Chapter 002
SHE WAS STARING at the edge of her desk because looking at the leathery old face of the supervisor made her sick.
She might not see him but could still hear him.
In other words.
Even from this vantage she could hear the huhs and hahs of his breath. When she thought of how they shared the air they breathed, how it filtered through his animal-like male body, through his filthy nasal cavity and viscous mouth hanging agape, it was enough to make her nauseated.
I hate conferences.
It was just a way to communicate the news, but they had to make it a pointless meeting.
It was not constructive. Nothing that came of these meetings had anything to do with the deliberation items. Discussions in person didn’t augment or add any information, nor did they refine what was already known. It was just a collection of advertised opinions, everyone’s comportment, body odor, grating voice, extraneous data collected for intellectuals. Of no use. At this rate there would be no real discussion or deliberation.
It was maddening.
You know what you really need to effectively research communications is just your damned self, thought Shizue Fuwa.
This was the only place she’d make eye contact.
There were faces to look at all around her. And…
Shizue hated the walls, the ceiling too. Actually, she hated the entire room.
It was wide and had a high ceiling. It was supposed to evoke a sense of space but instead made her feel trapped somehow. In other words it was pretending to be spacious.
Compared to this, the screen on her terminal was infinitely more spacious.
And suddenly all the inorganic designs felt like a total lie. It was an outright lie. Unabashed gussying up, at the end of the day.
The truth lay only in ideas.
Yet people created the facsimile of a truth and pretended it was the real thing all the time. They told themselves that bumps were straight lines. If they were so able to convince themselves of the lie, why bother saying it was straight?
Room 3, Section A, Area Community Center.
She didn’t know how many centers there were across the country, but each region had a community center and each community center was built according to a uniform standard. The materials, the design, everything.
A public platform had no need for embellishments—or so the thinking went. Austere, hygienic—that was the ethos of the design. But putting up the facade of austerity was costlier than putting up a cheap design. They talked about hygiene but weren’t really doing anything to disinfect the air—the spores were still there. What was more, you could see the dust. It was so bad you couldn’t really go anywhere without moistened wipes or a cloth.
Shizue wasn’t saying there should be embellishments and decorations everywhere. She just wondered why no one else saw how trying that hard to be austere just made it all the more obnoxious. It wasn’t like you could walk into a space that really looked like a monitor.
It was because they made rooms like this that organic humans did dirty deeds together.
I hate it. They’d just had their monthly meeting…last week.
Today’s was a unique summons.
The Ministry of Culture, which brought together the National Welfare and Development System and the Committee on Adolescent Welfare and Development—comprised of center personnel from each locality— was meeting under the auspices of an emergency session of the 122nd Area Branch.
Shizue had been brought in from central.
They called her a counselor, but it wasn’t like she was an accredited therapist. She had a license but mostly advised minors in their plans for the future and assured they were in good mental health.
She had no idea what it meant to deal with a serial killer, but they were saying at least one of the victims attended the 122nd.
The conference seats were filled with police associates and local cops, as well as local governance that didn’t usually show up to these things. It wasn’t any ordinary conference.
This was obviously a big deal.
Being in the same room as these people for any amount of time de-pressed Shizue. On top of which, the facilitator of the emergency meeting —the very man she was judging—was the dumbest one of them all.
Shizue’s melancholy was pitched at an all-time high. His whole introduction was pointless and over-long.
“There’s been a rash of bizarre crimes,” he waxed impassioned.
What’s bizarre mean anyway?
It was an obsolete term.
Bizarre. Derived from words signifying anger, wrath, and fascination with both.
Bizarre, eh?
Bizarre was a word that was popular a hundred years ago in detective novels, its time long since passed into history.
Making such distinctions between normal and abnormal was in and of itself passé.
Shizue thought the real crime was this attempt to apply the distinction to an unquantifiable territory and to the psychology of its inhabitants, its society.
Unusual simply meant outside of the norm.
It could also mean reality was less than ideal. Be it in excess or in its lack, significant idiosyncrasies were impossible.
In other words, before one could begin to use a word like bizarre one would have to define normal, and that required envisioning an ideal. This conference was not doing any such thing.
There was no such thing as a normal psychology or a normal society.
Things changed. Things were complex and had aberrations. Things couldn’t be easily territorialized. Besides it being impossible to draw lines, how was one ever to measure deviations, if they’d deviated successfully?
Ideals required ignoring the defects and deficiencies of a reality and replacing them with theoretically and carefully composed goals of superiority. Ideals were just ideologies. In which case, something was wrong with you if you tried to fix an ideal in this day and age.
Also…
It was stupid to be calling this a rash of incidents.
Who knew why they deemed this a bizarre crime. It wasn’t like “bizarre crimes” had never taken place before.
Even if in each era there were some vague trend of events noticed or unnoticed, the events were probably the result of several other events that occurred over the past several hundred years. Shizue was convinced that even if one tried to give numerical value to the events that led to the aberration and averaged a rate, there would be instances of too many or too few to come to a conclusion.
People had been the victims of mass murder from a long time ago, every single day. Of course you wanted to stop it, or if not stop, control… This savage country used to slit the throats of murderers. It was also a country that under the guise of war rendered tens of thousands of lives useless. The only difference now was that children were being uniquely targeted, the method of killing was atrocious, and they couldn’t figure out how it happened. It was certainly disturbing but there was no right or wrong with a killer. In any murder case, a murderer was a murderer. Which stood to reason that there was no reason to get all up in arms now. You want normal?
This is normal.
This concept of the abnormal was no longer valid.
And if you took the things that were abnormal or bizarre, you would eventually see they had no meaning.
“The situation is imminent. We need a more concrete plan.”
Shizue was through staring at the corner of her desk, so she looked to the right and saw the face of a fellow member of the welfare department. He looked obsequiously at the terminal, nodding stupidly along to everything the supervisor said.
Did he feel anything? Or was it coded behavior, involuntary gesturing, meant for precisely this kind of situation.
How insensitive.
Really…
He must not have felt anything. What did you expect from such insensitivity toward language?
These people—a generation from the end of a millennium—were all obtuse when it came to language.
You had to define your terms before starting any argument. Words were ambiguous; limiting the breadth of your words assured no confusion in argument. Terrible things happened when you didn’t respect this very basic premise, even when it came to something as simple as collecting data. It was impossible not to be prudent if you couldn’t see the face of the person you were talking to.
It was hard dealing with people coming into a still-developing culture. They lacked skill and numbers, and because they had such low comprehension levels they were too eager to believe everything and too easily convinced to take sides. That was why they had to be personally confronted with information in order to get the information. Whatever it took…
Whatever…
Shizue’s larger generation, born in the twenty-first century, was raised to be personally offended by words whose use lacked consideration. Whatever. That was a pretty thickheaded thing to say. It riled her up despite herself.
Still.
Shizue held her breath. Then slowly let it out to calm the ire in her belly.
The people who raised the insensitive generation that bruised Shizue now were probably even more insensitive. She tried to re-examine the bureaucrat’s face with a more historical appreciation of his stupidity.
It made her feel better.
He kept blathering.
“—the body was discovered in this locality, and what’s more it’s a resident of the area, but besides the fact that the victim is a minor, and the possibility of this being one in a string of serial killings notwithstanding, we can’t treat this case as anything less than alarming.”
That went without saying.
Shizue looked at the clock on her monitor.
They’d wasted 1,050 seconds just confirming the obvious.
In other words.
The murder discovered this morning wasn’t deemed part of the greater killing spree because this latest victim was male. The others had all been female.
Based on this information it was decided the prefectural police would take over the investigation. The special investigations unit leader had the chief of Area 122 reporting to him, but otherwise the area chief reported to the prefectural police.
That was all. They could have gotten all this information in writing and saved themselves a lot of time.
Still.
The problem was what had happened before this.
It just so happened this murder had taken place outside of their jurisdiction. What did they think they’d accomplish now? It was beyond conference meetings to determine protocols for emergency notifications.
Plus, all these incidents had taken place in adjacent neighborhoods.
It wasn’t as if there were some physical shield protecting the boundaries between those neighborhoods. Any distinction between inhabited areas was purely theoretical, nothing real. The ground kept going. The fire across the street could have started in your next-door neighbor’s house. Of course it was going to spread. There was nothing you could do if people weren’t worried about the fire in area 408 just because it wasn’t their quarter. They weren’t worth saving, thought Shizue.
“As people who work with adolescents…”
It had always been a dire circumstance.
“As far as we’re concerned…”
The area chief of police, who sat next to the center’s supervisor, spoke with a long face. Despite his severe face, the chief hardly moved his lips when speaking, making his speech come across as ambiguous at best and difficult to hear.
“So…we’re in the throes of smoking out our suspect, but as you can see in the documents we have provided for you, the murder took place outside the residential quarter, and we believe that it took place late at night once again, on top of which we think getting any verbal statements from witnesses of this random killing will be difficult.”
What about it, then?
What did he think was going to happen by presenting this to a group of youth counselors?
“At the moment…”
Shizue had a horrible feeling about this.
“As of now, as area patrols, we are compiling a list of deviants who live in this residential quarter.”
“Wait a second.”
She’d gone and opened her mouth. She knew it was going to end badly but couldn’t stop herself.
“How are you determining that this is a deviant? I’d like a clear definition of what makes this person deviant. Otherwise it’s just discrimination.”
Perhaps because she’d just thrown the conversation off course, the area chief went silent, furrowed his brow, and said “discrimination” under his breath.
“Of course it’s not discrimination. A deviant is a deviant. It’s someone who can’t be normal.”
“I am just asking as a matter of setting a standard. Are the police using a medical standard or else a sociological standard when using this term?”
It was useless.
“What for?”
The area chief looked perplexed and shifted his gaze to his right at another participant. That participant then shot a look at Shizue.
“C’mon, Fuwa.”
He sounded retarded.
“Stop saying things that make no sense. It runs our discussion off course. It’s a waste of our time.”
This whole conference was a waste of time.
“What’s not making any sense, Counselor Takazawa? I should like to repeat, as a counselor, that these baseless accusations are discriminatory. I should like you not to use these terms if you’re not prepared to define them.”
“Discriminatory…”
The police chief looked like he didn’t know what it meant and this time shot a glance at the counselor on his left.
Was he a superior? The skinny man gave the police chief a cold look, then faced Shizue.
“I am Ishida, from Division R of the prefectural police, head of the violent crimes investigation unit,” he said. “This is, as you say, a term we don’t want to have misunderstood. Let me try to explain. The deviant Officer Yokota is talking about will have committed crimes that are wholly removed from typical crimes prosecutable or non-prosecutable by the police, or else has attempted these crimes or is a person suspected of having participated in such crimes.”
“What does ‘wholly removed from typical crimes’ mean?”
“This is a very crude way of saying it, but sexually based crimes including stalking, for example. If I go any further than that it will seem discriminatory, as you say.”
“In other words—”
“You are correct. Distinguishing ‘normal’ from ‘abnormal’ is a very delicate issue. For example, there is nothing we can do about a person’s behavior if their proclivities remain personal, with no effect on others.
Even if he stepped outside those bounds, even if we are able to prove that he is a poor influence on society, if we can’t arrest or prosecute him, we can’t legally call him a criminal. However, if we’re to solve this crime swiftly, or prevent it from happening again, we must know what kind of person we’re looking for. We’ve aggregated all the information we need, and the prefectural police has a database of sorts.”
“That’s—”
Before Shizue had a chance to respond, Ishida sharply interjected.
“Could you say this is infringing on privacy? Sure. However it is not as if we were taking any extreme liberties into anyone’s information.”
“Does that mean you’re simply collecting public information on citizens into a database?”
“Public or private, we’re taking information deemed important to the general public, as well as secondhand information parlayed by others.
We’re not invading any personal information sources.”
“Of course not.”
“Right. This is information the average person could gather without a police badge. However it’s the mass of information. It’s on a scale the average person would never be able to collect. That having been said, for the police to collect this information in a calculated fashion…could raise issues.”
“I’m sure.”
“That’s why we can’t speak in simple terms.”
“That’s why you have these vague definitions of elusive notions?”
“That’s right. It’s like you said. There are too many different kinds of people in the world. If you look at our barometer, there are a good number of dangerous types out there. But no matter how dangerous they are, if they haven’t committed any crimes, they won’t spill out of the ‘lawful citizen’ category. And so I think our officer here dares to use the term ‘deviant.’ I’d like your affirmation on this terminology.”
This was all too convenient.
“So essentially, the authorities will draw the line on what is to be considered normal,” Shizue said.
“We’re determining which personages demonstrate a potential danger from the stance that we are to protect society at large. We are calling them deviants for the convenience of this conference.”
“That’s enough,” Shizue said quietly.
“Pervert or deviant, who cares. You’re stalling the conversation.”
“It’s important.”
“You’re just a troublemaker now, aren’t you, Miss?”
The area chief had made a reckless comment. Must have been in his fifties. Definitely born before the turn of the century. Shizue scowled at him. Ishida reprimanded him.
“Officer Yokota. That’s a clear instance of sexual harassment. We don’t approve of comments made on the basis of difference in age or sex.”
The area chief looked totally dissatisfied and stared at Shizue. Shizue looked away. She didn’t want to look at him.
“But as the counselor points out, there seems to be some unsatisfactory terms in the local police’s explanations, which the prefectural police will hopefully clarify,” Ishida said, as if to correct the situation. At least his delivery was acceptable.
“As I’ve just proffered, my prefectural police team, through the area patrol, will investigate the current situation and use the database to survey those who have the potential to commit violent crimes in the neighborhood.”
They were talking in circles.
“We’re working on a very minute survey process. And in that regard, we’re requesting the participation of the residents in the area in question. We will formally request their cooperation.”
Ishida turned toward the superior assemblyman.
“Of course,” he said.
“But, if I may be frank, the reality right now is that the police force is facing a difficult investigation. Truth be told we have a huge gap in our database.”
“Gap?”
“There is a remarkable lack of information on minors.” Ishida looked out at the group, one by one. His gaze finally landed on Shizue.
“We don’t have any data on the minors save what’s already been made public.”
“You mean the data we have collected?”
“Correct. All we have right now is the public data collected by your local community center—the local register of residents aggregated by each local youth welfare department and local government,” the representative said.
“There must be a lot of heinous youth crimes unmentioned in that data, eh?”
What an irresponsible thing to say. A lapse in judgment. The head chief of the area youth protective services gave a sideways glare at the representative.
“May I have a word, Assemblyman? Crime among minors has decreased drastically since its peak in 2002. It has not risen at all.”
It was something she’d say.
Actually, no she wouldn’t. It would imply counseling was totally useless.
“Whether the rate has decreased or not does not matter. Obviously since I was elected assemblyman, the laws have been repeatedly revised.”
Ishida replied that anyone who’d committed a crime would be charged and prosecuted, even minors.
“As you know, this will involve a criminal penalty. If it’s covered by existing laws, there is no distinction in criminality. Other than that it takes longer in court, there is no difference between criminal cases involving adults and minors. Just that in the case of minors, we have no legal access to personal information about them other than what’s been made publicly accessible. It’s the entire police organization’s judgment that accordingly, there is no need to gather that information.”
A man sitting next to Ishida who looked like a police officer said, You mean there’s no budget for that.
“All this data aggregation is difficult as it is.”
Hearing this wasn’t going to get anything started. The bug in Shizue’s gut started to act up again.
“I get that the police have no budget, but what about it? Maybe I’m not understanding what you’re saying, but this meeting itself is a waste of our time and hence your budget.”
Ishida spoke without change in expression or intonation.
“Let me be totally forthright. I want the information you all have on people over the age of ten to be handed over to the police.”
“That’s not right.”
Shizue looked at the counselor sitting next to her.
He wouldn’t move.
Is he shocked, or does he not think anything of it?
“What is the meaning of this?”
“Just as you heard. These minors—who until now were bundled up and referred to as ‘children’—in the residential quarter number approximately 3,200. We are respectfully asking you to provide nonpublic information about them.”
That’s not right.
“We can’t do that,” Shizue said. “As a rule, we do not make public the personal information collected on the children in each community center. Even if they are over the age of ten, if they are under supervision, you need their consent to peruse their file. It doesn’t matter that you’re the police.”
“These are rules by default,” the police chief said. “I’d like you to think about the situation. It’s a serial murderer.”
“People are killed all over the country every day. This isn’t even the first time someone’s been killed in this quarter. I’ve never heard such an illegal request.”
“It’s not illegal. This is a necessary measure we take as a matter of mitigating extralegal circumstances.”
“You’re twisting the words.”
“Hey, hey, Fuwa,” the head assemblyman said, stroking his hair back in an awkward gesture. He scratched his head, but his hair flopped back into place. It was depressing. Memory-hair transplants were truly one of the most regrettable innovations of the age, Shizue thought. If you’re going to grow hair like that, at least don’t try to make it move. He probably wasn’t held enough as a child.
“You’re overreacting, but we understand that. That’s precisely why we’ve organized this conference, so if you could just bear with us.”
“You’re saying you’re suspecting children now?”
They think they’re gonna get the last word here?
The assemblyman dropped the end his sentence and just flapped his mouth.
“You believe that there is a killer among these children at the center, do you?”
“It’s a possibility.”
“They’re under suspicion then.”
“Enough, Fuwa. C’mon—”
“They are,” Ishida said matter-of-factly.
“The victims are minors and have to be within shooting range. Of course we haven’t narrowed it down that far yet, but we need more information to do just that.”
Relationships.
There was no age limit on friendships. If they were communicating via monitors, there was no saying what age or sex their associates were. It had nothing to do with anything. If anyone were having frequent inperson exchanges there’d be no need for communication sessions.
I know what you want to say, Ishida said as if reading the look on Shizue’s face.
“We’re not just assuming that because they’re minors their friends are all the same age. The police are well aware of the reality. We’ve studied the monitor histories of these victims, and we’re in the process of filtering their public records. The victims all seemed to be fans of cel-based animation and seemed to be corresponding frequently with other fans. Of course, the age, sex, and nationality of their friends is all scattered. If anything, the average enthusiast shows to be older. However…”
Ishida looked briefly at his own monitor.
“In murder cases like this, it’s almost always the case that the victim and the culprit will have had physical interaction. You already know this. It was not poison or explosives used in these killings. Because the victims sustained physical damage, we know for a fact the killer was in personal contact.”
He did not have to explain all this again. She understood.
Ishida looked around.
“Since we’re talking about kids who aren’t just passing information around, since we know there was real physical interaction involved, the investigation is terribly limited. In any case, children these days don’t interact with people. Their only interactions are through communication labs. Learning levels and counseling notwithstanding, classrooms are divided strictly by age, after all.”
“You’re right,” Ishida agreed.
He didn’t want to answer.
“None of the victims had siblings. Other than their counselors, these kids had no physical interaction with anyone but groupmates and children in other groups they might have seen at their local centers.”
“That’s not necessarily true. It’s difficult to be certain as the police don’t yet have all the information on these kids, but the kids do have some interaction with society.”
“Right. So we’d like for you to share that data with us,” Ishida said directly at Shizue.
They probably thought that if Shizue relented now they could end this conversation. By settling one argument when confronted with two, the police side of the room was able to circumvent the original issue of the appropriateness of police requests for extreme lawful diligence.
Shizue was a scapegoat.
Who are my allies?
“As you’ve just mentioned, each of you has personal data on each of these children. It should be your job to collect the data and supervise the lives of these children.”
“You say ‘supervise the lives of these children’ like it’s nothing. No matter how you look at it, supervision comes down to information. We aren’t directly supervising the children.”
“Don’t you think that’s the same difference?”
“No, it isn’t. If a problem arises, resolving the issue will always end up being the individual’s responsibility. We will counsel them, and the children will respond according to their own whims, but our hypothesis is that our advice is absolutely not legally enforceable. It’s fundamentally different from back when school institutions strictly enforced a down-the-middle sociability on these kids, like they were animals or something. Those minors who seemed like social weaklings—we protect their basic human rights, and in order to maintain a position of aiding in the exercise of the right to full development, we expunged the word ‘education’ from our vocabulary, remember?”
Shizue thought to herself that this wasn’t her normal spiel. This was something the area bureau chief of the juvenile counselors cooperative should be saying.
The chief in question was scowling and simply sat there trying to see where this was going. He wasn’t upset. He was resigned. It probably didn’t matter to him what happened either way.
“And so…” Shizue continued. She had no choice but to. “And so the information I have on the children is all provided to me by them. We are forbidden from acting as a third party without any notice to the child in question. Doing that would be a violation of the relationship of trust between the center and the child, and it cannot be done.”
“Relationship of trust…” The area chief wrinkled his nose. “Well, I’m just a patrol officer, and I don’t understand these more complicated things, but speaking on my own behalf, with or without this counseling you’re talking about, the world isn’t a better place at the end of the day. Crimes committed by minors have certainly shown a tendency to decrease, and I don’t know about the numbers, but the actual reality of the situation hasn’t changed. When you say we can’t use the word ‘education’…”
The police officer looked around for reactions from other people of his generation.
“When we were growing up there was still school, but everyone complained that we were just being trained. I mean, as you pointed out, no one really trusted the schools, but what we have now is not so different, I don’t think. If anything I think it’s gotten worse. There’s no discipline.
That’s probably not good.”
“Could you not make this personal? Subjective interpretations are unacceptable to further such discussion.”
The police officer went “Oh” and cowered at the neck. He was no good.
“The point is, I’m against it.”
“You’re a counselor. You were just brought out here from central, weren’t you?”
“Of course I don’t have the power to make any decisions. I’d like to hear what the regional head and area chief have to say about it.”
The two in question both voiced strange sounds.
“In any case we have no precedent. We have to come to a consensus with the whole national organization of youth counselors.”
“There’s no need for that,” Ishida pronounced.
“No need?”
“Yes. Actually we’ve already broadcast news of this to all reporting areas outside the one in question, pursuant to the requirement.”
The local center’s director muttered in an uncertain tone that he hadn’t been told anything about this.
“There was no established route of communication for this kind of broadcast announcement.”
“Of course, the very fact that we had information of this nature was in itself not to be made public, so…”
“Are you covering something up?” Shizue asked.
“Covering up? We are simply not publicizing it is all.”
“You’re covering up precisely because you know this will be recognized as uncouth behavior.”
“That is not true.”
Ishida spoke up affirmatively again.
“This situation calls for immediate action. However, the reality is that there is no prior legal protocol for this kind of response. That’s why we requested cooperation and reached out to the adolescent welfare department through the respective prefectural offices—to see if we couldn’t find the most legal way to do this, in a best-case scenario. As it is, we are unable to compel compliance. But we were able to obtain the consent required. Rest assured they thoroughly studied the request. However, as has been mentioned more than once, this is an incredibly delicate situation, without so much as being illegal. Which is why we’re issuing a formal gag order so as not to create any confusion with the public.”
“You’re saying the welfare department answered positively to your request to keep this sharing of data a secret?”
“The gag order was issued by the police, but if anyone’s going to benefit from it in the event of such a data share, it’s the adolescent welfare department that provides the data.”
He’d been holding this information back as a courtesy, or at least that was what it sounded like.
Shizue stared at the bureau chief.
His mouth was a perfectly upturned V.
“You’re saying there is a precedent then.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“That’s how we convinced central.”
The bureau chief and Shizue stood up.
“Either way it’s a very unique illegal precedent. It’s clear this isn’t just the piecing together of established facts. It’s an abuse of power backed by destructive legalese.”
“Whether it’s an abuse of power or not, it falls in line with legislative privilege.”
“Our job is not to make laws, of course, so there’s nothing we can do about this.”
Shizue looked at the edge of her desk.
It was useless. There was no arguing this.
It was a foregone conclusion.
This wasn’t going to be documented.
And that was exactly why they’d gone out of their way to assemble this emergency meeting. Everyone was now implicated.
Shizue stopped breathing.
She couldn’t stand the smell.