Fuminori Nakamura - Evil and the Mask

“What he did was a felony, infringement of copyright. If everyone can get their hands on whatever they want for nothing, the people who provide the culture will lose their source of income and the culture will decline. But that’s exactly what he wanted. He wanted everything to go down the tubes. Doesn’t the word ‘professional’ make your flesh crawl? Traditional culture, underground culture, he wanted it all to collapse, everything to be done by amateurs. Enjoying things that non-professionals had created themselves in their spare time, enjoying them for free on the net, that would be cool. You see?

“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.”