“I see. You’re the kind of person who can’t collaborate.”
“You’re saying that to me?”
“This sucks.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“No, I mean this school.”
“No shit.”
“It’s pretty dumb to know school sucks and still keep coming.”
“Same goes for you.”
From that point on, we had an understanding, and Iroha and I arrived at a project that only could have been made by the two of us. We each filmed the other filming, quietly exchanging barbs, and drawing it out. Then we took our two films, overlaid and rerecorded them as one and called the final product “Mixed Cameras.” Iroha and I looked at each other through the cameras, and the footage of our faces was superimposed into a double image, which was, for us, a nightmare that transcended the image. Faces that look ready to break apart speak. It’s like a similar alternate world affixed right beneath the surface of the visible world. And while all that talking seems like it should be a conversation, it’s actually a strange and awkwardly timed monologue on top of monologue. We each expected to connect to the other, but we really went past each other and remained self-contained; we both just happened to be there. You’d think that aligned in the same space like that we would have merged into a single body, but it was like two totally disconnected people. Iroha and I sealed away the project as if to make sure we’d never have to look at it again.
I worried when I didn’t hear from Iroha after His Majesty died. She invariably commented whenever I uploaded new footage on my website. Sometimes she’d include ideas for production outlets for my work. But I didn’t hear from her during those weeks.
A month had passed since His Majesty died when she finally did contact me. Greeting me after I’d rushed to her family home in Yokohama’s Motomachi district, she looked as worn out and haggard as driftwood.
“I was feeling blue at the thought that maybe even you had collapsed.”
“Glad to know you worried about me. I’ve had a rough time looking after someone.”
“Were you suckered into some kind of film unit expedition or something?”
“Custodial duty for Miko.”
“Custodial duty for “‘Custodial duty’?”
“Can you believe it? It’s like he completely lost it.”
Iroha’s lover, Mikoto, was renting the week-to-week apartment where they lived together. He temporarily checked out when His Majesty died and wouldn’t eat unless fed, she said. I hadn’t yet met Mikoto, who started dating Iroha after she finished film school, but based on what I’d heard from Iroha, he was an easygoing guy, not prone to showing off or likely to elicit that behavior in others either, and basically I imagined him to be a pretty regular guy. Fundamentally like me in her eyes-and-ears-only approach to society as a documenter on the sidelines, Iroha for the first time started saying things like images aren’t just records, but also a means of expression after she started seeing Mikoto.
“Even if I don’t consider it more than a record of what I saw as it was, people who are watching can impose their own interpretations and give the image meaning, so even if it bugs me, my film is still going to end up expressing something. For better or worse, that becomes a source of power. If you don’t give this some careful thought, even if you make a point of shooting message-less images, they’ll still stick some kind of popular message on them and pull the rug out from under your feet, Shôji Inoue.”
I couldn’t believe my ears. She was talking just like all the stuck-up, sensible types from trade school.
“You can’t affect society from the inside. You can’t dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools. If you try to move into the nucleus of power to make a difference, you’ll end up getting changed yourself. The number of examples of people succeeding at doing it that way is zero. We can only destroy the system from the outside. That’s even more of a reason why we’ve got the power to destroy it with our diary films — by not entering society and acting only as observers.”
Iroha said that too. Of course, my sense of being ineffectual wasn’t going to be undermined by this pretense of concern. But still, I was won over by Iroha’s power of persuasion. I introduced fiber optics, launched my independent, personal broadcasting station, and obsessed over getting stuff on air (well, online really). So that’s how I indirectly felt Mikoto’s influence. I had a bad feeling about his optimism, but I couldn’t help persisting with even that small boost of energy I derived from him by way of Iroha.
That same Mikoto collapsed all too easily.
“He’s a wreck inside, and sometimes you can see the suffering in his face, but he won’t talk about it. He’d be reading the newspaper or watching TV and understand what I’d say or write, but he wouldn’t talk or write on his own. He’d go to the bathroom or drink when he was thirsty, but other than that, he wouldn’t do anything or want any meals. So I’d cook some stew and make him eat it, reminding him that he needs to eat if he wants to stay alive. He’d look up at me startled, and the tears would well up. He’d choke on the stew like it was poison. Am I really so cruel? He’s so helpless. He’d be right there in front of me, but wouldn’t do a thing to stay alive.” In one breath, Iroha vented her cumulative frustration.
Without missing a beat, I asked, “Did he say anything about His Majesty’s death?”
“Hello! That’s what I was trying to explain. He wouldn’t talk. No matter how simple my questions were, when he finally got to answering, the only sounds that came out weren’t even words. He eventually would start spitting up, so I stopped asking questions.”
“Wow. Hey, Iroha, you met Mikoto after His Majesty’s Era began, right? Maybe what we thought was Mikoto’s own vitality was really just hope he’d invested in His Majesty.”
“No, that’s not it. Miko couldn’t care less about His Majesty. He even said so, that people could make a big fuss over His Majesty’s youth, but they are the ones who are actually putting in their labor, and it’s not as if their biological clocks were going to be turned back.”
“Now that’s straight talk.”
“Far from it. His Majesty raised society’s expectations so much that he had the potential to impact government, a state of affairs that should serve as a serious red flag.”
There was a faction of youth calling for a Restoration and advancing a plan to reinstate His Majesty’s political rights, and they garnered an unexpectedly large amount of support.
Here’s what they said: Politicians today have fallen out of favor because they only work for a handful of vested interests, and those intellectuals and media moguls who could claim some charismatic popularity abused their power until they ended up destroying themselves. No politicians who have since emerged had enough support to take control of the government. At best, we are under crisis conditions in which the “sensibly nonpartisan” NGO-types who move in and out of Parliament’s revolving door have exposed their own incompetence. If we extend political rights to His Majesty and he’s elected, he could attract support that crosses party lines, and, in that case, without any barriers to him taking charge of the government and without harming democracy in the least, our movement could give new life to the shell of this so-called democracy!
It was an impossible proposition, but society was in an uproar, eagerly waiting to see whether or not His Majesty could be that much of a political leader.
But for me, their sensational message smacked of mania mixed with a syrupy romance novel and just like the kind of fantasy the mass media love. That could be because no one around me thought it would make a lick of difference whether the prime minister was His Majesty or anybody else for that matter. The media denounces political incompetence and corruption, but if the people around me or I were to tell it, the whole political scene is nothing more than groups of statesmen being moved around and played with by some unknown apparatus. Even if there weren’t any politicians, society would keep running on autopilot. Or maybe like how the seasons cha
nge, governments are one of those things that spin around on their own. That’s why even if a really strong leader emerges, that person can’t be more than what the machine dictates. We lack the optimistic energy to invest hope in or count on that sort of system. The only people who thought, without any basis, that society would change after His Majesty’s era began were relatively older. There probably aren’t many people who can so much as imagine feeling connected to a government. That’s why the responses of people like Mikoto struck me as a little suspicious and exaggerated.
“Iroha, do you think His Majesty’s death wasn’t the direct cause of Mikoto’s speech loss? That it was nothing more than the trigger that finally sparked an outpouring of accumulated stress?”
“I don’t want to think about stupid theories like that anymore. Unless Miko tells me what’s going on inside his head, there’s no way for me to know no matter how hard I try. Speculating won’t do me any good and isn’t worth the effort. I stay by his side because he’d literally starve to death if I didn’t. But sometimes I wonder if maybe I’m not just another source of stress for him, because he’ll wear himself out trying to communicate something he’s dying to tell to me because I’m the one who happens to be there. And at night, I have to pry open his mouth to make sure he swallows his sleeping pills. I wish I could be a robot with no feelings.”
“But because you’re not a robot, Mikoto improved enough to try and say something, right?”
“Who knows? I hope that’s the case.”
“Has he gone back to work yet?”
“They’re really understaffed, so they want him back, but it’ll take a little while longer before he’s up for that.”
I tentatively asked, “Been filming?”
“Oh, I’ve been filming. Like I can’t get enough of it.” Iroha answered like she was spewing exhaust. “And I played the film I took right in front of Miko. The image of him muttering nonsense reappeared right before his eyes. That’s pretty fucked up, huh?”
Iroha started breathing deeply at that point.
“But I still keep filming him. He stares at his own horrible-looking self without protesting, so I take more films of that to show him. It’s gone on and on like that...” Iroha looked up and counted. “Well, it went on like that more times than I can count. At this point, they’re pretty much like mirrors. The monitor Miko will be watching shows Mikos watching countless Mikos. To tell you the truth,” she took another deep breath, “the one about to go crazy is me.”
I could easily imagine those images. You’d see Mikoto from behind and in front of him would be the monitor, and in that monitor there’d be another shot of Mikoto’s back, and in front of that a monitor with yet another shot of Mikoto’s back with a monitor, and all those countless simulated Mikotos simultaneously moan and groan. You’d get into it and keep going. The person doing the filming, Iroha, isn’t visible. Mikoto is a pond toad surrounded by reflections of himself, and Iroha, who is capturing that, simply looks on. There’s no exchange between them.
“Was Mikoto okay with that?”
“I’m not sure. It wasn’t just images of him. I showed him films I made with you and other stuff too. His face lit up a little when he watched. And it’s not like he just watched passively. All of a sudden, he’d scribble something in his notebook and then show it to me. It was stuff like random lines, different versions of the same face, or a sketch of a creepy uninhabited town, and I have no clue what he meant by it all. One day, outof the blue, he said, ‘I get it already. I get it, soturn it off.’ I asked, ‘What do you get?’ ‘The whole city and this room are full of Majesties.’ Miko could talk, and all of a sudden I was the one who was dumbstruck. I just smiled.” sudden I was the one who was dumbstruck.
“So it was like shock therapy?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what Miko saw in those films. I can’t even figure out how we hooked up in the first place. Miko and I are like two pebbles that rolled close to each other but don’t have any authentic connection. Our personalities are totally different.”
I didn’t say so, but as she talked I thought about how anything you put on film ends up seeming removed, like a stranger’s story. Wouldn’t Iroha understand why that alone would make her films uncomfortable for Mikoto? It was obvious to me that she had applied concepts from that hideous “Mixed Cameras” to filming him. Knowing how horrible that was, how could she further close in on him by making claustrophobic films while he was in that state? I was exhausted just from imagining how awful it would be. I sighed and thought to myself, “She sure has balls.”
“You do the same thing,” Iroha said to me in a tired voice. “I wasn’t doing it because I like it. I thought I had to do something, and words are so unreliable. Before I knew it, I was filming. I scared myself, because I started filming Miko without taking the time to think about how insensitive I was being to him. That’s the kind of people we are, you and me. Even if someone was killed right in front of us, we’d probably keep filming without feeling anything.”
Iroha fell silent for a bit, looking me in the eyes, and then she pulled a DVD out of her bag and put it on the table.
“I want you to watch ‘Infinite Hell’ too.”
She gave me a cold stare. I felt like I was being subjected to an elaborate loyalty test. And something inside me warned that I was getting swept up in all her talk. Why was she so insistent about showing me her secrets with Mikoto, whom I hadn’t even met? But with a shame I couldn’t explain, I took the DVD.
Iroha’s mom had prepared an extravagant stone kettle full of crabmeat and insisted I stay, so even though Iroha looked like she wanted me to leave, I stuck around to eat.
“You haven’t been by for a while, Shôji,” Iroha’s mom gently chided.
“No free time for broke folks,” I gave as my pat answer. What’s more, it was a lie. I don’t think about money when I’m filming. And at any rate, I’d given up on earning any. For someone who lives off others, nothing is more depressing than the thought of working in order to eat. Slackers who’d say the same are a dime a dozen, but it’s just an excuse. They are nothing more than words for fabricating an “authentic sense of being alive.”
Mikoto might be a little different in that regard. He worked in the news department at a TV station. Even though he was young, he quickly was able to buy an apartment in Chiba, where he lived with his parents, whom he’d brought up from Daisen. According to Iroha, Mikoto’s parents had no interest in getting by in the world, so the whole family had ended up in dire straits. Mikoto started supporting his family financially when he was still in high school. He rented the week-to-week apartment in the heart of the city after he got together with Iroha, and they shacked up there together off-and-on, on a part-time basis. Mikoto collapsed while he was with her, so his parents had been left to fend for themselves.
“This girl never comes home to visit now that she’s moved out. And she acts like a stranger, telling me she doesn’t want to trouble anyone when I suggest bringing Miko over here or to his parents’ place so that we can all look after him until he gets better.”
“Don’t talk about Miko like he’s a stray cat, Mom.”
“If his folks are having a hard time, bring him here. I can be a big help. You can’t say that you couldn’t use a hand with dark circles under your eyes like that. Honey, you’re exhausted.” Iroha’s mom looked to me for a reply, but I got out of it by trying to change the subject.
“So, has Mikoto been by to visit much?”
Iroha answered in an irate voice, “Only on Mom’s birthday and New Year’s Eve.”
“It’d be nice if he were more eager to come by like you, Shôji.”
“Please! He comes here when it suits him. Don’t encourage him.”
“Hey, I’m not looking for anything.”
“Tell me something I don’t already know.”
“Next time, why don’t you bring Miko too, and the four of us can have sukiyaki or something? Or why don’t we have a dance party
? It’d be perfect — two guys and two women. I’ll do some folk dancing. And you can do an old flamenco.”
“So, I’ll meet him for the first time at a house party?” I blurted it out without thinking.
“What? You two haven’t met yet?”
A very exasperated Iroha answered, “Shôji doesn’t get along with optimistic people. That’s why.”
“But Shôji’s optimistic, isn’t he?”
“I think Iroha is the one who hates optimists. She’s projecting.”
“You get along well with Miko, so wouldn’t he and Shôji be likely to hit it off?” Iroha’s mom looked to me for confirmation, and I obliged by saying, “Absolutely.”
“I haven’t seen past the surface of this guy. I’d be devastated if Shôji copped an attitude and said something negative. And quit humoring me. It’s not funny.” Iroha raised her voice and looked agitated.
“I’d say you’re the one with an attitude. Miko isn’t better yet, and doing something fun together might be good for him. Why don’t we call him now? It’ll be fine, Honey. I’ll make sure everything goes well.”
“Actually, I can’t stay long today.” I glanced sideways at Iroha and then asked her mom, “Have you been learning how to use your computer? Can you see my webcast yet?” I made a big effort to shift topics.
“I’m trying. I’m really trying, but it’s hard without anyone around enough to teach me.”
“You’re never going to make it in a tough world like this if you can’t take care of things on your own.” Again, my heart wasn’t in what I said.
“You’re so serious, Shôji.”
Iroha responded to her mom’s absurd impression of me with an incredulous laugh.
“I’m not serious. If left to my own devices, I’d settle like dust in the nooks of a tatami mat. And if you take too long, you’ll end up swept aside like dust. That’s why you really ought to get going and learn how to use your computer, at least enough to be able to view my webcast.”
Lonely Hearts Killer Page 4