advert for a driving school: the advert is either very old or the driving school only accepts learners with a 1970s bent in clothes and hair. The soundtrack is the ‘YMCA’ song. Next, an advert for a plastic surgeon called Apollo Shigenobo who grafts permanent grins on to all his customers. They sing about facial correction. I enjoy the ‘Coming Soon’ trailers at the Kagoshima cinema – it saves the bother of watching the film – but here there are none. A titanium voice announces the film, PanOpticon, by a director I could never pronounce, winner of a film festival award in a city I could not even pinpoint to the nearest continent. No titles, no music. Straight in.
In a black-and-white city of winter an omnibus shoulders through crowds. A middle-aged passenger watches. Busy snow, wartime newspaper vendors, policemen beating a black marketeer, hollow faces in empty shops, a burnt skeletal bridge. Getting off, the man asks the driver for directions – he receives a nod at the enormous wall obscuring the sky. The man walks along its foot, looking for the door. Craters, broken things, wild dogs. Circular ruins where a hairy lunatic talks to a fire. Finally the man finds a wooden door. He stoops and knocks. No reply. He sees a tin can hanging from a piece of string vanishing into the masonry, and speaks into it. ‘Is anybody there?’ The subtitles are Japanese, the language is all hisses, slushes and cracks. ‘I am Dr Polonski. Warden Bentham is expecting me.’ He puts the can to his ear and hears drowning sailors. The door opens by itself on to a bleak forecourt. The doctor stoops through. A strange chanting echoes with the wind. ‘Toadling at your service, Doctor.’ A very short man unbows, and Dr Polonski jumps back. ‘This way, if you will.’ Snow is gravelly. Incantations whirl and die and rise again. Keys jangle on Toadling’s belt. Past card-playing guards, through a maze of cages. ‘Your destination,’ he croaks. The doctor gives a stiff bow, knocks, and enters a scruffy office.
‘Doctor!’ The warden is decrepit and drunk. ‘Take a seat, do.’
‘Thank you.’ Dr Polonski steps gingerly – the floors are not only bare, but half the floorboards have been removed. The doctor sits on a schoolchild’s chair. The warden is photographing a peanut in a tall glass of liquid. Warden Bentham explains. ‘I am penning a treatise on the behaviour of bar snacks in brandy soda.’
‘Indeed?’
The warden checks his stopwatch. ‘What’s your poison, Doc?’
‘Not while I’m on duty. Thank you.’
The warden empties the last drop from his brandy bottle into an eggcup and disposes of the bottle by dropping it between floorboards. A distant scream and tinkle. ‘Chin chin!’ The warden knocks back his eggcup. ‘Dear doctor, permit me to cut to the quack. The quick, I mean, the quick. Our own Dr Koenig died of consumption before Christmas, and what with the war in the East and whatnot we still have no replacement. Prisons are not priorities in wartime, except to house politicals. We had such high hopes. A Utopian prison, to raise the inmates’ mental faculties, to allow their imaginations to set them free. To—’
‘Mr Bentham,’ interrupts Dr Polonski. ‘The quick?’
Polonski shifts on his tiny chair, afraid of joining the brandy bottle. ‘Voorman is a prisoner here?’
‘Quite so, Doctor. Voorman is the prisoner who maintains he is God.’
‘God.’
‘Each to his own, I say, but he has persuaded the prison population to share his delusion. We isolated him, but to no avail. The singing you heard coming in? The psalm of Voorman. I fear disturbances, Doctor. Riots.’
‘I see you have a problem, but how—’
‘I am asking you to examine Voorman. Ascertain whether his madness is feigned, or whether his tapirs run amok. If you decide he is clinically insane, I can parcel him off to the asylum, and we can all go home for tea and fairy cakes.’
‘Of what crime was Voorman convicted?’
Warden Bentham shrugs. ‘We burned the files last winter for fuel.’
‘How do you know when to release the prisoners?’
The warden is flummoxed. ‘“Release”? “The prisoners”?’
Akiko Kato looks behind her. I duck down, in time, I think. At the end of the row a rat stands upright in a pool of silver screenlight. It looks at me before climbing into the upholstery. ‘I only hope,’ Akiko Kato’s companion speaks softly, ‘this is urgent.’