His Young Majesty succeeded in mid-life and was like a breath of fresh air. He introduced an atmosphere of newness and made it feel as if we’d been unburdened of the collective death our aging population had shouldered and like our whole society was rejuvenated. He wanted to make a powerful statement at his succession ceremony and stirred up a whirlpool of solidarity and inspiration with his ad-lib proposition. “We must all live life in our own way and, instead of studying the face of another, hold ourselves to be precious and meet one another with respect in this Island Country. Isn’t a ‘big-as-life’ society like that what we all should be building?” The content of his speech was good enough, but for many who heard him, it was His Young Majesty’s way of speaking that was truly as “big-as-life.” More and more people, especially those in their thirties and forties, felt like they could trust His Majesty, that he understood them all. Particularly since he was still single at that age and, moreover, didn’t give off any marrying vibes, the growing sector of the population made up of middle-aged singles, divorcés, and even those who live as couples for appearance’s sake felt a sense of connection that one could say was more than a bit self-serving. He took on a meaning different from Their Majesties before him.
That alone would have made his untimely passing, merely three years after his succession and at the age of forty-six, tragic. People had been so certain that His Young Majesty, who seemed so lively and so full of possibilities, surely would have changed things that a bitter sense of having lost out, of having suffered a setback now loomed. Most of all, among those of His Departed Majesty’s generation, there were many who expressed being as distraught as if their dearest friend had preceded them in death. Unlike the somber and expressionless periods of mourning and remembrance following the deaths of Their Previous Majesties, there was no question that this time the majority of the population was crushed and heartbroken.
But what was it that started to pull people my age into the abyss? According to the news, even after the period of official mourning was over there were youth in their late teens and twenties who had been oblivious to His Majesty, but who now were not returning to their jobs or schools, and in some places work was at a standstill. Headlines about “memorial general strikes” were popping up everywhere. They said this phenomenon differed in nature from the sense of loss experienced by the grieving middle-aged generation in that young people had become like imbeciles whose core had been forcibly ripped away from them. They withdrew into their shells, occasionally brooding over something, groaning, stupefied, or simply staring blankly.
For example, the case of the young mid-level commercial company businessman K (28) appeared in the newspaper Sun Rising. On the morning when the death was announced, he wasn’t particularly shocked or saddened, and since his company was closed on account of the tragedy, he was thinking he might go catch a movie, but while sipping his coffee, he glanced outside his window and saw a class of elementary school students going to school. At that moment, “it was like coming off an all-nighter when everything is hazy,” and the energy was sucked out of his chest. He couldn’t even get up out of his chair when he finished breakfast and was struck by “a feeling akin to chronic and extreme sleep deprivation” that produced aching from his back through his chest, and he fell asleep just like that. Three days later when his company reopened, he asked his mother P (56), with whom he lives, to phone in to let them know he would be absent. P knew that the death of His Majesty, in whom her son had invested little emotion, could not be the reason why he had fallen into such a severe depression. The son who was “always cheerful and eager to talk about everything” became completely silent, so she couldn’t know what he was feeling and was left to conclude that surely “layers and layers of accumulated work-related stress had happened to find a means of release on the occasion of His Majesty’s death.”
Having read about this, my dad looked at me and said, “I’ve got nothing to worry about.”
He went on, “This guy’s on the recovered side considering he could respond to the interviewer. Even over at my company the seriously ill kids aren’t like that; their parents and friends say it’s like they’re in critical condition and near death. There’s one of them in my department too, a really easy-going young guy, but sometimes he comes out with something so sharp it makes you go ‘huh?’ He’s a good kid, cooperative and upbeat. Well, apparently he’s been sleeping straight through and doesn’t wake up. Even if his family forces him awake and makes him eat, he falls right back asleep after eating. I’ll be damned if the only cause of that is stress from work.” He looked over at me again.
My mom added, “It’s the ordinary ones who are most at risk, like with any latest trend.”
“What I’m worried about is what you could call the results of overprotective, or just plain anal parenting. These kids haven’t experienced the dark side of people, and that makes them weaker.”
“We’re not that naïve,” I said a little sarcastically. “And isn’t it the other way around anyway? I’m not sure what you mean by the ‘dark side’ of people, but whether it’s dark or light, plus or minus, isn’t it the inability to divide things in categories like that that would make someone zonk out and just want to sleep?”
“I don’t understand the connection between not being able to tell plus from minus and sleeping.” My mom looked like she was earnestly trying to understand.
“Okay, to put it simply, everything’s the same, no ups and downs or nuances, just flat. Front and back or left and right are all the same. In a world where you don’t know which is which, the ideas of looking forward and moving ahead or looking behind and falling back are pretty meaningless, right? In that kind of situation, all you can do is sleep.”
My dad asked, “So, you’re saying everything looks gray?”
“Maybe it’s because the world’s been a dark place since they were born.” My mom was still trying.
“Whether it’s gray or light or dark doesn’t matter. They don’t understand those concepts. They don’t get it.”
“Well, aren’t you special then? You can do what you like without caring about how you’re closing off your own future.”
“It’s not as if I’m filming just because I like it. I just can’t settle for a job like some people, so I take pictures.”
My dad was about to fly off the handle and quickly brought himself under control, but I could see it in his face. “I’m relieved that you don’t want to give up who you are, but that doesn’t mean it’s okay to be conceited.”
My mom interceded in a stern tone, “You may be freelancing, but does that give you the right to think you’re better than other people? I’m not saying that confidence isn’t important, but it’s not necessary to make fun of other people.”
“I overstated it when I said settling for work. It just set me off when you were focusing on what’s involved in making a living.”
“Well, you aren’t really in the position to make an issue over that now, are you?”
“I know that making a living so you can eat and survive can be a real issue, but a job isn’t only about that, right? That’s why I also wanted to say that, on the other hand, you can’t pick a job just because you say you like it either.” I was wasting energy and gradually not even understanding what I was saying myself. My folks are liberal and genuinely invested in trying to be attentive to my life choices. Still, it’s almost tragic how much they don’t understand. Tragic to them — I don’t give it much thought. Parents respond like parents. That’s why they kept trying to make their point.
“Shôji, you also need to understand what it’s like to be stressed out when you have to do something that isn’t fair or perfect. Everyone faces this, and we’re all just doing our best to cope.”
I unconsciously sneered and said, “My chronic stress is not having stress then, huh? There’s just no winning.”
“That’s enough. Just remember your promise.” My dad was suppressing the anger about to flare up again. The promis
e was that I’d move out and live on my own in three years. The implicit message being that if by then I couldn’t make enough to eat, I’d have to give up the camera and get a real job. I’d thrown in the towel and vowed to honor at least the part about moving out in three years.
“I know what you are trying to say, Dad. How will I ever amount to anything by doing what I please without experiencing some of the hardships out there? Won’t I be destroyed when coming up against the walls society has in place? Won’t you be responsible for my weakness because of how you raised me? You’ll wish you’d been stricter with me, right? Isn’t that it?”
“Listen, I wouldn’t complain if you kept arguing as long as you stopped criticizing the whole world from the safety of your little bubble here. I want you to give a damn about your future, to be strong and push ahead when it comes to choosing your path in life. That’s all.”
“People who think in terms of pushing ahead or being pushed aside are simpleminded. For them, life must seem like a competition, like a fight to the finish. But it doesn’t matter if you win or if you’re a total loser, because none of us can die even if we want to. Isn’t that why so many people are shocked by the premature death of His Majesty?”
I said that just for the hell of it, but if you think about it, I really was right. By assuming the debt to my family for room and board — and this is coming from the vantage point of someone who takes the meals they serve me for granted — I forfeited the right to choose starving to death from the get-go. Therein lies the cost of leeching off your parents. Among the average households of today, you’ll find situations like mine everywhere. Parents allow themselves to be consumed while their kids sponge off them for years, and all the while both sides are thinking something isn’t right. But since the circumstances are supposed to be part of a temporary and transitional phase, everyone defers the debt collection and hides any fears that they are losing their power to resist. Barring any major outbursts of conflict, year after year passes uneventfully. The upshot of all this being that the cost of staying alive is silence. You reap what you sow, and I can’t forgive myself for having capitulated to these terms.
What I’d really like is to document myself having this sort of conversation with my folks on film. I’d want to make it like the story of some stranger out of a cartoon world. Of course, filming won’t turn it into someone else’s story, so I don’t bring my camera into the space I share with my parents.
When it comes down to it, I have no real sense of participating in society. I sell a fraction of what I film for close to nothing, and the only reason I’m not going to die is because I live with my folks in Tokyo’s Nerima neighborhood. What keeps me alive isn’t myself, but rather society’s energy reserves. I don’t know how it’s all amassed, but I eat up the money and energy society has stored, and that allows me to live.
It’s the same for everyone — whether you are a temp, a working stiff, or a slacker. Even if you aren’t living at home, you get some kind of allowance or get to borrow money for what your parents hope will lead to a successful career. As long as you aren’t too picky, someone my age can find all sorts of part-time job opportunities. The notion of starving to death even though you work hard is unreal, like a faraway dream. The fact that there are so many part-time jobs waiting out there is not the result of any efforts on our part either. We’ve inherited them. That’s why when someone tries to stress to us how self sufficiency is important or how you’ve got to work to eat, their words don’t seem real. I can’t even believe in things like “reality” enough to get to that point, let alone feel satisfied.
On the other hand, my generation, which is relatively few in number, is also being crushed under the feet of the elderly who do not work and who make up more than forty percent of the population. They let us eat, but they deny us access. The reason I think I’m missing an authentic sense that I’m alive is because in this world, which is teeming with old people, there’s nowhere to participate.
But if I really think about it, it wasn’t as if I’d ever participated in society before becoming an adult of working age anyway. Whether it was at West Funabashi elementary in Chiba, in junior high, or even at my public high school where, on the soccer team, I worked to make it to the National New Year’s Tournament, I got along well enough with kids in my classes and my teammates, and I didn’t stick out, but I wasn’t participating either. The proof is that while I always had a clique with lots of people around me, there’s not even one person I’d call a friend or still trust today. I was a tag-along. You could say everyone was a tag-along though. Kids who had a close friend they trusted were the freaks, and honestly, those kids also had very nasty personalities. Well, the reality is that they were so energetic and alive that I experienced them as having nasty personalities, and that says a lot more about how strange I was. It wasn’t until I recently developed the capacity to connect to another person that I finally realized this.
Analyzing it further, I’d have to say that I have never participated in anything and have been living like a travel writer who merely comments from the sidelines. No matter how much I struggle (and, truth be told, I haven’t struggled much), I haven’t managed to be the central player in my own life. For example, when I did things like play soccer, it felt so much like a lie, like a dream in which I’d split into two people, that I’d look at myself making a play as if I were someone else. I didn’t fall into a depression if I failed, and if I made a nice play, I didn’t high-five myself either. I was there, but it seemed like once I woke up, the me I had been watching would disappear like a fleeting dream. Sometimes you’ll find a middle-aged man who says he’s “exercising self control” by practicing Zen meditation, fasting, jumping in ice-cold lakes, getting pounded by a raging waterfalls, or the like. As someone who has no self over which I intend to exercise control, I don’t understand that sentiment. My self is hollow, substantial only on the surface like papier-mâché, and light and sound are all that’s projected into the empty space inside through surface holes like my eyes and ears. I’m a person whose existence is like a movie theater. Or maybe it’s better to say I’m the video camera that records that light and sound. That’s right; my video camera and I are like two peas in a pod.
Finding my true nature wasn’t any easier. I stumbled into my role in life by going to trade school to study film instead of pursuing higher education or hunting for a job. I’m not participating in society by becoming one with a lens or a microphone, but I can achieve a genuine sense of occupying my natural place in society. If I try to articulate it, for me, observing unobtrusively is like being a surveillance camera that my physical self discovered in this present world. The reason for having been found is something the camera itself can’t know.
Accompanying the growth of my catalogue of filmed images are occasional moments when I feel very sad at the thought that the substance of my worth, what matters about me, is contained in the volume of a disc. I film what’s before my eyes. Whether a sparrow chick is hatched, a kindergartner is stabbed to death, a stupid macho jerk is knocked to the ground when his girlfriend slaps his face, or the petals and stamen of plum flowers are rustled by a gentle breeze, I simply record what I see without getting involved. If I become a factor, it’s not as if I could make the egg hatch, the person die, the wind blow, or the lovers kiss. What kind of halfway existence is this? Unsettled, incomplete, suspended in midair, betwixt and between, going nowhere, a living corpse, a dead soul.
When I discussed my ideas with other trade school students and their companions, I was surprised by how much they related. They all understood my ideas so well that I felt like I could rest easy with the assurance that no one was participating in the world. If that’s the case, then the world is actually uninhabited, empty. Crowded around that emptiness, non-participants like us observe everything with clear eyes. Taking in the spectacle of it all, we must look like a crowd watching a movie. Conventional wisdom has it that there’d be no life without people. But all that’s there
is a white or silver cloth that we call a screen and, like idiots, we’re transfixed, watching and thinking people are really there doing things like chopping down trees. It’s like a bad joke to think that a white cloth with no intrinsic life of its own can satisfy the desires of crowds eager to indulge in watching. It’s enough to make you wonder if anything in the world exists.
But those same people who agreed with me when I shared my theories grew serious as graduation approached and let slip statements like, “I want the people who see my films to be moved,” “I want to give audiences something to think about,” or “I want to change the world.” I felt betrayed. These people didn’t truly understand what I meant by being powerless, and my face involuntarily contorted into a grimace. Those who fell apart after His Majesty died are no different from that bunch.
That’s why I wanted to make my graduation project by myself, but the school required that the projects be collaborative, so reluctantly I had to take a partner. That was Iroha. Like me, Iroha had intended to make her project independently, and she unhappily surrendered to working with me. She was in a foul mood when we first met, and she made a horrible first impression. Trying to get through it, I asked her what kind of project she wanted to make.
She snapped back, “It doesn’t matter even if I tell you because I’d planned to do it alone, so now it’s ruined.”
“Okay. So, why don’t we do our halves separately and present them omnibus?”
“As if that would make things any better.”
“Listen, I’m not getting to make what I want either, so can you just get over it?”
Lonely Hearts Killer Page 3
