Death of the Author

Yasushi Kazuo knew it was all over when Hoshino-san didn’t return his thirteenth call. Hoshino-san, over a beer or three or twenty, the exact amount was unimportant, had once explained to Kazuo the significance of this number.

“I love a novelist who is persistent,” he said, “When a writer arrogantly demands my attention and time, that’s when I think ‘my goodness, maybe this one is good.’ Petition outside my office, scream at me, drink me under the table if you have to, that’s how important you believe your work is to the reader. But I also hate a writer who resorts to begging, Yasushi-sensei. It’s a subtle and important distinction, and these days, I sense that from you. A writer begs in a particularly pathetic way when their best years are behind them, because their work has sunk into fatal mediocrity. They become unhinged. Unpublishable. Thirteen calls, sensei. If ever you call me thirteen times and I still have not answered, then you have become the kind of author in my eyes who begs, who has nothing left to offer this world.”

Kazuo lived for almost forty years alone in a six tatami mat room in Hatagaya, two blocks from the Keiyo line, a convenient two stops away from Hoshino-san’s office in Shinjuku. Every morning, he would leave out on his balcony bird feed for the fattened pigeons flocking upon telephone lines and then walk an hour to Yoyogi Park, where he spent his time writing his next manuscript beneath the zelkova tree closest to the shores of the lake. Younger writers preferred trendy American-styled coffee shops on Nishihara Street with beans imported from specialty farms in Guatemala, but Kazuo found his solace in the shadow of the graybark elms. After all, beneath their shade, Kazuo had written his debut novel, penned elegies for his deceased relatives, performed his first blood sacrifice, proposed to his wife, and received the phone call for his first and only literary award, an honorable mention and a respectable prize of five thousand yen.

It was beneath those very zelkovas on a bitter winter night that Kazuo now dialed for Hoshino-san, his frail fingers shaking at the precipice of that thirteenth call. In his oversized army green coat and wool beret, Yasushi Kazuo appeared to some passersby less as an author and more like a frenzied detective or overseas spy desperate to report stolen national secrets to a foreign adversary. His wrinkled eyes, watering, prayed to the spirits dormant in the barren boughs above him that Hoshino-san would answer this time, that perhaps he had simply been enjoying a long bath, or was entertaining his three children, or playing pretend. Maybe Hoshino-san was hard at work fifteen minutes before midnight, hurling profanities at the other editors, declaring that Yasushi Kazuo’s latest novel was a masterclass of science fantasy, that all the other duds, panned by critics for its excessive misanthropy, laughed at by readers young and old, who mocked, much to Kazuo’s outrage, that he was a mere sellout deriving conventions from his superiors, served only as fuels to the spark that birthed this work worthy of greatness.

“This is,” clicked the phone on the other end.

“Hoshino-san!” Kazuo cried, “My novel –”

“Arukawa,” replied the voicemail, “Please leave a message.”

“Hoshino-san, please, you must answer my calls. My novel, is it not wonderful like I told you at the izakaya here in Hatagaya? Does it not impress you with its vivid energy, does it not reveal the fetid sickness of this world? My goodness, I’m begging aren’t I, Hoshino-san, it’s just like you warned me, isn’t it? But surely you can understand why I’m so frantic. This is truly my best work, it is a true depiction of the world. I’m an exception that proves the rule, you must understand, Hoshino-san. I would never call you this many times if I wasn’t certain. I am, of course, grateful for your patronage these years, the novels that never made a single yen for your serial, but surely you can spare some space, two or three pages in next month’s serial. Just two pages is all I need, you’ll see, the readers will flock to this one. Oh dear, I’m begging again, aren’t I, Hoshino-san? It must sound like I’m mad, but it is not me that is mad but the world, the world that is mad and should not be as it is. You’ll see Hoshino-san, I will show you. Just two pages, two pages is all I need.”

The phone line died, and so did Kazuo’s soul. His spirit drifted out of his body like wisps of incense and snagged and tore on gnarled mangled branches. He decided that he hated elm trees, that he hated Hoshino-san, that he hated himself now that he had become a meager beggar. All the zelkovas in Shibuya lost their luster and spirit.

The old man tread homeward, his feet dragging through mud and fresh splotches of snow. But now, hidden behind his paltry gait, an unsettling unnatural vigor crawled into Yasushi Kazuo’s body. He slouched forth in anticipation like some creature from Bethlehem, right hand clenching the left shoulder, dry mouth hanging ajar just enough to reveal a wretched lopsided grin and ill-fitted dentures plastered with tartar. When he reached his apartment building, he trudged upstairs with heavy resolute steps. The light fixtures on the cement ceilings fluttered on and off. Between each flicker, like a stop motion animation, the old man’s sharp untrimmed nails drew fresh bloody tracks down his arm. When the red streaks reached his wrists, Kazuo stopped at his front door and fumbled through his coat pocket for his keys.

“Two pages, two pages is all I’ll need,” Kazuo repeated.

When Kazuo walked in, he was met with a frigid breeze and the sound of loose paper waffling about. He had forgotten to shut his balcony door that morning. He sauntered across the room, listening to the blood dripping from his leaky faucet of a forearm onto dark shadowed manuscripts bundled across his tatami mats. Each drop tapped against his life’s works at metronomic intervals, as if Kazuo played a conductor and his blood was the baton tapping the podium to ready the orchestra. Kazuo stepped onto the silent balcony, and he smiled. The pigeons he had fed this morning were still there.

All of them lay skewered on the deck, trapped and pinned against each other by a monstrous metal contraption almost the length of the entire balcony. When enough pigeons had landed to feed on the food Kazuo laid out that morning, the steel-ridden jaws of the device had snapped close, compressing their fragile avian bones together like they were witches hewn by an iron maiden.

Kazuo unlocked the device and began collecting the corpses, careful not to set his foot upon the weights that activated his trap. He began to hum a tune. Perhaps it was a local folk song from the underground jazz club here in Hatagaya or a classical sonata or even a pop track he might have overheard on the radio; the musical origins mattered less than the fact that the song was pleasant and spirited. It, above all other rhythmic or sonoric details, brimmed with optimistic beats and hopeful energy, hardly a melody to be sung by a decrepit ghost collecting the bodies of mutilated birds.

Still, Kazuo continued to hum, and if anything, the dynamism and vitality of his private performance strengthened further. He returned to the room with his pigeons dangling by their feet. He tossed some of the corpses to disparate corners of his six tatami mat room, until each corner had been tainted by one of the bodies. He dropped a pigeon into the bathtub and toilet and his kitchen sink and the cabinet beneath the stove. He hung one upon a plastic coat rack and one above each blade of the ceiling fan, and he continued to lay them across his room until only one pigeon was left, and this special bird was given the discrete honor of laying upon Kazuo’s kotatsu at the room’s malicious center, malicious because had Yasushi Kazuo’s neighbor stepped onto the balcony that unfortunate night with a cigarette dangling between her fingertips, she would have seen the foreboding vermillion lights emerging from within his apartment, and she would have witnessed the blood and smelled the stench of death, and she would have called the police station just a block down the road here in Hatagaya and the police would have rushed to the scene and arrested Yasushi Kazuo, and he would have died in a psychiatric institution as a mediocre author with an unremarkable award to his name, and so had all these events transpired in all the right ways, or perhaps had Hoshino-san simply picked up his phone, the end of the world could have been easily avoided.

Instead, the tune Kazuo hummed changed into a cacophonic mess. Musical tonality transformed into dissonant garble as if the singer was choking on something that had appeared in his throat. Yasushi Kazuo slipped beneath his kotatsu like a child happy to find warmth in the depths of an unforgiving winter. He bowed before his makeshift altar with his pigeon sacrifices set at the intersection of the leylines in his room. The crimson lights which rose from their carcasses doused the room with its insidious glow, and the birds dissolved into acrid smoke.

“This world gets what it deserves, this world gets what it deserves,” said Kazuo with his hands folded together, “It is not me that is mad, but the world, the world that has gone mad and turned its back on me, and so the world gets what it deserves.”

The smoke and fumes reached the manuscripts shuffled upon the tatami floor. Every page began to burn, and the stories upon stories, some never before seen by this world, crumbled into cinders. The smoldering ash and the smoke and the lights floated into the air where they swirled and gained speed and thickened into a dense incomprehensible singularity above the old man, who had become deaf to all senses and could only feel the pulsing of his heart and the trembling expectation at what was about to come.

“And so the world gets what it deserves.”