.

  As he contemplates the alcohol pouring into his third glass, he thinks once more about the links between energy and politics. It doesn’t take too much imagination, or alcohol, to imagine what companies donate funds for public works, for instance. Not that Japan’s antinuclear principles have prevented the presence of U.S. atomic weapons on sovereign territory, either. Diplomacy, he thinks, smiling, is the art of saying yes to no.

  Having himself done good business in many of them, Watanabe is sure that no world power is going to renounce nuclear energy. Not until the operating life of power stations has been maximized, and renovating them is more costly than shutting them down. That will be the moment for a supposedly environmental change of heart.

  In fact, this economic expediency is debatable. A single accident in one plant is enough to destroy not only many lives, but also the balance sheets. Rebuilding Fukushima is going to cost a fortune. The full figure will probably change in a planned, incremental way. In concentric circles.

  Naïveté being one of the few vices he prefers not to indulge in, Watanabe is aware of what rejecting nuclear energy would entail. Japan would have difficulty surviving among the elite economies, unless it increased its consumption of oil and coal to stay competitive. Which in turn would increase its greenhouse gas emissions, leading to further problems with the global protocol.

  That leaves only three possible options, Watanabe concludes. A gentle decline, which might herald the genuine end of the island’s imperial fantasies. A drastic change in immigration policy, opening the country to young working people, resulting in a cultural revolution. Or massive investment in renewable energies, which would transform the country’s major industries. Would they be able to build a green identity after Fukushima, the way Hiroshima and Nagasaki reinvented themselves following their disasters?

  Beyond all these calculations lies the problem of democracy. No government in the world allows its people to make decisions about their own energy resources, and they don’t even tell them the truth about how they are managed. Nuclear energy, inspiration strikes him as he drains his fourth glass of the evening, is an anachronism: it belongs t
o the era of big secrets.

  And yet, he promptly contradicts himself, the problem does involve the citizens. Would we really be willing to use less energy? If he’s not mistaken, in a national survey a couple of years ago, over eighty percent of the national population were in favor of nuclear energy. Since the accident, the Asahi has published another survey in which nearly sixty percent continue to show their support. Maybe we prefer to carry on as usual, and to blame the authorities in the event of a tragedy?

  Mr. Watanabe rises to his feet. He feels slightly dizzy. He pays for his drinks and leaves the Somewhere.

  MR. WATANABE’S SOCIAL LIFE is increasingly restricted. A dinner or two each month with his healthy friends, whose numbers are dwindling with awful regularity. Meetings with former executives at Me. Sporadic calls to Madrid and Buenos Aires, and very occasionally to New York. A hint of a smile when passing a familiar face in the street. Since his return to Tokyo, he’s preferred his recent friendships. It feels liberating to not have shared a long history.

  Aside from this, he maintains cordial relations with his neighbors, in particular with Mr. and Mrs. Furuya. The Furuyas are both a charming and a bewildered couple. They are at that delicate age when their children’s departure still overshadows the home, and feel neither young enough to invent a new life nor old enough to act as such. Mrs. Furuya is forever walking their little dog, which shows signs of understanding her verbal commands, while Mr. Furuya forces himself to go running in the park beyond the train station. When Watanabe bumps into them in the elevator, it occurs to him that, though they are young enough to be his children, he’d have liked to have parents like them.

  He also exchanges pleasantries with two young foreign women who share a studio on one of the lower floors. Watanabe isn’t sure if they are friends, colleagues, or lovers, or an enviable mixture of all three. They are employed at some job that demands an insatiable consumption of pencils. They don’t speak any language he recognizes. One of the women is tall and athletic, with a cheerfulness that seems to originate from her abdominals. The other is short and a tad more pensive, with a sedentary figure. During the last national holiday, they both came up to give him a cake that looked Central European or possibly Scandinavian. He tried to give them a banjo, which they politely refused.