As I skimmed the article, I couldn’t help thinking what a fool this man was. Tanabe, the oldest man alive, maintained he had got to the age of 113 eating nothing but vegetables and the occasional deep-fried prawn as a treat. Well, he sounded like a real live wire. This living fossil’s last remaining source of pleasure consisted of peeling a prawn or two, though he was eating fewer and fewer of them because greasy foods no longer agreed with him. Poor old Tanabe! Soon you’ll be welcomed into nirvana and everything will be all right, you’ll see: they’ve put a fried-prawn stand right by the entrance and you can stuff yourself to your heart’s content without worrying about the oil.
It seems ridiculous now, but at the time I was captivated; I stopped thinking about my trap and read the article from beginning to end. ‘I’m happy,’ the old fogey told them. ‘I want to live another ten years.’ Silly twerp! And I don’t know why but afterwards, oblivious to the sun going down amid the far-off rumble of traffic, I stayed for some time sitting in the dark, looking out of the bay window but not seeing the bay itself, the looming ships or the dockyard.
At that point in the evening you assume that your waking self with all its sediment of bitterness, worries, regrets or remorse and jealousy, will dissolve in a deep sleep, until the night veers off course. Though no different from usual – no louder, no quieter – the cicadas wake you the second you start drifting off. They screech on and on, driving you to distraction like drunken harpies; or are you being over-sensitive tonight? Here they come, single file into your head through one ear and out the other, circling around your skull before diving in again, spiralling malevolently in their line, laughing mockingly. Mercifully a violent downpour disperses them before dawn like the protesters on the NHK news last night, driven from wherever it was by water cannons. But how can you doze off knowing that with a simple copy of the key, the intruder – since there obviously is one – can let themselves into your home at any moment, together with a gang of heavies to beat you up and leave you for dead before you even know what’s happening to you? You think to yourself: it’s because of you, intruder, that I can’t sleep, and I’ll have a terrible headache later sitting in front of my areas of high and low pressure, but just you wait. You’ll get what’s coming to you. Everything is in place. And look, it’s time to get up; it’s already six thirty.
There comes a time when nothing happens any more. The ribbon of destiny, stretched too wide, has snapped. There’s no more. The shockwave caused by your birth is far, oh so far, behind you now. That is modern life. Your existence spans the distance between failure and success. Between frost and the rising of sap. I had been mulling all this over on the tram the previous week, and that morning, as I sat in the same spot on the tram, looking out at the same urban wallpaper, the thought that it might not be set in stone made me euphoric. The vehicle hurtled along, taking in the stops, taking in pensive, silent humans preoccupied with trying to decipher unfathomable dreams. Maybe they lived more fully in their sleep than in their waking hours? After a litany of stations I knew by heart – Kankodori, Edomachi and Ohato, Gotomachi followed by Yachiyomachi then Takaramachi – I got off and changed onto another line. Sometimes I finish my journey on foot, but this morning I wasn’t up to it, and besides I was in a hurry. No sooner had I left the metallic grating sound of the tram behind me than the cicadas took over, screeching as I walked under their trees. They were judging me, confounding my thoughts and barely formed sentences so that as soon as I reached the office I shut the windows and asked my colleagues to give me a moment: I was up all night because of them and they’re hysterical this morning, listen to them; it makes you want to block your ears, and even then, when everything’s sealed up, they still find a way in; they can get through glass and concrete, they pass through walls, these creatures – which brought my mind back to the matter in hand: the camera, and my very own person who walks through walls.
I retreated to my desk, alone. As far as my colleagues knew, I was busy studying the overnight satellite photos; because, like them, I am a meteorologist. Once I’ve logged on to my computer and launched the relevant programs, I spend each morning consulting the latest charts and reports sent in from various weather stations. Since on this occasion there was no need to issue any weather warnings or attend to any other urgent tasks, I opened a window in the bottom right-hand corner of my screen. In the space of a few clicks, I had set the trap. It was done. As if by magic, a still shot of a kitchen appeared, the same kitchen where I had just been eating my breakfast. Everything looked calm. If I had been married with a wife at home, I could have watched her moving about from my desk. Before leaving the office of an evening, I would know what she was making for dinner. The webcam I had installed the previous day worked brilliantly. Without leaving my seat, I could be an invisible, weightless ninja spying on my own home. I had achieved ubiquity without even trying. But then the telephone rang, telling me I was needed. The departmental meeting scheduled for ten o’clock had been brought forward and was starting any minute. Blast, just as I was trying to concentrate on the little aquarium in the bottom right-hand corner of my screen.
Later on, once the meeting had finished, I resumed my watch, regaining the use of my third eye. It’s possible to link these tiny webcams to your mobile phone, which is exactly what I should have done had mine not been prehistoric (three years old). Then I wouldn’t have had to waste my time during the meeting; I could have carried on watching the house while listening to them listening to each other, repeating each other, rehashing each other. If I was married, I could keep an eye on my wife, either out of jealousy or because I couldn’t bear to be parted from her. Passing in front of the camera, she would wink flirtatiously at my third eye, perhaps even blow it a kiss. Come the afternoon, I would know which friends she had round and what they were wearing. But today, the camera was far from being a chastity belt or any other marital tie. From inside the glass cabinet where I had installed it, the camera unveiled a chilling picture of my solitude which made me shiver if I dwelt on it. Luckily I had no time to dwell on it because the telephone rang, a colleague asking my advice, and I fine-tuned the shipping forecast: my job consists of pre-emptively saving the lives of fishermen from Tsushima-to to Tanega-shima and beyond.
As the morning wore on, so the cicadas kept up their racket. I was at their mercy, my nerves in tatters. They could force a confession from any suspect.
The house, on the other hand, was still giving nothing away.
I maximised the window in the bottom right-hand corner. There it was, full screen. A full screen of nothing. There was something odd though. Now that I had blown it up and could see the kitchen in detail, something was niggling me. Was it the bottle of mineral water left out on the work surface? Experts have been known to rely on such intuitions: the painting in front of them is a fake; they are utterly convinced of it, even without proof. They step right back and then lean in closer, in much the same way as I was inspecting the kitchen under the magnifying glass of my fears. This tableau was a fake. The bottle had moved. While I was a) in the meeting, b) in the loo, c) on the phone or d) sidetracked by a colleague struggling to interpret a shot. Was I really, totally sure that it wasn’t exactly where I had left it? For the remainder of the morning, I left my desk only to go and buy a bento box from the local Lawson, which I grazed on in front of my computer: an absence of ten minutes that I was now compensating for by not taking my eyes off the table where I would have dinner that evening. There I was, like a weatherman under house arrest in the eye of a static anticyclone. As I opened the box which held my lunch, I had the impression of looking into a doll’s house from above, with all the little neatly divided compartments filled with multicoloured items of food. And I said to myself, you could fit a webcam in each of your six rooms, split the screen into the same number of windows and do nothing from morning to night but examine from a distance the bento box you live in.
And then it was lunch time. My colleagues deserted the open-plan office, the air conditioning having given up the ghost, and, preferring to swelter rather than put up with the cicadas, I went round shutting all the windows again, leaving just one open, the one on my computer screen, which I continued to watch while finishing the contents of the box compartment by compartment. Hadn’t the bottle of water been slightly closer to the sink earlier on? A matter of fifteen or twenty centimetres, it seemed to me. No sooner had I convinced myself
