Silence Once Begun

Int. Note

Kakuzo, Kakuzo. Sato Kakuzo. In all my research, I had come upon him again and again only to hit upon one impasse or another. I felt that I must find him if I was to have the full story. As luck would have it, I managed to, but last of all, and only after a long search, culminating in a great piece of luck.

Here is how it happened:

A person like Sato Kakuzo — I imagined he could not be found unless he wanted to be found. The question then was: how does one make him want to be found? Or how does one make him reveal himself? I had a sense of Kakuzo’s vanity. I felt he was not a nihilist — and that he did truly believe in history, in a parade of history. I felt surely that he would not like the idea of a faulty account, of any faulty account. And if there was to appear somewhere a faulty account of him most particularly — or of something he had had to do with …

I was sure that Kakuzo would want the story to be correct; after all, there was every indication that he was the original architect; it was he who wrote the confession.

So, this is what I did: I arranged with a newspaper friend to print a remembrance article about the Narito Disappearances in a Sakai paper. I purposefully left him completely out of it. A long article about the most important event of his life — and no mention of Sato Kakuzo. My friend was understandably hesitant to print such a thing, but finally he did.

For a week we waited. One day, then another. I grew afraid that he had died, or that he had been living abroad for decades. Or perhaps he simply hadn’t seen that newspaper? Perhaps he hated newspapers. When a week had passed, I felt sure he would never be found.

Yet the ruse worked. A week and a half after the first article, the office of the newspaper received an indignant letter. What fools they were, the letter said, to print absolute fallacies without any reference to the truth. Were they journalists or not? Once upon a time newspapers had had a relationship to truth. Had this commitment been completely effaced? And on and on in this fashion. The letter was signed, Sato Kakuzo, and on the envelope was written a return address.

I contacted him then, and he agreed to meet.

The place of our meeting was a sort of boathouse and cafe at the shore. He showed up very late, more than an hour. I was preparing to leave when a car pulled into the lot. Indeed, it was he. Kakuzo wore an old fisherman’s hat, a tweed jacket, and corduroy trousers. He appeared a perfectly innocuous older man. His English was clear and unaccented. He had brought things with him, things for me. If I were to do the story, he would have me know the whole of it.

This interview was the only time I was able to meet him. However, the materials that he gave me provided many hours of study, so I felt that I had spent a great deal more time with him than I actually ever did. One thing that must be stressed is the immense force of personality possessed by Sato Kakuzo. I left the interview unsurprised that he had made Oda Sotatsu sign the confession. Indeed, he might have managed to convince anyone to do the same.

Interview (Sato Kakuzo)

[Int. note. At first we sat at a table by the window, but the position of the sun shifted, and it became too bright, so we were forced partway through to move to another table. Both times Kakuzo chose the chair he wanted and sat in it, without seeing whether I had an opinion on the matter. I suppose, as he was being interviewed, there is a certain justice to that. It was interesting to see that he always chose the seat from which one might observe the door. When I asked him whether I could use my device to record the conversation, he refused. Only after we had spoken for a little while did he relent.]

INT.

So, you had been inspired by the French Situationists? You were inspired by the ’68 riots? That’s what got you into trouble at first in Sakai and led you to return home?

KAKUZO

Do you know the fable of the stonecutter?

INT.

No.

KAKUZO

It is an old fable, Persian, I think. I had read it around that time, and it made me feel, somehow — as though certain things might be possible. I felt that things I had thought should be classed impossible were truly possible, with the very greatest effort.

INT.

What is the fable?

KAKUZO

A king is out riding with his nobles, all ahorse the very best steeds that can be had. They are riding out beyond the city where the king lives. They pass through fields and down road after road. The horse the king is riding is a fine new horse, such a horse as he has never possessed, and so he gives it its head, and the horse carries him farther than he has ever gone. The king and his nobles ride so far and so fast that they become bewildered, but their blood is in their faces and their hearts are beating so tremendously that they want only to course on and on. A wind is blowing and the weather is spinning in the air, clouds turning like looms. The horses trail to a stop, and the company is on a road before a lowly dwelling. It is a stonecutter’s hut. The king dismounts, and goes to the door. He knocks and the door is answered by an old man with pale cruel hands of sinew and bone. The old man welcomes the company and receives them into his hut. Strangely enough, there is a place for everyone. The table is large enough for all. Each lord sits at table, shoulder to shoulder, and the king sits at one end. The stonecutter sits at the other. I will feed you, said the stonecutter, but it will not be anything like what you eat. The nobles groused, saying they would like this or that, saying is there this or that, but the stonecutter looked at them and they looked at his hands, and they fell silent. The king spoke, saying, they were come like beggars, and were glad to be received at all. Such a thing a king had never said. So, the stonecutter went into his larder and brought out a goose that resembled a girl. He brought out a deer that resembled a boy. He brought out bread like the hair of a hundred court ladies, threaded into rope. He brought out honey like the blood of goats. Do not eat this food, the lords said, but the king laughed. The stonecutter watched them speaking, and the king laughed, saying, where you are brought by a swift steed is a place for courage. But the lords said beneath their breath, some steeds are too swift. Then the plates were filled, heaped nearly to the ceiling and passed around, and always the king chose first, and he filled his plate and ate of it, and filled it and ate of it and filled it and ate of it. Never had he tasted such food. And soon they were all fast asleep, and the stonecutter rose from the table. That is the end of the first part.

INT.

What is the second part?

KAKUZO

Do you want to hear it?

INT.

I do.

KAKUZO

The king wakes the next day, and he finds that he is the stonecutter. He sees no lords in his house. There are no horses in his field. There are only the remains of an enormous feast, which ended sometime in the night. He looks down at his hands and he sees how terrifying they are, sees the white bone, the sinew, that which the stone may not resist. But he is a king. He sets out on the road toward his kingdom, and follows the trail of the horses’ hooves. For nineteen days he walks. It takes him nineteen days to travel what on the fastest horses took a single flight of restless speed. Still he perseveres, and on the nineteenth day, he reaches the gates of his city. He presents himself there, and the guards will not let him in. Have you nothing to sell, they ask. Have you no money with which to buy? For what reason do you want to enter this fine city? Do you not know, they asked. Do you not know that this is the richest and wealthiest city in the world? And some fear in his heart keeps the king from revealing himself. I will see, he says, how the land lies. And he goes a short distance into a desolate field, and he finds a stone. He sits by the stone and passes his hands over it. He passes his hands over it again and again, and he knows then things that the stonecutter knows and he breaks the stone and seals it and breaks it and seals it and tears at it as if at a cloth. When he has done, he has made a puzzle of the thinnest weave, a puzzle in stone. He puts it beneath his ragged cloak, and goes back to the gates. There he waits until morning, and when the first guard to wake looks out at the sun, he is there.

You again. Have you nothing to sell? Have you the means to buy? The king lifts the cloak to show the stone puzzle, and the guard’s eyes follow the impossible lines and turns and corners. Round about they go, round about and around and they fall into nothing, into nowhere. Again he tries, again, he can reach nowhere with the puzzle, with his eyes on the puzzle. Very well, he says. You are welcome to the city, and he opens the gate. The king covers his puzzle, and goes then upon the streets of his own city. Never has he seen it so well. The merchants are opening their stalls in the squares and streets. Animals are being fed, watered, slaughtered, skinned, ground, groomed, their manes tied with ribbons. He finds his familiar way to the castle. There is another gate. I will see the king, he says. Anyone has a right, says the guard, to see the king. But it may be the end of you. The guard brushes the king’s hood back and looks upon his face. But he does not see anyone he knows. He has not seen this person before. Good fortune to you, he says, and opens the gate.

Then the king is upon the courtyard of his own castle. He goes along the passages as a claimant, with the others who have things to ask. They are endless in number, it seems, and they are admitted, all at once, to an interior chamber where the king will appear and speak to them. The king himself is astonished. He has never spoken to claimants. He has never seen this room. But an hour passes and another, and a counselor comes out and sits in a high chair. I am the king, he says. I know you, thinks the king. You are but a counselor. And so the king makes himself the last of all those there, and waits, and when they have all spoken to the counselor, and when they have all gone away, he presents himself, saying, I have something to say to the king, but you are not the king. I am not the king, agrees the counselor, stepping down off the high chair, but we will go to him now. So, they go down more hallways and cross more courts, the counselor, the king, and the guards, and they enter another chamber, where another counselor, yet higher, sits. I have known these men all my life, thinks the king, and never did I know … but already he is brought forward. Here is the king, they say to him. Tell him what you will. You are not the king, he says. I have come to see the king. And so they draw back the cloth at the back of the room, the heavy, rich, banded cloth, and there is another passage, and they go down it, the king, the first counselor, the second counselor, and the guards, and they reach a place where the guards can go no farther, and the counselors lead the king on, one on each side. His clothes are so filthy, his face so etched with weather and sun, that they can scarcely bear to be beside him, yet they pass on together. Into the final chamber they go. There sits the king, and he knows himself. He has seen that face, so often! To him he goes, and when the king on his throne perceives the stonecutter’s robes, when he perceives the stonecutter’s hands, when he perceives that the stonecutter has passed all obstacles to come before him, he opens his eyes wide as any owl, and calls out. Who has let this man in? To the counselors, there is a lowly stonecutter, standing before their king. And this is what they see. The king holds out his hands and the stonecutter opens his robe and holds out his impossible puzzle, this fashioning of stone and light. The king receives it into his hands and there he makes it again the stone it was, and he sets it beside him, as it had sat in the field.

Then the king wakes, and it is morning. The lords have saddled their horses. Come, they say, come let us ride away. And the king rouses himself from the table where he was sleeping and he goes to his horse. Out from the hut comes the stonecutter and he looks into the king’s face. What passes between them then is neither for lords, nor for storytellers. Who can say what it means to be one person and not another? When they returned to the city, the king did nothing as he had before, and he led his kingdom into a new age, which even now has been forgotten. Of it, we have only this tale.

INT.

You felt before that all things were inevitable, that nothing could be done. But when you read that, you saw that there was a tiller? That things truly could be changed, and even one man could do it?

KAKUZO

Exactly. I felt I could be the stonecutter.

INT.

But there is no king. Even if you could be the stonecutter, I don’t see …

KAKUZO

The king is now in general. The kingship is held in general. It is what is tolerated by the people.

INT.

Then, to change their vision, you would need to …

KAKUZO

I needed to speak to everyone at once.

INT.

But you were young, and finding your way. How did you make your plans? How did you set them in motion? It was the middle of the 1970s. Perhaps — civil and legal formality was the farthest thing from anyone’s mind?

KAKUZO

Not so. There were some of us who were concerned. It seemed that Japan had the chance to become what no other nation was or has been: an actually fair place. I wanted that, more than anything. In my own way, I would say, though I’m sure others would disagree with me, I would say I am …

INT.

A moral man? A patriotic man?

KAKUZO

Maybe not in the sense of one who follows the emperor, who gives up everything for someone else’s cause. I gave up everything, but for my own cause.

INT.

Did you? Or did you convince Sotatsu to do so on your behalf?

KAKUZO

His life was a zero. He would have done nothing. Instead, look: someone is writing a book about it.

(Laughs, spits on the floor.)

INT.

I don’t …

KAKUZO

I had returned home from the city. I reconnected with a girl named Jito Joo. We were living together. She had been my girlfriend some years before that, but things hadn’t worked out. I left. Anyway, now that I had returned, we had ended up together again. Oda Sotatsu was an old friend. I started to see him. We were all feeling the same way, very restricted, very angry. Joo and I would stay up all night talking about things that we could do to escape, ways that things could change. I had a few friends who had ended up in jail and I was angry about the justice system. I felt we were very far behind the way it worked in other supposedly civilized countries.

INT.

So, that’s what hatched the idea of the confession?

KAKUZO

Partially, yes. It was partially that, and partially just anger.

INT.

Did you have any help in preparing the confession?

KAKUZO

A friend from Sakai, I won’t say his name, a lawyer. He helped draft it. The intention was that it be legally binding, to a degree. Of course, it is difficult to make it truly binding. But, as binding as we could make it, we did.

INT.

And had you targeted Sotatsu all along? You knew that he would be the one?

KAKUZO

I felt that, and I wasn’t alone in this — I felt that I was too important as the organizer to be the one who would be in prison. I didn’t see that as my part of the task.

INT.

You saw that as Sotatsu’s part?

KAKUZO

He was well suited to it. I knew him to be honorable, to have great inner resources. I also knew that he had obtained a very, I don’t know, bleak outlook. He was not very happy at that time, when I had returned. I was unsurprised when he agreed.

INT.

I should tell you that I have been in contact with many different people in my research for this. Among them, the entire Oda family, and Jito Joo.

KAKUZO

Joo also?

INT.

Yes.

KAKUZO

You have to be careful whom you trust. Everyone has a version, and most of them are wrong. In fact, I can tell you clearly: they are all wrong. I am in a position to help you understand what happened. You need to understand, Mr. Ball, the world is made up almost entirely of sentimental fools and brutes.

INT.

And which are you?

KAKUZO

(laughs)

INT.

Truly.

KAKUZO

A sentimental brute, I suppose. One who means well, but has no feeling for others.

[Int. note. Here Kakuzo gave me the tape of the initial night — the actual tape of the moment when Sotatsu was lured into confessing. I was shocked. At first, I had trouble believing the truth of it, but when I listened, I knew it could be nothing else. Among the many things that were strange and beautiful, one was the manner in which the voices of Kakuzo and Joo were different from when I had spoken with them, but subtly. It was a weight of time — all the time that had passed since the tape had been made, and all the things that had happened.]

[After handing me the materials, Kakuzo did not want to be interviewed any more. He merely gave me the tape of that first interaction, and a series of statements. The statements I provide hereafter, verbatim (changed only as per my initial note). The statements were of drastically varying age, some even predating the events. I will enumerate them below.]

Statements (Sato Kakuzo)

[Int. note. The statements were carbon copies of originals that Kakuzo kept. I occasionally had difficulty making out a word here or there. In such cases, I strove to keep meaning clear and chose the least outlandish or strange usage. Some of the statements were little more than scraps. Others were on larger paper, printed with diagrams and explanatory text. I do not give all here, as the relationship of some to the matter at hand was tangential at best.]

1. Narito Disappearances: Blueprint

2. The Invention of a Crime

3. Confessions & The Idea of a Confession

4. Joo & How It Went in Practice

Narito Disappearances: BLUEPRINT

1. The abduction of individuals from their homes

2. The confession of a person

3. The trial of that person

4. The execution of that person

5. The reappearance of the various individuals

6. Public acknowledgment of wrongdoing on the part of the governing mechanism

The first should be accomplished in total secrecy. There must be no intervention of law enforcement at this time. It should be easily accomplished, but must require elaborate and long-standing plans, as well as the use of specific resources.

The second must involve either: a. an unbreakable person (dedicated to the cause and understanding it thoroughly); or b. a person who will prove unbreakable based upon arbitrary reasons, reasons of peculiarity, i.e., an eccentric.

The third will proceed naturally, as should the fourth.

The fifth is an artificial event, prompted by the announcement of the fourth.

The sixth may be hoped for, and can be accomplished by the pageantry and spectacle of the fifth, particularly by the directedness of the fifth, and the manner in which it places blame.

The Invention of a Crime

The invention of a crime is a special matter. A crime does not exist, and then it is invented. It is not executed. Never is the crime executed; it is merely invented. It is not carried out, but it appears to have been carried out. This appearance of execution creates the crime in the eyes of the populace who beg for enforcement. The individual who accepts guilt for the crime that never occurred is then caught (or comes forward) and is punished. The punishment, of course, is real. Should the society have sufficient resources to detect that the crime is an invented crime, and marry it with an invented execution, similarly un — carried out, though appearing to have been, then the crime would be un — carried out, would be revealed in its un-carried-out-ness and the criminal released. The system would have proven efficacious in the extreme. The chances of such an event are nil.

The invention of a crime is not the province of the criminal mastermind, as it does not, in its essence, involve any crime at all. The principals, both the victims and the agents, are complicit in the event. Some have said that this is always the case (in nature). We do not accept or make that point here. Here we simply say: all involved in the “invented crime” are a part of an organization created for the purpose of arranging the “invented crime,” and all have knowledge of the enterprise in which they are embroiled. The single exception may be (and must be) the confessor, if he be of the second type (spoken of previously).

The action of the crime must be such that it involves tremendous fear on the part of the populace with little reason for that fear. In other words, the fear that is generated must be archetypal, must not be truly causally connected with the crime. The fear must be inspired. Any direct connection between the fear and the event of the crime could serve as an infraction of sorts, and would, at the end of all events, prove to be a true crime, actually punishable.

The organization must have within it members capable of long silence and great discretion. The gathering of such individuals is the principal difficulty that faces any organizer at the founding of such an organization. It is most especially problematic when the ethical problem the organization has been created in order to combat is itself vague and full of complication.

To that end: a discussion of confession.

Confessions & The Idea of a Confession

It is at the heart of our human enterprise, that is to say, at the heart of society, to allow consensus a power it ought not to have.

This is to say, if a man makes a soup, a patently bad soup, and another tastes it on the end of a spoon and says to the first, “This is good soup,” the soup then is known as good. It is acknowledged good. It fulfills its purpose as soup. The consensus regarding the soup is that the soup is good. It perhaps will be made again in the same way. Others arriving on the scene, perhaps with doubt in their hearts as to their ability to accurately judge a soup to be good or not, they hear this verdict of the soup. They taste the soup and know it to be good. They are not judging the soup themselves; this power they have not obtained: rather they listen to that initial agreement.

When a man has committed a crime, it should be prosecuted in a fair society only if the evidence of that crime may be seen. No imaginary documents, that is to say, documents that are the province solely of the human mind unconnected with the world, should be used toward a prosecution or conviction.

That we as humans believe we see things we do not see.

That we will stake our lives and reputations on the above.

That we as humans believe we have done things we have not.

That we will stake our lives and reputations on that, too.

Ladies and gentlemen, it is clear that the mechanism of the law cannot discover all ends. They cannot find all evidence. It is the nature of the world that all evidence is ground into nothing, sometimes in mere minutes. It is the nature of the world that this grinding of evidence into nothing does not proceed (always) with malice or intention. The world simply renews itself. Chaos and order rear their alternate heads as two winds that tear at each other’s cheeks.

This being the case, it was soon determined (early in the course of law) that an element, a freeing element, might be obtained in the search for justice. This freeing element may be divided into two parts:

1. The first: eyewitness testimony.

2. The second: the confession.

That a person saw something, himself or herself, has long been accounted a part of the judicial process, however, it never was given the pride of place that it enjoys today, principally because the opinion of any one individual was never accorded respect on the basis of an individual being an individual. This is to say, in previous times, one’s office as a human did not accord one the full opportunity to both claim something and be its proof.

In previous times, such proofs were made thusly: by appeal to the gods.

That agency was then made known through various trials: trial by combat, trial by fire, trial by water. This then was the proof. The proof was not the accusation, nor the statement of an individual.

That said, it has generally always been the case that a person willing to confess to a crime may be acknowledged to have performed that crime. Such a position is mistaken: one cannot know that a person has the truth of a thing, most particularly in the manner in which he/she is affected by it. Our knowledge about ourselves is our least reliable knowledge. Yet, so thoroughly do we ordinarily champion our own cause that it is acknowledged effective to believe that a person who deems it impossible to any further champion his/her own cause must be guilty. Else, why would he/she not continue to declare innocence?

It is primarily through a judgment that favors efficiency over truth that confessions are deemed viable.

All true convictions should proceed from a scientific investigation the results of which can be replicated (and which should be shown to be replicable). A particular person should not necessarily have any involvement whatsoever in the investigation into or trial of their offense. The world itself should provide all details and all evidence. If such evidence is lacking, then a crime cannot be proven without a doubt, and a person ought not to be convicted or punished.

Joo & How It Went in Practice

[Int. note. This was the most recent of the papers. In my opinion, the previous sheets were old notes, written by Sato Kakuzo prior to the Narito Disappearances, likely even prior to his departure from Sakai. This paper, on the other hand, might even have been written in the year I received it, or thereabouts, long after the last gasps of the Narito Disappearances had been forgotten. He begins this with a vague ascription of date, but whether it can be trusted is unclear.]

The Unwilling Participation of Jito Joo

I write now to explain the unwilling participation of Jito Joo in the events of last year. Whether this document will be read by anyone during my life, whether it will be destroyed before anyone has seen it, whether it will be seen next week after I am carted away on some unrelated charge, who can say? I write it in order to not be a part of any deception related to Jito Joo, in order to say my piece about the truth of the matter.

I had known Jito Joo before I returned from Sakai. When we resumed our relationship, it was not much of a surprise to either of us. Things had gone well before I left; they went well after. It was simply a geographical dislocation that made us stop seeing each other. It was a geographical reuniting that prompted the resumption of our relationship.

I will say this also: Joo was smarter, sharper, and more clever than any of the other girls I knew, whether in Sakai or anywhere in Osaka. This alone was a determinant for me. I loathe to repeat myself, and with Joo, one never must. We also shared certain sympathies of temperament, and of political viewpoint. As I see it, the politics of our daily life are inextricable from the larger politics of the world. Therefore, when we felt ourselves confined, when Joo and I, sitting in our small apartment, felt ourselves confined, we sought for ways out.

I had been reading a great deal. I had read of various French attempts to throw off this oppressive air that infiltrates daily life. Debord, Vaneigem, and others had made many attempts, both to inspire, and to act in their own right. This led directly, as I will explain, to the events that I caused, that I and Jito Joo caused, in Osaka Prefecture.

I had planned the matter already. I had a sense of what I wanted to do. My eye had pinpointed a term, had seen a specific, which I felt should be overloaded and made to destroy itself. That specific, that element, was the confession. I felt that no one had stood against it sufficiently. I felt that its innate duplicity, its essential divergence from truth or fact, should be marked and seen by all for what it was. Yet wherever I went, whomever I spoke to, I was astonished. The matter was not clear; this matter, so clear to me, was not clear to others. Patently, I saw this as an opportunity, one to be prosecuted with swiftness, if I may take liberties with the phrase.

So, to return to the narrative, I was living there with Joo. I had made a plan, but had no helpers. I was working at the docks, traveling to the docks to work, and returning exhausted. I was angry. I was in love. I was also afraid — I was not sure that Joo would share my adherence to the precise elements of my plan, and once I confided it to her, it would have to go forward in that exact way, else fail.

That is why I trapped her. That is why the first contract was not the contract signed by Oda Sotatsu. The first contract, made in the same way, after a supposed game of chance, was signed by Jito Joo. I was ashamed to have had to make it, ashamed to have had to perpetrate it. But, in the course of time I saw that she would never have agreed to the repeatedly heartless actions that were required of her, had she not been forced by her agreement, and by her fealty to what she saw as her honor.

Joo & How It Went in Practice 2

One night, Joo and I were playing at a game, a game of chance, a comparison of cards, a drawing and comparison of cards. Neither would win more than the other. She would at times win; I would at times win. Our method at first had been to play for forfeits. When the burden of inventing forfeits proved too much, we moved to agreed-upon and more dangerous consequences. We began to cut ourselves with a knife upon a loss. I stepped from a second-story window and injured my leg. She stepped in front of a car and caused it to drive off the road. I give these examples as evidence of the state of mind in which we were going forward. We were in love with each other. We were in love with the mechanism we were using to repel the dank pressure of conformity. We were despairing all the while, because after each arch of our backs, the weight pressed down again, just as strongly as it had before.

Yet, I had my plan. Joo knew nothing of it. I said to her, I said, Joo, this time we shall write an agreement. We shall make a contract. The contract will bind one to the will of the other for a period of time. She objected. A period of time? How banal. Why not the course of a project, why not for the duration of some project, that therefore could stand for a week or a year or more. This was the sort of thing Joo would suggest. I agreed, and so we hammered out the terms of the bargain. The loser would be forced to obey the other entirely within the confines of the proceeding, of the particular project. Beyond that, he or she could have his/her will, but only insomuch as he/she would not affect the successful execution of the project by his/her actions.

I wrote it up. We cosigned the establishment of a bargain: that the loser of our card game would be forced to sign the sheet. We dated it.

We then sat facing each other. I laid the cards out. She cut them and drew one. I cut them and drew another. I won and she signed the agreement. It was as simple as that. I had placed the cards in order, and knew where to look for my winning card. She didn’t guess that I would do such a thing. She didn’t realize that there was a thing for which I was working, a thing for which I would cheat. But there was, and I did. And from then on, I had Jito Joo’s complete obedience in all matters related to the Narito Disappearances.

She never went back on her agreement, and she never threatened to. She never wanted to see it. Indeed, I did not keep it. I destroyed it immediately, the very day she signed it. To see such a document, and remember my behavior in relation to it — I wanted no part of that. I was looking to the future. I was thinking on how I could use her, and how I could cause a dislocation in the life of my society.

How It Went in Practice

As you may now suspect, the matter of the card game, as played with Oda Sotatsu, was similarly rotten. Joo and I got him to the bar; we got him drunk. Joo flirted with him. I complimented him. He was a man in a difficult situation. His life was difficult, bleak. He had little, and little to look forward to. In this way he was entirely typical, yet he was not typical in his nature. In his nature, he was proud, he was unrelenting. I knew what I had in Oda Sotatsu.

That he lost the card game, that he signed the confession: it was all inevitable. I had created the situation in my mind while sitting in a room in Sakai, a year before. I had moved shapes, edged like paper, in the stanzas of my head, and now I was watching as Sotatsu wrote on a sheet of paper. He wrote, Oda Sotatsu, and wrote the date, and he looked up at me, and I was looking at him from far away. I knew then that I had done it.

He left the bar, went away, it didn’t matter where. The farther the better. If they had had to hunt for him, it wouldn’t have changed a thing. I took Joo by the arm, I went home with her. We slept together. I read the confession like a poet reads a poem he has written, a poem which he feels will change his fortunes. But like a poet, it is not his own fortune that his poems change.

How It Went in Practice 2

I had noticed that Sotatsu was watching Joo, was looking at her. I knew her to be what she was — not only pretty, not only a pretty girl, a girl one wanted, but also a smart girl, a girl whose opinion was worthwhile. She would say sharp things and make people look stupid. She had, in fact, done this to Sotatsu. She had done it to me. Shall I say, most of the other girls we had ever met weren’t like that? I knew Sotatsu thought much of her, and so the thought crept into my mind, as I lay there, knowing that elsewhere in the town, Sotatsu lay, awaiting the arrival of the police, the thought crept in: should I send her to him? Could Jito Joo be the method for holding Sotatsu to his pledge? I looked at her where she lay naked beside me, and I felt completely sure. I felt not only that it would work, but that she would do it. Despite the fact that she need not do it, that she could claim it went beyond anything agreed to, it remained true. Our very helplessness in the face of our lives, the fact that we wanted to be drastic, and that we wanted to force that drasticness on others — it meant she would throw herself willingly off this cliff. She would let me tell her to go to him, and she would go to him, and she would hold him to his pledge.

Joo, I said, when I woke her, take this confession.

She stood and dressed while I watched her, and I thought, this is the essence of my life — not before or after will I have so many fine things at such fullness: the love of a girl, the plight of a friend, the grand opening of a conspiracy. I felt it all. And now, later, I can tell you — I was not wrong. There has been nothing to compare that moment to, and I expect there will not be. I expect very little now.

How It Went in Practice 3

If I am explaining how it went, I should explain it all, I guess. Friends in Sakai had an uncle. He owned a farm. He was a hateful man. The farm was an old place, etched out of a hillside. Nothing was near it, just a mostly abandoned shrine. He wasn’t even a very good farmer. The sort of man who could live on sawdust, who perhaps was made of sawdust. I met him; I traveled there with the express purpose of meeting him. I met him, and we got along well. He was a converted anarchist. He was an anarchist in a non-political sense. He was a sort of poverty-stricken miscreant who didn’t at all have a bad time of it. He enjoyed sitting outside in the morning time, and that was about it. I won him over by confessing how much I hated people. This surprised him: you hate people too? Yes, I do. I hate people. Well, we have that in common, then. So, we sat together in the morning time, and I described to him this fantastic plot I had come up with. It was a huge insult, I told him, we were throwing a huge insult in the face of the society. They would have to bear it. There was no way they could do anything else but bear it. He found the whole thing very funny. He agreed.

And so it became my lot: to travel in a borrowed car from place to place, finding old people with odd views, and convincing them, Go away for a while. I have a place for you.

In my defense, I explained the whole thing to each one. I explained to each one what it was that I was doing. I told them they might have to stay away for a year or two, or three, for five years even, ten. Who could say? I spoke for a long time, a very long time, and I did it again and again and again. In every case, when I had finished, the person got up, leaving everything just as it was. In every case, when I had finished, the person got up, and we walked out to the car. We got into the car, and we drove away.

One by one, I drove each person to the farm, where the old man took them in. There they lived together, a little boardinghouse of the oddest folk you’ve ever seen. The funny thing is, they got along very well together. I believe the time when they were disappeared was the happiest time most of those people had seen in many years.

When I’d driven the last one there, I didn’t go back, not until the whole thing was over. I didn’t even send a message. That was part of the bargain. I’d explained it all to the old man. I’d explained it to each of them. We were all of one mind.

How It Went in Practice 4

Joo fell into it. I didn’t know it would go that way. She fell into it like an actress. You would never have known she didn’t care at all about Sotatsu. I said to her sometimes, Joo, Joo. I shook her, I woke her up, I said, Joo, go there, visit him now. You have to keep it up. She’d say, no, no. She’d curl into me, into the blankets. I want to stay here, she’d say. But, I would push her off. I’d pull off the blanket. She’d stand up, shake herself off. Go on, I’d say. She would nod, and change, and go off. Remember, I would tell her, as she looked back at me: I don’t exist. Nothing exists except Sotatsu’s resolve. Make him know it. Make him know he can hold out.

For the most part, it went well. There was trouble when Sotatsu’s brother came, but Joo fixed it. She was quick. I told you she was. She undid whatever the brother did. She kept Sotatsu to himself, to his own resolve, to what he had decided. I couldn’t have imagined a better handler. She got so I didn’t even have to tell her to go. She would just go on her own. I would wake up and she would be gone. Then I’d be working, I’d take a breath during the day and think:

There on the farm, my disappeared people are standing in a line, looking down the mountain. There in the prison, Sotatsu is standing, looking at the wall. There in the bus, Jito Joo is sitting, looking at her feet. I am no one. No one knows that I am anyone, but my plan is inevitable. The judges are doing what I am telling them to do, simply because I understand better than they do this one thing: the absurd lengths to which human beings go to prove themselves reasonable.

How It Went in Practice 5

I was worried often. I can’t pretend I didn’t wake in a sweat most nights, afraid that something had gone wrong. Sometimes Joo would tease me, too. She’d arrive crying, saying he had recanted, he had confessed, only to break into laughter when she saw my horrified face. It’s not a joke, I would tell her, and she would laugh. Joo, Joo, I would say. You are a hard one.

But when the sentence had gone through, and when he was on death row, I felt more secure. That much, at least, had been secured. I was afraid too that some of my disappeared people would die. They were old! People die sometimes — yet it would not be easy to account for. I had nothing to do but wait, and I could not even learn how things were at the farm.

Several months into his stay on death row, Sotatsu started behaving strangely. He started writing odd things on paper. He started talking to the guards. I was worried that he was breaking down. That’s when I told Joo: I wanted her to go there and sleep with him, if it could be managed. I wanted her to bind him to her that way.

She broke into tears. She didn’t want to. I said you have to. You don’t have any choice. She said she wouldn’t do it. I said you will. You need to. She got her things and went out. She never came back. Whether she did go or not, to the prison, I can’t say. I never saw her again.

The next day, I heard the news on the radio.