I can’t quite place when it was. It feels like the day I first met Mary, or perhaps from the early days when we first started seeing each other.
“What exactly are you planning to do as the chairwoman of the Foundation?” I asked.
“Are you really trying to talk shop with me right now?”
She looked slightly miffed. She always tried to steer me away from discussing her work. It was strange, really; she had been my client first. I had met her to give a business presentation, but it seemed from the very start that she had no intention of talking business.
She spoke in a drifting, murmuring tone—likely on purpose—as if she were dodging the question.
“I want to be a Mama Bear,” she said. “A Mama Bear for all of mankind.”
I figured it was some kind of metaphor. She probably meant that as the head of the Foundation, she needed to exert a powerful, protective sort of leadership, like a mother bear. I felt it was best not to press her further.
Mary is the kind of girl who seems to have Coca-Cola running through her veins instead of blood. “Why do you always eat at drive-thrus?” I once asked her.
“I wonder why,” she replied, as if she’d never given it a thought. “Maybe because I can eat what I want, where I want.”
“In the middle of the desert?”
“Exactly. For example.”
Rust-bucket trailers that had long since stopped running. Drive-in theaters turned into ruins decades ago. The sun sinking into a gently undulating, parched horizon. The neon signs of roadside motels, some letters burnt out, flickering in the encroaching night. She loved this desert. It was her birthplace. Yet, she didn’t seem to want to stay here forever.
“Why are you so obsessed with hamburgers?”
“Tell me, Hiroshi. Don’t you think hamburgers and sushi are basically the same thing?”
“I don’t know about that.”
“A hamburger consists of meat, vegetables, bread, and cheese. It’s a complete food. Sushi is made of rice, fish, and vegetables. It’s the same principle.”
True. They were the same. In this part of the world, vegetable sushi was common enough. Come to think of it, gyoza was a complete food too—meat, vegetables, and flour.
When the sushi of my home country comes to the land of the hamburger, it transforms into a roll of avocado, tuna, and vinegared rice wrapped in seaweed. People eat it with dressing instead of soy sauce. They put ketchup or mustard on tofu.
At first, I suffered a bit of culture shock.
But Mary loves those kinds of visceral foods and drinks—like Coke—and lately, I’ve started to think that it might actually taste better than making everything taste like soy sauce.
At the salad bars in family restaurants, there are mushrooms. I was shocked to find that people in this country eat mushrooms raw. I later learned that mushrooms were an exception; almost every other kind of fungi must be cooked before consumption.
One day, while we were driving, Mary asked me, “What do you think of that giant concrete castle over there?”
“Oh, that?” It was a shopping mall, a common sight on the West Coast, connected directly to the Interstate. “What about it? It’s incredibly convenient. It’s huge, like Disneyland. You can buy anything, watch movies…”
“Corn harvested from vast, empty fields is processed into feed in massive factories, fed to broilers in massive factories, turned into yakitori in massive factories, and then sold to humans in an air-conditioned shopping mall. Isn’t it a wonderful country, this country?”
At the time, it sounded to me as if she had suddenly started reciting a cliché.
“The pinnacle of modern convenience,” I replied.
“Just like a nuclear shelter.”
“Yeah. I bet it’s cozy in there.”
“Are you being serious?”
“Uh…” I couldn’t find a good answer. I had never lived in a nuclear shelter.
“Have you ever lived in one?” I asked, half-joking.
“Yes, I have.”
“Really?”
“The 1950s. All the rich people dug holes in their backyards and built shelters. DIY shelters. It wasn’t just for nuclear attacks. In this country, plenty of houses in the Great Plains have basements to retreat to when a tornado warning hits.”
“I guess so. So? Did you actually live in one?”
“Yeah, my family had one. It hadn’t been used in over fifty years, but still. Want to try living in one sometime?”
“I don’t know. How was it for you?”
“It was perfect for writing my graduation thesis. I could actually concentrate.”
I remembered then that there was a time when people in this country seriously built nuclear shelters—to become a new Adam and Eve, surviving a nuclear winter that might last centuries.
I couldn’t imagine what it felt like to actually live in such a place. But then again, our world already feels no different from a nuclear shelter. I hate the idea of being trapped in a cramped space and dying of boredom, but the silence and solitude beneath the earth… I might actually like that. I suspect that if there were a massive nuclear shelter, I could get along just fine inside it. My friend Michael, a shut-in otaku, would probably say the same. He’d likely want to live in something like a space station—a scientific coffin.
To Mary, Coke and hamburgers were the pride of this country’s food culture, but shopping malls were cursed products of civilization. At first, I didn’t understand the distinction. To me, they were two sides of the same coin.
When Mary first suggested living in a “Geo-commune,” I vaguely imagined some kind of artificial biotope isolated from the outside world—something like a giant shopping mall, a Disneyland, or a nuclear shelter. I was completely wrong.
“What do you do in a Geo-commune?”
“I hunt.”
“With a gun?”
“Of course.”
Even in this country, there are certain restrictions on gun ownership. Shotguns can be purchased at 18; pistols at 21. Pistols are strictly regulated because they are easy to conceal under clothes. Shotguns are used for hunting, and since this country has vast wildernesses where wild animals roam, anyone can own one—even minors—provided they take the proper course, much like a driver’s license. If it’s just for target practice in a designated area, you can start even
younger.
“I see. Have you already started?”
“Yes. I got my license the day I turned eighteen.”
“For a hunting shotgun?”
“Yeah. And a rifle.”
“You got your rifle license at eighteen too?”
“Yes.”
“But don’t you need a history of hunting to get a rifle license? Gun ownership starts at eighteen, right?”
“Wrong. If it’s for Olympic-style rifle shooting training, you can start at fourteen. And after four years of formal training, you can obtain a license to own a rifle.”
“Wow. Are you a competitive shooter?”
“No. I’m going to be a gibier hunter. A professional game hunter.”
It was surprising to hear the word “gibier” come out of the mouth of a hamburger-loving girl like Mary. Nothing was further from her usual vocabulary than “gibier” or “gourmet.”
“I thought you wanted to be a moose in a birch forest.”
“No. I decided I wanted to be the hunter who kills the moose.”
“Why?”
“In the Geo-commune, there must be no lies or deception. Everything must be based on the truth of facts.”
Mary said this with a dead serious expression. She was declaring it as the sovereign of the Geo-commune. I peered into her pitch-black pupils, framed by irises that looked like solar flares. I felt that Mary, in that moment, was peering back into the darkness of my own.
“I went to a sushi place the other day,” she said.
“You really do love sushi. What kind of place?”
“A place where the sushi moves on a conveyor belt.”
“Oh, kaiten-zushi. I’m surprised someone as elite as you would go there.”
“I eat fast-food sushi and burgers too. And I saw something that shocked me. ‘Sale: L-size Fatty Tuna $1. M-size Fatty Tuna $2.’ In the promotional poster, the L-size Fatty Tuna was massive, overflowing from the rice ball. But when the real thing arrived, it was just a pathetic little sliver resting on the rice. On the other hand, the M-size Fatty Tuna had no ad and cost more, but the cut was larger, thicker, and actually tasted great. I mean, I know the advertising industry in this country treats consumers like idiots, but this is too much. It’s a desecration of language. It’s not the fault of the chefs in the kitchen. It’s the elite agents at the PR firms, doing this to protect their own skins and make excuses. The intellectuals, the very people who should be protecting the culture, are the ones leading the charge in desecrating language. The chefs just play along, deliberately serving high-quality M-size fish and low-quality, tiny L-size fish.”
I assume “L-size Fatty Tuna” referred to otoro (fattiest tuna) and “M-size” to chutoro (medium fatty tuna). The idea that chutoro would be more expensive, larger, and tastier than otoro is certainly unsettling. Perverted, even.
“I can tell that sushi restaurant is putting in a lot of corporate effort. It’s prosperous and the quality is high. But that’s only possible because they attract customers through hypocrisy. The logic that prevails in this country’s capitalist society is that as long as mass production and mass consumption provide cheap, good products and improve the ‘Quality of Life,’ hypocrisy is permitted—even mocking the consumer is permitted. These kinds of sales often create waste because they’re so afraid of selling out. But as long as they turn a profit, they don’t care if they throw away mountains of food. It’s the same everywhere. The masses are fooled by hypocrisy. They’re driven to run in one direction, even though there’s no reason to rush. Most don’t even notice they’ve been tricked. Even those who do just see it as part of the scenery, something inevitable, something normal. They forgive it with a ‘broad mind.’ The fact that the masses accept it gives entrepreneurs a seal of approval, and capitalists become further convinced that the masses want to be deceived, so they deceive them even more. Eventually, everyone loses the sense that they are committing an act of hypocrisy. They give up, thinking it’s useless to resist alone.”
“And you can’t forgive that?”
“It’s not a matter of forgiveness. I want to break this vicious cycle—this chain we’ve become dependent on over ten thousand years of human history.
Ten thousand years. She certainly went big.
“Isn’t your obsession with hamburgers also a conspiracy of capitalism?”
“No. I don’t eat hamburgers because everyone else does. I eat them because I like them.”
“Then what’s the solution? What do you think should happen to humanity?”
“A mother bear hunts other animals to raise her cubs. Humans should be the same.”
The bear metaphor again.
“But you’re not a bear.”
Her appearance didn’t resemble a bear in the slightest. If anything, Natasha looked more like one.
“Humans and bears are the same. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, when humans first appeared on earth, until just ten thousand years ago, we were no different from bears—hunting and gathering animals living in the forest. We kill other animals and plants to survive. To turn away from the fact that bears and gorillas do the same is a deception—a specifically human one. Don’t you agree? Humanity’s greatest deception is agriculture and animal husbandry. We think it’s pitiful to kill wild animals, but it’s okay to slaughter livestock or devour crops. That’s insane. It’s the modern human who is crazy.”
Vegetarians, wild-game enthusiasts… there are various ideologies, but they are all just different vectors of a reaction against this country’s culture of gluttony. The masses tolerate the deception, but a certain percentage of people can no longer bear the pangs of conscience and turn toward natural foods. She was one of them. Just as Natasha had said.
“I see. That may be so, but you don’t have to be the one to hunt and take animal lives. You don’t have to be a hunter yourself. You’re the head of the Mary Foundation. If you ruthlessly kill moose in your Geo-commune, animal rights groups will protest; they might even come to sabotage your activities.”
“I’m prepared for that kind of criticism. There must be no lies or deception in the Geo-commune. And the Geo-commune aims to be a self-sufficient community, independent of the products of civilization, like commercial crops and livestock. As the chairwoman, I will take the lead in that role. A mother bear must be strong and resilient.”
