In a corner of the room, I found a brown leather satchel and picked it up. It had been a present from a girl I had dated for only a month, a long time ago. I had been using it to store my insurance card, my official seal, the lease for this apartment, things like that. I dumped out all its contents and placed the gun inside. I felt like it was missing something, and after thinking for a minute, I spread a few white tissues underneath it. As I placed the gun back on top, I was filled with a sense of satisfaction. I stared at it for a moment, and then I practically had to force myself to close the flap and fasten the clasp.
• • •
The events of that night seem like a giddy dream to me. Even now, in my memory, they have a different quality, more pronounced, and for that reason, they lack a sense of reality. To me, reality always meant tedium. A few seconds after waking up, I recalled the events of the previous night, and again I was filled with that same joy. But then the joy turned to worry, and I hastily opened the leather bag. There was the gun, securely inside. Even if I doubted my reality, the mere fact of the gun there indicated its existence. I gazed upon the gun with fresh eyes. Once again, its overwhelming beauty and presence did not disappoint. I felt as though I might be transported — that is to say, that the world within myself could be unlocked — I felt full of such possibilities.
2
Three days had passed since I acquired the gun. There were no noticeable changes to my life — at least, superficially, there had been no shift. Everything around me was as tedious and boring as ever, but my spirits remained high. The change had occurred inside me.
I woke up each morning, as always, and the first thing I did was open the bag to make sure the gun was there. Then I got dressed quickly, put on my shoes, and went out. In the past, I often forgot to lock the door, but these three days, not once did that happen. This was hardly surprising, considering that I was leaving the gun behind in my apartment.
I looked up at the perfectly blue sky and thought about how the rain had finally stopped. For the past three days, the rain had continued to fall as if it some kind of spell had been cast. I was aware that I actually said to myself, The rain has finally ended, but that was because I was in a good mood, which was also why I peeked into my mailbox. I thought I might even allow myself to try the kinds of things normal people usually did.
I got on the subway and headed toward the university. The school’s campus was crowded with students, and the riotous mix of colors from the clothes they were wearing hurt my eyes a little. A number of people I knew called out to me, and I smiled at each of them and said a few words in response. I entered a big dingy white building and went up the stairs. On my way, a guy bumped against my shoulder as he passed, and knocked me a little off balance. The guy muttered a simple apology and kept going. He was really rushing, like he must have been in some kind of hurry. At that moment, I had the idea to run after him, to chase him and try to knock him down. Doing so would surely take him by surprise, and shock whoever was watching. I was fascinated, imagining such a scene. Even just coming up with an idea like that must have been another sign that I was in a good mood.
Someone tapped me on the shoulder from behind, and I turned around to see Keisuke. He was smiling as usual. “How come you’re just standing there?” he asked me. I was a little taken aback, and I laughed without answering his question. He looked at me and said, “Did something good happen to you?”
Keisuke kept talking. “The other day,” he was saying, “I ended up just taking her home, like an idiot. I must have really been out of it. In the car, she was talking to me about all kinds of things, she was crying — think I felt like hitting on her? I just got outta there. I did the right thing, seriously, I did. I ended up cheering her up and all.”
“Seriously? You really must have been out of it. You usually go in for the kill.”
“Yeah, you know me, going for the kill. Like you should talk, Nishikawa,” Keisuke said, laughing. He had started to walk alongside me. That’s when I remembered that we had the next lecture together, that we always had. Keisuke rattled on about girls, about his paper, about the CDs he’d bought recently.
After attendance had been taken and the lecture began, Keisuke gave a big yawn and promptly fell asleep next to me. Someone touched the back of my head, and I turned around to see a girl there. She said to me, “Haven’t seen you in a while,” but I didn’t know who she was.
The bespectacled lecturer started talking in a low, subdued voice about globalization in the world, and about how American culture occupied a major position in it. As he passed out papers to the students, he spoke slowly about how America developed as a country while absorbing the cultures of various peoples. However, he went on to say, even a place as tolerant as America was still besieged by problems such as ethnocentrism and ghettoization.
“What is so powerful about American culture”—he got this far and then sneezed once, loudly—“however, is America’s diversity itself. The Americanization of Japan is nothing new, but I would hate to think that it demonstrates a scarcity of Japanese culture. Yet the longing for American culture has existed since our defeat in the war up through the present day. .”
As I was half-listening, I had also been replying to questions, one by one, from the girl sitting behind me. She said she was bored so she asked if I wanted to go to the cafeteria with her, but I didn’t feel like it so I declined. At some point I realized that she was gone, although I had no idea when she had left.
In the middle of taking notes, I stopped and let my thoughts drift to the gun I had left behind in my apartment. I wondered why the gun held such boundless fascination for me, why I still felt such excitement about it being there. I led a boring life. It stood to reason that the gun would act as a stimulant within such tedium. I must have appreciated its absolute simplicity. The minimalism of the gun’s shape epitomized the act of firing bullets even as it conveyed cruelty. I could think only of it causing injury, of destroying life; it had been created expressly so that a person could commit such deeds, its design utterly compact, nothing extraneous. It seemed to me a symbol, like Thanatos, the god of death himself. Yet it was difficult to determine why I was so mesmerized by such a lethal object. It wasn’t as if I harbored the desire to kill someone. Nor did I yearn to kill myself. The thing is, up to then, I never expected to have anything to do with a gun. The idea occurred to me that I might be just like a child, thrilled by the acquisition of an unusual plaything, and that was what I liked best about it. There was no need to dwell on it. Whatever the case was, the gun was mine, and the pleasure I took from that had enabled me to pass each day since with relative ease. That, to me, was an important fact. To use the gun, to do something with it — the circumstances I now found myself in, that allowed for such a possibility, was the best part. I could use the gun to threaten someone, or I could use it to protect someone. I could kill someone, or I could even easily commit suicide. Rather than the question of whether or not I would actually do those things, or whether or not I wanted to, what was important was being in possession of that potential — that incarnation of stimulus itself.