by Jesse Ball
INT.
What is the second part?
KAKUZO
Do you want to hear it?
INT.
I do.
KAKUZO
The king wakes the next day, and he finds that he is the stonecutter. He sees no lords in his house. There are no horses in his field. There are only the remains of an enormous feast, which ended sometime in the night. He looks down at his hands and he sees how terrifying they are, sees the white bone, the sinew, that which the stone may not resist. But he is a king. He sets out on the road toward his kingdom, and follows the trail of the horses’ hooves. For nineteen days he walks. It takes him nineteen days to travel what on the fastest horses took a single flight of restless speed. Still he perseveres, and on the nineteenth day, he reaches the gates of his city. He presents himself there, and the guards will not let him in. Have you nothing to sell, they ask. Have you no money with which to buy? For what reason do you want to enter this fine city? Do you not know, they asked. Do you not know that this is the richest and wealthiest city in the world? And some fear in his heart keeps the king from revealing himself. I will see, he says, how the land lies. And he goes a short distance into a desolate field, and he finds a stone. He sits by the stone and passes his hands over it. He passes his hands over it again and again, and he knows then things that the stonecutter knows and he breaks the stone and seals it and breaks it and seals it and tears at it as if at a cloth. When he has done, he has made a puzzle of the thinnest weave, a puzzle in stone. He puts it beneath his ragged cloak, and goes back to the gates. There he waits until morning, and when the first guard to wake looks out at the sun, he is there.
You again. Have you nothing to sell? Have you the means to buy? The king lifts the cloak to show the stone puzzle, and the guard’s eyes follow the impossible lines and turns and corners. Round about they go, round about and around and they fall into nothing, into nowhere. Again he tries, again, he can reach nowhere with the puzzle, with his eyes on the puzzle. Very well, he says. You are welcome to the city, and he opens the gate. The king covers his puzzle, and goes then upon the streets of his own city. Never has he seen it so well. The merchants are opening their stalls in the squares and streets. Animals are being fed, watered, slaughtered, skinned, ground, groomed, their manes tied with ribbons. He finds his familiar way to the castle. There is another gate. I will see the king, he says. Anyone has a right, says the guard, to see the king. But it may be the end of you. The guard brushes the king’s hood back and looks upon his face. But he does not see anyone he knows. He has not seen this person before. Good fortune to you, he says, and opens the gate.
Then the king is upon the courtyard of his own castle. He goes along the passages as a claimant, with the others who have things to ask. They are endless in number, it seems, and they are admitted, all at once, to an interior chamber where the king will appear and speak to them. The king himself is astonished. He has never spoken to claimants. He has never seen this room. But an hour passes and another, and a counselor comes out and sits in a high chair. I am the king, he says. I know you, thinks the king. You are but a counselor. And so the king makes himself the last of all those there, and waits, and when they have all spoken to the counselor, and when they have all gone away, he presents himself, saying, I have something to say to the king, but you are not the king. I am not the king, agrees the counselor, stepping down off the high chair, but we will go to him now. So, they go down more hallways and cross more courts, the counselor, the king, and the guards, and they enter another chamber, where another counselor, yet higher, sits. I have known these men all my life, thinks the king, and never did I know … but already he is brought forward. Here is the king, they say to him. Tell him what you will. You are not the king, he says. I have come to see the king. And so they draw back the cloth at the back of the room, the heavy, rich, banded cloth, and there is another passage, and they go down it, the king, the first counselor, the second counselor, and the guards, and they reach a place where the guards can go no farther, and the counselors lead the king on, one on each side. His clothes are so filthy, his face so etched with weather and sun, that they can scarcely bear to be beside him, yet they pass on together. Into the final chamber they go. There sits the king, and he knows himself. He has seen that face, so often! To him he goes, and when the king on his throne perceives the stonecutter’s robes, when he perceives the stonecutter’s hands, when he perceives that the stonecutter has passed all obstacles to come before him, he opens his eyes wide as any owl, and calls out. Who has let this man in? To the counselors, there is a lowly stonecutter, standing before their king. And this is what they see. The king holds out his hands and the stonecutter opens his robe and holds out his impossible puzzle, this fashioning of stone and light. The king receives it into his hands and there he makes it again the stone it was, and he sets it beside him, as it had sat in the field.
Then the king wakes, and it is morning. The lords have saddled their horses. Come, they say, come let us ride away. And the king rouses himself from the table where he was sleeping and he goes to his horse. Out from the hut comes the stonecutter and he looks into the king’s face. What passes between them then is neither for lords, nor for storytellers. Who can say what it means to be one person and not another? When they returned to the city, the king did nothing as he had before, and he led his kingdom into a new age, which even now has been forgotten. Of it, we have only this tale.
INT.
You felt before that all things were inevitable, that nothing could be done. But when you read that, you saw that there was a tiller? That things truly could be changed, and even one man could do it?
KAKUZO
Exactly. I felt I could be the stonecutter.
INT.
But there is no king. Even if you could be the stonecutter, I don’t see …
KAKUZO
The king is now in general. The kingship is held in general. It is what is tolerated by the people.
INT.
Then, to change their vision, you would need to …
KAKUZO
I needed to speak to everyone at once.
INT.
But you were young, and finding your way. How did you make your plans? How did you set them in motion? It was the middle of the 1970s. Perhaps—civil and legal formality was the farthest thing from anyone’s mind?
KAKUZO
Not so. There were some of us who were concerned. It seemed that Japan had the chance to become what no other nation was or has been: an actually fair place. I wanted that, more than anything. In my own way, I would say, though I’m sure others would disagree with me, I would say I am …
INT.
A moral man? A patriotic man?
KAKUZO
Maybe not in the sense of one who follows the emperor, who gives up everything for someone else’s cause. I gave up everything, but for my own cause.
INT.
Did you? Or did you convince Sotatsu to do so on your behalf?
KAKUZO
His life was a zero. He would have done nothing. Instead, look: someone is writing a book about it.
(Laughs, spits on the floor.)
INT.
I don’t …
KAKUZO
I had returned home from the city. I reconnected with a girl named Jito Joo. We were living together. She had been my girlfriend some years before that, but things hadn’t worked out. I left. Anyway, now that I had returned, we had ended up together again. Oda Sotatsu was an old friend. I started to see him. We were all feeling the same way, very restricted, very angry. Joo and I would stay up all night talking about things that we could do to escape, ways that things could change. I had a few friends who had ended up in jail and I was angry about the justice system. I felt we were very far behind the way it worked in other supposedly civilized countries.
INT.
So, that’s what hatched the idea of the confession?
KAKUZO
Partially, yes. It was partial
ly that, and partially just anger.
INT.
Did you have any help in preparing the confession?
KAKUZO
A friend from Sakai, I won’t say his name, a lawyer. He helped draft it. The intention was that it be legally binding, to a degree. Of course, it is difficult to make it truly binding. But, as binding as we could make it, we did.
INT.
And had you targeted Sotatsu all along? You knew that he would be the one?
KAKUZO
I felt that, and I wasn’t alone in this—I felt that I was too important as the organizer to be the one who would be in prison. I didn’t see that as my part of the task.
INT.
You saw that as Sotatsu’s part?
KAKUZO
He was well suited to it. I knew him to be honorable, to have great inner resources. I also knew that he had obtained a very, I don’t know, bleak outlook. He was not very happy at that time, when I had returned. I was unsurprised when he agreed.
INT.
I should tell you that I have been in contact with many different people in my research for this. Among them, the entire Oda family, and Jito Joo.
KAKUZO
Joo also?
INT.
Yes.
KAKUZO
You have to be careful whom you trust. Everyone has a version, and most of them are wrong. In fact, I can tell you clearly: they are all wrong. I am in a position to help you understand what happened. You need to understand, Mr. Ball, the world is made up almost entirely of sentimental fools and brutes.
INT.
And which are you?
KAKUZO
(laughs)
INT.
Truly.
KAKUZO
A sentimental brute, I suppose. One who means well, but has no feeling for others.
[Int. note. Here Kakuzo gave me the tape of the initial night—the actual tape of the moment when Sotatsu was lured into confessing. I was shocked. At first, I had trouble believing the truth of it, but when I listened, I knew it could be nothing else. Among the many things that were strange and beautiful, one was the manner in which the voices of Kakuzo and Joo were different from when I had spoken with them, but subtly. It was a weight of time—all the time that had passed since the tape had been made, and all the things that had happened.]
[After handing me the materials, Kakuzo did not want to be interviewed any more. He merely gave me the tape of that first interaction, and a series of statements. The statements I provide hereafter, verbatim (changed only as per my initial note). The statements were of drastically varying age, some even predating the events. I will enumerate them below.]
Statements (Sato Kakuzo)
[Int. note. The statements were carbon copies of originals that Kakuzo kept. I occasionally had difficulty making out a word here or there. In such cases, I strove to keep meaning clear and chose the least outlandish or strange usage. Some of the statements were little more than scraps. Others were on larger paper, printed with diagrams and explanatory text. I do not give all here, as the relationship of some to the matter at hand was tangential at best.]
1. Narito Disappearances: Blueprint
2. The Invention of a Crime
3. Confessions & The Idea of a Confession
4. Joo & How It Went in Practice
Narito Disappearances: BLUEPRINT
1. The abduction of individuals from their homes
2. The confession of a person
3. The trial of that person
4. The execution of that person
5. The reappearance of the various individuals
6. Public acknowledgment of wrongdoing on the part of the governing mechanism
The first should be accomplished in total secrecy. There must be no intervention of law enforcement at this time. It should be easily accomplished, but must require elaborate and long-standing plans, as well as the use of specific resources.
The second must involve either: a. an unbreakable person (dedicated to the cause and understanding it thoroughly); or b. a person who will prove unbreakable based upon arbitrary reasons, reasons of peculiarity, i.e., an eccentric.
The third will proceed naturally, as should the fourth.
The fifth is an artificial event, prompted by the announcement of the fourth.
The sixth may be hoped for, and can be accomplished by the pageantry and spectacle of the fifth, particularly by the directedness of the fifth, and the manner in which it places blame.
The Invention of a Crime
The invention of a crime is a special matter. A crime does not exist, and then it is invented. It is not executed. Never is the crime executed; it is merely invented. It is not carried out, but it appears to have been carried out. This appearance of execution creates the crime in the eyes of the populace who beg for enforcement. The individual who accepts guilt for the crime that never occurred is then caught (or comes forward) and is punished. The punishment, of course, is real. Should the society have sufficient resources to detect that the crime is an invented crime, and marry it with an invented execution, similarly un–carried out, though appearing to have been, then the crime would be un–carried out, would be revealed in its un-carried-out-ness and the criminal released. The system would have proven efficacious in the extreme. The chances of such an event are nil.
The invention of a crime is not the province of the criminal mastermind, as it does not, in its essence, involve any crime at all. The principals, both the victims and the agents, are complicit in the event. Some have said that this is always the case (in nature). We do not accept or make that point here. Here we simply say: all involved in the “invented crime” are a part of an organization created for the purpose of arranging the “invented crime,” and all have knowledge of the enterprise in which they are embroiled. The single exception may be (and must be) the confessor, if he be of the second type (spoken of previously).
The action of the crime must be such that it involves tremendous fear on the part of the populace with little reason for that fear. In other words, the fear that is generated must be archetypal, must not be truly causally connected with the crime. The fear must be inspired. Any direct connection between the fear and the event of the crime could serve as an infraction of sorts, and would, at the end of all events, prove to be a true crime, actually punishable.
The organization must have within it members capable of long silence and great discretion. The gathering of such individuals is the principal difficulty that faces any organizer at the founding of such an organization. It is most especially problematic when the ethical problem the organization has been created in order to combat is itself vague and full of complication.
To that end: a discussion of confession.
Confessions & The Idea of a Confession
It is at the heart of our human enterprise, that is to say, at the heart of society, to allow consensus a power it ought not to have.
This is to say, if a man makes a soup, a patently bad soup, and another tastes it on the end of a spoon and says to the first, “This is good soup,” the soup then is known as good. It is acknowledged good. It fulfills its purpose as soup. The consensus regarding the soup is that the soup is good. It perhaps will be made again in the same way. Others arriving on the scene, perhaps with doubt in their hearts as to their ability to accurately judge a soup to be good or not, they hear this verdict of the soup. They taste the soup and know it to be good. They are not judging the soup themselves; this power they have not obtained: rather they listen to that initial agreement.
When a man has committed a crime, it should be prosecuted in a fair society only if the evidence of that crime may be seen. No imaginary documents, that is to say, documents that are the province solely of the human mind unconnected with the world, should be used toward a prosecution or conviction.
That we as humans believe we see things we do not see.
That we will stake our lives and reputations on the above.
Tha
t we as humans believe we have done things we have not.
That we will stake our lives and reputations on that, too.
Ladies and gentlemen, it is clear that the mechanism of the law cannot discover all ends. They cannot find all evidence. It is the nature of the world that all evidence is ground into nothing, sometimes in mere minutes. It is the nature of the world that this grinding of evidence into nothing does not proceed (always) with malice or intention. The world simply renews itself. Chaos and order rear their alternate heads as two winds that tear at each other’s cheeks.
This being the case, it was soon determined (early in the course of law) that an element, a freeing element, might be obtained in the search for justice. This freeing element may be divided into two parts:
1. The first: eyewitness testimony.
2. The second: the confession.
That a person saw something, himself or herself, has long been accounted a part of the judicial process, however, it never was given the pride of place that it enjoys today, principally because the opinion of any one individual was never accorded respect on the basis of an individual being an individual. This is to say, in previous times, one’s office as a human did not accord one the full opportunity to both claim something and be its proof.
In previous times, such proofs were made thusly: by appeal to the gods.
