Salmonella Men on Planet Porno (Vintage Contemporaries) (3 page)

All I could do was to follow the flow for now. It would be virtually impossible to uncover the mastermind at the bottom of it. Even if I caught one of my pursuers, he would just be small fry. He wouldn’t know who the mastermind was. That was the big cheese – big enough to buy off the media, at least!

“I’m not trying to make excuses, sir,” the cabbie said suddenly. “But I did lose that black Nissan. I did, really.”

“I’m sure you did,” I replied. “But I reckon it’s not that simple anyway. They’re not just following me in a car. They’ve probably even bugged this taxi.”

Hold on a minute
, I thought. How did I know I could trust this driver, anyway? He could be in on it too. Otherwise, how did they know the tip was five hundred yen?

I suddenly noticed a helicopter circling above us. It was flying at dangerously low altitude, almost skimming the tops of the buildings.

“I’m sure I saw that chopper on the way out, sir,” said the driver, squinting up at the sky. “Maybe they’re the ones that are following you.”

There was a thunderous crash, and a blood-coloured flash of light streaked across the sky. I looked up to see fireballs flying in all directions. The helicopter had crashed into the top floor of a multi-storey building. The pilot must have been paying too much attention to events on the ground and lost control.

“Serves him right! Heheheheheheheh!”

The cabbie laughed insanely as he sped away from the scene. He already had the look of a deranged man.

I knew I’d be in danger if I stayed in the taxi any longer. “Ah, I’ve just remembered something,” I said. “Could you let me off here.” Actually, I’d remembered there was a small psychiatric clinic nearby.

“Where are you going?” the cabbie asked.

“That’s my business,” I answered.

“Well, I’m going straight home to sleep,” he continued. He looked pale-faced as he took the fare from me. That decided it – he wasn’t one of them.

“Good idea,” I said as I stepped out into the unbearable heat.

I entered the clinic and sat in the waiting room for about twenty minutes. An apparently hysterical middle-aged woman was followed by an apparently epileptic young man. I was next. I went into the treatment room, where the doctor was looking at a television on a desk by the window. News of the helicopter crash was just coming through.

“Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Even the sky’s getting congested now,” the doctor muttered as he turned to face me. “And of course, there’ll be more patients as a result. But they won’t come for treatment until it’s too late, oh no. Another bad characteristic of people today.”

“Yes, you’re right,” I said with a nod of agreement. I didn’t want to seem pushy, but jumped straight in and started to explain my situation anyway. I was supposed to be at work, after all, and didn’t have much time. “They suddenly started talking about me on
TV last night. And there were articles about me in this morning’s papers. They made an announcement about me at the station. I was even mentioned on the radio. At work, they’re all talking about me in whispers. I’m sure they’ve bugged my house and the taxis I travel in. In fact, I’m being followed. It’s a major operation. That helicopter on the news crashed while it was following me!”

The doctor stared at me with a pitiful expression as I continued my story. Finally, however, he made a gesture to signal that he could take no more. “Why didn’t you come to me sooner?” he moaned. “But no. You only come when your condition is already too serious! You give me no option but to admit you to hospital immediately – by force if necessary! For there’s no doubt about it at all. You are suffering from a persecution complex, a victim complex – in other words, total paranoid delusion. A classic case of schizophrenia. Luckily, there’s no loss of personality as yet. I’ll admit you to the university hospital right away. Leave it to me.”

“Wait a minute!” I said. “I was in a hurry, I didn’t explain myself well! I had a feeling you wouldn’t believe me. I’m not a good talker, I can’t express things logically. But everything I’ve just said, it’s nothing to do with any complex – it’s plain fact! Yet I’m just an ordinary office worker – certainly not famous enough to be followed by the media! No, however you look at it, these media people who are tailing me, reporting about me – yes, even someone as ordinary as me – they’re the ones who are insane! I just came here to ask your advice, you know, what you think I should do to cope with all this. You’ve written books about the pathological tendencies of society and the perversion of the media. You’ve talked about it on TV. That’s why I came here. I hoped you could tell me how to adapt to this abnormal environment without losing my sanity!”

The doctor shook his head and picked up the telephone. “Everything you’ve said merely proves how serious your case is!”

His hand stopped dead as he was dialling. His eyes were now riveted to the picture on his desktop television. It was a picture of me. The doctor opened his eyes wide.

“Some news just in on the Morishita case,” said the announcer. “After leaving his client’s office in Ginza 2nd Street, Tsutomu Morishita, an employee of Kasumiyama Electric Industries, took another taxi, apparently intending to return to his office in Shinjuku. But he suddenly appeared to change his mind, left the taxi and entered the Takehara Psychiatric Clinic in Yotsuya.”

A photograph of the clinic’s main entrance appeared on the screen.

“It is not yet known why Morishita entered the Clinic.”

The doctor stared at me with glazed eyes, as if in admiration. His mouth was half-open, his tongue dancing about in excitement. “So you must be someone famous, then?”

“No. Not at all.” I pointed at the television. “He just said it, didn’t he? I’m a company employee. Just an ordinary person. But in spite of that, my every move is being watched and broadcast to the entire nation. What’s that, if not abnormal?!”

“Well. You asked me how you could adapt to an abnormal environment without losing your sanity.” As he spoke, the doctor slowly got up and moved towards a glass cabinet crammed with bottles of drugs. “But I find your question contradictory. An environment is created by the people who live in it. You, then, are one of the people who are creating your abnormal environment. In other words, if your environment is abnormal, then you must be abnormal too.” He opened a brown bottle labelled ‘Sedatives’ and tipped a quantity of white pills into his hand.

The doctor greedily stuffed the pills into his mouth as he continued to speak. “Therefore, if you persist in asserting your own sanity, it proves, conversely, that your environment is in fact normal, but that you alone are abnormal. If you consider your environment to be abnormal, then by all means lose your mind!” He took a bottle of ink from his desk and gulped down the blue-black liquid until it was empty. Then he collapsed onto the couch beside him and fell asleep.

“On a mad, mad morning in May, two lovers drank dry a bottle of bright blue ink,” hummed a nurse as she entered the treatment room, completely naked. In one of her hands she held a huge
bottle of ink, from which she took the occasional swig before draping her body over the doctor’s on the couch.

So I left the clinic without receiving a satisfactory answer. The sun was going down, but it still felt oppressively hot.

As soon as I was back at my desk, Akiko Mikawa called me from Admin. “Thank you for inviting me out yesterday,” she said. “I’m really sorry I couldn’t make it.”

“That’s all right,” I replied with undue reserve.

She said nothing for a while. She was waiting for me to ask her out again. She’d obviously noticed that public opinion was starting to shift towards me, and was probably worried that she would now become the butt of media vitriol. She’d called me in the hope of accepting an invitation.

We both remained silent for a few moments.

I sighed before plunging in. “How about today, then?”

“I’d love to.”

“All right, I’ll see you in the San José after work.”

News of our arrangement must have been reported immediately. For, as I walked into the San José, it seemed unusually busy. Normally, it wasn’t that kind of place. All the customers were couples, making it impossible to tell which were reporters and which merely curiosity-seekers. But whichever they were, they’d obviously come with one aim in mind – to observe my date with Akiko. While of course feigning a lack of interest, they would give themselves away by glancing over at us every now and again.

Needless to say, for the whole hour that Akiko and I were in the café, we sat in stony silence with our drinks in front of us. For if we’d discussed anything even slightly unusual, it would immediately have been reported in a three-column article with a massive headline.

We parted at Shinjuku Station, and I returned to my apartment. I hesitated for a while, but eventually switched on the television.

In a change to the evening’s schedule, they were showing a panel discussion.

“Now, I think we come to a very difficult question at this point,” said the presenter. “If events continue to unfold at this pace, when
do you think Morishita and Mikawa might be booking into a hotel? Or do you think it might not come to that? Professor Ohara?”

“Well, this Akiko is a bit of a shy filly, if you know what I mean,” said Professor Ohara, a racing expert. “It all depends on Morishita’s persistence and determination in the saddle.”

“It’s all in the stars,” said a female astrologer, holding up a card. “It’ll be towards the end of the month.”

Why on earth would we want to go to a hotel
, I wondered. If we did, our voices would be recorded and our positions photographed. The whole thing would be reported all over the country, exposing us to universal shame.

Things continued in a similar vein for the next few days.

Then, on my way to work one morning, my heart sank when I saw an ad for a women’s magazine inside the packed commuter train.

“R
EAD
A
LL
A
BOUT
I
T
– T
SUTOMU AND
A
KIKO’S
C
AFÉ
D
ATE!”

– it said in large bold letters, next to a photo of my face. And underneath that, in smaller type:

“Morishita masturbated twice that night”

I was boiling with rage and grating my teeth. “Don’t I have a right to privacy?” I shouted. “I’ll sue for defamation! Who cares how many times I did it?!”

On my arrival at work, I went straight to the Chief Clerk’s desk and presented him with a copy of the magazine, which I’d bought at the station. “I’d like permission to leave the office on personal business. I assume you know about this article. I’m going to complain to the company that publishes this magazine.”

“Of course, I understand how you feel,” the Chief Clerk said in a faltering voice, evidently trying to pacify me. “But there’s surely no point in losing your temper, is there? The media are too powerful. Of course, I’d always give you permission to leave the office on
personal business. As you know, I’m quite flexible when it comes to that kind of thing. I’m sure you’re aware of that. Yes. I’m sure you are. But I’m just concerned for your welfare, you see. I agree, it’s pretty disgraceful. This article, yes, it’s disgraceful. Yes. I can certainly sympathize with your predicament.”

“It really is disgraceful.”

“Yes, utterly disgraceful.”

A number of my colleagues had come to stand around me and the Chief Clerk. They all started to sympathize with me in unison. Some of the female clerks were actually weeping.

But I wasn’t going to be taken in by that. Behind my back, they were all swapping nasty rumours about me and cooperating with the media coverage. Theirs was the inevitable duplicity of those who surround the famous.

Even the company president came over to have his say. So I abandoned the idea of complaining to the publishing company. Now, the strange thing was that, even though I’d ranted and raved like a lunatic, not a word of it was reported in the TV news that day. Nor was it mentioned in the evening paper. So I took a long, hard look at the way in which news about me had been reported over the past few days.

Everything I did in awareness of the media was omitted from the news. For example, the fact that I’d tried to shake off my pursuers, or that I’d lost my temper and shouted about the magazine article. These were either ignored altogether, or reported in a different context. Not only that, but news of the helicopter that crashed into a building while following me was reported as if it were a completely unrelated event. In this respect, the coverage was quite different to that usually given to celebrities. To be more exact, the media were presenting a world in which they themselves didn’t exist.

But therein lay the reason why the news about me was gradually growing in scale, why people were taking an interest in this news. I’d become
a nobody who was known by everybody
. One day, for example, the morning paper had an article about me, written with a huge headline straddling six columns on the front page:

Occasionally, I’d stumble across people secretly trying to collect information about me. After using the company toilet, I would half-open the door to the next cubicle, only to discover a knot of reporters crammed into it, tape recorders and cameras dangling from their shoulders. Or on my way home, I’d rummage about in the bushes with the tip of my umbrella, only for a female TV announcer holding a microphone to dash out and run away shrieking.

Once, while watching television in my apartment, I suddenly leapt up and slid open the door of my built-in wardrobe. A huddle of four or five journalists (some female) tumbled out of the wardrobe onto the floor. Another time, I pushed up a ceiling panel with a broom handle. A photographer hiding in the attic, in his frantic effort to escape, put his foot through the ceiling and fell to the ground. I even pulled up my
tatami
matting and looked under the floorboards. A melée of reporters and hangers-on crouching in the floorwell hollered and fled in panic.