Necronomicon
A Comedy of Justice in Four Acts
by fallacies
I / The Camel
Names are important. His is Etorouji Ryuuichirou, and he's a forty-five year old regional executive at a certain multinational software company.
Ryuuichirou is a gentleman and philanthropist of the highest order, and he's known throughout the upper echelons of society as a kind, generous, and just man. You can tell it by the way he straightens his tie before the mirrored walls of his top-floor office, and by the fine tailoring of his Gieves & Hawkes business suit.
When he was seventeen years old, his father warned him of the four indulgences that the Confucian gentleman should partake of only sparingly - of drink, of flesh, of wealth, and of fame. One might lose his way, he was told, if these vices are allowed to dictate behavior. For years he believed this, but he saw when he became his own man that the warning was but a product of cognitive dissonance, spawned for the peace of mind of those too weak and complacent to strive for self-actualization. His father, a scholar of Chinese history, had - like the sheep that he was - merely overromanticized the antiquated values of what was obviously an evolutionarily inferior civilization.
Ryuuichirou does not think much of his father anymore.
"Do you know why you're still working here?" he asks the young, pretty woman in the slightly disheveled uniform sitting on the floor besides his desk. It's a rhetorical question, and they both know it.
"No, sir," she says, even though she does. She doesn't look him in the eyes.
"You have a daughter in preschool and a husband whose job has recently become a casualty of the strength of the Yen," he says. "Human resources has your productivity down by fifteen percent since March, and approached me with the suggestion that you're becoming a liability to your department. Frankly, we don't need you." He pauses, turning to study her expression. He can see the wetness of her eyes. "But you see, I'm an understanding man. You've got a family to support, and I can respect that. I'll let you keep your job - maybe even give you a promotion if you go the extra length. You understand what I'm saying?"
"Yes, sir," says the woman, wiping her eyes with her forearm sleeve. "Thank you, sir."
"Service with a smile," he says, more dangerously than necessary.
The woman lowers her arm and forces a smile at him. He finds the fear and resentment that he sees in her eyes to be quite pleasant. It will be nice to have a new challenge.
By October, the fight in her is no longer. Ryuuichirou makes a habit of discarding the things that cease to amuse him, but this doesn't yet apply to her. Since the breaking of her pride, the depths to which she's been willing to take herself on his suggestion have become a source of endless entertainment for him and his guests.
It has only been a scant few months, but already there isn't a trace of the ingrained, traditional properness of the Yamato Nadeshiko that the woman came packaged with - the shallow oversexuality of the dark-skinned o-gyaru is all that remains. Ryuuichirou doesn't find this attractive on a sexual level, really - it's simply a demonstration of the influence he holds over her, which pleasures him in a manner more cerebral than carnal.
At a street corner five blocks away from her home, they kiss. He feels the metal stud on her tongue against his flesh briefly before they break apart.
"Will Miria be alright when I'm through with this?" she asks, pressing her braless, surgically-enhanced breasts to him. "I don't want that fucker neglecting her for his computer games like he does now."
"Custody laws favor the mother," he says simply, even though he knows that social services will hold her tattoos and piercings and her promiscuity against her. He anticipates her tears.
The woman nods and withdraws from his embrace, waving and turning to make her way through the empty, darkened streets of the residential district. He watches her go before opening the door to his Bentley. As he makes to enter the car, something violently jerks his collar backwards, throwing him to the asphalt. There is a man standing above him with his back to the orange light of the street-lamp, holding a metallic baseball bat. Squinting, he recognizes the face. It's the woman's husband, who he fired almost a year ago.
No words are exchanged.
II / The Lion
His name is Tachibana Seiji. He's twenty-eight years old and a computer programmer, currently not in employment, education, or training. He's also forty-three minutes away from death.
At an unsecured summer-house that he broke into somewhere in the prefecture of Kanagawa, he watches the Sunday midday news on a large-screen television. His own face looks back at him from a two year old photograph of him and his wife and daughter on a second honeymoon in Seoul. The anchor says that he's wanted for assault and battery. Apparently, he's deranged, dangerous, and possibly armed.
"Don't you dare accuse me, you piece of shit," his wife had said to him when he noticed the things that he should've noticed, months too late to do anything about it. "You think I liked it in the beginning? I did it for you, and I did it for Miria. What the fuck did you do? You wasted away around the house, escaping into that Final Fantasy crap that you play online, just because you couldn't find a fucking job! That's what you did! You think you've got the higher moral ground?"
He doesn't look at the pale, innocent face of the woman he married on the screen. Seeing her will remind him that he allowed her to cease to be, and right now, he can't accept this. He wants justice.
He turns off the television. Hunger - or perhaps something else that he isn't able to name - brings him to the kitchen to scavenge for any unspoiled food the owners of the house might have left behind. As he goes consecutively through the empty shelves and cupboards, a small voice whispers to him that Etorouji Ryuuichirou has rather a good chance of being the sole author of his misery.
The beating. It had been a crime of passion. He'd premeditated it to some extent, if stalking around his neighborhood in an angry haze at two in the morning could count as premeditation; but he'd done it mostly because the guy had somehow resocialized his wife into a shameless harpy of a whore, like the plot of some low-budget AV film. Now that he thinks of it, though - really thinks about it - he realizes that he probably has a lot more justification to the act than he imagined.
Etorouji had been his immediate superior at Altimit, and the prospective employers that had rejected him over the course of the past year would've all been calling the bastard for reference - they turned him away, of all things, on 'overqualification' for his primary authorship of the company's signature OS. The mysteriously neverending string of rejections wasn't so much of a mystery anymore. This thing that Etorouji had gone about putting into action wasn't some spur-of-the-moment play for his wife. It was quite clearly a personal vendetta - and completely unprovoked on his part. Was it jealousy? Some use-and-discard philosophy? Turning the thought over in his mind, he feels his fury grow.
He doesn't find anything to eat.
Mentally staving off the emptiness, he lumbers up the stairs to an overly pastel bedroom that belongs to the owners' teenage daughter. He found the previous night that there was a PlayOnline install on the girl's computer. Now, using it, he logs on to Vana'diel with a warehouse account called Seijin. The music will relax him, he thinks. Then he'll go back to Tokyo and finish off what he started. He'll obtain justice.
Twenty minutes later, in a party of low-level American players, he lets out a string of cusses as his HP hits zero. The raptor-like monster that his party was fighting moves off the screen, and the party follows.
"Raise plz," he types.
After a minute of no response, the party leader, the designated healer, private-messages him:
"no. u suk as tank, Jap. booting u cuz ur a fag."
The handles and lifebars of the other players vanish from his display, and his character is alone, dead in the wilderness.
"Justice is servd," says the screen. "fagfagfagfagfagfagfagfagfagfagfagfagfagfagfagfagfagfagfag fagfagfagfagfagfagfagfagfagfagfagfagfagfagfagfagfagfagfagfagfagfagfagfagfagfagfagfagfagfag
fagfagfagfagfagfagfagfagfagfagfagfagfagfagfagfagfagfagfagfagfagfagfagfagfagfagfagfagfagfag
fagfagfagfagfagfagfagfagfagfagfagfagfag"
He stares dumbly for a moment. Then, biting his lower lip, he throws the USB game-pad to the floor, causing the wire to jerk from its socket. Defeated, he leans back into the white leather cushions of the office chair. The Final Fantasy is no longer final, or particularly much of a fantasy. Why did he think it could comfort him?
The feeling that grips him now isn't anger, he realizes. It's the hollow sensation of his own impotence - at not being able to do anything about anything. Etorouji was an exploitative bastard, yes, but where was Tachibana Seiji when his wife needed him? He could have done something. He *should* have done something.
"But don't I deserve justice as well?" he asks aloud.
Tachibana Seiji's forty-three minutes are up. In a pastel room filled with the Game Over BGM of his final fantasy, he feels a sudden pain in his chest. His vision blurs, and his final thought is a question:
What is justice?
III / The Child
Monsieur R_ Yagami of Tokyo, Japan, estimates by a careful system of merits and demerits that his relative placement in society is quite laudable. Per the writings of a certain nineteenth century German philosopher that he knows of only in passing, he thusly imagines himself an Ubermensch, who is capable - unlike the sheep that are satisfied to simply follow - of determining on his own terms the difference between good and evil. It does not for a moment occur to him that he has never precisely defined the merits and demerits by which he judges matters. He respects himself too much to do this.
On a certain Sunday in the month of October, M. Yagami switches on the small television on his workdesk shortly after lunch. After news of child suicide bombers in northern Africa, and of recent military exercises in western China, the pretty Eurasian anchorwoman speaks impassively on a subject of his interest:
"The billionaire philanthropist, Etorouji Ryuuichirou, age forty-five, was battered and assaulted last night on a private excursion to the Municipality of Setagaya in Tokyo by a former employee, Tachibana Seiji, age twenty-eight, currently unemployed. The Tokyo Metropolitan Police advises that Tachibana is to be considered armed and dangerous, and requests that any sightings of the criminal be immediately reported."
The man in the photograph on-screen is holding a small child and smiling. There is a pretty young woman standing besides him, who reminds M. Yagami vaguely of his younger sister. He takes the woman to be Tachibana's wife. In the background is the evening skyline of an unfamiliar city, possibly Osaka - and if the bad exposure of the flash is any indication, the photograph was taken with a fairly cheap camera. These details, however, are irrelevant to M. Yagami. He commits to memory only the face of the criminal, imagining him slightly older, less cleanly shaven.
M. Yagami's understanding of the situation is perfect: A violent crime has been committed by an unemployed lowlife against a good, upstanding man that positively contributes to society. This is an infraction that must be punished. The uneducated thug must be made an example of.
Of all his possessions, M. Yagami holds in highest regard a volume of blank pages bequeathed to him by an invisible otherworldly companion that he has seen fit to name 'Luke'; he now reverently removes it from a hidden, sealed compartment in his desk. The volume possesses no proper name, for the title associated has varied as often as the dominant language of the epoch; perhaps an item of a similar nature was once in the possession of the one known as the Mad Arab. M. Yagami, the prophet of his age, has penned within predictions of the deaths of countless sinners.
"In the name of Justice," he says under his breath, putting the tip of his red ballpoint pen to a fresh page. Visualizing the face of the culprit - the wretched villain - he quickly lays down the ideograms of a name, followed by a time of death - forty-three minutes past noon. The pressure of his keystrokes is enough to kill.
Just like that, the fate of a man has been sealed. M. Yagami's predictions always come true.
"I am Justice," he says, and blinks thereby. And so he is; it is inevitability.
'But I hafta wonder,' thinks the entity called Luke - who is perhaps a product of M. Yagami's own psychosis. 'Has the kid ever paused to consider if he's really this independent authority of justice he takes himself to be? He's got Tachibana Seiji down as a criminal only 'cause some half-French newscaster said so, and she's only saying so 'cause the Metropolitan Police wanted her to. How many are the scores of voices that moved his pen, exactly?' Luke begins to giggle at a realization. 'It doesn't occur to him that he's never bothered to define his own Justice.'
"What are you laughing about?" asks M. Yagami.
"Nothin'," says Luke, cackling as he takes another bite from his sweet fig. "Just that you're a real amusin' guy." And then he thinks: 'There isn't any question that Yagami is Justice. He's blind enough, and the weapon he wields is a whole lot mightier than a sword.'
IV / The Sleep of the Just
Etorouji Ryuuichirou hears it from the police before he sees the news: Tachibana Seiji has died. His body was found in a summer-house in the mountains out by Hakone.
His first thought is: Serves the damned shut-in right for presuming to be my intellectual equal.
He has no second thoughts; no remorse.
The rookie officer assigned to pass the message to Ryuuichirou doesn't delve much into the suspected cause of death. Ryuuichirou can tell why: The kid is uncomfortable with the idea of the supernatural force of justice that is Kira. He smirks at the boy's expense, and then wonders what he's guilty of.
That night, content in the knowledge that a threat to civilized society is no longer at large, Ryuuichirou falls asleep in his hospital bed while rereading Shakespeare's Julius Caesar in its original English. It is the best that he sleeps in the week since his concussion.
It is the sleep of the just.
Fin