The Book Of The Dead Marginalia [Lio] [Grapeshot]

[Dullahan]

doubtless you've heard of a oneshot. grapeshot is increases. it's more. more than one...shot.

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FORM REALM CYCLE
Interior
八・百・日
The Surface of Last Scattering
Things They Have Said About Me In The Papers
An Excuse, or The Transcendental Object of Desire
There is no such thing as Society
小川經::Ogawa Sutra
The correct answer is always drowned out by indistinct voices

DESIRE REALM CYCLE (not yet complete)
畜生界//THE SUBJECT SUPPOSED TO KNOW
人間界//BLIND NIGHTMARE
修羅界//HOTLINE MIFUNE (Part 1)
修羅界//HOTLINE MIFUNE (Part 2)
天上界//DAS FURCHTBARE GEGENBILD (TBR)
餓鬼界//THE PIED PIPER (TBR)
地獄界//SOME OTHER TIME (TBR)

FORMLESS REALM CYCLE (not yet complete)
the buddha's footprint, part one. (TBR)
nothing, not anything. (TBR)
mother nature's son. (TBR)
the buddha's footprint, part two. (TBR)
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八・百・日

Woke up around one. Swear to God I could smell the bodies downstairs.

Remember dream. Had lingered liminal state for while prior. (Vaguely) Light + noise as usual. Very loud – shouting, but nt. actually heard as shouting. Echoes from tiled surfaces – public swimming pool noise. I was back at school. For some reason it was v. important – water drainage? Some kind of bathroom, very brightly lit but nighttime outside. Very important: direction of swirls in sinks + toilets. An inspection. We (me & one other, male? dressed lk. student?) were testing them. Other would call out no's and I checked the sink or toil. referred and called out if drained CW or CCW. 3x each. Deadly serious. A scientific tone to proceedings. We finished one room & left & wrote up a sheet on clipboard w/ stats on this and stuck on outsd. bathroom door. Proceed dwn. hallway. Also white tiled v. brightly lit. Hallway circular large radius, curving rnd. to left out of sight. Many many doors on eith. sd. All doors led to bathrooms. Other spoke to me. I do not rmmbr. what he said.

Woke up.

On waking felt like shit, sick – vomited in sink. MELANGE. Recognised some of it. Vomit doesn't look normal. Runny. No solid substance. Don't ask Ar. Answer unnecessary answer never necessary.

Blood on my face + clothes. Dried in clumps. All over my face. Mine?

Probably mine

& my bathroom mirror is cracked. (when? how?) Post-it note stuck to mirror. Note contains character 渦 + underlined 4x.

toilet drains CCW but sink does not.

Buy more water!

Cnvs #18 dried overnight. Examine. Now perceive something off about it. Not paint thickness – lighting issue. Composition asymmetry or smt. Blood drplts. Spatter on l. hand crnr. Maybe recoverable but otherwise burn it.

Step outside. Down hall – woman smoking by handrl. Puppet. Looked at me was giving me a v. strange look. Not the blood I'm p. sure I got all in the sink

there is a moment our eyes meet passing by & I wonder about that

does it see me?

Abt. 1:30 went down to lobby. Talked to Ar. Summoned from depths. about problem re: rotting corpse aroma. He tells me the smells are neutralised. I say not evidently. He says they are. Chemical filtering + ventilation + wards etc take care of it. Then why do I fucking smell the dead fucking bodies in 410. It is a mystery. Can assure you it is neutralised. To prsrv. systemic integrity. So why do I – word 'hallucination' is circled around not said. Fuck him. Regret bringing up.

exit. Think abt. woman from before. Name is Enomoto? (Takemoto) & one of the suicides? (The BATH one) not actually tht. much older > me

behind the face. What operates. Behind the face. Finger through the eye. Look at yr. face & see a basic shape – three dots on a blank wall, inverted triangle – & I wonder

the question is not whether killing you has moral weight. It is prcsly. bcs. it does not

clanking labouring suicide machine in a cheap blouse

Tired. Want to vomit agn.

2-2:30 went lunch...? Forgot t. wear watch. Random chose almst. empty place in N. Shinagawa.

No appetite.

Fake leather seats.

It's all for a reason. And what the fuck is the reason now?

Tired.

Too bright. Too hot.

Out walking Shinagawa near bay. Am giddy – feel like holding breath – like the only one in a crowd in on a lethal secret can't bear to keep can't bear to share

Paper life tearing at the seams.

out of this fucking building.

Wnt. shopping for paints.

Sundown just after 5.

something about skin of her face – tautness, eye hollow? – reminds dried out skin of human cadaver. Thought about telling her that.

(??)

Back to the universe.

does not SLEEP does not END oh but it does CONTINUE

vomited again.

A line drawn from birth. Shape of a spiral. We are spiralling down to death.

Go back. Broke into Takemoto's apt. thought to mess with scenario setup bt. got back too late.

doesn't get out much...pattern very stable? Therefore?

took beer from her fridge & wandered over & examined body

still warm.

made it to two aside tonight (!!)

no blood. can't actually bleed out obvs.ly. simulated smhw. & I wonder about that. Does it hurt? Poke eyes. Eye surfc. dry & rubbery. If? I watched her do it what wd. I see?

drained water. puppets don't get rigor mortis. & don't shit themselves. Bath water usual metallic taste. Bored spent a minute cracking her knuckles & wrists.

Ar. sends his voice up. Don't interfere.

Does it matter? I ask – loop has ended for tonight & I'll be out before you reset

run lips alng. wounds on inside forearms – strange feeling – raw but bloodls. - kissing spiderweb – etched glass

out now. Shirazumi. Does it matter, does it matter

whatever

Pinch nothr. beer & leave

2am. A day wasted.

Wasting time.

It keeps going. It continues.

The disgusting part of the world is that it continues.

& get drunk and try to slp. with lights on & stare at the

unidentifiable

colour of the wall

you are unsightly. & undeserving of life.

You.

Re: the blood, just remembered. Last night I tried to cut off my face.

* * * *

The Surface of Last Scattering

Shutter clicks. It is waking up in its apartment, buried in unwashed bedsheets. A watch reports that the time has just passed one in the afternoon. There is a pervasive smell of sweat and something that is either blood or paint thinner. It doesn't want to get up. There is nothing to eat in this whole building. It stays in bed for two hours thinking about how much it doesn't want to get up. The day is going to end without its participation. That is ideal. The sounds of the city invoke themselves from outside. It doesn't want to go out. It doesn't want to eat anything. It doesn't want to. The blood is pounding in its ears. It doesn't want to. It wants to vomit. It doesn't want to. Time is dripping forth, deafening and endless. Now four in the afternoon. It hates this feeling. It can't sleep. It gets out of bed. It hears a plane passing somewhere far overhead. Getting dark outside. It'll be waking up tomorrow. Waiting for the day to end.

Caption. The diameter of the observable universe is roughly 30-35 km. I've measured this experimentally through walking, counting paces, though this is naturally time-consuming and I have only done it a few times. Anyway, it usually works out to something in that range. Perhaps too difficult to attain a precise figure. Automobile odometers don't work – they can't recognise the loop. Whether they can leave is another question. They might be able to. In fact they almost certainly can, just not with me inside.

Reverse side. Ordinary topology understands three kinds of manifolds. (1) Infinite & unbounded. (2) Finite & bounded. (3) Finite & unbounded. In their most basic forms you express their relation as Euclidean line/Line segment/Closed circle respectively. (3) is of primary interest. These days we are all on some level familiar with this kind of manifold: this is the character of geometry on spheres, planetary geometry as it generally appears to human observers. Though the surface of the Earth has a fixed area, you can traverse it indefinitely without reaching an edge and falling off. An unbounded surface like this is a surface on which unbounded paths can exist. However, since the surface is not infinite, unbounded paths must inevitably exhaust all the possibilities of the surface. The most aggressively escape-oriented path feasible on this surface will, eventually, have passed through every point on this surface without exception. But it will not reach the sky.

Shutter clicks. It is being punched in the face. Doesn't know where it is exactly. Outside. It has a sense of being surrounded by concrete. Pain blossoms through the highways of its skull. It is deep in the city. In the core of the core. The cold asphalt and the smell of garbage and ozone and the streaks of neon light seen through eyes screwed shut. It must have fallen. It is breathing heavily. There are voices around that are like movements of air over the road on a hot day. They don't really seem to be saying anything. It holds a hand to its face and the hand feels like a foreign shape. It feels sick. Blood lists inside its chest. There are people standing around it. Their skin catches the light like plastic. There is something massing inside it, there on the ground. White-heat. Molten metal. In a minute it is sitting on top of one of them straddling his chest and it leans forward and it forces open his jaw with one hand and it reaches in with the other and presses down on his front teeth with its palm and keeps applying more weight until the teeth snap clean out of the gums and he starts screaming. Its palm is sticky with blood and saliva. Go on. Hit me again.

Caption. I saw this once. I know what you'll say. It's a metaphor. An extreme one. All metaphors are lies – this is true, and likewise true is the conclusion drawn from the rigorous application of this principle to the effect that all language is composed of lies. So let me lie. (It wouldn't be the first time.) I was sitting on the roof once. Of what? Doesn't matter. Somewhere...the industrial district down by the bay, by the airport. Where weeds grow thick in the broken pavement. A cool clear evening. After sundown yet not after dark. The sky's colours ran pale to deep lilac. The first stars were coming out. The city...roared in the far distance. The smell of aviation fuel was caught on the wind at the end of the day. The runway lights shining across the water. Every few minutes planes were coming in, taking off. I was looking out across the water. Lights of the airport reflected in the bay. And I saw...it felt like I was dying. I saw the whole curvature of the universe. I saw the city curve up and over my head to form a surface coexistent with the sky. As if the megalopolis encrusted the inside of a sphere. That crystalline, figured surface – fractured by interlacing highways and elevated train lines, skyscrapers hanging like stalactites. Within this matrix, no path taken could possibly result in escape. It felt like being buried alive.

Reverse side. Space and time alike are functions of the paths taken through them. Not the other way around. When I was very young I learned a lesson about inevitability. For various reasons I was destined to be made fun of as a child. Among other things. I won't describe them because to do so would undeservedly dignify the perpetrators. I've forgotten their names anyway. But by sheer coincidence I was also very fast, very good at running away. A natural sprinter. No-one could catch me. A useful skill, but ultimately irrelevant. Being able to outrun your bullies doesn't matter when you're just going to see them again tomorrow. Your life is structured in that way. A certain inevitability attains to itself in the paths you take. And space and time as you perceive them – they curve up and over your head. And join, and form a sphere. The world is finite yet unbounded. There is not much in it, but everywhere it continues. You're locked in. So it was perhaps at this early age – long before this began, before I met her, and so on – that the circle began to close around me.

Shutter clicks. It is applying foundation in front of a bathroom mirror. Its face is white, ghost-like, something that is not there. Every now and then it turns alongside to check its profile. It is concerned that it didn't pad the bra enough. It tells itself not to worry. It's only a minor concern. It does it again thirty seconds later. It is concerned, though it shouldn't be. There is a constant sound at low frequency, a hum in the deep bass, which thoroughly permeates the walls and floor and ceiling. It might be music. There is a look in its eyes that seems not to belong there. It doesn't wear lipstick because she wouldn't. It holds a finger to its lips. It says, “You'd like to dissect me, wouldn't you, Agent Starling?” It breaks up over that. Is that even how the line goes? It forgets. Its hair looks good. It looks good. It looks like her.

Caption. The suggestion of romance is laughable. Affection. Lust. Even the idea of enjoying someone else's company. Love, most of all. These are things that no-one really does any more. If I can't be me and have her – then I'll be her, and let the others be me.

Reverse side. Of course, it's a delusion. The curvature does not actually manifest at street level – the rules of Euclidean geometry still hold true for calculating routes, even at rooftop altitudes. This is all a metaphor for talking about a certain dimension of the world as I experience it. There is something here that hates me. It is in the colour of the air. The haze, whatever. My problem is quite simple, really. I can't leave Tokyo. No matter what I do. Do you understand? I cannot – I try, I run as far as I can. I can't leave here. It circles around. I cannot – I have exhausted every square inch of the interior surface of this diseased fucking manifold and I cannot get out. I cannot walk away from this. It would be so easy. And yet it is impossible.

Shutter clicks. It is wandering on a station platform somewhere in the city. At this hour of the morning the trains have stopped running and no-one is around. There is a noise. A salaryman, close to blind drunk, staggers down from the stairwell. He's singing very badly a nursery rhyme with a familiar tune but unfamiliar words. It freezes involuntarily. He sidles up to it like some greasy insect in the toilet. It tells him to shut up, but he doesn't. Gets louder, even. After a while he tries to pinch its ass, so it punches him in the stomach and he falls over. He's winded on the floor with a stupid expression, so it kicks him a few times. He throws up liquid. It kneels down next to him, avoiding the vomit. It pulls out a knife. It holds the blade close to his eyes, so he can see it. Then it stops. The scene is somewhat awkward: It can't think of a single thing to say.

Caption. Human life is precious or it is worthless. There is no question of a finite value being placed on it. Any such figure would be a placeholder, a deferral, a delaying tactic ahead of the final answer which in every instance must evaluate to infinity or zero. There is no question of quantification, comparison, relativity of worth. If one spares a life and condemns another, there has not here been an evaluation according to quantitative difference: what has occurred is the establishment through act of will of a qualitative partition of the world. Infinity, or zero. No other option exists or can exist: to claim otherwise is mere dissimulation. What allows collective human life to persist in its present state is our ability to disregard the drive for consistency in moment-to-moment evaluations. Life implores us to be inconsistent. Under the threat of insanity if it must. Those who cannot heed the call and disregard the drive for consistency are failure modes in one way or another. To consistently evaluate to infinity is characteristic of a god. To consistently evaluate to zero is characteristic of a beast. Gods and beasts alike are by nature excluded from the social and political life of the human organism, for the simple reason that they are the only beings capable of total consistency.

Reverse side. In principle we must accept that there is no centre to this finite yet unbounded universe. The surface of a sphere, for example, has no 'centre' as we would understand it: the centre is that of the sphere itself, which does not exist on the surface and cannot be accessed from it. In practice, however, there are various possibilities for some kind of polarity to find itself expressed in a way that is centre-like. Some anisotropic quality. (a) The centre exists with me, and is co-moving with me such that I always occupy its location. (b) The centre exists at Ogawa, the axis of the mirror loop assembly. This is ambiguous. (c) The centre exists with R. S. This is highly likely. Who else could it be?

Shutter clicks. It is buying charcoal and rough paper at an art supply shop downtown. It pays in cash. The interior has a high ceiling and is lit by skylights. The cashier is processing its purchase. She lowers her gaze and asks if it is a student. No. Why? Oh, I just thought, since you come here now and then...we often get art students in here. Well, I'm not one. I see. Silence passes. There is traffic moving on the road outside. A slight tremor in the earth. I'm self-taught. I see. It looks at the door. She asks it what it draws. I draw portraits. Just portraits? Yeah. I see. She bags its items and gives it the receipt. See you again, then, sir. Yeah, see you. It walks to the door, which is made of glass. It can dimly see its reflection reaching out for the handle. It pauses and whispers to it. Well, I'm not one. I see. I am not a human being. I see. I'm self-taught. I see. It tilts its head. I am the nature of the form realm, I am suffering and death. I see. I'm not, actually. That was a lie. I see. I know what you taste like. I see. I'm a psycho. I see. I'm sorry. It steps outside. Unsightly. I see. Undeserving of life. I see. I see. I see.

Caption. We often think of the supernatural in terms of the sciences, kind of like a negative image of it. That is to say, a supernatural phenomenon would be one that cannot be explained by conventional understandings of physics, chemistry, biology, and so on. Consider another way of thinking: that the supernatural is the negative image of the legal system. You can understand law in the abstract as an attempt to create a certain kind of normality. A normal situation. Law aims to circumscribe the whole field of human action and divide it in a rational way into practices that are forbidden and practices that are permitted. Social normality is produced through a circle-always-attempting-to-close-itself of crime and punishment. The supernatural escapes this circle. Supernatural is everything you can't be punished for. A murderer who has been caught is never very impressive. Under the harsh light of press photography their grotesque aspects are magnified: their deadened gaze, their unkempt hair, their greasy skin so much more like plastic than flesh. Unsightly. The uncaught murderer, however, survives and retains a certain mystique. Without the bodily person of the culprit in the system's possession, his identity as a symbol attains to a curious kind of purity. A vehicle of public fantasy. I can't be caught, and even if I could be, I could never be punished. My crimes are hideous, and impossible.

Reverse side. The question of change invites itself often. Has my life changed since three years ago? Yes. Certainly it has. Unavoidable. All lives change. That much is obvious. The question is not one of whether my life has changed but rather one of how it has changed. Here I could point to all sorts of things. That I don't live in the same place as I did then, or attend the same school, or any school for that matter, or interact with the same people, few as they were and are, or make the same amount of money doing the same things, or wake and sleep at the same hours, or pass the time the same ways, or – whatever. It's endless. This and that. Like counting grains of sand on a beach. Of course there have been changes, changes upon changes. Of course. But they don't add up to a 'how'. Or rather, it's precisely because they can be added up that you can't extract a 'how' from them. It seems to me – it has become clear to me. That it is a mistake to call such changes qualitative. A category error. Changes like these are like an adjustment made to a volume control, a variable resistor, a sliding scale, an odometer. I lived there, I now live here: I was doing 50, now I'm doing 90. These are, fundamentally, no different to numbers. Quantities, fixed and dynamic. Decimals and gradations. I'm explaining this badly. They are facts, but they are facts that work in that kind of way. I used to attend school, now I don't: my lights were dimmed, now they are bright, but either way they are still switched on. Only the intensity differs. You understand? Scalars change, vectors do not. These changes in my life are changes in degree, not changes in kind. The truth is – the ugliest truth in the world is – that changes in degree are the only kind there will ever be. For me, at least. For others, maybe it's different. I don't know. But for me? Once I was moving slowly, now I am moving fast, too fast, faster than all self-preservation would dictate and still accelerating despite myself. But I remain in the same lane, still moving in the same direction. I do not stop. I do not turn back. Faster, faster. Am I the same person as I was, those years ago? I am. My life is the same life. Only the scale has changed. The intensity. The coefficients differ, some bigger, some smaller, but the equation remains the same. As does its solution. I'm going to die soon. Probably sooner than I think. It's no big surprise. It's an absolute certainty. In many ways I should already be dead; there's just been a delay somewhere up the line. It is in every sense predetermined. The rule of fate is iron. The end will be like the completion of a thought begun long ago and held in obsession for years. Life, which is to say, life as I experience it, didn't change for me. Life isn't changing. Life will not change. Life will...continue. And then it will end. And for precisely as long as it continues my life will be, inescapably, like this – precisely because I am the one who is living it.

Shutter clicks. It is sitting in its apartment listening to the sound of rain pouring on the roof. The rain is shot through with peals of thunder and runs in torrents down the window. There is a leak in the roof which is dripping into a bowl placed just next to its bed. It has to empty the bowl every hour, or it overflows. So it can't go to sleep. It doesn't know if there's a bigger bowl or container anywhere in the building. Feels like it should look. Also feels like an incredibly arduous imposition. The need harasses it. Feels impossible. It can't sleep. It needs to sleep. It empties the bowl again. In the time it takes to do that the leak drips on the floor. A wet patch is growing larger. The rain pours harder outside. There is nothing it can do. It wants to sleep. The storm continues deep into the night.

Caption. There is something truly ugly about writing. Something about marking paper, about producing these unsightly stains called words. It's not just that every word is a failed attempt to say something, though it is. Rather it seems to originate in an elementary confusion over what the purpose of writing is. We have this idea that we write to record. We write down our thoughts to preserve them, because they are important. But this is a lie. To record is impossible, as all words are lies. The moment something is put into words it no longer has any connection to what it was. A description becomes inaccurate the moment it is written. This is not a failure of writing, but rather its very purpose. What writing actually does is allow us to evacuate our thoughts. To bleed them from the inside of the skull like pus from a wound, lest they bloat and fester inside us. Think of that thing – in films, I know you've seen it. The stereotype of the 'serial killer apartment'. Writing all over the walls, photographs, et cetera. It is supposed to indicate the depth of the killer's sickness. But actually it is the evidence left behind by the killer's attempting to heal himself. He writes and writes, trying to expel the contents of his head. Trying to kill himself piece by piece, each word skewered on the page like preserved insects. Trying to attain that inner lack of tension. The pure void left once everything has been evacuated. Of course, he can't. So he keeps on writing. And all his words are lies.

Reverse side. Including these.

* * * *

Things They Have Said About Me In The Papers

'pure evil'

Pure evil. Imagine how my eyes rolled. Who talks like this? 'Evil' by itself, is, fair enough, it's a term that still has a certain, uh, idiomatic usage...like, in the vernacular, and shit. People do say that. I guess. But, you add 'pure', and...it becomes something out of a bad fantasy novel. How do you take this seriously? How do you take yourself seriously, saying this? As you would guess, not a journalist here; they have style guides which prohibit this kind of overt moralising. It's from a write-in. Letters to the editor. I don't remember the precise platform, but this was printed at around the beginning of winter, '95. Some incontinent senior citizen slowly cooking under cathode rays, bitching about the state of the world as their flesh fuses to the armchair.

'psychopath'

Used in a whole bunch of pieces, from all the way back to the beginning. Too numerous to list.

'sociopath'

As above. Generally the two are interchangeable. To be honest I'm not too sure of the distinction myself, if there is one. I don't feel qualified to comment.

'mentally disturbed'

Also common. Though this is more of a TV thing. I hear it a lot on talk shows. Panel discussions. They had...fuck, I still can't believe, really, this actually happened. It would have been late '95, I don't know, perhaps early in '96, and they had...they, they, brought this guy from Waseda? I think? He was a professor, psychology, psychoanalyst, like that, and they had – like, the idea was, I guess, they were talking about homicidal, uh, events, in general, like Aum, and the discussion turned to the Mifune Mutilator – that was the tabloid name at the time – and this, God, this fifty-sixty-looking Zen master wrinkled old bald dude motherfucker tries to profile me on air. He got it mostly right, but it was still funny somehow.

'sign of the same pathology as Aum'

Editorial in the weekly Red Flag. This was November of 1995, probably? I don't get to read this a lot. It never used to have great circulation in my neighbourhood. Newsagent down by the station has it but none of the others, I don't think.

'symptom of a terminally sick society'

Don't actually remember where this came from, or when, but I saved the clipping. The paper is glossy and I'm therefore tempted to say magazine. The article it comes from is somewhat more high-handed than your usual tabloid shit, and on the reverse side there's a fragment of something talking about declining agricultural output in Akita Prefecture. Some kind of current-affairs rag? A weekly? I sure wouldn't be able to pick it out in a rack. It may not even exist today.

'symptom of a society that is too materialistic'

Slightly paraphrased, but this is from the Asahi around March of '96. At that time I wasn't reading, and I actually didn't see this until a while later. A few months. Got used for wrapping fish, by the smell of it. I was out one night and saw it in a skip bin in the alley behind an apartment complex, all scrunched up and thrown away. Unfold it under streetlights – lo and behold, a message just for you.

'depressing and nauseating sign of the times'

From an article in the Yomiuri. January 1996.

'evidence of the decay in moral values'

Same article as above. It was a big one. Not an editorial, despite the tone – this line is from a guy they quoted. A cultural critic, whatever that entails. Apparently it made him qualified...well, I can't really blame him. Homicide, or really, death, is the one thing all humans feel uniquely able to comment on, precisely because it's the one thing that cannot be taken away from us.

'super fucked-up and gross'

Overheard on a station platform, waiting for the 8:12 into the city one Sunday. A woman's voice. I never saw her face.

'evidence of a horrific spiritual void in modern Japan'

From Soka Gakkai's paper. I don't remember the precise context. I find it laughable. What is a spiritual void? As if spirit would save you. As if the problem is people failing to believe. As if the soul would make your life worth living. As if reincarnation would. As if the prospect of your actions returning as karma after death would make it all worthwhile. Trust me, I've seen it. It'll only disappoint you. If you believed the things I know to be true, life would be impossible. Everything would end, and life would be over. The spiritual void is perhaps a sickness but not a fatal one – indeed, it's the precise opposite. If you believed in anything at all, you would shoot yourself in the head. The spiritual void is the last thing keeping humanity from walking together, hand-in-hand, into the dark. Let the lights go out at last. This is enough, now.

'possibly multiple killers working together'

My personal favourite. From a press release put out in late December of 1995 by the Tokyo Metropolitan Police. I'm confident they never seriously considered this as a possibility, but by that point their investigation had stalled from lack of evidence, lack of suspects, lack of consistent MO, lack of all the major components of a homicide case – except for dead bodies, of which there were a few – and they needed to keep spit-balling new ideas to give the appearance of achieving anything. So we get this hilarity. I can tell you exactly what I was eating when I read it – it was a deep-fried chicken wing – and I remember because I all but fucking choked on it. That was how I spent Christmas that year: alone in my apartment, eating junk food, reading about myself in the papers. Wasn't so bad, really. Next year would be worse.

* * * *

An Excuse, or The Transcendental Object of Desire

INTERVIEWER: Do you have anything to say to our listeners about the killings?

SHIRAZUMI: It's difficult for me to say that I thought anything in particular about the crimes, that I had any consistent opinion on what I was doing. The difficulty arises from the fact that for anything I did happen to think or feel about them at any given time, I also thought or felt the exact opposite at some other time, and everything in between. It's a question of moods. It's not as if I choose to think about things in a certain way. It's just that, depending on my mood, which is something not fully or even mostly under my control – they can change in an instant, at the slightest thing, even tiny, almost imperceptible things that I notice and they're just gone, a new mood replacing them – things just appear to me in a certain way, or in a certain other way. You know, sometimes, after I left home, I would walk through town at night, I'd grab a paper off a newsstand somewhere and I'd read what they were saying about me and it'd be the funniest shit in the world, because you recognise what they're talking about but at the same time you don't, it's like hearing your own voice on a recording, hearing someone else describe you. And other times I wouldn't find them very funny at all. I'd feel sick, actually. Sometimes I'd feel like I was walking on air, like the entire world was immaterial, dream-like, like a candle you could blow out with a thought. Sometimes I would be incredibly empathetic, I could look you in the eyes and feel everything you felt. Sometimes I wouldn't be; I'd hate humans, despise them, these faces like opaque surfaces, machines of meat wandering around each one convinced that they're a person. Sometimes I'd feel like an animal. Sometimes I'd feel like a god. Sometimes I would see my reflection in dark glass and become jealous, more jealous than I can describe. Sometimes I'd just cry and cry where no-one could hear me because everything was so fucked up, and I'd fucked it up, I'd sleepwalked into this enterprise that was so wholly corrupt that no part of it could be remediated, nothing could be fixed, nothing could be made better, nothing could be made whole again, not now and not ever. And other times I wouldn't, I'd cringe at myself that I'd done that, think it was ridiculous – pathetic, even – because after all, wasn't this so much fun? And I would mean it. I would mean all of it. I find that my thoughts are ephemeral. My feelings slip away too fast. They're produced in excessive amounts, overflowing, an infinite supply, and I don't have time for any of them. I don't think I really have a personality. I have interests, or rather I have things I do, habits, small rituals, likes and dislikes, memories here and there...but there is nothing, really, that holds them together.

INTERVIEWER: You're not really there, is that it?

SHIRAZUMI: No-one is. I don't think I ever was. Maybe you are, I don't know. Me, I...I mean, for example, I tend to have extremely vague memories of my childhood. Obviously I must have had one, there exist photographs of me from those ages, a number of people from my street will vouch that I certainly did spend the 1980s doing something or other, but I recall almost nothing of it. There are a few specific memories which persist, mostly bad ones – not really bad, but bad in minor and ultimately inconsequential ways, like scraping a knee or getting told off for something or other – but I cannot firmly locate them in time, and in most cases it is impossible to prove that anything like what I remember actually happened. Otherwise there are very general impressions of certain places or things or events, selected with no obvious criteria. I won't bore you with the details, what few details there are. Beyond these, nothing. What I remember least of all are people: I cannot recall the names or faces of a single person I went to elementary school with. Not even the teachers. There is no precise cut-off point at which my memories cease being vague, and indeed even today I have a pretty bad memory about all sorts of things, but in general the end of middle school and thereafter is a lot more clear, a lot more defined. They become recognisably the lingering traces of personal experience, rather than vague shapes and indications. I don't know precisely when I first became consciously aware of this, but I know I certainly was by the time I entered high school in the spring of 1994. I never thought – I don't think now, and I never did as far as I recall – that there was any special meaning to it. I never gave myself the idea that I had some kind of brain problem, or I was an amnesiac for whatever stupid reason, I didn't hit my head or jump in front of a car or anything. After all, I could still very well remember things I had learned in that period, the contents of books I had read, formulae I had memorised, multiplication tables, how to tie my shoes, abstract knowledge like that. And if, for example, I was actively reminded by someone else of something that had happened in that time, if I was prompted, I would usually be able to recall at least something about it, I'd be able to say with a fair amount of confidence that, yeah, that did happen, didn't it?

INTERVIEWER: Why do you think this was the case?

SHIRAZUMI: If pressed to account for this phenomenon, I would say that I just forgot things because they didn't matter to me. Not everything needs a complicated explanation. In all likelihood it really is that simple. I bring this – I hesitate even to call it an 'issue', since it didn't really cause any difficulties in my daily life – to your attention because it was nevertheless somewhat important to understanding how I perceived the world at around that time. Even though factually it wasn't the case, in some ways it was very much as if I had just popped into existence, already-formed, at some point in the early 1990s. The state of my memories lent itself to such an interpretation. Was it as if I had lived the first thirteen or fourteen years of my life in a kind of fugue state, non-conscious, during which there was no real 'I' that experienced things, only to wake up one day and find that there suddenly was? No. Decidedly not. If anything it was something like the exact opposite. I found that there were all these allegations of a pre-history that formed the container of my life, but they didn't seem to really apply to me. It was like they all referred to someone else, like I was some kind of impostor who had assumed the place of a person who used to exist but was now gone. I was a non-contingent human being. I did not really think – I could not really believe – that I was living in the real world, or that I was real. If there was a real Shirazumi Lio, he was somewhere far away in space or time; I was something insubstantial, standing in for him. An understudy. Likewise reality itself also seemed to be something that happened elsewhere. What I perceived in its place was something I can best and worst describe as greyness, not a colour but a certain tinge applied evenly to everything, inside and out, a kind of timbre, a uniform grey fog in which nothing possessed depth, nothing really happened, nothing changed, nothing affected me. That was what everyday life was like. Nothing was serious, nothing was taken seriously. It wasn't that everything was fake, but rather that everything was second-hand, a simulation of a real thing that existed at a great distance. School, for instance...every part of it, waking up, eating breakfast, working through lessons, talking to friends, going to clubs, studying for exams, planning a college entry pathway – these were things, it seemed to me, that no-one really did any more, that no-one had really done for a long time. They certainly had done, perhaps centuries or millennia ago, but now these practices were gone if not forgotten, they were evidenced only in ruins, they belonged to an ancient, disappeared civilisation of which it was like I was living in a giant historical re-enactment. As if some historian had meticulously researched and reconstructed a world that ceased to exist maybe hundreds or thousands of years ago, and had built a set and hired actors, of which I was one, and had us all go through the motions so that he could film a documentary or something. This pervasive sense of unreality, or rather simulated reality, non-serious reality, I must say, did not at all bother me. At least, not until a while later, until April '95, after I met her as it happens, but that's another story, and I think you'll forgive me if I save it for another time.

INTERVIEWER: Of course.

SHIRAZUMI: Now, having described this state of affairs to you I have two major comments to make: firstly, like any description this one's grasp of what it tries to describe is at best partial and incomplete and at worst an outright lie. It's not the whole truth because stating the whole of the truth exceeds the capacities of language. There were incontestably times in which my perception of the world did not conform to what has been here described in any way whatsoever, in which it was thoroughly otherwise, and I thus cannot claim to have given the final summary of my experiences to which nothing is left to add. If this sounds obtuse, try keeping a diary. If that teaches you anything, it's that there is always something left unarticulated by writing. If there were not, it would be impossible to write things down that you later return to and find yourself unable to understand – but I do this all the time, my diaries attest that it is extremely possible, hence, ergo, what have you. Secondly, and following on the first, my perception of myself and the world in this way was not passively apprehended; rather, it had to be actively maintained. This maintenance was most profoundly illustrated in my interactions with what I suppose I am obliged to call other human beings.

INTERVIEWER: What else would you prefer to call them?

SHIRAZUMI: There's no good word for what a human being is.

INTERVIEWER: What about 'unsightly'?

SHIRAZUMI: Undeserving...

INTERVIEWER: Undeserving of life.

SHIRAZUMI: Let's put that aside for now. To describe the way I perceived other people in around 1994 is to describe a certain movement of thought that begins, basically, with fear. It is difficult to find a precise object for this fear. It was a vague fear, a nebulous fear, not of anything specific. If I had to give some qualification I would classify it as a fear of being discovered, being found out. What was there to be discovered? Obviously, that I was some kind of impostor. People I interacted with seemed to want something to do with the real Shirazumi Lio, who was unavailable, and I had to stand in for him – working off these sketchy character notes that were my memories – without anyone finding out. But it was more than that, the fear. It was, at the heart, a fear of anything that threatened the reproducibility of everyday life. What was everyday life? Little that would be unfamiliar to my classmates, to be sure. It was something I had an accommodation with: I would pretend to be Shirazumi Lio, with all that that entailed, and in turn the world would pretend to be the real world. As long as I discharged my few responsibilities to the world, the world returned with an unspoken promise that things would remain this way, that day after comfortable day would keep on reproducing itself unchanged. In interacting with another person, what would happen was they would appear in my perception as if emerging from out of the fog – for ordinarily that was where they belonged, like set dressing, background decorations – bearing with them the threat of reality coming to call, coming to reveal the falsehood of everything, especially myself, and thus upset the compact that reproduced my everyday life. The fear of this was all but paralysing. What would follow was a determined and mutedly desperate effort to make the other person dissolve back into the grey fog from which they came, which meant demonstrating to myself that they posed no threat, that they were not a sign of reality coming to collect its due, that they were not going to upset the balance of my everyday life. To do this I would take my impersonation of the real me to a fever-pitch: I would completely dissolve into the grey fog of unreality, I would hide inside myself, trying to conceal every outward sign of my being an impostor, I would observe my responses becoming mechanical, automatic, my words and actions the simulacra of real words and actions that no-one really spoke or did any more, and by the other party's very interaction with that they would confess, they would reveal, they would prove themselves identical with the greyness of the world and thus dissolve into it themselves, and I would be safe. In other words, my interactions with others were defensive on a very fundamental level. Other people were something to 'deal with' rather than relate to. I realise this sounds bad. I expect the more astute among you will already be here discerning some symptom, some prognosis of the pathology that later inflames the brief remainder of my life. I feel like that's kind of unfair. Considering that my coping mechanism was to very aggressively pretend to be a normal person you could hardly call me antisocial. It's not that I didn't care or want to understand other people, insofar as such a thing was possible – it was just that I didn't have time because I was too busy obsessively trying to defuse any conceivable threat they might pose to my stable everyday life. To exaggerate, but only by a little: where others saw a classroom, I saw a room full of lethal explosives, and I was the only bomb-disposal technician in town. Human beings existed for me in terms of threat value.

INTERVIEWER: Did you think that made you a special case, phenomenologically?

SHIRAZUMI: Couldn't tell you. You know, one time, I had Kokutou try and describe me with a single word. Just one of those things you do when you're bored. The sort of things friends talked about...I supposed. Real friends, wherever they existed, would talk about that sort of thing. He thought about it for a while – we were in the library playing Go at the time, on a small board, thirteen-by-thirteen, a game I was significantly better at than he was but which he played against me anyway, him always playing black, me always playing white, for obvious reasons – and eventually he came back with 'Distant'. I was not exactly overjoyed but not exactly surprised. He was somewhat apologetic, he explained his reasoning, which was characteristically strange but more or less sound, and I said that him in a single word was definitely 'Idiot'. But I didn't really mean it.

INTERVIEWER: You liked him.

SHIRAZUMI: I suppose he was exceptional. The exception proves the rule. Never once did I see him as something that threatened me, something I had to hide in front of. He was already perfectly of the same substance as the greyness of the world. Or something like that. The point is that I never really had to pretend to be the absent real Shirazumi Lio in front of him. Sometimes I could almost believe it was me.

INTERVIEWER: And what about her?

SHIRAZUMI: As I said, the unreality of my everyday life assumed the character of a simulation of a real thing: that is to say, it implied, it alluded, to the real existence of reality, always somewhere else. My interactions with others were characterised by the suspicion – the anxiety – that they were hostile emissaries from that reality, and this suspicion was assuaged by certain means, although it could never be completely eradicated: the complete and final confirmation that a person posed no threat was an endlessly deferred confirmation, always about to arrive, never here. All that I have said. What I mean to say now is that despite the inaccessibility of reality, the remove at which it kept itself from the simulation, there were nevertheless instances, times, places, moments at which distant reality could be glimpsed, as it were, peeking through the cracks. The real world was gone, but here and there its trace could be definitely detected.

INTERVIEWER: And she was one of these traces?

SHIRAZUMI: No, she was the thing itself. R. S. was the end of the fucking universe. The plane she existed on, the plane of reality, was absolutely incommensurable with the plane of simulation I existed on.

INTERVIEWER: You were afraid.

SHIRAZUMI: I was anxious. I was made anxious.

INTERVIEWER: Anxiety always shelters a kernel of desire. Deadlocked desire.

SHIRAZUMI: Mm, quite. Throughout this explanation I have tried to remain ambiguous on whether or not I actually enjoyed my everyday life. I must now reveal that I have done this because I don't know if I did or not.

INTERVIEWER: You were in two minds about it.

SHIRAZUMI: Everyday life – 'normal life' – is sustained by continuous tension. That it continues is intolerable. The continuation is hideous. It makes you want to cut off your face. Yet to depart from it is terrifying. Terrifying and impossible.

INTERVIEWER: Impossible?

SHIRAZUMI: Any escape from a 'normal' situation will only produce another kind of 'normal' situation, on a different plateau to the first if you will. “Man gets used to everything, the scoundrel!” The only exception is the total escape, that is, the void. Death.

INTERVIEWER: Do you want to die?

SHIRAZUMI: Only if the world ends with me.

* * * *

There is no such thing as Society

Am I the only one who noticed that? It can't be possible. Someone else must have done. At least one other person. He himself surely had some self-consciousness about it. I brought it up only once, maybe around June of '95, by which time it had become glaringly apparent to me, not in the sense of being conspicuous or gaudy, but rather like an absence. Anyone can see, and he kept this up all the way through high school as far as I know, that he only wore black and white. Every single article of clothing that ever touched his skin was either black or white, or failing that some substitute for or valiant attempt toward either, like charcoal grey or off-white. Sometimes, I guess in adventurous moods, a more neutral grey became accessible...he had a hooded jacket like that, but in general there was a very severe lack of hue. No red, no green, no blue; no cyan, no magenta, no yellow. Very few exceptions. He had a blue scarf. Exactly one, or possibly many identical because indistinguishable ones, and come to think of it I don't think he ever wore that to school. He also had one jacket of which part was coloured with some very pale earth tone I hesitate to call brown, honestly near enough to grey that lighting conditions decide the better part of the difference, but he never wore that to school either. Now, to be fair, it's not like everyone else was kitted out in the gaudiest things they could find – if you crunch the numbers, average it out, you'll find that the most colourful dresser there was probably R. herself, which is an irony and a fucking half – but it was especially noticeable with him. It was precisely because the contrast was not that great that it was noticeable. To me, anyway. Even for the admission ceremony at the start of the year, which specifies formal, he showed up in black-tie, like it's a funeral or something. It's like – I said this to him once and he laughed, first time I'd ever seen him do it – he went to a funeral years ago and got the memo about mourning colours but not the one that said he could stop.

I, of course, went red-tie for my admission. It was a particular shade of red which the manufacturer's label referred to as Permian Ochre, registered trademark, a name which always intrigued me because I didn't see what a geological period which ended in a planetary mass extinction about 200 million years ago had to do with ties, and I still don't, and I think it ended up being more to do with some small town in northern Italy or Switzerland where the dye came from which was coincidentally named something like Perm or Permi or Permia but I don't know if that's actually true, and which resembled more than any other the third-from-left entry in the dark red spectrum of tie shades pictured on page 113 of Harron's Illustrated Style Guide for Men, published in translation by Kodansha in 1977, and which is therein described as a 'sober, straightforward yet approachable shade, the ideal complement to a dark soft-contrast ensemble intended for a relaxed and moderate public setting' which seemed reasonably believable at the time I read it. Maybe I was overthinking it. You know, back in my first year, '94, for about the first week the freshmen tended to keep the ties and the shirts and whatnot, holdovers from almost all of us having had to wear uniforms through all our many prior years of schooling. The shift to a free-dress (within reason) policy was too radical for newcomers to immediately adjust to, and it was only once people cottoned on to the fact that the upperclassmen didn't bother with ties and whatnot that we got rid of them. I held onto mine for about a month because of the above-mentioned reason but also because I was very frustrated about the uniform-or-lack-thereof situation because I had spent a lot of time learning how to tie it myself in the summer and I didn't want it to be wasted but one week I heard, or maybe thought I heard, someone I vaguely recognised commenting in homeroom to someone else similarly nameless about how I looked like a weed or a squid or some other fucking term which didn't make any sense outside of that highly restrictive context but made just enough sense inside it and I went home that day thinking extremely abstract and violent thoughts about the both of them – smashing heads in classroom doors was a particular preoccupation – and the next day and thereafter I stopped wearing it and put it away in a drawer.

Where was I? Actually, forget it. The colour thing is boring anyway. Kokutou dresses like that because, what, a whole bunch of reasons, it's overdetermined like most things: his mother buys his clothes, he doesn't care much for fashion, he just likes black and white, there's no interesting story behind it, there is no higher knowledge to be gained, it's just one of those things, like favourite ice-cream flavours. No-one decides them consciously, they just happen. His, by the way, is roasted almond. I don't like ice-cream. I know. Fucked up, right? Let me tell you about how Kokutou and I met. This story's pretty funny. So, first week of school, there's the club open day thing...it has an official name but I don't care. Basically all the school clubs set up booths around the place and try to attract freshers. The usual stuff. Runs for three days. R. hid for most of it, she didn't care, and more importantly her family, I guess, didn't care. Had it only been so easy for me the previous year. I was forced to. Parental override...my mother, mainly, she had this idea in her head that, uh...anyway, I was forced to, and I thought it was retarded but I didn't say that to her and I still did it. Fortunately, I suppose, it didn't seem to matter particularly what club it was I joined as long as it was a club and not something that was not a club. But what to choose? There must have been fifty, at least. You could go everything, do everywhere. An entire club for card games. An entire different one for board games. An entire entirely different one again for Western board games. What is this shit? What is this school? I'm exaggerating, but not by as much as you'd hope. These people have too much money. Kokutou is, to the surprise of no-one, about the average in terms of the kind of background which people who come here tend to have: like him, they're the kids of families headed by the middle to upper ranks of working professionals. Generally, salarymen, at the middle management levels and above. These are kids who are, the upper percentiles of them, going to go to the best or near-best universities, though they aren't guaranteed the best jobs. In other words, essentially the step just below the feedstock for elite private schools out in the country...R. was an abnormality, I suppose, because by rights she should have gone to one of those. Sometimes I wish she had. I was an abnormality as well, because my family are shopkeepers. Pharmacists, to be precise. That goes way back, but, you don't want to know about it here. To be clear, a pharmacy is at the very upper end of the economic spectrum of shopkeeping; you need an advanced degree to operate one, so it's somewhat more highly-regarded than running a convenience store. But even so, it's a difference. And you could tell...at least, I thought you could tell. Without a school uniform to efface our differences, these things were subtly demonstrated in how we dressed. And that – you pretend not to notice, everyone does, but you do. Not to mention how we acted. It was invisible but nevertheless quite clear that they all had more disposable income than I did, and that the same was true for their families. The week after the end of the summer break, my first year, '94, I had to listen to everyone talk about their holidays...they'd been to Okinawa, they'd been to Hawaii, Australia, New Zealand, whatever. I've never been on a holiday. I've never even left the country. I can tell you right now, absolute certainty, I'm not going to leave this city before I die. They're going to scatter my ashes into wet cement on some new building site just to make sure I can't get out. In addition, I think I was the only one in my entire class who actually knew, first-hand, what their father did at work. The rest of them? They don't know. He leaves the house before they do in the morning, he comes back after they do in the evening, in between it's a profound mystery. Kokutou? I asked him once. He doesn't know. I mean, he knows the name of a company, he knows the title beneath the name on a business card, but he doesn't know.

Anyway. Clubs. What to choose? I had to look around for something suitably low-effort...though, that said, at the same time, I didn't want to join one of those clubs that seems to exist only for the purpose of accommodating the people who choose clubs based on how low-effort they are. The Classics Club, for instance – what the fuck do they do? I don't know. No-one knows. They themselves don't know. It is a mystery. I didn't have any respect for the people who'd do that and I didn't think they'd be at all worth interacting with. I wanted at least somewhere where they did something.

So now we come to photography.

I'm going to skip over a lot here. Just a few main points. Firstly, I made a mental note to myself on joining that if this was the kind of club where they had a cutesy nickname for members designed to be used in place of the third- and second-person plural pronoun, like 'shutterbugs', I would jump out a window at the first opportunity. They didn't. Secondly, the photography club here was sufficiently old and well-established – they had their own darkroom, funded I think by alumni donations – that there was no serious threat of it being disbanded no matter how low the member count dropped, so it was down to about five by the time I showed up, three of which almost never showed up themselves. So their recruitment efforts were not particularly desperate, which I appreciated. I did not want to join any club that fell over itself trying to have me as a member. The booth was hidden somewhere at the end of a corridor, and I had to ask for directions multiple times to find it. Thirdly, their only real obligation to the school, such as it was, was to put together some kind of exhibition of members' work at the end of the winter break. I think there was also a school magazine run from elsewhere which tapped them for contributions every so often. Fourthly, the only things I learned there were how to use video cameras and how to develop my own photos, which I suppose both ended up being pretty useful. The procedural side I was very interested in, the chemical processes, making prints, recording to tapes, editing tapes and so forth, but the artistic stuff I did not really get. They would talk about composition, colour balance, rule of thirds, that sort of thing, very technical, and I struggled to associate it with anything photography actually involved for me. The camera I had at home, which was I guess a reasonably modern film camera for that time, was previously used to take a photographic inventory of the shop every month as a safeguard against theft. I had started using it myself in the winter when it was replaced in that capacity by an even newer one; I asked if I could have the old one and I got it. There wasn't a lot of consistency to what I took photos of in those days, and I had to be very careful about it because all the money for film and development was coming out of my pocket, but I do recall one thing I was very adamant on was that my shots shouldn't have people in them. They were ugly, they ruined it, they didn't turn out well. They looked wrong. If I caught one in a shot accidentally, walking by as it were, I would try to cut the print so as to exclude them, and bin it if I couldn't. It did not occur to me, at all, that a photograph of a person was worth taking. Not for a while, anyway. So I didn't have much of an aesthetic sense, I just had very immutable instincts about what looked good and what did not, and sometimes these instincts overlapped with what others thought about the same things and sometimes they did not. I didn't keep any of the photos or negatives from that period so I can't tell you precisely what I was all about; I seem to recall silhouettes of powerlines against the sky playing some prominent role, and tall buildings, and cars, and concrete, and weird bugs, and weird bugs on concrete. Anyway, very long story very short, I joined the club, school happened uneventfully, and the following year I found myself compelled to work the recruitment booth. I wasn't the only one, there was one other, a girl whose name I never bothered to remember who wore these round glasses and was incredibly short-sighted without them and exclusively shot in black-and-white and spoke maybe less than fifty words to me in her entire life. I think she played tennis as well, which was surprising because you wouldn't think she'd have the depth perception for it. Together we signed on two new members in two days, which was considered super impressive, good job all round. Then on the last day she got bored and begged off to go do something with her friends and I was left to handle the booth by myself which annoyed me intensely because I had been planning to do much the same thing so I was in a foul mood for the rest of the afternoon in which time who should show up but?

He had been going around with a map, very diligently and meticulously visiting every single booth in the school to see what he thought of them. He explained this to me before even introducing himself. My mind recoiled in horror. I immediately concluded he was a dangerous lunatic.

Kokutou Mikiya, he said to me.

I'm gonna be perfectly honest, I said to him. I don't really give a shit if you join this club or not.

A bird chirped outside the window.

Shirazumi Lio.

Hi.

Told you it was a funny story. That was how we first met, though to tell the truth we didn't actually become acquainted, as it were, until a bit later, around the beginning of May. By that time the situation was more complicated, not as complicated as it would eventually become, but more complicated all the same. To tell the truth of the truth, this meeting may not have actually happened as described. Many months later, towards the end, I asked him about it...I brought up the topic of my having, the first time we ever met, said something incredibly rude and inconsiderate to him and I felt really bad about that but he didn't remember it that way at all, he said I was very polite, in fact that was one of the things he noticed about me, that I was always very polite to everyone, maybe overly so, stiff and formal, and that really bothered me for some reason, I thought about it a lot, how he could have possibly formed that opinion of me, and it wasn't until a few weeks later when I was out at night and I had just finished taking off all this girl's arms and legs and I still had a while to go so I made a big cut down between her breasts and I peeled the skin and the fat back so I could start snapping her ribs out so I could get the sternum out in one piece 'cause I vaguely wanted to see if I could reach through and pull part of her spine through the front that I realised it made sense that our opinions would differ since I'd always had low self-esteem.

* * * *

小川經::Ogawa Sutra

Sonoda.

I am the hill of the nameless.

Watanabe.

The shaded path in spring.

Itsuki.

The ruin in the tall grass.

Takemoto.

I am loss, I am privation. The silence of birds after rain.

Haimon.

My touch is the hand dredging skulls from the riverbed.

Touenji.

My breath is the heat of the forest in rot.

Sasaya.

I am old age, I am sickness.

Mochizuki.

Suffering, and death.

Shintani.

The heart of the form realm is none other than these.

Tsujinomiya.

The wheel that turns, investing phenomena with form.

Kamiyama.

The wheel that turns, pushing all forms to collapse.

Enjou.

Thus I am rebirth and repetition. I am the spiral of paradox.

Narushima.

And for all this I am nothing: I am less than the dew on the grass cast away in the dawn.

Tennouji.

There is no distance to the void. The bliss of the highest heaven is void.

Shirazumi.

Void too is the hateful sinner, void too the Hell-realm in which he lingers.

Naitou.

Rightly do the sages tell: all beings and all things belong to the void: for all that breathes and sees is void already.

Kusumoto.

No matter how they live.

Inugami.

No matter how they die.

[Mujun's Commentary]

At the end of his life Arya-Alaya could not fail to fall into Hell! A single hair from his head outweighs Mount Sumeru. Every pore drips with blood, and every sound is a plaintive cry. His lungs fill with the fumes of Hell, and his speech is as an injunction to the fire. If his voice is heard in the wilderness, one should pass by untroubled, paying no mind.

[Rasen's Commentary]

Once the master created a fine model of the bhavacakra [wheel of becoming]. He showed this to his disciples, saying, “Does the wheel turn of its own accord?” The disciple Hakujun who was among them stood up and turned the model around by himself. Then he left the room without saying a word. The master took the model and broke it on the ground, saying, “The rest of you may go. Hakujun alone remains.” The realisation attained by this disciple of Arya-Alaya at the end of his novitiate suggests the profundity of the master's teaching.

* * * *

The correct answer is always drowned out by indistinct voices

Do you remember the Concrete Girl case? I know it was a few years ago – '88, '89, around then? I think I was, like, twelve when it hit the news. Big news, apparently, though you'll understand that I didn't pay much attention at the time. I only got to know about it later. Read an article in some magazine. True crime, true horror. I'll summarise. A bunch of high-school boys abducted a 17-year-old girl from the suburbs – her name was Furuta Junko – and imprisoned her in a room in one of their parents' houses in...Adachi, I think, it was somewhere in the city. And for over a month they kept her there, they put their imaginations to work, the kind of imagination that springs forth from the circumstance of having complete power over someone else. If you look it up you can read the list of everything they did to her – this all came out in the trial, as you can imagine – but I warn you, you'll probably regret it. It's just day after day of rape and torture, basically. They cut her, they beat her, they went at her with scissors...to the fingers, I think...burnt her with lit cigarettes out of pure fucking meanness. That and more like it. And then eventually they'd had their fun, I suppose, so they killed her. By that point I think she'd endured enough, she would have welcomed it, but who can say? Maybe even at the end she still entertained some faint hope. Anyway, they put the body inside an oil drum and filled it in with wet cement, then dumped it on an abandoned lot somewhere. Hence the name. The culprits got caught, it went to trial, big news, very famous, very infamous. In the end they all went to prison. As far as I know they're still in there. The girl's parents weren't satisfied, but could they have been? By anything? You could run those boys feet-first through a woodchipper, you're not getting Junko back. It is in the nature of evil to inflict damage that cannot be amended.

As I said, I only read about it long after the fact. It was, I recall, in late '94 – and I have to stop here and clarify that in 1994, I was...well, what was I? I was different. Although how different I was is subject to interpretation. I hadn't met Kokutou, that's true. I hadn't met Araya. I had not yet had that...first sight, of R. S. I guess I was a normal person back then. Of course, to say that implies that I'm not one any more, which is in some ways true, important ways, ways that are difficult to ignore, but in other ways debatable. Yes, debatable. Does that surprise you? It shouldn't. I'll come to that later. Anyway, when I first read about the case it struck me powerfully. I had a very vivid impression that I was reading an account of events that instantiated, that indeed epitomised, evil. If there was evil in the world, I thought, that was what it looked like. Perhaps that was parochial of me, thinking back on it. This was 1994, and to think of Japan as a particularly ugly place was a luxury. Despite everything, it still is. Earlier in the year, the news was all over Rwanda. The genocide. You turned on the TV, you looked in the paper, every day, there they were: all these stories, all these photos coming out of this little African country almost no-one here had ever heard of, where one fine morning half the population got out of bed and decided to slaughter the other half. I'm talking entire families, entire villages hacked to death with machetes. By normal people, I should say – people who, the day before, they'd gone to work, they'd played with their kids, they'd joked around with friends, they'd gone about their everyday lives. And then they went and killed something like eight hundred thousand of their fellow countrymen over the course of a month or two. I can't really grasp that kind of number. Even now, after all the mayhem I have been party to, I still can't. So I certainly couldn't back then. What do eight hundred thousand dead bodies look like? I worked it out once. Back of the envelope. The result is pure absurdity. Imagine a cube, forty metres to a side, filled wall-to-wall, no gaps, with human flesh and blood and bone and viscera. Imagine that – rather, try to and fail. There is simply no way to take that figure and put it in terms of something familiar. It was perhaps because of this incapacity that it didn't really come home to me, nor anyone else, actually. It is too distant. It is, lest we forget, on the other side of the world. We barely give a shit what happens the next zipcode over. Rwanda might as well be one of the moons of Neptune. You look at your TV, you shrug, you say oh, how horrible, and life goes on entirely unaffected. People at school, they talked about it sometimes, you know, they'd give each other these wry looks and say, well, that's Africa, as if that explained it. And, the thing is, it did. It explained it well enough to satisfy them, and that's all it needed to do. There was no particular sense of evil that inhered in the event, because in many ways there wasn't really an event. There was no reality at all. Just some strange TV movie we kept seeing clips from here and there, stripped of any context. After a while they stopped showing it, and everyone lost interest. The Concrete Girl case, on the other hand, had recognisable characters and settings. The culprits and the victim alike: they lived in places much like where you lived, attended schools much like yours. These were not people you knew personally, there was still a certain distance in play, but nevertheless you could imagine knowing them, imagine being them. I imagined being Furuta Junko in that room, alone and in so much pain you couldn't bear it. I imagined her body stuffed into that barrel, sealed in concrete. That, it seemed to me, was what evil looked like. It was something in that very deliberate and protracted destruction of a human being. It was sickening. Yet all the same there was something very interesting about it. Like a gruesome car accident. You cannot help but want to look.

I couldn't help but think: the boys who did that to her, what did they discover in the process? What knowledge was obtained on the far side of all that suffering and death? About her, about themselves, about anything? In all likelihood, I reassured myself, they'd learned nothing, and wouldn't have cared to. They were just a bunch of bullies, different in degree but not in kind from the ones I had known in elementary school, and they were cruel more or less because they could be and nothing would ever change that. But sometimes I did suspect. That even though they had crossed to the far shore of a dark river that perfectly and forever separated them from general humanity, was it not the case that they stared back across that river, the look in their eyes betraying knowledge of a great secret, a secret learned in the crossing or on the far side that they would never, ever tell?

What I tended to think about the following year, when I was actually out killing people, was whether or not there was a fundamental difference between what I was doing and what they had done. Excluding all superficial contrasts – they killed one person, I killed several, they abducted and confined her for over a month, I never abducted or confined anyone, et cetera – was there an essential difference between our crimes? Allowing that we were all perpetrators of evil acts, were we necessarily engaged in the same kind of evil? Was the difference only in degree, or was there something more? I never reached a conclusive answer. I don't think anyone could have. Generally I was in two minds about it. Sometimes – at the bad times, I guess – these could come at any moment – something I'd see or hear would set it off – I'd remember something, like – the second guy I killed, first victim the cops found – back alley off the shopping district – I cut his hands and feet off and left him there to bleed out – for some fucking reason – it seemed like a good idea at the time – he was crying, screaming – even though it was the middle of the night and no-one was going to hear – and he was trying, he was scrabbling around on these bleeding stumps – looked ridiculous, I almost laughed – in shock I guess – but after a minute or so he was gone – faded away – that was a particularly bad one, and if you examine the case file you'll find I never did one like that again – but I was often reminded of it, what he was feeling in those last moments, and when I was, then and other times, those were the bad times. They descended on me like this immense, this infinite blackness, covering my eyes...pure disgust. You can't even imagine. You cannot. Every passing second was worse than the last. A horrifying imposition. I hated every single part of myself. I couldn't even speak. I was disgusted. Unsightly. Undeserving of life. I felt like I was being eaten alive, if you cut me open there'd spill out thousands of maggots...everything inside was completely rotting away. I couldn't look in the mirror. I'd look, and I would see the very worst thing in the entire world. In those times I could say, yes, the evil I commit is precisely of the same order. I too have complete power over my victims – the power of a feudal ruler, the power to let live and make die, and the will to choose the latter every single time. And I have an imagination. That I don't have my very own Furuta Junko locked in a room somewhere, to play with, is accidental, incidental. If I told you I did, you'd probably believe it. I would, in your position.

But then there were the other times. And though 'good' is the natural counterpart to 'bad' I hesitate to call them the good times. It's true that it could generally be said that during these times I would not experience the same depressive state as in the bad times. In some ways I may have been happier, but I don't know if that is the right way to describe it. What they were, were periods of essentially manic energy, incredible energy, like my heart was pumping white-hot molten metal. There was this inexhaustible excess inside me that had to be expended, by any means whatsoever, just as long as it was expended as fast and in as lavish amounts as possible, or I would explode. These were the times you'd find me running over rooftops in the dead of night, wind whipping at my face...daredevil stunts, climbing tall buildings, breaking into places, jumping from platform to platform on the subway moments before a train came through...I could be incredibly generous, I once saved someone's life like this, street crossing, just pulled him out the way of a truck he didn't see, I barely even knew I did it, he barely even knew, I ran off before he got a look at me, off wild somewhere else...I could be incredibly cruel, too, I committed most, not all, of my murders like this, one of them I just kept cutting and cutting, I never got tired, I realised I'd cut him completely in half so I nailed one of the halves to the wall and kept going on the other...it was in this state, I thought, that I felt most in tune with what Araya had done to me. Most aware of it. Because it was possible, after all, to not be aware of it. But there I was, out of control and super-powered, a crazed mutant tearing through the city with a brake that didn't work and a fuel tank that never ran dry. And it was in these times that I could say, no, the evil I commit is not of the same order. Because I have gone further: I have crossed that dark river and clambered dripping onto the far shore and I have kept going, I have seen that whatever secret those boys seemed to possess was a meagre and partial and paltry thing just like they were and I have seen that the far shore commences not an island of the damned but an entire continent, a howling waste and starless twilight sky and immaterial dust and desolation but all the more beautiful for it, so beautiful it could make you cry, and I have seen that in its extremest reaches there is the whole of the great secret they did not learn but an atom of in all they did to that girl and I have seen that every day I hasten solitary through the waste towards it, closer ever closer, and I have seen on the faces of the people I kill at the moment the light drains from their eyes the sign of that same secret, that they have known it too in the passage to that twilit country, and I have seen the very same look in the eyes of Ryougi Shiki.

[shounen jump]

I read maybe half way through before i stopped, cause i wasn't sure what to make of this or what was going in on. This was some kind of...journal entry(?) about Lio Shirazumi done in the "Contemplate Our Navels" way?

[Gl❀w]

Well, shit.

[Kirby]

Halfway through this I was wondering when you'd start bringing up simulacra

- - - Updated - - -

also demimondaine isn't dead, expect the unexpectable

And I just noticed this in the AN, hawa

[Dullahan]

This was some kind of...journal entry(?) about Lio Shirazumi done in the "Contemplate Our Navels" way?

yep

[SeiKeo]

them's some letters

[Dullahan]

come to me & open your mouth so I can vomit words into it like a mother bird feeding her babies

[Leftovers]

Ah.

[Dullahan]

畜生界//THE SUBJECT SUPPOSED TO KNOW

All things must at some time become nought, that is, return to their original reality. When we sit facing the wall doing zazen, we realize that none of the thoughts that arise in our minds, as a result of karma, are real. The Buddha’s fifty years of teaching are meaningless. The mistake comes from not knowing what the mind is. […] Think now, when your breath stops and the skin of your body breaks, you will also become like me. How long do you think you will live in this fleeting world?

Ikkyū Sōjun

The subject expressed unwillingness to continue our discussion.

The subject announced the presence within itself of such untold feelings of anxiety and trepidation.

The subject understood, with a hint of wishful thinking, that this was the end.

The subject mumbled.

The subject hated this.

The subject did not care.

The subject had come to such a pretty pass.

The subject simply did not care.

The subject had finally seen the day.

The subject was amorphous.

The subject was a lump of fat and meat with no distinguishing features whatsoever.

The subject looked like nothing you would recognise.

The subject had perceived certain things.

The subject was a thin sheet of human skin stretched taut like a drum over a hollow space.

The subject heard certain sounds which spoke of general dissolution.

The subject nevertheless well understood the impossibility of communication as such.

The subject had learned several things in this regard.

The subject would disavow this knowledge if pressed.

The subject despised its own knowledge most of all, as if the things it had learned were branded upon its surface like obscure marks of subjugation.

The subject knew first of all that nothing existed.

The subject found this amusing.

The subject knew second that, even if something did exist, it could not be comprehended.

The subject found this obvious.

The subject knew third that, even if it could be comprehended, it could not be expressed in language.

The subject hated speech, writing, language in general, and scorned it as an endless cavalcade, a cavalry charge, of lies, bullshit, meaningless paraphernalia.

The subject believed, sarcastically, that language was no longer useful, or perhaps never had been.

The subject knew last of all that whatever was expressed in language could not be understood by others.

The subject postulated that there was neither purpose in speaking nor anything to speak about.

The subject saw humans – if the wording can be forgiven – as somewhat like grains of sand, points of null dimension, scattered within a vast ocean of mud which obscured all from all.

The subject said that all distances between humans were infinitely subdivided, blindly groping through the mud with No End In Sight.

The subject said that there was no difference between any kind of relation and any other, quantitatively speaking.

The subject refused to talk about its parents.

The subject conveyed that despite all empirical evidence suggesting the futility of this act, it had, indeed, one night, a brutal night, it had tried to communicate.

The subject had bought supplies and prepared a large piece of paper on which it scrawled some commonplace sentiment.

The subject wrote in chalk.

The subject did not consider that it had written anything offensive or controversial.

The subject had arrived at an unshakeable judgement.

The subject then placed this sign in a semi-public location in the dead of night, ensuring that there were no witnesses.

The subject recalls ambiguously the half-shy conspiracy of it all, the childish joy of a kept secret.

The subject returned to the location some hours later, in the early afternoon.

The subject had long disliked early afternoons, considering them phenomenologically as a kind of overwhelming mood of failure, of the solar arc's failure to prolong itself.

The subject found that its message was no longer there.

The subject described beneath the sign of a lit cigarette the disappearance in terms quite specific, “as the corpse of a dead dog vanishes from a highway.”

The subject had nothing to say about that.

The subject said nothing for a long time, about fourteen hours all told.

The subject had a business proposition for us.

The subject declared that it had long had a certain hobby, it had found a certain private amusement, in waiting on the rooftops of buildings and waiting for tentative suicides to show up.

The subject said that this was often a fruitless search since, obviously, there were so many rooftops in this city you could never catch them all.

The subject was nevertheless invested in a certain fantasised scene.

The subject enjoyed this thought.

The subject thought – as it were, in terms of a film camera shooting the whole thing – of the hapless suicide climbing to the roof only to be confronted by the subject, reclining, casually, on a deckchair, as one would by the poolside at a resort hotel.

The subject mentioned something about “drinks with cocktail umbrellas” and “very large very dark sunglasses” in describing this.

The subject rationalised this in obscure terms.

The subject understood that the most effective way to prevent a suicide was to be there.

The subject immediately clarified that it did not mean 'being there' in the saccharine sense of 'being there for X' which entails some configuration of listening, understanding, comforting, consoling, et cetera, which were in any case impossible, but rather, simply, 'being there', i.e., being present, being at the location, being conscious, Looking At Them.

The subject said that very few people are able to commit suicide while being watched.

The subject compared this phenomenon to stage fright and said it was empirically backed up, though by what it declined to elaborate.

The subject explained that the reason for this was the thorough-going narcissism of suicidal people.

The subject had this idea that people who were on what it called 'final approach' i.e. walking to the edge of the cliff were living entirely inside their heads, inside fantasy scenes, little movies that were being written inside their minds, and that when they came to the edge, they were acting not so much on volition as they were like puppets or machines, the servo-mechanism of the beautiful image of their own deaths, being pulled along by it.

The subject understood that being present at the scene interrupted this process by forcing the suicides to recognise that they were being looked at by another person and get, like, frozen in place by it, because the fantasy gaze from nowhere through which they perceived the little movie of their own suicide they have got 'hard overwritten' by the imagined gaze of the person they recognised as looking at them.

The subject said that people who were caught in this situation were forced to imagine, involuntarily, that's just how it works, mostly, they were forced to imagine what they looked like to the other person, and they experienced shame responses and generally felt very stupid.

The subject added that this was probably justified because suicide was very stupid, although no stupider than anything else.

The subject said that existence and non-existence alike were 'fucking dumb' and 'phoney', exhibiting a 'uniform and uniformly profound capability to suck enormous dick'.

The subject had not read Sartre.

The subject thought Sartre sounded like a faggot.

The subject said that narcissism was a prerequisite pathology for suicides because humans were generally incapable of consciously willing their own deaths up to the point of death.

The subject was willing to admit a few exceptions, maybe – some samurai committing seppuku, for instance, or extremely high level Buddhist monks who could stop their hearts by meditating hard enough, but said that there were probably none of these people alive today.

The subject corrected itself on the Buddhist monk part and said, alright, there was maybe one.

The subject said however that that was beside the point.

The subject had classified suicide methods in general as means of technical delegation adapted to narcissistic acts of self-murder.

The subject held that so-called suicides did not actually commit suicide so much as they set in motion chains of events which, as it were passively, resulted in their deaths; they delegated their death to an external agent, such as a bullet (which a trigger causes to fire) or various simple machines exploiting natural forces, such as gravity.

The subject considered these kinds of delegation to be critical components of any successful suicide.

The subject understood that narcissistic pathologies by nature entailed a total foreclosure of one's own death, because the fantasy gaze by which the subject 'spectates' the little movie in their head of their own death remained inextricably bound to the subject.

The subject laughed and said narcissists could not actually kill themselves, but they could come very close – because they are both audience, actor and director of their little film.

The subject said that the only way they actually died is when they delegated their death-fantasy to a machine, a natural force, something thoroughly out of their control, which bridged the final gap and ended their life.

The subject named this gap, between the narcissistic fantasy and the termination of organic life, The Real World.

The subject gave an example in that, for a jumper – one of the more common types of suicide – The Real World was the period of a few seconds between leaving the lip of the building and hitting the ground, or maybe a short while after hitting the ground, depending on how it went.

The subject had heard about some cases in which people survived for relatively long periods after jumping from ten or twenty stories.

The subject thought about the life, of sorts, that was left within those bloodied pulps, and said it must have been agony.

The subject said that that was however the only place in which The Real World existed.

The subject then said that we had gotten off-topic, a little unhappily, and reminded us that it had a business proposition.

The subject explained, that since suicides were delegating their ability to close the gap of The Real World in any case, it had thought about a starting a consultancy business.

The subject enunciated, between air quotes, 'suicide consultant' followed by its name.

The subject said that it would operate by locating vulnerable people and offering to – for a competitive fee – kill them so they didn't have to do it themselves.

The subject believed firmly that there were several reasons this option would appeal to many.

The subject knew first of all that a great many life insurance policies would pay out significantly more in the event of a death by homicide than a death by suicide – presumably in order to avoid creating perverse incentives – and that this would surely appeal to those who had the well-being of their families to think about.

The subject also considered itself thoroughly altruistic with respect to the immaterial burden, i.e. psychological burden, placed upon those same family members.

The subject said that a death by suicide invariably provoked intense guilt feelings, various kinds of mental anguish, and so forth, as those close to the deceased interrogated themselves – narcissistically, it added slyly – over what they could have done, if they could have done anything, if they could have talked, or done X or done Y and so on and so forth.

The subject counterposed this to the outcome of a death by apparently random homicide, in which, for sure, guilt feelings might show up, and other anguish, and whatnot, but to a lesser extent, and more importantly the whole causal relation would be different; the death would come across as pure contingency, no reason or rhyme.

The subject even went so far as to say that maybe, you know, there could be that kind of comic book plotline where the kid's parent gets killed and, the reality of the pure contingency of human relations thus laid bare before them, they devote their lives to the pursuit of justice and stuff.

The subject said that it was a public service if nothing else.

The subject had to admit though that in the logical development of this idea it had had for a business it had come to the point of confronting some problems, as it were, inherent to the notion.

The subject was worried about those.

The subject was concerned about what would happen if its client, having so delegated its suicidal fantasy by means of a duly constituted business relationship, attained a certain critical distance to it, you know, and began experiencing the good things in life and finding joy in everyday things and meaning in existence and other 'just, fucking, straight-up Special Olympics retarded shit' like that.

The subject would impose a strict no-refunds policy for this possibility, but it wouldn't be able to escape in the event a certain feeling of being cheated, of having ultimately lost out in the transaction, because, right, the client gets, as it were...he gets something, the subject didn't know, but the client sure as hell got something and here was the subject just stuck here, stuck here exactly where it was and where it would always be, killing people.

The subject was however also concerned by what would happen if that first thing didn't happen.

The subject was indeed profoundly concerned by what it would mean if the client cooperated and everything went ahead just 100% exactly perfectly.

The subject said it didn't know how one could respond to finding a person that absolutely narcotised by their own fantasy, that they could delegate its most important component and still follow it all the way to the edge of their life, other than to conclude that it said something very disheartening about the Human as a category.

The subject thought that if someone like that existed it would make by association the very character of being Human somehow less.

The subject said that there would be only one thing to do in that situation and that was to kill them.

The subject admitted that this didn't exactly solve the problem.

The subject was asked which of the two possibilities concerned it more.

The subject said it didn't know.

[ilikehats]

New content?WoooooooEDIT: was the art there before?

[Dullahan]

人間界 BLIND NIGHTMARE

When Zhuangzi went to Chu, he saw an old skull, all dry and parched. He poked it with his carriage whip and then asked, “Sir, were you greedy for life and forgetful of reason and so came to this? Was your state overthrown, and did you bow beneath the ax and so came to this? Did you do some evil deed, and were you ashamed to bring disgrace on your parents and family and so came to this? Was it through the pangs of cold and hunger that you came to this? Or did your springs and autumns pile up until they brought you to this?” When he had finished speaking, he dragged the skull over and, using it for a pillow, lay down to sleep.

In the middle of the night, the skull came to him in a dream and said, “You chatter like a rhetorician, and all your words betray the entanglements of a living man. The dead know nothing of these! Would you like to hear a lecture on the dead?”

“Indeed,” said Zhuangzi.

The skull said, “Among the dead, there are no rulers above, no subjects below, and no chores of the four seasons. With nothing to do, our springs and autumns are as endless as heaven and earth. A king facing south on his throne could have no more happiness than this!”

Zhuangzi couldn’t believe this and said, “If I got the Arbiter of Fate to give you a body again, make you some bones and flesh, return you to your parents and family and your old home and friends, you would want that, wouldn’t you?”

The skull frowned severely, wrinkling up its brow. “Why would I throw away more happiness than that of a king on a throne and take on the troubles of a human being again?” it said.

Zhuangzi

I remember it was a grey shadowless month, a month of overcast skies and unsurpassed boredom and homogeneity. Of painfully acute cognizance; all light too bright, all sound too loud. The nights were infected with an oily sheen, from the city lights scattering off low cloud. I had headaches often. I had dreams of baroque complexity, obscurely unpleasant dreams suggestive of vast mechanisms coordinated by systematics I could not even begin to grasp, and which rendered the act of waking a thorough-going entry into the calculus of household economy – only when the dreams became more tiresome to deal with than waking life was anticipated to be could one countenance getting up. Usually around two or three in the afternoon, or the morning.

Patheti
c. It's
such pathet
ic weakne
ss. Pathetic.
Pathe
tic. You ar
e pathetic. Unsi
gh
tly. Und
eserv
ing of
life.

One night in tunnels deep below the city I found myself in a train compartment where I was the only conscious life. It was [illegible] in the morning. Let us say I was 'drunk'. (I was not.) In the depths of night some horrible things had been done to my nervous system – the passive voice conceals the culprit – it was me, of course – horrible things, barely worth mentioning. 'Drunk' is the alibi for those. I was possessed by thoughts which drove themselves to the point of terror and disgust, and there was no-one to share them with. Everyone else on the train had passed out. Keening steel, the crush of air that races through subterranean arteries – the scintillating flicker of tunnel lights, an epileptic crash of angled shadows fluid in the inner space of the compartment. These here, these people, these faces...were office girls, right? Suburban types, a uniquely suburban archetype, returning home from shopping in Shibuya till late in the evening, laden down with designer goods, exhausted and eyeless sleepers. And I paced up and down among the bodies gingerly stepping over splayed out legs, a forest of as it somehow detached and independent shins and skirts and stockings and heels and I thought about my reflection in the dark glass at the end of the compartment and the howl of rushing air through tunnels and stealing their wallets or hair or teeth. My

corpse

was there, at the far end of the compartment, nonchalantly checking her watch. Each of us forming correspondent poles of a diagram drawn in perspective. Twin vanishing points of an infinite corridor. Infinite.

So I was at the convenience store the other day, she began to say.

The fuck asked you?

Easy, wildman, easy...I was just saying, I was at the ol' konbini, down by the way, you know the one, by the train station...

Yes, I should have mentioned that earlier. Lately – I plead the indefinite, I say SAIKIN, lately, since when, since one second ago, one hour, one week, one hundred thousand years – my corpse has begun to irritate me. Miserable bitch; I cannot say exactly how. There is a certain free-floating unpleasantness to her that no singular feature can exhaust – not the smell, which is gangrenous, nauseating rot, almost unbearable in close quarters; not the shambling gait she has, legs in spindly rigor, this clumsy and ungainly thing which never permits the satisfaction of seeing her fall flat; not the voice, which disgorges an endless stream of babble, of mindless, rambling bullshit; not the face, which is fixed in its expression, half-decayed, halfway to the flesh sloughing cleanly off the skull.

...And I am, I don't know, I'm there because I have no real desire to be anywhere else, or to be anywhere at all, really, it was pure happenstance that I was there and a bunch of local brats four-fifths my age who were out at night for some reason had just left and I was gliding through the aisles, as it were like a housewife, appreciating the colours, the displays, the comforting gentle hum of fluorescent light and electric refrigeration, the products exploding into my field of vision like a kaleidoscope beaten into the eye with a hammer and I found a shelf in the refrigerated section where they were selling what advertised itself, with the tricolour and all, the brown-pink-white, they were selling 'Neapolitan Milk'...I shit you not, I had to say it aloud, Neapolitan Milk.

But even now I lie.

Like, what do you, uh, what are you even selling there, you can't actually...

I devoted some thought to the finer details of the spatial configuration of the train compartment. An enclosed oblong, its innards gutted and stratified, ascendant steel risers, filled seats, formica, the scuffed floor, handholds swaying from the roof like a hundred hundred tiny victimless gallows, advertising cutting through the surfaces like seams of exposed fat, advertising what? God only knows. Some shotgun pattern of little explosive bursts of colour and text like an insurrection of greedy armed beggars. Then the windows. Perfectly clean, sheet-plating the upper section of the exterior, offering a perfectly clean view of the murky persistent blur of the tunnel. In the floor, surfacing, a persistent tremble, engine shudder. Metal on metal on metal. Hrmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

It's a liquid, you can't do the, the thing. Individually, yes, all the flavours, but, do you – is it just a mixture? Did they actually do that? Just mix one-third of each? That's – not even Neapolitan, really, that's like, the end state, once you melt it, it's, uh, just kind of – yeah.

I put my ear to the window and listened. It was an opening onto a space of cold, frosted sounds reverberating in the superstructure. I heard a wheezing parody of laughter...from far out in the audience. Then silence. Then something trying to scream. I stopped listening to the window. My corpse continued.

It felt like I was going insane...my headache worsened immensely, so I rested my head against the glass of the refrigerator. The clerk called over and asked me, I warrant you, politely as formality bade, not to do that – but, of course, on hearing it, I was immediately overcome with feelings of shame, and I desired intensely to choke her to death right then and there.

How did that happen? How did the events of this night take place? What was their a priori, their condition of possibility? What things necessarily had to be true for this to be real? I carefully cracked the joints in my wrists, one and then the other. The knob of bone distending the upper surface suggested in my mind a dubiously reptilian quality though I couldn't precisely say why, what I was associating it with. I happen to dislike killing people with my bare hands. I would prefer a weapon. Some kind of intermediary. I think it is because of a general dislike of touching people, people who are alive, since as long as they are alive it is impossible to touch them without also being touched, and it's probably being touched I dislike most of all. Once they are dead and thusly dead objects they of course cannot touch in any meaningful sense, so that is fine. But I do not like being touched by the living. Hm, I said aloud. Vocalising onomatopoeia for fun and profit. Hm, I said. Things that make you go hmmm: Was that it, then? Was that how it happened?

I opened the display and cold air tumbled out, fell down around my feet, and I grabbed, fingers faintly trembling, a carton of Neapolitan Milk properly so-called and took it up to the counter and gently placed it down and leaned forward slightly and smelled her in a perfectly casual, unobtrusive way.

She smell good?

Just this please, I said. Just this! And she – round moon-like face I recall – vomits some syllables indicative of a acquiescence to my demand, and I'm struggling to remember if I have any cash on me, and if so, how much, and where is it. Do you understand, I said to her. My disbelieving tone was quickly dissolving in the realisation that the milk probably was just a mixture and not very good. She met my eyes like a spooked reptile that was a little bit overweight and impaired in its ability to escape from predators and knew it even though its lizard hindbrain was not capable of the abstract thought that could sustain such knowing. I think I said that aloud. Just this miss, question mark, she posed. Just this. This. Neapolitan Milk.

A conflagration of light and sound, I remember that. The geometry of a large room. Music, if it could be called that – more like an electric simulacrum of a natural process, the heart of a blue whale – a massive palpitation set resounding through the room. So loud no words could escape it. A kind of mass synchronisation mechanism, an artificial high dispersed to the airwaves. Blast all foreign affects from your head. Like a gunshot. Gobbets of flesh spat bleeding onto the walls where your inhibitions used to be. I remembered – the image, truly, flashed up before me – of an instant, preserved there, seated at the bar (was there a bar?) holding a long-stemmed glass, a nucleating bubbled liquid folded inside it, and I was twisting the glass, the stem, between my fingers, turning it round and round as if twisting a flower stem to break it off and I was gazing into the liquid as if some fugitive reality, some certain principle, was hiding in there. A higher state of grace. I had watched the pill – a chalk-white unbranded piece no larger than the nail of a little finger – dissolve in there, effervescent, falling to pieces with languorous slowness and immeasurable rapidity, as a moment in time is continuously obliterated by the next moment. And so on.

Ami, I said to her, bug-eyed, reading off the nametag, Ami, do you, fucking, understand the, the, the, the implications, of this? Do you know what this means? Just this miss? My headache hit fever-pitch. Throbbing blood in my temples. Now, seriously, I was going to break something over this bitch's head. How long, I mutter, has it been, gritting teeth, eyes bulging in her direction, since you...I forget. I don't know where that was going. Uh. Anyway I found some cash. Will it be enough, I asked aloud. Will it, Ami?

When I had been there, in the moment, the moment had seemed the entire world to me. Nothing else was real. Now I am where I am, safely ensconced up here in the future, and that moment seems thoroughly unreal. Now I'm in this moment. In a while this moment too, will become nothing to me. This coolness of the air, this coordination of shapes in my vision, this mourning wail of the underground air, this metal, this plastic, this corpse of mine at the far end: will all become nothing. A moment of another day. They tick past each other. Clockwork ratcheting forth. Moment, moment, moment, moment. Where, in this flux, am 'I' – you may ask. Stupid question. I think I am something like a contagious disease which spreads from moment to moment. My presence in space, this ineffable 'hereness' of the 'here' where I am, is an infected wound. Around me: the inflammation of the world. A secret society of moments conspires, pressing close to the diseased one, to catch and disperse the plague – like a mob of nineteenth-century decadents trying to catch syphilis all from the one whore as a point of style – as if to infect everyone, effect a universal dissolution of the flesh. Probably it won't work. Probably, assuredly, at some point the lethality of the disease will overtake its contagious qualities and kill the thrillseekers faster than they can breed. But even then, I suppose, in secret ceremonies one might suspect – masochistic debasement beyond measure – future moments will take turns to copulate with the gutted, fly-bloated carcass of the moment I live in now and the virus called 'I' will continue to spread. It will corrupt and destroy everything it touches out of no real malice or indeed complex comprehension of any kind, but simply as an innate function of its own survival and reproduction.

Like, her face was...what was it? I saw it, my man. Her uniform was rippling like a flag in high wind. Her face was swimming before my eyes. She was a wax doll. Melting. Ami-chan. I said this. Please talk to me. I'll, like, I'm a psycho, yes, I understand, but look, I, uh...and she was like, that'll be three hundred fifty yen miss. Hm. Yeah. No, you don't understand. I will – I will murder you. If you don't listen to me. Do you want that to happen? I'll, I'll, I'll watch your blood empty. I'll eat your brain. Carve the cellulite from your thighs with a steak knife. Listen, forget it.

If I killed myself, would it make me happy? I had wondered about that. Sarcastically. That was what I had wondered about. I had asked that question to the glass. I had drained it in one shot – there's a certain violence to this phrasing which appeals to me – and put it back down on the bar with a calculated excess of force, as to suggest a mediation between a casual, nonchalant unconcern for material things, and a slight diminution in fine motor control. The trained muscle-armature of the 'party girl', as much as snowy breasts fitting into champagne glasses. Precisely how much volition had there been in this activity? Hard to say at the time, impossible to say now in hindsight. It was a matter of transference. I was watching him watch me, from the next seat over. The gaze recognises the gaze recognising the gaze recognising the gaze recognising the gaze recognising the gaze recognising the gaze recognising the gaze recognising the gaze recognising the gaze. Hall of mirrors. Endless game of hide-and-seek. If you maintain a clear head you can observe yourself as this happens – as your own flesh twists itself into the fantasy formation of the other party. Posture, figure and meat. It is not unlike watching the severed legs of a dead frog twitch when electrodes are applied. I recollected a certain movement of the head – I had passed the tip of my tongue, with exquisite care, along the surface of my upper lip. A certain quantity of waxy, tasteless, virulent-red substance was stripped from the sensitive membrane there, and I swallowed it. It had tasted like nothing whatsoever.

I had to ask her. I said: Tell me about this milk. Where does – who makes this? I need to, uh...it's vitally...necessary...urgent that I find them. Give me every individual one of their names right fucking now. I swear to God. Three hundred fifty yen, you say? Hold on let me – ok, look, all I have, this ten thousand. OK? I got this from – an individual. Yes. Yes give me change. It will be fine. It's all I have. Nine thousand – I was exhausted I should tell you that – six hundred fifty change here you go.

The pure and empty form of seduction. It really didn't matter what I said to him. I don't think he even heard me. There was too much noise. Gregorian chant shot through with Spanish guitars. Female choir enters and leaves. I shared some anecdote. No discernable language – we have obtained a realm of vocality exterior to semantics. Breathy female singer. Once when I was a kid I went to the shops with my mother. When we left she ran into a friend in the parking lot. They entered into a conversation – about what I couldn't tell you. Transactions of a secret suburban mother dialect. Synthesised piano. Deeper modalities of the throat. I was impatient to leave and I bothered her about it. She remained impassive, seemingly. The image of a 'tight, thin smile' threw itself up in my vision; I don't know if it had any connection, if it was a real memory. She finished up her conversation, smiling, laughing, and we both got in the car. A dark turn, what seems like crumbling – no, back to normality. When we had closed the doors she turned around and slapped me across the face. Piano flits over and over itself. High pitched turn, now falling. And, you know, I didn't cry at all, that was the strange thing. Despite the pain. I sat there and I looked at her, a stubbornly unreachable look, consciousness already bricking itself in behind its own death-mask, facade, immune to all kindness and concern. It was a look that said to her, “So that's how it is.” Without pity but without judgement either. Chorus. The drawn-out phoneme IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII. Crescendo. And she never spoke of it again, never. Within hours it was as if it never happened. Wave breaks. Vocals retreat. Guitars left to their own devices. Of course – this never actually happened. Female singer returns. Even now I lie. Voice ringing like a cathedral. Chorus. IIIIIIIIIIIIIII.

And it was at that point that – I can only speculate, but, if you will – something inverted, inside my head, some quantitative change flipped over, all at once, into a qualitative. Like the inside of my mind flash-froze, all at once, from a murky, dull, painful flourish of liquids into something hard, flawless, crystalline, drawn along clear lines and adhering to a recognisable order and structure.

I AM A PATHOLOGY were words someone had scratched, with a coin or car key, into the brushed steel surface of the bar. Maybe I had done it. He hadn't been listening to me. Of course not. Communication rigorously conceived was not possible in that field. It is a naïve consciousness which understands sexual fantasies as little movies, blue movies screened in the privacy of your mind. Rather it is a slideshow. A series of still frames. Figure and meat. Impressionist sketches. Do you know how you appear to others? I saw it murmuring in his retina, like the pattern impressed on the obverse face of a coin. Figure one. I as I had been on that barstool, the warmly insecure pose of an adolescent. The shyness of figure. Recapitulation in the geometry of the face a complex dialectic of innocence and experience. Black dress embracing tightly this underdeveloped body. Figure two. A willing glance of eye. Warm aerosolised alcohol on the breath. Skin and skin in proximity. She smiles, showing teeth. Figure three. Naked thighs like the legs of a young mare in heat. A subtle movement of the lung. Plexus. Palpitation. Figure and meat. And in the transference you could almost see them yourself, couldn't you. The flesh recombines itself like water filling a cup. That is fantasy. At no point does volition enter this calculus. The mind is the meat. The wanting is the accommodation. You will come to such a point. Yes. Reaching to the inner angle of your legs. Arousal musk of sweat and pheromones. Deface yourself – with a hunting knife, skinning a kill, cut out your sex and incise, razor-slit, a vertical passage. Encunt yourself deeply and be used like a household appliance.

A voice began to speak. Silvery, demonic. Like the distant nattering of insects at sundown. It was, my corpse said, pausing as a silverfish crawled out of her mouth and scuttled down between her breasts to burrow again into a necrotic patch of flesh south of the ribcage, mine, of course. It said...perhaps 'said' is not the right word, but a certain discourse was initiated here. Something began to turn, like a screw into wood. I'm sure, it said – I'm sure, Ami, or whatever your name is, if you have one – I'm sure that, at one point, in the past, a past whose cleavage from the present is so profound that it cannot even be remembered except as the memory of a memory, stripped of all innocent sheen, the wistful longing for a moment when you could, without a twisted smile witness to pain, remember something like this. At one point in the past. In the past. You too must have had one of those moments, or series of moments – perhaps you were still a child, or a young teenager – in which, as it were, the world suddenly OPENED itself to you. In which the days were acrid-bright, virulent blue skies which spoke to you of an endlessness that did not crush but exhilarated you, a bird in flight. And the silhouettes of power-lines in front of the paling light of a darkening dusk spoke to you of something beautiful and nameless, beautiful because it could not be named. And even your loneliness in the depths of night seemed full of promise, and the streetlight empire extensive unto infinity out the window of your childhood bedroom seemed everywhere your home, everywhere familiar and yet utterly new, outlaid beneath a sky lavished with countless stars. Which you counted anyway.

A deeply ambiguous mood prevailed, at once buoyant and explosive. Floating high above oneself and then trapped inside, locked-in. Such concentration of energies as if urgently needed but unable to scream.

Butterflies in your stomach. Why is that? Some gutted ruin of an inhibition? Thought you were done with those.

Fuck off and die.

Accursed progenitor.

A painful eternity as we stole away to the restrooms. When the fantasy took the form of a slideshow, the in-between moments revealed the fantasy in its impossibility. The unarticulated remainders. I had seen patterns everywhere, tracing fugitive apophenias along the brushed steel of a door, the reflections of fluorescent lights on polished tiles, in the phrases penned roughly on the inside of the stall, as if some meaning were hidden there. Western-style toilets, I had noted, mutely, an anthropologist on Mars. He closed the toilet seat and sat down; I straddled his thighs. Thick with blood and muscle. An athlete, I wondered. I had felt the hard press of his erection below, an uprising of linen. Our mouths joined. A complex union of the tongues. I endured the taste of nicotine, schnapps, designer drugs – negotiated the tip of my tongue over the amalgam filling at the far back of his mouth. Then I withdrew, trailing saliva. A sudden whim, to taste the skin, lick the ink, drew up and around the bone of the jaw. Then I left off, dextrously, and kneeled down in front of the seat. Supplicant to a throne – he had liked that. When I'd succeeded in disrobing him below, I took a moment to run a fingertip, slick with saliva, along the smooth, responsive surface of his penis. Some nonsense noises from him. Steadily, without hesitating, I closed my mouth around it. Almost gagged at the end. Heat of the flesh, the scent of pubic hair trapped in my nose. I made eyes up at him, studious, doe-like, some screen stereotype of the prey-species adolescent girl. I maintained eye contact and bit straight through at the root.

But, Ami, it didn't last. You woke up one day and the magic was gone – not just gone but retroactively vanished, traceless, in the blunt but unarguable proof that it had never been thus. It was all a savage lie. Created by an industrial concern, complexes of advertising companies, the education ministry. What it concealed was the true endlessness of the world. The world is truly unbounded, but it is, like the surface of a sphere, entirely finite. No exit. And it is the same in time, really. You understood at some point that all your days would be nothing but faintly shabbier, more pallid and bloodless reproductions of the preceding day, marking their time by nights that darkened over you like bruises on flesh. And you saw yourself, day by day, older, weaker, uglier inside and out. True enough that the system, the administration of things, would keep you comfortable. Your wounds would be tended to, not enough to heal them, but enough to maintain a pleasant level of pain. Scabs to pick at, when you wanted. You understood that there was no place above or below you which would be better than this, because the administration of things had at last resolved all contradictions in its enacting a fair and equitable distribution of misery through the social body. You despised the poor as a matter of course, like a morass you were fearful of seeing yourself dissolved in, but you kept that in your deeper recesses and were in any case ambivalent about it, never sure of where you stood with regard to them. You were too smart for envy; you knew the rich led lives just as regularised and repulsive as yours, only with better lighting and a more professional writing staff. Your days would be spent in the fruitless reproduction of the next day, day after day, night after night, without meaning or purpose. Comfortable – not entirely comfortable, a grain of sand in your eye to keep you going, but comfortable enough, enough that you wouldn't do anything about it. Because you thought only about yourself, anyway. You would pay the toll, which was your gnawing pain, the ugliness in you, the grain of sand in your eye, you would pay that toll every day in exchange for your comfort. Your everyday life was in any case assured. And when you were old and no-one gave a shit about you, even less than they did now, you would comfortably perish, sliding into oblivion as the atom of nothingness you were, had always been, had been crushed into, seamlessly reunited with the greater nothingness it had so long strived to serve and recreate and identify itself with. And that will be the end of you.

I was careful not to give him time enough to scream. I stood up and deftly to the side, away from the streak of arterial blood that began to spurt from the intersection of his thighs and drained over the china-white surface of the toilet lit. In the moment before shock subsided enough to sustain a formal consciousness of the event, I had taken his head in my hands – in one, swift, smooth motion, I twisted his skull until I heard the vertebral linkage at the top of the spine snap, like a wooden skewer. At this point I still had his member in my mouth, erection draining with the rest of its fluids. A thin noodle of ligament dangled from my teeth – clearly something that had been torn out when I pulled off him. I forced his lips open. One last kiss. By then he wasn't seeing anything, brain death was in progress. I passed his sex back to him and left it there, in the mouth half-open, gaping, as if to swallow all the universe.

Now maybe that's alright by you. I won't claim to judge. I just observe. I observe all the time, every day. What do they say? They do say things to me. Even though they don't mean it. Actions, idle chatter, the performance of everyday life. It is a message, all of it, directed squarely at me. They laugh at me. I know it. They point and they gawp. Look at you. Filthy murderer. Look at you. You're wretched. Wretched, hateful, despised. Unsightly. Undeserving of life. Look at you. And an idiot, of course, above all. Look at you. Such a fool. You don't even know the magnitude of your mistake, you're such a fool. You're such a fucking idiot. Don't you know what you're missing out on? Don't you know – oh, don't you know – that life can be good, and true, and wonderful? There are such things as love, and beauty, and honest work – we have them, they're right here. You can enjoy yourself, you can be content, living your everyday life, doing ordinary things in an ordinary way. You were wrong, so unutterably wrong, weren't you – you coward. You ran away from these ordinary struggles, ordinary problems, which all people have, all of us in the one herd, all in the same boat, you ran away, you coward, because you were like a child, you couldn't stand the slightest discomfort, you couldn't realise, you idiot, that behind the ordinary woes and ordinary stresses of the day there is a whole plenitude, a wholesomeness, a fullness of life and it could have been yours, you idiot, it could have been yours, you could have had just what your father had, couldn't you, you could have been an ordinary shopkeeper in an ordinary suburb, married an ordinary girl, had an ordinary son, loved, laughed, grown old, in an ordinary way, but you won't, will you, you fucking idiot, you coward, because you're so wretched and perverse and a fucking monster, really, a criminal maniac, and you've given it up for nothing, for nothing, for nothing, you FUCKING IDIOT..........they say this to me. That is what the world says to me.

We had locked the stall when I came in. I listened at the door, to ensure the restroom was empty. Then I climbed over the door, leaving his corpse sitting on the toilet – grotesquely wrenched at the upper shoulders, while a slowing secretion of blood dribbled out between his thighs. At the sink I examined my face in the mirror. I examined a face, anyway. I don't know what I had seen there. I saw something with blood on its face, blood and other viscera which I quickly washed off. It looked like nothing I recognised. I didn't look like anything at all. Some other people stepped into the restroom, a haze of higher voices, meaningless conversation. I slipped out, shyly, my presence not proving worth serious comment or observation. As if in a dream. I left the locked door in there, its hidden treasure unseen. I glided past the bar, my seat now taken by someone else. I stole an unattended drink, milk-white and gasoline-thick with Russian vodka. Drained it in one. I had tried again to work out where I was, to enunciate the geometry of this room, and failed. Fuck it. I made for the exit. Out the door, out of sight – into the warmth of night, the close and familiar blackness of a city skyline that obliterates stars as unwanted competition. Echoes trailed down the concrete lines, into the midnight streets of a city hollow at the core. I broke into a run. I was giddy, wild, giggling like a schoolgirl – the wind whipped at my ears as I pounded, heels in hand, until I found myself at last in a place that had no people around. I didn't hear sirens for an hour. Maybe I never did.

But it's a lie. Everything that makes up that everyday life of theirs, is a lie. A savage lie. I find it laughable. I find it ridiculous. Because, no, is my answer. No, I'm aware of it all, and still no. In full possession of my faculties, I turn down your offer. Society? The answer is no. And they won't accept that, they'll keep pushing. Because they can't admit, not readily, their own failure. Society is a failure. Life is a failure. The everyday is a failure. All you have to offer is so much steaming shit. Your values, your dreams, your ideals. It's shit. And you will admit this if pressed. Some easier than others. But you will all admit this, even if I have to choke it through gobbets of your blood. Because I am wretched, yes, I am weak, I am a coward, I'm a failure, I'm an idiot. I am guilty on all charges. But you are the same. You are just the same. And if you hate me, then be honest. You couldn't care less about the people I kill. You don't care about anyone other than yourself. You hate me for a more rarefied reason. You hate me because I've found something at last that isn't a lie. I've found an exit.

This is no exit, I murmured softly. I noticed the presence of my corpse at the far end of the compartment, as if for the first time. I saw her, that dead girl. Her sunken eyes and maggot-eaten cheeks and the portrait they formed, a portrait of pure disgust, loathing, a hatred that tolerates nothing, abides nothing, forgives nothing, not ever. I saw a picture of infinite sadness, akin in its intensity to a medieval icon. I raised my voice, over the sleeping herd of office girls, and called out to her. This is just a short-cut.

A long silence transpired, and I remembered at last – that after I had run off, before I got on the train, I had stopped off at ol' konbini. Bought some milk.

Look, can you just stop, said my corpse at last. A trace of the petulant child.

Stop what?

Following me around. Can you stop? I will say please, if you make me. Please. Please. Just stop. Alright? Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop-

I'm not following you around, I said. Why the hell? You piss me off. You shit me up the wall. The hell would I follow you around?

You are. You are. You've been following me for months. You're such pathetic weakness. Unsightly.

Undeserving of life? I asked. My corpse glared at me.

The inner lights of the compartment flickered to life, as we slowed to a halt at the station platform.

I'm not following you, trust me. I'm really not.

The fuck, then.

We're just going the same way, you and I.

The doors opened and everybody got out.

[34]

basically
don't forget to drink your Neapolitan milk

okay I really shouldn't read the whole thing at 1 AM

[Dullahan]

nah, that's pretty much it. neapolitan milk exists, here at least. shit sucks

[34]

ooh, a sneaky update
neat

[Dullahan]

i will complete the trailokya

[34]

i cannot imagine how the writing style for the formless realm would be

[Dullahan]

quite traditional, i expect to have run out of ideas by then

[Dullahan]

修羅界 HOTLINE MIFUNE (Part 1)

As a rule the whole lifetime is used for paying off this debt, yet in this way only the interest is cleared off. Repayment of the capital takes place through death. And when was this debt contracted? At the begetting.

Schopenhauer

/////////////////////////////////////////////

Load up. Black screen.

Fade.

Developer splash.

【竹パン】

Fade.

Black screen.

Fade.

BGM: 幽玄会社 –

And Yet

けれども

Slowly we pan across a 16-bit fever dream. Dithered suggestions of low clouds simmer atop jagged elaborations of glass and wire. Soft tones of vintage CRT scatter like upturned rain. Indirect light is cast on the vicious contusion of sky. Deep night's dark is imperfectly exterminated.

Tokyo. The end of the twentieth century.

Title fades in. Rasters over midnight.

【廾回卞し工几ヨ・冊工乍凵几ヨ】
【〜ホットライン・ミフネ〜】

Yes, we're finally doing it. The much-requested Hotline Mifune.

Though frankly it's hard to see the point. This game is not for you. You are, all of you, plebs and casuals to a man. For the vast majority this walkthrough will only confirm what you already dimly suspect: that this game is not for you. Which if true would be understandable. Hotline Mifune is, for those not previously aware, an indie ultra-violent top-down 2D lo-fi roguelite beat-em-up horror game released by the dojin circle Bamboo Bread at C108. Large numbers of adjectives frequently portend commercial failure, which HM was, even by the modest standards of the dojin scene. Today it is all but forgotten. Chances are that you have not heard of this game. And even if you have, chances are, for not unrelated reasons, that this game is not for you. As Bamboo Bread discovered, it is not easily marketable. It has been received, to here abbreviate the general tendency, as just slightly too arthouse for those who want to enjoy the high-octane violence and kickin' darkwave electronica soundtrack, and, on the other hand, just slightly too edgy guro exploitation cold-steel sociopath mass murder simulator for the artfags. Which is a shame, because HM is probably – quite probably – the last really ambitious thing to come out of Bamboo Bread's founding duo Okura Shimeji and Ryokuchiku before they froze in the Cocytus of mobage production. That, of course, is just an opinion. By sheer coincidence it happens to be correct. You, meanwhile, are here because you do not yet have an opinion, or at least not one worth articulating, or, if it were to be articulated, worth listening to. We will do our best to rectify this situation. You, unfortunately, will not. The effort is sabotaged from the outset. Alas. History has shown that the only even marginally reliable method of obtaining an opinion of HM of the kind described above is, obviously, to play the game yourself. But you are here, reading a walkthrough, a “Let's Play” even, because you are disinclined to play the game. You're too busy. Playing the game is for other people. Naturally. We don't hold this against you. This is just to clarify where things stand. And, more to the point, even if you did play the game yourself, this is no guarantee that you would understand it. HM is not what you would call 'story-dense', being, on the contrary, about 99% pure unfiltered murder gameplay by volume. It is like the popular 'Kokuan Reikon' series of action RPGs in that the 'story' is largely delivered to you through the environment and incidental dialogue with dubious NPCs. Once you know how to navigate the menus and have a cheat sheet for the controls you can pretty well finish the entire game as an EOP, and many people do. Because of these 'people', to say nothing of the reddit immigrants and itinerant pseudo-translators, a lot of misinformation floats around regarding HM. We see many here who play this game and do not understand – or worse, misunderstand with great confidence – what Bamboo Bread were actually doing with this game. That is why we are here. To correct it. That is the purpose of this walkthrough.

People ask us what Hotline Mifune is 'about'. We tell them it's about a nameless faceless psychopath who walks into a yakuza-filled office building and ascends it floor by procedurally-generated floor, violently murdering everyone inside in copious amounts of muddy synths and pixelated gore. That satisfies most. A rare few will notice that it doesn't actually answer the question. Quite right. That is what 'happens' in the game, but it is not what the game is 'about'.

Let us say first of all that HM is not a one-and-done type of game. It is not an easy game or indeed even a moderately-challenging game. It is a hard game. Very hard. Shmup hard. It requires persistence. Of course all games require persistence, one way or another. All games implemented electronically ultimately reduce to loops in code; loops increment counters, counters increment other counters, counters within counters add up to mechanics. We play with the mechanics, repetitively. Shoot one. Kill one. Add one. Move one. Select one. Repeat. We repeat our actions. Electronic or not, all games ultimately resolve to the ability to 'repeat' on a small or large scale. Finish a chess game, clear the board, begin again from zero. If someone isn't taking a situation seriously, you say that they're treating it like a game: that is to say, they're acting as if their actions have no indelible consequences. Precisely. What is a game? Repeatability. It is the ability to choose, to will, a repetition. That is all. What makes something a 'game' in the most fundamental sense is the absence of irreversible consequences.

Insofar as it's 'about' anything, Hotline Mifune is a game about nothing more than what it is: a game. Which is to say, a repetition. It performs what it symbolises and symbolises what it performs. You play the game by choosing, by engaging your will, to persist through repetition. We might just as well say that your will 'causes' the repetition, since you are the one choosing to keep playing, which means, necessarily, doing the same things over and over again. Persistence through repetition, through the repetitive cycle of combat and death – is what the game is, and nothing more. The path of the Asura. It does not tell a story 'about' persistence, because story is for films and books and other gay shit like that. Games in the pure sense are not stories. Expecting 'story' from a game is idiotic. Games are maps. Sometimes very detailed, precise maps. Other times loose, distended, bizarrely exaggerated sketches out of the medieval world. Off the edges, here be dragons. Hotline Mifune is a map. It is an architect's schematic, inked in blood, which depicts an obsessional state of mind. Yours – which you have chosen.

We will be completely clearing Hotline Mifune and translating all of its dialogue (English patch arriving SoonTM I assure you. Open bracket, laughs, close bracket.) here in this thread, to ensure for all perpetuity that you never have to.

At the risk of repeating ourselves – we repeat ourselves.

This game is not for you.

/////////////////////////////////////////

Beneath the sickly-lilting logo, scanlines flitting up and down, are our menu options. Very simple. Continue, Config, Exit. They all do what you expect.

Exit exits.

Config lets you change things. Mainly control bindings. Audio sliders. Display resolution. Nothing spectacular. Best not to touch it.

Continue continues from where you left off, or, if it's your first time, starts a new game. HM works off one continuous save file – called act.sav in the root directory. No save slots, no save states. For our purposes, which is to say, for the purposes of this walkthrough, we have deleted our act.sav (made a backup, don't worry) in order to reset all progress back to zero. What you'll be seeing here is precisely what you'd see if you started up the game for the first time. Nothing hiding up these sleeves.

Nothing else to show here. Continue.

Smash cut to black.

BGM: Nil.

Text card fades in. The style resembles title cards in the early days of digital video editing, transposed through maybe one or two VHS tapes and replayed.

【ENVOI】
ANOTHER RIDICULOUS FALSEHOOD HAS IT THAT I
ASTERION
AM A PRISONER
SHALL I REPEAT THAT THERE ARE NO LOCKED DOORS
SHALL I ADD THAT THERE ARE NO LOCKS
J. L. BORGES

Fade to black, and after a brief pause, back into another text card.

【HEISEI 8】
【800 DAYS】
【00:00】

BGM: ΛSЖƧΛ –

Black Curtain, Grey Eminence

黒幕

Cutscene cuts in. Not quite animated. A slideshow, a progression of dithered backgrounds. Still frames, rapid cuts. Establishing shots: the city in high contrast. Oversaturated colours. Neon-fucked chaos in bitmap. Sheer geometry vermiformed by rabbit-warren underlife. Tireless headlights are motile. Heat of bodies and engines. Raindrops fall and scatter like arc-welder's sparks. Entropy is bleeding out over midnight. Blacktop glistens like crackling fat.

Somewhere it exists. The deepest recess of this concrete-human synthesis. Phosphor illume of car interior. Flickering sealed in motorised hermitage.

There are two men here. Passenger and driver. They are dressed in the pastel suits proper to a yakuza stereotype of a bygone decade (the 70s). No ties. Ever so slightly camp.

They are wearing animal masks.

[HORSE] ...
[OX] ...
[HORSE] DOES IT NOT BOTHER YOU
[OX] ...
[HORSE] THE ODOMETER
[OX] WHAT
[HORSE] THE NUMBER ON THE ODOMETER
[OX] ...
[HORSE] IT IS 0
[OX] 0

The number here in the cutscene is the 'run count'. It will change as you go. Basically it tracks the number of runs you have completed, either by death or attaining an 'ending'. Since upwards of 99% of your runs will end in death, it is very nearly a serviceable 'death counter' as well. Since we, as mentioned, have deleted our act.sav and are starting from zero, the number they quote is, of course, zero.

[OX] ...
[HORSE] DOES THAT NOT BOTHER YOU
[OX] ...
[HORSE] ...
[OX] NO
[HORSE] ...
[OX] ...
[HORSE] YEAH
[HORSE] ME NEITHER
[OX] ...
[HORSE] STILL
[HORSE] WEIRD HUH
[HORSE] FEELS LIKE WE DO THIS ALL THE TIME
[OX] WE DO
[HORSE] WE DO NOT DUMP BODIES ALL THE TIME
[OX] WE DO
[HORSE] REALLY
[OX] ...
[HORSE] ...
[HORSE] MUST BE A REAL BLOODBATH UP THERE
[OX] PATH OF THE ASURA
[HORSE] I GUESS
[OX] ...
[HORSE] ...

SFX: Click.
BGM: Nil.

[OX] HEY
[HORSE] ...
[OX] I WAS LISTENING TO THAT
[HORSE] JUST SHUT UP FOR A MOMENT

SFX: Engine roar.
SFX: Crumpling air.
SFX: Pure background, pure noise.
SFX: Nil.

[OX] SIT DOWN

SFX: Thump.

[HORSE] THAT
[OX] ...

SFX: And again. Louder.

[HORSE] YOU HEARD THAT
[OX] ...
[HORSE] YOU DID HEAR THAT
[OX] THE TRANSMISSION
[HORSE] ...
[OX] OLD VEHICLE
[HORSE] NO
[OX] ...
[HORSE] ...
[OX] IT HAD BETTER BE

SFX: And again, louder still – pure nil of virtual silence broken by something.
SFX: Impulse from the dark.

[HORSE] THAT IS NOT POSSIBLE
[OX] DO WE HAVE A PROBLEM
[HORSE] THAT IS NOT POSSIBLE
[OX] DO WE
[HORSE] ...

SFX: Thump.
SFX: Something tearing.
SFX: Plastic cracks.

[OX] WE HAVE A PROBLEM
[HORSE] ...
[OX] ...

SFX: Something trying to scream.

[OX] PATH OF THE FUCKING ASURA
[OX] FIGURES

SFX: Breaking.

Smash cut to black.

SFX: Hideous screech. Mechanised roar.
SFX: Something is crushed.
SFX: Rending metal, breaking glass.
SFX: Crumpled form.
SFX: Laceration.
SFX: Electric motor dies.
SFX: Air is moving through here, howling in far distance.
SFX: Lights are blinking on and off.
SFX: Nil.
SFX: Ticks of cooling engine.
SFX: Nil.
SFX: Nil.
SFX: Nil.

Cut from black. Wreck. Vicious concatenation of metal on edge of rainslick street, some corner alcove of labyrinth sealed under yellow spectra. Twisted metal. Asphalt strewn with crystalline glass.

SFX: Breathing.

Something is on the inside. Dark mass, limbs involuted, insectile, crawling in and over crushed enclosure.

SFX: Something like a cough. Phlegmy, guttural.
SFX: Tearing, crushing.
SFX: Raw meat is chewed.
SFX: Laboured gulping.
SFX: It breathes.

Ruined door is cracked open. Trickle of blood drains to road, garish crimson pooling under streetlight.

Door opens wider.

Mutilated corpse spills out, collapses onto hard ground.

SFX: Gasping in pain.

Seized, winded from impact, lacerated by cuts of glass. Shuddering, trembling, gaze lost in blood, teeth grinding the vestige of flesh from its jaw, blood spilling from its gorge, wounded, cut-open, tendons stripped and muscles raw and exposed, bone-like visage scabbed to permanent red.

The corpse stands up.

SFX: Dial tone.
SFX: Dial tone.

Cut to black.

SFX: Dial tone.
SFX: Click.
BGM: Nil.

Pause of 4-5 seconds.

SFX: Rain is pouring.
SFX: Distant thunder.

Fade in.

We perceive from our top-down, overlooking view a dark expanse of ground onto which rain is falling heavily. Countless overlapping circlets of ripples interlace and fade. In the very centre of this screen stands the player character. From overhead the human form is crushed into a vaguely rectangular clump of coloured pixels which describe, here, discernible features only of a bulky yellow rain-jacket. The figure in the yellow rain-jacket has a large bag with it, held at the side, off the shoulder.

What to call this guy? He never gets named, canonically. In the script files he's just called 'ware', which means 'I' or 'me'. First person pronoun. Somewhat inconvenient. You could try something like Shujinkou or Main Character but that's not very poggers, is it? Basically we have two choices here. Okura Shimeji, in one of his many Q&As, once jokingly referred to the protagonist of HM as 'Shura-kun' while answering an unrelated question from someone called Mongoose. Meanwhile randos on Pixiv have adopted 'Rasetsu' as his tag, which you can search in order to find all three (3) pieces of fanart which feature him. We're following the latter.

This empty outdoor space is where you get introduced to basic movement. You will soon grasp that fundamentally this game controls like a twin-stick shooter. The camera is locked so as to keep Rasetsu's body in the exact centre at all times. The direction of Rasetsu's motion and the direction he's looking/attacking are completely independent.

People, which is to say EOPs (who are, admittedly, only tenuously 'people') who jump right in without paying attention will run into trouble here. They will wail and gnash their teeth and make posts on the forum saying things like “why can't I move???” or “help my character is frozen!” because they are retards. They assume character movement should be done with WASD, but it is not. They then assume OK, maybe it is like Touhou and movement is done with the arrow keys. No. What you neglect to learn in your haste to be one of the cool kids is that this game is controlled with the Numpad. With all numeral keys on the Numpad – except 5 which does nothing – you have eight-directional movement. It takes getting used to. But it gives a very fine degree of control. We suggest moving your keyboard way over to the left so you have it in front of you. If your keyboard does not have a Numpad then you are poor.

As for the direction Rasetsu looks, this is controlled with the mouse. There is a crosshair on screen which you can move around. This is the exact point he is looking at. Crosshair is used also for aiming thrown weapons, which we will discuss later. We recommend turning mouse acceleration off for a more precise aiming experience.

Incidentally, there is controller support if you think a keyboard is too MLG for your cerebral palsy stricken fingers.

We move around this vast empty rain-slick asphalt surface, just to get used to controls.

In lines, in circles, in spirals.

Let us assume we are ready. This is very simple. Move far enough in any direction – it doesn't matter where you go – and eventually you will come to the sole point of distinction on this boundless asphalt plane: the street-facing facade of an office building, seen skewed orthogonal. Through a spillway set into the dark mass of concrete, a torrid stream of light is vomited out onto the surface of the road. The door. Walk to the door. A prompt will appear, left-click to interact. Do it.

Smash cut to black for the load transition. Title card.

【CONNECTED DISCOURSES】
【1F::HELL REALM】

Rasetsu stands in a lobby of characterless style associated with the dubious prosperity of the late 1980s. The floor is tiled, slate-grey. Light is aseptic, fluorescent, colourless. The walls have decorative glass bricks. There are ferns, or aspidistras, or some other kind of indoor plant in pots here and there. The lobby is a room with chairs set out on either side, like the waiting-room at a dentist. At the far end there is a door which is closed, and next to it, a window which is open in the wall. A service kiosk. Behind it sits a female concierge in a sealed booth.

SFX: Storm fades, receding through glass.
SFX: Circulating air.

Highly cinematic black bars, as in the prologue cutscene, slide in from the top and bottom of the screen. Control is taken away for this short section. Rasetsu walks up to the woman at the desk. Their conversation plays out silently – no expense spared for seiyuu – given only in subtitles in the lower empty space. To indicate the 'speaker', so to speak, a portrait appears from one side or another of the emptiness. These portraits are somewhat deliberately grotesque. Caricatures, pixel-art abominations. Rasetsu has a garishly yellow rain-jacket on, and in the portrait the hood obscures most of his face. At most one can see the bottom half. A tuft of blonde hair extrudes faintly. The jawline that is visible is a little too angular, almost polygonal. The 'concierge' as we call her – again, no name – presents as a sallow-faced woman, around forty, with mole on her lower cheek and a frown next to it and all over a deep, featureless disinterest in what's before her.

[CONCIERGE] GMK FINANCING AND LOAN

There will be some complaints here. The name of the company is Gyoukai Mujin Kumiai [業界無尽組合] which might be literally translated as 'Industrial Credit/Mutual Aid Association'. We have rendered it as GMK Financing and Loan, which is, yes, redundant. The thing to communicate with this nondescript Three-Letter-Acronym is that in Japanese this is a tremendously nondescript kind of name, which would be equally at home in some kind of third-floor office at the Bank of Japan or a private lobby group or whatever. It is an opaque name, all corporate sheen and smell of antiseptic, which covers over what is already being implied to be a yakuza-run loan shark operation. That is the point.

[RASETSU] ...
[RASETSU] ...
[RASETSU] ...
[CONCIERGE] CAN I HELP YOU
[RASETSU] I HAVE
[RASETSU] ...
[RASETSU] AN OUTSTANDING DEBT
[RASETSU] ...
[RASETSU] I WANT TO RESOLVE IT
[RASETSU] NOW
[CONCIERGE] WILL THAT BE BY WIRE TRANSFER
[RASETSU] NO
[RASETSU] CASH
[RASETSU] LUMP SUM
[RASETSU] I HAVE IT HERE
[RASETSU] ...
[RASETSU] YOU ARE EXPECTING ME
[RASETSU] UPSTAIRS
[RASETSU] YOU KNOW WHO I AM
[CONCIERGE] ONE MOMENT PLEASE

From overhead we observe the concierge's sprite reaching for the phone on the desk in front of her. She lifts the receiver.

SFX: Dialling.

[CONCIERGE] ...
[CONCIERGE] SIR
[CONCIERGE] ...
[CONCIERGE] YES

SFX: Distant laughter, very faint, through tinny speakers.

[CONCIERGE] ...
[CONCIERGE] RIGHT NOW

SFX: The laughter again.

[CONCIERGE] ...
[CONCIERGE] YES SIR

SFX: Click.

[CONCIERGE] AN ASSOCIATE WILL BE WITH YOU PRESENTLY
[CONCIERGE] PLEASE WAIT HERE

And you will wait. Rasetsu now walks over to one of the seats and sits down and waits. The cutscene is still running. Nothing happens. The background soundscape continues, muffled storm effluence, rain hammering on the glass, occasionally passing cars. Nothing continues to happen. The game will actually make you wait here for up to about two minutes of real time. (The interval is randomly selected between 1 and 108 seconds.) Yes, this will happen on every new cycle. No, you cannot skip it. Your frustration has been anticipated. We dare not say that there is some deeper meaning. Just that everything happens for a reason.

SFX: Approaching footsteps, muffled.

After a period of time, the door at the far end of the room (which is closed), opens. A clean-shaven though somewhat ratty middle-aged man walks out. Sweat-stained, balding, office attire. Not quite ugly enough for doujin work.

[ASSOCIATE] THERE YOU ARE
[RASETSU] ...

Rasetsu stands up.

[ASSOCIATE] COME ON
[ASSOCIATE] THIS WAY

The associate turns around and disappears into the doorway. Still in the cutscene, Rasetsu follows him, shutting the door as he passes through into the corridor. The corridor is silent, still, carpeted slate-grey. Air-conditioning murmurs. Various doors lead off, all closed. Halfway down its length there are set of elevator doors. The associate and Rasetsu come to a halt in front of these, and the former pushes a button.

SFX: Machinery humming, in the distance, behind the walls.

[ASSOCIATE] IT HAS BEEN A WHILE

A sudden smash cut to black. Really a 'flicker'. A black screen flashes up for less than one second and vanishes just as quickly. On it is a single line of text.

【BREAK】

And back.

[ASSOCIATE] HAVE YOU LEARNED ANYTHING
[RASETSU] ...
[RASETSU] NO
[RASETSU] NOTHING

And again.

【BREAK NOW】

And back.

[ASSOCIATE] TO HAVE LEARNED NOTHING EH

SFX: Elevator nearing.

And again.

【PERFECTLY BREAK】

And back.

[ASSOCIATE] WHAT A WASTE

SFX: Elevator arrives.
SFX: Ding.
SFX: Doors slide open.

And one last time.

【PRESS “LEFT CLICK” TO BREAK】

This one doesn't flash momentarily. It hangs there on the screen, indefinitely. Pure black text card with tutorial instruction. The indicated input is whatever you have bound to 'attack'. Left-click is default. This instruction will hang there no matter what, until the player finally does hit left-click.

At which point, naturally, all hell breaks loose.

BGM: 下司照ル –

Complicity With Anonymous Materials

無名物質との共謀

Snap back to the corridor. Rasetsu reaches over and snaps the associate's neck in one deft movement.

SFX: Breaking bone.
SFX: Dying gasp.
SFX: Body crumples to floor.

We observe as Rasetsu takes the fresh kill by its legs and drags it halfway into the elevator, lying across the gap, thus preventing the door from closing, and, by extension, the elevator from leaving the ground floor. This done, he steps over the body and back into the corridor. Another 'flicker'.

【HER TOO】

Now, at last, we have control. The overhead camera zooms out, giving us a clearer view of the level in general, its rectilinear array of rooms linked by doors. One can see how one of the doors in the corridor connects to a room which connects to the rear of the concierge's office. More importantly, however, we now have a view of the UI elements.

UI in this game is minimalist but not simple. In the top centre of the screen there is a circle filled with a stylised illustration of an empty palm, and 'empty palm' written under it. This displays the equipped weapon. On either side of the circle there is a filled bar.

On the left there is a white bar set against a black cartouche. The bar slowly drains rightward, toward centre-screen. Below the bar there is a percentage readout which ticks down as the bar drains: 100%, 99%, 98%, and so forth. This left-hand bar is labelled 【PURITY・志士伝導率】.

On the right there is another black cartouche which contains a bar split into a red portion (the half nearest centre-screen) and a blue portion (the half nearest the edge of the screen). This bar is currently static. Below the bar is a percentage readout which is holding stable at +50%. This right-hand bar is labelled 【FLESH・死屍伝導率】.

For future convenience, these values will be referred to simply as PURITY and FLESH. What they represent will be tutorialised in-game shortly. All you need to know for now is that if PURITY reaches 0% then it's a game over. This will happen if you tool around and waste time here instead of taking the hint and heading over to waste the concierge, like you should be. No great loss, just means you have to start a new run.

With our overlooking view of things and ability to move the character on-screen it is a trivial matter to navigate Rasetsu through the shabby minor labyrinth of back-rooms – an office or two, a break room, a bathroom, filing cabinets, some kind of dubious kitchenette, all formica and chrome, pot plants, scattered pieces of paper. Eventually we come to the door behind the concierge's booth. We burst through. The handful of pixels which describe her form seen from above swivel in the chair. She turns around. She falls off the chair and collapses on the floor next to it. When we approach her several 'flickers' occur in very rapid succession. About one second encloses all of the following.

【THIS WAS YOUR MISTAKE】
【WHAT DID I DO WRONG】
【THIS WAS YOUR MISTAKE】
【IT IS BETTER THIS WAY】
【THIS WAS YOUR MISTAKE】
【UNSIGHTLY】
【THIS WAS YOUR MISTAKE】
【UNDESERVING OF LIFE】
【JUST DIE】

Approach the concierge and left-click. Nothing else will happen otherwise.

Rasetsu kicks her in the stomach.

SFX: Impacted flesh.

She splays out on the floor. Her legs twitch slightly.

A flicker.

【JUST DIE】

Rasetsu begins to stomp on the concierge's face.

SFX: Ribs breaking.

Continues.

【JUST DIE】

SFX: Skull cracks.

Continues continuing.

SFX: Death rattle.

【JUST DIE】

After this last flicker we cut back to the whole of the inside of the concierge's booth drenched in blood. Rasetsu's yellow raincoat is now fairly red.

SFX: Heavy breathing.
SFX: Breathing slackens.
SFX: Nil.
BGM: 陰陰殷殷 –

Cold Gaze

冷視

Brief cutscene. The view pans a little way across the level to centre on a nondescript door back in the corridor with the elevator – still uselessly trying to close around the corpse of the Associate from earlier. This door swings open. You get the hint. Navigate Rasetsu – note how he leaves bloody footprints now, a neat detail which also helps you in navigating the more complex floors later on – back through the remnants of the mayhem you have caused, back through this shitty kitchenette and these paper-strewn backrooms to the corridor. Enter the door. You can tool around here if you want, but your PURITY is still ticking down, so don't waste too much time. Hit the door and the level ends.

Smash cut to black for the load transition. Title card.

【STAIRWELL】

BGM: 幽玄会社 –

Far Shore Return Trip

彼岸帰航

I hope you like stairwells. You'll be seeing a lot of this one. This is your intermediate space, the pause for breath between levels/floors. Like a safe room in RE. You will notice that PURITY does not decay while you're in here; in fact it regenerates, so even if you walk in with 1% left you'll be fine for the next go at things. So don't be in a hurry. Examine the fine texture work. Appreciate the long mellow drones of Yuugengaisha playing in the background. You wouldn't think there'd be so much detail in concrete, but here we are. From above we see an oblong space, delineated by right-angled shadings of raw, unpolished concrete. Overlit, to the point of shadowlessness. On the floor where we enter, before the door, there is a stencilled mark '1F'. In front of the stencil is a flight of stairs, yellow steel handrail, leading to an intermediate landing; from here another flight runs back the other way to arrive at a landing similarly stencilled '2F' with a similar door before it. On the intermediate landing, next to an exposed water mains pipe, there is an NPC.

It is a figure dressed in black, wearing a mask which is roughly as blood-red as Rasetsu's rain-jacket right about now. Ascend the first flight of stairs to the landing, and a cutscene starts. Black bars slide in. The NPC's 'portrait' appears – a crimson, glaring, angry, fearsome-looking Enma mask, or at least, a mask at some point intended to be fearsome, which the combined effect of garish kabuki-esque colouration and the exaggerated ugliness of the pixel-art style renders a bit clownish. Being anonymous, like everyone else in this game, we call him Enma. Because 'homeless guy who lives in the stairwell' is too long.

[ENMA] YOU
[ENMA] ...
[ENMA] I SEE
[ENMA] AFTER THE BOSS ARE WE
[RASETSU] ...
[RASETSU] ...
[RASETSU] YOU WORK HERE
[ENMA] NO
[ENMA] NOT AT ALL
[RASETSU] ...
[ENMA] I CAME HERE SOME TIME AGO
[ENMA] FOR REASONS NOT WHOLLY DISSIMILAR TO YOUR OWN
[ENMA] A MATTER CONCERNING DEBT
[ENMA] IT IS NOT SO UNUSUAL
[ENMA] MANY PEOPLE HAVE TAKEN OUT LOANS HERE
[ENMA] LOANS TO PAY OFF OTHER LOANS
[ENMA] CREDIT CARDS AND WHATNOT
[ENMA] AND SO ON
[ENMA] DEBT BEGETS DEBT
[ENMA] THE INTEREST IS HIGH
[ENMA] PEOPLE GOT TRAPPED LIKE THIS
[ENMA] FORCED TO BE SLAVES IN ORDER TO REPAY THEIR DEBT
[ENMA] ...
[ENMA] YOU ARE A DEBTOR ARE YOU NOT
[RASETSU] FOR THE TIME BEING
[ENMA] YOU SHOULD KNOW
[ENMA] THESE GUYS ARE CONNECTED
[ENMA] YAKUZA
[ENMA] TRIADS
[ENMA] EVEN THE STATE
[ENMA] THE BOSS IS OWED A LOT OF FAVOURS
[ENMA] MANY CAME THIS WAY BEFORE YOU
[ENMA] THEY ALL GOT KILLED
[RASETSU] OBVIOUSLY
[ENMA] ...
[ENMA] I ASSUME THEN THAT YOU KNOW
[ENMA] WHY YOU ARE HERE
[RASETSU] ...
[ENMA] IN THE STAIRWELL

In fine Okura Shimeji style, Enma sometimes relies on untranslatable wordplay and furigana manipulation to 'communicate' what he means. While 'stairwell' is written normally in the title card when you enter, i.e. as [階段室], Enma's line here replaces the character [段] with the identically-pronounced [壇]. All sorts of ill-informed translation attempts have been made; we would prefer not to conjure up some atrocity like 'stair-altar' and instead just explain it in a TN. The allusion is probably to the word [戒壇] – also pronounced 'kaidan' – which is a ceremonial podium where Buddhist monks are ordained.

[RASETSU] BY CHOICE
[RASETSU] ...
[ENMA] UNMISTAKEABLY
[ENMA] YOU ARE HERE BECAUSE YOU WANT TO BE HERE
[ENMA] IT IS MUCH THE SAME WITH EVERYONE
[ENMA] YOU ARE ABLE TO BE HERE ONLY INSOFAR AS YOU WILL IT
[ENMA] AND THAT HAS CERTAIN ENTAILMENTS
[ENMA] I WOULD SAY GOOD LUCK
[ENMA] BUT YOU WILL NEED MORE THAN THAT
[ENMA] STRENGTH IN THE FLESH IS ONE THING
[ENMA] BUT THE FLESH IS ONLY A SUGGESTION
[ENMA] WHETHER YOUR FLESH IS STRONG OR WEAK
[ENMA] DAMAGED (-50%) OR HEALTHY (+50%)
[ENMA] YOU CAN GET NOWHERE IN THIS PLACE WITHOUT PURITY OF WILL
[ENMA] IF THERE IS NO PURITY (0%) TO YOUR ACTIONS
[ENMA] YOU DIE
[ENMA] AND ALL THIS RETURNS TO ZERO

We said earlier that PURITY and FLESH would be tutorialised in-game. So that was a fucking lie. This is all you get. The game came with a physical manual in the CD jewel case, illustrated by Ryokuchiku (a collector's item nowadays) and presumably they were expecting you to have read it. Don't worry. We'll explain it once we get into 2F.

[ENMA] PURITY OF WILL MEANS BEING WHAT ONE ESSENTIALLY IS
[ENMA] BUT ONE DOES NOT KNOW WHAT ONE ESSENTIALLY IS
[ENMA] BECAUSE IT IS MORE ESSENTIAL THAN THE SELF WHICH WOULD KNOW IT
[ENMA] THE FACE OF FLESH YOU WEAR IS NOT THE TRUE FACE
[ENMA] THE TRUE FACE YOU HAD BEFORE YOUR MOTHER AND FATHER WERE BORN
[ENMA] A MASK REVEALS THE TRUE FACE
[ENMA] HERE

Enma's sprite hands something to Rasetsu. A brief smash cut to black – no, not quite. Not entirely. A text card appears, but instead of a pure-black background it is displayed against a faint 'portrait', in the same grotesque pixel-art style as all others, of a distinctly canine-looking mask with slathering tongue and long fangs.

【MASK GET】
【CONSCIOUS HYENA】

This dialogue with Enma happens only once, the very first time you start a run and enter the stairwell. CONSCIOUS HYENA, which he gives you, is the first mask you'll have. Masks are preserved between runs; once you get one, it's in your inventory (the gym bag) forever. We'll explain what the name means and how masks work in a bit. Left-click and you snap back to the stairwell.

[ENMA] TAKE THIS
[ENMA] THE REST WILL COME NATURALLY
[RASETSU] PATH OF THE ASURA
[ENMA] NONE OTHER

End cutscene. Enma sticks around, but you can't talk to him. In fact you can't really do anything else here but climb the stairs up to the 2F landing. As we said above, Enma is scripted to appear here and give you CONSCIOUS HYENA on your first run; on subsequent runs he probably won't, and if he does, you'll have different dialogue. His other appearances in the stairwell are randomised. Whenever he shows up, you'll get a short conversation in cutscene. He is the closest thing this game has to a 'lore NPC', kind of like the Remnant Psyches in Killer7.

Ascend the stairs to the 2F landing. When you approach the door, Rasetsu will enter a scripted animation where he takes the gym bag off his shoulder, puts it on the ground, and opens it. A garish menu appears, superimposed over the screen: a long horizontal bar along which you scroll to select your mask. Since only one mask is available at the start of a run, this is a simple choice.

【CONSCIOUS HYENA】
【FEED ON CORPSES TO REGAIN FLESH】

Select it. Menu vanishes. Rasetsu's sprite, now visibly equipped with the mask, zips up the bag – leaving it on the ground, mind you – and steps forward and opens the door into 2F.

Smash cut to black – no, not quite. Again. Loading screens for entry and exit of levels will always have the currently-equipped mask as the background. Smash cut to Hyena, then.

Text card.

【CONNECTED DISCOURSES】
【2F::HUNGRY GHOST REALM】

And we're in.

BGM: ΛSЖƧΛ –

One Hundred Demons

百鬼

Every level – which is to say, every floor of the building excluding 1F – is procedurally generated from a 64-bit seed which is randomised at the start of the run. Thus every run is different. For every floor the game will assemble a conglomeration of rooms, corridors, doors, and so on, from out of one of six 'tilesets' or 'biomes'. These determine the look and feel of the level, the selection of music which plays on the level, as well as, to a degree, what kinds of enemies and weapons spawn on the level. This is what the 'realm' mentioned in the level entry dialogue refers to. Thus all floors which are labelled 'Hell Realm' will visually resemble 1F, with its pot plants, shabby offices, formica tables, break rooms, and so on. Floors 1F through 6F are called the Connected Discourses because they go through the six realms in order, one floor of each, more or less as a sampler to get you used to what each one looks like. On 7F and above we move into the Collected Discourses, wherein the floor 'realms' are fully random.

Our first view of 2F, the scion of the Hungry Ghost Realm, reveals a loud, shiny, garish, gold-and-silver everywhere, cigarette-stained, red-carpeted, shady as hell, blatantly yakuza-run, pachinko parlour. From the stairwell door we enter into a corridor; from our overlooking view we can see branching off several large rooms containing rows of pachinko machines. There are sprites which suggest pastel-suit-clad yakuza toughs around. Some are roaming on patrol paths, others are idle, others are sitting in scripted animations playing pachinko, believe it or not. They're not aggro'd yet, but they have weapons: a baseball bat here, a length of pipe there. We can't see the whole level – too big for the screen – but within our FOV there are about eight guys, obscured from Rasetsu's present position by diverse combinations of walls, side-rooms, bathrooms, and whatnot. The nearest door to the level entry point leads directly into one of these big gambling pits. The music is blasting. This part needs no further commentary: just burst through the door, run up to the guys, keep the crosshair in their direction, and hit left click to fuck them up before they fuck you up.

SFX: Crunch.
SFX: Blood gushing everywhere.

Yeah, like that. Now since you have no equipped weapon other than 'empty palm', you can walk over any dropped weapon and pick it up with right-click. Once you have a weapon – which the marker in the centre of the HUD will indicate – you can left-click to attack with it, and right-click to throw it in the direction you're aiming. Never underestimate the utility of throwing a weapon at someone.

SFX: Whap!
SFX: Someone's skull getting smashed in with a baseball bat.

Now that we have your attention-

SFX: Death gargle.
SFX: Horrific screaming in Japanese.

Ahem.

SFX: Impact of a semi-conscious body with a pachinko machine.
SFX: Smashing glass and plastic.
SFX: Pachinko balls exploding everywhere.

Yeah, the pachinko machines are pretty fun. Real-time physics on the balls, by the way. Anyway, while you're busy with these guys, it's time to explain how FLESH and PURITY actually work, which is somewhat vital information if you don't want to die.

So, first: as you know, PURITY starts at 100% and begins ticking down when you're on the level. If PURITY reaches 0%, you die. Whenever you kill an enemy, you gain PURITY. This is the basic loop of HM: PURITY is constantly decaying, and you need to be constantly killing to keep it up.

SFX: Splintering door frame.
SFX: Golf club striking the teeth from some unfortunate jaw.

Now FLESH starts at +50% at the start of a run, and does not regenerate between floors like PURITY does. Whenever you take a hit, you lose some FLESH. However, as you were told in the stairwell, FLESH is only a suggestion. Even if you lose all your FLESH – i.e. it drops to the minimum of -50% – you don't die. So what does FLESH do? Well, when you get hit, you lose FLESH, but at the same time, your PURITY gets modified by an amount proportional to the FLESH value (the one you just lost, not the one you just arrived at by losing FLESH). So if you have +50% FLESH, getting hit will actually give you some PURITY, while if you have -50% FLESH, getting hit will cause you to lose PURITY. The FLESH value also affects some other things. The lower your FLESH, the higher the rate at which PURITY drains – but, at the same time, the amount of PURITY regained from kills is also higher.

You can think of it as a risk/reward thing in place of a traditional HP system. Taking damage, in HM, does not kill you – in fact it cannot kill you, not directly. On the level of FLESH, you are immortal. The only way to die is by running out of PURITY. The basic loop of HM is managing PURITY, keeping it as high as possible; taking damage, and thus losing FLESH, simply raises the stakes of this loop. PURITY starts draining faster, and further damage will cause increasing losses to PURITY, but you can make it all back, provided you can get the kills. No matter how much damage you take, you can survive, provided you keep on killing, killing more, killing faster. Kill forever, infinite life.

SFX: Breaking ribs with a hammer.

You done yet? I think everyone's pretty well dead here.

SFX: Heavy breathing.
SFX: Breathing slackens.
SFX: Nil.
BGM: 陰陰殷殷 –

Cold Gaze

冷視

When the BGM swaps out for Reishi [Cold Gaze] by In'in'in'in then that means everyone's dead and you should head back to the stairwell. Good job. Damn, that's a lot of blood. You wouldn't think these guys would have it all in them. We step over the bodies strewn across air-conditioned corridors, obliterated faces and torsos beneath the bright chirpy light of pachinko machines. Just head back over to the door you came in from and exit the level/floor.

Smash cut to Hyena for the load transition. Title card.

【STAIRWELL】

BGM: 幽玄会社 –

Far Shore Return Trip

彼岸帰航

Back in the stairwell. Scripted animation plays where Rasetsu picks up his gym bag at the door and puts it on his shoulder. Enma isn't here, so there's nothing to do but catch your breath, wait for PURITY to regen, and climb the stairs up to 3F. When you get to the 3F landing, Rasetsu – get this – takes off his gym back, puts it down on the floor, and opens it again. You might think this would get boring after a while. No. It's hypnotic, really. Select mask menu again – but, as before, you only have the one mask, so this is barely a choice. Don't waste time. Into 3F. Go go go. Do it.

Pause to load. Load times are quite good in HM, rarely more than a second or two even on HDD.

【CONNECTED DISCOURSES】
【3F::ANIMAL REALM】

BGM: 下司照ル –

Antisocial

反社会的

The first 'Animal Realm' floor discloses itself as some kind of nightclub or bar. The top-down view discloses a layout structured around a large central area, a dance-floor, captured in a kaleidoscopic flux of rave lighting and artificial smoke. Branching off from here are corridors interrupted by doors leading to private booths, a DJ nest, and the back-room behind the bar, a utilitarian space divided up between storage and cleaning equipment. Distributed around this area – mostly on the dancefloor, smoking, milling about, some even trying to dance – are more of the usual suit-clad yakuza toughs, equipped with various blunt objects, sporting equipment, pocket-knives, and so on. You know what to do from here. Your weapon carries over from when you left the last level. Go forth and kill.

SFX: Swish, slash.
SFX: Gasping through severed vocal cords.

While you're busy with that, we should talk about another mechanic: weapon durability. As you can see, in the middle top of the screen, between the PURITY and FLESH meters, there is an icon which indicates the currently-equipped weapon, or 'empty palm' if you have none. When you first picked up a weapon you doubtless noticed that the icon was divided into an upper white part and a lower black part. As you used the weapon, you would have also noticed – if you weren't too busy dismembering people – that the black part decreased in size, leaving more and more of the icon shaded in white. This is the condition of the weapon. If the icon is fully shaded in black, it's in perfect condition; when the icon becomes fully shaded in white, the weapon breaks, and you drop it automatically...most of the time. There are some weapons which when broken are still usable; or rather, when you break them, they are replaced with a new weapon entirely. Case in point, see what you have now?

SFX: Hollow thud.

That's a champagne bottle you just brained that guy with. Champagne bottle has a pretty low durability. A couple more hits like that, and,

SFX: Shattering.

It breaks. But you're not empty-handed: you're now holding a broken champagne bottle, which is an entirely new weapon with its own durability.

SFX: Screaming.
SFX: Carving out an eye-socket with crystalline edges of glass.
SFX: Screaming continues.
SFX: Screaming stops continuing.

Its durability is even lower, so it'll break too before long, and then you will be back to being empty-handed. So there are some weapons which are one-and-done, break them and they're gone, and there are others which become entirely new weapons once broken. You'll discover these as you go. There are a lot of weapons in HM, 108 to be exact. A lot of extremely horrible ways to destroy people. Some of them are very rare, some are locked to particular kinds of floor, etc.

SFX: Heavy breathing.
SFX: Breathing slackens.
SFX: Nil.
BGM: 陰陰殷殷 –

Cold Gaze

冷視

Yeah, that looks pretty well done. Time to walk back through this horrorshow you've made, back to the stairs where you began.

【STAIRWELL】

BGM: 幽玄会社 –

Far Shore Return Trip

彼岸帰航

Now you may be wondering – if you're in the stairwell, can't you just skip floors by climbing past them? Do you have to clear every single one? Can't you just go up to the final boss right away?

This is not a stupid question, but it does have a stupid answer. By all means, go ahead. Try it. You can take Rasetsu up from the 3F landing, up a flight, up another flight, now you're at the 4F landing. You can go up again. Up one flight, up another, and...

...4F again. Hm. OK, maybe that's a fluke. Try climbing another flight, another – 4F. Higher and higher – still 4F. Nope. Sorry. The game has your number. You can't skip floors. The stairwell will just keep looping you back, real MC Escher shit. Until you finally get the hint. Head to the 4F door, put your bag down, get your mask out, and get to work.

【CONNECTED DISCOURSES】
【4F::HUMAN REALM】

BGM: 河原=ステレオ –

All Living Things Must Die

生者必滅

The 'Human Realm' floors are very dense, close-packed, labyrinthine. Aesthetically they conform to an indoor shopping district – an aggregate of small retail outlets, izakaya, ramen places, chinese restaurants, etc., all cramped together so as to fill the floorspace in a deceptively fractalised way. A rabbit-warren, veritably. This could be anywhere. You get the feeling that whole stretches of the inner 23 wards are tiled, aperiodically, with this kind of generic outlay of exchange relations. Some kind of hideous muzak is playing very faintly underneath the face-melting atonal synths of Kawara=Stereo. There are, as ever, a bunch of yakuza milling around: some just wandering, some smoking in the corridors, some crouched on a stool at the ramen place slurping ramen, of all things. Anyway, time to get killin'.

SFX: The inexpressible sound of hitting a man in the face with a wok, which resembles but does not wholly replicate the ceremonial gong struck at Buddhist temples to mark the hours.
SFX: Crunching of skull.

Now it's time to talk about another mechanic, which you have probably discovered by accident already: parrying. Let us suppose that an enemy yakuza has run up to you and is about to hit you in the face with a baseball bat, as often happens. If you input to move Rasetsu in the direction of the enemy attacking you, and at the same time hit left-click to attack – and you do both of these things fast enough, before the enemy's attack connects – you will perform a parry. At the cost of a small amount of weapon durability, you will take no FLESH damage from the enemy attack, and you will regain PURITY equivalent to half the amount you would get if you killed the guy outright. (The exception here is if you parry with no weapon equipped; since 'empty palm' has no durability to lose, you will instead lose a bit of FLESH if you parry with it. Which makes sense, really.)

SFX: Parry cue, which sounds like a snare-drum hit.
SFX: Decapitation via rusty machete.
SFX: Small geyser of blood impacts and disperses on the proximate walls and floor.

Now if you time these inputs just right, you will perform what is called a perfect parry. The timing here is very tight. Basically frame-perfect. There's an audio cue if you do it right. If you perfect parry an attack you take no durability or FLESH damage whatsoever, and the enemy will be momentarily stunned. When they're in that state you can quickly follow up by hitting 'attack' again for an instant kill riposte which regains double the amount of PURITY returned by a regular kill. This is the pro gamer move. Where an outright kill would return 'x' amount, let's say 10% PURITY, a perfect parry plus riposte will return 2.5 times 'x', so 25%.

SFX: Perfect parry cue, which sounds like a taiko being hit, as in the Noh theatre.
SFX: Someone is choking on half-vomited blood.
SFX: Tearing linen.
SFX: Expertly filleting some hapless yakuza's liver with a kitchen-grade stainless steel santoku.

Vital skills, vital skills. What else is there? Oh yeah, almost forgot: the mask ability. That's somewhat important. So, the current mask – the one you are guaranteed when you start your first run – is CONSCIOUS HYENA. This one is kind of the game's trademark; there's promotional art featuring Rasetsu wearing it. It was on the CD jewel case, on the inside. There was a figurine at some point. Maybe a daki. We'll explain what the CONSCIOUS part means later, when it becomes important; what is important now, what determines the mask ability, is the second part of the name. In this case HYENA. As the selection menu at the start of the level disclosed to you, the HYENA ability is described as 'feed on corpses to regain FLESH'. Now you can imagine-

SFX: Heavy breathing.
SFX: Breathing slackens.
SFX: Nil.
BGM: 陰陰殷殷 –

Cold Gaze

冷視

Ah, good, you've killed everyone here. That simplifies things. Just walk up to a corpse – quickly, remember PURITY is still draining – and hit left-click to attack it. Rasetsu's sprite will display a brief animation where he, uh – well. Just listen.

SFX: Tendons rip.
SFX: Grinding cartilage.
SFX: Mastication.
SFX: Swallowing.

Even more gore sprays everywhere around the corpse. A big mess. In an interview a few years back Ryokuchiku claimed that these SFX originate from a recording of him eating a plate of crab rangoon. You will notice that you have regained FLESH from doing this. That is all that CONSCIOUS HYENA does. It doesn't do anything else. The reason it exists is as, probably, sort of a 'safety net' for if you end up taking hits and losing all your FLESH and want to get it back. In other words it is for those who aren't good enough to do no-hit runs, but also don't want to play high-risk high-return with negative FLESH values. Casuals, basically. CONSCIOUS HYENA is the closest thing to an 'easy mode' this game has available. Don't worry. We'll be getting more masks soon enough. All that our MLG instincts crave and more. But, whatever – PURITY is still ticking down, so go back to the stairwell before Rasetsu dies of boredom.

【STAIRWELL】

BGM: 幽玄会社 –

Far Shore Return Trip

彼岸帰航

Look around on entering. Hey, what do you know? Enma is here. Aside from the landing after 1F on first playthrough, there is a 1/6 chance that he appears in the stairwell whenever you load in. He's got a whole bunch of unique dialogue; odds are you'll need multiple runs to hear everything he has to say. We will be translating all of it in the course of this LP, because that is what 100% means. Let's walk up to him and enter a cutscene.

[ENMA] YOU AGAIN
[ENMA] ...
[ENMA] HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN HERE
[RASETSU] ...
[RASETSU] ...
[RASETSU] ...
[ENMA] STUPID QUESTION
[ENMA] WHERE ELSE WOULD YOU BE
[ENMA] ALL THE SAME
[ENMA] QUITE A MESS YOU HAVE MADE SO FAR
[RASETSU] THERE WILL BE MORE GOING FORWARD
[ENMA] WHO DO YOU THINK WILL CLEAN IT UP
[RASETSU] THAT IS NONE OF MY CONCERN
[ENMA] DO YOU ENJOY HURTING OTHER PEOPLE
[RASETSU] WHAT DOES IT LOOK LIKE
[ENMA] IT SHOWS ON YOUR FACE
[RASETSU] THE FACE OF FLESH
[ENMA] ADMITTEDLY
[ENMA] THE FACE OF FLESH IS NOT THE TRUE FACE
[RASETSU] IT IS NOT A QUESTION OF ENJOYING OR NOT
[RASETSU] I JUST WANT TO
[ENMA] DO YOU KNOW WHY
[RASETSU] IF I WANT TO DO SOMETHING I CAN CHOOSE WHETHER OR NOT TO DO IT
[RASETSU] BUT I CANNOT CHOOSE WHETHER OR NOT TO WANT TO DO IT
[RASETSU] IT IS OUTSIDE MY CONTROL
[ENMA] OUTSIDE THE CONTROL OF THE FACE OF FLESH YOU MEAN
[RASETSU] OBVIOUSLY
[ENMA] I SUPPOSE IT CANNOT BE OTHERWISE
[ENMA] AS FOR ME
[ENMA] I AM JUST HERE AS A COLLECTOR
[ENMA] SOME OF THESE DEAD GUYS HAVE GOOD STUFF ON THEM
[ENMA] GOT A ROLEX HERE
[ENMA] WANT ONE
[RASETSU] NO
[ENMA] SUIT YOURSELF

Cutscene ends. There's not a lot else to say here. Leave Enma behind, climb up to the 5F door, and put your mask on. The upcoming rogue's gallery won't depopulate itself.

【CONNECTED DISCOURSES】
【5F::ASURA REALM】

BGM: 陰陰殷殷 – ko.ro.si.te.ya.ru

Floors of the 'Asura Realm' have a kind of traditional Japanese theme – long corridors with polished wooden floors, sliding doors, big rooms with tatami mats on the floor. Like an old martial arts dojo, with a touch here and there of a traditional ryokan or bath-house. Can't quite decide which it wants to be. Sometimes an interior courtyard or rock-garden will spawn when the floor is generated, but this is not common. Ornamentation is quite sparing overall, but here and there you'll see – insofar as you can make them out, through the pixelation and gore – standing suits of samurai armour, bonsai trees, Buddha statues, etc. The yakuza who appear on these floors have a more traditional look to them; the suits get swapped out for judo and kendo practice outfits, and you'll see a whole lot of swords, singlesticks, nunchaku and so on being directed your way.

SFX: Beating a guy to death with a wooden practice sword.
SFX: It breaks.
SFX: Beating a guy to death with a broken wooden practice sword.

Oh, that is brutal. 'Asura' floors are the best, speaking honestly. They have the best music too. Anyway, while murdering your way through this gauntlet of nameless extras from Jingi Naki Tatakai, it's time to address a question you may have raised previously vis-a-vis the extent to which this game, Hotline Mifune, conforms to the general pattern of other games of its type. That is to say – how does one keep score? Because it is one thing to clear the game, but what is more important than that is gaining the recognition of others that you've done it, and what is even more important than that is flexing on them to show you did it better. Well, HM does have a 'score' in a manner of speaking, though as you will notice it does not appear on the UI. You can only see it when you pause the game [Esc by default. Brings up the usual stuff; restart run, options, return to title, quit to desktop] or on the results screen which appears when a run ends [either by your death or attaining an ending]. If you go in and check yours now, you'll see it right there at the top of the pause screen.

【超伝導率+329%】

What does this mean? Basically-

SFX: Performing a flawless iai-jutsu strike through an enemy's guard, slashing the torso through and past the sternum in a single diagonal strike which causes the victim to collapse to the floor in a geyser of arterial blood.

Basically it works like this. Your goal throughout gameplay is to keep the PURITY meter as high as possible. By performing various actions – kills, parries, ripostes – you gain PURITY up to a maximum of 100%. The stat you see on the pause screen, which we will refer to as SCORE for convenience, represents the aggregate total of all PURITY you have ever gained in excess of the meter. That is to say, for example, if you're at 90% PURITY and do something which gains you 25%, your PURITY goes to 100% while the remaining 15% is added to SCORE. Much like PURITY itself, the SCORE mechanic incentivises keeping PURITY as high as possible at all times; the more often you're maxing out PURITY, the more excess you're adding to SCORE.

SFX: The highly cinematic swish-thunk of a meat cleaver hurled through the air at professional cricket-pitcher velocity so as to embed itself in the face of an approaching enemy with a gory ripping of nasal cartilage.

The world record for SCORE at the time of writing is +42190%, obtained by Sato Itoguchi. Go find it on niconico. Incredible run.

SFX: Heavy breathing.
SFX: Breathing slackens.
SFX: Nil.
BGM: 陰陰殷殷 –

Cold Gaze

冷視

What a mess. Due to the spawn weightings you're more likely to get edged than blunt weapons on floors of this type, so the gore is something spectacular. Blood on the tatami. You should just accept that this game runs on, like, Hong Kong action movie rules, where everyone has about 50 litres of blood and need to lose all of it before they die.

【STAIRWELL】

BGM: 幽玄会社 –

Far Shore Return Trip

彼岸帰航

Time to roll the dice. And guess what? Here's Enma again. This happens more often than you'd think. 1/6 doesn't seem like a lot, and his appearances are – as far as anyone can tell – truly random, no less random than the 64-bit seed which generates all the level layouts for a particular run; but still it will often seem that you'll get him appearing two or three times in a row. This is called the 'clustering illusion', a term you may recognise as one of the chuuni shibboleths much beloved by Okura Shimeji back in the old days, before mobage and the Sleep of Reason. Let's see what our tame homeless guy has to say.

[ENMA] WHY DO YOU THINK IT IS
[ENMA] PEOPLE GET INTO DEBT
[RASETSU] CAUSE THEY SPEND MORE THAN THEY HAVE
[ENMA] YEAH NO SHIT
[ENMA] BUT WHY DO THEY DO THAT
[RASETSU] WHY DID YOU
[ENMA] THERE WAS SOMETHING I WANTED
[ENMA] I KNOW YOU ARE THE SAME
[RASETSU] ...
[ENMA] BUT CAN IT REALLY BE THAT SIMPLE
[ENMA] WE ARE ALL HERE BECAUSE OF OUR WANTS
[ENMA] ALL OF US
[ENMA] THE GUYS YOU FIGHT ARE ALSO IN DEBT
[ENMA] IN A MANNER OF SPEAKING THEY ARE ALL VERSIONS OF YOU

It seems that this translation has provoked some controversy. The word rendered as 'versions' is [片反], read as 'henpan' probably, which might, if you were in a mildly autistic mood, produce something like 'fragmentary counterpart' or 'reversal.' We, however, are more autistic by far, and so we have noticed that these two characters written horizontally are actually just the one character [版], a 'version' or 'edition' e.g. of a published work, divided into its component radicals because Okura Shimeji hates translators, the Japanese language, and making sense in general.

[RASETSU] MAKES NO DIFFERENCE TO ME
[ENMA] SOME PEOPLE LIVE THE HIGH LIFE
[ENMA] SOME FIGHT
[ENMA] SOME JUST GET BY
[ENMA] SOME GORGE THEMSELVES
[ENMA] SOME ARE STARVING NONETHELESS
[ENMA] SOME ARE MADE SLAVES AND FORCED TO REPAY
[ENMA] BUT IT IS ALL ON CREDIT WHICH MUST BE REPAID
[ENMA] ALL FOR THE SAME REASON
[ENMA] BECAUSE THEY WANT THINGS
[ENMA] BUT WHY
[RASETSU] EVERYTHING GOTTA HAVE A REASON TO YOU
[ENMA] EVERYTHING IN THIS WORLD HAS A REASON
[ENMA] THE WORLD IS REGULATED ACCORDING TO THAT PRINCIPLE
[ENMA] ALL YOU SEE BEFORE YOU IS EXHAUSTIVELY DETERMINED

The word 'determined' [定められている] is given the reading 'programmed' [プログラムされている] in furigana. Can't figure out how to say that in a clever way so here's a TN.

[ENMA] THIS COMPANY FOR INSTANCE
[ENMA] THIS BUILDING
[ENMA] IT IS ALL BUILT ON REPAID DEBTS
[ENMA] THAT IS HOW THEY MADE MONEY
[ENMA] IN A GENERAL SENSE THE ECONOMY RELIES UPON IT
[ENMA] IN THE SECOND YEAR OF HEISEI JAPANESE CONSUMER LENDING EXCEEDED 57 TRILLION YEN
[ENMA] THE CHAIN MUST LEAD BACK TO SOMEWHERE
[ENMA] IT ALL TRACES BACK TO PEOPLE WANTING THINGS
[ENMA] ALL OF THIS IS HERE ONLY BECAUSE OF WANTING
[ENMA] AND YOU ARE HERE ALSO ONLY BECAUSE OF THAT
[ENMA] WANTING DESIRING WILLING
[ENMA] IT IS ALL THE SAME
[ENMA] AND EVERYTHING THAT EXISTS HERE IS AN EXPRESSION OF IT
[RASETSU] I GUESS PEOPLE WANT WHAT OTHERS HAVE
[ENMA] THAT IS WHY THEY WANT THIS OR THAT IN PARTICULAR
[ENMA] CAUSE THEY SEE OTHER PEOPLE WITH IT
[ENMA] SURE
[ENMA] BUT WHY DO THEY WANT ANYTHING AT ALL
[RASETSU] THAT IS JUST WHAT HUMAN BEINGS ARE
[RASETSU] THEIR TRUE FACE
[RASETSU] THERE IS NO REASON FOR IT
[ENMA] BUT EVERYTHING IN THIS WORLD HAS A REASON
[RASETSU] THEREFORE
[ENMA] YES
[ENMA] EXACTLY

And that's all she wrote. This is actually one of the more explicit dialogues with Enma; we'll consider it more closely later on. For the time being, let's continue. Let's head up the stairs, open our mask bag, select good old CONSCIOUS HYENA (as if we have a choice right now) and get into 6F.

【CONNECTED DISCOURSES】
【6F::HEAVEN REALM】

BGM: 遠流と王国 – 92\235

Time for the fun part. Oh, make no mistake, you're having fun already. But now we're gonna do this unleaded. You're on a 'Heaven' floor for the first time. These present themselves as a complex of corporate offices, but not like the entry-level kind you saw down in 'Hell'. This is way, way, upper management. Top floor, mahogany row, nice carpets, brass fittings, big desks, bigger boardrooms, internal lounges done up with an inhuman modernist sheen, elevator lobbies with installations of abstract sculpture, etc. On the wall? Probably a genuine fake genuine Rothko. It's from rooms and corridors like this that corporate raiders and high-level MITI bureaucrats once long ago coordinated massive offshore movements of Japanese capital during the bubble period, buying up half the world with nothing but unlimited credit extensions and terrible 80s haircuts. Now only the latter remain, attached to the for-now intact crania of the diverse crowd of extremely well-dressed yakuza thugs who prowl the ruins of the Showa era, looking for trouble and finding you.

SFX: Sounds of horrible murder.
SFX: More of them.
SFX: More of the more.

Now 'Heaven' floors are not like the others. Where the other biomes will spawn a floor which is generally maze-like, on a 'Heaven' floor the layout is more linear. You will proceed through the level, murdering everything in your path as per SOP, and you will observe as you do (from your overlooking view) that the level progresses toward a large room at the end, a big window-facing or corner office generally, with a desk of despotic size in its centre and exactly one door, and which contains exactly one enemy. You do not have to be a pro gamer to know what this means, but it helps. You might be expecting an intro cutscene, but no. What happens is quite simply that after killing all the rest of the guys on the level Rasetsu's trail of bloody footprints arrives at the last door, you bust through it like any other, and you're in a boss fight. His title appears. This isn't one of those smash-cuts to black like in the level transitions, the text is just superimposed at the bottom of the screen.

【CORPORATE AGENT GENZHEN XIAOGUO】
【SOARING BIRD THUS OMINOUS】

This looks like unintelligible kanjispam, because it is Chinese. The bosses on 'Heaven' floors are all given the peculiar 'title' of Gyoukai-dairi [業界代理] here translated as Corporate Agent. In addition to their title, the bosses each individually have a name, or something which could be a name but could also be another kind of title. The name is generated from a randomly chosen I Ching hexagram, in this case No. 62: Xiao Guo or Small Preponderance. The subtitle is a quote from the I Ching referring to the hexagram in question. As for what it means, there'll be a time to speculate later. Right now the boss is trying to murder you.

SFX: Sounds of exertion, yelling kiai.

You will also note – in the brief window of time while this dude is rushing you with his katana – that he is not like other enemies. First in that his sprite is slightly bigger than the usual and is wearing a mask (a dog mask, it looks like), and second in that he has two bars floating over his head – a white bar on the left and a red-blue bar on the right. This looks familiar, or it should, because you have the exact same thing on your HUD. Yes, indeed: bosses have PURITY and FLESH meters too. And all the same rules apply to them as to you.

SFX: The furious clash of blades, or rather the clash of a blade and an aluminium baseball bat which altogether produces a sound like dropping a saucepan on concrete.

So the boss has PURITY which will constantly drain (starting from the moment he aggros). Your goal is to make his PURITY reach 0% so that he dies. If you're feeling very MLG you can actually do this fully pacifist. You just keep parrying or perfect-parrying his attacks to keep your PURITY up, and his will keep draining as long as he's not landing hits. But that is also boring as shit so we're just going to murder him instead.

SFX: Sharpened steel impacting flesh – a heavy sword, crushing and mutilating as it goes, very much like a baseball bat if it were made of knives.
SFX: Spitting blood.

Yeah, be careful. The bosses can parry you, even perfect parry if you're unlucky. Just pay attention to the sprite, there's a certain stance they adopt which cues you in. Basically you have to try and goad them into breaking that stance, or try and get behind them (easier once you have more advanced movement options from the other masks). That's a spoiler. Oh well. You'll see what we mean.

SFX: A very palpable hit.
SFX: A human figure crumples to the floor.
SFX: Beating the crumpled figure with a baseball bat until it is a bleeding mass of bloodsoaked clothing and exposed flesh.

This is a pro strat actually. When a Corporate Agent hits 0% on his PURITY metre he falls over. When this happens you've won the fight, effectively, but you can keep hitting him for a while and get PURITY boosts from it. That's for the high scores.

SFX: Beating to a pulp.
SFX: Beating the pulp to a pulp.

You can't do it indefinitely. It tails off after a bit. Diminishing returns. Eventually the fallen Corporate Agent will really 'die', meaning his now-empty FLESH and PURITY metres vanish, and the fight is over.

SFX: Heavy breathing.
SFX: Breathing slackens.
SFX: Nil.
BGM: 陰陰殷殷 –

Cold Gaze

冷視

You will notice, now that you're no longer distracted, that when he collapsed his mask fell off, just to the side. Just walk over it and you'll pick it up.

【MASK GET】
【CONSCIOUS DOG】

The usual smash-cut black screen here. The PURITY drain is paused while you're in screens like this so don't worry about wasting time here. We have here a mask – faintly pulsating, in the usual 2-bit grotesque style – which represents the growling maw of a rather vicious-looking Alsatian. This is CONSCIOUS DOG. We'll examine what it does shortly. In the meantime, click through to banish the screen. You're still in the office. Now, before you navigate Rasetsu back to the level exit as normal, there's one more thing you can do here – quickly, so you don't die from PURITY loss. The boss room, you'll notice, is an office with a big desk. On the desk, if you can discern it in the blood-tinged pixel vomit which covers it now, is a phone, a bulky 90s-style corded handset. Now that Cold Gaze is playing, a quieter and more subdued track than the level theme, you can just faintly hear it.

SFX: Dial tone.

Walk over to the side of the desk nearest the phone. You don't need to do anything to interact with it.

SFX: Click. The receiver is lifted.
SFX: A pause, not more than a breath.
SFX: Distant laughter, very faint.
SFX: Click. Hang up.

That's all. Or is it? Navigate your way back to the level entrance as normal. Exit. Smash cut to black for load transition. As usual it reads:

【STAIRWELL】

But below that, in smaller text:

【HEAVEN OPERATES WITH REGULARITY】
【IT DOES NOT EXIST BECAUSE OF YAO】
【IT DOES NOT PERISH BECAUSE OF JIE】
【ANSWER HEAVEN WITH ORDER AND FORTUNE WILL RESULT】
【ANSWER HEAVEN WITH DISORDER AND MISFORTUNE WILL RESULT】

Just for a second. Then we fade into the stairwell as normal.

BGM: 幽玄会社 –

Far Shore Return Trip

彼岸帰航

So the fortune-cookie bullshit you have here is another Chinese thing. It is (our translation of a Japanese translation of) a quote from the philosopher Xun Zi. This will appear after a 'Heaven' floor on the level-exit-to-stairwell loading screen if-and-only-if you (1) have interacted with the phone in the boss room after killing the boss and (2) were wearing a mask of the CONSCIOUS grade when you were in the level. That is all. There is nothing else you have to do to activate it, contrary to what certain seditious Discord mafias might have intimated to you. Mask doesn't matter; HYENA, DOG, whatever, as long as it's CONSCIOUS and you do the phone thing you will always get this quote. There are – as you might guess from this – different quotes that you get from doing it with a different grade of mask, but we'll deal with those when it happens.

At this stage you may be beginning to put the pieces together. Some pieces, anyway. It would be inappropriate to extend your speculations beyond what you have gathered, since there's a lot more left to go. But you've seen some things. The distant laughter on the other end of the phone, for instance, is the same – the same actual sound file in fact – as that which plays during the introduction, when the Concierge is on the phone to her boss who is upstairs. The messages you get after interacting with the phone on a 'Heaven' floor may be regarded as messages from 'upstairs' – i.e., the director of GMK Financing and Loan. More on this later. For the time being, we've got a shiny new mask to play with. Climb the stairwell – no Enma this time, alas – and get to the 7F door. Open up the bag. In the menu here we can now scroll across to see the latest addition to our collection.

【CONSCIOUS DOG】
【WEAPON IS UNBREAKABLE】

Pretty self-explanatory. Wearing a DOG mask means that your weapon doesn't lose durability and therefore cannot break. Useful if there's one in particular you want to keep, for a challenge run or whatever. Otherwise it's fairly generic. Doesn't do anything else. Still, let's select it and go in.

【COLLECTED DISCOURSES】
【7F::HUNGRY GHOST REALM】

BGM: 陰陰殷殷 –

No memories, nothing

記憶もなければ何もない

So now we're into the “Collected Discourses”, which means that the biomes of successive floors are randomly determined, as opposed to the fixed progression from 'Hell' to 'Heaven' over 1F-6F. A lot can happen from here on out. For example, you could, theoretically, get nothing but 'Heaven' floors and have to fight a boss on every single one. Statistically this is exceedingly unlikely, but it is possible. Likewise for getting no 'Heaven' floors at all. It can happen, and it has even come close to happening on one or two occasions that people have recorded, but practically speaking you would have to play for a very, very, very long time before you could be reasonably sure of getting it. So don't sweat the RNG. Just kill.

SFX: Just killing.

The usual pachinko parlour. This being your second time on this biome, you'll begin to see how the level randomisation actually works. This is quite technical, but it's interesting, so fuck you you're learning about it. For each biome the game has a big set of 'tiles', which are like individual pre-fab pieces of level geometry, containing art assets, collision data, enemy spawn points, and so on. Every individual edge of a tile has a certain 'code' which means that it can only connect to another edge with the same 'code', kind of like the game of Dominos. So a tile with a piece of hallway running east-west is 'coded' such that it cannot immediately plug into another tile with a piece of hallway running north-south, because there would be an inconsistency where an open edge would plug directly into a wall in the next tile. But it can connect to a tile with a four-way hallway intersection, because that has an edge with a 'code' which matches. The game builds levels like this. It starts with an 'entrance/exit' tile, which contains the door where Rasetsu walks in. There are several different variants of this for a given biome, so one is picked at random. Then the game checks the edges of this first tile to see what 'codes' they they have, and randomly selects out of biome-appropriate tiles with edges that match the entrance tile's edges. Then it looks at the new tiles it's added, checks their edges, finds more tiles with edges that match those, and adds them. And so on and so forth. This process iterates until the game reaches a point where there are no available tiles in the biome pool which have edges that can fit the edges that are already spawned. Because of how the tiles are laid out and coded, this process will always produce a single topologically 'closed' level. Mathematically this is very elegant. In the literature systems like these are called “Wang Tiles” after their discoverer Hao Wang. You've killed everyone on the level in the course of this discussion, haven't you?

SFX: Killing the last guy on the level.
SFX: A human corpse slams backward into a pachinko machine which explodes into a melange of glass and metal.
SFX: Heavy breathing.
SFX: Breathing slackens.
SFX: Nil.
BGM: 陰陰殷殷 –

Cold Gaze

冷視

Well, let's get out of here. Nothing really to report. As we said, the CONSCIOUS DOG mask has nothing really special about it, it just lets you use weapons without worrying about them breaking. This is the point, you know, when narration in the vein we've been doing up till now becomes rather superficial; for the most part there's nothing to say other than “Rasetsu walks in, Rasetsu kills everyone, Rasetsu walks out.” It becomes formal, perfunctory, like all those passages in ancient chronicles where the only thing they bother writing down for the whole year is like “Waged war against the Volscians again.” From this point forth – which means, in the next update or updates, however long this takes – we're going to be treating the playthrough in less detail. We'll still be translating all the dialogue and everything, there's just not much more need to describe all the levels in detail now that we're into the Collected Discourses.

【STAIRWELL】

BGM: 幽玄会社 –

Far Shore Return Trip

彼岸帰航

Good old stairwell. Oh, look who decided to show. Hi, Enma. What's poppin'?

[ENMA] HAVE YOU NOTICED IT YET
[RASETSU] WHAT
[ENMA] THE SHAPE
[ENMA] IT DOES NOT MATCH
[RASETSU] ...
[ENMA] FROM ONE TO THE NEXT
[ENMA] THE FLOORS
[RASETSU] SO
[ENMA] ...
[ENMA] WHAT DO THEY LOOK LIKE
[ENMA] TO YOU I MEAN
[RASETSU] FULL OF DEAD MEN
[RASETSU] OBVIOUSLY
[RASETSU] ...
[ENMA] ...

That's that. Some of these dialogues are, fortunately, quite short. You will find that Enma makes a lot of 'meta' comments. In some ways that is his job. He is here obliquely referring to how the architecture of this building – consisting of a large number of floors of radically different styles, shapes, and layouts – makes no sense whatsoever if you stop to think about it. Indeed, this is not a 'realistic' environment; it does not conform to objective reality. It is, rather, radically impossible.

Okay. So we said above that this seems about a good place to end this first update. And it is. We're right, as usual. But people – this is fact – are going to complain if we don't do something in particular. Already we can hear them bitching in the replies. “What about the creepypasta stuff?!!” Yeah, yeah. Right. So, yes, Hotline Mifune is indeed a creepypasta game. But what does this mean, exactly? How does one even go so far as to realise this? Actually it is quite simple. Remember how, earlier, in the stairwell, we tried getting Rasetsu to climb up a flight and skip to the next floor? Remember how it doesn't work and no matter how high up you climb you're always on the same flight? Some real MC Hammer shit? About that. Turns out, while trying to climb 'up' the stairs will keep warping you back to where you're supposed to be, the same is not true if you try to go back 'down' the way you came. Try it now.

SFX: Footsteps on concrete, descending stairs.
SFX: Screen wipe, reload.

【STAIRWELL】

So after you left 7F you were in the 7F-8F stairwell. Now you're back down in the 6F-7F stairwell. First thing to note: Enma is gone. This wouldn't happen if you had tried going up. It is your clue that you've actually changed levels. Now you can actually walk right back in – you could earlier even – to the floor you've just left, 7F, but why stop there? Keep going down. See what happens.

【STAIRWELL】

【STAIRWELL】

【STAIRWELL】

BGM: Nil.

We are now down on the 3F-4F stairwell. Notice that the music has cut out. Dead silence.

SFX: Vague movements of air.
SFX: Water gurgles in pipes.

The lighting flickers now and then – which it doesn't do, normally.

SFX: Fluorescent hum.

Walk Rasetsu down to the 3F doorway. You'll notice you don't have to go through the animation where you put down the gym back and select a mask. Just walk right on in.

【CONNECTED DISCOURSES】
【3F::ANIMAL REALM】

BGM: Nil.

The floor is just how you left it. The same nightclub, the same DJ pit, bartop, dancefloor, all just as it was when you walked in the last time. The layout is the same. Perfectly the same. Only, just, all the corpses are gone.

SFX: Rainstorm outside.
SFX: Distant thunder.

Yes, just as if someone has cleaned it. Very thoroughly. There is not even a vestige of blood. And there's no music, of course, which lends a certain feeling of desolation to the now-pristine area. And PURITY is draining, you realise at this point. You're on the level, of course it is. Your PURITY is dropping dangerously fast, and you're about to cut this exploration short and head back to the stairwell when you notice, at the edge of your screen, flitting through the extremity of the level-

SFX: Footsteps approaching.
SFX: Quickly.

-something moving. You're not alone, here, you never were. And as fast as you can move Rasetsu toward the exit, the other thing is much, much faster. At approximately jump-scare velocity a white, pixelated blur rushes the player character, and in the space of about five frames it attacks and drops your PURITY to 0% instantly.

SFX: Bladed weapon slicing flesh.
SFX: Choking on blood.
SFX: Ragged breathing.
SFX: Breathing stops.

You die. Smash cut to black, so fast and so jarring you'd otherwise assume the game crashed.

【UNSIGHTLY】
【UNDESERVING OF LIFE】

SFX: Dial tone.
SFX: Dial tone.
SFX: Click.

That death message is always the same, by the way, it's nothing to do with whether or not you get killed by the white thing. There are a few other more subtle creepypasta things we can look at next time, but that is the one you've probably seen in reaction videos. It's very RPG Maker like that, cheap funhouse shit. Not very scary just to read about it, of course, but let there be no doubt: encountering it on an empty floor after a long gameplay session has shit quite a few pants. The 'white thing', if you are very quick on the screenshot button – or you just extract the sprite from the game files ell oh ell – is a humanoid figure, as much as anyone is in top-down perspective.

And after that brief message from our sponsors, we smash cut right back to the main menu screen where it all began. Simple as. Rainy night, urbanised pixel hell.

BGM: 幽玄会社 –

And Yet

けれども

【廾回卞し工几ヨ・冊工乍凵几ヨ】
【〜ホットライン・ミフネ〜】

That's enough for today. We've shown you how the game begins. Next time you'll see how it can end.

[Leftovers]

oh shit I'm feeling it

[Rafflesiac]

Very cool, very nice read, thick with atmosphere, would watch someone stream gameplay on Discord, debate buying it myself, and ultimately not follow through because I have item enhancers to grind in Pokemon Unite.