Uemura Tatsuaki
BOOKBAGS NATURALLY DEVELOPED holes over time. And if you were careful, you could find a camera small enough to fit.
Between classes, though, he didn’t have to be that sneaky. As long as no one was behind him and he wasn’t too concerned with picture quality, he could openly use his smartphone and no one would know.
And so Tatsuaki walked off campus after yet another day of not getting caught.
First, he boarded the nearest subway and took it to a station he didn’t normally visit. There, he climbed onto the bicycle his older sister wanted him to retrieve and, after twenty minutes of pedaling, arrived at the parking lot of their apartment complex. After locking it up, he gave it a good kick—just hard enough to avoid knocking it over.
He took the elevator up to the floor they lived on, unlocked the door at the end of the hall, and walked in. No one else appeared to be home. Stepping out of his shoes, he walked into the kitchen. Inside the fridge was a box of cream puffs with his sister’s name on it. He took it into his bedroom and locked the door.
As soon as he set his bookbag down, he promptly pulled out the mini-camera and connected it via cable to the computer on his desk. While the data transferred to his hard drive, he changed out of his uniform, drank water from the bottle in his bag, and sat down in his desk chair. A few minutes later, he connected his smartphone to repeat the process, as per his routine.
Once his phone was wiped clean, he put on his headphones and hit Play on the footage he had spent the day recording. He wasn’t worried about visual artifacts or judder. These things were irrelevant to his objective.
After the first video ended, he moved on to the next, then the next, all of them with different timestamps and locations, sipping his water as he scrutinized each one. And as the images flowed onscreen, he thought to himself:
I can’t believe no one’s caught on.
Checking his footage after school was a daily activity, but even after all this time, the novelty had yet to wear off. With practice, he’d learned that acting casual made him less suspicious, but still.
Onscreen, right as an object came flying toward the camera, Tatsuaki paused the video, rewound a little to check, then resumed. Naturally, it wasn’t the flying blob he was interested to see—it was the expression of the female who threw it. And he could easily tell that while her eyes were pointed in his direction, her mind was somewhere else.
I can’t believe no one’s caught on.
As he repeated the words in his mind, it unconsciously filled him with pleasure. This was how he established himself as intellectually superior to the blind sheep all around him. They lacked the capacity for observation or imagination, and yet they dared ignore him. Thus, to protest their unjust treatment of him, he spent nearly every day filming them on campus without their knowledge.
For the most part, he targeted his classmates. Among them, there was one female in particular who he focused on. He could already imagine what people would say to him if they knew he was doing this, but no, he most certainly did not harbor the slightest of romantic feelings for her, nor anyone else in their class. All he wanted was to shine a light on these monsters pretending to be goody-goodies.
For instance, the childhood friend he spent extra time filming: Itobayashi Akane. She was constantly surrounded by people who were smiling and having fun—all of them with good looks, good reputations, and good social standing.
I can’t believe no one’s caught on.
He felt this way not just about his illicit conduct, but about her screening process, too. How could she act like it was normal? Not just her, either—whenever he observed his classmates, he became convinced that he was the only decent human in the room.
But one of these days they were bound to slip up. In order to capture that moment, Tatsuaki filmed the classroom and the halls each and every day. Then he went home and combed through the footage to see if any of his classmates had done anything wrong. He had nothing special to show for it just yet, but he eagerly awaited the day that he could expose them for what they were.
At last, it was time to watch the final video of the day: his childhood friend chatting with some classmates after school. At some point her smile had turned ugly, and she started being picky about who she associated with, but though he despised who she had become, her appearance was still recognizably the same girl he once knew. Perhaps as a child he had innocently fallen in love with her from afar.
As several different strains of hatred welled in his chest, he deleted the final video and let out a long breath.
✦ ✦ ✦
Tatsuaki felt no sense of belonging at home or at school. That being said, the places he lingered while his peers were spending time with friends or family (mainly the internet or his bedroom) offered him little comfort either. Be it in the real world or elsewhere, he pitied himself for being subjected to endless swarms of shallow, immoral worms and the torment of their emotions, and at the same time, he sympathized with those who, like him, were punished for being nice. That was why he needed to expose these disgusting manipulators and get justice—before more people like him could get hurt.
This belief served as the foundation for his other daily activities, too.
Online, Tatsuaki was known as “gentian4.” He felt it was a sign of integrity to associate with a specific name in a place where anonymity was the norm, and this trifling “integrity” weighed on him like a king’s crown, deluding him into thinking he was justified.
On the internet, if you hurled vicious abuse at someone, another person would attack you for it. Under the name gentian4, however, this exchange was a debate. In his eyes, his posts weren’t defamation but merely criticism.
“God, you’re everywhere. Get a life.”
Even when ill-mannered replies interrupted his “debates,” he didn’t feel the need to give them the time of day. Everything beyond his own account was no different from what went on in the classroom. He kept watch over those who were showered in praise, waiting to pull the rug out from under them as soon as they slipped up. Major scandals were ideal but rare, so instead he used his powers of observation to evaluate their financial decisions, their health, the good and bad of their performances, their physical appearance, their heritage, and even their home lives.
He checked all their official photos, social media posts, and interview articles, and if he ever found something worthy of criticism, he became furious that the subject of his surveillance was confirmed to be one of them. Deep in his heart, he tasted something sweet, and it deluded him into thinking he had found yet another piece of proof that his suspicions and complaints were right all along.
Unlike his classmates, celebrities with fanbases always had at least one or two haters. Whenever he insulted a famous person, someone always responded to it, and he experienced a level of attention he never got in his normal life. It was an extremely easy way to feel something akin to accomplishment. So while he wasn’t conscious of it, he liked when the celebs he targeted did controversial things on a daily basis.
After dinner that night, like every night before it, he holed up in his bedroom and searched until he found a tweet that he could prey upon.
“You don’t need to know my past. All that matters is the present and the future.”
There was no image or anything else attached to it—just those two sentences. Her crazed fans read into what was left unsaid and sent affirming replies back.
The slightest perceived arrogance from one of his marks made his blood boil. He searched through public tweets until he found people who agreed with him, then used that to fuel his criticism as he flung it into the void. The response was instant, and he felt a rush of relief. Once again, he had managed to salvage the heart of someone in the same sorry boat as him.
That satisfaction was the only thing that kept him going most days.