Salmonella men on Planet Porno: stories - By Yasutaka Tsutsui Page 0,33

realize that it merely accelerates inflation. But I’ve no doubt that it’s far more sensible to spend money than to keep it – and therefore, not to own a home. So I have no option but to follow the trend.

I sipped some tea my wife had made for me. It was finest Uji tea, ordered direct from the store in Kyoto.

The grandfather clock struck ten. The clock was an expensive handcrafted piece. Paid for in monthly instalments, of course.

My wife started knitting.

I drank my tea as I watched TV.

It was a contented family scene.

My wife suddenly shuddered, lifted her head and looked at me. “Darling, I’m so happy,” she said in a self-demeaning voice. There was even a hint of a tear in her eye.

I couldn’t hold back the anger, the loathing, the sheer abhorrence of it. I kicked the coffee table and got up. “You bloody fool!” I shouted. “You stupid bloody fool!” I opened my mouth so wide it seemed likely to split, and bellowed with all the air in my lungs. “What do you mean, happy?! You’re not even slightly happy! Now I know why they call you cows! You think happiness just means being satisfied! You call yourself human?! You think you’re alive? Well, I wish you were dead! Dead, dead, dead!!”

I punched and kicked her wildly. She keeled over and tumbled onto the linoleum floor of the kitchen, where she crawled about in confusion.

“I’m sorry, dear! I’m really sorry!” she wailed.

“What do you mean, you’re sorry?! You don’t even know why I’m angry! How can you possibly be sorry?!”

I was boiling with rage. I grabbed hold of her hair and slapped her on the cheek perhaps ten, twenty times.

Startled, my mother and Shigenobu rushed out of the next room. They knelt on either side of my wife on the floor, apologizing to me as they wept.

As always, I went off to the bedroom in a fit of pique, leapt into bed and pulled the sheets over my head.

There was nothing unusual about this. I have an outburst like that about once a month, on average. For my family, who don’t understand why I’m so angry, it must seem like some kind of natural disaster. But by the next day, it’s all forgotten, and they try to smother me once more with their sickening phoney happiness.

That utterly repulsive, extraordinarily ordinary blinkered happiness, so false it saps my energy, so tepid it makes me want to vomit. A kind of happiness in which a minor dissatisfaction might surface every now and again, or a small disagreement might occasionally flare up, but we pretend to make up almost immediately.

Just after lunch the next day, I went to the bank near my office. I wanted to deposit my wages and complete the direct debit forms for the television. The bank was heaving with other office workers like myself, taking advantage of their lunch break, as well as salespeople from the nearby shopping centre. Expecting a long wait, I sat on a bench near the window and lit a cigarette.

While I was waiting for my number to be called, a gaunt young woman with narrow slanting eyes came and sat on the bench in front of me. She was accompanied by a boy of about the same age as Shigenobu, a mischievous-looking brat who just couldn’t keep still. Before long, he started knocking over ashtray stands and grabbing handfuls of leaflets, which he scattered all over the floor.

“Yoshikazu! Stop that!” shouted the boy’s mother. “What do you think you’re doing? Stop it, I said! You naughty boy! Keep still! Yoshikazu! Where are you going?”

Ignoring his mother’s incessant scolding, the boy continued to wander around, until he eventually knocked over the entire leaflet stand.

“YOSHIKAZU!”

The boy’s mother stood up, grabbed the brass pipe of an ashtray stand and, brandishing it high above her head, brought the solid metal base down onto his head.

There was a dull, sickening sound, like that of a wooden post being driven into the ground by a mallet. The child cowered on the floor, his eyeballs turning white. With the look of a woman possessed, the mother continued to beat the boy over the head with the ashtray stand. He was sprawled belly-down on the floor, but I could still see his face. White matter was coming out of his nose. His mouth was gaping open, and it too was full of white matter. His pummelled brains were oozing out through his nose and filling his mouth. The