Memories of a Machine

Prologue

My cheek was throbbing. My face burned, yet my body was as cold as ice.

“Hey, can I kill you?!”

A sharp voice shook my eardrums.

I had to find the optimal solution, fast. This time, I had to run the best algorithm.

“I gave birth to you, so I’m free to kill you too, aren’t I?!”

The voice was so loud that the inside of my ears buzzed.

“Well, it cuts both ways, doesn’t it!” “Do you know how much you’ve jerked me around?”

Word after word was fired at me. I was about to exceed my tolerable overload.

“Hey!!”

Suddenly a dull blow struck my back. Grabbed by the collar, I was pressed against the wall. Heavy intimidation. There was madness in my mother’s eyes.

“If you’ve got a problem, then get out!!”

Even if I was told that, I had nowhere to go. What I should do, I did not know back then.

Chapter One: Choice

A small, flat insect crawled out from a gap in the tatami.

This was a cheap lodging house called the “Daini Hotel” — what they call a doya. A box just for sleeping, walls yellowed by cigarette smoke, a sharp, strange smell. It would be more accurate to say that I was a lodger in a home belonging to bedbugs and cockroaches.

Why am I here?

For the past few days, the same images had been looping in my head over and over. I felt like a doll left behind in front of a television. The forgotten body stayed neatly folded and did not move.

Come to think of it, every day had been like a state of emergency for as long as I could remember.

In class I would get caught up in a column in the textbook, and before I knew it the lesson was over. The teacher’s words reached my ears but scattered like mist before they could be processed as meaning. Three seconds after checking a date or a time, I had forgotten it.

I was bad at studying and bad at sports, and I was told I was useless at everything I did. Why am I so clumsy at things …

At the edge of a handout printed with an incomprehensible code, I drew a single line. The line could look like a ladder, or like a tightrope. Or perhaps it was a cane someone had left leaning there.

That line does not disappear. That line does not betray me. I draw the next line on the premise of the one before. On paper, the simple accumulation of actions appears as a clear form. There is no failure. No one is disappointed, and there is no need to hurry.

In this way an imaginary order took shape, and a sheet of arithmetic exercises turned into a strange maze.

As I went on through junior high and high school, drawing gradually became the only thread tying me to the world. Clinging to that thin thread, I came to think that the only way to erase the inferiority inside me was to create work that was not an imitation of someone else.

And so I dropped out of university after two years and decided to live as a painter. Whatever else, I was happy only while I was drawing, and almost all the rest of the time was pain. Then minimize the time of pain and maximize the time of happiness. That was the optimal solution I arrived at.

The theme of my work was humans made of machines. Its starting point was a fantasy I had held about myself since childhood. Unable to share feelings with others, perhaps I was a robot. If so, then the things I could not do well, and this loneliness, were not defects. It was all just how I had been specified …

I remember my mother mocking me and hitting me, but I have no memory of being indulged or praised by her.

Easily hurt by trivial things, convinced she had been attacked, looking down on someone. From early on I learned to read my mother’s face. But if I stayed close and tried to understand her suffering, she would be angry that I was “acting superior,” and if I chose silence, she would be angry that I “had nothing to say.” The cycle repeated without end.

My father, on the other hand, was someone who quietly withdrew from emotional scenes. He showed no malice; he was gentle, and he was simply there. He did not step into quarrels; he was the type to wait for the storm to pass. I liked the way he carried himself, but even when I needed him to help me, he was simply there.

After that I kept working as a painter while doing part-time jobs, but my sales were tiny. If I started looking for a regular job, I might not have time to paint. The optimal solution was nowhere to be found.

“I want to die …”

An unhealthy feeling crossed my mind.

No … I want to live.

A shabby light bulb was swaying slightly from side to side.

The two were probably two sides of the same coin. If I went on living as I was, there would be only pain. If I did not find a new place to belong, I would die. I was pressed to build human relationships outside my family.

It was around then that I began going to exhibitions and events. Each time I showed my face where people gathered, I came to know a few more people. And in the autumn of my second year as a painter, I met Himari.

From the day we first exchanged words we got along, and we talked about all sorts of things, from making art to love.

“Hmm? Isn’t that wrong?”

Himari said to me, laughing.

Himari and I rarely agreed, but strangely, it was comfortable. Drinking, comedians, vintage clothes, theater, self-published zines … Himari knew so many worlds I did not know, and everything was fresh. Before I knew it I was drawn to her.

When you become close, you begin to confide personal troubles. One day I made up my mind and told her about the situation at home.

“That’s … definitely not right.”

Himari said it in a tone more serious than usual.

Not right?

That had never occurred to me. If you grow up inside an abnormal system, the abnormal becomes the standard. Input from outside made me doubt my default settings for the first time. From then on, Himari listened and gave me advice as if it were her own problem.

Himari peeled away, one plate at a time, the armor I had built out of lies, and affirmed even the parts I thought were the ugliest. Her interventions were sometimes forceful, but for me that was exactly what made me truly glad.

Himari, too, had gone through a time of suffering in her relationship with her parents. Even though she did not tell me everything, I could feel her emotions painfully from her face as she spoke. Borrowing her knowledge, I made up my mind to leave that house.

It had now been three weeks since I escaped from my parents’ home. When I rushed into the ward office, I was first directed to a cheap lodging house called the “Daini Hotel.”

“Until your application to use a rehabilitation facility is accepted, you will need to live in this lodging house first.”

The ward officer’s voice plays back as precisely as a recording. A flat, monotonous pronunciation. Information transmitted without emotion. The same way I speak.

I could tell myself I should be grateful not to become homeless, and leave it at that, but I still had a feeling that a certain amount of endurance would be needed.

Cough! Cough! I heard someone coughing.

The sourish smell of the walls, the sound of water from a tap down the corridor. Right on the other side of the thin wall was the life of a stranger.

What was it that filled this room with such a grim atmosphere? There were probably several reasons, but above all, this was something I had decided for myself, so I would leave it there. I left the shabby light on and curled up small again. At least, I was no longer a character in “that house.” I had not simply run away; I had made a “choice” myself, in order to survive.

Chapter Two: Reorganization

Anxiety had become the normal state.

A pulsing body, anti-anxiety medicine that did not work, a feeling as if the skin all over my body were stinging.

Someone is … talking. I am kneeling formally, somehow tilted. Me? Who … ? Against the light, I cannot see the face.

The flickering was organic, the oxygen thin, crackling … asserting something …

There was a smell like hospital disinfectant. When I woke, I was somewhere I did not recognize.

Right — I had fallen back asleep. It had been a terrible dream. What kind of dream it was, the images receded at tremendous speed. Now I could no longer … remember it well.

When my application was accepted in May, I moved to a rehabilitation facility called “Shin-Yamazaki-so.”

“Well, um, this place is, well, mainly for single-person households that need support, and we provide living support like meals and baths, and support for independence toward returning to society, that sort of facility.”

A staff member read aloud the words from a stapled set of handouts.

The residents were relatively old, and many had criminal records. Even so, with a clean room, nutritionally balanced meals, baths and even a monthly haircut, it was an ideal environment for recuperation.

At Shin-Yamazaki-so there was a morning cleaning rota, and my assignment was the smoking room. It had a large window facing the road, and you could see toy cars running along four parallel lanes.

Lit by the morning sun, the toy cars flowed by, casting shadows at 45° to the lanes. The simple composition was beautiful. The self that felt the beauty was beautiful too. Looking at myself reflected in the window, I felt my face had changed a little from before.

Inside the facility, cut off from the flow of society, I fell into the illusion that time had stopped. Just as a word loses its meaning when cut from its context, I too, cut off from my former social relationships, drifted as a being that had lost its meaning.

For me, who had longed for unconditional love, this place offered its very lack of conditions in the form of loneliness. In a clean room where comfort and loneliness lived together, I painted. The machine-humans on the canvas were always expressionless. In a place cut off from human relationships, I kept painting myself longing to be human.

From somewhere came the smell of my father.

With thick fingers like a baseball glove, he would deftly carry rice crackers to his mouth and gulp down a low-malt beer. On the television in front of his eyes, some comedian was on. Wrinkles etched at the corners of his gentle eyes. I loved my gentle father.

Even if we call it abuse or a dysfunctional family, it is not as if there are only sad memories. Every family has its own life and memories, and I do not think it is something simple that can be judged in a single word.

I had fallen ill in body and mind from excessive suppression brought on by over-adaptation. Family, love, work. Looking back, I had over-adapted to all of them. If I try hard, it should work out. Someday there should be peace. I had been living a kind of fantasy like that. In the short term such fantasies created a sense of safety, but in the long term they eroded my mind.

The quiet days at Shin-Yamazaki-so were washing away my distorted perceptions little by little. Perhaps there is no real me anywhere. In this place where time seemed to have stopped, I was being freed even from the fantasy of a unified self.

I took a deep breath, as if stirring a soup of countless “I”s. From here on, would I be able to make the people dear to me happy? For that, I first had to accomplish the reorganization of myself.

Chapter Three: Human

The clock’s hands pointed to 8:15 p.m.

I began looking for a place in October, and from December I came to live in a rented apartment in Tokyo called “Corporas Yanagi.” Eight months since leaving home; it had been a long road. Not spacious, but a living space that was necessary and sufficient. Outside the window, everything was wrapped in the random lights given off by tower apartments.

Lately my whole body was heavy as lead, and I fell asleep regardless of whether it was day or night. I could no longer continue working as a painter. Or you could also say I had finally become able to allow myself to rest.

Perhaps because of the shallow sleep, I kept having anxious dreams. A year-end spring cleaning of memory, perhaps. What the dreams had in common each day was the repetition of restlessness and loss, and that it was all so staged. In short, it was my life itself. If this was supposed to be my life flashing before my eyes, it had no taste at all.

“Maybe I’ll be bedridden for the rest of my life. Then is there any value in a me who can’t paint?”

Suddenly such a question crossed my mind.

“Listen, why don’t you stop with that ‘rest of my life’ stuff? So are you saying that all the bedridden people in the world have no value?”

Immediately another one inside me answered.

“I think your condition is heading toward recovery.”

The psychiatrist’s words play back as precisely as a recording.

Like a flickering LED, ruminations appearing and disappearing. When I thought that taxes were being spent on me as I lay there repeating this meaningless dialogue, I felt I would be crushed by guilt.

“Is there any meaning in my being alive?”

I asked again.

“No meaning at all. You know that, don’t you?”

Someone inside me replied.

“But … I want to be of use to something …”

Something I could not hold back welled up inside me.

“To be thanked by someone, to recognize each other … just to be indulged … to be happy together … to … to be loved …”

My field of vision was warping and wobbling.

What am I doing in a place like this?

Where is this unfamiliar room?

Again, I began to want to die.

I wished someone would just kill me. If such a luxury came true, surely a happiness beyond anything else would envelop me. A pathological numbness slowly took control of my body.

The night gradually grew denser and heavier.

For a time, I wanted to be killed by Himari. If the day ever came when such a fantasy was carried out, it would without doubt be a perfect day.

I think the wish “I want to be killed” is probably close to the desire “I want to be loved.” To love is to interfere with the other, and that is, in a sense, an act that infringes on an individual’s freedom. Love may not be made up only of kindness and empathy; it may be a phenomenon that contains within it the violation of freedom.

I dreamed again.

It was a woman I had dated when I was a university student. She was an unstable person who would smile anxiously one moment and suddenly push people away the next. In a sense, you could say she was not unlike my mother.

And yet it was precisely her personality, with its contradictions, that drew me. It was as vivid as fireworks and had an overwhelming power to dominate.

Come to think of it, I had always loved senko hanabi — sparkler fireworks. Sometimes they felt to me like a symbol of life.

Perhaps I want to be dominated by an overwhelming presence. Or perhaps I want to dominate. Is it a longing for motherhood? No — rather, do I want to feel the omnipotence of dominating the other by making them think “I must dominate this one” … yes, just like a baby.

Two years after I began living at Corporas Yanagi, I married Himari.

While understanding each other’s instability, we supported each other when needed and respected each other. As always, Himari listened slowly to my words and then returned her own carefully. She faced my anxieties head-on. Every time I realized that she was an independent “individual,” entirely different from me, I felt gratitude and relief.

Meanwhile, during the time I had not been in contact with my mother, I had begun to nurture an easy fantasy in my head. Put simply, it was the fantasy that if my mother and I both calmed down, we could settle the mistakes of the past and meet again.

But when a reply came to the email I sent for the first time in a long while, on the occasion of my marriage, that fantasy of mine was mercilessly shattered.

Subject: Re: I got married　From: Mother

Thank you for your email.

It is so sudden that, honestly, part of my heart has not caught up, but first of all, congratulations. Between leaving home and getting the life you have now, I think you went through things so hard that Mother cannot imagine them. But all of us, including Mother, and Father too, have been suffering in the same way all along.

Mother has also developed depression and can no longer think through complicated things or act flexibly. I was always the type to let stress build up, but my stress after the pandemic began was considerable. The pain of not being able to see people, my relationship with Father, your leaving university.

I should not say this to you, but my wish to vanish grows stronger by the day, and my tears do not stop all day long.

You have a girlfriend with you now, don’t you? It may seem creepy for me to write this, but I have been seeing the two of you on social media.

I think having someone you can trust close by is the best thing for recovering your heart. Mother has no such place right now. I have talked to Father many times, but I think he is unable to understand.

Could we meet once and talk?

I do not mean to ask you to help me. I just want to meet again and talk properly. If things go on like this, I feel we will never meet again.

From Mother

As I read the message, a high-pitched ringing filled my ears and everything went distant. The scene in front of me lost its reality, like some unrelated footage.

Apparently I had been badly mistaken. All at once I felt a sense of loss, as if the twenty-odd years at my parents’ home had been a fiction. The quarrels, the anguish, the apologies I had thought had some meaning.

Now they had crumbled away like a sandcastle.

Suddenly something soft and warm enveloped me.

It was Himari’s scent.

“That must have been so hard …”

Himari was crying.

The surface of my thoughts grew slightly rough.

“It’s all right now … it’s all right … you did so well …”

At that moment, something made a sound in the deepest part of my chest.

What caused it, I did not know. Only, for that one instant, everyone inside me stopped.

When I came to, I was crying and crying in Himari’s arms, sobbing — just like a baby.

The plan for resuming my work as a painter is progressing smoothly. Preparations for a new place to live are also proceeding according to plan. There are no problems at all. Language assembles itself in my mind and defines my present self.

It’s all right.

I have grown close to Himari’s family, and I have slowly made more friends.

My head feels just a little lighter.

Apparently I have already made myself a new fantasy.

“You’re tougher than you look.”

One of those inside me is impressed with me.

But at the same time, I was a little disillusioned — with a mental strength so weak it cannot maintain stability without leaping at such a simple fantasy, and with a sensitivity so dull that it accepts this as toughness.

Epilogue

The set of hand-held fireworks, which we had finally found after going to three convenience stores, was nearly finished. In the end, the plain sparklers were the last ones left.

Himari’s sparkler was crackling.

Surely, none of it has any meaning. It was just so beautiful, and as I gazed at it absently, I quietly cried.