It is a long time since I have read this book but the image of Toxitown has stayed with me. In terms of environmental catastrophe, this book examines the legacy of a murderous military past with a hidden dump of chemicals off the coast of the southern islands of Japan and the resentment of two young boys, Kiku and Hashi, abandoned in coin lockers in the early 1970s. Life is cheap, especially in Toxitown where the dregs of human society eke out a brutal existence in the shadow of the skyscrapers in West Shinjuku. The repeated image of corpses reduced to a red blob, drive the plot forward as the boys come face to face with their past.
Raised as orphans on a small island to the south, Kiku and Hashi know little about their past except for the fact that they were abandoned. When Hashi runs away to Tokyo, Kiku and his foster mother come looking for him. In one of the first of the red doll images, Kazuyo dies after being knocked to the ground in the streets. After wrapping her corpse up in a sheet like a mummy Kiku describes her in the morning:
"Kazuyo's body had apparently bled from the mouth during the night, dyeing the top half of the mummy a deep rust colour and laminating the sheet to the skin so that Kiku could see every detail of the face and chest" (p 85, Translated by Stephen Snyder)
"Kazuyo's body had apparently bled from the mouth during the night, dyeing the top half of the mummy a deep rust colour and laminating the sheet to the skin so that Kiku could see every detail of the face and chest" (p 85, Translated by Stephen Snyder)
As a result Kiku feels claustrophobic until he wonders if 'he too was a hard red doll draped in a sheet?' The sounds from a demolition site fill the air until he imagines the city calling to him to destroy it and he is given a sense of freedom. He imagines the city 'as a sea of ashes, bloodied children wandering among the few surviving birds and insects and wild dogs...' Filled with a murderous rage, this is just the start of his plan to unleash an apocalypse on Tokyo, a plan that can now be realised through Kiku's discovery of the truth about DATURA, a chemical stockpiled by the Americans in a cave on his faster-mother's island. Significantly, he is briefly united with his mother, and kills her in what is described as an accident by the courts. What is most significant is the description of her death. He pulls the trigger and:
"A second later, her face had been ripped away and her arms spread open as she collapsed into the same crouch as before, covered now with what might have been a bright red sweater. her head was just a smooth globe with no trace of eyes, nose, lips, ears, or hair. The globe tilted at Kiku, and a muddy red pool drank in the snowflakes from the sky, giving back a fine, faint steam" (p 211, Translated by Stephen Snyder).
Human life is reduced yet again to a sticky red doll image set off by a family dispute. This combination of the breakdown of the family, the willingness of mothers to abandon their young, a world where obscene amounts of money lead to an inflated sense of self worth whilst the legacy of the past is stockpiled in piles of abandoned chemical weapons is a recipe for disaster and Toxitown is the end result.
Whilst Murakami indulges himself to some extent in a one-sided polemic against the U.S., the reality is that today the Japanese on the southern islands are facing a deadly legacy from the war that was created by their own military. The island of Okunoshima, off the coast of Hiroshima. was used by the Japanese military to create and store the chemical weapons it used on nearly two thousand occasions in China. According to activist Yamauchi Masayuki, 6,000 tonnes of mustard gas were manufactured here as well as lewisite gas, mustard gas and tear gas. After the war, much of it was buried by American and Australian troops. Two ship loads, however, were sunk in barrels at sea. A worker at the time, one of 6,700 Japanese employed at the plant, recalls that the lives of workers was secondary to the production targets set by the military. They had no protection gear and just wore cotton masks. Breathing in arsenic trioxide led to cancer rates in the workers 3 to 4 times the average. Apart from demanding compensation, Fujimoto has been to China three times to personally apologise for war crimes that he feels he helped to commit against the Chinese people. As for the barrels of poison gas, they sit quietly at the bottom of the ocean waiting to be disposed of properly. This is the real Toxitown that the Japanese government refuses to acknowledge.
Whilst Murakami indulges himself to some extent in a one-sided polemic against the U.S., the reality is that today the Japanese on the southern islands are facing a deadly legacy from the war that was created by their own military. The island of Okunoshima, off the coast of Hiroshima. was used by the Japanese military to create and store the chemical weapons it used on nearly two thousand occasions in China. According to activist Yamauchi Masayuki, 6,000 tonnes of mustard gas were manufactured here as well as lewisite gas, mustard gas and tear gas. After the war, much of it was buried by American and Australian troops. Two ship loads, however, were sunk in barrels at sea. A worker at the time, one of 6,700 Japanese employed at the plant, recalls that the lives of workers was secondary to the production targets set by the military. They had no protection gear and just wore cotton masks. Breathing in arsenic trioxide led to cancer rates in the workers 3 to 4 times the average. Apart from demanding compensation, Fujimoto has been to China three times to personally apologise for war crimes that he feels he helped to commit against the Chinese people. As for the barrels of poison gas, they sit quietly at the bottom of the ocean waiting to be disposed of properly. This is the real Toxitown that the Japanese government refuses to acknowledge.
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