People Who Eat Darkness (29 page)

These conversations were conducted half a century later, and several years after Joji Obara had been arrested and charged with a series of grave crimes. It was perhaps not surprising, although it was still striking, that of the ten people I tracked down who knew him as a child, not one described himself as a friend of Seisho Kin, or remembered anyone else who did.

*   *   *

Seisho was the second of four brothers. He was ten years older than Kosho, the youngest, and six years older than the third boy, Eisho. The oldest brother was Sosho, who had been born in 1948. In a traditional Korean family, it was he who should have carried the greatest burden of parental expectation and pride. But there were problems with Sosho Kin.

One of his schoolmates was Shingo Nishimura, who would go on to be elected to the House of Representatives of the Japanese diet. Nishimura was a member of the nationalist right wing, an ultrapatriot who believed that the Pacific War should be a source of pride rather than its opposite, and that Japan should arm itself against future war in Asia with nuclear weapons. Such people form a noisy but small minority in Japan; for one of them to be elected an MP is very unusual indeed. It was difficult to know to what degree Shingo Nishimura’s chauvinism shaded his childhood recollection, but he spoke sadly and rather fondly of Sosho Kin.

His earliest memory was of a likable and well-adjusted boy who fitted in well enough in a class of high-spirited teenagers. “If people teased him, he took it in his stride and didn’t let it bother him,” Nishimura said. “I saw him at close quarters, and I always found him quite straightforward.” He knew that Sosho’s father was extremely rich, that he had made his money from pachinko, and that the family lived in the most expensive part of Osaka. “He was regarded as a bit different from others, but I wouldn’t say that he was bullied. He was like a pet to us. In junior high school, he was a very loving character. But when we started in senior high school, all of a sudden he changed.”

Between lessons, Sosho Kin would walk to the front of the class and chalk slogans on the blackboard, political slogans, full of resentment for Japan and the Japanese. “He would write, ‘Down with Japanese imperialism!’ and talk about how Japan was bad, and Japanese were bad, and Korea and Koreans were victims,” Nishimura remembered. “And he said that he was being followed by the Korean CIA”—the notorious South Korean intelligence agency, which frequently abducted and tortured its political enemies.

This was the 1960s, a time of political tumult in Japan and Korea, with strikes and demonstrations against the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty and the Vietnam War. But the closest that the rich and pampered children of the school got to left-wing politics was listening to Joan Baez records; Sosho Kin’s radical slogans were impossible for them to take seriously. “The other boys, we just watched him doing all this and laughed,” Nishimura said. “People would say, ‘Ah! He’s at it again.’ Some of them said, ‘If you don’t like it, why don’t you go home?’ When he talked that way, it was like watching a character in a comic. He took it so seriously, and the more seriously he took it, the less seriously everyone else did.”

Towards the end of senior high school, Sosho Kin suddenly stopped coming to classes. Shingo Nishimura never found out why. There were vague rumors that it was because of an inadequate academic performance; later, he heard that Sosho had gone to the United States. Nishimura went on to university in Kyoto and qualified as a lawyer, the most competitive and prestigious of the Japanese professions. Twenty-five years passed, and he forgot all about the strange Zainichi boy. And then late one night in 1989 he received a telephone call.

It was Sosho Kin, sounding terrified. He said that he needed to see Nishimura immediately. It was after midnight, but Nishimura found himself hurrying over, for the first time in his life, to the big house in Kitabatake. A maid admitted him; there seemed to be no one else at home. Sosho greeted him silently and produced a pad of paper on which he quickly began to write. “He wouldn’t speak,” Nishimura remembered. “He wrote everything down. He wrote, ‘I’m being bugged so I can’t talk. Even at home or on the train, someone is watching me and following me.’

“Well, I looked at my surroundings and thought that it could not be true. He was in this big, peaceful house with a maid looking after him. It was obvious that there was no one following him or bugging him, but he believed it passionately.” Apart from expressing his paranoia about surveillance and pursuit, Sosho Kin wrote a little about his time in the United States. “I felt that his life there must have been very unhappy, that he must have suffered loneliness,” Nishimura remembered. “He said a little about it. He told me that once he had been in a tent in the middle of the desert, and that he had shot a rattlesnake.”

It wasn’t clear from his scribbled sentences what Sosho Kin wanted his lawyer friend to do for him. Eventually, Nishimura took his leave. “What could I do?” he said. “I told him that he should have a good sleep and try to relax. Then I left.”

Nishimura never heard from him again, although other contemporaries from the Osaka University of Education School did. Around the same time, a handful of ex-classmates had been contacted by Sosho Kin with a peculiar request. He wanted to borrow their copies of the school yearbook, and when the albums were returned, the faces of boys from Sosho’s year had been cut out with a knife.

“At school, we knew that he was Korean,” Nishimura said, “but we had no particular prejudice. We were friends, in the usual way. We got on well. But, thinking back, it seems that even leading that wealthy life, he was unhappy, and he believed that unhappiness was brought about by Japan and the Japanese.”

*   *   *

The third of the boys, immediately junior to Joji Obara, was Eisho Kin. In different ways from his oldest brother, he too seems to have struggled with the face he presented to the world, and with his Korean identity.

Eisho went to the foreign-language university in nearby Kobe. He was a talented and creative young man. He spoke Chinese and English, as well as Japanese and Korean, and he had literary and intellectual ambitions. A group of like-minded young Zainichi used to meet at a library in Osaka to discuss literature and the politics of being a Korean in Japan; Eisho was one of them. They talked of Dostoyevsky, Sartre, and Camus, and of the prejudice they faced in their daily lives: invisible for most of the time but hard and high as a prison wall. These young men would never be offered jobs at a top Japanese bank or trading house. However outstanding their university careers, they would never be recruited into the fast track of the diplomatic service or the Ministry of Finance. “Most Zainichi Koreans aren’t conscious of discrimination,” an Osaka journalist told me. “That’s just who they are—they get on with their lives. It’s the people with ambition, who want to rise in society, they’re the ones who hit the glass ceiling. Most of the time they don’t realize they’re captive. It’s only the ones who try to escape who suddenly become aware of the cage. These are people who’ve grown up in Japan, speaking Japanese, eating Japanese food, never imagining that they are objects of discrimination. For people like this, in the second or third generation, the shock of discrimination is very great.”

I met a man who had been a member of this group of young intellectuals and a friend of Eisho Kin. They had spent many hours together, talking of books and ideas. But he always found Eisho’s company a strain. He was touchy and hesitant and defensive; the conversation never unfolded smoothly. “He was very stiff,” the friend told me. “He couldn’t be natural in the way he dealt with people. Whenever it got on to family matters, he always lost his composure. He was on guard all the time.” Once, he visited Eisho Kin’s home. The tone of their conversations, with their emphasis on radical philosophy and left-wing politics, had left him unprepared for its luxury and grandeur, and its garden filled with huge and expensive ornamental stones—immense, immovable manifestations of a family’s wealth and power. “My impression is that he had difficulty in accepting that he had risen in social class,” the man told me. “He couldn’t deal with the distance between himself and other Koreans.”

Eisho Kin had aspirations to be a writer. When he was twenty-two years old, a short story of his was published in a journal of Zainichi writing. It was an account of the sadness of a young man: hesitant, awkward, tormented by self-consciousness, disdainful of others, and humiliated by them.

The story is called “It Happened One Day,” and its protagonist is a Zainichi named Bun’ichi Ri. He is sitting on the subway when three Japanese men of his own age board the train; he understands immediately that they are deaf. Unintelligible whooping sounds come from their mouths. They communicate with one another in sign language, with busily moving hands and exaggerated facial expressions. Bun’ichi wonders if subtle emotions and nuances of feeling can ever be expressed with fingers and eyebrows. But the deaf men are struggling so hard, with such physical effort, to communicate with one another. The sight of them moves him deeply.

Bun’ichi, we are told, had “problems at home.” To escape them, he first put his energy into “social issues,” also of an unspecified kind. But he became disillusioned with the “phoniness” of the Zainichi organizations in which he participated and preoccupied by painful questions about discrimination. He identifies this not only in the treatment of Koreans by Japanese but also in a sense of superiority over others that he recognizes in himself. If Bun’ichi is a victim of racism, he also has to own up to prejudices of his own. “What are we to do with this habit, this instinct to discriminate against others, to feel good in setting another below ourselves?” he asks. “In thinking about such things, he felt the weight of a stone on the top of his head.” Bun’ichi feels himself to be divided within, to carry inside him a consciousness separate from his own—a cold, scrutinizing intelligence that passes judgment on him for saying one thing while intending another. It is the absence of this self-consciousness in the deaf men on the train that moves him so much. “They struggled without self-deception,” he observes. “There was no dishonesty in their desperate struggle to communicate.”

A drunk Japanese man walks down the subway train—in his shiny suit and white shoes, he looks like a yakuza. One of the deaf men unintentionally brushes against him. The drunk reacts furiously, grabbing his collar and demanding an apology; all the deaf man can do is whoop wordlessly. Bun’ichi stands up and shouts at the bully to leave his victim alone, and so the man turns upon him. In a fight between the stocky thug and the tenderhearted Bun’ichi, it is obvious who will come off best. But before any blows are exchanged, the three deaf passengers come between the two of them—and in the end, it is the handicapped men who save the Korean from a beating by the Japanese gangster.

Bun’ichi had intervened out of what he identified as a sense of fairness and justice. But in his humiliation, the voice in his head passes a harsher verdict. He acted because he had judged the deaf men to be weak and vulnerable. His anger against the drunken thug was actually based on a kind of prejudice and an assumption of superiority over the disabled—not so different from the prejudice he faces as a Zainichi. “Are we the strong if we name them the weak?” he asks himself. “Then what about Koreans in Japan who are discriminated against even in our jobs in this closed Japanese society? Which are we, the strong or the weak?”

He gets off the train and walks home from the station, filled with confusion and self-reproach. “Am I no different from those I despise?” he asks himself. “Why do human beings want to discriminate against human beings?”

He finds himself walking past a big house with an imposing front gate, a garden of “huge heavy stones, so huge that an ordinary house might be built with them.” A Cadillac drives past with its headlights blazing. “Bun’ichi wondered if people who live in such a house would ever think about what troubled him.”

This house, although few readers of the story could ever have known it, is recognizably the house of the Kin family in Kitabatake; the Cadillac is probably old Kim Kyo Hak’s car. And so, in a story about self-reproach and isolation, Eisho Kin turns the final reproach against himself. He has created a sympathetic character, who articulates complicated feelings of alienation and self-disgust. But he has done so from a situation of unearned privilege, from behind the high walls in Kitabatake. Even the young man in his story, isolated as he is, is less isolated than the people in the big house. “Those parents and sons, so used to their wealthy life,” Bun’ichi reflects, referring, although he doesn’t know it, to his own creator. “What about me?”

“It Happened One Day” appeared in the Winter 1977 issue of
Sanzenri
magazine. It was singled out for commendation in a literary award. Eisho Kin was delighted and told his friends about his success—it seemed to impart to him the confidence he had lacked. But then he discovered that the competition had been judged by a famous Zainichi writer, a close friend of his mother since before he was born. He came to believe that his story had been commended for reasons of favoritism and family feeling, not for its literary qualities. And his confidence fled him once again.

*   *   *

At school, Seisho Kin, the future Joji Obara, “liberated himself by degrading himself.” But when he chose, he could elevate himself ruthlessly. He demonstrated this when he passed the entrance examination for the senior high school attached to Keio, one of the most famous and prestigious private universities in the country. Boarding schools of the British kind were almost unknown, and for a teenager to leave home and move to another city was unusual, although not unheard of. But the arrangement his parents made for Seisho would be unusual in twenty-first-century Japan. In the 1960s, it was extraordinary.

At the age of fifteen, he left home and went to live in Tokyo, alone. With a female housekeeper to look after him, he was installed in Den-en Chofu, another neighborhood of the very rich, Tokyo’s equivalent of Kitabatake. Today it is one of the few areas in the capital still dominated by traditional Japanese homes, set behind wooden fences in gardens of bamboo groves and moss. But the house where Seisho lived was aggressively modern, the epitome of late 1960s architectural chic. A six-foot brick wall and an inner cordon of fluffy pine trees closed it off from a narrow lane. Inside were an oval swimming pool and a wide two-story house with a façade of white plaster and brown tiles. The rooms were fronted by walls of sliding glass; those on the upper floor gave on to wide thrusting balconies, and a garage to one side had room for several cars. The traditional Japanese homes that surrounded it, like his parents’ house in Osaka, were shadowy, cool, and somber, but this house was a fantasy of Hawaii or California, a place of light and brightness, made for sunbathing, barbecues, and dancing by the pool. And in the move here, the future Joji Obara underwent the next stage of his self-transformation. He left behind Seisho Kin and became Seisho Hoshiyama, and the weight of his family, his life in Osaka, and his Koreanness fell from his shoulders, like a man in springtime shrugging off a heavy winter coat.