Fear and Trembling

  Everything happened very quickly. I barely had time to turn around to see the great bulk of the vice-president bearing down on me.

  Microseconds of astonishment were followed by an eternity of panic.

  He grabbed me the way King Kong did Fay Wray and dragged me out into the corridor. I was like a doll in his hands. My terror peaked when I saw that he was taking me into the men’s bathroom.

  Fubuki’s threats came back to me: “You don’t know what could happen to you.” She had not been bluffing. I was going to pay for my sins. My heart stopped beating. My mind composed a will.

  I remember thinking he was going to rape me and kill me. I hoped that he would kill me first.

  A man was washing his hands at one of the sinks, but the presence of a third party seemed to have no effect on Mister Omochi’s evil designs. He opened the door to one of the cubicles and threw me onto the John.

  I told myself my time had come.

  He started yelling three syllables, over and over again, convulsively. So great was my terror that I didn’t understand what they were. I thought they must have been the equivalent of the kamikazes’ “banzai!” used very specifically for sexual assault.

  He went on screaming these three sounds. Suddenly, the dim light of understanding dawned.

  “NO PE-PA! NO PE-PA!”

  Which meant in Japanese-American, “No paper! No paper!”

  The vice-president was pointing out in his fashion that the toilet-paper roll had run out.

  I leapt up and hurried off to the storeroom, then returned on my quaking legs, my arms laden with rolls of paper. Mister Omochi watched me install one in the appropriate place, shouted something that was presumably not a compliment, threw me out, and locked himself in the now fully equipped cubicle.

  My heart in shreds, I took refuge in the ladies’ room, crouched down in a corner, and started crying.

  Fubuki chose that moment to come and brush her teeth. In the mirror I could see her, her mouth frothing with toothpaste, watching me weep. Her eyes were jubilant.

  Just for a moment, I wished her dead. Memento mori

  I REMEMBER HAVING loved a Japanese film called Merry Christmas, Mister Lawrence, set during the Pacific War in about 1944, about a group of British soldiers in a Japanese POW camp. One of the Englishmen (played by David Bowie) and one of the Japanese officers (played by Ryuichi Sakamoto) formed what certain textbooks might call a “paradoxical relationship.”

  Perhaps because I was young at the time, I was completely overwhelmed by the film, especially by the scenes depicting the fraught interaction between the two heroes. The film ends with the Englishman being condemned to death by the Japanese officer.

  Toward the end the Japanese officer comes to contemplate the Englishman, who has been buried up to his head, a form of execution that kills its victim either by exposure, hunger, or thirst. The British officer is barely alive by this point, his light-skinned complexion the color of a slightly blackened joint of beef. I was sixteen and it struck me that dying like that was a beautiful way of demonstrating one’s love.

  I couldn’t help sensing a parallel between this story and my own tribulations in the Yumimoto Corporation. Of course there were huge differences, but I did feel like a prisoner of war, and my torturer was at least as beautiful as Ryuichi Sakamoto was handsome.

  One day, while she was washing her hands, I asked Fubuki whether she had seen the film. She said she had.

  “Did you like it?”

  “The music was good. Too bad that the plot was so unrealistic.”

  (Perhaps without realizing it, Fubuki was guilty of the same “soft” revisionism afflicting so many young people in the Land of the Rising Sun. Her compatriots during the Second World War had nothing to be ashamed of, it went; their incursions into Asia were intended purely to protect the indigenous populations from the Nazis. I was not in a position to argue with her.)

  “I think that you have to see the film as a metaphor.”

  “A metaphor for what?”

  “For the relationships between people. For example, the one between you and me.”

  She looked at me, perplexed, wondering what sort of lame-brained idea I was entertaining.

  “Yes,” I went on. “There’s the same difference between you and me as there is between Ryuichi Sakamoto and David Bowie. East and West. Behind the surface conflict lies reciprocated curiosity. Misunderstandings hide a genuine desire to understand one another.”

  However convincing I thought my argument, I realized that I had again gone too far.

  “No,” she replied.

  “Why?”

  I wondered which withering reply she might choose: “I’m not in the least bit curious about you” or, “I have absolutely no desire to understand you”; or, “how dare you compare yourself to a prisoner of war!”; or, “there is something disturbing about the relationship between those two characters that I would have nothing to do with.”

  Instead, in a polite and neutral voice, she replied with an observation both clever and wounding:

  “I don’t think you look anything like David Bowie.”

  I had to admit she was right.

  I SPOKE RARELY in my new post, not because it was forbidden but because an unwritten rule stopped me. When your job is as dreary as mine was, the only way of preserving your honor is by remaining silent.

  If a bathroom attendant is chatty, people are likely to think she feels comfortable with her work, that she feels she belongs there, that she finds her job so fulfilling that she feels a desire to babble.

  If, on the other hand, she remains mute, it is because she treats her work as monastic mortification; she is expiating the sins of humanity. The French Catholic writer Georges Bernanos and Hannah Arendt talk of the crushing banality of Evil; the bathroom attendant knows the crushing banality of dejection, a dejection that always remains the same however disgusting the superficial differences.

  Her silence expresses her quiet desperation. She is the Carmelite of the rest rooms.

  I was mute, therefore I thought.

  I thought, for example, that despite the lack of physical resemblance between David Bowie and myself, what I had said to Fubuki about the film was true. The comparison held. Let’s face it. For her to have condemned me to the life she had, her feelings toward me really couldn’t have been what you might call normal. I was not the only person she despised at the Yumimoto Corporation. There were others she could have martyred. She had focused her cruelty on me alone.

  I decided that I had been accorded a privilege.

  READERS MIGHT THINK I had no life outside of Yumimoto. This was not the case. During this whole ordeal I was leading a life that was far from being either meaningless or insignificant.

  I have nonetheless decided not to talk about that other life in these pages. First of all, my extra-Yumimoto existence is beside the point. Second, given the hours that I was working, my private life—though, I insist again, not insignificant—was kind of limited in terms of time.

  Thirdly, most importantly—and a little schizophrenically—descriptions of my other life will not be found here because when I was stationed at my outpost in the bathrooms on the forty-fourth floor at Yumimoto corporate headquarters, scouring and scrubbing away, I simply found it impossible to believe that merely eleven subway stops away existed a place where people loved me and respected me, people who made no automatic connection between me and a toilet-bowl brush.

  When these nocturnal and weekend elements of my life came to mind when I was working, they seemed like an illusion. That house and those friends? An illusion. An invention. What possible link could there be between my days and my nights? I thought of those photographs of towns flattened by bombs, showing wastelands of space with ruined, lifeless houses devoid of form—and yet whose commodes still stood, proudly open to the skies, perched defiantly on their miraculously intact plumbing. When the Apocalypse comes, the only traces of human civilization to survive will be its porcelain m
onuments. My life is here alone, in these rest rooms on the forty-fourth floor. They are my world.

  People with menial jobs conjure up what Nietzsche calls a background world, forcing themselves to believe in an earthly or heavenly paradise. Their mental Eden is as seductive as their job is repugnant.

  I would walk over to the bay window and look down upon the eleven subway stops, trying to see that journey’s end. But from there, no house was visible or even imaginable. You see? I told myself. You only dreamed that life.

  Then, once again, I pressed my forehead against the glass, and once again imagined my trajectory through space. Throwing myself into the view outside of that window saved me.

  There must be pieces of my body all over Tokyo to this very day.

  THE MONTHS PASSED. Every day, the block of my time at Yumimoto was chipped away, though I had no sense whether it was happening quickly or slowly. My memory was beginning to work like a toilet bowl. I would flush it in the evening. A mental brush would eliminate the remains of the day.

  This ritual cleaning served no real purpose, of course, since it was only smeared again the following day.

  Most people know that bathrooms are conducive to monastic meditation; they are places designed for pondering. In the quiet of the rest rooms on the forty-fourth floor, I came to understand something profound about the country in which I was living: existence, in Japan, is an extension of The Company.

  That is an observation already expounded upon in countless economic and sociological studies. However, there is a world of difference between reading a study and living the reality. I saw quite clearly exactly what this meant for the employees of the Yumimoto Corporation—and for myself.

  My suffering was no worse than theirs; it was just more degrading. And yet I did not envy them. They were as miserable as I.

  The accountants who spent ten hours a day copying out numbers were, to my mind, victims sacrificed on the altar of a divinity wholly bereft of either greatness or mystery. These humble creatures were devoting their entire lives to a reality beyond their grasp. In days gone by they might have at least believed there was some purpose to their servitude. Now they no longer had any illusions. They were giving up their lives for nothing, and they knew it.

  Everyone knows that Japan has the highest suicide rate of any country in the world. What surprised me was that suicides were not more common.

  What awaited these poor number-crunchers outside The Company? The obligatory beer with colleagues undergoing the same kind of gradual lobotomy, hours spent stuffed into an overcrowded subway, a dozing wife, exhausted children, sleep that sucked them down into it like the vortex of a flushing toilet, the occasional day off they never took full advantage of. Nothing that deserved to be called a life.

  The worst part of it all was that they were considered lucky.

  DECEMBER CAME. THE month of my resignation. The word “resignation” might come as a surprise. I was, after all, coming to the end of my one-year contract; it therefore should not have been a question of my having to resign. And yet it was. In a country in which until very recently, contract or no contract, you were always hired forever, you did not leave a job without following certain traditions.

  To respect those tradition, I was to tender my resignation to every level of the hierarchy, starting at the bottom: first to Fubuki, then to Mister Saito, then to Mister Omochi, and finally to Mister Haneda.

  I prepared myself for this duty. I was determined to observe the most important rule of all: not complain.

  Moreover, my father had given me some firm instructions in the matter. He was concerned that nothing should threaten the good relations between Belgium and Japan. I was therefore not even remotely to suggest that any Yumimoto employee had mistreated me. Any motives for resignation—I would have to explain my reasons for wanting to leave such a promising position—were to be presented in the first person singular.

  This did not leave me with much choice: I had to place full responsibility for leaving on myself. Still, I proceeded under the assumption that Yumimoto would be grateful if I helped them save face, and might even protest that I was being too hard on myself, and that despite it all I was a good person.

  I requested an interview with my superior. Fubuki told me to meet her in an empty office at the end of the day. As I was about to meet her, a demon whispered in my ear: “Tell her that you can make more money working as a bathroom attendant somewhere else.” I had difficulty resisting the temptation. In fact, I was on the brink of hysterical laughter when I was face to face with Miss Mori.

  The demon came back. “Tell her you’ll only stay if they charge anyone who uses the bathrooms fifty yen.”

  I bit the inside of my cheek. Stifling my laughter was such a consuming effort that at first I couldn’t actually speak.

  Fubuki sighed.

  “Well? You wanted to tell me something?”

  To hide my mouth’s contortions, I lowered my head as much as possible, conferring upon me an apparent humility that must have delighted my superior.

  “I am coming to the end of my contract and it is with very great regret that I announce that I cannot renew it.”

  My voice was meek and tremulous—that of the archetypal underling.

  “Ah? And why is that?” she asked crisply.

  I realized I wasn’t the only one doing the acting. I followed her lead by reciting my prepared lines.

  “The Yumimoto Corporation has offered me many wonderful opportunities to prove myself. I will be eternally grateful for that. Sadly, I have not proven myself worthy of the honor.”

  I again bit the inside of my cheek. Fubuki, on the other hand, had no trouble staying in character.

  “Quite so. Why do you think you were not worthy?”

  This took me by surprise. Was she really asking me why I had not proven myself worthy of scrubbing toilets? Was her need to humiliate me really so great? Had even I underestimated her feelings toward me?

  I composed myself, looked straight into her eyes, and took up her challenge.

  “Because I do not have the intellectual capabilities.”

  I was deeply curious whether such grotesque submission would please her. Her expression remained impassive. It would have taken a highly sensitive seismograph to detect any tensing of the jaw. But I knew she was enjoying her part.

  “I agree. Why do you think you lack these capabilities?”

  “Because the Western brain is inferior to the Japanese brain.”

  Fubuki seemed both delighted by and prepared for this.

  “That is certainly part of it. And yet we shouldn’t exaggerate the inferiority of the average Western brain. Don’t you think that this incapability derives primarily from a deficiency specific to your own brain?”

  “Without a doubt.”

  “At first I thought that you intended to sabotage Yumimoto. Can you swear to me that you weren’t being deliberately stupid?”

  “I swear it.”

  “Are you aware of your handicap?”

  “Yes. The Yumimoto Corporation has helped me to realize its existence.”

  Fubuki’s expression remained impassive, but I could tell from her voice that her mouth was getting dry. I was making her deliriously happy.

  “So the company has done you a great favor.”

  “I will be eternally grateful to it.”

  This somewhat surreal twist that our conversation was taking lifted Fubuki to unforeseen heights of ecstasy. Despite myself, I found it deeply moving.

  I suddenly wanted to tell her how delighted I was at being the instrument of her pleasure. I wanted to tell her to be the snowstorm of her name, to bombard me with bitterly cold blasts of wind, flint-sharp icy rain. I accepted that I was a mortal lost in the mountains on which her clouds were unleashing their unmerciful fury.

  Giving her such satisfaction cost me so little, and her need to torture me was so great. Looking into her eyes, I read signs of pure joy. How long I had been waiting to see in those eye
s the smallest glimmer of pleasure.

  “What do you plan to do next?” she asked simply.

  I had no intention of telling her that I was doing some writing.

  “Perhaps I could teach French,” I replied blandly.

  My superior burst into a scornful laugh.

  “You think you’re capable of teaching?!”

  I realized that she wanted something more, so I instantly decided against telling her that I already had a teacher certification. I lowered my head.

  “You’re right. I still haven’t understood my limitations.”

  “Obviously not. Tell me honestly what job you think you are capable of.”

  Ancient Japanese protocol stipulated that the Emperor be addressed with “fear and trembling.” I’ve always loved the expression, which so perfectly describes the way actors in Samurai films speak to their leader, their voices tremulous with almost superhuman reverence.

  So I put on the mask of terror and started to tremble. I looked into Fubuki’s eyes.

  “Perhaps … I… perhaps the garbage collectors would hire me.”

  “Yes!” she replied, a little too enthusiastically.

  She took a deep breath. I had succeeded.

  I THEN TENDERED my resignation to Mister Saito. He too arranged to meet me in an empty office but, unlike Fubuki, he seemed uncomfortable when I sat down opposite him.

  “I am coming to the end of my contract and it is with very great regret that I announce that I cannot renew it.”

  Mister Saito’s face broke into a multitude of nervous tics. As I was unable to interpret their meaning, I went on with my lines.

  “The Yumimoto Corporation has offered me many wonderful opportunities to prove myself. I will be eternally grateful for that. Sadly, I have not proven myself worthy of the honor.”

  Mister Saito’s body twitched convulsively. He looked profoundly embarrassed.

  “Amélie-san…”

  His eyes searched every corner of the room, as if looking for the right words to say. I felt sorry for him.

  “Saito-san?”