Salmonella Men on Planet Porno (Vintage Contemporaries) (18 page)

I’m sitting on top of the parliament building, resisting tear-gas attacks from air force helicopters that circle above me like flies. I will soon enjoy my very last cigarette, my last show of resistance. My comrade, the painter Kusakabe, fell to his death just moments ago, leaving me alone as the last smoker remaining on earth. At this very moment, images of me – highlighted against the night sky by searchlights down below – are probably being relayed live across the country from TV cameras inside the helicopters.

I’ve got three packs left, and I refuse to die before I’ve finished them. So I’ve been chain-smoking two or three at a time. My head feels numb, my eyes are starting to spin. It’s only a matter of time before I, too, fall lifeless to the ground below.

It was only about fifteen or sixteen years ago that the anti-smoking movement started. And it was only six or seven years ago, at most, that the pressure on smokers really started to intensify. I never dreamt that, in such a short time, I would become the very last smoker left on earth. But maybe the signs were all there from the beginning. Being a fairly well known novelist, I used to spend most of my time at home writing. As a result, I had few opportunities to see or feel for myself the changes that society was going through. I hardly ever read the newspapers, as I abhor the journalistic style – it reminds me of dead fish. I lived in a provincial town, and my editors would come out to see me whenever the need arose. I tended to shun literary circles, and so never ventured into the capital.

Of course, I knew about the anti-smoking lobby. Intellectuals would often write articles stating their support or opposition in
magazines and elsewhere. I also knew that the tone of the debate, on both sides, had gradually grown more hysterical, and that, from a certain point in time, the movement had suddenly started to swell while opposing arguments rapidly disappeared.

But as long as I stayed at home, I could live in splendid isolation from it all. I’d been a heavy smoker since my teens, and had continued to smoke without pause. Even so, no one ever admonished me or gave me any complaint. My wife and son tacitly put up with it. They probably realized that, for me to continue producing literary works and maintain an income as a fashionable writer, the consumption of huge quantities of cigarettes was absolutely essential. This probably wouldn’t have been the case if I’d worked in an office, for example. For it seems that, from a relatively early time, smokers started losing out on promotion.

One day, two editors from a young people’s magazine came to my house in the hope of commissioning an article. I showed them into my sitting room. One of them, a woman of about twenty-seven or twenty-eight, handed me a business card with this printed in bold across the top:

Apparently, this was not so uncommon at the time. More and more women were expressing anti-smoking sentiments on their name cards. But I was unaware of that. So you can imagine my indignation. Any magazine editor worth her salt should have known that a fashionable novelist such as myself would be a heavy smoker. Even if she didn’t know it, handing a name card like that to someone who might be a smoker, especially when she was asking that someone to do a job for her, was completely out of order – even if the other person
wasn’t
actually a smoker.

I stood up immediately.

“Regrettably, I’m unable to earn your thanks,” I said to the stupefied pair. “For I myself am a chain smoker. I couldn’t imagine even discussing work without a cigarette in hand. But thank you, anyway, for coming all this way.”

The woman arched her eyebrows in twitching increments. Her colleague, a young man, hurriedly rose and started to entreat me. “Oh, well, you know, it’s just that, please don’t be angry, if we could just, you know…” he continued behind me as I left the room. It seems they also left shortly afterwards, arguing with each other on the way out.

I was somewhat perplexed by my overreaction. They had, after all, spent four hours travelling from Tokyo. And of course, I could have gone without a cigarette for an hour or so, if I had to. But why should I? It’s not as though they were some kind of changelings who’d die if they breathed a bit of smoke. So I justified myself with the thought that, if I
had
agreed to talk to them without smoking, I’d have grown so irritated that our little
contretemps
would have seemed tame by comparison.

Unfortunately for me, this female editor happened to be one of the standard-bearers of the anti-smoking movement. She was so enraged by the incident that she started spreading malicious slander about me, in other publications as well as in her own. By extension, she also cast scorn on all smokers in general. Smokers were bigoted and pigheaded, obstinate and rude, arrogant and overbearing, selfish and obsessive, self-righteous and despotic – or so she said. Working with such people is fraught with difficulties and therefore bound to fail. As such, smokers should be banished from all workplaces. Reading this author’s works is not to be advised, as the reader could become contaminated with his smoking ethos. All smokers are fools. All smokers are insane.

Eventually, I could remain silent no longer. It might have been all right if I were the only one, but other smokers were being insulted, too. Just as I was thinking of issuing some kind of reply, I received a call from the Chief Editor of a magazine called
Rumours of Truth
, for which I wrote a regular column. He urged me not to give in to this pressure from the newly empowered anti-smoking lobby, but to fight back against it. I quickly wrote my next submission to the magazine, which went something like this:

“Discrimination against smokers seems to have reached new heights. This results from a combination of extremism and the
simple-mindedness of non-smokers. Anti-smoking proponents show an utter lack of understanding, precisely because they do not smoke. Mouth ulcers are cured by cigarette smoke. Tobacco soothes nervous irritation. Admittedly, people who don’t smoke are healthy and have wholesome complexions. That’s because many of them take part in sports. But they also smile for no reason. They don’t think deeply about anything, and are totally uninteresting to talk to. Their conversation is superficial and their topics shallow. Their thinking is unfocussed and vague. They go off on a tangent without warning. They can’t discuss any topic on more than one level. Their reasoning is not
inductive
but
deductive
. That’s why they’re so awfully easy to understand, yet, on the other hand, are always so quick to jump to hackneyed conclusions. When it comes to sport, they can prattle on endlessly, however little interest we show. But when the conversation turns to philosophy or literature, they fall asleep. In the old days, the air at long, difficult meetings would be thick with cigarette smoke. But now the conference room has been sanitized by air purifiers, ion generators and the like. Does that mean we can meet in relaxation?
Au contraire
. Meetings are over before they’ve started, or so I hear. Everyone’s in such a hurry to leave. But of course – non-smokers can’t bear long conversations, deep conversations, difficult conversations. As soon as the business at hand is over, or they know what they’re supposed to do, they get up and go. They can’t keep still. If someone detains them, they keep looking at their watches impatiently. But when they’re angry, they just go on and on. What’s more – whether male or female – they’re all sex-mad. The more they take care of their health, the more they neglect to use their brains – at the expense of their health, ironically. In other words, they become imbeciles. What’s the point of living such long, healthy lives if they’re nothing but blockheads? Large groups of foolish old people would become a burden to the minority of younger people. Do they really mean to keep playing golf until they’re a hundred? Tobacco was a truly great discovery – it has given people depth of feeling. Nevertheless, even journalists today are jumping on the anti-smoking bandwagon. What’s that all about?! Newspaper editing rooms should be epitomized by murky
clouds of tobacco smoke. Why are newspapers so uninteresting today? – Because the editing rooms are all too clean!!”

This article sparked a storm of protest as soon as it was published. Of course, originating from non-smokers, there was nothing particularly new about it. Some of it was simply idiotic – the writer would merely turn my argument on its head by replacing “nonsmokers” with “smokers”. These reactions were duly published in
Rumours of Truth
, where they were deemed suitably illogical to represent the views of non-smokers.

It was from about this time that I started receiving malicious phone calls and hate mail. The calls were simple abuse, along the lines of “So you want to die young, then? Moron!” The letters were similar, though sometimes rather witty – one, for example, contained a lump of tar and the message “Eat this and die!”

Soon, cigarette advertising was completely banned from all media. People’s inclination to follow the crowd now came to the fore, and discrimination against smokers grew more overt. Though I spent most of my time at home writing, I would also venture out on occasion – to buy books, for example. On one such occasion, I shook in anger when I saw this sign in a nearby park:

So now we were no better than dogs. That made me all the more defiant, and my will became so much more unyielding. Would I bend to such oppression? Was I not a man?!

A department store sales rep would bring ten cartons of cigarettes to my house once a month. They were the American brand More, of which I would consume around sixty or seventy a day. But then imports of foreign cigarettes were banned. Just before the ban, I stockpiled about two hundred cartons. These soon ran out, and I’ve had to make do with domestic brands ever since.

One day, I was obliged to travel to Tokyo, as I’d been invited to give an address at a literary event. The event was organized by a publishing house that I’d been indebted to for some years. So I asked my wife to reserve me a seat on the train.

“The fares for smoking seats have gone up by 20%,” said my wife as she handed me the ticket. “And there’s only one smoking car. The ticket-seller looked at me as if I were some kind of wild animal!”

I was utterly dismayed on entering the smoking car. The seats were falling apart and the windows covered with grime. Some were cracked for good measure, only held together by little patches of sticky tape. The floor was strewn with litter, the ceiling thick with cobwebs. In this filthy carriage sat seven or eight po-faced smokers. The gloomy strains of Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A Minor filtered through the loudspeaker. The ashtrays by the seats were crammed full of cigarette ends, and had evidently not seen a cleaner for some time. On the doors at the ends of the carriage were signs saying “No passage to other carriages”. The toilet at the rear of the carriage was just a hole in the floor, leading down to a vat. Peering through the hole, I could see a pile of human waste. There were no taps at the wash basin – just a tin cup chained to the wall, with a hand-operated water pump.

I was so incensed that I decided to cut my engagement and get out at the next station. From there, I returned home in a taxi. After all, if things were already this bad, who could know what awaited me at the venue, or the hotel?!

Urban tobacconists soon became ostracized by the communities they served. One after another, my local suppliers went out of business, forcing me to walk ever longer distances to make my purchases. In the end, there was only one tobacconist left in my vicinity.

“Don’t tell me you’re giving up, too!” I begged the elderly shopkeeper, adding, “But if you do, could you bring your remaining stock over to my house?”

And that’s just what he did, that very same night. “I’m giving up,” he said as he handed the lot over to me. It seems he’d been waiting for the opportunity to jack it in. When I said what I said, he’d jumped at the chance, gathered his stock and shut up shop.

Discrimination against smokers grew ever more extreme. In other countries, they’d already managed to ban smoking completely. We
in Japan lagged behind as usual. Cigarettes were still being sold and people were still smoking them. Non-smokers saw this as a national humiliation, and started treating smokers as less than human. Some who smoked openly were beaten up in the streets.

There is a theory that the nobility of the human soul will always prevent this kind of lunacy from getting out of hand. I beg to differ. Opinions may vary on what exactly is meant by “getting out of hand”. But looking back over the history of mankind, we find countless examples of such lunacy merely leading to greater forms of extremism, such as lynching or mob killings.

Discrimination against smokers quickly grew to the level of a witch-hunt. But it was hard to control, precisely because the discriminators didn’t regard their actions as lunacy. Acts of human savagery are never so extreme as when they are committed in the name of a lofty cause, be it religion, justice or “correctness”. In the name of the modern religion of “health,” and under the banner of justice and correctness, discrimination against smokers soon escalated to the point of murder. A renowned heavy smoker was butchered in the street, and in broad daylight, by a gang of seventeen or eighteen hysterical housewives who were out shopping and two policemen. He’d refused to stop smoking despite repeated requests. It was said that, as he died, nicotine and tar spurted out of holes left in his body by bullets and kitchen knives.

When an earthquake set off fires in a densely populated part of Tokyo, a rumour was put about that they’d been deliberately started by smokers. So checkpoints were set up on the roads, and those trying to escape were stopped. If they were wheezing for breath, they were assumed to be smokers and executed on the spot. A sense of guilt, on a subconscious level, seemed to have given the discriminators their own paranoia.

When the national tobacco company went up in smoke and was forced to fold, it was the start of truly dark times for smokers. At night, gangs calling themselves the National Anti-smoking Front (NAF), their faces partly hidden behind triangular white masks, would roam the streets brandishing torches and setting fire to the few remaining tobacco shops.