The Sentence Is Death

This was where Akira Anno was speaking at half past six that evening. Hawthorne and I arrived in time to get a couple of seats at the back. It was interesting to see how relaxed he was inside the bookshop; certainly more than he had been in Yorkshire. He was completely cheerful as we sat down and it reminded me that he was a member of a book club, one which I would be joining on Monday night. I hadn’t read A Study in Scarlet for some time. I’d have to spend a few hours with it on Sunday.

About a hundred people had turned up for Akira’s event and every seat was taken. There were more people standing at the back. When she finally appeared, making her way down the side, the applause was loud and enthusiastic. I was quite surprised. She didn’t have a new book out so there was actually no reason for her – or her audience – to be there. And the title of the talk certainly wouldn’t have dragged me out on a miserable November evening.

She was interviewed by a slim man with a tangle of black hair, black glasses, a black jacket and a black polo neck, a lecturer at the School of Oriental and African Studies whose name I didn’t catch. He spent much of the hour discussing her earlier work, A Cool Breeze in Hiroshima. The main character, a Korean comfort woman called Jung-soon, finds redemption in the days after the atom bomb is dropped, only to die a few chapters later of leukaemia. I knew the book from the blurb on the back cover and drifted in and out during the next forty minutes, but I did manage to jot down some of what she said.

‘The sexualisation of the nuclear arsenal, as a trope, is of course self-evident. It is no coincidence that the first two bombs were Fat Man and Little Boy, while both the cities have inherently feminine-sounding names, particularly with the unvoiced phoneme at the start of “Hiroshima”. As I’ve explained, I use the rape of Jung-soon that opens the book to some extent to prefigure what history informs us will come. History or, in this case, her story. But I think we have to be careful. For too long we have allowed such issues as missile proliferation, cyberwarfare and nuclear strategy to be seen from a state-centric and male-dominated perspective. If we accept the masculinised identity of the discussion, then it becomes more difficult to challenge it. We cannot allow politics to become gender hierarchical and I think that language can all too easily affect the very way we think.’

All of this may be true but I’m afraid it went right over my head. It wasn’t just the sense of what Akira was saying that lost me, it was the manner of her delivery. She spoke very softly and with almost no emotion so that if her talk had been translated into one of those wavelengths you see in medical dramas, it would have appeared as an almost flat line.

The audience loved it. That line about the unvoiced phoneme even got a laugh and the university man was nodding so much his glasses almost fell off. There’s no lonelier place than an audience where you’re the only person having a bad time – I’ve often felt this in the theatre – and I was glad when the first part of the talk came to an end and Akira took questions from the floor. At the same time, Hawthorne (who had been blank-faced throughout) nudged me and pointed to a pair of seats about five rows in front of us.

I felt my stomach shrink as I recognised Detective Inspector Cara Grunshaw and her leather-jacketed assistant. They had come to the talk as well, presumably planning to interview Akira a second time when it was over. My worry was that I hadn’t informed them we would be there and the moment they saw me they would know I wasn’t living up to my side of the agreement that had been forced on me. Worse still, what would I do if she referred to our recent telephone conversation in front of Hawthorne?

I sweated out the question-and-answer session and didn’t hear very much of it. I’ve admired the work of feminist writers from Virginia Woolf to Doris Lessing and Angela Carter, but Akira’s brand of humourless introspection – along with her audience’s appreciation of it – left me cold. At long last there was a round of applause, an announcement that Akira would be signing books, including her recent collection of haikus, and everyone got to their feet. Hawthorne and I stayed where we were, watching as a short line formed. For all their enthusiasm, not many people stayed to buy books, but presumably they had them already. Grunshaw and her friend Darren were sitting with their backs to us. I wondered if they knew we were there.

We waited until everyone had gone, then moved forward, all four of us descending on Akira in a pincer movement, coming at her from both sides. She was clearly alarmed to see us, giving the lecturer a quick peck on each cheek and sending him hastily on his way. Grunshaw noticed Hawthorne and turned to him first.