Prologue

It had been nothing but a troublesome life.

As I drove along the mountain road toward the campground, I looked back on the path of my life so far and suddenly thought that.

I worked and worked and kept working until I finally broke my body and resigned.

And then I was treated like a nuisance for “causing the company trouble,” and I quit as if I were being chased out……

I heard it just before I left, but there had been an illegal, behind-the-scenes top-down order that said even if the person wanted to quit, they were absolutely not to be allowed to.

Because of that, they wouldn’t let me quit until I was violently broken down, and I ended up leaving the company in a state where I was practically beyond recovery.

This wasn’t a novel gimmick—this was completely nonfiction.

Even if a major corporation does something that cowardly and illegal, in Japan they aren’t punished at all.

That was why I was driven that far.

There were tens of thousands of people like that in the world.

It was a murderous, slave-labor top-down order that violated the Japanese Constitution’s “freedom of occupational choice,” and the Labor Standards Act, among other things.

Protect Article 9 of the Constitution?

Don’t make me laugh.

The United States—who forced Japan into a hellish quagmire war by shoving that piece of trash called the Hull Note in Japan’s face for its own convenience—built laws on the rotten-hearted occupation constitution it imposed, and there wasn’t a single reason anywhere in Japan to “respect” that kind of law.

At the very least, major corporations never had even a shred of intention to follow it from the start.

To be thorough about it, the company had even imposed a gag order.

Well, if it got out, the media would savage them, the president would get arrested, the stock price would keep falling, and if things went badly the stock would be sent to a supervised post (a stock graveyard just before delisting), so of course they’d work hard to keep that kind of major legal violation from being exposed.

It wouldn’t just be “in the newspapers”—their wrongdoing would spread overseas through TV and the internet.

In particular, in Europe and the U.S., things that ignore human rights are intensely hated, so if it became an international scandal, they’d lose those markets, and all the factories over there would be shut down.

The rotten company I worked for had quite a few factories and offices over in that direction.

But even with a gag order in place, there were still people who would let something slip.

Especially inside the company.

That person casually let it slip and said this to me.

“Huh!? You actually managed to get the resignation paperwork!? I couldn’t believe it. Even though the company order was ‘Don’t let anyone resign because we’re going to use every employee until they’re used up—whether they break down or not, even if they die, don’t let them quit.’ Ah! O-oh no—!”

That’s what they were saying.

The fact that all of this was completely nonfiction from the author was what makes it truly maddening.

It’s the kind of thing people on the internet call an “XX Federation plan to enslave humanity.”

In reality, plenty of people had died, too.

Back when I was still an active employee at an XX Federation company, if I found that kind of over-the-top phrase on an anonymous forum, I used to laugh my head off over drinks and mock it to death—but now……

The guy who leaked it to me was also my age, someone I’d known for years, someone I was really close with.

We were both mid-career hires, too.

Thanks to that, it hit me even harder.

Without thinking, we both drooped in silence.

That was probably why he let it slip to me, but—

Even someone like that was bound by an extraordinary rule: it had to be kept secret even from close friends.

That was what this “behind-the-scenes top-down” of the XX Federation companies was.

Whether that was only the story of that company, or whether it was the same everywhere across other XX Federation companies too, someone like me—already shoved into the corner of society—has no way of knowing anymore.

There were probably countless other illegal “behind-the-scenes top-down” orders out there that I didn’t even know about.

Japan really was a society with a deeply nasty island mentality.

That’s why “bullying” was built into the basic structure of Japanese society.

Foreigners who get jobs in Japan apparently say, more often than not, that they never want to work in Japan again.

Even in the past, when a company vanished after making the news for serious legal violations, there were cases where a gag order had been imposed.

It was only because the gag order wasn’t kept that they were erased from society and disappeared.

In big companies, there are idiotic supervisor-type employees who shout in pre-shift meetings things like, “Part-timers are employees too, so work with sincerity, work and work until you die, and you also have a duty of confidentiality about the illegal things the company is doing,” but there’s no way something that convenient could ever be true.

If anything, hearing that makes the part-timers sick of it, and their hearts tilt toward leaking it on purpose.

Ever since I was young, I’d heard so many exhausting stories through part-time-worker word of mouth.

Back then the internet didn’t exist, so things didn’t leak and spread everywhere so easily.

In worse cases, after being forced to swear loyalty and worked to the bone, someone got so furious at being illegally fired mid-contract (also illegal) just because the economy was “a little bad,” that they finally crossed the line and stepped into the territory of a fake bomb threat call (a perfectly embarrassing nonfiction police case).

Both sides were awful in their own way……

Give it a rest.

Even I thought that was going too far, but—

It had been a worst-of-the-worst company where it was almost inevitable that a part-timer would end up like that, so all the full-time employees just nodded along like, “Yeah, I get it.”

Of course, even after that happened, the company didn’t stop the factory operations at the announced time that day (lol).

Truly, truly troubling nonfiction.

Employees blown to bits with nobody to collect the bodies—was that it?

It was ridiculous.

Everything was.

Behind-the-scenes top-down, huh.

Even though it was an illegal directive that was only to be known by people above—people in positions of management—and not to be shared with ranks that couldn’t “take responsibility” for its contents, the people holding it still ended up telling subordinates they trusted, as if their consciences pricked them and it weighed too heavily on them.

And then those subordinates would leak it little by little to other people.

That’s just how humans are.

You can’t put a door on a person’s mouth.

It was that unbearable of a thing.

Whether it was human conscience, or the crushing guilt of doing something illegal, corporate crime secrets always leak out into the world.

And then someone who isn’t even in the responsible class slips up, like that.

For someone like me—left in tatters as a victim of that illegal directive—hearing it only made me sick of it.

Hearing it changed nothing, and my body, broken down to the level of the skeleton, would never return to health (nonfiction).

The labor office came often for workers’ comp matters and could easily see through that level of thing, but maybe it was a hassle—they looked the other way.

The police probably pretended not to know, too.

Especially in a rural town like that.

Well, I guess that’s how it is.

To government officials, it doesn’t matter who dies.

I can’t write too much, but because of that, many people died.

There was even a pitiful person who died at fifty-five—someone who was supposed to attend the pension briefing that day—whose obituary was printed on a union flyer handed out on the day of the briefing.

And sometimes, because it simply wasn’t a day when union flyers were distributed, even if a coworker in the same factory died suddenly, the obituary wouldn’t even appear on the union flyer.

That, even I found nauseating.

After all, that person was on the line I was responsible for.

When I quit, there was someone who, with a face that looked half about to cry, said this to me at the very end.

He was the kind of earnest, conscientious person you could truly trust as a human being, and he worked as an on-site supervisor.

“Please! Go to the labor office and report what the company is doing!”

At the time, even my mind was in shambles and other people’s words barely sank in, so I could only have a vague exchange with him, but I still remember his sincere words and expression even now, in one way or another (nonfiction).

Even if you told the labor office, nothing would come of it.

No matter what I said, neither the labor office nor the police would move.

All that would happen is they’d threaten me, and I’d just suffer another psychological blow—an enormous loss.

Was he still doing okay now?

That kind of person would be bullied even more as he got older in a company like that, so I can’t help worrying.

If you couldn’t get promoted, the last few years before retirement were spent being thrown into physically brutal workplaces on purpose, to be used up and bullied—and a company like that usually didn’t promote people with good natures who couldn’t bring themselves to bully their subordinates to the limit.

Those conscientious “good people” got a brutally unfair deal.

It was a disgusting company where only the sly, the ones who tripped others up, benefited.

So it kept mutating into an even worse company.

Naturally, the people who sacrificed others and climbed the ladder were truly disgusting people.

They were hated like venomous snakes even by regular employees and temps—and even by the shipping companies and business partners.

Maybe I was still one of the lucky ones, just for getting out alive.

I can’t even count how many didn’t get out alive and set off for the slope that leads to the underworld.

Because you can’t distinguish it from “real” natural illness.

Everything was treated as a simple death by illness.

Just like North Korea’s starvation deaths, it was something forbidden—something the nation must never count, something that must never officially exist.

That’s the miserable true nature of the country called Japan.

Even as I drove like this, fragments of that past—things that snagged inside my heart—would sometimes peek out.

It wasn’t quite what you’d call a flashback.

It was baggage I carried in my heart—something I could only describe as fragments, or a lingering snag—something I’d have to drag along until the moment I died.

No, it was nothing more than a thorn stuck in my heart.

Sometimes the wound where it stayed embedded would seep a thin trickle of blood.

With a body like this, I couldn’t go out to work, so I stayed shut in and slowly ate through the little savings I had.

It was mentally brutal, too, so I felt resistance to going back to work.

For a long time I didn’t even have health insurance, so I couldn’t take care of my body—and now my body is broken down everywhere.

Nothing good ever happened.

I was truly fortunate that I was single and had no family.

I was long past fifty, and there was nothing left I had to do.

Seven years had passed since I resigned.

I was a man with nothing left but to die, and yet, by some twist of fate, I won 800 million yen in the lottery.

But even that came too late.

My body wasn’t one I could use for chasing women anymore, and traveling overseas sounded exhausting, so I didn’t want to go.

At best, I could indulge a little in food and drink.

Maybe because my body was broken, alcohol didn’t taste as good as it used to.

Still, my car was old, so I replaced it with one I’d been a little curious about.

An off-road model from T Company.

It was a serious four-wheel-drive off-roader with switchable two-wheel drive and part-time 4WD, a transfer case with high/low 4WD switching, and a differential lock.

It also had other special off-road equipment, and I found its oddly distinctive character appealing.

Because it was so specialized, ordinary people had no interest, it never became a huge seller, and it was near the end of production—but orders from enthusiasts like me never stopped, so at least domestically it continued to be sold by the skin of its teeth.

It had been sold for the U.S. market ten years ago, and domestically it had been six years since release, I guess.

A fading model on the verge of being cut—perfect for a pathetic, wretched man like me.

We were both outcasts living in the shadows.

Let’s get along for the rest of our lives, together.

When I buy a car, I tend to drive it for a long time—until it’s practically completely broken and repairs are impossible.

This one looked tough, so I figured I could drive it for a long time.

It was a ladder-frame off-roader from a manufacturer famous worldwide for making vehicles that don’t break.

It was already late November, in the depths of late autumn.

A season you could practically call the arrival of winter.

I wondered what I was thinking, coming in a season like this, but since I’d gone through the trouble of getting this car, I decided to enjoy an auto-campground.

Even if you didn’t pitch a tent, they had rental bungalows you could stay in, with heating and loaner bedding.

I planned to bring in various gear and savor the “camp” feeling.

When I was younger, I used to dabble in this kind of thing a little.

On the day of the trip, I drove my way along narrow mountain roads in a big-bodied vehicle nearly 190 centimeters wide and somehow arrived at the campground.

I’d gotten tired from driving mountain roads I wasn’t used to.

Honestly, the car was too wide for those narrow roads.

It was the first time in my life I’d bought a vehicle this big.

Lately, I hadn’t gone on any long trips at all.

Since quitting the company, I hadn’t once driven more than twenty kilometers round-trip.

Near the end of my company days, just driving about thirty minutes to work left me slumped in the car, drained.

Every morning I couldn’t move for an hour afterward.

During lunch breaks I would be slumped in the car again.

There was no way I could have kept working in that state, and yet I was forced into a workplace with work that was multiple times more physically demanding (this too, naturally, is the author’s nonfiction).

It was like being told to die.

I felt such despair I thought I’d fall into the abyss.

It was the kind of company that would use a half-broken machine that was supposed to be depreciated in seven years by grinding it down for over twenty years—until parts ran out and, in the end, it couldn’t even be repaired.

Naturally, humans were treated the same way, with the same mindset.

“Humans are free if you just go buy them.”

As long as companies don’t abandon that long-standing, far-too-much human-trafficking way of thinking, Japanese society will never change.

And if it changes, it will absolutely be in an even worse direction.

The idea that there “won’t be enough workers” because of the falling birthrate has nothing to do with Japanese corporations.

After arriving, I checked in right away and took a look at the camp shop.

They sold snacks, instant foods, and simple camping supplies.

The prices were pretty high.

Well, that was normal in a place like this.

Normally I would never buy that kind of thing, but—

It bothered me.

For some reason, what they were selling bothered me intensely.

My eyes stuck to them and wouldn’t let go.

It felt like my entire body was packed with lead—none of it would move.

I couldn’t stand the thought of not buying these items.

There was absolutely no option where I didn’t buy these fine goods.

I couldn’t think about anything else.

If I didn’t buy them, I couldn’t take a single step from here.

From the depths of my body, a maddening impulse surged up—violent, pushing upward, almost like it was going to burst out of me.

Even standing there, I couldn’t move, and all I could do was cling to the counter and endure an indescribable pressure welling up from deep within my body.

Apparently it was a sensation other people could never understand.

It was something you could never convey to others with words.

I learned that all too well from readers’ reactions, too.

“What in the world does that even mean? I don’t understand if you say it like that!” someone shouted at full force, in a way that conveyed even a sense of despair (nonfiction).

Thanks for trying so desperately to understand it (a belated apology).

You couldn’t use credit cards here, but I had about 500,000 yen in cash in my wallet.

This was probably my ability—the thing I called the “Seventh Sense”—at work.

Strictly speaking, it wasn’t “my own ability,” either.

That was how I felt: an overwhelming, overpowering compulsion to purchase the goods that were there.

I’d been dealing with this “Seventh Sense” for almost thirty years now.

I’d learned it in my bones: there wasn’t a single good thing that came from resisting that sensation.

So I had no choice—I decided to buy up the products as the impulse demanded.

I had money.

There was no need to pinch pennies.

This kind of thing had happened plenty of times before.

And even if I didn’t understand it, experience had taught me it was better to obey this sensation.

It was a strange ability—one where you “just know, without logic.”

Depending on the situation, it could become an ability bordering on omniscience.

I can’t even count how many times someone screamed, “Why do you know something like that!?” (nonfiction).

Well, screaming was pointless.

That’s just what it was.

If I ignored it, it would always turn into something unbelievable, and I’d be forced into intense regret (my memories are too bitter—also nonfiction).

Bitter mental reels of it played over and over.

I was still alive, though.

Snack foods, cup noodles, and other food and sweets.

Cup soups and drinks like oolong tea.

Mosquito coils, insect repellent spray, insecticide—camping staples.

Retort-pouch meals and seasonings.

And they had around twenty bottles of wine for sale, so I bought every kind in bulk, too.

Single-serve cups of sake, and even refrigerated and frozen goods like milk, ice, and ice cream.

I thought, what am I doing buying things that will melt at room temperature right now, but the compulsion was far too strong to suppress.

With no choice, I bought ice and shoved it in together with everything else.

A violent, powerful impulse—a maddening yearning—shot through my body.

It drove me forward.

As if something invisible behind me were pushing me.

I was already half hunched over.

“Guh… what is this?

It’s been a while since I’ve had one this intense.

What in the world was about to happen?

Was there going to be a huge earthquake here or something?”

It wasn’t something I’d had lately.

But sometimes, when I went along with this thing, I ran into unbelievably exciting experiences.

Lately I’d been shut in at home, so those chances had almost disappeared.

The buying compulsion still went on and on.

I bought dish soap, gas cartridges, batteries, charcoal, firewood, and more.

I even stocked up on the beer and juices sold in vending machines.

Even I found myself ridiculous, but the compulsion showed no sign of stopping.

Something pushed my back.

Pushed and pushed and pushed, driving me violently forward.

An overly intense impulse surged from my feet up through my whole body like a storm.

“Buy. Buy. Buy with everything you’ve got,” said “that thing inside me.”

That was what it felt like.

I even stocked up on individually packaged detergent and fabric softener for a washing machine.

I’d brought quite a lot with me already, but on top of that I also grabbed rental items from the campground—everything I could.

I’d planned ahead for the bedding set, heater, and the fire stand that required a reservation, so I received those.

And on top of that, I borrowed and borrowed and borrowed items you could rent immediately without reservations: a lantern, planks, a hot-water bottle, all kinds of cooking tools, an iron griddle, a stove, pots large and medium and small, and a cassette stove.

In the end, even though I had no intention of fishing, I even borrowed a full trout-fishing rod set from the fishing pond.

It wouldn’t stop.

I couldn’t stop it by my own will.

A maddening impulse that came crashing in.

My body moved on its own and did things on its own (I’m not writing this because it’s a novel—this is something that really happens in reality).

This, at least, was the usual pattern, so I gave up resisting.

I had enough cash on hand.

It was a phenomenon even I truly couldn’t explain.

I bought disposable barbecue grates, trash bags, and gas canisters in bulk, too.

What on earth was I thinking?

At this point, the car interior was packed full of stuff.

To be honest, I’d already pulled a big stunt at the convenience store before stopping here.

I’d replenished my cash by maxing out the daily ATM withdrawal limit to replace what I’d spent.

I thought the impulse had settled after that, but I was naive.

What the hell was this?

And yet, even after doing all that, I felt strangely no regret.

What was I even going to use this enormous pile of goods for, in a place like this?

At this point, I was starting to look forward to it.

And I knew it.

“These will definitely end up being used for something.”

And then, all of a sudden, I remembered something the Seventh Sense once told me.

“You will gain dreams and adventure and romance, wealth and honor. And at that time, you will……”

That being—the “Seventh Sense,” as I’d named it—had said that to me.

And together with it, I’d lived through many adventures that no one who spent their whole life as an ordinary salaryman would ever do.

If only I could have a life like that one more time.

Even as I thought that, I wasn’t that age anymore.

I couldn’t even drive long distances anymore.

Those days—real adventures, not fiction, that I ran through together with that being I called “Ikoma,” a being of the Seventh Sense (nonfiction).

The name “Ikoma” was the “true name” of that so-called Seventh Sense that the author truly named (nonfiction).

At twenty-six, when I gave it the name Ikoma, I never dreamed I’d end up sharing that name with so many unknown readers.

That was the strangest thing in the author’s life.

At this point, writing something like that into a novel was almost laughable.

But all of it was a forgotten past now.

The latter half of the verse Ikoma told me was about my own ruin—and then, the peace of my soul.

As for the first half, looking only at the result, it hadn’t been all that extraordinary.

But if I’d truly decided to go all-in, it could have become something incredible.

And yet I couldn’t grasp success with these hands.

It’s something common among Japanese people: I couldn’t wipe away the image of failure, and that made me fail.

As for the “ruin” part, unfortunately, it hit the mark in a big way.

When someone takes a corner on a motorcycle and looks at the guardrail instead of the exit—because they can’t fully wipe away their fear—they end up plunging right into the goal of ruin.

It was the same thing.

Still, I’d experienced many things that people who simply live ordinary lives never experience.

Which is to say, in the end, all I had left was to die, to vanish, and there was nothing left for me.

This was the remainder of my life: spending my days alone, blankly staring into the past.

Unfortunately, even this miserable state was the author’s nonfiction.

And that was why this story was born.

After that, I ate the gohei rice cakes I’d reserved (a local grilled rice cake on a stick, typically brushed with a rich walnut-based sauce).

They grilled them properly over charcoal here.

I even ordered two more to take home.

The buying impulse flared up again.

Seriously—what was I even going to use freshly grilled gohei rice cakes for?

With no choice, I took them to go.

These weren’t the tourist-packaged souvenirs you often see at Aichi’s attractions—these were charcoal-grilled ones with a delicious walnut sauce.

By the way, the campground in this story had a real-life model that actually exists deep in the mountains of Aichi Prefecture.

If you’re someone in Aichi who likes driving and camping, you might be able to guess where it was.

Around there, I feel like there were only about three campgrounds of this class, at most.

If you went past that, you’d already be heading toward Nagano.

Sadly, after the campground was renovated, that painstakingly made, delicious, freshly grilled gohei rice cake corner disappeared.

Hands together in prayer!

There were no other guests at the campground today, so this wide campground was mine alone.

And just as I pulled up to the bungalow and thought I’d unload the car, a thick, pure-white fog suddenly rolled in.

I sighed, and decided to wait in the car for it to clear.

But I’d never seen fog this thick.

It was dense like milk, and I couldn’t see even what was right in front of me.

The fog refused to clear, and my impatience started to rise, but moving around too much at times like this was dangerous.

There was no need to rush.

I’d come here planning to take it slow anyway.

And even after I got home, there was nothing I needed to do.

All I had left was to end up in a coffin someday, and be sent straight to a funeral hall—without even having a funeral—like a hermit who’d thrown the world away (the author’s sad nonfiction).

So I’d wait calmly.

I’d planned for two nights and three days, with plenty of time.

Still, what was I going to do with the massive amount of stuff I’d bought?

On that point, I could only shrug.

There was no point thinking about it now.

When I checked the smartphone I’d just bought, I frowned without thinking.

Unbelievably, there was no signal.

Seriously, in this day and age.

But maybe it wasn’t surprising this deep in the mountains where trees grew thick.

Aichi Prefecture was basically rural backwater territory to begin with.

The auto industry created plenty of jobs so the population was oddly large, but more than half of its already cramped area—relative to its population—was deep mountains.

Toyota City’s urban area was right up against the mountains, and lately bears had been appearing even in city zones, so in years when food was scarce you had to be careful—they might show up.

Apparently a bear had even been caught on a security camera.

I shrugged, gave up, and decided to listen to music on my phone.

But while listening, I eventually fell asleep.

……And then I had a strange dream.

For some reason, it felt like I was building a computer system myself.

Muttering “this, that, no, not that,” while fussing over it.

Panicking and repeating, “No time, no time.”

In the dream, I vaguely watched my own back and thought I looked like the rabbit from Alice in Wonderland.

Maybe a little over ten minutes passed?

When I woke up and looked around, the fog was gradually clearing.

I felt relieved.

All right—time to unload, I thought, and as I got out of the car, I felt a strange sense of wrongness.

“Huh? What is this…… am I in the middle of a forest?”

It was a campground in the mountains, so it had always been “kind of like a forest,” but it was supposed to be more open than this.

But now I was in the middle of a dense forest, and when I looked closely, the other bungalows that should have been next to me were gone!

All that existed was the bungalow I’d rented—and my car.

And when I looked down, for some reason I was standing on a small hill made of something like rubble.

Even the height of my viewpoint might have been part of what felt wrong.

Of course it would be.

At first I’d still been half asleep and didn’t really understand, but the ground underfoot also felt unstable.

When I looked closely, the ground where the bungalow and car sat was a different color from the surrounding ground.

And it looked as though only that patch had been torn away from the original earth.

What the hell was this?

I was utterly confused.

Uh—what?

I had no idea what had happened at all!

---

Around that time, back at the campground.

Because the bungalow’s power line had snapped, it affected the main management office as well, and when the manager came to check the scene, he went speechless.

Of the bungalow units, only the single one rented out today had vanished—foundation and all—as if it had been torn right out of the ground, and the guest who should have been there, along with his car, was gone.

Worse still, there was an enormous, grotesque hole—too unnatural to believe.

And the cut surface was perfectly smooth, as if it had been gouged out with a razor-sharp blade.

“What… in the world is this……”

The manager stood there, stunned, as if his heart had gone numb, but when he saw the snapped power line throwing sparks, he came back to himself and hurried toward the management building to contact the power company.