Evil and the Mask (24 page)

“Deep down, people who deliberately distribute other people’s music and stuff feel contempt for professionals. And it’s not just culture—these days lots of people are contemptuous of everything. Without realizing it, they’re searching for things to despise. What we’re doing is actualizing millions of people’s subconscious desires. Wouldn’t you piss yourself laughing seeing the Prime Minister doing an over-the-top imitation of Hiromi Go in the middle of a serious press conference? After a whole series of depressing stories about politicians getting killed and stuff, it would be a kind of comic relief. I bet lots of people couldn’t help laughing if they saw that on TV. But of course that’s not the only thing.”

His eyes were mere slits.

“Next, people who’ve been successful in various other fields will become victims, one after another. And then gradually that feeling of contempt will extend to the people doing the laughing as well. Down with authority—it’s definitely a sexy catchphrase. But from now on people are going to find JL harder and harder to understand. Finally we’re planning a series of terrorist attacks against ordinary citizens. Whenever anything happens, society demands to know the reason. That’s why we’ve issued statements for each incident. But we’re doing that only to set the stage for the unpredictable events that are still to come.

“In future our communiqués will get weirder and weirder. Like, ‘Such-and-such building was renovated, so we blew up
several houses in the neighborhood.’ ‘The final episode of our favorite TV show was so exciting that we scattered poison around Shibuya in downtown Tokyo.’ ‘Today’s Wednesday, so we left explosives in the subway.’ No one will be able to make heads or tails of them. Then maybe we’ll get the one percent to do some impressions again. While society is facing senseless violence, the people at the top will be earnestly doing imitations. Wouldn’t that be really funny? I’d kill myself laughing. But it wouldn’t even matter if they didn’t do it. The people who’ve achieved things in society would be the first to go, but at the same time hundreds of ordinary people would also be dying every day in terrorist attacks. Authority, class difference, logic, meaning, common sense, they’ll all fall to pieces. The country will be thrown into chaos by incomprehensible violence. By then I bet there’ll be thousands of copycats.”

“You guys will get caught and it will all be over.”

“Haven’t you been listening?”

Ito looked at me.

“Didn’t I tell you we’re not an organized group? By the time people can no longer understand where we’re heading, we’ll have grown even bigger. Let’s assume that I’m arrested in the middle of it, for example. The other members or new members will take over. Since we’re just a loose-knit collective and don’t know each other, we can’t be wiped out like Rahmla were. Maybe by then there won’t be a single original member of JL left, but there’ll be one part of us that will survive. Contempt. Contempt for the world, for love, for everything of value, and then contempt for contempt itself.”

A motorbike raced past outside. Its muffled roar seemed to
be asserting something outrageous, though its exact message was unclear.

“It’ll never work. You’ll never be able to do it.”

“Do what?”

“It’s like Sato said before. You’re even hesitant about killing corrupt politicians.”

Ito was sitting on the carpet, his knees bent and his back against the wall. I realized that I’d taken up an identical pose beside him.

“We can.”

He was staring at the opposite wall, like he was talking to himself. I imagined Father’s blood oozing out from the surface.

“You really don’t want to do that.”

“Why?”

He grinned suddenly.

“Think about it. It’s an old question. Why shouldn’t we do it? Why shouldn’t we kill people? Why shouldn’t we blow the world to smithereens?”

I looked at his wristband. I didn’t know why I was trying to stop him, but I went on.

“Those questions defy all logic, so no matter what I say you can turn it back on me. So I’ll turn it around on you. Why is it all right to do those things?”

“Why? Because I want to.”

“Okay, why is it acceptable to do whatever you want?”

“Hey, that’s not a fair question.”

“But it’s the same as yours. Try turning them around. There’s no difference.” I took a deep breath. “I’m not really trying to
save you or anything. You can go ahead and kill people, do what you like. I’m only telling you this because you asked. The reason you shouldn’t do it is because maybe you’ll keep on living, and someone who kills another person, afterwards they can’t accept beauty or warmth with a pure heart. The instant you feel any kind of human beauty, the instant you feel any human warmth, the knowledge that you’ve killed a person will start squirming inside you, because those things—beauty and warmth—they can’t exist without human life. Beauty is created by humans. Even natural beauty, we can only feel it because we are alive. Warmth is the same.

“And another thing—living things are fundamentally designed not to kill their own kind. I’ve read dozens of books on biology, and cannibalism is a really rare phenomenon. All animals know instinctively that they shouldn’t kill other members of the same species. Maybe it’s imprinted in our DNA. Of course there are people who say they don’t care, people who snigger while they’re on trial for murder. But people like that are weak. They can’t cope with the shock of knowing that they’ve murdered another human being, a living creature just like them, that they’ve taken a life just like their own, so they bottle up their true feelings in the deepest recesses of their mind. Because our subconscious automatically tries to find some sort of mental equilibrium. Imagine strangling a monkey, for example. Even that’s disturbing, isn’t it? Killers who say they aren’t bothered by it are just too weak to cope with the shock, and shut it up inside themselves. They’re just brainwashing themselves. As proof, look at those pathetic people who do stuff like going around killing at random. Real
monsters don’t do those things. They lurk behind the scenes, calmly dispensing evil from positions of power. When people face up to the impact of killing, without locking it up deep inside them, they are bound to malfunction.”

I recalled Father staring at me in that basement room.

“No matter what they gain from killing someone, it won’t balance out that malfunction. So aren’t you better off not killing anyone in the first place?”

Ito was looking at me with amusement.

“In that case, couldn’t you just use a weapon to minimize that feeling? Then that malfunction wouldn’t happen.”

He was fiddling with the lid of his bottle as he talked.

“Have you heard the story about the US and World War Two?” he asked. “After the war was over, they studied how many of the guns of the soldiers in the front lines had been fired. It was about twenty percent. Around eighty percent of the soldiers at the front had never actually pulled the trigger. That’s a sign that they really didn’t want to shoot at the enemy, kill them, without a damn good reason. So the US army changed their training methods. They replaced the old bulls-eye target with a cutout of a human figure, complete with a photo of a face, to get the soldiers used to killing people. The result was that in Vietnam the firing rate increased dramatically. So we can change human nature any way we want.”

“But that story has a sequel, doesn’t it?” I said.

Ito’s expression didn’t change.

“Sure, I’ve heard that story,” I went on. “And sure, the firing rate went up. But the flip side was that lots of soldiers came home with serious psychological problems. The army
concluded that guns were no good. Even though the soldiers had been watching Westerns since they were kids, in which people kill each other all the time, the real thing took its toll. So they decided to develop hi-tech weapons, virtual, remote-controlled weapons, so that it didn’t feel like you were killing a real person at all. That was the Gulf War. There was a terrible imbalance between the people being killed and the people doing the killing, between the Iraqis who were dying spurting blood in pain and suffering and hatred and the soldiers of the multinational force, who managed to completely avoid the feeling that they were killing people. That caused a different kind of spiritual decay.

“And then there was Iraq, which became a land war, an old-fashioned shoot-out with rifles. As a result, the rate of psychological disorders among returning soldiers was abnormally high. I can’t help feeling sorry for them. The perverted history of modern warfare is all about trying to maintain the emotional balance of the soldiers who kill. That’s been the constant refrain. But it’s simply the difference between keeping the shock of killing bottled up in the subconscious and using weapons to numb the soldiers’ sensibilities. If you think that’ll work, you’re just stupid. In fact, maybe the real purpose of war is simply to replicate itself, to create more wars.”

Ito had stayed stony-faced throughout my monologue. He continued to stare fixedly at the wall in front of him, as though something was written there.

“You’ll never understand,” he said quietly. “Listen. Imagine there’s this guy who’s thinking about killing himself after murdering someone. Imagine he doesn’t care when he
dies—or rather, he wants to die but plans to kill someone else first. He wouldn’t give a shit about beauty or malfunction or any of that. Ethics and morality are irrelevant to him. Because for us there is no god. We don’t believe in an afterlife either. Look, the only reason I’m doing this crap now is because of the bloodbath that’ll come at the end, that feast of contempt for life. Now it’s all just a preview. Thousands of people dying for no reason, hundreds per day. It’ll be a world of contempt for everything, where life is absolutely worth nothing. I can’t wait. I’ve been yearning for that from the depths of my soul, ever since I was a kid.”

He turned towards me. Again, the noise of a motorbike engine shook the apartment.

“Let’s say,” he continued, opening his eyes slightly and playing with his wristband again. “Let’s say there’s a guy like this. Brought up in violence from as far back as he can remember, brought up as though that was completely normal. Constantly beaten, beaten without love, without any feeling at all, as though even kicking him was a bother, indifferent kicking, because he was in the way … Shunned by people from warm, bright, caring homes just because he hadn’t taken a bath for days. Nothing but pain; no food, only fear and hatred. Unable to sleep properly because of recurring memories of violence. Slashed his wrists many times but couldn’t die …

“Can you tell someone like that to be kind to others? Can you tell him to think about how other people are suffering, that there are people in the world worse off than you, think of the starving children in Africa? Can you say that to a man
who had those feelings beaten out of him from the day he was born? To a man who has lost the ability to cherish those things? To a man who suffers because he can’t feel anything for other people, no matter how hard he tries? You can tell him not to interfere with other people’s happiness? To a man who already wants to die, you can tell him to die alone, thinking only of others, like some kind of saint? To a man who’s tried to protect himself by telling himself that the years of abuse he received weren’t such a big deal, you can tell him that violence towards others is bad? To a man who was raised by an insane, drug-addicted woman whose adored husband died in a mass suicide as part of an evil cult, and whose only thought was to ruin her son’s personality in order to pass on the malevolence of his father? To a man whose mother somehow blamed him for her husband’s death, who was filled with crazy ideas she inherited from her husband and with hatred of her son? To a man who was raised by a monster who grew tired of him and only continued the violence out of habit? To a man who was so hungry that he used to eat his own hair? To a man whose birth wasn’t even registered?”

His shoulders heaved as he gasped for air, and his frightened eyes stared directly into mine. Father’s blood was still seeping from the wall opposite. Suddenly I remembered the doctor’s tale of the baby who died in the toilet. I had a vision of my booze-soaked father, and it felt like his blood and alcohol were running off me, mixed with my own perspiration. I could hardly breathe. Ito fell silent. I felt like I had to say something.

“If that’s how it is, my advice is just to keep on living. Sure,
malfunctions and beauty don’t mean anything to a man who’s already made up his mind to die. But still, I’d advise you to live.”

“Obviously. If you advise a murderer to live and he follows that advice, then the idea that malfunctions and beauty don’t matter to someone who’s determined to die, that no longer applies. So I’m listening. Why should he live?”

I couldn’t answer, because the question was directed at me.

“Why should he live? With such a background and such an emotional vacuum inside him towards other people, why? You know what I mean. Enough with the sermon already. Anyway, will you fund us? JL needs money now.” He put the empty bottle on the carpet. He looked exhausted.

“But you’re still not ready to do it, are you?”

“I am.”

“No, you’re not. You’re still putting it off. You can’t join in the killing, you’ve stopped at pretend terrorism. That proves it. You satisfy the impulses inside you by stopping just short of exploding. You give yourself various reasons to make yourself feel better, but you steer clear of actually blowing things up. Besides, isn’t JL in big trouble right now? I bet that’s the real reason you need money.”

He glared at me.

“What do you mean?”

“They’re close to catching one of you, aren’t they? One of the early members. If they arrest him, the whole group could be in trouble.”

“What have you heard?”

“There’s a guy on the run, isn’t there, a guy with a protruding
jaw? If they catch him, JL will be in deep shit. You said it yourself, when you were talking about killing politicians too early. There’s a risk you could get wiped out before you get really big.”

“How much do you know? What do you mean?”

“You’re smart. You need escape money for when JL is eliminated. Yeah? That’s what it’s really for, isn’t it?”