Evil and the Mask (27 page)

“You know you killed her, your mother?”

It felt like someone had stabbed me in the heart. I sat there, right in front of him, staring at his face. He smiled faintly.

“Well, sort of. Didn’t you? She died giving birth to you. What? You didn’t know?”

The only thing I could see was his mouth moving.

“The old house has a room hidden under the cellar, like this secret room here. The room where you killed Father. Yeah? But there’s another room below that, an even smaller one.”

He took a slow breath.

“That’s where all your mother’s belongings were. Did you
know that? The clothes she was wearing, some odd keepsakes like the glass she was drinking out of, locks of her hair and so on. Why? Because your mother was the only woman that Shozo Kuki, our monstrous father, ever loved. Apparently he tended to become fixated on mementos. The only people who know about that are me and the housekeeper Tanabe.”

He was tapping his glass with his fingernails.

“I’ve already found Father’s body, you know. When I heard that he’d gone missing, I thought he’d killed himself. Buried under relics of his dead lover. I visited the estate, called Tanabe, who’d been dismissed, and got her to open the underground room. Father had drunk the poison he carried on him. It appeared to be suicide, but it wasn’t. There were strange scratches on the door handle, and it looked to me like he’d been locked in. Tanabe thought so too. She also found a child’s footprints in the dust. She suspected you, but I wasn’t sure, because you were still just a kid. Could you have done something like that? But as soon as I saw the torment in your face as you lay in bed, I was certain. I thought, ‘Wow!’ You looked absolutely identical to him, as though you’d murdered him and taken on his features. Last time we talked I told you it was the first time we’d met, but actually I watched you when you were having a nightmare way back then.”

I was finding it hard to breathe. I forced myself to look at him. He laughed.

“What happened to Koichi Shintani? You had some kind of scheme in mind when you walked in here, didn’t you? Don’t say you’ve forgotten? Well, it must be hard to keep up the act when you’re faced with the truth. But don’t worry, Tanabe got
rid of the old man’s body, along with all your mother’s stuff. The suicide of the chairman of the Kuki Group would have been too much of a shock for the affiliated companies. Even worse if they found out that he was killed by his own son. It’s better to leave it unclear, whereabouts unknown, just treat him as dead. Like he had an accident while he was enjoying a hike in the mountains or fishing in a river somewhere. Tanabe was Father’s mistress, and mine too. She hated your mother, so she burned all her things. And she was devoted to Father, so she dealt with his body as well. Cleaning up your mess.”

He kept drinking his whiskey. His eyes were glazed with alcohol, and the smell was gradually drowning out the lingering scent of perfume. I couldn’t keep up with what he was saying.

“Kaori looks like your mother. Not so much her face, just her general aura. I saw her once, and that’s what I thought. I haven’t been able to find out who her parents were, no matter how hard I looked, but I’d say they had some loose connection to the Kukis. Because Father was attracted to her, and so am I, even though she’s not all that good-looking. She doesn’t look anything like my mother, but somehow she’s got under my skin. I’ll tell you a story.”

He stood up and took another bottle from the liquor cabinet. He couldn’t be bothered getting ice, so he poured the lukewarm scotch into the glass just as it was.

“Several years ago, in Shinjuku in Tokyo, there was a traffic accident.”

He slouched heavily onto the sofa again.

“Just a typical accident, and the person who died had
nothing to do with us. An ordinary collision between a car and a cyclist. The driver hurt his wrist slightly and the woman on the bike was killed instantly. The driver took his eyes off the road, just for a second, distracted by his cell phone, which he’d tossed on the passenger seat. Hundreds of accidents like that happen every day. But when I looked into it, some eerie facts came to light.”

His thick lips twisted at an angle, though whether he was smiling or grimacing I couldn’t tell.

“The driver’s ancestor and the cyclist’s ancestor came into contact once, a long time ago, during the war with China in the 1930s. The man’s grandfather was a soldier. The woman on the bike was Japanese, but her relatives on her mother’s side were from China. The driver’s grandfather was in the Japanese army and during the war his unit was ordered to attack a particular Chinese village. Pillage, slaughter, they did it all. The man himself didn’t actually take part in the looting, but since he was the youngest member of the platoon he couldn’t put a stop to their folly and just had to endure it. And the cyclist’s grandparents were caught up in the massacre and lost their lives. In other words, many years later the descendant of the man who had witnessed the carnage in China ended up killing the descendant of two of the victims, here in Shinjuku. This sounds like some kind of fate passed down through the generations, but there are four things about the story that are quite creepy.”

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.”

His mouth opened in a swallowing motion.

“At first I thought it would be okay if the missile missed the target, with only a few casualties. In that case there wouldn’t be a war, but the defense budget would skyrocket and new markets would open up for us. That would certainly be entertaining to watch, but now I think we can go further than that, because I’m already ruined, and of course the object of a plan born from ruin will be more ruin. I don’t care how many missiles rain down on central Tokyo. The country will be thrown into chaos, America and China will get involved, and the whole munitions industry will come along for the ride. That’s part of my plan too. American arms manufacturers will be delighted, at any rate, because Japan will buy more weapons. This is all several years down the track, but I’ve got it all planned out.”