Fuminori Nakamura - Evil and the Mask

She went to stop my mouth with her lips, like they do in the movies, but missed and bumped against my chin. She burst out laughing.

IN THE DARKNESS we walked through the narrow streets and up a gentle slope, ignoring the bright lights of a convenience store. Ryosuke Ito was wearing the same gray knit cap, a white, sleeveless down jacket with a hood, and ripped designer jeans. He walked in front of me, looked back once and then started climbing a rusty staircase outside an apartment block. Two communal washing machines stood in a row. The building was damp from yesterday’s rain. Overall it seemed old, but the intercom looked incongruously new.

The guy who answered the door turned around and retreated back inside without even looking at us. He was still young, in his early twenties. The room was small, with a blue carpet and a simple loft. Apart from a low table and a TV, there was absolutely no furniture.

“That’s Sato. His real name isn’t important.”

Despite this introduction, the guy just looked at me without responding. He was wearing blue-framed glasses and a blue hoodie, and his brown hair was styled with gel.

“Just the two of you?” I asked.

“Of course not,” said Ito, sitting on the floor. “We’re just one cell. Most of us aren’t in Tokyo.”

When I lit a cigarette the guy calling himself Sato opened his mouth for the first time to tell me I couldn’t. I ignored him and kept smoking. Maybe he was used to it, because he passed a flattened can to Ito to use as an ashtray.

The TV was showing a report about photos of election candidates being replaced with pictures of a porn actress in eighteen places up and down the country. Their electoral offices were furious.

“How did it go?” Sato asked, pulling the cord hanging from the fan.

Ito opened his bottle of mineral water.

“I forget her name but apparently the posters are done well, so they look just like the real thing. She’s smiling and saying ‘Full penetration!’ out of the corner of her mouth.”

“Ah, that’s pretty funny. It’s borderline, though. Well, I guess it’s okay.”

“Yeah. I’ll email them, then. And I heard they found a heap of dead pigeons in a park.”

“That’s no good.”

The news program continued. There was a follow-up story on a third politician, who had been found dead in a love hotel. The prime minister appeared, surrounded by reporters, and the announcer read that the police had further increased the number of detectives on the case. There was a big fire at the office of a car manufacturer that had laid off lots of contract workers. A foul smell had caused a disturbance on the subway. On their blog, JL had written that they were fighting back against the corrupt government. They had covered the house of a TV commentator who had publicly declared himself a friend to young people with vivid graffiti. There’d been numerous arsons targeting rich people’s mansions. Two popular TV personalities had recently gotten married live on TV, and the husband had received threatening letters, which stated in childlike printing that they weren’t going to kill him but that in the next five years they would definitely cut his balls off. Photos of a famous newscaster taking part in a bondage game at an S&M parlor were released. While the culprits were still unknown, enough palytoxin to kill several thousand people had been stolen from three different medical universities.

“You guys are pathetic.”

Sato laughed briefly.

“Of course we are. Because we’re just messing around.”

“It’s a waste of time and effort,” I said.

He laughed again.

“You’re right.”

He turned back to the TV. A reporter was walking towards a university where the poison was stolen, a stern expression on his face.

“If it’s just a joke,” I went on, “then it’s not too serious. But if you use it to start killing people it gets complicated.”

“Yeah, well, that wasn’t us,” interrupted Ito. “Sure, whoever did it was a member, but we only heard about it after. It certainly wasn’t approved beforehand. It’s still a bit too soon. The police and Public Security taking us seriously at this early stage, that’s a nuisance.”

“Don’t you guys have a leader or anything?”

“We don’t need one. We’re not even a proper group.”

Laughing, Sato picked up the story.

“Recently there’ve been lots of copycat crimes, but if any of them take our fancy we issue a statement saying that it was us, attaching a code that’s only known to us and the press. Of course the copycat puts out a statement of their own, but then everyone assumes that that’s just to confuse the cops, or that they’re a JL associate of some kind. Sometimes even the copycats themselves get the wrong end of the stick and think that we’re accepting them as members. We send our communiqués directly to the media. That’s something we learned from Al Qaida.”

“Then …”

“Yeah, there are still real members. I guess you could say that anyone who knows that code, they’re real members. By the way, killing those politicians, that was done by JL. Apparently they called for volunteers. We’re only loosely affiliated — we don’t all get together to discuss our plans. Our only rule is to keep the code secret. Because if newcomers muscle in, that’s a pain.”

“Okay, what things have you two actually planned?”

“I don’t have to tell you. But me and Ito, we still haven’t got mixed up in any killings, because we’re not ready for it.”

He laughed.

“We plan to do it eventually. What I mean is, it’s best to leave the killing to others for now. To the extremists. Actually, JL’s gotten lots of publicity since the murders started. Hey, Ito, is this guy okay? He’s got no intention of joining us, has he?”

“He’s fine. He’s here, isn’t he? That shows he’s interested. And we need cash.”

“That’s true, we need cash. That’s our biggest problem right now.”

Sato stood up.

“Okay, so now you’ve got to convince him. I don’t mind teaming up with him. He’s kind of annoying, but he looks smart.”

Glancing at the clock, Sato picked up his backpack.

“Where are you off to?”

“You don’t need to know. See you.”

He left the room. Ito started flicking through the TV channels with the remote.

“Where did he take off to in such a hurry?” I asked.

“We also have an unspoken rule not to pry into each other’s business. Probably a part-time job. A while ago I spotted him from a distance handing out packets of tissues advertising a bar.”

He drank some more water. The two rings in his ear glinted white under the lights.

“Before you get the wrong idea, we’re not really social reformers. We’re not even trying to change our own lives.”

He began turning the band on his left wrist with his right hand.

“We’re just having fun. We’ve only got one thing in common. We want to drag everything down as far as we can. We want to pull down all human achievements, all human successes, all authority. For example, this is a really small thing, but you know how a few years ago dozens of websites sprang up where you could download vast quantities of music, movies or whatever for free as compressed files? At the time, everyone was talking about how easy and fast the download software was, right? And they were getting millions of hits? The guy who did that is one of us, back before JL was formed.

“Apparently maintaining those sites was really expensive, but he got so much money from the ads for porn sites he linked to that he even made a small profit. He kept them updated from a PC registered to someone who was already dead, using a provider in Southeast Asia, and he had the money he got from ads remitted to a bank account in Shanghai. Someone he knew there paid homeless people to withdraw the cash, then his friend would wire it back to the guy’s own bank account in Japan, so it was almost impossible to trace it back to him. That money was what got JL started.