Evil and the Mask Read online

  In the quiet of the room I was aware of a faint ringing in my ears. He continued to sip his whiskey without speaking. I opened my beer. He reacted slightly to the sound of the cap coming off, turned his dead eyes on me as though he was surprised. But he still just kept drinking in silence. I lit a cigarette, unpleasantly aware of the sofa subsiding beneath me. Finally he opened his mouth again.

  “I’m in the war business.”

  His voice was extremely low.

  “You’re going to work for me.”

  “Why?”

  “No special reason.”

  He sighed. His muddy eyes were pointed in my direction, but he seemed to be looking right through me.

  “Do you know the story of Nayirah?”

  “Not really.”

  He set his glass on the table. His speech was very slow.

  “In 1990, when Saddam Hussein of Iraq invaded neighboring Kuwait, the USA called a simple young woman from Kuwait to testify at the Congressional Human Rights Caucus.”

  His face betrayed no emotion, only his thick lips moving.

  “She spoke of how cruelly the Iraqi soldiers were acting in Kuwait. She spoke of how they had ripped new-born babies from their incubators in the hospital and left them to die. America—no, the whole world—shook with rage. A UN force led by the US started aerial bombing to drive the Iraqi army out of Kuwait. The Gulf War.”

  Slumped on the sofa, he droned on in his low voice.

  “But afterwards it came to light that it had all been a lie. Nayirah was really the daughter of Kuwait’s ambassador to the US, and her whole story had been scripted by a PR firm. It turned into a huge scandal, reported all over the news, though it was only discovered after the war was over.”

  He sighed again as though he was bored, and slowly reached for the whiskey bottle.

  “There are two main ways of making money.”

  I couldn’t tell where the conversation was heading.

  “One is to develop an attractive product or service and to exchange it for the money in people’s wallets. The other is to squeeze money from the government, money they’ve taken by force in the form of taxes. That way is usually more profitable. Now I’m going to give you a brief lecture about how wars are started.”

  Somehow I couldn’t get the giant painting of the lake behind him out of my head. His monologue looked like it was never going to end.

  “Imagine a small country in Africa, with copper and diamond mines. The big powers want the mining rights, but the king refuses, so the big powers scrape together the forces opposed to the king and secretly encourage them to form a rebel army. Then they start a propaganda campaign in their own countries, about how the king is oppressing his people, how he’s resisting freedom and democracy. They might send soldiers in to assist the rebels, or they might send in private companies to do it instead. Lots of modern wars have been privatized. Companies that supply weapons, companies that provide tents and food for the soldiers, companies that provide the rebels with military training and strategic guidance. These private companies are usually set up by ex-officers, so naturally they have ties to politicians and defense officials. They get their financing both from the rebels and from taxes in rich countries in the name of international cooperation.

  “Of course the rebels in a small African country don’t have any funds, so how do they come up with that kind of money? How can they get their hands on such high-powered weaponry? They do it by borrowing money from the multinational mining corporations, in return for promising them the digging rights after they overthrow the monarch. With those funds they buy more weapons from private western companies and depose the king. War is big business. Any war has business interests involved in it somewhere—if you look deep enough, you’ll always find someone making a profit.

  “Even after the fighting’s over there are plenty of business opportunities. Multinational construction firms get the contract to repair buildings and other stuff that’s been destroyed in the war. Naturally that’s also paid for out of rich countries’ taxes, under the guise of friendship. It’s a conspiracy by the politicians, the bureaucrats and the corporations to grab their own country’s taxes and the small country’s resources.

  “I’ll tell you another thing. After the war, western nonprofits go into the country to help the exhausted populace, right? But it’s hard to offer aid in places that are still unstable, and they have no choice but to use guards from private companies to take care of security. Even if their motives are pure, they still generate concessions. No matter which way they turn, they can’t avoid them. Wars are fought in order to create concessions. Throughout human history, killing people in conflict has always stimulated the economy. And for generations the Kuki family has been intimately involved in the war business.”

  The whole time he had spoken in a soft monotone, with a distinct lack of enthusiasm. The level of whiskey in the bottle gradually grew lower.

  “So what’s your point?” I asked.

  His expression didn’t alter. “I’m talking about the Kuki family. About us.”

  “Nothing to do with me.”

  The room felt too quiet. The sound as he swallowed seemed really loud.

  “I told you that’s not going to work. You’re Fumihiro. I know it, because we’re Kukis. And you’re desperate to hear my story.”

  “I’m not interested.”

  “Just listen. How many times do I have to tell you? It’s not going to work.”

  His blood-shot eyes were staring straight at me.

  “The Kuki family began as merchants. They started a money-changing business around the time of the Meiji Restoration in 1867. In the turmoil of that period, we curried favor with the new government and made big profits.”

  He took a long, slow breath.

  “But we really started to prosper around the First World War. By then we already held the rights to most of the mines, and we were mass-producing warships and guns and selling them all over the world. We raked in huge profits and set up a wide range of companies, which became the emerging Kuki Group. At the time the whole of Japan was booming with special procurements for the war. But while the economy was thriving through sales of instruments for killing people and transport ships to carry those instruments, the Japanese people still believed that their nation was founded on peace and harmony. And then World War Two started. Our father, Shozo Kuki, served in that war.”

  “Huh?”

  I reacted without thinking. Mikihiko smiled faintly.

  “During the Sino-Japanese War, the Kuki Group fanned the flames of war and cozied up to some of the military authorities to get the concessions in Manchuria. But why did their son have to go and serve? The son of a corporation that was still making enormous profits from World War Two? Because Shozo Kuki wasn’t from the main branch of the family. You can guess. He was raised as a cancer.”

  “A cancer?”

  My heart started to beat faster.

  “That’s right. When the family patriarch at the time, Yosuke Kuki, was sixty years old, he sired our father for his own amusement, to be a cancer on the world. The father of the man who was leader of the Rahmla cult, a high-ranking officer who committed as many atrocities as he could, was our father’s twin brother. To prolong the entertainment, the old man decided to send the cancer twins off to war.”

  With a bored expression he lifted the whiskey glass to his thick lips. The buildings I could see through the window were already largely in darkness.

  “And then they both went insane.”

  IN THE DARK, quiet room the rumble of the air conditioner rang in my ears like a low murmur. Outside the window most of the lights in the surrounding buildings had gone out, and a half-moon shone strongly between the tower blocks. Mikihiko kept on drinking, sunk deep in the sofa. The alcohol had not soaked to his core, however—rather than making him drunk, it had simply softened his gloomy exterior. Without thinking, I lit another cigarette. My heart continued to beat rapidly, ignoring my best effort
s to slow it.

  “It’s going to be a long night,” he said, rolling his tongue around his mouth. “Today I’m going to tell you the complete history of the Kukis.”

  I still couldn’t read his face.

  “What did Shozo Kuki do in the war?”

  “So you’re interested, are you, Koichi Shintani?” He smirked. “What did Father do in the war? I did some research and it gradually became clear. From his infancy, he was exposed to violence. Out of malice, he wasn’t fed properly and was horribly thin. He was constantly beaten. Because of that, he became all twisted inside and learned to act violently towards other people. His father, that is Yosuke Kuki, used to thrash him repeatedly for no reason and without showing any emotion. You know that Father was missing part of one ear. His twin brother, who was raised in exactly the same way, twice got into trouble for assaulting women and had a juvenile record, but not Father. My guess is he just harbored that violence inside him. But then he was sent off to war.”

  The painting of the lake behind him started to get on my nerves again.

  “He was posted on the front lines in the Philippines, places like Leyte and Luzon where the Japanese army had been completely destroyed. He was commanding a surviving platoon as a second lieutenant in the 356th Division. You probably know that most of the Japanese soldiers who died in World War Two died of disease and starvation. They weren’t killed by the US army, but just wandered around in the tropical jungle until they died, waiting for supplies that never arrived because the central government was incompetent. Father’s platoon was the same. There’s almost no evidence that the 356th took part in battle. They were starving. They couldn’t prevent their basic human instincts from coming out, terrifying though those urges were. It’s not difficult to imagine what happened to Father, raised as he was, when he was put in that situation.

  “In the area where his men were roaming there was a small village that was destroyed by fire. That got me interested, so I tracked down one of his men and asked him what had happened. This old man had a fine son and grandson. He had locked up his violent past inside him and lived in agony, unknown to anyone. He told me his story. We did everything, he told me. They set fire to the village to destroy the evidence of their ferocity, but it’s not easy for me to condemn them. Do you think it was possible for them to act like civilized human beings in those circumstances, carrying the burden of certain death, suffering terrible hunger for days on end, never knowing when they might be killed? With Father, who was accustomed to violence since his earliest childhood, the platoon trudged through the jungle, resigned, just putting one foot after the other, watching their friends die one by one of hunger or malaria, walking the boundary between life and death, covered in sores, convinced that their lives were over. And there in front of them was a peaceful village.

  “This village had a little bit of food, the people were weak and there were plenty of women—young women with beautiful bronze skin exposed to the tropical sky. With soft lips, gorgeous, fleshy legs peeping out from their skirts, smooth bodies. That’s probably when Father’s violence was released, with an ominous, overpowering noise, as though all the darkness of the world was concentrated there. They burned the villagers’ bodies, leaving nothing but bones. They must have been trying to destroy the evidence, the evidence of the lust and madness that burst forth from inside them, that they had forced themselves on the fleeing women until they were all corpses. Father and his men killed the men of the village and ate all the food. Then they herded the women to the center and raped them all at once. Day after day after day they ravished their victims. They lost themselves in the madness. Apparently some of the men kept on assaulting the women, not even realizing that they were dead. Not out of some elaborate perversity—it was simply a time of chaos, when humans revealed their true viciousness. The soldiers were no longer in full possession of their reason. They were already convinced of their own impending cruel death. Their dark lives were squirming, their reason was probably almost lost to insanity, and in its place their black unconscious minds were whispering to them. Whispering, ‘If this is the end, why not?’ ”

  His face still betrayed no feeling.

  “In nineteen forty-five we were defeated. Father answered the Americans’ call to surrender, became a prisoner and was returned to Japan. Apart from him and a few of his subordinates, the Three Hundred Sixty-fifth Division had almost entirely perished. The survivors were no doubt appalled by the cruel fact that they were still alive. Many of his comrades committed suicide. Father probably surrendered less out of a desire to keep on living than because of the thought that he still had unfinished business here. On his return, at first the other members of the Kuki family could hardly recognize him. That’s how much he had changed.

  “Japan had been occupied by the Americans and was ruled by MacArthur’s GHQ. The Americans dissolved all the conglomerates, because they figured that the close ties between some of these industrial giants and the military had been the cause of Japan’s aggression. The Kuki Group was one of the corporations that was broken up. Some of their shares were also confiscated. Amidst the confusion the head of the family, our grandfather Yosuke Kuki, died of stress, and his eldest son, who was much older than Father, and his son were killed in a car crash. They said it was caused by faulty maintenance, but I suspect that Father was behind it. The direct line had died out and Father, from the branch that was supposed to be cancers, became head of the Kuki clan. His twin brother, who was also a cancer, died during the war, completely insane. They say that he was killed by his subordinates, who could no longer bear to witness his vicious acts, but that’s not definite.

  “The Kuki family had lost some of its earlier power, but times were changing. Under the nineteen fifty-one Treaty of San Francisco, Japan became independent again and financial combines started to revive. The Americans wanted to use Japan as a defensive bulwark against Communism, against the Soviet Union, who were a threat at the time. To do that they judged that they needed a powerful economy, so they allowed the big corporations to reform. The Kukis started to mobilize their companies once more, as the Kuki Group. Then our older brother was born, I was born … and you were born.”

  He stood up. Maybe he was tired. He moved to the window and opened the curtains wide. The neighborhood was almost entirely in darkness. I heard him take a seat at the table behind me, but I was too drained to turn around.

  “Most of the companies of which I’m the major shareholder deal with war in one form or another, from brokering arms deals overseas to rebuilding after the wars are over. I can’t tell you what I’m up to yet, but I’ll tell you one thing. To start with, I’m putting all of my efforts into abolishing the article in the constitution that says that Japan can’t export weapons. If we can repeal that we’ll be able to sell locally produced weapons to other countries, then whenever a war breaks out we can reap vast profits. The arms business is a gold mine, because weapons are consumables. The longer the war drags on—in other words, the more people are killed—the more money we make. Japan’s superior technology will take the world by storm. Imagine we develop a fighter plane. We can include the maintenance in the contract, the whole works. It’s a gravy train with no end. Obviously it’s not the money I’m interested in. What I’m looking at, as an end in itself, is hundreds of thousands of people dying in those economic currents.”

  “What’s that got to do with Kaori? You’re sniffing around her, aren’t you? Why?”

  Behind me I could hear him breathing. He continued in the same tone.

  “So you noticed that. Well, I’d expect that from someone who hired that PI Sakakibara. You’re sharp.”

  He got to his feet again.

  “But the two things are separate. I’ve got a personal interest in Kaori. Well, I guess I’ve got a personal interest in all my schemes. Would you believe me if I said I’m doing it to get revenge for Father?”

  “No.”

  He slumped deeply onto the couch in front of me again. In his
hand was a fresh bottle of whiskey.

  “I’m the one who set Yajima onto Kaori.”

  “You?”

  “That’s right. Takayuki Yajima, the guy you murdered.”

  Without my noticing it the air conditioning had gone off and the room was even quieter. My forehead was covered with perspiration. He sat slouched on the sofa like some giant, limp worm.

  “I was surprised when the man I put on her came back dead. It’s your handiwork, that’s not hard to figure out. But why did I get him to target her? To get my hands on her. Here’s what I asked him to do—get her addicted and then deliver her to me.”

  “Why?” My voice shook violently.

  “Because I’m depressed. Father adopted her to show you hell. The Kuki family’s sacrificial lamb, as it were. As his son, I plan to destroy the girl that Father wanted to destroy but couldn’t. It’s an interesting echo, isn’t it? If I get her addicted, I can possess her forever, body and soul. I’m thinking about hiring another guy to get close to her.”

  “Stop it.”

  He laughed.

  “Fallen for her, have you? Don’t lie.”

  My field of vision narrowed. My headache grew fiercer and shadows stretched before my eyes.

  “What?”

  “I said don’t lie.”

  All I could see was his thick lips moving.

  “You want to hurt the girl, don’t you? You want to totally destroy her. You’re a Kuki. I know all about that. You want revenge on the woman who ruined your life. No, strictly speaking it’s not revenge, because you fell for her of your own accord, ruined your life of your own accord. Here’s a more accurate way of putting it. Unconsciously, you want to create the maximum evil. That means completely destroying the one thing that is the most valuable in the world to you. In other words, Kaori. To do that, you placed her on a pedestal above all else, just so you could harm her one day. You don’t love her. You fell for her so you could hurt her. You offered up your own life so you could hurt her. You made her the number one thing in your life so you could hurt her. So at some time you will hurt her for real. You long for the time when that overwhelming urge to destroy her will explode, and for the overwhelming despair that will follow. Your whole life is directed towards that instant. You long with your whole being for that explosion of darkness that will blaze forth in a way it never does in ordinary people’s lives, with lust and sorrow and despair all heaped up together. At that moment you will shake with an overpowering pleasure. With the pleasure of thoroughly insulting this world and your own life.”