I’ll give you the money in the register, I said to him in my mind, just hurry on out of here. Taking the money might be the end of this for you, but I don’t have it so easy—I’ll have to call the cops, report to the head office, do the paperwork, and all that. I’m paid by the hour, not by what I do, so don’t add to my duties.
Having only one worker on shift in the middle of the night was an invitation for robberies. Due to changes in our parent company—said by some to be a momentary cause for public concern—a single part-timer, me, was left to tend the store. This practice was introduced as a product of cold financial calculation: even after accounting for losses due to the occasional robbery, the company made more profit by trimming shifts nationwide from two people down to one.
Beside the sliding glass doors of the entrance, a multicolored strip of tape was marked 160 cm, 170 cm, 180 cm, and 190 cm. The sticker had been put there so that the entryway’s security camera could measure the height of anyone who passed through. These cameras took particularly crisp images; brazen robbers drawn in by desire for a little bit of scratch would eventually leave a clear capture of their likenesses, and their careers would end with an arrest. Japanese police were good enough at that sort of thing.
In that case, I considered, we should put a button beside the door for robbers, so that when they pushed it, a machine would dispense a few ten-thousand-yen bills, take a picture of their face, then automatically report it to the police. Maybe then the criminals would form an orderly queue and await their turn in solemn silence. I could avoid the police interview, and the other customers could go on eating their beef bowls undisturbed. Well, I guess it’s cheaper to give a part-timer like me overtime instead.
Kitchen knife in hand, the robber demanded my money, and I raised my arms high, indicating my lack of resistance as I slowly walked behind the counter to the register.
His eyes were like little marbles glaring at me through the visor of his motorcycle helmet. I suspected that he was devoid of any foresight or planning. For just a tiny amount of money and the short-lived freedom it would provide, he was committing himself to spend a vast stretch of time in prison. Sure, he might believe he could get away with this, but otherwise, he would one day be thrown into jail and forced into labor. Why not just work now, instead? In a way, the robber and I, we were both doing our jobs, all for a little bit of money.
The robber brandished his knife, urging me to hurry. Light reflected from the metal and bounced around the little restaurant.
It’s not my money anyway. So, sure, take it and get out of here.
But this must have been my unlucky day. Just as I had opened the register and was about to take out the money, another customer came in. This one covered the 190 cm mark of the sticker. He was a big man, the type who would order a jumbo beef bowl, extra beef. Steam rose from his bulging T-shirt. As he crossed the doorway, wiping sweat from his brow, he took one look at the scene and shouted, “You, what are you doing?”
I saw the tip of the robber’s knife tremble. I went stiff, my hand clutching the money in the cash drawer. With what I’m sure was a fraught expression, I thought to the interloper, Hey, man, keep it cool. A beef bowl restaurant in the night has no need for your clumsy justice. This guy here is a necessary business expense. I’ll give you your beef bowl afterward, so just pretend you didn’t see anything and take your seat. Don’t cause me any more trouble than I’ve already got.
But my hopes went unheard. The large man leaned forward in an aggressive stance. He was going to rush this way, his bulk as his weapon. The robber, on the other hand, was an older guy of average build; even accounting for the knife, the big man looked like he had the advantage.
The robber shouted something. It might have been words, but I couldn’t tell. It was like the cry of a cornered cat. He waved the knife around as the big man began his charge, but even as he did so, the robber shrunk back. Even worse, he tried to hide behind my counter.
What the hell are you doing? I thought to the robber. Damn it. Keep away from me. I’m not your ally.
My body was frozen; my hand in the money tray. The robber turned around. A streak of light drew a line from right to left, left to right. I felt a warm impact run along my neck. A curtain of red fanned out before me, filling my vision.
A thing of beauty and art, the red curtain ill suited the dingy mass-produced decor of the beef bowl joint. With no flaws in the fabric, the folds, or the way light reflected from it, the curtain evoked velvet woven with care by an artisan’s hand. Such a thing had no reason to be in a place like this; yet here it was, swaying in the air conditioner breeze.
For a while, I was mesmerized by the movement of the folds, but soon the strength left my knees, and my chin slammed on the register as I dropped. It didn’t hurt. As coins rained down, I kissed the floor, which smelled like an old mop, and I finally realized that blood was spurting from my carotid artery.
Shit, this is going to be hard to clean up, I thought, and I died.
The next instant, I was standing in the restaurant, gripping a knife drenched in my black-red blood. “I” was lying behind the counter, looking as miserable and unattractive as I had always been in the mirror. The blood from “my” neck felt warm on my hands.
The deluge of blood had given a blotchy red-and-white pattern to the big man’s T-shirt. He looked like a murderer as he stood in stunned shock.
Leaving behind the large dumbstruck man and my fallen self, I ran into the washroom. I checked the mirror that I had wiped clean at the beginning of my shift not long before. I was wearing a motorcycle helmet. I took it off. The slickness of the gore made the helmet hard to remove.
Reflected in the mirror was a man I didn’t know, of average build and with eyes like marbles.
When I returned to the lobby, the dead man behind the counter was, as I had thought, me. No sign of the big man. He must have fled. What a jerk. My corpse was still. The thick smell of blood, ill suited to a beef bowl restaurant, filled the room.
Does this mean that I killed me?
I heard a police car siren in the distance.
—
My new stomach protested with a fierce hunger. Leaving “my” dead body where it was, I made myself a jumbo beef bowl and was eating it when the police arrested me.
They took me to interrogation, where I insisted that I was really me, and I didn’t know anything about my killer. But the investigator wouldn’t listen, his face taking a disapproving expression straight out of a religious painting from some bygone century. My background and record, as told to me, were of no relation to my own, and my parents who visited were strangers. I was grateful for the money they sent in for me, so even though they were the parents of my murderer, I decided to think of them as my mysterious benefactors.
I lost count of how many times I looked at myself in the mirror, but each time my face and my body unmistakably belonged to the man who knifed me. If I knew nothing else, I could be sure that the body I now inhabited had been the one that killed me. I underwent a psychiatric evaluation, but according to the result, I wasn’t insane, but rather in perfect mental health. At this news, my public defender looked distressed, while the investigator seemed happy. I kept on insisting that my inner self had been put into this body, but my lawyer admonished me, saying, “You’re only going to hurt the feelings of the bereaved family.” My parents—that is, the parents of the me that was killed—were apparently seeking a harsh sentence. This was unfortunate for me, yet knowing that my parents felt that way brought me tears of happiness.
Ultimately, since I didn’t show any signs of remorse, I was sentenced to thirty years of imprisonment with hard labor. I argued that it was unreasonable for me, who had been killed, to also receive the punishment for that killing, but doing so only lowered the judge’s opinion of me.
I was taken to a prison somewhere in the north called Asahikawa, though the place must have been well heated, because it was considerably warmer there than the detention center in To
kyo’s Katsushika Ward. Less favorable was my bed’s location, closest to the toilet stall in a room of six, and that my mattress’s sheets were already torn. In the detention center, being a murderer placed me at the top of the pecking order, but only murderers were in Asahikawa, and a mere single knifing was nothing special. I felt like a piglet wearing a fake mane locked in a cage of lions.
The first night, someone snuck up to me while I was asleep.
He slunk through the darkness, and without a word, he wrapped something ropelike around my neck and pulled tight. I tried to resist, but the strength left my body in a matter of seconds. Wait. I’m no criminal. I was sent here by mistake. What’s the point of killing me? But my thoughts never made it into words. Instead, I slowly began to feel better. So, getting strangled really does make you feel good, I noted, and then I was staring down at my former self with new eyes, my former tongue lolling, body lying dead on the mattress. My former face looked like a hard-boiled egg, only black and red. Upon a closer look, I saw that the thing squeezed around my neck was a piece of torn bedsheet twisted into a rope.
What had been a vague hunch was now proven true: when my body died, my consciousness somehow survived. Where the consciousness of my new body went, I had no idea. I didn’t know why it happened. Whatever. It’s all bullshit.
My cellmates were all quietly asleep. Maybe none had noticed the midnight murder drama, or maybe some had and were only pretending to sleep. Then I realized something: I had been strangled by sheets torn from my own bedding. In other words: the murder had been premeditated. If that was the case, my killer had surely planned on leaving no evidence of his deed. There had to be some way to make my former self’s death appear a suicide.
I surveyed the cell, and the half-open door to the toilet caught my eye. I dragged my former self over, tied one end of the sheet to the doorknob, and made it look like I had strangled myself.
The new me returned to my new me’s bed.
When the guards made their rounds, they saw my suicide and made a fuss, but none of this had anything to do with the new me; to my surprise, the very next day was the last day of my sentence, and I was released.
As I set foot outside the prison gate, some hoodlum came to meet me. He was missing a front tooth and looked none too bright. He seemed to know me, but I didn’t even know his name.
“Nice work,” he said, cackling. “Sounds like ya pulled it off. The Aniki’s happy too.”
I was deflated. A gold watch glittered on my wrist; I couldn’t believe the gaudy thing was mine. I was wearing a square-shouldered suit like the yakuza used to wear twenty years ago. I hadn’t checked yet, but I was sure I had a dragon or something tattooed across my back. And whoever this gang was, they must have had some connection with my murder.
The punk insisted I get in his car, so I did. At a rest stop along the way, I pretended to use the bathroom and escaped. I didn’t have anywhere to go, and these yakuza held the only clues to my new self, but I wasn’t going to let this guy take me to the kind of people who would order a murder in a prison, no matter what reason they might have had.
I ran as hard as I could.
I was scared. I was scared of what was happening to me, and I was terrified of this body I was now using. If my former self had been marked for death, then the murder of my former-former self may have been planned as well. And if the government knew that someone like me existed, they would certainly work to keep me under control. And if they captured me? They would keep me alive and under wraps. And they would experiment. And experiment. And experiment. That’s what I would do. I knew that’s what I would do. It would be for the good of mankind. I would spare no concern for the rights of one individual.
Here a convenience store worker, there a uniformed delivery driver, a middle-aged man in a suit swinging his umbrella like a golf club—I saw everyone as a pursuer.
Luckily, my new self’s decade-and-change-long stint in prison had earned me a stipend of two hundred thousand yen. I bought new clothes from a home-improvement store and discarded my old ones, and I sold the gaudy gold watch at a pawn shop. By taking a succession of local trains, I returned to the Tokyo where I was born.
For a little while, I lingered around my original self’s parents’ house. But I was no longer that me, nor even the me who had killed me; I was now a total stranger to my earliest self, with no connection to my parents. I had to run away when it looked like the old lady next door was going to report me. My current face was just too villainous.
For a while, I drifted from one business hotel to the next, but when my wallet started getting light, I applied for a part-time job at a beef bowl restaurant. I still remembered how to do the job, but they didn’t hire me, whether due to my forbidding face or the tattoos, faintly visible through my shirt, that betrayed my yakuza past. In the end, I decided to make my home on the banks of the Arakawa River.
It was a place where the homeless gathered, a tiny village hidden behind the tall river reeds. The scattering of simple structures with their blue tarp roofs was visible from the train line that crossed the water, but from the side, the settlement was entirely unnoticeable. This was the best place for me now. I built myself a grand home with scavenged cardboard and blue tarp I’d bought at the hardware store.
In the weeds next door lived a white-haired old man called Lon. I didn’t know if that was his family name, his given name, or a nickname. He claimed it meant “dragon.”
Lon earned his living by collecting magazines from trash cans and selling them to used bookstores. When business was slow, he fished with a handmade pole. He told me the bluegills in the Arakawa tasted muddy, but when he added curry powder, he found that the fish were not inedible. He welcomed me with some one-cup sake and proclaimed that he would bestow me his magazine territory after he kicked the bucket. Every now and then I caught a sign of senility in him, but he was a very kindhearted man.
We often fished together, standing side by side, talking about this or that. Usually the topics were trivial, like tomorrow’s weather, or a lady who shared her bento boxes on the days she didn’t sell out, or a nasty old woman who sicced her dog on my new neighbor.
There were mornings, and there were evenings. I’m not sure whether I had told him what had happened to me or if Lon came up with the notion on his own—but at some point, my neighbor had begun to claim that he would come back to life as another person after he died. Maybe he’d gone full-on senile, or maybe he’d reworked his story to mirror mine. That he could respawn or something like that was of course impossible. I couldn’t prove it, but I was certain.
And then I wondered if I had been coming back to life as myself. Maybe I had some mental illness that made me think I had died multiple times. That would make me a homeless ex-con who falsely believed he had been murdered at his part-time job in a beef bowl joint then taken to prison where he was murdered again. The slippery blood on my palm, the feeling of the rope on my neck, and the pleasure of ascension—maybe it was all some delusion conjured up by a diseased mind during my imprisonment.
In the end, I decided to buy into Lon’s tall tales. It was my way of finding enjoyment in my life on the riverbank teeming with bugs.
“How long ago was it now, I wonder,” Lon said, “that I heard there was a new kind of hot dog in L.A., so I went all the way there to try it. When I came back home, I started selling the same dogs. And they really sold.”
According to him, he was actually an American. He looked entirely Japanese, and he never spoke English, but that was his story. He had laughed and said that becoming Japanese was handy, because a gentle smile could answer any question.
“That went well for a while,” he continued, “until a rival hot dog cart opened up, and then it was all over. Deep in debt, I fled from my wife and children and drove to some uninhabited desert, then put a gun in my mouth and killed myself. And what happened next? I became a wealthy man who was getting himself drunk at the bar nearest where I was.”
“You say nea
rest,” I said, “but it had to be pretty far away.”
“That’s what’s interesting about it.” He licked his lips, his mouth a black cavern. “After that, I went to where I had died. The car I had driven supposedly the day before was covered in dust, and my body, practically mummified. I hadn’t been revived immediately, but rather had been reborn as someone else many years later.”
Lon was talkative today. It might have been due to the happoshu—the cans of almost-beer he’d bought at a discount store for thirty yen each.
Lon said that we shouldn’t think of ourselves as being reborn, but as having a kind of mental illness or something, transmitted through death. In other words, “I” really was dying each time. Then, some bystander seeing “my” death would begin to wonder, Maybe I’m “me,” and by doing so began taking my place. Only in retrospect would it seem that “my” consciousness continued on. When Lon came back to life in Arizona, he did so only because someone had discovered the mummy inside the car, and the memories of the bar and everything else were nothing more than fabrications after the fact.
As Lon explained it, people like to believe, “I think, and then I act,” but the reality is that the speed of communication of the nervous system is not that fast. There’s just not enough time for the brain to think in response to an event and then to act. The brain is nothing more than a circuit that recognizes the automatic actions of the body, then finds self-satisfaction in the belief, “I thought it, therefore I acted.” Given that, it was entirely believable that a person, having acted as if he or she was someone else, could end up thinking, “I was the other person all along.”
What Lon said had logic. I saw no other explanation for my condition, outside of the paranormal phenomenon of post-death possession, or the existence of another, higher-level me controlling each successive me down here. And neither of those were at all believable.
Lon said, “This me here is me, but I don’t think I’m me. I have a transmissible mental illness that makes me think I’m not me. So can I really say that I’m alive? Meanwhile, the me who now believes this to be my body—he died a long time ago, and is being roasted in the fires of hell. The actions of the me here can do nothing for the me there. The me now is like the living dead, and without intervention, I’ll continue like this for eternity. It’s terrifying.”