The brakes slammed on and the close-up came to a crawl. And then it was clear. All those little black specs were words. They covered the screen like a swarm of bugs. When they were close enough to be a legible size, I realized it was Inoue’s document.
The rest is predictable. Iroha’s text gets mixed in there, right? And then the words start to move and scramble until they turn into meaningless black and white dots. I didn’t want to imagine what form those black and white dots were going to take.
I switched on the lights. Then I turned off the projector and tore the sheets off the wall. I pulled the real sliding glass door wide open. The smell of dead leaves rushed in with the cool air. I inhaled deeply. I got goosebumps. The mountains were purple, and the sky above painted a deep indigo.
I’m not wasting my time to analyze it. To do that and draw some kind of meaning from this “work of film” would be playing right into Iroha’s hands. By creating all this and writing her statement, Iroha was already getting played herself, caught up in someone else’s trap (Inoue’s or Miko’s or the media’s). I’m not getting played for a second-hand fool.
She should have just filmed it and shown it. She was actually doing okay and hanging in there, but then she got carried away by those big ideas. When she just filmed while worrying whether she was a fake or whether she was simply some device that records light and sound, she was sensual, loose, and clever. But as soon as she tried to express that fake-ness, she became nasty, tight, and boring.
Why does everyone get all worked up about “self-expression?” Iroha hated all those documents and manifestos, but she went and wrote one herself. She made that dumbass movie that only Udzuki and I saw. It’s pathetic. If you’re a fake, that’s fine. Be a fake. There are faky ways of living for fakes. If you don’t feel geared up for life, then that’s proof you’re living. It’s like back when everyone was whining about allergies and they cut down the cedars up here and replaced them with a transplanted fake variety forest. Human activity creates the bad pollution that makes the sky purple.
People get hung up on “self-expression” because they want the real thing, the big essential truth. When you start to think there’s some true meaning out there and that it’s hidden, you fixate on it, you struggle for it, and you try every trick in the book to say, “I’ve got it. This is the real thing.”
Maybe there is a real thing, and maybe there isn’t. Even if there is, I am not going to know what it is. And if there isn’t, what’s there to know? So, no matter how you look at it, it’s beyond human comprehension. And I enjoy a very satisfying life without knowing.
People searching for the real thing are not living satisfying lives. They suffer from some kind of lack. To make up for that lack, they invent the real thing. And then they start “expressing” themselves.
What I want to say to the Iroha who just films and shows her films is that you yourself are expression. When I watch the films you made, I feel moved. To have those feelings and be satisfied with life is my expression. It’s okay to try and communicate that, and it’s okay not to. We can communicate it when we can and can’t when we can’t. But there’s nothing that is impossible to communicate.
Making a movie of the lunar surface (which you probably want to say is the real thing), putting the document out in public, and turning yourself in like that follows the same pattern as what Inoue did. Iroha, you do see that, don’t you? When you come back, I’m going to read you the riot act.
September 30
I got to see Inoue’s parents. It was the first time we’d met, of course. They arrived without reservations, and I told them I could have gone to pick them up or at least arranged for them to pass through security without all the nuisance. They said their calls wouldn’t go through and that they did send a letter, but hadn’t received a reply, so they decided to just come. Communications must have been shut down because of Iroha’s arrest.
Communications were a pain for a little while after the “snow-melt” when the police were strict. But it was a slow time for the lodge, and if they weren’t going to pay attention to individuals connected to my friends, then the surveillance was just for show. They must have been checking on my activities some other way.
Inoue’s parents had come to collect his old document that Iroha put up on the net. They said it would be impossible to recover everything, because even if Iroha’s site could be shut down, lots of copies were probably being stored in different places. That threw me for a loop. The site she made wasn’t deleted even after her arrest. It had been a week since her arrest, and you could still access Inoue’s document and her story.
In a quiet voice Inoue’s dad said, “I understand. We just want to do as much as we can. If you can understand how we feel. If it stays out there like this and wakes the sleeping children, we just couldn’t bear it.”
Inoue’s mom said, “We finally have some peace, but this could start it all up again. Why did Iroha do this?”
“It’s a mystery to me too. I have some questions for her too,” I replied.
Inoue’s dad said, “All this time, it’s been tearing us apart to think about our responsibility as parents and the reality of how your kid is his own independent person even though he came from you. Even now, we still don’t know what we should do. But now that things have settled down, we’re trying quietly to get on with our lives.”
“I lost my job. And we had to move. I had to leave behind everything from my life up until then, and I’d just found my second life,” his mom said.
“Even though we say it’s our second life, it’s filled with grief over our son’s mistake. We simply want it to be our own personal grief. But having the document available like that puts us back in the public. Are we supposed to be seen as failures in the eyes of the public forever?”
“Have you two ever met Iroha?”
Inoue’s parents shook their heads.
“Please, at least this once, talk to her directly. After she decides how to handle everything, I’ll get in touch with you.”
“If Iroha refuses to shut it down, we can sue for copyright infringement,” Inoue’s dad said. Inoue wrote in the document that he wanted it to be copied and circulated, so I thought it would be considered open source material, but at that point I simply told them I understood.
They’d come all the way here, so I took them on a tour to show off our fabulous sunset. We walked down the path to the pass when Inoue’s mom asked, “Is Yellow Hell Spring far from here?”
“The only person who calls it that is Iroha. Do you want to see it? It’s a bit of a walk.”
“No, no, it’s okay,” she replied. She was quiet for a bit and then asked, “What is Iroha like?”
I started out by saying, “She’s sweet and attractive.”
“Do you think she’s perhaps too sweet or maybe comes across as a little overly impressionable?”
“Don’t get the wrong idea. She pretty much keeps to herself. But there are aspects of her like that.”
“Forgive me for asking, but it’s been on my mind so much since I read what she wrote. It’s just that, well that, that part about the dead coming back to life. Were those eerie rumors what influenced her to write it all? I’m probably making too much out of this.” It looked like Inoue’s mom for the most part believed Iroha had been affected by the rumors.
The rumors were related to The Majesties. On September 30, around one month after her succession ceremony, at the end of a fertility festival performance, Her New Majesty, citing poor health, announced she would take a break from her official duties, and she stopped appearing in public. But more recently, rumors that maybe her predecessor, His Young Majesty, came back to life began to swirl around the gossip papers and on the net. Those blew up into bigger rumors that spread about how everyone who died in the love suicide era had not only been resurrected, but were now “driving the living off to be “spirited away” and that more and more people were disappearing.
“She rejected that idea at the
beginning of her document when she wrote about how she doesn’t believe in ghosts and that her experiences at the spring were personal and ultimately figments of her imagination.”
“I hope so. But she also wrote several things like how the spring is a shrine or something to that effect. I wondered if maybe she was into the occult.”
We got back to the lodge, had some of Udzuki’s famous savory rice made with our own homegrown mushrooms, and talked a lot. They spoke openly about their feelings and conflicts, about what it’s been like since they lost their son. Maybe there was no one else they could talk to like that. Their softly spoken stories were never-ending.
“We knew about Iroha before. We were looking forward to meeting her. Our boy talked to us about everything, so we’d heard a lot about her. Well, he was honest about whatever he did talk about, but it feels like he was also a person we didn’t know. It was as if all of a sudden he’d been replaced with someone else who looked exactly like him. That’s why it doesn’t feel real. It’s like that other person caused that incident. We tried to respect his opinions and give him space, but it ended up creating this strange barrier between us. We were trying to think from his point of view, but now it’s clear that we only drove him further away. That attitude came out of our fears about not wanting to make any mistakes with our son. That’s why there’s no end to our sadness. There’s nothing worse that knowing you messed up in raising your child. It’s as if the value of your existence just evaporated. It’s unbearable.”
The conversation lasted through the night, so I had them sleep over, and they left shortly after noon today. When they asked if they could come back, I said, “You are always welcome here.”
According to information from a friend connected to the mass media, the charges against Iroha were dropped and she is expected to be released. Inoue’s document isn’t considered dangerous material anymore. That’s a no-brainer. The files Iroha put up on the net hardly got a response. And the only newspaper coverage was one teeny article in the evening edition about her arrest. In a world fully armed with a strong sense of “total health” (Terujirô Kishi coined that phrase), not even a document like that can carry any weight. The situation now is too different from the time when Inoue wrote his document. If you think you can create a sensation the same way, serve time in jail, and stir the world up into a frenzy, then you are the most naive dreamer the world has ever known.
I didn’t mention this when Inoue’s parents asked, but Iroha did react a bit after she first heard the rumors of people coming back from the dead. She got angry and said the rumors showed that people who considered themselves “survivors of the love suicide era” were really just hiding their guilty consciences.
“Being scared shitless and powerless back then and acting like all they could do was watch people die was plainly and simply shameful. There’s no value in surviving that. And yet they forget all about that shame and the dead people and the ones who were spirited away like more water under the bridge, and now they’re enjoying safe lives, so they feel guilty. They’ll start thinking they were attacked by zombies and want to strike back, so they’ll kill somebody. An incident like that is bound to happen. They’ll probably even call it justifiable self-defense. Another killing age is on its way. If they are gonna call up the spirits of the dead like that, then they’ll just have to kill the dead all over again. Fuck me, but I’m not having any of it.”
She always talked like that. Three years ago, the two of us went at it over the same issues.
I suppose that’s another way of taking rumors seriously. At any rate, the origins of the rumor weren’t exactly what Iroha had in mind. As I mentioned earlier, they had to do with The Majesties.
The Current Majesty didn’t give any signs she’d return from her medical leave. At first, disturbing rumors abounded that an evil spirit appeared during the fertility festival when the mystical rites were being performed and said she was a fake Majesty and unfit to succeed. But after half a year or so, people had lost interest, and she was all but forgotten. Then, out of that lull burst the question of an heir. The current Majesty wasn’t married, and those around her didn’t seem to be pressuring her to find someone. People thought this was strange and wondered whether something was being hidden from them. The theory that The Previous Majesty was alive apparently developed from that idea.
A friend who works at a communications company told me about the unspoken understanding within the Imperial Household National Press Club that Her New Majesty was, in actuality, quite healthy. There was considerable rancor with the government over various opinions and views, with each side holding fast without giving an inch, and Her Majesty was sort of relieved of her duties. However, that was also what Her Majesty wanted. She ventured out on walks and enjoyed her anonymity. Even the prickly Imperial Household Affairs cooperated with the police and acquiesced to her not showing up in public. According to my friend, there were reports that Her Majesty was disguising herself as a man and that maybe the sightings of His Young Majesty were just her in men’s clothing.
But Iroha didn’t know any of that. When I heard how angry she was, I thought she wanted the love suicide era to come back with a vengeance.
If I were to hazard a guess, Iroha’s feelings would go something like this:
She’s not hoping for love suicides or for us all to die, but if this façade of shining peace and stability is going to continue, she’d rather we went back to the dangerous love suicide days when no one trusted anyone else. At least in those chaotic times, to use her words (or, more accurately, the words she borrowed from Inoue), you could see the fraying edges of society through holes in the screen. You could glimpse the real thing, the true nature, the “essence,” of this world.
The holes Inoue and Mikoto did such a fine job of opening had been filled in. And along with them, Inoue, Mikoto, and even Iroha herself were buried alive and left forgotten. Given the circumstances, the only thing to do would be force back the hands of the clock to the moment when Inoue decided to die and His Young Majesty was truly buried.
That’s why Iroha took actions that put her smack into Inoue’s shoes. Maybe she was trying to be a reincarnation of Inoue. And maybe in that sense she was also processing her yearning and sadness over it having been Inoue and not herself who committed love suicide with Mikoto. The very person who warned another bloody age would come if people kept up this same attitude was herself on the verge of setting off a love suicide ticking time bomb.
I really should have taken her, even kicking and screaming, with me to Shanghai, but hindsight is twenty-twenty. I’d invited her time and time again, but she wasn’t interested, so I dropped it. But she reached her limit after never going anywhere and staying holed up in her little room with nothing to do but keep that threesome going. And three years of that was enough to turn her into a deluded dreamer completely out of touch with the world.
Yes, it was also the same three years when “the Winning Team’s Premier” Terujirô Kishi, burst through the mainstream and, before you knew it, popularized his message of pride in being one of the “superior people who survived” and stuck the label “total health” on it. In the blink of an eye, he’d enacted martial law, and since there weren’t enough soldiers to make that happen, he opened the door to citizenship for foreigners on the condition they served in the military. And with the relief over law and order in the background, he reached out for support to legalize euthanasia in order to reduce the number of old people, which fueled the elderly exodus abroad. And he cooked up that dominant gene myth too. Nevertheless, since it seems like the peace has been secured now, nobody gives a rip what Terujirô Kishi does.
Udzuki started Chinese-Language studies, and now he helps me. He’s no whiz when it comes to foreign languages, and I have to help him out a lot, but he’s finally gotten to the point where he can read newspaper clippings.
Either she really is slow on the uptake or isn’t interested, but Iroha doesn’t know what my real job is. The restaura
nt manager gigs in the Shinjuku and Yokohama Chinese-Towns were real jobs too, but I make my real money placing workers. I find above-board job opportunities for those from the continent looking for work on these islands and those from these islands who want to cross over to the continent. Obviously, all the work involved in that process is more than I can do on my own. People like me shuttle from here to there and there and back delivering human resources. The world’s a big bathtub full of people, and our job is to stir it up. I used money I made that way to pay for the advertisement.
Even though my role in the process is completely legal, after they cross, some of the people I place commit crimes. That’s why the Feds have their eyes on me. I think they set up police surveillance at the mountain retreat so they could check on the comings and goings of myself and those close to me. Because I had those suspicions, I placed the ad and caused the big commotion. I thought that would increase the flow of people (boy, did that backfire!).
I brought people crossing to the continent, looking to immigrate, or coming over from the continent here to stay at the lodge. When the “snow-melt” hit and almost everyone left, they didn’t just go back down the mountain, but many of them crossed over to the continent for good. Or, in my mind, they flew the coop. One reason for seeing the hand of the state in all this is the coastal surveillance. Ascension Pass is a kind of harbor in the sky, so it’s only fitting that the police would arrive here too.
In that sense, a hole did open up. But there’s no real thing on the other side.
I’m probably seen as a necessary evil on these islands, where fewer babies are being born, and on the continent too. Actually, I’m getting fat off Terujiro Kishi calling for foreigners to join the military and scaring the elderly overseas. That’s not all. Terujirô Kishi is putting his own head in the noose.
Lonely Hearts Killer Page 21