method of satisfying them. Because, far from being hysterical, she always had a glint of pure satisfaction in her eyes. She was probably being satisfied by someone else. It may have been an illusion, because I was hungry and my vision was blurred. But two or three times, when I returned home from work unannounced, I saw my wife and the moustache man hurriedly moving away from each other. Maybe she was having an affair with him. But I didn’t feel like questioning her about it. And anyway, even if I did discover she was having an affair with him – or with a different man altogether – I no longer had the strength to get angry about it. I would have no option but to pretend I hadn’t noticed. In fact, vitality was slipping away from my body day by day, as I wasn’t eating properly. Even my capacity to think straight, to grasp situations and work out how they would develop, was quickly starting to disappear.
“But hey,” I thought incoherently, idly inside my feeble head. “He’s satisfying my wife on my behalf, since I don’t have the energy to. Because of him, I’m released from my wife’s demands. I can go to work without collapsing, so I can carry on working. That’s good, isn’t it? If anything, I ought to thank him!”
But one day, the moustache man suddenly stopped visiting us. Not only did he stop visiting us, but he suddenly vanished from our apartment block, from our entire neighbourhood.
It was just a few days later that I realized he’d withdrawn almost our entire savings from our bank account before he vanished. And we weren’t the only victims. All fourteen households in our block had suffered the same fate. All had believed, nay, never doubted that the moustache man had been sent from their bank. They’d entrusted him with their passbooks, and had handed him money and name seals to let him deposit their salaries into their accounts. In other words, they saw him as a kind of roving bank employee. And he disappeared the day after payday.
But at least he was human – at least he had some sort of conscience. For he’d been kind enough to leave the small sum of five thousand yen in each account to tide us over. That made me feel better. It was about the same amount as we spent on food each month. Yes! That was all we needed to keep us going until the next payday.
You see, our hard-earned savings are always going to be taken from us by
The World Is Tilting
Marine City started tilting at the end of a particularly blustery autumn one year. A typhoon in September sent waves of almost tsunami-like proportions into the bay, where the City rested on an artificial island. The waves breached one of the bulkheads on the ballast tanks used to stabilize Marine City, causing its centre of gravity to shift south-southwestwards.
The entrance to the bay was on the south-southwest, and just after the middle of October, Marine City gradually started tilting towards the Pacific Ocean. But the angle could have been no more than about two degrees, and nobody noticed it at the time. Nor did it cause any inconvenience. Rod Le Mesurier first became aware of the tilt when an old university professor, Proven McLogick, spoke to him at a bus stop. They were both waiting for a bus to take them over Marine Bridge into the metropolis.
“Look you there, Master Le Mesurier,” said the Professor. “Look at the northeastern wall of yon North No. 2 Block. The wall is supposed to be vertical, is it not. But try lining up the perpendicular of the corner with the perpendicular of the wall on that thirty-six-storey building – oh, what is it called? Yes, the Notatall Building, over there in the distance. Do you not see? Their tops are askew of one another.”
Unlike the City’s women, Rod was always most deferential to Professor McLogick, and perhaps because of this the Professor often spoke to him. Rod looked out in the direction indicated by the old man’s leaden-grey, spindly finger, and saw that the top of the multistorey building across the water in the metropolis was indeed tilting by about half an inch to the right, as his eye saw it, from the fifth floor of an apartment block on the northern edge of the City.
“So it is. It’s sticking out a bit, isn’t it. The Notatall Building must be tilting to the northeast.”
“No, young man. The North No. 2 Block is tilting to the southwest. Look from over here. It’s parallel to the perpendicular of North No. 1 Block, is it not.”
Their conversation, which concluded somewhat sonorously that the whole of Marine City must therefore be tilting to the southwest, was overheard by Miss Loyalty, an office worker with proper and orderly features, who happened to be waiting at the same bus stop. Later that morning, she used her office telephone to report the conversation to the Mayor. The Mayor of Marine City, still in her first year of office, was a fifty-eight-year-old woman named Fedora Last. She’d always been on bad terms with Professor McLogick anyway. It was she who’d called for the creation of a “marine city” in the first place, and this distinction had led to her being elected the City’s first Mayor. She loved Marine City to an almost obscene degree.
Fedora Last took the call from Miss Loyalty in her private office. She’d never entertained any particular opinion or feeling about Le Mesurier, though she knew him to be a salaried worker, since she was acquainted with his wife Caprice, an employee of the City. But she reacted quite strongly when she heard the name of Professor McLogick.
The Mayor ordered Rory O’Storm, the Chief of Police, to investigate the Professor, on the grounds that his observation was an uncivil act designed to spread malicious rumours, based on his spiteful intent to cause anxiety among the citizens. Later that day, Professor McLogick was called to the telephone in his university laboratory, and answered it with calm composure.
“Another order from Old Fat Arse,” he said with a chuckle. Old Fat Arse was his nickname for Fedora Last, that being an anagram of her name. He was certainly fond of annoying her.
Marine City had an official news journal as befitting any large town, and at the beginning of April six prominent citizens, including the Mayor, had gathered in the Community Hall for an editorial round-table discussion. During the discussion, there was a heated confrontation between Fedora Last and Professor McLogick. Asked what Marine City needed most of all at the present time, the Mayor answered “A narrative”. The other five interpreted this “narrative” as they wished, and so voiced their agreement. In fact, Fedora Last was thinking of a “Marine City Creation Story” in which her own name would go down in legend, along the lines of Joan of Arc. Professor McLogick, on the other hand, took the “narrative” to be a modern concept. The “narrative” as a postmodern term dates way back to 1979, when Jean-Francois Lyotard used it in his book
“Who will create this ‘narrative’, Mayor?”
“All of us, of course.”
“Who do you mean by ‘us’? Someone first has to create an ideology for the narrative, do they not?”
“A narrative is not an ideology. Do you mean to deny our democratic principles?”
“So your intention is not to create a narrative that will replace democracy?”
“My intention is to create a narrative.”
“What are you talking about?”
“What are you talking about?”
Professor McLogick, exasperated at the Mayor’s utter lack of comprehension, could hold back no more. “Alas, I fear it’s true. By nature, women are in all respects inferior to men.”
“I could have you arrested for that,” the Mayor retorted. “Women will respond to the physical violence of men with the violence of language. Sometimes, women’s linguistic violence will spark physical violence by men. Therefore, linguistic violence should also be punished. It was a man who said that. But now, men’s linguistic violence is a penal offence, while that of women is not. It was me who proposed this law and pushed it through. You know that very well.”
“Yes, I know. But it wasn’t me who said what I said. It was Schopenhauer.”
