Status Updates From MANCHUKUO 1987

“…and in silence he waited and watched as they came back and forth in their panicked way, the bastard remnants of what had once been a navy, which had once been part of a military, which had once been the cursed sword of a terrible empire. Now there were only boys scared and unused to battle, nobodies who dreamt uneasily of the retribution karma had prepared for them.”

“You exist. And I exist too. I don’t need to know your war stories now, you know. I’m certain about it. There’s no point. We can’t move forward, the two of us. Not in that way. But we can understand one another. Is that fair?”

“The thing that had become Hana was only a blood-soaked revenant, the remainder of a finished war, wandering over Manchukuo looking for peace. The best thing would have been for things to stay as they were. Manchukuo would exist unjustly forever, built on death, and Hana and Munekata would stay as pathetic client and useless whore and they could then go on until the Soviets or Germans dropped a missile on them.”

“She, Chinese, speaking Japanese bluntly and rudely like a Chinese would, obscuring herself with a Japanese name, and he, a Japanese who felt nothing about Japan, who would sooner or later die here in this Ersatz-place, this country that was not real, that had no soul, that was as far from ideas of harmony or righteousness or the Way as was possible. Creatures assembled by history.”

“They enjoyed themselves and they laughed and talked, and they were here alive, with eyes to see and hearts to feel with. Was it that simple? Did the fear stop one day? He couldn’t imagine it. The spectre that had haunted him all his life, the Power that was inevitably to hunt him down - now it had a name, a form that he could find within his memory, one that he could properly despise. That of Keizo Munekata.”

“The misbegotten parody-nation he now was trapped in had felt alive then. Love and lust in Shinkyo. The feeling of achievement, of freedom, of a world ever-changing, of possibilities dangerous and beautiful writhing beneath the surface. He supposed that when Karashima had said he was the only person who even half-believed in Manchukuo that it hadn’t been incorrect. A nomad clinging to a failed non-home.”