Salmonella men on Planet Porno: stories - By Yasutaka Tsutsui Page 0,11
do to cope with all this. You’ve written books about the pathological tendencies of society and the perversion of the media. You’ve talked about it on TV. That’s why I came here. I hoped you could tell me how to adapt to this abnormal environment without losing my sanity!”
The doctor shook his head and picked up the telephone. “Everything you’ve said merely proves how serious your case is!”
His hand stopped dead as he was dialling. His eyes were now riveted to the picture on his desktop television. It was a picture of me. The doctor opened his eyes wide.
“Some news just in on the Morishita case,” said the announcer. “After leaving his client’s office in Ginza 2nd Street, Tsutomu Morishita, an employee of Kasumiyama Electric Industries, took another taxi, apparently intending to return to his office in Shinjuku. But he suddenly appeared to change his mind, left the taxi and entered the Takehara Psychiatric Clinic in Yotsuya.”
A photograph of the clinic’s main entrance appeared on the screen.
“It is not yet known why Morishita entered the Clinic.”
The doctor stared at me with glazed eyes, as if in admiration. His mouth was half-open, his tongue dancing about in excitement. “So you must be someone famous, then?”
“No. Not at all.” I pointed at the television. “He just said it, didn’t he? I’m a company employee. Just an ordinary person. But in spite of that, my every move is being watched and broadcast to the entire nation. What’s that, if not abnormal?!”
“Well. You asked me how you could adapt to an abnormal environment without losing your sanity.” As he spoke, the doctor slowly got up and moved towards a glass cabinet crammed with bottles of drugs. “But I find your question contradictory. An environment is created by the people who live in it. You, then, are one of the people who are creating your abnormal environment. In other words, if your environment is abnormal, then you must be abnormal too.” He opened a brown bottle labelled ‘Sedatives’ and tipped a quantity of white pills into his hand.
The doctor greedily stuffed the pills into his mouth as he continued to speak. “Therefore, if you persist in asserting your own sanity, it proves, conversely, that your environment is in fact normal, but that you alone are abnormal. If you consider your environment to be abnormal, then by all means lose your mind!” He took a bottle of ink from his desk and gulped down the blue-black liquid until it was empty. Then he collapsed onto the couch beside him and fell asleep.
“On a mad, mad morning in May, two lovers drank dry a bottle of bright blue ink,” hummed a nurse as she entered the treatment room, completely naked. In one of her hands she held a huge bottle of ink, from which she took the occasional swig before draping her body over the doctor’s on the couch.
So I left the clinic without receiving a satisfactory answer. The sun was going down, but it still felt oppressively hot.
As soon as I was back at my desk, Akiko Mikawa called me from Admin. “Thank you for inviting me out yesterday,” she said. “I’m really sorry I couldn’t make it.”
“That’s all right,” I replied with undue reserve.
She said nothing for a while. She was waiting for me to ask her out again. She’d obviously noticed that public opinion was starting to shift towards me, and was probably worried that she would now become the butt of media vitriol. She’d called me in the hope of accepting an invitation.
We both remained silent for a few moments.
I sighed before plunging in. “How about today, then?”
“I’d love to.”
“All right, I’ll see you in the San José after work.”
News of our arrangement must have been reported immediately. For, as I walked into the San José, it seemed unusually busy. Normally, it wasn’t that kind of place. All the customers were couples, making it impossible to tell which were reporters and which merely curiosity-seekers. But whichever they were, they’d obviously come with one aim in mind – to observe my date with Akiko. While of course feigning a lack of interest, they would give themselves away by glancing over at us every now and again.
Needless to say, for the whole hour that Akiko and I were in the café, we sat in stony silence with our drinks in front of us. For if we’d discussed anything even slightly unusual, it would immediately have been reported in a three-column article with a massive headline.