‘What about the other one, with the sprained ankle?’ inquired the guide.
‘Oh, B-0372? He went to the refectory on crutches.’
They don’t even have names!
That’s because they’re not considered human. That is, they aren’t human. But even cats and dogs get names… Not to mention that females still need male cooperation to have children.
I don’t know too much about it, but apparently males are raised in these facilities in order to collect some kind of secretion they produce. Beyond that, I’m pretty much in the dark.
‘Like keeping honeybees?’ I asked Maki, always an authority on such matters.
‘Hmm, no, not quite. Though the sexual morphology of our society is maybe similar. Except that with honeybees, there’s only one queen.’
‘And we’re all queens,’ Rei cut in, bursting into giggles.
‘We all have the potential to be, anyway,’ I replied, showing off some meagre wisdom of my own. ‘Since all you have to do to have a baby is go to the hospital. And those who don’t want to, don’t have to. That’s how we took care of the population problem.’
There was nothing charming or interesting about the rat-faced man, and the students all blithely returned to their idle chatter. But for me it had been a real shock.
That feeling stayed with me for the rest of the trip. The thing is, the males in that place were nothing at all like the boy who passed by my house on those early mornings. They didn’t even seem like the same species. Even though I’d never exchanged a word with the boy, I was certain that he wasn’t female. But no matter how much I searched for the same aura among the males in that place, it was nowhere to be found.
They seemed to be uniformly apathetic and timid, their vacant expressions suggesting low intelligence.
The other students were getting bored and antsy. The orderly line began to fall apart, and people started horsing around.
‘Quiet, everyone, quiet!’
Our teacher was sweating bullets, but the guide was beaming.
‘How nice it is to be in the presence of so many young women for the first time in what feels like forever. You’re all so wonderfully lively. Working here isn’t very rewarding, you know. No matter what we do for them, we get no gratitude, and when someone does say thank you, they don’t really mean it. The men are all infected with a terrible indifference. Nothing to be done about it, though, that’s just how men are.’
Hang on. That doesn’t seem right. I’m pretty sure if I was locked up in a place like that for my whole life and never allowed to leave, I’d end up apathetic too.
Then, when the tour was over and we were about leave, something happened.
Mealtime had ended by the time we passed by the refectory and there was no sign of anyone inside, but suddenly a man leapt out and threw his arms around one of the students. She shrieked, and our teacher and the guide grabbed hold of the man and pulled him off her right away.
The guide began reprimanding the man and pressed a buzzer. Three guards charged up and seized him.
The student stood there startled, but she didn’t faint or anything.
‘My apologies, young lady, I’m glad you’re alright. This isn’t the first time that man has done something like this. He’s not mentally ill, but there’s clearly something wrong with him. Although this is the first time he’s attacked a student… How many times will he have to do this sort of thing before he’s satisfied, I wonder.’
Deciding perhaps that it would be inappropriate to say more, the guide left it at that.
‘They’re so dangerous,’ remarked our teacher.
I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why she thought that. But, more important, I couldn’t understand why that man attacked a student. If he resented the world outside the GETO, you’d think he would’ve used a weapon, a knife or a meat cleaver or something. I couldn’t quite figure out what had motivated him to attack her, to wrap his arms around her the way he did.
Maybe our teacher didn’t know either.
In the bus on the way back, the students were all saying, ‘That wasn’t what I was hoping for at all,’ and so on. At school right now, manga from before is really trendy. Most of the movies and books from before are banned, but what used to be called ‘girl’s manga’ is still permitted. The males who appear in it are quite young for the most part, and they’re all extremely charming. Most of the girls who imitate men nowadays use these characters as their point of reference. They’re all convinced that’s what men are like.
The heroines of these stories typically fall in love with skinny guys. Big fat men do appear sometimes, but only as comic relief; they’re never the protagonist. The love interests have long spindly arms and legs and delicate features, and they’re detached or sweet or naïve. You never really see passionate men in these comics. According to Rei, the actresses who get super popular on account of their manliness are all ‘extremely passionate’.
Anyway, it was because all these schoolgirls had been reading manga from before that they were so disappointed by the men they saw on the field trip.
‘They gave me the creeps.’ This was Rei.
‘Not even one of them was attractive at all. None of them had white hands or long fingers or anything!’ They’d all been hoping for beautiful men.
‘It was like a zoo.’
‘Not really, but it sure was like they were a different species or something.’
‘Why on earth did people marry men before?’
‘Maybe because the men before were like the ones in manga?’
‘They’ve gone downhill, no question about it.’
‘Or maybe the manga from before was just pure fantasy. Maybe the actual men weren’t like that at all, maybe they were stronger. That’s what my great aunt told me, anyway, and she used to live with a man. She said that most men used to be way more reliable than the guys in girl’s manga.’
‘But, come on, didn’t you notice the smell? It stank so badly I thought I was going to pass out.’
‘Yeah they smelled awful, it made me wanna puke.’
‘The volleyball club locker room smells the same way.’
‘No, it doesn’t.’
Everyone was so revved up.
But I was miles away, lost in my own thoughts.
At dawn I sat by the window.
It had become a habit of mine to wait there, whether he ended up coming or not.
Today was the day – I was going to say something. I was determined to make friends with him. Obviously I had decided not to go school. I couldn’t let Grandma or Asako find out, though, so I’d asked Maki to deliver the message.
‘Why aren’tcha coming?’
‘I’ve decided to become a juvenile delinquent.’
Maki gave a weird chuckle and accepted the mission. I had no doubt she’d be able to pull it off.
The boy appeared around the same time as usual. He mimicked a birdcall below my window, so that my sister wouldn’t suspect anything. She was always talking about how she couldn’t sleep, though, and she’d finally got some illicit sleeping pills from a pharmacist friend of hers, so it was probably fine anyway. And Grandma is conveniently hard of hearing.
I wrote ‘I’m coming down, wait there’ on a scrap of paper and dropped it to him. He read the note, put it in his pocket, and gave me a big thumbs-up.
I snuck down the stairs, clutching the big bag I always carry with me. The staircase creaked with every step.
‘What’s your name?’ I asked the waiting boy in a hushed voice.
‘Hiro,’ he replied simply, and started walking.
‘You’re a man, aren’t you?’
I fell into step beside him. He was much taller than me, which I hadn’t been able to tell when I was looking down on him from the second floor.