Tokyo Literary Masters: Starting from the Late 1980s

Chapter 198 The First Person to Ask for Help

In the days following the publication of the "Declaration of the League of Free Writers," the entire Tokyo literary scene was like water struck by a boulder, with ripples spreading outwards in concentric circles.

Kenzaburo Oe was surrounded by reporters at the entrance to his lecture.

Ryu Murakami's column was widely reprinted by major newspapers.

Kobo Abe even gave a brief television interview, something that was unprecedented for him.

Facing the camera, this usually aloof master left only one sentence: "Writing should never be done on one's knees."

The next day, the phrase was printed on posters and plastered in the windows of countless independent bookstores across Japan.

Unlike the hustle and bustle outside, Kitahara Iwa's apartment remained quiet.

The off-key karaoke singing and the drinking party in Minami Aoyama acted as a gentle buffer, subtly separating Kitahara Iwa from "The Long Road".

Although Kitahara Iwa is still immersed in the story, he no longer lets himself suffocate in the ashes along with the characters in the book, as he did before.

When Kitahara Iwa sat back down at his desk and unscrewed his pen, his emotions had completely settled down.

On the desk, the manuscript of "The Long Road" is stacked very thick.

Over the past few weeks, the father and son he depicted have been pushing a dilapidated shopping cart through burnt-out cities, desolate forests, and wastelands utterly abandoned by humanity.

Now, they are almost at the end of the road.

Kitahara Iwa looked at the blank manuscript paper in front of him.

He knew very well that this story could not offer a bright ending, because that world had long since lost its sun.

But it also cannot be left with only a lifeless silence.

If the purpose of this book is merely to depict despair to its extreme, then it loses its meaning for readers.

This work is not about death itself, but about what people can give to those who survive in this long dead end.

Outside the window, the summer rain pattered against the glass.

Kitahara Iwa sat at his desk, calmly writing towards the final conclusion.

He wrote that the father and son finally reached the long-awaited shore.

But the sea wasn't blue; it was a despairing gray, just like the sky.

Gray waves crashed onto the beach, carrying a bone-chilling salty smell. Only dead fish bones and rotten debris were scattered on the shore.

The long and cruel journey, hunger, and disease finally brought my father to the end.

On his deathbed, he handed his son a revolver with only one bullet left.

For most of the book, this bullet feels like a cold iron pressing on the reader's heart.

Because it is both the last line of defense and the last way out.

Kitahara Iwa's pen paused for a moment here.

He didn't let his father say too much, because people in the wasteland couldn't deliver long, rambling last words.

The father simply told his child, in short, clumsy words, to keep going south and to "carry fire."

When the boy cried and asked, "Where is the fire?", his father told him, "It's in your heart, it's always been there."

Kitahara Iwa continued writing.

After his father died, the boy stayed on the gray beach with the body for three whole days.

The world is so vast that it seems no one will hear his cries anymore.

His only support collapsed at the end of the long road, and ahead lay only endless desolation.

In this suffocating isolation, Kitahara Iwa's pen paused briefly on the paper before scribbling away again.

He didn't let the boy wait alone in the wasteland forever.

On the next line of the manuscript, Kitahara Iwao wrote unhurriedly: Another family has appeared.

The man was wearing a worn-out yellow and black ski jacket, and his face was covered in dust and frost from his long journey.

But he didn't pounce on the boy to snatch the items from the shopping cart, nor did he treat the boy, who had lost his protector, as prey.

The boy, holding a pistol ready to end his life at any moment, asked through the ashes in the wind, "Are you good people?"

The man looked at him and calmly replied, "Yes."

"You don't eat people?"

"No, we would never eat people."

Do you have children?

"Yes, there is one boy and one girl."

After confirming all the harsh realities of survival, the boy hesitated for a long time before finally asking the most crucial and central question in the entire book: "Do you also carry fire?"

The man was slightly surprised when he heard this, but looking into the boy's clear yet wary eyes, he finally gave the promise his father had risked his life for: "Yes, we'll take him."

As Kitahara Iwatsu wrote this, the study was so quiet that only the soft sound of raindrops tapping on the glass could be heard.

This is not a fairytale happy ending; the old world can never be returned to, and the road ahead is still filled with coldness and danger.

But the appearance of this family left a faint spark at the end of the book.

It was small enough to prove that the father's death was not meaningless.

In this cannibalistic world, there are still people who uphold the bottom line of not eating people.

At the very end of the novel, Kitahara Iwao did not continue writing about the wasteland, but instead left a long flashback.

The poem describes a stream in a deep valley and a mountain trout with a maze-like pattern on its back.

The water holds hidden scenes that can never be restored.

When the last period was placed, the ink on the manuscript paper was not yet completely dry.

Rainwater streamed down the glass outside the window, blurring the neon lights of the distant city into a hazy glow.

Kitahara Iwa gently put down his pen, rubbing his aching fingers. The long hours spent hunched over his desk had made his back stiff and numb.

He picked up the half-cold glass of water from the table and drank it all in one gulp. Then he stood up, rubbed his sore neck, and walked to the window.

It was raining heavily on the street.

In order to save costs, the neon signs of office buildings and shops in the distance, which used to be brightly lit all night, have now mostly gone dark, and the whole city exudes a sense of desolation and quiet during an economic recession.

Looking at this night view, Kitahara Iwa felt very calm.

He was well aware that "The Long Road" was not the kind of book that could deliver the most exhilarating impact to readers, like "The Collapsing Tower".

This is just a book written for ordinary people.

He asked for nothing more than that when a middle-aged man who had just lost his job, or a young man driven to the brink of despair by debt, opened this book in the dead of night with nowhere to retreat, he could use the faint sparks in the book to get through the coldest night before him.

The afternoon after "The Long Road" was completed, an editor from Shinchosha sent me a letter with a solemn expression.

"The envelope was addressed to the Free Writers' League."

"7

"Because no specific mailing address was left, the post office delivered it directly to our switchboard. The intern who was opening the mail was terrified and didn't dare to say anything, so she handed it over to me."

Kitahara Iwa accepted the thin envelope.

The edges of the envelope were frayed from being kneaded by hand sweat or some other liquid, and the postmark was blurry, but it was vaguely recognizable that it came from a remote place.

Kitahara Iwa pulled out the letter and began to read it, only to discover that it was no ordinary reader's letter at all.

The handwriting on the letter was initially quite neat. The writer introduced himself as Yusuke Morita, 27 years old, a former social affairs reporter for a local tabloid, who had also submitted short stories to doujinshi (fan-made comics magazines).

But as the narrative unfolds, the handwriting begins to visibly flutter and distort, even allowing the reader to directly perceive the violent trembling of the writer as they grip the pen.

Through those incoherent and disordered sentences, the outline of a young man driven to the edge of a cliff by tyranny truly emerges.

After the bubble burst, Yusuke Morita secretly investigated a local housing finance company called "Hokuriku Housing Finance".

He witnessed firsthand how those well-dressed, respectable people with "asset management consultant" printed on their business cards were doing things even more heinous than the Yakuza: smashing doors in the middle of the night, splashing red paint on doors, ambushing debtors' children on the way to school, and even forcing middle-aged men who had just lost their jobs and were desperate to sign high-interest loan agreements with additional guarantees, squandering even their elderly parents' savings for their funerals in the countryside.

Following the clues, Yusuke Morita uncovered an incredibly filthy secret.

Behind these thuggish debt collectors is actually a local branch of a major bank secretly providing support.

The banks, which are high and mighty, want to squeeze every last drop of blood from debtors to cover bad debts, but they don't want to tarnish their respectable reputation. So they comfortably keep a group of "white gloves" who do the dirty work for them in the dark.

Outraged, Yusuke Morita wrote an in-depth report titled "Who's Knocking on the Bank's Door?"

However, before the article was even published, he was swiftly dismissed by the newspaper for "violations of interview procedures."

The following day, Hokuriku Housing Finance sent him a lawyer's letter, demanding that he hand over all interview materials and issue a public apology, or face a defamation claim of up to 50 million yen.

Late on the third night, his front door was splashed with glaring red paint, and in the center were two threatening words written in black paint: "Shut up."

"I can't find any work—no newspaper dares to take this story. The victim's family members who had agreed to testify were so frightened that they moved away overnight."

"The bank's legal department called me privately and told me that if I dared to leak even a single page of the document, I would be stuck with a mountain of debt for the rest of my life."

Kitahara Iwa's gaze fell on the bottom of the letter.

On these few lines of almost illegible pleas for help, the paper was smeared with large clumps of water, and the ink had become a mess.

He couldn't tell whether it was the rain that the desperate young reporter got wet while mailing the letter, or the tears that fell onto the paper while writing the letter.

"Teacher Kitahara, I don't know if this letter will ever reach you, and I don't know if I've done something wrong—"

At the end of the letter, those few lines had completely lost their original structure, like a person's final convulsions in despair: "I just feel that if even this kind of thing can't be written, then what's the point of journalists and writers—I can't hold on any longer. If the Free Writers' Alliance really exists, please save those who come after."

At 10 p.m. that night, a small meeting room of Shincho-sha was filled with smoke.

The first impromptu meeting of the Free Writers' League was held here overnight.

Only a few people arrived after receiving Kitahara Iwao's call: Kenzaburo Oe, Ryu Murakami, and Haruki Murakami.

Kobo Abe was unable to attend due to a relapse of his old illness, but he sent a brief message through his assistant: "Do what you think is right, count me in."

The photocopies sent by Yusuke Morita were placed in the center of the conference table, the paper covered in the grayish-black ink of cheap photocopying.

All eyes in the room were on this. Everyone knew that this was not a document, but a life handed out from the abyss.

The victim's bloodstained statement, a photo of a security door splattered with red paint, a forcibly concealed financial transaction record, and a lawyer's letter at the top bearing the claim of "50 million yen".

Murakami Ryu casually flipped through two pages, and his face was already so gloomy it looked like it was about to drip water.

"These bastards in suits, they really don't have any new tricks up their sleeves."

Murakami Ryu slammed the lawyer's letter heavily on the table, gritted his teeth and sneered, "First, we'll corner them into a corner where they're socially dead, then we'll sew their mouths shut with tens of millions of dollars in debt."

Haruki Murakami, who had been silent all along, stared at the photo of the door panel that had been splashed with red paint for a long time.

"Please save those who come after us—"

Haruki Murakami repeated the last sentence of the letter in a low voice, his tone not revealing intense anger, but rather a heavy, oppressive feeling.

These words were like an invisible needle, precisely piercing the nerves of everyone present.

This was not just a cry for help, but a direct questioning of the meaning of the alliance's existence. If they ignored this letter, the grand declaration published in the Asahi Shimbun would become the biggest joke in all of Japan.

Kenzaburo Oe looked up at Kitahara Iwa: "Iwa-kun, this is the first letter."

Kitahara Iwa met Oe Kenzaburo's gaze and nodded, saying, "For a 27-year-old local tabloid reporter, 50 million yen is nothing at all a defamation claim."

"This is the bank using legitimate legal procedures to calculate the cost of an ordinary person's social death with extreme precision. They never expected to get the money; they are simply using this absolutely unpayable debt to completely cut off a young person's path to survival."

Kitahara Iwa took a deep breath and said, "The 'Spark' Fund will be launched immediately tonight."

This special reserve, which was just established at the Nanqingshan banquet, was cobbled together by several core writers within the alliance using their publishing taxes.

Its purpose is to cover the exorbitant legal fees and living expenses for young creators who are besieged by capital or power for writing the truth in this cannibalistic society.

As Kitahara Iwao finished speaking, Oe Kenzaburo carefully gathered the scattered financial statements on the table and then said, "Leave the legal and investigation matters to me."

"I will contact the top legal team in Tokyo that specializes in defamation lawsuits and have them rush to Hokuriku overnight to take over the case."

"At the same time, hire several top-notch independent accountants to thoroughly uncover the financial chains behind this residential real estate agency and that big bank. All expenses will be paid from the fund."

Moreover, this literary giant raised his head, his eyes revealing an undeniable determination: "I'll make a few more transoceanic calls later to contact media friends in London and Paris."

"The systemic scandal of Japan's financial system condoning violent debt collection is a topic that will be of great interest to overseas media."

"Leave the domestic pen holders to me."

Murakami Ryu took out a cigarette, lit it, and said with a cold, hard look in his eyes, "I'll write about this in my column tomorrow, without blurring out the names of the banks and executives involved."

"Don't they like to use the Ministry of Justice to scare young people? I'd like to see if they dare to sue me too."

Amidst the swift division of labor, Haruki Murakami took a deep breath and said, "Before that, we need to find Yusuke Morita."

"No matter what it takes, contact the station, the hotel, or his former colleagues—we must find him immediately. Don't let him be alone now."

Everyone suddenly woke up at that moment.

A young man who wrote in a letter, "I can't take it anymore," faced with a huge debt of fifty million and threats from the underworld, might jump off a high-rise building at any moment on this rainy night.

Without uttering a single unnecessary word, Kitahara Iwa stood up, strode to the corner of the room, and picked up the landline receiver.

Instead of relying on the local police, he called the late-night duty office of Shinchosha directly, and then dialed the number of a senior executive at Kadokawa Shoten.

With Kitahara Iwa's forceful intervention, the two publishing giants' vast local distribution networks and resident correspondents were mobilized overnight.

Several internal dedicated lines were urgently requisitioned, and countless urgent calls were made from Tokyo, spreading like a giant net to every corner of the Hokuriku region.

The bookstore's distribution channels, local branch reporters, and even the newspaper logistics lines that were still operating late at night were all mobilized on this rainy night, just to find a complete stranger's name.

These three hours felt incredibly long.

None of the people in the meeting room left, and the cigarette butts in the ashtray kept piling up.

Until one o'clock in the morning, after countless frustrating busy signals and deadlocks, Kitahara Iwatsu finally heard a definite echo from the receiver he was tightly gripping.

Yusuke Morita, driven to the brink of collapse by a massive debt of fifty million yen and threats, was pulled back from the storm by local staff members urgently contacted by two publishing houses on the edge of the rooftop of a cheap capsule hotel.