I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like (24 page)

—
This is fucking bullshit, Masa said. The Up Front Agency are fascists.

—
Man, I don’t know... I feel kind of disappointed. Why was she smoking, anyway?

—
Does it matter? She can smoke if she wants to. The point is they’ve gone too far. And the new W album is supposed to come out next month, so what’s going to happen to that?

—
I don’t know, Tatsuya said. It’s probably leaked already, just download it.

—
Yeah but what about the packaging? It’s different when you have it in your hands.

—
I know.

A pause.

—
I feel really weird, Masa said. Aibon’s not going to be on Hello! Morning anymore.

Tatsuya thought about it. When Ai Kago had joined Morning Musume after the Fourth Generation auditions, he had hated her. She’d seemed too childish, too insistent, her gimmicks forced and obvious. He preferred the elegance and style of the older members like Aya Ishiguro and Yuko Nakazawa. But as he adjusted to her personality and sense of humor, she and her counterpart Nozomi Tsuji — or ‘Tsujikago’ as they were collectively known — became another fixture of his mental landscape. The two twelve-year-old girls were the same height, wore their hair in a similar style, and were inseparable on-set. Kago had the stronger personality, but Tsuji was capable of standing up to her. The unforced affection between the two was clear, and it fascinated Tatsuya. Perhaps he was being naive, he told himself — they were performers, after all. But sometimes it seemed only by chance that they had become as famous as they were. He could imagine them playing the same kind of games at school: singing the latest songs, imitating celebrities, taking pictures of each other and laughing at their own expressions. It was a beautiful thought, and one that excluded him entirely — although he was not sad about it.

—
I’m sure she’ll come back, he said. They can’t suspend her forever, she’s too popular.

—
Im still pretty worried about it. I think it’s pretty clear we have to do something.

Tatsuya looked around the room. He was hungry already, and thought of getting something from downstairs. But Masa had called him on the normal line instead of his cell phone, and so he needed to hang up before he could go.

—
Masa, what are you talking about? What could we do? We don’t know anyone, we don’t have any connections. What are we going to do, write a letter? They won’t even open it.

—
I’ve got connections, Masa said, and Tatsuya could hear the smile in his voice. You think I don’t know anyone, right? I’ve got connections, just wait, I’ll come over and tell you all about it. I’m working this out already.

—
Are you really coming over?

—
Yeah, I’m on the train right now.

Tatsuya hung up, went to his desk, and took out a large Campus notebook. Several similar notebooks were piled beside the bed; taken together they comprised a single manuscript, a philosophical treatise opposing the value of human life, which he had titled
The Book Against the Human Race
. It was not an especially angry book, Tatsuya told himself, more a kind of lament. In it he described a hypothetical planet where human life had never evolved — a world of silence and forests, without sadness or loss. The descriptions were supplemented by long essays in which he argued that no positive human experience could ever justify the sum of human suffering, and so it would be better for humans to stop reproducing. Tatsuya had no intention of publishing or distributing the book; he wrote it because he had nothing else to do. He was ‘between jobs’, as he said whenever one of his parents’ friends stopped by. In truth he had never had a real job. After finishing a post-graduate course in journalism, he had retreated to his room to sleep, read, write, and listen to music. At twenty-six, the outside world had already lost its appeal. He realized his family thought of him as a parasite, but he was never obtrusive, and they were too accustomed to his presence to turn him out entirely. His mother continued to leave breakfast out for him in the morning, and at night he joined the family for dinner when his father came home from work. None of them had anything in common.

Stepping downstairs, notebook in hand, he noticed a bento lunchbox resting on the table. After getting some chopsticks from the kitchen, he sat down and was about to start eating when he heard his mother’s voice from the bathroom. Tatsuya was a little disappointed; he had assumed she had already gone to work. He needed to be alone to work on the next section of the treatise, but now he would have to talk to her. Though he depended on her greatly, he always felt uncomfortable around his mother. She was an intelligent and attractive woman, but Tatsuya and his father took her for granted. Bored, she had taken up a part time job at a bank last year. Sometimes she went out drinking with her coworkers on Friday night, and although Tatsuya’s father didn’t like her associating with anyone he didn’t know, he mostly kept quiet. It wasn’t worth the effort to argue, he had decided. And he was usually too tired from work to worry about anything else.

—
So, any plans for today? she asked him, as he opened the lunch box and picked up his chopsticks.

—
Not really. Masa might come over in a bit.

—
Oh. Going to go out shopping?

This was a little joke on his mother’s part, as Tatsuya constantly spent above his means. His room was crowded with idol posters and photobooks, trading cards and T-shirts, CD cases and concert DVDs. To Tatsuya, none of these items was more important than any other — although he did have his treasures — instead, all of them contributed to a general comforting atmosphere, a sense of protection from the rest of the world. He liked to think that the interior of his room reflected the interior of his mind, and so stepping inside was like stepping into his personal history, itself entwined with the progression of his interests. When he looked at a certain poster, for example, he was reminded of the innocence of the five-member first-generation Morning Musume lineup (the assembled rejects from a television show contest), or the short-lived shuffle groups which formed every summer, combining members from the fifty girls under the Hello! Project label. There was always something for him to read, watch, or listen to; and at night the last images before his eyes as he fell asleep were always the faces of the idols, their pristine smiles lulling him to rest.

As it was, though, the room was filthy — the bed was never made; the three trash cans were rimmed with mold; wrappers and bottles covered the floor. But since no one but Tatsuya saw it anyway, what was the point of cleaning? At least everything was where he needed it.

—
I don’t think so, no. We’ll probably just look around, find something worth eating.

Tatsuya had intended the last statement as a subtle barb, but if his mother registered it, it didn’t show. She dried her hands silently and stepped out of the bathroom.

—
Well, I’m going to work now. Don’t stay out too late.

His mother had been saying this to him for as long as he could remember. But even if he had the inclination, where was there for him to go? Apart from occasionally spending the night at Masa’s, he rarely left the house. Most of his shopping was done online, and on the few occasions when he went out for some other reason, the noise and the crowds exhausted him. The last thing he wanted was to stay out all night.

After finishing the lunchbox, Tatsuya began to revise the most recent section of
The Book Against the Human Race.
Of late he had been reading Schopenhauer’s
The World as Will and Representation
, and his attempts to integrate Schopenhauer’s philosophy had left him feeling derivative. Worse, he felt as if he didn’t really understand what he was reading, and that Schopenhauer was not truly pessimistic in the way he had expected. Tatsuya realized there was no reason to worry about clarity, consistency, or originality when writing a book that no one but himself would read, but he found himself unable to move on unless each section was exactly as he wanted it. As usual this perfectionism left him feeling tired and uncreative, and after thirty minutes he pushed the notebook aside, poured himself a glass of milk, and sat back to wait for Masa. Remembering the phone call, his frustration with the manuscript gave way to a general sense of unease, and he realized he was less worried about Kago’s suspension than about Masa’s reaction to it. He knew Kago would be reinstated eventually, but if Masa intended to contact her or anyone else, he didn’t know what he would do.

Tatsuya and Masa had met online, on a 2channel Hello! Project forum. Both of them were regular posters, and before long they found their interests converging. They had both come to prefer the younger Berryz Koubou unit over the more established Morning Musume, and this united them against a faction of MoMusu loyalists who considered them traitors. The two usually defended each other’s opinions, but recently Masa’s reputation had declined considerably, and even Tatsuya’s support seemed unlikely to revive it.

It was all the fault of his reviews, of course. They’d started out as conventional descriptions of new albums, singles, concerts, and merchandise; and Masa had been lauded for his dedication and comprehensive knowledge of Hello! Project minutiae. But as the months went by, the reviews became increasingly personal. Tracklistings and scanned photos were replaced with detailed, clinical descriptions of Masa’s physiological responses to the members of Morning Musume. Instead of analyzing lyrics or predicting future lineups, he recorded his sweat, erections, and breathing changes; he went off on long tangents about Saki Shimizu’s eyebrows and Momoko Tsugunaga’s legs; and he posted stories in which meetings of the underage idols degenerated into orgies and gang rape. And in the post that initially got him banned, he recorded the precise quantity of semen he had expended over a recent Risako Sugaya photobook. Five pages alone were devoted to his procuring, unwrapping, and displaying the photobook, during which time he pre-ejaculated four times. After that he moved onto reviews of individual pages, the longest being the ones that had brought him to climax. Before long he was banned from most of the major idol forums, labelled a paedophile, sent death threats. Depending on the day, his reactions wavered between despondence and extreme self-confidence. Sometimes he sent Tatsuya messages in which he contemplated suicide; in other moods he was defiant, defending himself against what he considered a repressive and closed-minded fanbase.

—
They think I’m an asshole for masturbating to children so much. But you know what? Their opinion doesn’t count. I’m not hurting anyone, so what the hell do I have to feel bad about? Everyone I’ve ever loved has turned me down, so what do I care what anyone thinks? I don’t even want a girlfriend anymore, that’s too much for me, too much to worry about. All I can think about is children.

It was in one of the latter moods that he arrived at Tatsuya’s house an hour after his phone call. His hands were shaking from the cold, and the bottom of his shirt had been awkwardly tucked under his jacket. As he kicked off his shoes, Tatsuya noticed his frayed and mismatched socks, one longer and lighter than the other.

—
Take a look at this, he said, throwing a CD case down on the table. Tatsuya inspected the cover, immediately recognizing its bright pink lettering and flower-pattern design.

—
Yeah, the first MoMusu Best Of. What about it?

—
I saw it in the bargain-bin at HMV for seven hundred yen. I feel like I rescued it.

Tatsuya stared at the pink flowers on the cover. To him the album seemed as timeless as a natural object, no different from a leaf or a stone. He couldn’t remember a time when it hadn’t been part of his consciousness. Over the years he had taped, burned, and ripped it to .mp3s more times than he could count. He supposed there were at least five copies of it in his room, some of them vinyl.

—
They were selling it for seven hundred? They should be shot for that.

As he turned the case over and inspected the track listing, the block English capitals of the first track, ‘LOVE MACHINE’, set off a trigger in his mind. This was the single that had launched the group to national attention some seven years earlier, largely on the strength of its promotional video. Tatsuya was nineteen when it was released, and before watching it, he had looked on idol music with scorn. In high school he’d listened mostly to J-rock and foreign metal bands, considering popular music beneath his notice. Idols were for girls and little kids, and music was only worth listening to if people he hated didn’t know about it.

But after ‘LOVE MACHINE’, something in him changed. He remembered sitting in front of the television as the song came on at the top of the nightly countdown. There was a brief intro in which a poster of the group was pasted onto a billboard in Tokyo, and then a low murmur began, a soft chanting of girls’ voices layered together like a choir. The screen resolved into the image of an enormous pink aeroplane, its hollow interior lined with glass windows. At the end of the fuselage was a circular platform held in place by struts, on which eight girls materialized and, as Tatsuya watched, began to dance. The music that soundtracked them did not conform to what he knew of as the insipid structure of the modern pop song — there seemed at first to be no consensus as to who was singing what. Lines were at first sung, then chanted, then interpolated in brief yelps; new sections and song-flashes erupted from the mix; the sudden refrains and interjections fought each other for space. Finally the chorus broke: a repetition of the title phrase counterpointed by a simple and insistent chant, the single syllable ‘wow’ repeated in an ascending harmony. Then the chant collapsed and the voices fractured again. Through it all the editing kept pace with the rhythm, as each cut outfitted the girls with a different costume — in the instants between beats they changed from police women to flight attendants, nurses to crossing guards; they donned black leather and wedding dresses, pink boots and velvet veils. They shook their fists. They broke formation fighting for center stage. They were variously animated, blown up to giant size, and projected into downtown Shibuya. Every one of them smiled in each frame; and reflecting off the neon pink of the walls, the harsh white light of the closeups gave them the look of angels.