My new assignment took me out of the building and into a taxi. The young cabbie had his radio on at full volume.
“Ginza 2nd Street, please.”
“Eh? What’s that?”
He couldn’t hear me for the music.
“Ginza 2nd Street.”
“Ginza what Street?”
“Second. Ginza 2nd Street.”
The cabbie finally understood, and the taxi set off.
The music ended. An announcer started talking.
“This is the news at two o’clock. The government this morning ordered all laughing bags to be confiscated from shops throughout the country. Police nationwide have been instructed to clamp down on the illegal manufacture or sale of the bags. Laughing bags are novelty toys that emit a hysterical laughing noise. Today’s move follows a dramatic surge in social unrest caused by nuisance calls using the bags. Calls are often made at two or three o’clock in the morning. When the victim answers, the caller makes the bag laugh into the telephone. There have also been reports of a phenomenon known as ‘laughing-bag rage’.
“Tsutomu Morishita arrived at work on time this morning. Soon after entering his office, he went to the Administration Department and called Hiruma Sakamoto out to the corridor, where the two were observed in conversation. The precise nature of their discussion is not yet clear. Details will be announced as soon as they’re known. Later, Morishita went out on company business, and is currently travelling towards central Tokyo in a taxi.
“The Ministry of Health & Welfare today released the results of a nationwide survey of pachinko game-machine users and designers. The results suggest that playing pachinko after eating eels can be very detrimental to health. According to Tadashi Akanemura, Chairman of the National Federation of Game-Machine Designers-”
The cabbie switched the radio off – he probably wasn’t too interested in the news.
Was my name really that well known? I closed my eyes and thought about it. Could I really be so famous, when there was nothing distinctive about me at all? After all, I was nothing but a lowly office worker, a company employee. No one as unremarkable as me could possibly merit attention in the world of the media.
So just how well-known was my name, my face? Take this cabbie. Was he aware that the person mentioned on the news just now was none other than the passenger in the back of his cab? Had he recognized me as soon as I got in? Or did he actually know nothing about me at all?
I decided to test him. “Er, driver? Do you know who I am?”
He checked me out in the rear-view mirror. “Have we met somewhere, sir?”
“No. I don’t think so.”
“Well then, I don’t know you, do I.”
There was a pause. “You’re not one of them celebrities, are you sir?” he asked at length.
“No. Just an office worker.”
“You been on telly?”
“No. Never.”
The cabbie smiled wryly. “Then I’m not going to know you, am I sir.”
“No,” I replied. “I suppose not.”
I thought back over the radio news I’d just heard. The announcer knew that I was in a taxi heading for central Tokyo. That meant someone must be following me. They must be watching my every move. I turned and looked through the rear window. The road was full of cars – it was impossible to know which of them was following us. Come to think of it, they all looked pretty suspicious now.
“I think someone’s following us,” I said to the cabbie. “Can you shake them off?”
“That’s a lot to ask, sir, if you don’t mind me saying so,” he said with a grimace. “Unless you know which car it is. Anyway, you’d have a job shaking anyone off in this traffic.”
“I think it’s that black Nissan. Look! It’s got a newspaper company flag on it!”
“Well, all right sir, if you insist. Though, personally, I just think you’re being paranoid, sir.”
“I’m perfectly sane,” I countered hastily. “Don’t go taking me to the madhouse, will you!”
The taxi meandered and roamed aimlessly for a while, as if driven by a sleepwalker, before finally arriving in Ginza 2nd Street.
“Well, I lost the black Nissan at least,” the cabbie said with a broad smile. “That must be worth something!”
I reluctantly added five hundred yen to the fare on the meter.
On entering the office of our client in Ginza 2nd Street, I was greeted with uncommon courtesy by a female receptionist whose face I recognized. She led me to a special reception lounge for particularly valued guests. Normally, I’d be called to the duty clerk’s desk, and would stand there talking while he remained seated.
I sat myself on a sofa in the spacious lounge and was fidgeting in some discomfort when, to my surprise, the Department Director walked in with his assistant. They both started greeting me with particular formality.
“Suzuki is always most glad of your kind assistance,” said the Department Director, bowing deeply. Suzuki was the duty clerk who usually saw me.
As I sat there bewildered, the Department Director and his assistant, far from discussing the business at hand, started to heap sycophantic praise on me. They admired my tie, flattered my dress sense, and even started extolling my good looks. In my embarrassment, I hurriedly handed over the documents I’d been given by the Chief Clerk, passed on his message and quickly took my leave.
As I left the building, I noticed the same taxi still waiting there by the pavement.
The young cabbie thrust his head through the side window. “Sir,” he called.
“Still here, are you?” I said. “Well, that’s perfect. Take me back to Shinjuku, will you.”
I was just settling into the rear seat when the cabbie thrust a five-hundred-yen note towards me. “You can have this back, sir,” he said. “You’ve got to be joking!”
“Is something the matter?”
“I switched the radio back on, didn’t I. And they were talking about you, weren’t they. They said you’d been carried off by a rogue taxi driver, who’d deliberately taken you out of your way and squeezed five hundred yen out of you for it! They even mentioned my name!”
Now I understood why I’d been treated so courteously at the client’s office.
“I told you, didn’t I? We were being followed!”
“Whatever. You can have your five hundred yen back.”
“Go on. You keep it.”
“No way! Have it back!”
“Well… All right. If that’s the way you feel. Anyway, will you take me to Shinjuku now?”
“How could I say no? Next thing they’d say I refused a fare!”
And with that he started off towards Shinjuku.
I was gradually realizing that the plot to drive me out of my mind was unimaginably massive in scale. Apart from anything else, my enemy appeared to have bought off the mass media. Who on earth could it be? And what was his motive? Why would anyone want to do something like this?
All I could do was to follow the flow for now. It would be virtually impossible to uncover the mastermind at the bottom of it. Even if I caught one of my pursuers, he would just be small fry. He wouldn’t know who the mastermind was. That was the big cheese – big enough to buy off the media, at least!
“I’m not trying to make excuses, sir,” the cabbie said suddenly. “But I did lose that black Nissan. I did, really.”
“I’m sure you did,” I replied. “But I reckon it’s not that simple anyway. They’re not just following me in a car. They’ve probably even bugged this taxi.”
Hold on a minute, I thought. How did I know I could trust this driver, anyway? He could be in on it too. Otherwise, how did they know the tip was five hundred yen?
I suddenly noticed a helicopter circling above us. It was flying at dangerously low altitude, almost skimming the tops of the buildings.
“I’m sure I saw that chopper on the way out, sir,” said the driver, squinting up at the sky. “Maybe they’re the ones that are following you.”
There was a thunderous crash, and a blood-coloured flash of light streaked across the sky. I looked up to see fireballs flying in all directions. The helicopter had crashed into the top floor of a multi-storey building. The pilot must have been paying too much attention to events on the ground and lost control.
“Serves him right! Heheheheheheheh!”
The cabbie laughed insanely as he sped away from the scene. He already had the look of a deranged man.
I knew I’d be in danger if I stayed in the taxi any longer. “Ah, I’ve just remembered something,” I said. “Could you let me off here.” Actually, I’d remembered there was a small psychiatric clinic nearby.
“Where are you going?” the cabbie asked.
“That’s my business,” I answered.
“Well, I’m going straight home to sleep,” he continued. He looked pale-faced as he took the fare from me. That decided it – he wasn’t one of them.
“Good idea,” I said as I stepped out into the unbearable heat.
I entered the clinic and sat in the waiting room for about twenty minutes. An apparently hysterical middle-aged woman was followed by an apparently epileptic young man. I was next. I went into the treatment room, where the doctor was looking at a television on a desk by the window. News of the helicopter crash was just coming through.
“Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Even the sky’s getting congested now,” the doctor muttered as he turned to face me. “And of course, there’ll be more patients as a result. But they won’t come for treatment until it’s too late, oh no. Another bad characteristic of people today.”
“Yes, you’re right,” I said with a nod of agreement. I didn’t want to seem pushy, but jumped straight in and started to explain my situation anyway. I was supposed to be at work, after all, and didn’t have much time. “They suddenly started talking about me on TV last night. And there were articles about me in this morning’s papers. They made an announcement about me at the station. I was even mentioned on the radio. At work, they’re all talking about me in whispers. I’m sure they’ve bugged my house and the taxis I travel in. In fact, I’m being followed. It’s a major operation. That helicopter on the news crashed while it was following me!”
The doctor stared at me with a pitiful expression as I continued my story. Finally, however, he made a gesture to signal that he could take no more. “Why didn’t you come to me sooner?” he moaned. “But no. You only come when your condition is already too serious! You give me no option but to admit you to hospital immediately – by force if necessary! For there’s no doubt about it at all. You are suffering from a persecution complex, a victim complex – in other words, total paranoid delusion. A classic case of schizophrenia. Luckily, there’s no loss of personality as yet. I’ll admit you to the university hospital right away. Leave it to me.”
“Wait a minute!” I said. “I was in a hurry, I didn’t explain myself well! I had a feeling you wouldn’t believe me. I’m not a good talker, I can’t express things logically. But everything I’ve just said, it’s nothing to do with any complex – it’s plain fact! Yet I’m just an ordinary office worker – certainly not famous enough to be followed by the media! No, however you look at it, these media people who are tailing me, reporting about me – yes, even someone as ordinary as me – they’re the ones who are insane! I just came here to ask your advice, you know, what you think I should do to cope with all this. You’ve written books about the pathological tendencies of society and the perversion of the media. You’ve talked about it on TV. That’s why I came here. I hoped you could tell me how to adapt to this abnormal environment without losing my sanity!”
The doctor shook his head and picked up the telephone. “Everything you’ve said merely proves how serious your case is!”
His hand stopped dead as he was dialling. His eyes were now riveted to the picture on his desktop television. It was a picture of me. The doctor opened his eyes wide.
“Some news just in on the Morishita case,” said the announcer. “After leaving his client’s office in Ginza 2nd Street, Tsutomu Morishita, an employee of Kasumiyama Electric Industries, took another taxi, apparently intending to return to his office in Shinjuku. But he suddenly appeared to change his mind, left the taxi and entered the Takehara Psychiatric Clinic in Yotsuya.”
A photograph of the clinic’s main entrance appeared on the screen.
“It is not yet known why Morishita entered the Clinic.”
The doctor stared at me with glazed eyes, as if in admiration. His mouth was half-open, his tongue dancing about in excitement. “So you must be someone famous, then?”
“No. Not at all.” I pointed at the television. “He just said it, didn’t he? I’m a company employee. Just an ordinary person. But in spite of that, my every move is being watched and broadcast to the entire nation. What’s that, if not abnormal?!”
“Well. You asked me how you could adapt to an abnormal environment without losing your sanity.” As he spoke, the doctor slowly got up and moved towards a glass cabinet crammed with bottles of drugs. “But I find your question contradictory. An environment is created by the people who live in it. You, then, are one of the people who are creating your abnormal environment. In other words, if your environment is abnormal, then you must be abnormal too.” He opened a brown bottle labelled ‘Sedatives’ and tipped a quantity of white pills into his hand.
The doctor greedily stuffed the pills into his mouth as he continued to speak. “Therefore, if you persist in asserting your own sanity, it proves, conversely, that your environment is in fact normal, but that you alone are abnormal. If you consider your environment to be abnormal, then by all means lose your mind!” He took a bottle of ink from his desk and gulped down the blue-black liquid until it was empty. Then he collapsed onto the couch beside him and fell asleep.
“On a mad, mad morning in May, two lovers drank dry a bottle of bright blue ink,” hummed a nurse as she entered the treatment room, completely naked. In one of her hands she held a huge bottle of ink, from which she took the occasional swig before draping her body over the doctor’s on the couch.
So I left the clinic without receiving a satisfactory answer. The sun was going down, but it still felt oppressively hot.
As soon as I was back at my desk, Akiko Mikawa called me from Admin. “Thank you for inviting me out yesterday,” she said. “I’m really sorry I couldn’t make it.”
“That’s all right,” I replied with undue reserve.
She said nothing for a while. She was waiting for me to ask her out again. She’d obviously noticed that public opinion was starting to shift towards me, and was probably worried that she would now become the butt of media vitriol. She’d called me in the hope of accepting an invitation.
We both remained silent for a few moments.
I sighed before plunging in. “How about today, then?”
“I’d love to.”
“All right, I’ll see you in the San José after work.”
News of our arrangement must have been reported immediately. For, as I walked into the San José, it seemed unusually busy. Normally, it wasn’t that kind of place. All the customers were couples, making it impossible to tell which were reporters and which merely curiosity-seekers. But whichever they were, they’d obviously come with one aim in mind – to observe my date with Akiko. While of course feigning a lack of interest, they would give themselves away by glancing over at us every now and again.
Needless to say, for the whole hour that Akiko and I were in the café, we sat in stony silence with our drinks in front of us. For if we’d discussed anything even slightly unusual, it would immediately have been reported in a three-column article with a massive headline.
We parted at Shinjuku Station, and I returned to my apartment. I hesitated for a while, but eventually switched on the television.
In a change to the evening’s schedule, they were showing a panel discussion.
“Now, I think we come to a very difficult question at
this point,” said the presenter. “If events continue to unfold at this pace, when do you think Morishita and Mikawa might be booking into a hotel? Or do you think it might not come to that? Professor Ohara?”
“Well, this Akiko is a bit of a shy filly, if you know what I mean,” said Professor Ohara, a racing expert. “It all depends on Morishita’s persistence and determination in the saddle.”
“It’s all in the stars,” said a female astrologer, holding up a card. “It’ll be towards the end of the month.”
Why on earth would we want to go to a hotel, I wondered. If we did, our voices would be recorded and our positions photographed. The whole thing would be reported all over the country, exposing us to universal shame.
Things continued in a similar vein for the next few days.
Then, on my way to work one morning, my heart sank when I saw an ad for a women’s magazine inside the packed commuter train.
“READ ALL ABOUT IT- TSUTOMU AND AKIKO’S CAFÉ DATE!”
– it said in large bold letters, next to a photo of my face. And underneath that, in smaller type:
“Morishita masturbated twice that night”
I was boiling with rage and grating my teeth. “Don’t I have a right to privacy?” I shouted. “I’ll sue for defamation! Who cares how many times I did it?!”
On my arrival at work, I went straight to the Chief Clerk’s desk and presented him with a copy of the magazine, which I’d bought at the station. “I’d like permission to leave the office on personal business. I assume you know about this article. I’m going to complain to the company that publishes this magazine.”
“Of course, I understand how you feel,” the Chief Clerk said in a faltering voice, evidently trying to pacify me. “But there’s surely no point in losing your temper, is there? The media are too powerful. Of course, I’d always give you permission to leave the office on personal business. As you know, I’m quite flexible when it comes to that kind of thing. I’m sure you’re aware of that. Yes. I’m sure you are. But I’m just concerned for your welfare, you see. I agree, it’s pretty disgraceful. This article, yes, it’s disgraceful. Yes. I can certainly sympathize with your predicament.”
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