Lonely Hearts Killer

by Tomoyuki Hoshino

  Iroha closed in on me with her camera lens and said, “I feel betrayed.”

  “Don’t look at me through the camera, damn it. It’s sleazy. If you want to see, look with your own eyes,” I protested. Instantaneously, tears and my nose started running. But that was because of the sand.

  “But isn’t this exactly what we always do, Inoue? We were doing it just now. What’s wrong? Did you suddenly become a fundamentalist? Did Mikoto get to you? Where did Shôji Inoue, the camera, go? Who are you?”

  Iroha hit me where it hurt with those accusations, which she fired off at me without letting up her gaze. I couldn’t answer any of her questions. For the first time, I felt the perils of being alive. It upset me to think that if I kept getting played like that, I’d have to keep living. I thought about what to do like my life depended on it.

  What I needed to do required Mikoto.

  I wanted to hear that last thing Mikoto said again. I was determined to become a central figure in his life. I picked up my stuff and the bill. I could only manage to say, “I haven’t taken care of this yet” and then went up to the register and paid Mokuren. I paid with my dirty money. Sucking down the rotten juice of what this country stashed away was what enabled me to get by, and I paid with that unclean, fake money. The parting words I tried on Mokuren were, “You and Iroha are pretty tight, huh? You gave me quite a show.” She answered with a coy smirk. It looked like I was getting the silent treatment again.

  Not that I didn’t expect it, but there wasn’t a soul to be found on the streets when I went out into the gusty sand storm. With only the exception of an occasional car passing by, everyone was holed up inside. Of course, it wasn’t like Mikoto was going to be waiting for me. But I wondered where he’d gone. I regretted not at least getting his phone number, so I tried calling Iroha on her cell, but because of all the sand interference, the call wouldn’t go through.

  Still, I didn’t feel like going back. Even though I was used to seeing the empty streets, it drove me crazy to walk through them. I busted out my camera, which was protected by a handkerchief and plastic bag. Flowers had fallen from the cherry trees that were as brutalized as if they’d been riddled with bullets. The fallen flowers were covered with sand and would soon be completely buried. The city would be entombed.

  I was full of sand, as though I’d been dragged through dunes, and had no idea which way to go. In a city with no people, it doesn’t matter which way you go. No matter where I looked, all I recorded was a city shrouded in air that was thick with yellow sand. Because of that, it wasn’t long before I couldn’t open my eyes. Little by little, my eyes were coated in a hard lacquer of sand that even dried up my tears. And it wasn’t just my eyes. Sand filled my ears to the point where noises were muffled. My nose was so stuffed that I had to try breathing out of my mouth, which felt chock full of gravel. I’d want to swallow saliva, but my mouth was so dry that it hurt when I tried. I was wrapped in an armor of sand, separated from the outside world, barely surviving the grains of sand that hit the skin on my face and hands and felt like shotgun fire. Once I was numbed to even that sensation, I would be completely closed in with no way out. It was not a good situation. At that rate, I would spend eternity with His Majesty like an ancient slave buried alive in an enormous sarcophagus along with the deceased ruler.

  Every ten minutes or so, I’d force myself to open my eyes if only for just a second like a shutter. In a flash, a picture of a world with only light and shadows and no clear outlines was burned into my retina. My eyes froze shut. All I could see was the afterimage of the lemon yellow light and the jet-black shadows. The glare of the blazing sun was so blinding that it had the opposite effect of appearing black. The street surfaces and corners and glass of building clusters were illuminated by the sunlight, and everything that shot through my eyes looked overwhelmingly lemon yellow. The air looked like it was struggling to breathe because of all the yellow grains of sand dancing around in it. Everything was flipped around. The backlit silhouettes of buildings and telephone polls were cut off from the sunny spots and looked like caves.

  As strange as it was, I felt an intimate attachment to this new world I’d met, a world that was only harsh light, shadow, sand, and heat. Then I remembered the sketch of the cityscape at the end of Mikoto’s notebook. This looked just like it. The scenery was divided into light and shadow, the sky was smeared in darkness, and there were no people.

  Even though I’d never been to the moon, I felt certain that Mikoto had drawn the lunar surface. That’s what my heart was telling me even though I didn’t have any reason to feel that way. Mikoto foresaw that this earth would gradually turn into the surface of the moon. And at that very moment, I myself was seeing raw lunar landscapes. I’d flown to a lifeless lunar desert. I hadn’t been spirited away, but I had just taken a trip to the moon. I stopped, stood still in the middle of the sand storm with my eyes shut, and laughed at myself. What the hell?

  I thought about His Majesty, about how he was a thing and not a person anymore. This lunar landscape is the fresh world he showed us through his death: a simple world in which everything is objectified. If His Majesty is an object, then I am an object too. The same object takes in light, casts a shadow, absorbs heat, and then gives off that heat.

  In that lunar world where I’d become indistinguishable from an object, I figured out the meaning of my life. I was fully alive in a world without other people. I transcended naive worries about whether or not I was participating. I was there.

  This is the real nature of the world. Regular people are like screens shrouding the reality first made manifest in His Majesty’s funeral. The illusion is projected onto human skin. My camera ingested that illusion and exposed the deal.

  Even though my camera records the illusion, it doesn’t record the truly real. I arrived home covered in sand, looking like I’d barely escaped a swarming anthill. As I showered, I tried to recapture the true essence of the world I’d just been shown. I turned off the light in my room and savored the thrill of the moment in the growing evening darkness while staring at the light of the LCD monitor.

  Displayed there were images more or less like what I’d seen on the TV in the dim sum restaurant. Specs of dirt like flying ants danced in rhythm with the whistling wind inside a yellow light that was a bit brighter than before. The sparkling silver sun, lemon-colored halation, and cavern-like black sky weren’t visible.

  But I wasn’t discouraged. Mikoto was right. These images showed the true nature of reality as it was. It wasn’t as if a lunar world would show up on earth. That was nothing more than an illusion. I had been hopped up on strong, vintage Pu-erh tea and jittery at the time. And on top of that, I had sand in my eyes and ears and was in no shape to get a handle on my surroundings. I’d seen it all because I was under the influence of the tea and impaired vision and hearing. I realized all that.

  And yet, I couldn’t deny the tangible intimacy with which I’d experienced the spectacle I’d witnessed with my own eyes. Whether or not it was a hallucination, what mattered was the fact that I saw it. All that’s recorded through my camera lens is, after all, the world of people, and even if I could capture the illusion, the essence it veiled couldn’t be shown clearly. In that sense, I’d seen images that couldn’t be reflected through a lens, so I wasn’t really a camera anymore. The one who peeled away the illusion of the world of people was His Majesty. To borrow Mikoto’s way of saying it, I’d come face to face with the naked world through the cracks that His Majesty bravely ripped open by volunteering up his body. I had to revive the lemon yellow light and heat of that world and convert it into a camera recording. That was the purpose of me seeing the illusion. This was being spirited away for me!

  So, what Mikoto said wasn’t enough. If the raw, scorched world illuminated by the glittering sun had been laid bare, couldn’t you say that His Majesty had been the phantom concealing it? And if so, was the world burning under the brilliant sun a world without a Majesty?

  That’s
it! By removing His Very Self, which had been hiding the true nature of the world, His Majesty had stripped the world completely naked. We had already been released into a world with no Majesty. It wasn’t just the individual Young Majesty, but Majesty itself that died. Majesty was dead. There would be no more!

  I was thrilled at my discovery. I arrived at the truth without being led there by Mikoto. The duty to show people what a world without Majesty was like was mine. I wasn’t a camera, so I had to convey the naked world I’d known in words. I’d have to explain my central role in relation to it in a message. If I didn’t, I’d still be nothing more than a bystander.

  With that, I put some writing up on my website. Tapping away at the keyboard, I tried putting what Mikoto said into my own words. I typed so much faster than I could think that it seemed I might flood the monitor with words. I felt like I was taking notes on someone’s lecture. There, all the contradictions melted away as I plunged ever deeper into the world.

  As if possessed, I finished writing the short piece in no time at all and then set about processing the film. I only had the hazy lemon yellow and black colors to work with in the digital processing, so I pushed the contrast to the limit and managed to recreate the shadows of the lunar surface. Then I tacked on footage of the blossoming cherry trees and ended up with about fifteen minutes of film.

  It was already quite late when I uploaded the following text with the footage. I arrived at these truths with all of my body and soul. I have no doubts.

  “I never thought I was alive until now. I always wondered whether it mattered if I died if I didn’t feel like I was living. But before I could come to a conclusion, I’d be overwhelmed with shame, and since it was too hard to continue thinking beyond that, I’d try to repress the feeling.

  But today, I figured out that it would be good for me to die. Or rather, without a trace of guilt and in good spirits, I wanted to die and accepted this revelation as if it were the most regular of things for anyone.

  I saw it for myself on the day of His Majesty’s funeral. This world was already dying. I understood it, that this is a post-mortem world, that this place is like the surface of the moon and we are all just residents of the Sea of Tranquility or Sea of Fecundity caught in a recurring afterimage of once upon a time when life was normal. I saw that raw heat and light mercilessly bake everything exposed under a platinum sun and that, as the temperature is changed by rising waves of heat, we are all but fleeting illusions.

  Because this is a post-mortem world, it’s natural for those who are still living to desire death. But even though this is a post-mortem world, it’s not the afterworld. It’s this world itself that is post-mortem.

  My wish is that I might achieve a state befitting this world. I want all those dead people who are still living to die, to really die, to rest in peace in a quiet desert. I want the post-mortem world to be seen for what it truly is. Because that is the homeland where I belong.”

  A few moments later, I got an email from Mikoto.

  Subject: Beautiful

  Text: Well said! I had a feeling you’d get it. It’s a little on the extreme side, but I can feel His Majesty’s message alive in your words. And maybe you can’t communicate the real sense of it all without exaggerating some like that.

  It’s the same with those images. Beautiful! They gave me shivers. I really was moved.

  Actually, I’d seen a scene like that before. Not on the day of the sand storm, but at dusk when a typhoon was building. Even though the sky was filled with black clouds, the sun was beating down on the western horizon. I watched that orange ball of a sun suddenly turn silver just like the color changes when you flip an Othello piece. Just then, the colors everywhere faded, and the sky, the mountains, the cape, the river, and the houses all reflected the shining silver in monotones. Places where the sunlight didn’t hit looked as black as bottomless pits. I was overcome with emotion at the time and felt like I was viewing someone’s residence. No doubt, that’s the “homeland” for all of us, including His Majesty. We’ll have to repaint the flag, huh? :)

  We have to return there. I mean really return.

  Of course, each in his own way. After you “punished” me, I took a taxi back to the funeral procession and stayed to watch until the end. My eyes were mostly shut, so I suppose I should just say I “stayed.” :)

  What I felt at the time, and I don’t mean this is in a spiritual way, was that everything from dead people to animals, grass, and trees had a soul. And those souls didn’t go to the afterworld. They were staying here in the world in which we live. Corpses rot and decompose, and souls become the energy that propels future life. You can’t see that develop with your eyes, but we live our lives framed by those souls, saved by them, and empowered by them. You can call it the Law of Soul Conservation if you want, but the amount of life on the planet is limited. Let’s say the sum of that life shapes our world and dead bodies and spirits occupy a proportional amount of space above ground. We can’t just go about our lives ignoring that. Or maybe we grow uneasy because we do disregard it, act as if it didn’t exist, and relegate the “afterworld” to the place of myths, where we forget all about it. The living and the dead are unrelated inorganic matter, and even though we are barely able to relate to anything, we only see one piece of the puzzle, so we feel like some great unknown enables us to live as opposed to anything of our own doing, and we start to feel like we are worthless and fake. We think the world wants to die because we are caught up in our own feelings of powerlessness. But of course we’re powerless. We don’t even try to tap into the strength of the spirits. That’s why I first thought that this world is the afterworld, the world of the dead, and that I wanted to be able to see the existence and power I’d never tried to see before. I want to escape from the illusion of a world inhabited only by living beings.

  That’s what I was thinking while seeing off His Young Majesty, every inch of my body like eyes. But I’m not so sure about your manifesto. Our interpretations seem a little different.

  But it’s okay if they are. Or rather, they have to be different. You’ll have your own way of doing it. His Majesty’s message was for each of us to start by finding our own way. It’ll be no good if we all fall in line. If that happens, the true form of these islands will be taken back. Either way, we have to start with honest explanations, right?

  Not to change the subject, but do you want to grab dinner or something tomorrow night? Iroha made plans with that woman Mokuren from the dim sum place, so I’m free. I probably won’t get done with work until after seven, and if it works for you, how does Dormir, the Sleeping Café in Higashi Aoyama sound? If you don’t know where it is, call me on my cell. Even if you can’t make it, I’m going to relax for a while there, so please come if you feel like it.

  I read that email four or five times. The first thing that welled up inside me was the satisfaction over having connected with Mikoto. I’d waited to meet him for so long, and to think that this person, who mattered more than anything to Iroha, now mattered more than anything to me made me feel like I’d been accepted by this couple as a life partner. It wasn’t exactly what I’d fantasized about, but I was excited that this marked the beginning of a new relationship for the three of us.

  I was also thankful for having been guided into experiencing the essence of the world. I didn’t understand it at the time, but when His Majesty died, I felt a lot of anxiety and guilt because I wasn’t spirited away or emotionally affected by his death even though so many of my peers were. The door was open, but I was still lost and looking for a chance to get in when, thanks to Mikoto, I made it right in the nick of time. Moreover, I resorted to violence with Mikoto while he was still weak, but he didn’t abandon me.

  What worries me is Iroha. Am I going to be able to persuade someone who didn’t even try to understand Mikoto’s explanation? It would probably take considerable patience and time. I trust Iroha, but I’m not confident enough to say that she’ll get it. The foundation for the new rela
tionship involving the three of us was the world with the shining silver sun. If we don’t get there (or, more accurately, here), we’ll be separated. Will Iroha appreciate what this means?

  I thought it wouldn’t be a bad idea for me to have a tête à tête with Mikoto the next day. And at any rate, there were so many things I wanted to talk about with him. I sent a reply email, accepting his invitation for dinner and letting him know I’d make reservations for the Narcissus Cell.

  As soon as I sent that, I received a message from Iroha.

  Subject: I saw it

  Text: Who the fuck do you think you are?

  Do you think dying is going to make you all high and mighty?

  Please! I’m the one who wants to die. For more than a month, I gave my all to keep Miko from dying, and now you? And I thought you knew how heartbreaking Miko’s “custodial duty” was for me. I shared my loneliness with you and thought you’d at least lighten the load a bit for me. You even watched the video. What? None of it registered with you at all? I thought if we got together, you could help me bring Miko back from the brink, but no, you went his way instead.

  You are acting like someone else. I have no idea who you are anymore. The only Shôji Inoue I knew was a skeptical observer, an autotoxic guy caught in his own weirdness and sensitive to the goings-on in his own head. I don’t know where the fuck he went, but he’s gone. I’ve learned how much I trusted and needed you the hard way. Miko’s gone, and so are you. You’ve left me out in the cold. Why did you have to be so heartless?

  I’ll be the first to admit that I have some responsibility in all of this too. I should have just skipped all the bullshit worries and introduced you to Miko back when we first hooked up. I created an awkward moment for you both when I turned to you all of a sudden when Miko was in dire shape. And you are a total reactionary, so it’s entirely consistent of you to roll that way when given the chance.