Fuminori Nakamura - Evil and the Mask

The ceiling fan started turning uncertainly.

“One is that this traffic accident wasn’t some kind of ancestral revenge tragedy. The perpetrators were still the perpetrators, the victims still the victims. The second is that the ancestor was present at the massacre but didn’t actually join in. Third, the accident was not deliberate on the part of the driver. A moment’s inattention, as it were, a simple mistake. And the fourth thing is that the driver received a slight injury to his wrist, but the soldier, tormented by his memories of the atrocities, in later life attacked his own wrists several times with a hatchet. What do you think of that?”

He poured another drink.

“It’s just a coincidence,” I said.

“True, you can look at it that way too. But you do hear stories like that from time to time. Or you could call it ‘karma.’ Like the killer driving the car and the victim were suddenly, through their respective bloodlines, swept up in that flurry of violence, that massacre in the Chinese village, like some kind of time slip. Retroactively, the accident makes the driver’s ancestor seem like a perpetrator as well. If the accident was really just negligence, perhaps that means that karma can manipulate people’s unconscious minds, as though they are linked through the unconscious. In this world, I believe that there are many incomprehensible karmic threads that transcend time and space. I don’t know what these threads are trying to achieve by repeating similar things in different times and places. Maybe that girl Kaori had some kind of connection with the Kukis. Maybe she’s descended from someone who was killed by one of the guns we sold in World War One.”

“That’s absurd.”

“Really? Or perhaps she’s the great-great-granddaughter of some woman who was raped by a Kuki. Or the descendant of that dead woman’s best friend. Don’t you think the word ‘karma’ has a really Japanese ring to it?”

He laughed. The whiskey seemed to be seeping out through his eyeballs.

“Maybe the Kuki family’s repeated acts of wickedness are leading somewhere too. At any rate, when I look at her I feel a definite attraction. She stirs something inside me. I bet it’s the same for you, isn’t it?”

THE ONLY SOUND in the room was the tortured rumble of the fan heater. Maybe the place was soundproofed, because I couldn’t hear a peep from the adjoining rooms. I took another mouthful of scotch in the gloom, felt the warmth slide down my throat. My cigarette smoke swayed lazily at the edge of my vision.

“It’s going to be another long night,” said Mikihiko, standing.

He scooped a small red fish out of the aquarium and dropped it in a dish, where it twitched convulsively. He watched for a while without expression, then deposited it on the counter behind him. It was still floundering, but he had lost interest.

“I’m so depressed. I almost killed this girl a little while ago.”

He sank into the sofa in front of me again.

“Hurry up and spoil her. Defile the thing you value most in the world. If you pass through that violent whirlpool you can truly liberate yourself from the mundane and from your own life. Then come over to my domain.”

The red fish had almost stopped moving.

“You’re drunk,” he said, smiling faintly. “This booze is strong. You look pretty slow-witted for someone who’s up to something. But never mind. You’re distracted, and I can bypass your consciousness and talk directly to your subconscious.”

His eyelid was twitching slightly.

“You should be my sidekick. You’ll enter my realm and be free. You’ll be a perfect cancer, and I’ll show you some wonderful sights. Since you killed Father and killed Yajima, you’re the ideal person to be by my side. Here, I’ll let you in on my modest goals.”

I reached for more whiskey.

“But before I do, let me ask you this. If you were king of a country and you had no ethics or morals, what kind of citizens would be your ideal?”

He watched me. When I answered, my voice had gone hoarse.

“Ones who are easy to manipulate, I suppose.”

“That’s right.”

I thought he might smile at that, but he didn’t.

“Citizens with no doubts about anything, who will trust their king like children no matter what he does, who will get fired up as a single, unified body in support of war, who will turn a blind eye to corruption, who will swallow all his propaganda. Simple people, you could call them.”

The fish behind him was completely still.

“These days, in fact, when people are readily susceptible to images and impressions, it’s fairly easy to manipulate them with information from the government or the government’s proxies. There are lots of ways of doing it, some of them visible, some not. If you don’t believe me, just look at the screwed-up logic that was used to justify the Iraq War. The intelligentsia call this populism. They say that the public are stupid for being fooled by the government’s lies. But that’s not strictly true.”

He smiled faintly.

“Why did the simplistic logic of the so-called War on Terror end up prevailing, despite being widely criticized? Why does a politician’s popularity change because of images on TV? When three Japanese nationals were taken hostage in Iraq, why did the harsh phrase ‘individual responsibility’ become so widely accepted in Japan? Why is public opinion swayed by primitive images rather than by the complex reality of events? The answer is that people are busy. There are other reasons as well, but that’s the main one. Everyone is busy with their daily lives, their worries, their work, their search for happiness, and you can’t blame them for that. Who’s going to take time out from their busy life to think about a dispute in some tiny country in Africa, let alone the business interests behind it? Do you think they’re going to go beyond the mass media and examine the real meaning of the information the government is feeding them? Do you think that when some criminal is presented as an absolute villain, anyone is going to wonder if he’s been falsely accused and actually go out and do their own digging? Do you think anyone will look into whether a TV commentator has got close ties to a particular political party? Hardly anyone will do that. Most people are too busy. And by working away behind the scenes, we’re planning to provoke North Korea. We’re planning Japan’s Nine-Eleven.”

He continued to study me, his face giving nothing away.

“Imagine a missile hitting Japan. Public opinion would change in an instant. The Peace Constitution would be thrown out of the window. As the number of victims was reported, as the grief of their families was reported, the whole country would be filled with pity and seethe with hatred towards North Korea. When people believe they have a good cause, the violence within them bursts forth unrestrained, as if their good angel has given permission for it to escape. Basically, that’s how wars are started. The public executions they had in the old days worked on the same principle. Hardly anyone realized that they served any purpose other than punishing criminals, and even if they did, their voices were drowned out by the boiling violence of righteousness. People have enough on their plates just going about their day-to-day lives. Japan would agree to war, and our profits would be beyond our wildest dreams. The state would use taxes to buy the weapons we manufacture. Transport planes, the whole lot. And then after North Korea was defeated there’d be a construction boom. Obscene people flock to obscene money, and after millions of deaths there’d be even more obscene money swirling around. War is the best business model there is.”