I’ve got three packs left, and I refuse to die before I’ve finished them. So I’ve been chain-smoking two or three at a time. My head feels numb, my eyes are starting to spin. It’s only a matter of time before I, too, fall lifeless to the ground below.
It was only about fifteen or sixteen years ago that the anti-smoking movement started. And it was only six or seven years ago, at most, that the pressure on smokers really started to intensify. I never dreamt that, in such a short time, I would become the very last smoker left on earth. But maybe the signs were all there from the beginning. Being a fairly well known novelist, I used to spend most of my time at home writing. As a result, I had few opportunities to see or feel for myself the changes that society was going through. I hardly ever read the newspapers, as I abhor the journalistic style – it reminds me of dead fish. I lived in a provincial town, and my editors would come out to see me whenever the need arose. I tended to shun literary circles, and so never ventured into the capital.
Of course, I knew about the anti-smoking lobby. Intellectuals would often write articles stating their support or opposition in magazines and elsewhere. I also knew that the tone of the debate, on both sides, had gradually grown more hysterical, and that, from a certain point in time, the movement had suddenly started to swell while opposing arguments rapidly disappeared.
But as long as I stayed at home, I could live in splendid isolation from it all. I’d been a heavy smoker since my teens, and had continued to smoke without pause. Even so, no one ever admonished me or gave me any complaint. My wife and son tacitly put up with it. They probably realized that, for me to continue producing literary works and maintain an income as a fashionable writer, the consumption of huge quantities of cigarettes was absolutely essential. This probably wouldn’t have been the case if I’d worked in an office, for example. For it seems that, from a relatively early time, smokers started losing out on promotion.
One day, two editors from a young people’s magazine came to my house in the hope of commissioning an article. I showed them into my sitting room. One of them, a woman of about twenty-seven or twenty-eight, handed me a business card with this printed in bold across the top:
THANK YOU FOR NOT SMOKING
Apparently, this was not so uncommon at the time. More and more women were expressing anti-smoking sentiments on their name cards. But I was unaware of that. So you can imagine my indignation. Any magazine editor worth her salt should have known that a fashionable novelist such as myself would be a heavy smoker. Even if she didn’t know it, handing a name card like that to someone who might be a smoker, especially when she was asking that someone to do a job for her, was completely out of order – even if the other person wasn’t actually a smoker.
I stood up immediately.
“Regrettably, I’m unable to earn your thanks,” I said to the stupefied pair. “For I myself am a chain smoker. I couldn’t imagine even discussing work without a cigarette in hand. But thank you, anyway, for coming all this way.”
The woman arched her eyebrows in twitching increments. Her colleague, a young man, hurriedly rose and started to entreat me. “Oh, well, you know, it’s just that, please don’t be angry, if we could just, you know…” he continued behind me as I left the room. It seems they also left shortly afterwards, arguing with each other on the way out.
I was somewhat perplexed by my overreaction. They had, after all, spent four hours travelling from Tokyo. And of course, I could have gone without a cigarette for an hour or so, if I had to. But why should I? It’s not as though they were some kind of changelings who’d die if they breathed a bit of smoke. So I justified myself with the thought that, if I had agreed to talk to them without smoking, I’d have grown so irritated that our little contretemps would have seemed tame by comparison.
Unfortunately for me, this female editor happened to be one of the standard-bearers of the anti-smoking movement. She was so enraged by the incident that she started spreading malicious slander about me, in other publications as well as in her own. By extension, she also cast scorn on all smokers in general. Smokers were bigoted and pigheaded, obstinate and rude, arrogant and overbearing, selfish and obsessive, self-righteous and despotic – or so she said. Working with such people is fraught with difficulties and therefore bound to fail. As such, smokers should be banished from all workplaces. Reading this author’s works is not to be advised, as the reader could become contaminated with his smoking ethos. All smokers are fools. All smokers are insane.
Eventually, I could remain silent no longer. It might have been all right if I were the only one, but other smokers were being insulted, too. Just as I was thinking of issuing some kind of reply, I received a call from the Chief Editor of a magazine called Rumours of Truth, for which I wrote a regular column. He urged me not to give in to this pressure from the newly empowered anti-smoking lobby, but to fight back against it. I quickly wrote my next submission to the magazine, which went something like this:
“Discrimination against smokers seems to have reached new heights. This results from a combination of extremism and the simple-mindedness of non-smokers. Anti-smoking proponents show an utter lack of understanding, precisely because they do not smoke. Mouth ulcers are cured by cigarette smoke. Tobacco soothes nervous irritation. Admittedly, people who don’t smoke are healthy and have wholesome complexions. That’s because many of them take part in sports. But they also smile for no reason. They don’t think deeply about anything, and are totally uninteresting to talk to. Their conversation is superficial and their topics shallow. Their thinking is unfocussed and vague. They go off on a tangent without warning. They can’t discuss any topic on more than one level. Their reasoning is not inductive but deductive. That’s why they’re so awfully easy to understand, yet, on the other hand, are always so quick to jump to hackneyed conclusions. When it comes to sport, they can prattle on endlessly, however little interest we show. But when the conversation turns to philosophy or literature, they fall asleep. In the old days, the air at long, difficult meetings would be thick with cigarette smoke. But now the conference room has been sanitized by air purifiers, ion generators and the like. Does that mean we can meet in relaxation? Au contraire. Meetings are over before they’ve started, or so I hear. Everyone’s in such a hurry to leave. But of course – non-smokers can’t bear long conversations, deep conversations, difficult conversations. As soon as the business at hand is over, or they know what they’re supposed to do, they get up and go. They can’t keep still. If someone detains them, they keep looking at their watches impatiently. But when they’re angry, they just go on and on. What’s more – whether male or female – they’re all sex-mad. The more they take care of their health, the more they neglect to use their brains – at the expense of their health, ironically. In other words, they become imbeciles. What’s the point of living such long, healthy lives if they’re nothing but blockheads? Large groups of foolish old people would become a burden to the minority of younger people. Do they really mean to keep playing golf until they’re a hundred? Tobacco was a truly great discovery – it has given people depth of feeling. Nevertheless, even journalists today are jumping on the anti-smoking bandwagon. What’s that all about?! Newspaper editing rooms should be epitomized by murky clouds of tobacco smoke. Why are newspapers so uninteresting today? – Because the editing rooms are all too clean!!”