“Yeah, well, just in case.”
The TV suddenly went dark. Or maybe it had been off for some time.
“I don’t know how to say this, but are you all right?”
“I don’t know.” I grinned briefly. “When I think about my personality, my life so far, my future, somehow I get the feeling there’s only one destination for me.”
“Destination?”
Suddenly I remembered the bottle of cyanide. There was still some left.
“Yeah. In the end I think that getting tangled up in things, that’s what life is all about. Even if you think you’re following your own wishes and desires, those wishes and desires are formed by your entanglements. See what I mean?”
“Maybe.”
“I guess I’ve only worked that out since I got my face changed.”
She moved closer, took the cigarette from between my fingers and took a puff.
“Hey, you want to …?”
“You don’t have to.”
“No, it’s not that. I want to.”
She started undoing her buttons.
“But that too,” I said. “Maybe your DNA and character and environment are just reacting to my randomly altered appearance. You’re getting tangled up.”
She went to stop my mouth with her lips, like they do in the movies, but missed and bumped against my chin. She burst out laughing.
IN THE DARKNESS we walked through the narrow streets and up a gentle slope, ignoring the bright lights of a convenience store. Ryosuke Ito was wearing the same gray knit cap, a white, sleeveless down jacket with a hood, and ripped designer jeans. He walked in front of me, looked back once and then started climbing a rusty staircase outside an apartment block. Two communal washing machines stood in a row. The building was damp from yesterday’s rain. Overall it seemed old, but the intercom looked incongruously new.
The guy who answered the door turned around and retreated back inside without even looking at us. He was still young, in his early twenties. The room was small, with a blue carpet and a simple loft. Apart from a low table and a TV, there was absolutely no furniture.
“That’s Sato. His real name isn’t important.”
Despite this introduction, the guy just looked at me without responding. He was wearing blue-framed glasses and a blue hoodie, and his brown hair was styled with gel.
“Just the two of you?” I asked.
“Of course not,” said Ito, sitting on the floor. “We’re just one cell. Most of us aren’t in Tokyo.”
When I lit a cigarette the guy calling himself Sato opened his mouth for the first time to tell me I couldn’t. I ignored him and kept smoking. Maybe he was used to it, because he passed a flattened can to Ito to use as an ashtray.
The TV was showing a report about photos of election candidates being replaced with pictures of a porn actress in eighteen places up and down the country. Their electoral offices were furious.
“How did it go?” Sato asked, pulling the cord hanging from the fan.
Ito opened his bottle of mineral water.
“I forget her name but apparently the posters are done well, so they look just like the real thing. She’s smiling and saying ‘Full penetration!’ out of the corner of her mouth.”
“Ah, that’s pretty funny. It’s borderline, though. Well, I guess it’s okay.”
“Yeah. I’ll email them, then. And I heard they found a heap of dead pigeons in a park.”
“That’s no good.”
The news program continued. There was a follow-up story on a third politician, who had been found dead in a love hotel. The prime minister appeared, surrounded by reporters, and the announcer read that the police had further increased the number of detectives on the case. There was a big fire at the office of a car manufacturer that had laid off lots of contract workers. A foul smell had caused a disturbance on the subway. On their blog, JL had written that they were fighting back against the corrupt government. They had covered the house of a TV commentator who had publicly declared himself a friend to young people with vivid graffiti. There’d been numerous arsons targeting rich people’s mansions. Two popular TV personalities had recently gotten married live on TV, and the husband had received threatening letters, which stated in childlike printing that they weren’t going to kill him but that in the next five years they would definitely cut his balls off. Photos of a famous newscaster taking part in a bondage game at an S&M parlor were released. While the culprits were still unknown, enough palytoxin to kill several thousand people had been stolen from three different medical universities.
“You guys are pathetic.”
Sato laughed briefly.
“Of course we are. Because we’re just messing around.”
“It’s a waste of time and effort,” I said.
He laughed again.
“You’re right.”
He turned back to the TV. A reporter was walking towards a university where the poison was stolen, a stern expression on his face.
“If it’s just a joke,” I went on, “then it’s not too serious. But if you use it to start killing people it gets complicated.”
“Yeah, well, that wasn’t us,” interrupted Ito. “Sure, whoever did it was a member, but we only heard about it after. It certainly wasn’t approved beforehand. It’s still a bit too soon. The police and Public Security taking us seriously at this early stage, that’s a nuisance.”
“Don’t you guys have a leader or anything?”
“We don’t need one. We’re not even a proper group.”
Laughing, Sato picked up the story.
“Recently there’ve been lots of copycat crimes, but if any of them take our fancy we issue a statement saying that it was us, attaching a code that’s only known to us and the press. Of course the copycat puts out a statement of their own, but then everyone assumes that that’s just to confuse the cops, or that they’re a JL associate of some kind. Sometimes even the copycats themselves get the wrong end of the stick and think that we’re accepting them as members. We send our communiqués directly to the media. That’s something we learned from Al Qaida.”
“Then …”
“Yeah, there are still real members. I guess you could say that anyone who knows that code, they’re real members. By the way, killing those politicians, that was done by JL. Apparently they called for volunteers. We’re only loosely affiliated—we don’t all get together to discuss our plans. Our only rule is to keep the code secret. Because if newcomers muscle in, that’s a pain.”
“Okay, what things have you two actually planned?”
“I don’t have to tell you. But me and Ito, we still haven’t got mixed up in any killings, because we’re not ready for it.”
He laughed.
“We plan to do it eventually. What I mean is, it’s best to leave the killing to others for now. To the extremists. Actually, JL’s gotten lots of publicity since the murders started. Hey, Ito, is this guy okay? He’s got no intention of joining us, has he?”
“He’s fine. He’s here, isn’t he? That shows he’s interested. And we need cash.”
“That’s true, we need cash. That’s our biggest problem right now.”
Sato stood up.
“Okay, so now you’ve got to convince him. I don’t mind teaming up with him. He’s kind of annoying, but he looks smart.”
Glancing at the clock, Sato picked up his backpack.
“Where are you off to?”
“You don’t need to know. See you.”
He left the room. Ito started flicking through the TV channels with the remote.
“Where did he take off to in such a hurry?” I asked.
“We also have an unspoken rule not to pry into each other’s business. Probably a part-time job. A while ago I spotted him from a distance handing out packets of tissues advertising a bar.”
He drank some more water. The two rings in his ear glinted white under the lights.
“Before you get the wrong idea, we’re not really social ref
ormers. We’re not even trying to change our own lives.”
He began turning the band on his left wrist with his right hand.
“We’re just having fun. We’ve only got one thing in common. We want to drag everything down as far as we can. We want to pull down all human achievements, all human successes, all authority. For example, this is a really small thing, but you know how a few years ago dozens of websites sprang up where you could download vast quantities of music, movies or whatever for free as compressed files? At the time, everyone was talking about how easy and fast the download software was, right? And they were getting millions of hits? The guy who did that is one of us, back before JL was formed.
“Apparently maintaining those sites was really expensive, but he got so much money from the ads for porn sites he linked to that he even made a small profit. He kept them updated from a PC registered to someone who was already dead, using a provider in Southeast Asia, and he had the money he got from ads remitted to a bank account in Shanghai. Someone he knew there paid homeless people to withdraw the cash, then his friend would wire it back to the guy’s own bank account in Japan, so it was almost impossible to trace it back to him. That money was what got JL started.
“What he did was a felony, infringement of copyright. If everyone can get their hands on whatever they want for nothing, the people who provide the culture will lose their source of income and the culture will decline. But that’s exactly what he wanted. He wanted everything to go down the tubes. Doesn’t the word ‘professional’ make your flesh crawl? Traditional culture, underground culture, he wanted it all to collapse, everything to be done by amateurs. Enjoying things that non-professionals had created themselves in their spare time, enjoying them for free on the net, that would be cool. You see?
“Deep down, people who deliberately distribute other people’s music and stuff feel contempt for professionals. And it’s not just culture—these days lots of people are contemptuous of everything. Without realizing it, they’re searching for things to despise. What we’re doing is actualizing millions of people’s subconscious desires. Wouldn’t you piss yourself laughing seeing the Prime Minister doing an over-the-top imitation of Hiromi Go in the middle of a serious press conference? After a whole series of depressing stories about politicians getting killed and stuff, it would be a kind of comic relief. I bet lots of people couldn’t help laughing if they saw that on TV. But of course that’s not the only thing.”
His eyes were mere slits.
“Next, people who’ve been successful in various other fields will become victims, one after another. And then gradually that feeling of contempt will extend to the people doing the laughing as well. Down with authority—it’s definitely a sexy catchphrase. But from now on people are going to find JL harder and harder to understand. Finally we’re planning a series of terrorist attacks against ordinary citizens. Whenever anything happens, society demands to know the reason. That’s why we’ve issued statements for each incident. But we’re doing that only to set the stage for the unpredictable events that are still to come.
“In future our communiqués will get weirder and weirder. Like, ‘Such-and-such building was renovated, so we blew up several houses in the neighborhood.’ ‘The final episode of our favorite TV show was so exciting that we scattered poison around Shibuya in downtown Tokyo.’ ‘Today’s Wednesday, so we left explosives in the subway.’ No one will be able to make heads or tails of them. Then maybe we’ll get the one percent to do some impressions again. While society is facing senseless violence, the people at the top will be earnestly doing imitations. Wouldn’t that be really funny? I’d kill myself laughing. But it wouldn’t even matter if they didn’t do it. The people who’ve achieved things in society would be the first to go, but at the same time hundreds of ordinary people would also be dying every day in terrorist attacks. Authority, class difference, logic, meaning, common sense, they’ll all fall to pieces. The country will be thrown into chaos by incomprehensible violence. By then I bet there’ll be thousands of copycats.”
“You guys will get caught and it will all be over.”
“Haven’t you been listening?”
Ito looked at me.
“Didn’t I tell you we’re not an organized group? By the time people can no longer understand where we’re heading, we’ll have grown even bigger. Let’s assume that I’m arrested in the middle of it, for example. The other members or new members will take over. Since we’re just a loose-knit collective and don’t know each other, we can’t be wiped out like Rahmla were. Maybe by then there won’t be a single original member of JL left, but there’ll be one part of us that will survive. Contempt. Contempt for the world, for love, for everything of value, and then contempt for contempt itself.”
A motorbike raced past outside. Its muffled roar seemed to be asserting something outrageous, though its exact message was unclear.
“It’ll never work. You’ll never be able to do it.”
“Do what?”
“It’s like Sato said before. You’re even hesitant about killing corrupt politicians.”
Ito was sitting on the carpet, his knees bent and his back against the wall. I realized that I’d taken up an identical pose beside him.
“We can.”
He was staring at the opposite wall, like he was talking to himself. I imagined Father’s blood oozing out from the surface.
“You really don’t want to do that.”
“Why?”
He grinned suddenly.
“Think about it. It’s an old question. Why shouldn’t we do it? Why shouldn’t we kill people? Why shouldn’t we blow the world to smithereens?”
I looked at his wristband. I didn’t know why I was trying to stop him, but I went on.
“Those questions defy all logic, so no matter what I say you can turn it back on me. So I’ll turn it around on you. Why is it all right to do those things?”
“Why? Because I want to.”
“Okay, why is it acceptable to do whatever you want?”
“Hey, that’s not a fair question.”
“But it’s the same as yours. Try turning them around. There’s no difference.” I took a deep breath. “I’m not really trying to save you or anything. You can go ahead and kill people, do what you like. I’m only telling you this because you asked. The reason you shouldn’t do it is because maybe you’ll keep on living, and someone who kills another person, afterwards they can’t accept beauty or warmth with a pure heart. The instant you feel any kind of human beauty, the instant you feel any human warmth, the knowledge that you’ve killed a person will start squirming inside you, because those things—beauty and warmth—they can’t exist without human life. Beauty is created by humans. Even natural beauty, we can only feel it because we are alive. Warmth is the same.
“And another thing—living things are fundamentally designed not to kill their own kind. I’ve read dozens of books on biology, and cannibalism is a really rare phenomenon. All animals know instinctively that they shouldn’t kill other members of the same species. Maybe it’s imprinted in our DNA. Of course there are people who say they don’t care, people who snigger while they’re on trial for murder. But people like that are weak. They can’t cope with the shock of knowing that they’ve murdered another human being, a living creature just like them, that they’ve taken a life just like their own, so they bottle up their true feelings in the deepest recesses of their mind. Because our subconscious automatically tries to find some sort of mental equilibrium. Imagine strangling a monkey, for example. Even that’s disturbing, isn’t it? Killers who say they aren’t bothered by it are just too weak to cope with the shock, and shut it up inside themselves. They’re just brainwashing themselves. As proof, look at those pathetic people who do stuff like going around killing at random. Real monsters don’t do those things. They lurk behind the scenes, calmly dispensing evil from positions of power. When people face up to the impact of killing, without locking it up deep inside them, they are bound
to malfunction.”
I recalled Father staring at me in that basement room.
“No matter what they gain from killing someone, it won’t balance out that malfunction. So aren’t you better off not killing anyone in the first place?”
Ito was looking at me with amusement.
“In that case, couldn’t you just use a weapon to minimize that feeling? Then that malfunction wouldn’t happen.”
He was fiddling with the lid of his bottle as he talked.
“Have you heard the story about the US and World War Two?” he asked. “After the war was over, they studied how many of the guns of the soldiers in the front lines had been fired. It was about twenty percent. Around eighty percent of the soldiers at the front had never actually pulled the trigger. That’s a sign that they really didn’t want to shoot at the enemy, kill them, without a damn good reason. So the US army changed their training methods. They replaced the old bulls-eye target with a cutout of a human figure, complete with a photo of a face, to get the soldiers used to killing people. The result was that in Vietnam the firing rate increased dramatically. So we can change human nature any way we want.”
“But that story has a sequel, doesn’t it?” I said.
Ito’s expression didn’t change.
“Sure, I’ve heard that story,” I went on. “And sure, the firing rate went up. But the flip side was that lots of soldiers came home with serious psychological problems. The army concluded that guns were no good. Even though the soldiers had been watching Westerns since they were kids, in which people kill each other all the time, the real thing took its toll. So they decided to develop hi-tech weapons, virtual, remote-controlled weapons, so that it didn’t feel like you were killing a real person at all. That was the Gulf War. There was a terrible imbalance between the people being killed and the people doing the killing, between the Iraqis who were dying spurting blood in pain and suffering and hatred and the soldiers of the multinational force, who managed to completely avoid the feeling that they were killing people. That caused a different kind of spiritual decay.