Around that time, the next train was approaching Shibuya Station. Looking like a doll turning somersaults, a human figure jumped from the end of the platform onto the tracks in front of the oncoming train. The conductor covered his face with his arm and lowered his head. Bloodcurdling screams and roars filled the platform along with the faint sound of friction as the train car ran over foreign matter. He was decapitated by the wheel and died instantly.
The man inside the train had been stabbed with a long blade during the tackle. The paramedics waiting at Ebisu Station stopped the bleeding and transported the man to the hospital, but his heart couldn’t withstand the shock, and he died.
At first this incident was reported as another crime influenced by Inoue’s document. But the police department released information related to the suspect, a language arts teacher in a public middle school. They said he was driven to the breaking point after losing control of his unruly homeroom class. They found no indication whatsoever of any connection to Inoue and chalked it up to a single, isolated freak occurrence.
Still the Chief Secretary of Cabinet proclaimed, “This is indiscriminate murder and a new breed of suicide terrorism. It differs from crimes of a personal nature such as love suicides.” His rejection of the term “love suicide,” over which Inoue’s shadow loomed, struck me as a way to rush to bury Inoue and, at the same time, to maintain people’s outrage over the murder-suicide.
Inoue’s name disappeared from both the print and TV news media, as if they were in lockstep. Rumors spread over the net, like the one about how just when a very influential weekly magazine had prepared an article linking the suspect to Inoue, they received a threatening message from Homeland Security officials who had hacked their way into reviewing the text before it went to press. The publisher buckled under the pressure, and the piece never saw the light of day. It supposedly revealed evidence that the suspect had actually printed out copies of Inoue’s document at an internet cafe he sometimes used and explained he wasn’t on leave due to anxieties over his class, but was instead unable to return to the workplace after having been “spirited away.” There actually was the possibility that reporting links between the incident and Inoue without incontrovertible and hard proof could be seen as the dissemination of material inciting crime and thus could be interpreted as illegal under the revised laws, and in all likelihood that’s exactly the chilling effect the government had in mind.
The mass media didn’t delve into the particulars of any case, but instead started to fill the airwaves with special features on how to avoid “personal terrorism.” They offered friendly advice on avoiding rush hour trains, busy streets on weekends, and crowded places from which it could be hard to flee, and created stereotypical profiles of “dangerous types” to watch out for. There were also segments on how to use martial arts techniques and legal weapons to fend off attacks from suspicious characters. Every channel and every magazine tried to attract attention with more or less the same kinds of baseless predictions about how the economy looked better for next year and how that meant fewer people would want to die. And the commentators who enjoyed the most popularity were hawkish right-wingers who accused the government of “sitting around and doing nothing while the people’s security and safety were in jeopardy.”
Along with deep chills, the dead of winter saw an increase in incidents branded with unfortunate labels like indiscriminate love suicide, random street killing-suicide, personal terrorism, and suicide-terrorism. There were seven more incidents in January and an even sharper rise in February, when there were eleven in the first two weeks alone and not a single day in the second half of the month without an incident. By that point, society was pretty much in a state of panic. The police increased their street presence all over the country to little effect, because it’s simply not possible to prevent crimes when you don’t know when and where they’ll occur.
For that reason, police guards were stationed in conspicuous places. Their highest priority was the forest where Her Majesty lived. Cops stood guard like trees lined up alongside the roads all along the perimeter in a singular show of pomp. They worried that the approaching anniversary of His Young Majesty’s death might push some likely perpetrators over the edge, and they warned that someone might be devising a terrible plan. Intending to put the kibosh on the rumors and whisper campaigns, the government announced that it would allow TV broadcasts of a news conference with the unprecedented successor on the first anniversary of His Young Majesty’s death, February 30th.
It was a very snowy year, and the temperature dropped enough to freeze the hearts of all living creatures. You would have thought the rainy season had come in winter, because every day thick clouds covered the sky, and even when the snow stopped, there were only brief glimpses of blue sky or the sun every now and then. Ice kept everyone confined indoors, and it felt like there was no way to run away from fate.
The level of alcohol consumption skyrocketed nationwide, and fixing stew at home became the thing to do. As the restaurant industry suffered a marked decline in customers, more and more businesses went under.
Incidents occurred in every type of location. It didn’t matter if you were in a busy urban downtown neighborhood, a provincial train station, an apartment complex in the suburbs, a village in the boonies, a path between rice paddies, or a quiet and empty trail in the woods. No place was safe. Most incidents involved men approaching women, old people, or children and stabbing them, strangling them, bashing their heads open with rocks, lynching them, or taking them by force to the top of a building and pushing them off. But there were exceptions, like the patrolman who gunned down a middle school kid who had come to the police box asking for directions or something and then put his revolver to his own head and shot himself. Or the female bartender who, when only one customer was left, laced cocktails with arsenic, drank one herself too, and they both died. And then there was the female taxi driver who drove herself and her passenger, an elderly woman, straight into the sea and the eleven year old boy who smothered a younger kid to death, got drunk, stuck his head in a plastic bag, fastened it tight around his neck, and then fell asleep before dying.
The vague and uncertain news coverage only exacerbated the climate of fear. The ins and outs of how a crime was committed would get covered in lurid detail, but it seemed like a suspect’s inner life or any information that might point to a motivation were strictly off-limits and the real questions were being suppressed. Meanwhile, even if they thought of it, no one would dare mention Inoue’s document, and that only made its murky presence loom larger in the background.
Like I’ve said before, the real horror of each incident lies somewhere that can’t be seen from the outside. You can run down the list of any incident’s surface details, but that’s nothing more than rattling off statistics. Every case is bound to have its own individual circumstances along with any similarities it shares with others. The cause-and-effect stories that get attached to incidents are usually distorted. They change to suit whatever works for the storytellers. I can only know the horror of my case and all its nitty-gritty specifics. When it comes to another incident, all I can do is imagine based on my own experience. And everything I imagined gnawed away at me, without me even being aware of it.
You don’t know who’ll be targeted or where. You don’t know what kind of person will be seized with the impulse to kill or when. If it could happen to anyone, what’s to say you won’t be next? Somewhere along the way, I internalized those paranoid suspicions that held so many others in their grip.
One day I phoned my usual distributor to place the weekly grocery order. They said they would stay closed past the New Year while things still looked dangerous. What could I do? So, I asked them to refer me to another store. They said it wasn’t likely other shopkeepers, who didn’t know me, would sell to me, but they gave me a name anyway. As it turned out, that store did agree to supply us, so I struggled along the icy path down the mountain to pick up the order. The earthy old guy at
the shop had a warped sense of humor, and he was on a roll.
“You kids are lucky, livin’ up there, not havin’ to listen to the news. Don’t even need to think about society. Yup. Up there, in a little cabin. No neighbors. Pretty safe like that, aren’t ya? I reckon ya never knew what it’s like to feel all alone with nothin’ but strangers everywhere.”
“Strangers? But don’t you pretty much know who everyone is in a small town like this?”
“Knowing who someone is don’t make ‘em your friend. It’s on account of you kids not knowing about what’s going on in the world that I don’t mind having you here. And hell, it beats closing shop and having to go somewhere. City people are always on edge. All that stress wears ‘em down. Yup. They up and drop dead from overwork.”
The old guy saw us off, warning that we should be careful about going to stores we didn’t know, because if we looked a little strange or said something even slightly out of the ordinary, we’d get reported.
Having my vulnerability pointed out like that left me feeling as if I was always being watched, and I couldn’t shake the idea that someone was looking over my shoulder or spying on me. Life on the mountain didn’t change. We still lived apart from society and enjoyed a tranquil existence. But the arrival of each new guest rattled my nerves with suspicion and paranoia. Even if a person who just arrived from below appeared cool, I’d assume they were a nervous wreck inside and somehow using all that nervous energy to overcompensate. For me, that feeling in and of itself is proof that insecurity in the world below is contagious.
The snowfall didn’t let up, and when there was a pause every now and then, it would freeze in a flash. It was like we lived in an ice castle. I went to the spring many times, but there were no reflections because it was frozen over and covered in snow. The stream froze too, and the only secure water source we had was what had collected in the dried up old well. We were faced with bona fide Snow Country tasks – running water to prevent freezing and shoveling snow that fell off the roof in front of the door. And the whole lot of us had way too much time on our hands. Gaps of free time were more openings where uneasiness could breed.
After we finished shoveling, four guys in their early twenties who’d been working with me asked, “We’re warming up some wine. How’s about a cup?” Even though I was uncomfortable, I was won over enough to stick around. Then one of them started talking about how another had a brush with indiscriminate love suicide. Seeing how shocked I was, they tried to downplay the topic as if it wasn’t a big deal, explaining, “Well, if five people get together, usually at least one of them will have been through that sort of thing.”
“So you’re saying one in every five people is targeted?” I couldn’t keep from trembling.
“On average, yeah, that’s about it.”
“It could happen to anyone. If you’re alive today, your chances are pretty much the same as the next person’s,” said the guy who’d been through one.
“But you must have run away. You ran away because you didn’t want to die, right?”
“It wasn’t really a question of will so much as my competitive instincts. I play rugby, see, and once I knew what was up, I made a move, and the other guy fumbled. He could have picked himself up, pulled it together, and come after me, but he gave me a quick once-over, looked away, and then charged after someone else. It didn’t take him long to learn that he was messing with the wrong guy.”
“Weren’t you scared?”
“I just didn’t want to get hurt. If it wasn’t going to be painful, I might have gone along with it even knowing I’d die.”
Another guy agreed, “I know what you mean.”
“So, you really do want to die?”
“No, it’s not like that. I just think it would feel awesome to give into that kind of rush, if I looked at my destiny and was all like, ‘Bring it on!’”
“For real. That would be total ecstasy. Better than drugs or sex.”
“Death is an extreme high?”
“It doesn’t have to be death. Any extreme game of fate. Like say for instance you’ll get shot if you don’t shoot your girlfriend. So, you give into it and pull the trigger.”
“Not me, man, I’d rather take the bullet and die right there in front of her.”
I told myself these kids were at the mountain retreat because they were connected to Mokuren, so they weren’t typical people from below and were just letting loose a little and talking trash, but I couldn’t shake how disruptive all this was. I wondered about the figure of one in five. And I’d been close enough to share air with someone who escaped an indiscriminate love suicide, and we’d had a conversation. I felt like I’d been tainted by something that wouldn’t go away. The incident had caught up to me. But it hadn’t arrived with a big ground-shaking entrance. It came naturally, like an everyday strand of new hair.
With the burden of this new awareness that even the reservation wasn’t safe, I said to Mokuren, “At a time like this, maybe we should be a little more careful about who we let stay here.”
“Didn’t the old guy down the mountain say we were safe in our ‘little cabin’ up here?”
“Sure, but the new people come from below. Everyone down there is more or less freaked out by the indiscriminate love suicides. I think some people caught up in it all end up perpetrating. Just because someone might normally be calm and collected doesn’t mean they won’t do it.”
“If you want to think something bad is going to happen, I can’t stop you from imagining whatever you imagine. But there’s no reason to think anything like that will happen here. Everyone here is either a friend I trust or one of their trusted companions, so there’s nothing to worry about.”
“But there are people I don’t know.”
“Hell, there are people I don’t know, but I trust them.”
“Have you talked with all of them? When I talked to some new young guys the other day, they seemed pretty sketchy.”
“I don’t know who you mean, but when I say nothing bad will happen, nothing bad is going to happen. This isn’t a matter of logic. It’s about people sense.”
“Are you saying my people sensors are out of order? That I felt those guys were dangerous because I’m the one who’s messed up?”
“Sometimes, my little likable nihilist, you are a supreme pain in the ass. You are the most vulnerable and well-meaning, but also the most suspicious. We still have to figure out a way for you to stop that behavior. Incident, schmincident, you were already worrying back in your news-phase. Don’t blame that on my friends. If anyone is going to start an incident, it’ll be you.”
That one sentence really hit home. I felt like my whole body was made of sand, and all my confidence just spilled out of me. Still, Mokuren was merciless.
“It was the same in your relationship with Mikoto and in that whole triangle with Inoue, wasn’t it? You are still caught in the same spot, Iroha. You think you can take in a few ideas from society, one at a time, and just observe them. But no one is more chained by those ideas than you. You think you aren’t though, and so you move deeper, step by baby step, without realizing that you are drowning in the process. I suppose some people could leap headlong into the thick of it without hesitating and somehow inoculate themselves. But people like you aren’t so good at being decisive, so when you do jump in, your timing is off, and that could be why you are so easily suckered. Well, my primary concern is making sure you are safe, so why don’t you just give it a rest?”
Maybe strong people have always been clear-headed and determined, while the weak have always had to battle their fears. But what Mokuren said was wrong: case in point being Miko, who seemed ready to stand by my side, steady and cool, but who was all too easily “spirited away,” who encouraged Inoue’s love suicide, and who died. So, at some level, I can’t bring myself to trust in Mokuren’s strength either. For the time being, I turned my way of life over to this mountain retreat and my friendship with Mokuren, but only for the time being, a tempo
rary risk. I was surrounded from every direction by a vast and deep surface where nothing was clear, and as it spread, there was no way to tell top from bottom or left from right.
The mourning period for His Young Majesty came to an end in those uncertain times.
After the government announced Her New Majesty would grant an audience on the anniversary of His Young Majesty’s death, the level of anticipation rose quickly. Her New Majesty had never been one to show her face in public much. She was plain and didn’t stand out, so TV stations and magazines ran special features to introduce her to the public. People were led to believe she’d always been close to them through interviews with her classmates, who told stories about what she was like as a student, and programs on her work in the conservation movement before she became Her Majesty. People started calling her by a name they hadn’t even known before then.
The public was hoping to relive their memories of His Young Majesty’s succession ceremony of four years earlier. Back then, His Young Majesty related to us on our own level and swept away what had been until then a gloomy mood. It seemed as if he’d beamed an optimistic energy straight into the hearts of those who listened. In the same way, people hoped maybe Her New Majesty, who was wounded by His Young Majesty’s death, might feel our pain and bring us comfort. Maybe she could quell the evil intentions of those in the grip of violence and make this nightmare end.
Of course, those were the selfish hopes of people looking to a higher power for salvation. The believers in Her New Majesty’s ability to fulfill that soothing role were members of her generation, in their mid-to-late thirties. Most were women, but even men who were initially put off accepted this image of Her New Majesty.
There was a group arguing that it was pointless to place such hopes in Her Majesty. They were even more visible than in his Young Majesty’s days. They said that we were the ones who’d determine the course of society, that we can’t forget the lessons we learned in His Young Majesty’s days, and that if Her New Majesty words were heartfelt and revived the people’s spirits, the effort involved in making that happen would still be ours. To lose sight of all that would mean we were rehearsing for a reenactment of the tragedy following His Young Majesty’s passing. Her New Majesty can only voice her individual desires. She doesn’t have the power to stop a world careening out of control.
Lonely Hearts Killer Page 14