Bullet Train (Assassins #2)

by Kōtarō Isaka

‘I’m gonna get the bastard.’ ‘But are you gonna be able to forgive him?’

Probably nothing going on inside, thinks Tangerine. Often the case with people who don’t read fiction.

He could get into a story about a spoiled kid if it was in a novel, but in real life he isn’t interested. All it does is aggravate him.

It’s a strange feeling, facing someone exactly his height, like looking into a mirror. But the person he sees is more careless, more badly behaved than he is, giving Tangerine the peculiar sensation that his own negative traits have taken human form and are staring back at him.

Nanao can’t escape this thought: if it happened once it can happen again, and if it happened twice it can happen three times, and if three times then four, so we might as well say that if something happens once it’ll keep happening forever.

‘What year are you from? Ever heard of gender equality?’ ‘This conversation is sexual harassment.’

‘Think of it this way. The more complicated a job is, the more you need to know ahead of time. Special considerations, trial runs, contingency plans. On the other hand, not getting any details beforehand means the job’ll be simple. Like what if you had a job that was breathe in and out three times? Would you need details beforehand?’

He tells himself this like performing a ritual, like he’s banishing bad energy from the path ahead.

Prince thought it was ridiculous. Just blindly following a set of rules to avoid assuming any responsibility, avoid taking any risks. Enacting sick leave without a moment’s hesitation, the teachers all seemed like fools to him, fools who had shut off their brains. Zero consideration, zero analysis, zero initiative.

It’s probably not up to the teachers you weirdo

‘What kind of schoolkid looks up to the tax bureau? You’re the fucking worst.’

Adults always keep their mouths shut, thinks the Prince, when I’m right.

‘Why is it wrong to kill people?’ The Prince tries asking. He isn’t being cynical or making a joke, he actually wants to know the answer. He wants to meet an adult who can give him a satisfying answer.

A person can’t live without being able to tell themselves that they’re right, that they’re strong, that they have value. So when their words and actions diverge from their view of themselves, they start looking for excuses, to help reconcile the contradiction.

That’s why the Prince frequently displays his own certainty, using words of derision and contempt. More often than not his subjective opinion takes on objective force, reinforcing his superior status. People think, that guy’s got a way of looking at the world, he knows what he’s talking about.

Most Japanese people think that if there’s ever a major problem, America or the UN will deal with it. A feeling like the police are on the job and will take care of everything. When in reality, the US and UN determine their course of action based not on any sense of mission or moral obligation, but on a calculation of profit and loss.

It was easy for the Prince to understand how a genocide could occur. It was because people make decisions based on feeling. But those feelings are extremely susceptible to outside influence.

Human beings are creatures of conformity. There have been other similar experiments. One of them isolated the optimum pattern for conformist behaviour: when the stakes are high but the question is difficult and the right answer isn’t obvious. When this happens, people are much more likely to adopt someone else’s opinion as their own.

The Prince understood it like this: when people have a difficult decision to make, one that may go against their code of ethics, they conform to the group, and even come to believe that the answer is correct. When he thought about it in those terms, it became easy to see the mechanism by which the genocide not only was difficult to stop but by which it fuelled itself.

Nothing’s as boring as when old folks brag about how hard things used to be or how much hell they used to raise.

Kimura was usually among those doing the pushing, so he knew that most of the time it happened for no particular reason. People just feel better when they can put themselves above other people. By grinding someone else down, you prop yourself up.

He felt like a fisherman who casually throws in a line and hooks a monster fish that may well pull him into the water. He felt afraid.

Human beings don’t operate on logic. Deep down we’re built just like animals.’

‘Accidents happen. There’s even a song about it in Thomas and Friends. It goes, “Accidents happen, just don’t take it all to heart.” ’ ‘You should take it to heart at least a bit.’

It’ll be all right, it’ll work out fine. He keeps telling himself this. No more unforeseen developments. Oh really? the other self inside him whispers tauntingly. Whenever you do anything, there are always twists and turns you never imagined, it says. Hasn’t it always been that way, your whole life?

The compartments of the storage cabinet in his mind start swinging open, thwack, then closing again, thwack. The scenes from the past that he glimpses inside may have been covered in dust but they maintain a vividness, scenes from his childhood that nevertheless seem immediate and tangible.

Everything I do ends up going wrong. As soon as I think, wow, it would be terrible if that happened, I really hope that doesn’t happen, it happens.

Say you have a board resting at an angle, and you drop some BBs or pebbles on it. Each one will roll in its own direction, find its own course down, but that’s not because anyone set the course for it or changed its direction partway down. Where it falls depends on the speed and shape, so that it would naturally go that way on its own.’

When you lead a group by fear the rank and file lose trust in one another. The stronger the fear, the weaker the trust. The anger and resentment at the despot is turned on people who should be allies, making the spark of rebellion less likely. Everyone just wants to keep themselves safe, their only goal is to avoid being punished, and they start watching one another.

By the time people start to regret not having got off earlier, it’s too late. Whether it’s war, genocide, or revisions to the law, in most cases people don’t notice until it’s already happening, and they feel like they would have protested earlier if they only knew.

Basically, if people hear an explanation they want to believe it, and when someone important says with full confidence, Don’t worry, everything’s fine, people go along with it.

The first step in gaining control over his classmates was to destabilise their sense of self-worth. He made them realise how flawed they were as humans.

‘He said never trust authors who overuse sentence fragments or conversationalists who use the word irregardless.

This man just makes you want to tell all, he thinks. Like he’s got some kind of special aura. Like the space around him is a confession booth.

Controlling people’s emotions depends a good deal on appearances. If babies weren’t as cute as they are, if they didn’t push that emotional button, no one would go to all the trouble of taking care of them.

He’s not feeling fear, which is good. All he feels is a mild sense of disappointment that it’s happening so abruptly. As if the end of his life is a television being switched off, and someone’s telling him that there weren’t really any good shows on anyway.

He pictures himself crushing people so he can harvest the juice that comes pouring out. To him nothing else in the world tastes as sweet.

The Prince notices for the first time that Kimura’s mother sounds unusually calm. Stable, like a mighty tree with roots dug deep.

With that in mind, it makes perfect sense why wars and the death penalty are allowed. Because they serve the needs of the state. The only things that are allowed are the things the state sanctions. Which has nothing to do with ethics.’

Bearing the seven sorrows of Mother Mary into the sky. That’s why it’s called the ladybug. Asagao doesn’t know what the seven sorrows are. But when he thinks about that tiny creature carefully loading the sadness of the world onto its spots, black surrounded by vivid red, then climbing to the very tip of a flower before taking off, he gets a warm feeling.