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Most of you are familiar with Triple X’s story Nihon no quantum, with its reclusive character Shinji Takeshita.  Not many know that there was actually a real-life Shinji Takeshita, a theoretical physicist known as Haru Suzuki. He was a recluse who lived with his mother in a small house in one of the poorer districts of Kyoto.

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As a youth, Suzuki had been outgoing and athletic, and a notable martial artist. He was actually a Kendoka, having reached the eighth dan in ancient Japanese art of swordsmanship, kendo.  When he was 28, however, Haru Suzuki barricaded himself in his bedroom and began a sort of monastic retreat, in which he devoted himself to the problem of reconciling Einstein’s theories of relativity and quantum physics. Suzuki believed he could build on the standard method of modelling time in physics, to give time an ontology similar to space. This would mean that time was just another dimension, that future events already existed, and that there was no objective, uni-directional flow of time.

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In the West, many physicists were unhappy with Suzuki’s theory, because of its implications for free will; they believed he was proposing that future events were immutably fixed and pre-determined. I had the privilege of studying the personal papers that Suzuki left to the University of Kyoto, and it is clear that he took a radically different position. In one paper, he imagined, with Augustine of Hippo, that God, being eternal, was outside of time. When God looked down upon the created world, He saw space-time as a ‘block universe’, in which time exists as a fourth dimension, alongside the three of space.  (The block universe was equivalent to the Dharmadhatu, in Buddhist thought, the ‘total field of events and meanings’.)

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The ‘block universe’ included all actual and potential events, and when individuals made a decision involving free will, their lives followed a different trajectory through it. At the same time, an alternative trajectory existed, in which the individual had made a different decision. These alternative trajectories form a branching tree, symbolising all possible outcomes of any interaction. Rather than refer to parallel universes, Suzuki preferred to think of a life history as being a trajectory or path through the infinite number of potential events. As a Buddhist, he believed this related to the doctrine of Karma, and the way actions shaped consciousness, although the passage of time was essentially illusory and subjective, being created by the mind.

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It was here that Suzuki lost his Western followers, because he gave quantum theory a distinctively Japanese twist. As a Kendoka, Suzuki aspired to the state of muslin, or ‘empty mind’, which relates to the Buddhist concept of shunyata, or voidness. Suzuki believed that, if the mind-consciousness was in a state of muslin, it could move outside of the confines of space-time. Through meditation, he argued, it would be possible to be liberated from the illusion of time’s arrow, and access knowledge of the past and future, and of different worlds. Suzuki called this the Urashima Taro Conjecture, after an ancient Japanese tale about a young fisherman who visits an undersea palace and stays there for three days. When he returns home, he finds himself three hundred years in the future, his house in ruins, and his family long dead.

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For the last two years of his life, while Suzuki struggled to resolve this problem, he received all his meals on a tray, and only emerged from his bedroom when his mother was asleep, to empty his antique, Edo-period chamber pot. And then, one fresh Spring morning, when the cherry blossom was just about to flower, Haru Suzuki disappeared. When several meals were left untouched, his mother persuaded a neighbour to force an entry to his locked bedroom, and they found it empty. The bed had been slept in—there was still the indent of his head on the pillow, and the bed was warm—and the chamber pot had been used but not emptied, yet there was no sign of Suzuki. He could not have left the house without passing through the room in which his mother slept, and she was convinced she’d have woken. She was convinced he was still there. She felt his presence, and carried on leaving food for him as though he was invisible, or had become an ancestral spirit, needing nourishment from sacrificial offerings.

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Suzuki was listed as a missing person by the Japanese police, and he appeared to have vanished without trace. To understand his fate, it is necessary to go back in history to the strange events of 1680, when there was a pogrom in Moravia, a region of Eastern Europe that is now in the Czech Republic. In that momentous year, the inhabitants of the Jewish ghetto in Třebíč discovered a wild, naked creature roaming the streets, terrorising the townspeople who were trying to attack their neighbourhood. The creature, which was seven foot tall,  tore a long pole from the scaffolding outside a derelict property and charged at the mob, using the pole as both a lance and a flail. Three people were killed before the mob fled in panic. Taken before the Rabbi Bezalel, it was confirmed that the creature had been created from the riverside clay by the famous Kabbalist, Abraham Zacchi, who had recently died.

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The Rabbi announced that the monster was a Golem, an incomplete or demonic Adam, kneaded from the earth like the first Adam, but lacking a divine soul. The Golem could only speak a barbaric tongue, and was bereft of reason, so the Rabbi wrote the divine name, Adonai ha-Aretz, upon its brow, to bind it to service. It was imprisoned in a room above the Neuschul synagogue, from which it was only released to perform errands, or to defend the ghetto in times of peril.  When unchained, the Golem fought with a ferocity that became legendary. It could only be subdued by the Rabbi reciting the Ineffable Names of God.

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Later that year, the Spanish Inquisition tried 72 people for being Judaizers, the descendants of forcibly converted Jews who secretly practiced the Jewish religion. Over 60 were burned at the stake in Madrid, the King of Spain lighting the fires personally. This sparked anti-semitic riots across Europe. Hundreds of Jews were killed in Bohemia and Moravia, but not one person was harmed in Třebíč. When the mob surged down an empty Blahoslavova Street, they were confronted by the hideous figure of the Golem. It stood silently in the middle of the highway, a wooden stave held aloft, and waited until the crowd was almost level, before springing forward and attacking all within reach. Sixteen men were clubbed to death, and three more died subsequently from abdominal injuries.

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Eventually, the Golem was destroyed by the terrified citizens of Třebíč.  A pack of hounds, followed by a gang of apprentices carrying lighted torches, chased the creature for several hundred yards down Blahoslavova Street, before cornering it in a courtyard, like a wild beast. Despite the monster’s piteous howling, the apprentice boys succeeded in tying it in a sack and dropping its body into the River Jilava, where it dissolved before their eyes, and returned to the mud from whence it came.

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After the Golem’s destruction, the Rabbi inspected the room in which it had been confined and found the walls to be covered in mathematical formulae, and strange writing. The writing seemed related to Enochian, the Angelic language discovered by Dr John Dee, astrologer to the English Queen Elizabeth, and visiting alchemist at the court of Emperor Rudolph II in Prague.  Rabbi Bezalel made a careful transcription of the writing, ordered that it should be preserved for posterity, and recorded the whole story in a Hebrew manuscript, held at the Charles University in Prague. A copy of the manuscript, together with an English translation, A True and Faithful History of the Golem of Třebíč, is available in the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

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There the story might have ended, had not a group of Japanese Communist Party delegates visited the synagogue in 1965, when it formed part of the Museum of Atheism of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. Not only could they decipher the sixteenth century writing, they claimed it was in Gyousho, the Japanese semi-cursive script. It said, “Pity me, poor Haru, who demonstrated the truth of the Urashima Taro Conjecture, who went to sleep in his room in Kyoto in 2009, and awoke in this land of ghosts.”

Footnote

Some say that the learned Rabbi controlled the Golem through the God Name Adonai ha-Aretz, which is Lord of Earth, who governs the clay from which it was made. Others, however, say the Rabbi wrote the word Emet, or Truth, upon its forehead, and that he could disable the creature by rubbing out the first letter (aleph) leaving the word Met, or death, upon its brow.