“Okay, maybe you got the spelling right, but you distorted the meaning. Look, up to here, you’ve got the meaning exactly backwards.”
They go back and forth with that inane bickering.
The intensity of their dispute only grows more heated with the buildup of abuse they hurl at each other, and it seems the next logical step would be for them to come to blows. I imagine Inoue felt incredibly wronged right before he lost it.
But he didn’t rush into a love suicide because he’d lost it. For one thing, in spite of the severe content and as hot as the discussion was, Inoue’s voice was blissed-out. He seemed almost slap-happy. As long as he could keep up that abstract and philosophical tug-of-war with Miko, he would have continued to put off the love suicide plan even if he had been moved to violence again. The feedback from battling wits and standing his ground in an engagement with Miko must have made Inoue feel alive, more so than the actual content of their conversation. That extreme talk and even those subversive notes were nothing more than attempts to stage a fight, to provoke Miko.
But Miko sabotaged what was supposed to have been Inoue’s beloved game with an unexpected announcement. Namely, he said that I would be there soon.
I actually was on my way to Dormir at that very moment. Mokuren and I had moved up our plans and hung out the night before, so I ended up with free time. The day before, the day of the State Funeral, Miko and Inoue both took off without me after their fight, so I figured what the hell and went out drinking with Mokuren.
We were out until after two in the morning, getting hammered. While Mokuren was downing shot after shot of seven year-old Havana Club like it was green tea, she gave me a hard time about still being in love, poking fun of my tragic abandonment.
When it comes right down to it, romance is a simple game of pretending to be lovers. Jealousy, affection, and lust included, it’s all just play-acting, and how we play our roles is established at the beginning. It gets to be pretty fucking ridiculous after you walk through it over and over again. It’s no big deal if you know you’re acting out a story and are having fun with it. Sure there can be a certain amount of variation. But no normal adult is going to enjoy playing the same role all the time. And when you gradually do step outside your role, the battle begins. There’s a power struggle between you and your partner, and nobody wins. I don’t know how you feel about it, Iroha, but from what I saw earlier, you all hit the dead-end of a triangular relationship. I’m not talking about the kind of triangle where everyone’s vying for a lover. No, there’s an unnatural power relationship with you three, and it seems like each of you thinks it’s not worth it. If the endgame of your romance is that sense that it’s not worth it, you might as well call it off. If you want to get things straightened out, why don’t the three of you come out to our place in the country? My family just bought a lodge up in the mountains. We still have a lot of repairs to do and could use a few extra hands. Count me in too, and we all can work on rebuilding relationships one at a time. Wouldn’t that be nice? All together, there are six ways it could go, what with four of us. Sounds good, huh?
That hit me where it hurts, but I also had the good feeling that comes after a well-needed overhaul. I was still feeling the effects of Mokuren’s words when I got home and, as was my routine, checked Inoue’s site, which was why I wrote that email message you read in his manifesto.
I woke up the next evening and called Miko to see if he wanted to have dinner with me. Miko said, “Perfect timing. I’m about to head out to meet Inoue at Café Dormir. It’d be great if you’d join us.” I felt the blood rush to my head and hesitated for a moment, but I got a hold of myself and answered, “It’ll take me a little while, but I’ll meet up with you there later.”
I brought along the cobalt blue bowl and porcelain spoon Inoue had left behind at the dim sum restaurant. When I arrived, blockades were set up on all the streets around Café Dormir. On the other side of a pile of squad cars and ambulances, a steady stream of cops filed in and out. Police tape adhered to the surroundings like moss. I called Miko’s cell phone. A voice I didn’t recognize answered. Before long, the owner of that voice appeared and took me away in a squad car. The owner of that voice also officiously explained that what I’d already predicted had indeed taken place. Maybe he thought I’d faint or lose it, because he held me tightly by the shoulders and didn’t let go.
When Miko announces that I am on my way, Inoue forgets his lines and clams up for a bit. It was probably like what happens when you’re engrossed in a movie and the film starts to burn up right at the climax. The world into which you’d been drawn suddenly disappears, and all you see is an empty white screen.
“Well then, we’ll just have to finish this before she gets here. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be fair to her.” Inoue’s voice is unnaturally cheerful. The camera moves away from Miko’s face and zooms in on the wall monitor. You can hear Inoue’s finger click the mouse, and his documents are uploaded.
Unless you’re exceedingly stupid, I’m sure you can imagine what happens next. But Miko didn’t try to run away from the Narcissus Cell. He didn’t call out for help. He didn’t even try to contact me. He sat back quietly in the red lip-shaped reclining chair and watched intently as Inoue set up his camera in the corner of the room. Miko betrayed me in the end. He made the choice to become Inoue’s partner in crime.
Inoue separates from his lens and moves diagonally to the opposite corner, the first time his own image had ever been filmed by his camera. He is wearing a whitish shirt. He pulls an army knife out of his backpack and asks, “Is that spot okay?” Miko replies back vacantly, “Yeah, sure.” Inoue returns to the central table and drinks the rest of his herbal tea, then moves further away from the camera again, turns his back to the lens, and stands next to Miko.
A muffled voice says, “All right, hold your breath for a sec.” Inoue’s arm works furiously. Miko makes coughing noises. A soothing voice says, “Hold on. Just a little more.” Inoue’s arm quickly moves back and forth many times. Meanwhile, Miko’s coughs and groans reverberate.
Before long, Inoue lies down alongside Miko. For a brief moment, his red-stained arms and shirt cuffs, as well as his splattered chest are recorded, but once he lies down beneath the camera level, he’s no longer visible – just moans, coughs, and violent breathing like Miko’s sewn together by a red arm and red knife that rise and fall from view several times. Finally, the arm rises even higher and falls with greater force, and after that nothing stirs in the room. A short time later, the disc is full, and the recording stops.
Even after the camera dies, Inoue waits for the world to change in the darkness between scenes. But since for him the real world itself is the world of the dead, he doesn’t have anywhere to go after death and has to remain in this world. The moment of death is drawn out for countless hours and days and years of everyday dying, and the cathartic transition to eternity never comes. I gaze at the surface of the spring and see the knife thrust into their flesh thousands and millions of times, veins punctured, blood that never stops flowing, faint breathing that never lets up, and four eyes holding onto the last flicker of life that look up at me with unrequited passion. But I refuse their passion and don’t try to understand it, instead taking it all in as if only light and sound, just another overblown film by Shôji Inoue. He was a camera until the end.
To me, that film is a joke. It’s not a nightmare anymore. What worse joke could there be than for Inoue to think his camera-self watches and keeps recording the image of him killing and dying just like it was “Mixed Cameras” or “Infinite Hell.”
Why did Inoue and Miko act out such a B comedy? They surely would have been happy enough to get some thrills out of a heated argument and exchange of blows or something, so why did Miko have to set it off? He had to have known how Inoue would respond to the announcement I was on my way. Did Miko want to die at Inoue’s hand? Inoue had become a slave to his own crazy theory and simply backed himself into a corner where the conclusion mea
nt dying even without wanting to die. But Miko must have really wanted to die. And if so, what the fuck was I? Was he letting me take care of him for no reason? I was always dogged by the sense that life was phony and it didn’t matter when we died. But the desire that led those two to die seems fundamentally different. They had faith that I’d understand and sympathize with their desire, but I flat-out will not. The death they advocated feels more like a lie than any death I feel. They were so sweet. Why did they have to reject all my ideas like that?
My thoughts on not forgiving them and the torment I feel are exactly like what I wrote in that final email I sent to Inoue. They haven’t changed since then, and they can’t be replaced. And, if I can just add one thing, he wrote that he erased my message without reading it a second time. That is a load of crap, because the whole thing is included verbatim in his document.
If I’d been driven to despair and tried to follow them in death, it would have looked like I’d put his theory into practice, and maybe that would have gone a long way towards satisfying public curiosity. The incident was widely reported as a love suicide following His Young Majesty in death. The media learned of the existence of Inoue’s document the next day and began training the spotlight on me, as the person who held the key. Was I supposed to laugh at the big joke? Was I supposed to be enraged? Was I supposed to be consumed with grief? My feelings were stuck somewhere between all three, and I was at a loss. But I am certain that I called Mokuren a bunch of times to say, “Fucking kill me already!” Mokuren wasn’t about to cut off contact with me at a time like that, but she grew irritated, which was obvious in her attitude and forced comments about how I didn’t die, so all I could do is keep on living. I nodded appropriately.
The incident was Inoue’s demented brainchild, and it took each step on its own without paying me any mind. The next day, a twenty-two year old man and twenty-four year old woman committed suicide by poison in a members-only private room in “Roppongi Hills,” a reading lounge.
Initially, people thought it was merely a lovers’ suicide pact carried out in Roppongi. However, evidence that they’d accessed Inoue’s site was discovered on the computer that came with the private room, and speculations that they’d killed themselves in response to Inoue’s call abounded, so the event took on a different meaning than what would have been the case had it just been seen as the individual actions of a particular pessimistic couple. Because they didn’t leave behind any suicide notes or other writings of their own that might have explained their reasons, public interest immediately turned to Inoue’s work on the internet.
Just as he’d planned, Inoue’s document multiplied by leaps and bounds over the net and was even picked up and mauled by the rabid mass media, which went crazy with sensationalized interpretations of the shocking contents. People even made their own compilations of earlier films Inoue had sold or aired on his webcast, and viewers could tack on their own bone-chilling commentaries, which were replayed on TV. I was appalled to watch a TV anchor at a broadcast subsidiary of Miko’s company look anguished while recounting the ins and outs of Miko’s past with the attitude of someone who had a special right to do so. I thought about ways to assassinate whoever was responsible at the TV station at the time. They went through his “spirited away” period after His Young Majesty’s death and the days I took care of him. They even aired footage from “Infinite Hell.” I’m not sure if it was for a cash payoff, but Miko’s parents let themselves get used and handed over his personal effects.
Whether or not it was true, all sorts of bullshit was reported about the person of the moment who piqued everyone’s curiosity, me. When they found out that the couple who’d poisoned themselves were both “spirited away” after His Young Majesty’s death, they featured exposé close-ups on the “spirited away” connection. They said we were seeing the early stages of a cult that believed people who had been spirited away were the “chosen ones,” and their proof was Inoue’s own written admission that he had been converted by the revelations Miko had while “spirited away.” They labeled me the lover shared between the two sect founders who would take over the reins in accordance with their wishes and make them saints. Of course, my real name was circulating freely over the net, and my mom’s house was surrounded by the mass media, so it wasn’t as if my name was really withheld. If Mokuren hadn’t helped my mom and me escape up to her mountain lodge to hide out, I was so close to the deep end that I might have started talking in curses just to satisfy the general public’s expectations.
Thankfully, I didn’t have to go to Miko and Inoue’s funeral, but after seeing the ridiculous images, I wondered how much a corpse matters. At most, they were wax figures, and I couldn’t stop smiling at the idea of the two of them at the crematorium, like two identical burning candles. Probably the best they could spin out of that would be stories like “the lover of the cult founders finally goes mad.”
Ascension Pass is located in the small Peaks of Many Gods mountain range that connects the boundaries of Okuchichibu and Jôshû-Shinshû in a place where the ridge dips a bit into a small canyon. Apparently there used to be a road that crossed over the pass, but now the main access is through a tunnel, and since the forests of cedars on the mountains grew so thick, people stopped coming up here to hike or climb. The lodge was basically deserted when it caught the eye of Mokuren, who was entrusted with the task of house-hunting.
Mokuren’s folks, who kept shop in Yokohama’s Chinese-Town, went in on a vacation home purchase with some colleagues who shared roots back on the continent. They were charged with locating the property and negotiating everything, and the lion’s share of that responsibility fell to Mokuren. She made use of her vast network of connections to find the mountain lodge and decided on her own to make a bid on it. She negotiated a real bargain of a price and managed to raise enough money to finance it. She parlayed that success into claiming the biggest voice in how the property was managed.
Mokuren had told me that the place was a fixer-upper and that she and the friends whose help she’d enlisted were in the middle of some home improvement projects, so I’d imagined a dilapidated and moldy, old house. But to my surprise, it was a fabulously renovated log cabin. We arrived at the crack of dawn, and it looked like a big, gentle living creature that had emerged from the sea and was lingering playfully on the shore.
Nobody inside the body of that living thing was awake yet, and as soon as Mokuren showed me to the bedroom, I collapsed and fell fast asleep. I slept straight through for two days. When I woke up on the morning of the third day and got my bearings, I felt like the last twenty-five years of my life had been a bad dream.
The day I woke up, Mokuren, her dad, and a bunch of her friends were there working on the lodge. They said I didn’t need to do anything until I’d recovered from the fatigue, so my mom and I helped out with the cooking and cleaning, and the rest of the time, I just loafed around, filming everyone while they made tables, chairs, shelves, and things. The following day, some people left and others arrived, with yet another rotation a few days later, and then Mokuren’s dad headed back down the mountain a week later. With all the comings and goings, I couldn’t remember the names of the only two people remaining, a couple, a man and a woman. They introduced themselves as Udzuki and Kisaragi, probably not their real names. According to them, as long as you did your part to help out, you had the right to use the lodge free of charge. They said all the people coming and going were Mokuren’s friends. They were a curious pair whose only common thread may very well have been their shared connection to Mokuren. No one had a grasp on the big picture of what all those relationships were.
I’d had a taste of this sort of scenario with Mokuren before. In high school, she had networks of friends I didn’t know outside of school and a slew of flashy romances. She gave me a hard time over my relationship, but back in the day, she earned the nickname “the anaconda of love” because her relationships were anything but normal. You’d see her with a new guy or girl on an almo
st daily basis. No one could tell if a particular person was in the running for something more serious, if she was dating lots of them at the same time, or if she was just going through one lover after another. She hooked up with a lot of people, but it never seemed to make a dent in her personal pace. She was never in a hurry and was somehow laid back about it all, detached and positive at the same time like she knew she had to flirt a little to get some loving or that she wouldn’t get fireworks without first advertising a bit. But whatever the reason, her capacity was so large that she never reached the saturation point. At the time, I felt like a mere blip on the corner of the screen in the movie of Mokuren’s life. She saw me as more than that, but the fear of betrayal kept me from getting too close to her.
She got older, and her relationships matured, which might account for the range in ages and types of people who gather here. Intellectually, I understood, but still I was as cautious as before and didn’t want to get too closely acquainted with any of them. Mokuren said it was okay to trust everyone, but how was I to know who would disappear with such a high turnover? Luckily, we can live as we please here. Those who want to get involved in intense conversations can do so (which is how Udzuki and Kisaragi met and got together here), and no one bothers those who prefer to be left alone. So, all I did was hide behind my camera and take walks.
When I left the lodge and ventured out onto the mountain ridge, I was immediately surrounded by a different kind of stillness. All I heard were birdsongs and rustling leaves. I slowly hiked along the edge of the mountain while filming. Along the way, I walked down a side road on the western slope, where all I could see were cedars, a novel sight for someone like me who lived in Yokohama. The landscape is starker now. However, rows and rows of different kinds of trees peppered the eastern slope back then. That part of the forest was manmade. Somebody apparently planted a variety of trees over there as an alternative to the cedars in the days when people freaked out about allergies. They didn’t just plant seedlings, but actually brought fully grown trees all the way over from deep in the heart of Shinshû’s mountains. The woods were thick with curvy trees and fat trees, hollow trees with lots of holes and big trees with a gazillion leaves. I was met with one fascinating surprise after another when I first explored that environment, which was inhabited by strong and sturdy wild animals like bears and wild boars, as well as poisonous bugs, snakes, and plants. (Were they also transplants from Shinshû?)
Lonely Hearts Killer Page 10