The car entered the dark. The thirty-something man was not convinced by what he heard. Yet the fifty-something man kept speaking.
“Of course, I don’t have the whole picture. I don’t know what this Cult X’s plan is.”
“Their enemy is Japan. They’re just trying to get attention,” the younger man said automatically. When he spoke, he felt a strange sense of satisfaction.
“How green.” The older man smiled faintly. “You don’t know Sawatari.”
Takahara was sitting up in his hospital bed, staring at the cell phone he’d been given.
What they’d said was wrong. No, maybe his expectations were wrong.
YG had ordered him to carry out a terror attack. He was to draw attention to the problems of deprivation around the world in the name of the gods. Take over a TV station, kill some of those wealthy Japanese, and spread our name around the globe. If he refused, they would kill everyone in the cult. That woman, your lover, will be gang-raped and killed. There was no way Takahara could stop them. The police wouldn’t protect the cult even if he asked for help. As long as Ryoko was connected to him, she would always be in danger. Even if he ended their relationship, he couldn’t stop YG from coming after her five, ten years from now.
Takahara had originally approached Sawatari because he wanted to change the world. But all Sawatari did was have sex with women. He never tried to do any good for anyone. When Takahara was contacted again by YG, it had felt as though the goals they propounded were the same as his, even if their methods were quite different. They would never plan a terror attack where no one would die. Takahara was done with doing things their way.
He had tried to shape YG’s demands into something that would fit with his desires. To carry out a terror attack without killing anyone. He’d tried to fail on purpose. He’d planned to forcibly defend his opinion on TV, start a movement, and purposely fail to kill anyone. YG would not forgive betrayal, but they would not blame him for failing. If he carried out one attack, his actions would make up for his previous failure, and if he died, he thought, they wouldn’t punish anyone else. He felt bad for his co-conspirators, who would probably be arrested, but that was better than being killed by YG.
But something had gone wrong. Why did Sasahara shoot me?
Was the terrorist attack really organized by YG? Is Sasahara a member?
He had a headache. He also felt slightly nauseated.
I have to get out of here. He removed the IV and got out of bed. His belongings were under the bed. His phone was gone—he had only the prepaid one—but his wallet was there. And a large bottle of pills. Were they painkillers?
Takahara dressed, left the room, and walked down the dark hallway. The silver door that led to the fire escape stood open, like an unhappy greeting. Were they telling him to leave through there? No one was guarding the stairs.
Takahara had to update himself on the situation before he did anything else. He caught a cab and rented a small room in a run-down Western-style business hotel nearby. Intense pain ran through his right shoulder, so he turned on the TV with his left hand. JBA was running footage of cult members pointing guns at the hostages. He flipped the channels, seeing more and more of the same.
This is not an attack by YG, he thought. This is an attack by the cult. By the leader.
Had Sawatari known everything he was doing? Was he just using Takahara to plan his own attack? His face always looked so blank. Had he planned this all—made Takahara do it? There must have been other members involved. But why would Sawatari do something so complicated?
Yoshioka, who had been in charge of preparing the guns, had been killed in his room. That wasn’t a coincidence. Sasahara’s gun hadn’t been altered as Yoshioka was supposed to alter it.
But why was Sasahara demanding they become an independent ward? Why was the facility being surrounded? It’s so suspicious.
What was Sawatari’s true aim?
One thing is clear, Takahara thought. Those two men were messengers from YG, and YG is upset at this situation. They are mad that their terror attack, my terror attack, was taken over.
Takahara looked at the phone in his hand. I’m the only one who knows the numbers. All these terror plots have gotten mixed together, but there’s only one thing for me to do. Ryoko’s life, or normal people’s lives. The answer is easy.
I’ve never approved of this world.
I don’t care about normal people.
23
“Welcome.”
Matsuo looked thin, sitting cross-legged on top of a hospital bed, facing the camera.
“Now I’m going to tell you all what I’ve always wanted to say.
“These are the words I was meant to tell you from the moment you were born. Welcome to this world. You have been given life. From the universe of nothingness, you have received a brief something. Please indulge in it. Enjoy this world with your whole body. Just like a teenager in the fever of first love, take pleasure in this world with everything you have.”
At Matsuo’s mansion, many members had assembled to hear his last lecture. Yoshiko, who already knew the contents of the talk, stood in the back watching everyone watch the video. This was Matsuo’s will.
“Our universe started with the Big Bang, and eventually living things came to be. Living things are less stable than things that aren’t alive. It’s possible that the reason they must die is because by doing so they produce diversity. Why are we alive? I’ll try to explain that in my own way. We are alive to give birth to stories. The story of having lived as a salaryman. The story of having spent twenty years hiding in a room, then finally mustering the courage to leave. We live to give birth to stories. We live to live through stories. We continue to birth new stories into this world. There’s no such thing as a good or bad story.
“Our existence is built on our brains, made from tens of millions of neurons, and the countless synapses connecting them—an astounding feat, the joining together of innumerable particles. Atoms, and the protons, neutrons, and electrons that compose them. For this world to be the way it is required an astonishing combination of microparticles, a very particular value of the elementary charge that determines the strength of magnetism and the miraculous value of the coupling constant that determines the strength of the atomic bonds that hold together protons and neutrons. The collection of tiny particles that would become our world was born in the Big Bang. In .01 seconds, the temperature rose to ten trillion degrees, and in the following three minutes the nuclei of our helium atoms were born. For about 1.37 trillion years this astounding universe has continued to be everything, and now it is the stage for your stories. Our lives are supported by this astounding system. Or we could put it this way. Every piece of this astounding system has been given to us.
“So, why are our stories needed? That I don’t know. But this world wants stories. Because atoms are full of the potential to produce life, they are also full of the potential to produce stories. I don’t know what purpose is served by the various stories our unstable lives produce. The world is probably just built that way. Judging from the way the world is constructed, and the fact that atoms are full of the potential to produce life, we should probably just accept that we live to produce stories. God is probably the full form of this world, the universe. So we can probably call the structure of this world ‘god.’ All the great, ancient religions of this world simply saw god differently because of their different cultures.
“Pray to god. By that I mean pray to everything. Everything outside yourself. You, you don’t really exist. Our bodies are always changing at the atomic level, always trading parts. So we could also put it this way: praying to god means praying to everything, which includes yourself.
“While we are the agents of our stories, our consciousnesses are also the audience watching those stories. So let’s watch until the very end. As long as we have consciousness, we must watch our
own stories.
“I’m going to die soon. I think it may be tomorrow. When you watch this, I will already be gone. But this isn’t anything to be scared of. I’m just returning to nothingness. We are all really nothing, and after we enjoy our brief lives, we humbly return to nothing. My body will be cremated, broken down to the atomic level, and will become part of this system of particles that supports your stories, I imagine. We are all one, and each of us is just part of this great world.
“We live to produce stories, and no one has the right to erase another’s story. The structure of this world—in other words, god—created us. We do not have the right to kill anyone produced by this world, by god. Aside from eating—aside from consuming life to support life—we have no right to take the life of any living thing. God does not tell us to kill. The only people who say god tells us to kill are scam artists using god’s name—false prophets. What right do they have to speak the word of god? How do they know what god wants? What evidence is there? Who is their witness? With what certainty can they speak? Human beings, as simple as we are, cannot understand the truth of god. That is why we must speak carefully, only in postulations. Maybe this is what god thinks. We cannot say anything as absolute as Go to war, or Kill him. Even if they praise god, we must not listen to false prophets who demand war and death. They are nothing more than ordinary humans who shit and fuck just like us. Please remember that by praising false prophets you risk turning your back on the real god. Consider yourself as being tested by god—you must not be fooled. True prophets remain humble. Humans must not make absolute decisions. Such conclusive actions as war exceed human authority in the face of the god who created us.
“During the Second World War, Japan tried to placate its people by convincing them to worship the nation, not the self. There was a certain pleasure to be found in throwing one’s own body into that mad frenzy. People could forget how trivial their lives were, devote themselves to a larger ‘cause.’ They were set free from the ‘burden’ of freedom, of having to think for themselves. In Japan now, a group of people is trying to recreate that nationalist war machine.
“It certainly does feel good to be so committed to a cause that you would give your life for it. You feel pride in being Japanese. However, given the slightest opportunity, that sort of pleasure can give way to a rampage. For humans it is a terribly dangerous state. There were many people in Nazi Germany who took comfort in raising their right hands in the Nazi salute and shouting ‘Heil Hitler!’ We must not fall into that trap again. This is not just a matter of concern for Japan. Since time immemorial, societies have returned to this sort of pleasure over and over again. We must reject both those who demand murder in the name of god and the pleasures born out of totalitarianism. Only by doing that can humans move on to their next stage.
“From the beginning of the Pacific War until we lost, political power shifted hands seventeen times in Japan. But the war followed a single filthy path. Once the system was put in place, we couldn’t stop it. The government that set this pleasure-engine of nationalist fervor in motion couldn’t stop the people. The officers who had been mobilized couldn’t imagine surrendering and giving up that glorious feeling of pride and purpose. They continued to order their subordinates to carry out ridiculous attacks. Think about the berserk actions of the Kwantung Army, which brought down the wrath of the rest of the world during that war. Even level-headed politicians could not stop them. In the midst of such a state of pleasure, it’s impossible to maintain balance. Do you believe our current politicians have the capacity to maintain that perfect balance under the totalitarian rule of 120 million people? We will just run wild again. If that particular pleasure-state is restored, Japan will find itself in a dangerous situation. We will drown in that pleasure and leave another dark spot on our history, just as we did in World War II. We must mourn those who died in that war not as heroes, but as sacrifices. Of course it’s an ugly point to make, to say after the war that those we sent to battle were not heroes. However, if we don’t get past this ugliness, we will never advance. Those in charge of the country should certainly, as our representatives, bow their heads to those soldiers who died. Weeping, they should tell them, We hope for peace. We will not allow the pleasure-state to be revived. So from now on we will treat you as sacrifices. We will always remember that we called you heroes and sent you to battlefields. And we will always mourn you. Your sacrifice was part of a far too heavy lesson we had to learn. And in exchange, in atonement, we will bring peace to this world. If we continue to call them heroes, more humans will go to die in the hope of becoming heroes, too. The more we call soldiers heroes, the closer we get to war. If we worship the fallen, people will long to be like them. And when our country turns to war, people will not resist.
“Dostoevsky said that once someone is seized by a way of thinking, they rarely change. Even if evidence contradicts their beliefs, it is rare for people to change their mind. Dostoevsky said people only change because of their emotions. And so it’s not enough to reject one way of thinking. Without finding another way of thinking instead, a person will never change.
“I believe he was right. That’s why I must also offer an alternative. However, unfortunately, I have no solution to offer that can compete with the simple search for pleasure that is totalitarianism. I don’t have that kind of power.
“What I say will probably sound harsh. I am going to die soon, and I will keep saying harsh things until the very end.
“Japan should become a country that speaks out for peace. We should be hated by all the countries that long to go to war. So, you’ll ask, if another country starts a conflict, do we just ignore it, even if people are suffering? What an extreme opinion! However, have you ever thought about what’s behind such a conflict? The calculations of many large governments are tied up in the interests of the oversized weapons industry. We should oppose not only the forces initiating the dispute but also the corporations behind it. We should keep working to stop those disputes before they happen. We should stop businesses from trying to profit off of war. We must continue to hold peace up as an ideal. If a conflict occurs in another country, let’s bravely tell the whole world why we oppose it. Let’s name names. This country and these businesses are behind this conflict, and that country and these businesses are trying to profit from that war. If we stop them, war will cease. On the other hand, as long as they’re profiting behind the scenes, war will never end. We should put all our energy into producing a system that makes war unrealistic. We must not let munitions companies just do what they want. The more weapons we have in this world, the more likely we are to go to war. I don’t suggest anything as purely irresponsible as Japan’s giving up its military—we should maintain the defense forces befitting a developed country. In our recent history we have been not only blatant aggressors, but also victims who experienced the atomic bomb and the air raids on civilians. We’ve had the special experience of being both aggressors and victims. Can we give up our uniqueness? If Switzerland can remain eternally neutral, Japan should become a country that eternally pursues peace. If we give up our uniqueness, wouldn’t the many lives lost in the Second World War be wasted? We absolutely cannot let their lives be wasted. When I think of those who died, I desperately want Japan to devote itself to fighting for the end of war. Some of the leaders of other wealthy countries will furrow their brows at us, as will many international corporations. But the people of the world will support us generously. It is always the common people who suffer in wartime. I believe those who died at war also hoped for peace. I believe they were too noble to demand to be revered as heroes. The world . . .”
The doors were flung open and a member burst in.
“The police are outside,” the member panted. “Everyone—”
Police officers flooded the room.
“The world is built on a balance of great powers. If Japan cut the rudder that allowed for war, that balance would be lost.”
; “Everyone remain calm,” shouted one of the officers. “I have a warrant to arrest all of you. We’re going to take you into custody.”
“Why?” asked Yoshiko. “We have nothing to do with that cult.”
“We’ll give you the details at the station. Let’s go.”
“In the end, I never figured out whether or not everything was decided at the moment of the Big Bang. But I did learn one thing. I don’t know if it controls everything, but fate is real. I don’t mean to say your fate is decided the moment you’re born. I’m speaking more broadly. Picture a giant stone pillar—it’s being worn away on all sides, pushed by one force or another in one direction or another. Once it begins to fall in a certain direction, no one can stop it. Then that becomes its fate.”
“Please stop!” Yoshiko yelled. “We’re not involved!” An officer was restraining her as the members were handcuffed one by one.
“Stop!” Yoshida shouted at a member who was resisting arrest. “Don’t resist. Don’t lay a hand on them. You can’t become like one of them.”
Cult X Page 31