World War Z_ An Oral History of the Zombie War ( PDFDrive )

the Akakaze went from a repatriation center to a luxury hotel and Japan went from conquered
rubble to economic superpower.
I was still working at the Akakaze when I heard of the first domestic outbreak. I was trimming
the Western-style hedges near the restaurant, when I overheard several of the guests discussing
the Nagumo murders. According to their conversation, a man had slain his wife, then set upon the
corpse like some kind of wild dog. This was the first time I had heard the term “African rabies.” I
tried to ignore it and get on with my work, but the next day there were more conversations, more
hushed voices across the lawn and beside the pool. Nagumo was old news compared to the much
more serious outbreak at Sumitomo Hospital in Osaka. And the next day there was Nagoya, then
Sendai, then Kyoto. I tried to push their conversations from my mind. I had come to Hokkaido to
escape from the world, to live out my days in shame and ignominy.
The voice that finally convinced me of danger came from the hotel’s manager, a stiff,
no-nonsense salaryman with a very formal manner of speech. After the outbreak in Hirosaki, he
held a staff meeting to try to debunk, once and for all, these wild rumors about dead bodies coming
back to life. I had only his voice to rely on, and you can tell everything about a person by what
happens when he opens his mouth. Mister Sugawara was pronouncing his words far too carefully,
particularly his hard, sharp consonants. He was overcompensating for a previously conquered
speech impediment, a condition that only threatened to rise in the presence of great anxiety. I had
listened to this verbal defense mechanism before from the seemingly unflappable Sugawara-san,
first during the ’95 quake, and again in ’98 when North Korea had sent a long-range, nuclearcapable
“test missile” streaking over our homeland. Sugawara-san’s articulation had been almost
imperceptible then, now it shrieked louder than the air-raid sirens of my youth.
And so, for the second time in my life, I fled. I considered warning my brother, but so much time
had passed, I had no idea how to reach him or even if he was still alive. That was the last, and
probably the greatest of all my dishonorable acts, the heaviest weight I will carry to my grave.
Why did you run? Were you afraid for your life?
Of course not! If anything I welcomed it! To die, to finally be put out of my lifelong misery was
almost too good to be true…What I feared was, once again, becoming a burden to those around
me. To slow someone down, to take up valuable space, to put other lives in danger if they tried to
save an old blind man who wasn’t worth saving…and what if those rumors about the dead
returning to life were true? What if I were to find myself infected and awake from death to
threaten the lives of my fellow countrymen? No, that was not going to be the fate of this disgraced
hibakusha. If I was to meet my death, it should be in the same manner as I had lived my life.
Forgotten, isolated, and alone.
I left at night and began hitchhiking south down Hokkaido’s DOO Expressway. All I had with me
was a water bottle, a change of clothes, and my ikupasuy, 2 a long, flat shovel similar to a Shaolin
spade but which also served for many years as my walking stick. There was still a sizable amount
of road traffic in those days—our oil from Indonesia and the Gulf was still flowing—and many truck
drivers and private motorists were kind enough to give me a “ride.” With each and every one, our
conversation turned to the crisis: “Did you hear that the Self Defense Force has been mobilized?”;
“The government’s going to have to declare a state of emergency”; “Did you hear there was an
outbreak last night, right here in Sapporo?” No one was sure what the next day would bring, how
far the calamity would spread, or who would be its next victim, and yet, no matter whom I spoke to
or how terrified they sounded, each conversation would inevitably end with “But I’m sure the