The Benefactor of Kabukichō by Víctor David Manzo Ozeda
In Tokyo's entertainment district, a wealthy man passes the pachinko parlour every day and gives money to addicts.
There is a Japanese proverb that says: Nana korobi ya oki. Fall seven times, stand up eight. It's the kind of phrase that appears on motivational posters, in graduation speeches, on those ceramic mugs people buy at airports when they don't know what else to give. What the proverb doesn't mention - what no motivational poster dares to say - is what happens when someone helps you up every time you fall. What happens when that outstretched hand is not salvation, but a sentence.
Kenji Nakamura knew. He knew with the clarity of a scientist and the patience of a sculptor. Because Kenji Nakamura had turned that help into an art, into a science, into something that had no name in any language but which he, in the privacy of his mind, called simply: the experiment.
Kabukichō, Tokyo. Midnight.
Asia's largest entertainment district never sleeps, but it has different versions of itself depending on the hour. At eight in the evening, it's tourists and salarymen looking for izakayas where they can forget the day. At eleven, it's youths and hostesses and that particular buzz of people who still hope the night has something good in store for them. But at one in the morning, when the last trains have already departed and only those with nowhere to go remain, Kabukichō shows its true face.
It was at that hour when Kenji would go out for a walk.
He was fifty-three years old, though he looked younger. He always dressed impeccably: dark Western-cut suits, white shirts without ties, Italian shoes that gleamed under the neon lights. He looked like a successful businessman, an executive of some corporation whose name no one can pronounce, the kind of man taxicab drivers treat with instinctive deference.
No one would have guessed that Kenji didn't work. That he hadn't worked in fifteen years. That he lived off a considerable inheritance left by a father who had made a fortune in real estate during the eighties bubble and who had had the wisdom, or the luck, to sell everything before it burst.
No one would have guessed, either, what Kenji did with his nights.
He walked through Kabukichō with a specific purpose, following a route he had perfected over the years. He passed by the pachinko parlors - those cathedrals of noise where thousands of silver ball bearings fall in endless cascades, where machines blink with promises of fortune and people sit for hours, days, entire lifetimes, feeding a hope that statistics refute. He didn't go in. He never went in. The interior didn't interest him.
What interested him was outside.
The first time had been an accident. Or so Kenji told himself, though years had taught him that accidents are just patterns we haven't recognized yet.
It was 2007, and Kenji had just inherited. He was walking through Kabukichō aimlessly, trying to process the death of a father he barely knew, when he saw him: a man in his forties, sitting on the curb in front of a pachinko parlor, crying.
It wasn't a dramatic cry. It was worse: it was that silent, contained weeping of someone who no longer has the energy even to sob. The man's shoulders were slumped, and he had the look of someone who has just lost something they can never get back.
Kenji stopped. Not out of compassion - compassion was an emotion he had never quite understood - but out of curiosity. There was something fascinating about this broken man, something Kenji couldn't name but that drew him in like a moth to a flame.
"How much did you lose?" he asked, surprising himself.
The man looked up. His eyes were bloodshot, wearing that expression of shame addicts have when they are discovered.
"Everything," he said. "Three hundred thousand yen. This month's salary. The money for my daughter's school."
Kenji nodded. Not with sympathy, but with something resembling scientific interest. He wondered what would happen if he gave that money back. Not as charity, but as... what? An experiment? A whim? A way to see what the man would do with a second chance?
He pulled out his wallet - back then he still used cash, before mobile payments changed everything - and counted out three hundred thousand yen. He placed them in the man's hand.
"Try again," he said.
The man looked at him, uncomprehending.
"What?"
"Try again. You have another chance."
And he left, without waiting for an answer, without leaving a name or an explanation.
That night, Kenji slept better than he had in years. He had found something. He didn't know what, exactly, but he knew he wanted more.
A week later, he returned to the same pachinko parlor. He didn't expect to find the man - Tokyo has fourteen million inhabitants; the odds of crossing paths twice with the same person are astronomically low. But there he was. On the same curb. Crying in the same way.
This time he had lost four hundred thousand.
Kenji gave him four hundred thousand.
"Try again," he said, and left.
The third week, the man had lost five hundred thousand. The fourth, six hundred. The fifth, the man was not on the curb. Kenji found him in a nearby alley, unconscious, with an empty bottle of sake and a pill bottle that, fortunately or unfortunately depending on how you look at it, he hadn't managed to open.
Kenji called an ambulance. He waited until they took him away. And then he went to his apartment in Shibuya, poured himself a whisky, and sat down to think.
The experiment had failed. The subject had destroyed himself too quickly, without giving time to observe the intermediate stages. It was like burning a book to see the ending: you missed the whole development.
He needed a better method.
The method, developed over the next fifteen years, was elegant in its simplicity.
First: selection. Not just any loser would do. Kenji looked for specific profiles: men (always men; women addicted to pachinko existed, but they tended to destroy themselves in less interesting, more private ways) between thirty and fifty years old, with signs of having a family, a job, a life to lose. Young people with no ties didn't interest him; they didn't have enough to risk. Old people didn't either; they had already lost too much, and the experiment became predictable.
Second: initial contact. Always outside the pachinko parlor, always after a significant loss, always with the same question: "How much did you lose?" And always with the same response: the exact amount, in cash, with the instruction to try again.
Third: follow-up. Kenji didn't just give the money and disappear. He came back. Week after week, sometimes night after night. Always with the exact amount. Always with the same words: "Try again." Consistency was important. It was important for the subject to know that help would always be there, that no matter how many times he fell, there would always be a hand to lift him up.
Because that was the trap, of course. The perfect trap, disguised as help.
In 2023, Kenji had three active subjects. That's what he called them in his mind: subjects. Not names, not stories, not people. Subjects.
Subject A was an accountant for a medium-sized company in Chiyoda. Forty-two years old, married, two children. He had started with losses of one hundred thousand yen; now he regularly lost half a million a week. His wife thought he had a mistress. Kenji knew this because Subject A talked while he cried, telling his life in disjointed fragments, confessions no one had asked for but that he needed to release.
Subject B was a software engineer. Thirty-eight years old, divorced, no children. This one was quieter, more controlled. He accepted the money with a nod of the head, almost formal, and returned to the pachinko parlor without a word. Kenji found him fascinating: it was like watching someone drown in slow motion, without screams, without fuss, just that quiet determination to sink deeper and deeper.
Subject C was the most recent. A primary school teacher from Nerima. Fifty-one years old, a widower. This one had cried the first time, but then he had stopped crying. Now he received the money with a smile that Kenji couldn't decipher. It was a smile that could be gratitude or madness or something in between.
All three had something in common: none had tried to refuse the money. None had asked who Kenji was, or why he did it. Addiction has that quality: it makes you incapable of questioning the source of the next fix. A heroin addict doesn't ask the dealer about his philosophical motivations. A gambler doesn't interrogate the person financing his destruction.
The notebook was the most important part of the experiment.
Kenji kept it in a safe in his apartment, along with legal documents and his father's suicide note that he had never opened. It was a common notebook, black-covered, bought at a stationery store in Ginza. But its content was extraordinary.
Each subject had their section. Each section contained meticulous observations: dates, amounts lost, amounts delivered, apparent emotional state, fragments of conversations, observed physical changes. Kenji noted everything with the fidelity of a scientist, though he had never studied science, though the experiment had no hypothesis or formal methodology or anything resembling academic rigor.
It was, rather, a catalog of destruction. A work of art in progress. A testament to how far a human being can go when given permission to fall.
That night, Kenji opened the notebook to Subject A's section and wrote:
March 15, 2023. 1:47 AM. Found in front of Pachinko Sunrise, Kabukichō. Reported loss: 800,000 yen. Delivered: 800,000 yen. Emotional state: extreme agitation. Mentioned his wife found a pawn receipt. Sold the wedding ring. Hands shaking. Visible sweating despite the cold. Estimated time until collapse: 2-4 weeks.
He closed the notebook and poured another whisky.
Outside, Tokyo sparkled with its millions of lights, indifferent to the dramas unfolding in its streets. That indifference was something Kenji admired about the city. It didn't judge. It didn't intervene. It simply existed, allowing everyone to destroy themselves in their own way and at their own pace.
Subject B was the first to surprise him.
It was an April night, damp and cold. Kenji found him in the usual spot, but something was different. The engineer wasn't crying or staring into space. He was standing, waiting.
"I knew you were coming," he said as Kenji approached.
"How much did you lose?"
"Six hundred thousand. But that's not what I want to talk about."
Kenji felt something he hadn't felt in a long time: genuine curiosity.
"What do you want to talk about?"
The engineer looked at him with those eyes that had seen too many pachinko screens, too many balls falling, too many broken promises.
"Why do you do it?"
It was the first time a subject had asked that question. Kenji had prepared answers, of course - "I like to help," "I was lucky in life and I want to share it," all those lies that people accept because they are more comfortable than the truth. But something in the engineer's gaze told him that lies wouldn't work this time.
"Because I want to see what happens," Kenji said, and the honesty surprised even him. "I want to see how far you go."
The engineer nodded, as if the answer confirmed something he already suspected.
"And what happens when I reach the end?"
"I don't know. I've never seen the end."
"And if I show it to you?"
Kenji didn't understand the question until he saw the knife. It was small, the type used for opening boxes, but the engineer held it with the firmness of someone who has made a decision.
"This is what happens," the engineer said. "This is the end you wanted to see."
Kenji didn't move. Not because he wasn't afraid - the fear was there, cold and clear - but because a part of him, a part he preferred not to examine too closely, wanted to see what happened next.
The engineer cut himself. Not Kenji, but himself. A red line on the forearm, not very deep, but enough to bleed.
"Every time you give me money," he said, as the blood dripped onto the asphalt, "this is what I do afterwards. Every time. Because it's the only way to feel something other than the need to go back and play."
Kenji looked at the blood. He looked at the engineer. And for the first time in fifteen years of the experiment, he didn't know what to say.
"Give me the money," the engineer said. "Give me the six hundred thousand. I'm going back in. I'm going to lose everything. And tomorrow you're going to come, and you're going to give me more. And we're going to keep going like this until one of us gets tired. You want to see the end? Here it is. The end is me, bleeding out in a Kabukichō alley while you take notes in your little notebook."
"How do you know about the notebook?"
"Because I've been watching you. Did you think you were the only one watching?"
Kenji pulled out the six hundred thousand yen and placed them in the engineer's free hand. The hand that wasn't bleeding.
"Try again," he said, because he didn't know what else to say.
The engineer took the money, bandaged the wound with a handkerchief he had in his pocket, and walked toward the pachinko parlor without looking back.
That night, Kenji wrote in his notebook:
Subject B has developed awareness of the experiment. This should invalidate the results. However, he continues to participate. Hypothesis: awareness of the trap is not enough to escape it. Addiction overcomes knowledge. Continue observation.
Subject A collapsed in May.
Kenji found out through the newspaper, a small note in the crime section: a forty-two-year-old man had thrown himself from the twelfth floor of an office building in Chiyoda. He left behind a wife and two children. Police did not suspect foul play.
Kenji read the note three times. He looked to feel something: guilt, remorse, the moral weight that should accompany someone who has contributed to a death. He found nothing. Only a slight disappointment because the subject had chosen to end the experiment in such a... predictable way.
Suicide was an obvious ending, almost a cliché. Kenji expected something more. Something that would teach him about the limits of the human being, about the capacity for resistance, about that gray zone between life and destruction where some manage to stay indefinitely.
He crossed out Subject A's section in his notebook and wrote:
Conclusion: total collapse. Time since first contact: 14 months. Total investment: approximately 18 million yen. Result: self-inflicted death. Observations: the subject lacked the resilience necessary for a prolonged experiment. Select better in the future.
Subject C, the primary school teacher, was different.
It was October when Kenji found him for the last time. Eight months had passed since the first contact, and the teacher had lost everything there is to lose: his job, his apartment, the savings of a lifetime. He lived in a manga café in Shinjuku, those places where for five hundred yen an hour you can sit in a cubicle and pretend you have a place in the world.
But the teacher was still smiling. That smile Kenji had never managed to decipher.
"How much did you lose today?" Kenji asked, as always.
"Fifty thousand. It's all I had."
"Where did you get fifty thousand?"
"I sold blood. It's the only thing I have left that anyone wants to buy."
Kenji pulled out fifty thousand yen. He put them in the teacher's hand.
"Try again."
The teacher looked at the money. Then he looked at Kenji. And the smile changed. For the first time, Kenji saw what was behind it: it wasn't madness or gratitude. It was something worse. It was peace.
"Do you know what I discovered?" the teacher said. "I discovered that it doesn't matter. Nothing matters. Before, when I had a job and an apartment and a life, everything mattered too much. Every decision was a weight. Every error was a catastrophe. But now... now I have nothing left to lose. And it's liberating."
"You're going to lose again."
"Yes. And you're going to give me more money. And I'm going to lose again. And that's how we're going to continue, you and I, until one of us dies. And you know what? I don't care which one."
"Don't you want to get out?" The question surprised Kenji. It wasn't part of the script. It wasn't something he ever said.
The teacher laughed. A genuine laugh, without bitterness.
"Get out to where? I have nowhere to go back to. You took care of that. Every time you gave me money, you pushed me one step further away from any exit. And you know it. That's why you do it."
"Why do you keep accepting it?"
"Because it's the only thing I have left. The game. The hope of winning. I know it's false. I know the machines are programmed so that I lose. I know you're part of the trap. But it's all I have. What would you prefer I do? That I throw myself off a building like the accountant did?"
Kenji froze.
"How do you know about the accountant?"
"Because I saw him. We were in the same pachinko parlor. We crossed paths sometimes. I knew you were giving money to him too. And I know there's another one, the engineer, the one who cuts his arms. We all know each other, those of us who receive your poisoned charity."
The teacher put the fifty thousand yen in his pocket.
"Thanks for the money. I'm going to try again. Because that's what we do, isn't it? Try again. Fall seven times, stand up eight. Except that the eighth time we also fall, and the ninth, and the tenth. And you're still there, helping us up so we can fall again."
He turned around and walked toward the pachinko parlor. Kenji watched him enter, disappear among the lights and the noise, becoming just another silhouette among thousands seeking something the machines were never going to give them.
That night, Kenji did not write in his notebook.
He sat in his Shibuya apartment, his whisky untouched, looking at the city through the window. Fourteen million people out there, each with their addictions and their traps and their outstretched hands that could be salvation or a sentence.
He thought of the accountant who had jumped from the building. Of the engineer who cut his arms. Of the teacher who had found peace at the bottom of the abyss.
He thought of himself.
What was his addiction? What was his trap? For fifteen years he had believed he was the observer, the scientist, the one outside the experiment looking in. But the teacher was right. Kenji was also trapped. Trapped in the need to see others fall, to push them down, to feed their destruction to feel... what? Power? Control? The illusion that he was different, that he couldn't fall because he was the one making others fall?
The perfect trap, disguised as help.
But help for whom?
Kenji stood up, went to the safe, and took out the notebook. He leafed through it slowly, reading the entries from over the years: the subjects he had observed, the amounts he had delivered, the destructions he had documented. Millions of yen invested in seeing how far human desperation went.
And suddenly he saw it clearly: he was also a subject. The experiment wasn't about the pachinko addicts. The experiment was about him. About his need to destroy to feel alive. About his addiction to the addiction of others.
Someone, somewhere, was taking notes on Kenji Nakamura.
Maybe it was the universe. Maybe it was that God he had never believed in. Maybe it was simply the implacable logic of traps: no one escapes, not even the one who designs them.
Kenji closed the notebook. He went to the window. He looked at the city that never slept, that never judged, that simply existed allowing everyone to find their own way of getting lost.
And for the first time in fifteen years, he wondered if there was a way out.
At three in the morning, Kenji Nakamura left his apartment. He walked to Kabukichō. He passed in front of Pachinko Sunrise, where the teacher was probably still playing, where the engineer was perhaps cutting himself in some bathroom, where thousands of people fed machines that were never going to love them back.
He didn't go in.
He kept walking until he reached Shinjuku Station. He sat on a platform bench. He waited for the first train of the morning.
He didn't know where he was going. He didn't know if he was escaping or simply changing traps. But for the first time in fifteen years, he had no money in his pockets to give to anyone.
It was a beginning. Or an end. In Kabukichō, at three in the morning, both look much the same.
The primary school teacher won that night. Seven hundred thousand yen on a machine that hadn't paid out in months. He left the pachinko parlor looking for the man in the dark suit, the benefactor who was always there, the one who told him "try again" with that voice that sounded like help but tasted like poison.
He didn't find him.
He waited an hour. Two. Three. The dawn began to tint the Tokyo sky with colors that neon could not imitate.
The man didn't come.
The teacher stood on the sidewalk, with seven hundred thousand yen in his pocket, not knowing what to do with a victory that no one was going to witness.
Because that was the last trap, the cruelest of all: after so much time losing with company, winning alone was unbearable.
He went back into the pachinko parlor.
The machines welcomed him with their chorus of lights and sounds, indifferent to his victory, indifferent to his defeat, indifferent to everything except the balls that fell, one after another, in an infinite cascade that meant nothing and meant everything.
Nana korobi ya oki.
Fall seven times, stand up eight.
The teacher sat in front of his favorite machine, fed the seven hundred thousand yen, and began to play.
He didn't need anyone to help him up.
He had already learned how to fall alone.
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Kenji Nakamura knew. He knew with the clarity of a scientist and the patience of a sculptor. Because Kenji Nakamura had turned that help into an art, into a science, into something that had no name in any language but which he, in the privacy of his mind, called simply: the experiment.
Kabukichō, Tokyo. Midnight.
Asia's largest entertainment district never sleeps, but it has different versions of itself depending on the hour. At eight in the evening, it's tourists and salarymen looking for izakayas where they can forget the day. At eleven, it's youths and hostesses and that particular buzz of people who still hope the night has something good in store for them. But at one in the morning, when the last trains have already departed and only those with nowhere to go remain, Kabukichō shows its true face.
It was at that hour when Kenji would go out for a walk.
He was fifty-three years old, though he looked younger. He always dressed impeccably: dark Western-cut suits, white shirts without ties, Italian shoes that gleamed under the neon lights. He looked like a successful businessman, an executive of some corporation whose name no one can pronounce, the kind of man taxicab drivers treat with instinctive deference.
No one would have guessed that Kenji didn't work. That he hadn't worked in fifteen years. That he lived off a considerable inheritance left by a father who had made a fortune in real estate during the eighties bubble and who had had the wisdom, or the luck, to sell everything before it burst.
No one would have guessed, either, what Kenji did with his nights.
He walked through Kabukichō with a specific purpose, following a route he had perfected over the years. He passed by the pachinko parlors - those cathedrals of noise where thousands of silver ball bearings fall in endless cascades, where machines blink with promises of fortune and people sit for hours, days, entire lifetimes, feeding a hope that statistics refute. He didn't go in. He never went in. The interior didn't interest him.
What interested him was outside.
The first time had been an accident. Or so Kenji told himself, though years had taught him that accidents are just patterns we haven't recognized yet.
It was 2007, and Kenji had just inherited. He was walking through Kabukichō aimlessly, trying to process the death of a father he barely knew, when he saw him: a man in his forties, sitting on the curb in front of a pachinko parlor, crying.
It wasn't a dramatic cry. It was worse: it was that silent, contained weeping of someone who no longer has the energy even to sob. The man's shoulders were slumped, and he had the look of someone who has just lost something they can never get back.
Kenji stopped. Not out of compassion - compassion was an emotion he had never quite understood - but out of curiosity. There was something fascinating about this broken man, something Kenji couldn't name but that drew him in like a moth to a flame.
"How much did you lose?" he asked, surprising himself.
The man looked up. His eyes were bloodshot, wearing that expression of shame addicts have when they are discovered.
"Everything," he said. "Three hundred thousand yen. This month's salary. The money for my daughter's school."
Kenji nodded. Not with sympathy, but with something resembling scientific interest. He wondered what would happen if he gave that money back. Not as charity, but as... what? An experiment? A whim? A way to see what the man would do with a second chance?
He pulled out his wallet - back then he still used cash, before mobile payments changed everything - and counted out three hundred thousand yen. He placed them in the man's hand.
"Try again," he said.
The man looked at him, uncomprehending.
"What?"
"Try again. You have another chance."
And he left, without waiting for an answer, without leaving a name or an explanation.
That night, Kenji slept better than he had in years. He had found something. He didn't know what, exactly, but he knew he wanted more.
A week later, he returned to the same pachinko parlor. He didn't expect to find the man - Tokyo has fourteen million inhabitants; the odds of crossing paths twice with the same person are astronomically low. But there he was. On the same curb. Crying in the same way.
This time he had lost four hundred thousand.
Kenji gave him four hundred thousand.
"Try again," he said, and left.
The third week, the man had lost five hundred thousand. The fourth, six hundred. The fifth, the man was not on the curb. Kenji found him in a nearby alley, unconscious, with an empty bottle of sake and a pill bottle that, fortunately or unfortunately depending on how you look at it, he hadn't managed to open.
Kenji called an ambulance. He waited until they took him away. And then he went to his apartment in Shibuya, poured himself a whisky, and sat down to think.
The experiment had failed. The subject had destroyed himself too quickly, without giving time to observe the intermediate stages. It was like burning a book to see the ending: you missed the whole development.
He needed a better method.
The method, developed over the next fifteen years, was elegant in its simplicity.
First: selection. Not just any loser would do. Kenji looked for specific profiles: men (always men; women addicted to pachinko existed, but they tended to destroy themselves in less interesting, more private ways) between thirty and fifty years old, with signs of having a family, a job, a life to lose. Young people with no ties didn't interest him; they didn't have enough to risk. Old people didn't either; they had already lost too much, and the experiment became predictable.
Second: initial contact. Always outside the pachinko parlor, always after a significant loss, always with the same question: "How much did you lose?" And always with the same response: the exact amount, in cash, with the instruction to try again.
Third: follow-up. Kenji didn't just give the money and disappear. He came back. Week after week, sometimes night after night. Always with the exact amount. Always with the same words: "Try again." Consistency was important. It was important for the subject to know that help would always be there, that no matter how many times he fell, there would always be a hand to lift him up.
Because that was the trap, of course. The perfect trap, disguised as help.
In 2023, Kenji had three active subjects. That's what he called them in his mind: subjects. Not names, not stories, not people. Subjects.
Subject A was an accountant for a medium-sized company in Chiyoda. Forty-two years old, married, two children. He had started with losses of one hundred thousand yen; now he regularly lost half a million a week. His wife thought he had a mistress. Kenji knew this because Subject A talked while he cried, telling his life in disjointed fragments, confessions no one had asked for but that he needed to release.
Subject B was a software engineer. Thirty-eight years old, divorced, no children. This one was quieter, more controlled. He accepted the money with a nod of the head, almost formal, and returned to the pachinko parlor without a word. Kenji found him fascinating: it was like watching someone drown in slow motion, without screams, without fuss, just that quiet determination to sink deeper and deeper.
Subject C was the most recent. A primary school teacher from Nerima. Fifty-one years old, a widower. This one had cried the first time, but then he had stopped crying. Now he received the money with a smile that Kenji couldn't decipher. It was a smile that could be gratitude or madness or something in between.
All three had something in common: none had tried to refuse the money. None had asked who Kenji was, or why he did it. Addiction has that quality: it makes you incapable of questioning the source of the next fix. A heroin addict doesn't ask the dealer about his philosophical motivations. A gambler doesn't interrogate the person financing his destruction.
The notebook was the most important part of the experiment.
Kenji kept it in a safe in his apartment, along with legal documents and his father's suicide note that he had never opened. It was a common notebook, black-covered, bought at a stationery store in Ginza. But its content was extraordinary.
Each subject had their section. Each section contained meticulous observations: dates, amounts lost, amounts delivered, apparent emotional state, fragments of conversations, observed physical changes. Kenji noted everything with the fidelity of a scientist, though he had never studied science, though the experiment had no hypothesis or formal methodology or anything resembling academic rigor.
It was, rather, a catalog of destruction. A work of art in progress. A testament to how far a human being can go when given permission to fall.
That night, Kenji opened the notebook to Subject A's section and wrote:
March 15, 2023. 1:47 AM. Found in front of Pachinko Sunrise, Kabukichō. Reported loss: 800,000 yen. Delivered: 800,000 yen. Emotional state: extreme agitation. Mentioned his wife found a pawn receipt. Sold the wedding ring. Hands shaking. Visible sweating despite the cold. Estimated time until collapse: 2-4 weeks.
He closed the notebook and poured another whisky.
Outside, Tokyo sparkled with its millions of lights, indifferent to the dramas unfolding in its streets. That indifference was something Kenji admired about the city. It didn't judge. It didn't intervene. It simply existed, allowing everyone to destroy themselves in their own way and at their own pace.
Subject B was the first to surprise him.
It was an April night, damp and cold. Kenji found him in the usual spot, but something was different. The engineer wasn't crying or staring into space. He was standing, waiting.
"I knew you were coming," he said as Kenji approached.
"How much did you lose?"
"Six hundred thousand. But that's not what I want to talk about."
Kenji felt something he hadn't felt in a long time: genuine curiosity.
"What do you want to talk about?"
The engineer looked at him with those eyes that had seen too many pachinko screens, too many balls falling, too many broken promises.
"Why do you do it?"
It was the first time a subject had asked that question. Kenji had prepared answers, of course - "I like to help," "I was lucky in life and I want to share it," all those lies that people accept because they are more comfortable than the truth. But something in the engineer's gaze told him that lies wouldn't work this time.
"Because I want to see what happens," Kenji said, and the honesty surprised even him. "I want to see how far you go."
The engineer nodded, as if the answer confirmed something he already suspected.
"And what happens when I reach the end?"
"I don't know. I've never seen the end."
"And if I show it to you?"
Kenji didn't understand the question until he saw the knife. It was small, the type used for opening boxes, but the engineer held it with the firmness of someone who has made a decision.
"This is what happens," the engineer said. "This is the end you wanted to see."
Kenji didn't move. Not because he wasn't afraid - the fear was there, cold and clear - but because a part of him, a part he preferred not to examine too closely, wanted to see what happened next.
The engineer cut himself. Not Kenji, but himself. A red line on the forearm, not very deep, but enough to bleed.
"Every time you give me money," he said, as the blood dripped onto the asphalt, "this is what I do afterwards. Every time. Because it's the only way to feel something other than the need to go back and play."
Kenji looked at the blood. He looked at the engineer. And for the first time in fifteen years of the experiment, he didn't know what to say.
"Give me the money," the engineer said. "Give me the six hundred thousand. I'm going back in. I'm going to lose everything. And tomorrow you're going to come, and you're going to give me more. And we're going to keep going like this until one of us gets tired. You want to see the end? Here it is. The end is me, bleeding out in a Kabukichō alley while you take notes in your little notebook."
"How do you know about the notebook?"
"Because I've been watching you. Did you think you were the only one watching?"
Kenji pulled out the six hundred thousand yen and placed them in the engineer's free hand. The hand that wasn't bleeding.
"Try again," he said, because he didn't know what else to say.
The engineer took the money, bandaged the wound with a handkerchief he had in his pocket, and walked toward the pachinko parlor without looking back.
That night, Kenji wrote in his notebook:
Subject B has developed awareness of the experiment. This should invalidate the results. However, he continues to participate. Hypothesis: awareness of the trap is not enough to escape it. Addiction overcomes knowledge. Continue observation.
Subject A collapsed in May.
Kenji found out through the newspaper, a small note in the crime section: a forty-two-year-old man had thrown himself from the twelfth floor of an office building in Chiyoda. He left behind a wife and two children. Police did not suspect foul play.
Kenji read the note three times. He looked to feel something: guilt, remorse, the moral weight that should accompany someone who has contributed to a death. He found nothing. Only a slight disappointment because the subject had chosen to end the experiment in such a... predictable way.
Suicide was an obvious ending, almost a cliché. Kenji expected something more. Something that would teach him about the limits of the human being, about the capacity for resistance, about that gray zone between life and destruction where some manage to stay indefinitely.
He crossed out Subject A's section in his notebook and wrote:
Conclusion: total collapse. Time since first contact: 14 months. Total investment: approximately 18 million yen. Result: self-inflicted death. Observations: the subject lacked the resilience necessary for a prolonged experiment. Select better in the future.
Subject C, the primary school teacher, was different.
It was October when Kenji found him for the last time. Eight months had passed since the first contact, and the teacher had lost everything there is to lose: his job, his apartment, the savings of a lifetime. He lived in a manga café in Shinjuku, those places where for five hundred yen an hour you can sit in a cubicle and pretend you have a place in the world.
But the teacher was still smiling. That smile Kenji had never managed to decipher.
"How much did you lose today?" Kenji asked, as always.
"Fifty thousand. It's all I had."
"Where did you get fifty thousand?"
"I sold blood. It's the only thing I have left that anyone wants to buy."
Kenji pulled out fifty thousand yen. He put them in the teacher's hand.
"Try again."
The teacher looked at the money. Then he looked at Kenji. And the smile changed. For the first time, Kenji saw what was behind it: it wasn't madness or gratitude. It was something worse. It was peace.
"Do you know what I discovered?" the teacher said. "I discovered that it doesn't matter. Nothing matters. Before, when I had a job and an apartment and a life, everything mattered too much. Every decision was a weight. Every error was a catastrophe. But now... now I have nothing left to lose. And it's liberating."
"You're going to lose again."
"Yes. And you're going to give me more money. And I'm going to lose again. And that's how we're going to continue, you and I, until one of us dies. And you know what? I don't care which one."
"Don't you want to get out?" The question surprised Kenji. It wasn't part of the script. It wasn't something he ever said.
The teacher laughed. A genuine laugh, without bitterness.
"Get out to where? I have nowhere to go back to. You took care of that. Every time you gave me money, you pushed me one step further away from any exit. And you know it. That's why you do it."
"Why do you keep accepting it?"
"Because it's the only thing I have left. The game. The hope of winning. I know it's false. I know the machines are programmed so that I lose. I know you're part of the trap. But it's all I have. What would you prefer I do? That I throw myself off a building like the accountant did?"
Kenji froze.
"How do you know about the accountant?"
"Because I saw him. We were in the same pachinko parlor. We crossed paths sometimes. I knew you were giving money to him too. And I know there's another one, the engineer, the one who cuts his arms. We all know each other, those of us who receive your poisoned charity."
The teacher put the fifty thousand yen in his pocket.
"Thanks for the money. I'm going to try again. Because that's what we do, isn't it? Try again. Fall seven times, stand up eight. Except that the eighth time we also fall, and the ninth, and the tenth. And you're still there, helping us up so we can fall again."
He turned around and walked toward the pachinko parlor. Kenji watched him enter, disappear among the lights and the noise, becoming just another silhouette among thousands seeking something the machines were never going to give them.
That night, Kenji did not write in his notebook.
He sat in his Shibuya apartment, his whisky untouched, looking at the city through the window. Fourteen million people out there, each with their addictions and their traps and their outstretched hands that could be salvation or a sentence.
He thought of the accountant who had jumped from the building. Of the engineer who cut his arms. Of the teacher who had found peace at the bottom of the abyss.
He thought of himself.
What was his addiction? What was his trap? For fifteen years he had believed he was the observer, the scientist, the one outside the experiment looking in. But the teacher was right. Kenji was also trapped. Trapped in the need to see others fall, to push them down, to feed their destruction to feel... what? Power? Control? The illusion that he was different, that he couldn't fall because he was the one making others fall?
The perfect trap, disguised as help.
But help for whom?
Kenji stood up, went to the safe, and took out the notebook. He leafed through it slowly, reading the entries from over the years: the subjects he had observed, the amounts he had delivered, the destructions he had documented. Millions of yen invested in seeing how far human desperation went.
And suddenly he saw it clearly: he was also a subject. The experiment wasn't about the pachinko addicts. The experiment was about him. About his need to destroy to feel alive. About his addiction to the addiction of others.
Someone, somewhere, was taking notes on Kenji Nakamura.
Maybe it was the universe. Maybe it was that God he had never believed in. Maybe it was simply the implacable logic of traps: no one escapes, not even the one who designs them.
Kenji closed the notebook. He went to the window. He looked at the city that never slept, that never judged, that simply existed allowing everyone to find their own way of getting lost.
And for the first time in fifteen years, he wondered if there was a way out.
At three in the morning, Kenji Nakamura left his apartment. He walked to Kabukichō. He passed in front of Pachinko Sunrise, where the teacher was probably still playing, where the engineer was perhaps cutting himself in some bathroom, where thousands of people fed machines that were never going to love them back.
He didn't go in.
He kept walking until he reached Shinjuku Station. He sat on a platform bench. He waited for the first train of the morning.
He didn't know where he was going. He didn't know if he was escaping or simply changing traps. But for the first time in fifteen years, he had no money in his pockets to give to anyone.
It was a beginning. Or an end. In Kabukichō, at three in the morning, both look much the same.
The primary school teacher won that night. Seven hundred thousand yen on a machine that hadn't paid out in months. He left the pachinko parlor looking for the man in the dark suit, the benefactor who was always there, the one who told him "try again" with that voice that sounded like help but tasted like poison.
He didn't find him.
He waited an hour. Two. Three. The dawn began to tint the Tokyo sky with colors that neon could not imitate.
The man didn't come.
The teacher stood on the sidewalk, with seven hundred thousand yen in his pocket, not knowing what to do with a victory that no one was going to witness.
Because that was the last trap, the cruelest of all: after so much time losing with company, winning alone was unbearable.
He went back into the pachinko parlor.
The machines welcomed him with their chorus of lights and sounds, indifferent to his victory, indifferent to his defeat, indifferent to everything except the balls that fell, one after another, in an infinite cascade that meant nothing and meant everything.
Nana korobi ya oki.
Fall seven times, stand up eight.
The teacher sat in front of his favorite machine, fed the seven hundred thousand yen, and began to play.
He didn't need anyone to help him up.
He had already learned how to fall alone.
from FICTION on the WEB short stories https://ift.tt/bRt1oiL
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