The Future Is Japanese (43 page)

“That house. With the well.”

The older girl points below them. A small building comes into sight and disappears again, half buried in the waving of the plain. There seems to be a well next to it.

“Is he there?” says the younger one. Her sister has told her that the house shelters Frankenstein’s monster from the movie—actually, it houses the Spirit of the Beehive.

The girls stand and walk down the slope. Their receding forms quickly grow smaller, then tiny, melting into the wind, into the film grain and the visual noise. They pass into the screen itself—into the source of the movie.

I lean forward. Something terrible is coming.

This location, this movie that was released in 1973, is also within Imajika’s reach. The presence gets stronger. I clench my fists on my knees. My hands tremble violently. I feel the urge to get up and run.

But escape is forbidden.

The figures finally disappear. The waving of the plain is violent now. The sand-colored film grain runs amok.

Then it happens.

On the undulating surface, at the center of the plain, a hemisphere pushes up like soft candy, a huge bubble. The hemisphere grows with uncanny speed and spreads its footprint. It expands faster and faster, pulling the landscape along with it, and in a moment covers more than half the plain. But its footprint, its diameter, keeps expanding. More than half of the sphere is still below the surface.

I am resigned to my fate. The sphere dwarfs everything on the screen. It’s bigger than the screen itself. The swelling quickly reaches the edges of the screen, spreads beyond them and engulfs the row of seats in front of me.

I can only look up and away. When I look back, the sphere has fully emerged. A sand-colored rock now floats where the movie was, in an utter void, like a small, incongruous, sandy moon.

Then the surface of the sphere crumples inward, as if unable to bear its own weight. Chasms form and rumble inward, collapse upon collapse, altering the surface contours with a violent roar.

I watch as scene after scene from the movie, scenes in motion, are sucked into that parched avalanche. I listen as fragments of soundtrack—dialogue, music, and effects—rumble in a last dying convulsion. Then the rumble is cut off, the collapse stops, and suddenly the orb morphs into the very image of Méliès’s weeping moon.

Again the chasms collapse and the moon’s surface is reshaped and transformed, and now it is not a moon, but a fist—a fist clenched so tightly, I’m certain the fingers have fused.

4.

The walls in the high-ceilinged room are lined with bookshelves that are filled with dark, leather-bound volumes. The books absorb the light, pushing this study a long step past four
PM
, the time it is now, toward night. The gold-inlaid titles on the spines have flaked off and the dyed leather has darkened. What little light there is comes through a tall, narrow window. The window is floor to ceiling, about a foot and a half wide. It can’t be opened, and the light coming through it is enervated, scattered by the complicated layout of the courtyard beyond.

A large, old-fashioned chair stands next to the window. Its legs and armrests are elegantly curved. The seat back is broad.

place—I placed—Jundo Mamiya in that chair.

Jundo clears his throat and blinks his slitlike eyes. The expression in those tapered, hooded eyes is hard to read. His eyebrows are slender. His head is shaved. Jundo strokes his face from cheek to chin. He strokes his ears and shakes his head slowly. His neck is thick with muscle. His body seems to be bursting from its short frame. Jundo Mamiya in his late thirties, vigorous and robust. His shirt has a standup collar. His pants are silk. On his feet, leather slip-ons.

“Nice to meet you. Is this room suitable?”

Jundo looks dissatisfied. “What are these clothes? I can’t take them off.”

“Your clothes have no buttons. No metal clasps or strings. No belt, of course, and no seams. Everything woven to fit your body. You can’t take them off, unless you rip them off.”

Jundo’s clothes were generated along with the rest of him moments ago.

“There’s something rather peculiar about this situation. You have me at an overwhelming disadvantage, I take it.”

“The clothes were a hint, yes.”

“And you can erase me anytime?”

“Yes. And I’m afraid you can’t influence me with words.”

You are completely at my mercy. That’s sure to get a rise out of Jundo. Maintaining the right degree of resistance is part of my role here. Extremely dangerous, but unavoidable. We need as many Jundos as we can generate, and we need a wide range of variation.

“There’s something I really must object to.” Jundo gestures toward his left ear. “This. I certainly can’t accept this.”

Jundo’s left ear is smaller and less mature than his right. It is his ear at age thirteen.

“I’m sure you know I cut this off when I was in elementary school.”

“I’m aware of that. You had two last names then, didn’t you? At school you used Mamiya, your mother’s name. Your father’s name was on your birth certificate. You were living with your mother in a provincial town of about thirty thousand. You cut off your ear in order to murder your teacher during a home visit.”

“I didn’t kill her. She did it herself,” Jundo says.

“She used your knife to stab herself in the throat.”

“That’s right. Mrs. Tsuge used my knife. Thank you—I hadn’t thought of that name for a long time. Yukiko Tsuge.”

“Your teacher had no reason to kill herself, of course. She had a warm family life with a husband, a daughter in fourth grade, and a son in kindergarten. She was happy.”

“She had her reasons. We all do. I just gave her a little encouragement.”

“You manipulated her. No threats, no hypnosis, just conversation—”

Jundo had the ability to drive people to suicide with nothing more than conversation. This he confirmed in writing before his death. If it struck his fancy, he could make you take your own life, no matter who you were.

Seventy-three victims. His final testament contained a list of their names.

Each one had proved to be a real person. They each had had a relationship with Jundo, just as he stated. He knew the time and manner of each death. Yukiko Tsuge was his eighth victim, which meant Jundo had already wielded this power as a child. His first victim was the father of a classmate, a man widely known for making violent threats. On his way to work, he jumped the center divider and plowed head-on into several other cars, dying instantly. The evening before he was killed, he had been talking to Jundo.

Some victims took their own lives on the spot, others committed suicide months or years after their conversation with Jundo. According to his testament, he found it amusing to force people to recall long-forgotten personal secrets and sins. Then he would bore in and finish them off.

Jundo’s testament reproduced an example, a fragment, of one of these exchanges. It ended in the suicide by poison of a fellow writer his age. Everyone who read the account was struck by a physical conviction that it was genuine. It was as if the letters Jundo used to record the conversation began to move like insects on the page, crawling under the nails of the hand holding the document. The quiet abuse he unleashed on his victims is still under analysis by more than one organization.

“—just conversation.”

“Not always.” Jundo looks annoyed. “Words weren’t enough for Mrs. Tsuge. She was obstinate. She wouldn’t go over the edge until I gave her my ear. It was never that difficult before. That was my biggest disgrace. The worst stain on my record. I made up my mind never to repeat such a blunder. So you see, my missing ear is the core of my identity. But you’ve grown it back. You mock my dignity.”

He doesn’t look as angry as he sounds. His eyes are a mix of boredom and irritation with a trace of interest. A viscous look, something slowly mixed together and congealed, like the film on a bowl of porridge gone cold. That disturbing gaze, the one that comes to mind when anyone hears the name Jundo Mamiya.

“The ear of a child on an adult’s head. The technology to do that without the slightest effort is the core of what I am. You regard yourself very highly, but you can’t even escape this room with no locks. From where I sit, you’re a nonentity.”

Jundo’s eyes smolder. “I want this ear gone.”

“Then maybe you’d like to do it again? I can’t give you a razor, but you can always tear it off.”

“Tell me to tear it off. I’ll probably use all my strength to do it.”

This surprises me, frankly. Jundo is nearing the core. No, he’s already there.

“I’m sure you would. You are completely in our power.”

“ ‘Our power’? I see.” Jundo never misses a detail. A man who can kill with a few words. Superhuman profiling ability. “This is some sort of project, isn’t it? And I’m one of the inputs.”

“Exactly.”

“You regenerated my ear. You control me completely. Dress me in clothes I can’t take off. How can such technology be?”

“You yourself are the proof of its existence.” I manage to force that much out.

“At minimum, I seem to have no physical existence. Are you using some kind of emulator?”

“In a sense. But you know that simulating a real person’s body and their mind and actions would be impossible. It’s far too complex. Especially when the person you want to simulate has been dead for thirty years.”

My function is to draw Jundo’s attention to the fact that he’s dead. That he is not of this world. That nevertheless, our literal technology has given him a brief resurrection.

We agents—thousands of us deployed throughout GEB—are each delineating thousands of Jundo Mamiyas. I am speaking to one of them. I speak to spark awareness.

You are one of the dead.

A patchwork monster.

A botched Ahab.

Then—

“And what if I’m not a simulation?”

The dead man, the monster, the Ahab, gets out of his chair and faces me. Small and tough. He stands relaxed, like a veteran judoka. The tall, narrow window behind him is turning the color of boiled pine pitch. Night is flowing in. Night air seems to rise from Jundo’s body. I try to speak, but I only mumble. Is he controlling my will? Jundo takes a step forward.

“In that case, what are you doing?”

“I—”

I sense that Jundo has already reached this conclusion, but I speak anyway.

“I am ‘writing’ you.”

#The Letter

Those happy hours we all spent together will never return

I have been praying to God to reunite us

I have prayed every day since we parted in the civil war

In this remote village

Where Fernando, the girls and I struggle to survive

Except for the walls, this house has changed completely

What could have happened to all the wonderful things we had

I say this not out of nostalgia

That is something I have not been capable of feeling for years

So much that we knew was lost, so much has been destroyed

Only sadness remains

Along with the things we lost,

I think we have also lost the strength to live life fully

I don’t know if this letter will reach you

The news from outside is so sparse, so confusing

Please let me know that you are alive

All my love

—Teresa

5.

am in a decaying apartment. It’s a three-story public housing block surrounded by farmland on the outskirts of a small provincial town. The tatami mats are sun-bleached, scuffed, and gritty with dust. I see paddy fields through grime-clouded windows. It’s been years since anyone cleaned them. The golden rice stalks lie flattened by yesterday’s typhoon, as if some gigantic dog shed its fur all over the fields.

I turn away from the sliding window and shut the paper screen. The paper is spotted with round stains. A young boy is sitting on the floor, kneeling on a cushion with his heels under his buttocks. Black shorts, a white shirt. His left ear is already gone. His shirt is dyed crimson from shoulder to chest. The cushion is squishy with blood, but not his blood. His teacher faces him in the same formal posture, torso thrown forward. Her forehead touches the tatami. Her hands are pinned beneath her throat. The point of a knife protrudes from the left side of her neck. She probably died less than an hour ago.

I hear the musical sundown announcement from a distant PA system, a distant melody. A child’s voice speaks over the music. “All primary school students, time to go home now.” The voice belongs to Yukiko’s daughter, but the boy may not know it. He moved here less than two months ago.