Written on her forehead was a name with a secret meaning: “Babylon the great, the mother of whores and of every obscenity on earth.”
Well if Tokyo was Babylon it could go up in flames for all she cared, thought Shinobu. Along with me, and all the men I’ve slept with. It wasn’t Tokyo’s fault, but that of its tainted people. No one spoke the truth. All were equally dyed deep with evil and corruption. That was why we needed God; a God who could make us all humble and ashamed of our sinfulness. But such a God could never appear on Earth in human form. If He did, all our envy and hatred would be hurled at Him.
Ah, she thought, I wish I could see Kita again. I don’t want to let him die. Even if we can’t meet again in this life, I just want to believe that there can exist on this Earth a man free of envy and hatred, like Jesus in the Bible.
A sudden thought flashed into her mind. That killer – she still had his cell phone number! She rushed out of the toilet and straight to a public telephone box. He answered on the fourth ring.
“Hi, it’s Shinobu. I’ve got something to ask of you. You can save people’s lives too, can’t you? If so, please stop Kita from killing himself. He absolutely mustn’t be allowed to die. I’ll pay you a million yen.”
“Right.”
“You can?”
“I’ll see what I can do. I was just about to come and get my fee for killing Yashiro, actually. Is Kita still with you? Oh, he’s escaped, has he? I see. But no need to worry. I’ll find him, have no fear. I put a transmitter in his backpack, see, so I can tell pretty much exactly where he is.”
And so Yoshio Kita was once again a followed man.
Kita intended to quit the capital again. He hadn’t fixed on where he should kill himself, but he could see that it would be useless to hang around the city with its high ratio of police.
Hot on Kita’s trail aided by the transmitter in his backpack, the doctor caught sight of him going into Tower Records. The doctor stood just beyond the periphery of Kita’s vision, watching his feet to see where they’d take him next. Kita walked past the Opera section three times and finally left without buying anything. Outside, he hailed a taxi.
His destination was the airport out on reclaimed land in the bay. With what must be close to the last of his money, Kita bought a ticket at the counter, and proceeded to check in for the flight to Sapporo. The doctor followed suit, allowing a two-minute interval. There were still forty minutes before boarding. Still wearing his backpack, Kita went into the bathroom, and didn’t emerge for some time. Maybe he was having trouble getting rid of the pistol, mused the doctor. Or busy plastering down his hair. Or did he want to be alone for a bit? Then the worrying thought flashed through his mind that Kita might actually commit suicide in there behind closed doors. He was just setting off to check when Kita emerged, looking cheerful. He went straight to the hand luggage inspection point, and passed through without any check being made of his backpack. Evidently he was no longer carrying the pistol. Well, that meant that at least he wouldn’t be able to shoot himself, and also that the doctor needn’t worry about being kidnapped again.
The doctor let five others pass ahead of him before he went through the hand luggage check. But then he was taken aside while his bag was inspected, and had to explain the presence of the syringes, medicine, and clinical examination equipment. In the end his bag was handed to one of the stewardesses to carry on board. The reputation of doctors must have taken a dive in recent times.
Kita wandered about the shops, but didn’t buy anything. Then he went in a snack bar and ordered a curry rice. Watching at a distance, the doctor tutted at the sight of Kita standing there at the counter hunched over his food. If his planned suicide was pointless, eating curry was even more horribly pointless. No man about to die should be eating curry, and no man eating curry should be set on suicide. The doctor felt he was spying on some illicit scene. For some reason, he was suddenly consumed with anger. Nevertheless, he continued to stare until Kita had run his spoon around the edge of the plate and licked up the last morsel, like some starving student. The fellow was still brimming with life, it seemed. Perhaps there was one more thing he was planning to do. Still, this kind of energy wasn’t necessarily just self-sustaining. It could easily shift to something destructive – of himself, or of others as well.
The doctor boarded ahead of Kita and settled down to doze as soon as he was seated. But his nerves were still tingling from all the running around of the last couple of days, and he was in no fit state to sleep. Before long, a recording of the three o’clock news began on the screen in front of him. The newscaster announced that at two that afternoon Shinobu Yoimachi had been found alive and well in a Shibuya department store. Her abductor was still on the run, and the police were on his trail. Shinobu was refusing to give any information about him, either his name or distinguishing features. In an interview with the press, she had said, “The man who kidnapped me is not a bad person. I want to save him. He’s taken our illness upon himself.”
What would the viewers make of this? Not knowing what had actually happened, and seeing her looking as fervent as her words, at best they’d probably assume she’d fallen in love with her kidnapper, or even that the whole story had been a fiction. But perhaps there’d be a tendency to try to see some logic in what she said after all. It was true, the kidnapper wasn’t a bad person. That in itself would probably elicit some public sympathy. Personally, the doctor was unmoved by Kita’s apparent goodness, but somehow he felt a tremendous pity for him nevertheless. He was surely wasting his time by shadowing Kita all the way to Hokkaido like this, but he had an urge to meddle in his fate.
Once the plane was airborne, the doctor suddenly recalled someone who somehow reminded him of Kita. He’d forgotten the guy’s name, but he’d known him at middle school. They’d been in the same class in the second grade for a mere three months. Rumour had it that the boy had lost his parents in an accident, and his grandparents were taking care of him. He had a hook-shaped scar on his head, and in class he was constantly either snivelling like something coming to the boil, or chuckling to himself. In the first week everyone avoided him and kept their distance. In the second week, someone came up with the nickname “Frankenstein,” and from that moment on he’d been tormented. He was the perfect target for the violence of his fellow students. He made no effort to resist, so even people who were physically weaker felt safe to hurl the name at him. He also had a habit that the others couldn’t understand. As he lay there snivelling while he was beaten and kicked, he would murmur to himself, a little smile on his face. You could never really catch what he was saying. When a bully asked him to say it again, he’d simply turn away with a little chuckle. This would incense the bully, of course. He’d register a momentary unease at not knowing what his victim was thinking, and he’d have to inflict a bit more pain on Frankenstein to dispel it.
The doctor had wanted to stay out of the gang who made this boy a scapegoat, but one day he began to feel he’d like to see the guy dead. The boy was silent in class, but all the time he spent alone seemed to have induced him to think things through and develop his own philosophy, which he seemed to long to share with someone. On the way home from school one day, the boy stopped him and told him something like, “The world’s forsaken me. But what this means is that I’ve been chosen by God. I must battle alone against the world. I’ll probably be defeated. In order to win, I must become the incarnation of the world’s evils. When I do this, the world will find it needs me.”