The Gun

  I left the coffee shop, declining the detective’s offer to walk with me, and went home alone. Even after I left the detective, my heartbeat raced with no sign of abating. I could barely think straight—all I knew was that I couldn’t settle back down again. I returned to my apartment and lit a cigarette to try to relax. But maybe because I had already smoked too much, it just made me nauseous, and I actually vomited a little in the toilet.

  13

  I spent the next several days mostly thinking about whether I really would get caught the next time I fired the gun. I hardly left the apartment, and stopped answering the phone. I didn’t really sleep much either; I barely did anything other than polish the gun. I did so, quietly, the gun and me in my apartment.

  I came to the conclusion that I would never be caught. Connecting me to the gun from the Arakawa case was a matter of speculation, and as long as that connection remained as vague as it was, I didn’t think they would tie me to the another incident. For example, if someone died, even if they discovered a bullet in the body that was similar to the one found at Arakawa, they might be able to connect those two incidents, but they couldn’t tie them to me. I figured I could get by, even if I were under suspicion, assuming no one could place me at the scene of the crime and, just to be on the safe side, afterward I stashed the gun someplace temporarily. I had the feeling there might be flaws in this thought process, but I decided to stick with it anyway. This made me feel liberated, which made me feel better. But at the same time, this also led to a chronic nervousness.

  One thing I could not get out of my mind—what kept repeating over and over—was that if I didn’t keep my wits about me, these thoughts would just spin out endlessly. Once I realized this, I was badly shaken up. The silver-black of the gun shone, its metallic luster penetrating deep within my vision, beseeching me. Or, I felt as though it were beseeching me. The woman next door was screaming, and I could hear something bumping against the wall randomly, accompanied by short cries. I tried to distract myself by putting on some music, but somehow, even as I did so, I was still trying to hear what was going on over there.

  Yuko Yoshikawa called at one point. Actually, she may have called more than once, I couldn’t really be sure. I just happened to be near the phone, so that was the only call I answered. For some reason, she was extremely worried. She went on and on—Why couldn’t she get in touch with me, and why hadn’t I contacted her? And then she just started crying. I felt as though I had been saved—I suggested we meet up now, and I told her I would come over to her place. I took a shower, got dressed, and went out. It was bitterly cold. I bought a can of hot coffee.

  As soon as I was inside her apartment, I took off my coat and drew close to Yuko. “I’ve liked you for a long time,” I said, caressing her face with both hands. Maybe she was surprised—she stared at me with a strange expression and repeated, “What are you saying?” I told her, “I really like you, and I can’t stand it any longer.” I brought my mouth to her lips, but for some reason she tried to avoid me. I told her again, “I’ve really liked you for a long time,” and I tried to push her down onto the bed that was right there. But she resisted fiercely and managed to shove me away. I was quite surprised by how much force she used. She looked at me and asked, “Why are you smiling?” I didn’t know what she meant, so I didn’t say anything. But she asked me again, “What are you smiling about?” She gave me an insistent look, then seemed about to burst into tears. I was sweating, but I doubted that I had been smiling. So I left her apartment. It was still just as cold outside, so I bought a can of hot coffee, just like I had on the way over.

  I did not try to dissuade myself from shooting a person. It felt as if it were a matter that already decisively existed in my immediate future. Why the matter had already been decided, I didn’t really understand myself. I was free, and was supposed to be able to control my own actions. I was able to do the things I wanted to do, and not do what I didn’t want to do. However, I could not stop myself from thinking about shooting someone.

  The gun was a man-made device, so it stood to reason that it had a purpose and, to stretch the point, a philosophy and an ideology. Musical instruments were created to play sounds, lighters were a simple way to spark a flame. A gun had been made to shoot a person—it was created to make it easier to kill someone. The general impression that people had of a gun, ultimately, was of death and murder. Being in possession of the gun, I was not immune from such associations, and imagining myself shooting someone was an inevitable progression. But for me to actually carry out such an act required negotiating that choice. Although the concept of killing a person was inherent within the gun itself, I had been able to ignore it, and I should have continued to enjoy the feel and the experience of the gun, as I had before. However, the gun burgeoned within me, until it took over all of me, a process that I had willingly tolerated. Even though I probably felt an emotion akin to love for the gun, there were times when, inexplicably, I felt as though the gun hated me—I was under this illusion despite the fact that the gun was an inanimate object. The result of such thinking was that I wondered whether I was ill-suited to the gun. I often felt that someone more cold-blooded, like you see in the movies, someone who coolly committed murder, who conformed with the ideology of the gun, would be better suited to it. The idea was extremely upsetting to me. At this late juncture, I had the feeling that perhaps I had discovered the sadness that one felt when, out of jealousy or despite your love for someone, the object of your desire turns their back on you. At times, I yearned for the gun to find favor with me, regardless of what might happen.

  Nevertheless, I still did not see this ache for approval as a reason to shoot someone. Of course it was an influence—I could tell as much from the fact that I was even entertaining these ideas—but I still wasn’t quite convinced, not even theoretically. This kind of thinking was not really my forte. Nor was I particularly good at analyzing myself; in fact, self-study actually inspired a feeling of revulsion. It took me quite a while to work through all this in my mind.

  What distressed me the most was probably my own idea of what it meant to shoot someone. That option as a choice—as well as the images and sensations that I imagined went along with it—sought to connect with my real action, to move beyond the theoretical. I was unable to find the basis of that connection within myself. Whether it may have even been my own fundamental desire, I could not tell. Human consciousness is constantly shifting, influenced by various surrounding circumstances and instinctively fluid actions, societal norms, your perception of the outside world during childhood, experiences, the groups that you belong to, unconsciously accumulated information—it goes on and on, but this consciousness is an unstable thing, determined by the interaction of all these things—I knew I had read about it in a book somewhere. But I had to think. If I wanted to avoid shooting someone, these circuitous ideas were necessary.

  In order to change the direction of my thinking, I tried taking the opposite position: why shouldn’t I shoot someone? It was difficult to come up with an answer. It was a well-known fact that the world was full of people who didn’t deserve to live, myself included, and the existence of the death penalty was societally accepted—whatever that tells you about society. And, after all, the fact that guns existed was also accepted as a matter of course. Conveniently, there was a person living in the apartment next door to me who would be better off dead. At that moment, it felt as if my thoughts had taken on a concrete movement of their own. Naturally, I would lose my freedom if I were caught, but I just needed to figure out how not to get arrested.

  Most importantly, the truth was that I felt as though the gun had brought me back to life. Since having the gun, that fulfilling—you might even say thrilling—progression, probably formed as the gun insinuated itself into my life, became something automatic, and by tracing this transformation, I felt a pleasure that shook my existence as well as gratitude, and to deny that meant denying everything about myse
lf. I wanted to experience every aspect of the gun thoroughly, and to abandon the firing of it that now loomed before me would mean there would be nothing left to do but to relinquish the gun. That was an impossible option, one that I couldn’t even fathom. Losing the gun would turn me into an empty shell of myself, and the prospect of carrying around that lifeless husk for the remaining years of my life seemed like endless torture. I had often heard it said that humans lived to achieve what they chose to do, and I believed that. Putting one’s soul to the flame, in order to experience such fullness, was essential for humans, and I had no reason to think that I was an exception. Thoughts of how to avoid doing so had gotten in my own way. I no longer felt the need to contemplate it. If I continued to brood over it, I would become paralyzed. And if I couldn’t do anything, I would lose whatever value there might be to living. With this realization, I decided to pursue the idea of how, specifically, I would fire the gun. At that moment, I felt decidedly more at ease.

  14

  I began to shadow the woman from the apartment next door every so often, and I got to know the general pattern of her movements. She spent the daytime in her apartment, she worked nights at a kind of local bar; Saturday and Tuesday were her days off, but there were times when she worked on Tuesdays. She came home at five o’clock in the morning; sometimes she had a man with her, and when that happened, she made the kid go outside. She was around her late twenties, she was thin, her eyes slanted upward, her hair was dyed brown, most of her clothes were garish but, on her days off, she often wore the kind of brand name track suits that were trendy with people younger than her. One day while I was shadowing her, I remembered how, when I first imagined firing the gun, I had envisioned shooting a young woman. At that moment, it felt as though this was something that had been decided all along; I had the impression that I was following, very precisely, a process that was integral to the gun itself. The place where she worked was in Itabashi in Tokyo, but she often went to a supermarket on the edge of the neighboring prefecture to do her shopping. I took note of this, and actually went to the supermarket myself to determine its exact address, which I got from a receipt. The store was in fact located in Saitama prefecture. Realizing that it would fall under a different prefectural police jurisdiction, I hit upon the idea of shooting the woman on Saitama turf. It seemed like this might confuse the police somewhat. To make the connection between incidents involving a woman in Saitama and a man from Itabashi in Tokyo would take some time, I thought—maybe not long, but a while, anyway. Perhaps it was only trivial, but it seemed to be in my best interest to complicate things however I could for the police.

  The woman often went to that supermarket on Thursday, or sometimes Tuesday, between eight and nine in the evening. At that hour, the area was already dark, so it seemed to me like the perfect time. I began to consider the act from various angles, carefully investigating the neighborhood around the store to determine the best place to shoot her, along with my own escape route. I bought a black jacket from a local shop, and hung it on a hanger in my apartment. The dark color would be less conspicuous at night, which was absolutely critical for what I was about to do. The jacket was one of those reversible types—it was white on the other side—which I also liked. After the deed, I thought it would be extremely useful to be able to turn it inside out as I made my getaway. When I purchased the jacket, I also bought a pair of black leather gloves. They weren’t a practical necessity, but I paid good money for them, in order to add to the excitement.

  I placed the leather gloves and the gun on the table, and I gazed at the reversible black jacket suspended on the hanger. I also had a small flashlight that was still packed in its cardboard box, one of the things my mother had bought for me when I passed the university’s entrance exam and moved out. I had taken the flashlight out a few days earlier and lined it up on the table along with the rest. The reversible jacket, the leather gloves, the small flashlight, the gun—these four items constantly reminded me of the fact that I was a criminal. Sometimes I liked the way this made me feel, sometimes I didn’t. Yet these shifts in mood, this ambivalent consciousness that could be swayed by whatever vague reasons did not matter much to me. This was a simple process that I needed to follow, and what was important was whether I would succeed.

  The toast girl called, and I yielded to temptation when she asked me to come over to her place. The truth was, I was more inclined to turn her down, but it felt almost like an automatic response when I agreed to go. I took a shower, smoked two cigarettes, and got dressed.

  When I went outside, for some reason I felt slightly dizzy. After walking for a little while, I realized that all along I had been staring at the top of a utility pole far off in front of me. I took a puff on my cigarette, threw it on the ground, and lit a new one. Several of the people on the street eyed this repetitive behavior with suspicion as they walked past me. A bicycle that appeared out of nowhere completely startled me—I almost collapsed on the spot. For whatever reason, the agitation from being caught off guard like that made my mind go momentarily blank. Lately, at least, minor things often startled me. The phone ringing surprised me, or someone knocking on the door made me terribly nervous. Even when I was on the train, I scanned my surroundings, my eyes darting restlessly around me. This may have been an affectation, but I must have felt a need to check one thing or another. Looking out the train window in front of me, I waited patiently for the station where I would get off to be announced, as nervous as if I were threatened by something.

  Once inside the girl’s apartment, I pushed her down on the bed. For some reason, she laughed, and told me to hang on a minute. But it made no difference to me. I could wait a bit, or I could do whatever right then and there. I felt thirsty, so I opened the refrigerator and drank a Coca-Cola that was inside. After helping myself to it, I felt a little guilty and apologized to the girl. She said something to the effect that those kinds of things really didn’t matter to her, but I didn’t quite hear her. She kept talking, now with a more serious look on her face, asking me if there was something wrong. I don’t know why, but I reacted to her words with irritation. Wanting to have sex, I pushed her down on the bed vigorously, took off her clothes, and ran my lips over her body. The girl laughed and said, “Guess I have no choice,” and she let me have my way with her. Or perhaps I should say, I let her have her way with me. In the middle of things, my mind was somewhere else. Once I realized it, though, I couldn’t remember what I had been thinking about. At the time, I had been toying with her sex, putting my fingers inside her. I didn’t know how long I had been doing this for; I was staring vacantly at her sex as my fingers moved unconsciously. She was making sounds, her body repeatedly shuddering in short bursts. When I increased my efforts, the sounds she was making grew heavily, and I wondered if they could hear her next door. As she quivered with these convulsions, finally she said, “Enough already!” It made no difference to me, but I held down her torso, pinning her legs so she couldn’t move them, and continued to move my fingers deep inside her. She kept shouting, “Stop!” and her husky voice reminded me of the black cat’s cry from that night. I persisted in what I was doing, but eventually she struggled enough to shove me off her. I had the feeling that was going to happen all along, but somehow I was still surprised. She was breathing hard and sweating, and she called me a pervert. The word penetrated me, as if without resistance. Ridiculous as it may have seemed, it felt as though something about me had been defined for the first time. That seemed funny to me, so I chuckled a little. Then I left the girl’s apartment.

  After that, I walked around the neighborhood on the edge of the prefecture where I had decided to shoot the gun, and scoped out the area from various angles. In front of the supermarket there was a wide road, and beside it there was a small restaurant and a convenience store; it would be extremely conspicuous to do anything around there. As I followed along a street that the woman often took, I looked for a more out-of-sight place, and the best spot where I coul
d conceal myself. In the midst of it, I got annoyed, and on a sudden impulse I almost headed straight for her apartment to shoot her dead right then and there, but of course I didn’t do that. I chain-smoked cigarettes as I walked, and reassured myself that there was really only one place to do it. It was the site of a demolished restaurant. Not quite demolished yet, the structure still remained; they were probably about to begin work on it, there was dirty white sheeting stretched over iron scaffolding, and the only thing visible from what was enclosed within was part of the top of the roof. The woman had passed by here many times. Nobody would see the shooting if it happened here, and it seemed like I could then make my escape by taking the street in front of the building, heading in the opposite direction from where she came. I looked at the construction placard, checking to make sure that this spot was indeed part of Saitama prefecture and not Tokyo. However, the start date of the construction was five days from now. I was totally stunned—the moment I saw this, I felt a dull and heavy jolt to my heart. A voice inside my head said, There’s no time. I felt weak in the knees, and I was sweating. The woman passed along this street between eight and nine o’clock in the evening; I thought for a minute about whether they would be doing construction in the dark. I didn’t have to think long—once they started construction, I figured the odds were good that there would be people around at any given hour. Not surprisingly, the details of the work procedure were not posted, and to inquire about them was too risky. Posted on the placard was the name of the real estate company that held the title, and the name of someone along with a bunch of numbers I didn’t understand, and lettering for a condominium’s construction. I was flustered but I felt like I had no choice. I considered the deadline of five days—the only time to do it was Tuesday, four days from now—Thursday would be too late. Realizing that next Tuesday I was going to kill someone, I attempted to reflect on why this was something I needed to do, but my mind felt weary, so I gave up. I decided to begin my preparations.