I’m sitting on top of the parliament building, resisting tear-gas attacks from air force helicopters that circle above me like flies. I will soon enjoy my very last cigarette, my last show of resistance. My comrade, the painter Kusakabe, fell to his death just moments ago, leaving me alone as the last smoker remaining on earth. At this very moment, images of me – highlighted against the night sky by searchlights down below – are probably being relayed live across the country from TV cameras inside the helicopters.
I’ve got three packs left, and I refuse to die before I’ve finished them. So I’ve been chain-smoking two or three at a time. My head feels numb, my eyes are starting to spin. It’s only a matter of time before I, too, fall lifeless to the ground below.
It was only about fifteen or sixteen years ago that the anti-smoking movement started. And it was only six or seven years ago, at most, that the pressure on smokers really started to intensify. I never dreamt that, in such a short time, I would become the very last smoker left on earth. But maybe the signs were all there from the beginning. Being a fairly well known novelist, I used to spend most of my time at home writing. As a result, I had few opportunities to see or feel for myself the changes that society was going through. I hardly ever read the newspapers, as I abhor the journalistic style – it reminds me of dead fish. I lived in a provincial town, and my editors would come out to see me whenever the need arose. I tended to shun literary circles, and so never ventured into the capital.
Of course, I knew about the anti-smoking lobby. Intellectuals would often write articles stating their support or opposition in magazines and elsewhere. I also knew that the tone of the debate, on both sides, had gradually grown more hysterical, and that, from a certain point in time, the movement had suddenly started to swell while opposing arguments rapidly disappeared.
But as long as I stayed at home, I could live in splendid isolation from it all. I’d been a heavy smoker since my teens, and had continued to smoke without pause. Even so, no one ever admonished me or gave me any complaint. My wife and son tacitly put up with it. They probably realized that, for me to continue producing literary works and maintain an income as a fashionable writer, the consumption of huge quantities of cigarettes was absolutely essential. This probably wouldn’t have been the case if I’d worked in an office, for example. For it seems that, from a relatively early time, smokers started losing out on promotion.
One day, two editors from a young people’s magazine came to my house in the hope of commissioning an article. I showed them into my sitting room. One of them, a woman of about twenty-seven or twenty-eight, handed me a business card with this printed in bold across the top:
THANK YOU FOR NOT SMOKING
Apparently, this was not so uncommon at the time. More and more women were expressing anti-smoking sentiments on their name cards. But I was unaware of that. So you can imagine my indignation. Any magazine editor worth her salt should have known that a fashionable novelist such as myself would be a heavy smoker. Even if she didn’t know it, handing a name card like that to someone who might be a smoker, especially when she was asking that someone to do a job for her, was completely out of order – even if the other person wasn’t actually a smoker.
I stood up immediately.
“Regrettably, I’m unable to earn your thanks,” I said to the stupefied pair. “For I myself am a chain smoker. I couldn’t imagine even discussing work without a cigarette in hand. But thank you, anyway, for coming all this way.”
The woman arched her eyebrows in twitching increments. Her colleague, a young man, hurriedly rose and started to entreat me. “Oh, well, you know, it’s just that, please don’t be angry, if we could just, you know…” he continued behind me as I left the room. It seems they also left shortly afterwards, arguing with each other on the way out.
I was somewhat perplexed by my overreaction. They had, after all, spent four hours travelling from Tokyo. And of course, I could have gone without a cigarette for an hour or so, if I had to. But why should I? It’s not as though they were some kind of changelings who’d die if they breathed a bit of smoke. So I justified myself with the thought that, if I had agreed to talk to them without smoking, I’d have grown so irritated that our little contretemps would have seemed tame by comparison.
Unfortunately for me, this female editor happened to be one of the standard-bearers of the anti-smoking movement. She was so enraged by the incident that she started spreading malicious slander about me, in other publications as well as in her own. By extension, she also cast scorn on all smokers in general. Smokers were bigoted and pigheaded, obstinate and rude, arrogant and overbearing, selfish and obsessive, self-righteous and despotic – or so she said. Working with such people is fraught with difficulties and therefore bound to fail. As such, smokers should be banished from all workplaces. Reading this author’s works is not to be advised, as the reader could become contaminated with his smoking ethos. All smokers are fools. All smokers are insane.
Eventually, I could remain silent no longer. It might have been all right if I were the only one, but other smokers were being insulted, too. Just as I was thinking of issuing some kind of reply, I received a call from the Chief Editor of a magazine called Rumours of Truth, for which I wrote a regular column. He urged me not to give in to this pressure from the newly empowered anti-smoking lobby, but to fight back against it. I quickly wrote my next submission to the magazine, which went something like this:
“Discrimination against smokers seems to have reached new heights. This results from a combination of extremism and the simple-mindedness of non-smokers. Anti-smoking proponents show an utter lack of understanding, precisely because they do not smoke. Mouth ulcers are cured by cigarette smoke. Tobacco soothes nervous irritation. Admittedly, people who don’t smoke are healthy and have wholesome complexions. That’s because many of them take part in sports. But they also smile for no reason. They don’t think deeply about anything, and are totally uninteresting to talk to. Their conversation is superficial and their topics shallow. Their thinking is unfocussed and vague. They go off on a tangent without warning. They can’t discuss any topic on more than one level. Their reasoning is not inductive but deductive. That’s why they’re so awfully easy to understand, yet, on the other hand, are always so quick to jump to hackneyed conclusions. When it comes to sport, they can prattle on endlessly, however little interest we show. But when the conversation turns to philosophy or literature, they fall asleep. In the old days, the air at long, difficult meetings would be thick with cigarette smoke. But now the conference room has been sanitized by air purifiers, ion generators and the like. Does that mean we can meet in relaxation? Au contraire. Meetings are over before they’ve started, or so I hear. Everyone’s in such a hurry to leave. But of course – non-smokers can’t bear long conversations, deep conversations, difficult conversations. As soon as the business at hand is over, or they know what they’re supposed to do, they get up and go. They can’t keep still. If someone detains them, they keep looking at their watches impatiently. But when they’re angry, they just go on and on. What’s more – whether male or female – they’re all sex-mad. The more they take care of their health, the more they neglect to use their brains – at the expense of their health, ironically. In other words, they become imbeciles. What’s the point of living such long, healthy lives if they’re nothing but blockheads? Large groups of foolish old people would become a burden to the minority of younger people. Do they really mean to keep playing golf until they’re a hundred? Tobacco was a truly great discovery – it has given people depth of feeling. Nevertheless, even journalists today are jumping on the anti-smoking bandwagon. What’s that all about?! Newspaper editing rooms should be epitomized by murky clouds of tobacco smoke. Why are newspapers so uninteresting today? – Because the editing rooms are all too clean!!”
This article sparked a storm of protest as soon as it was published. Of course, originating from non-smokers, there was nothing particularly new about it. Some of it was simply idiotic – the writer would merely turn my argument on its head by replacing “nonsmokers” with “smokers”. These reactions were duly published in Rumours of Truth, where they were deemed suitably illogical to represent the views of non-smokers.
It was from about this time that I started receiving malicious phone calls and hate mail. The calls were simple abuse, along the lines of “So you want to die young, then? Moron!” The letters were similar, though sometimes rather witty – one, for example, contained a lump of tar and the message “Eat this and die!”
Soon, cigarette advertising was completely banned from all media. People’s inclination to follow the crowd now came to the fore, and discrimination against smokers grew more overt. Though I spent most of my time at home writing, I would also venture out on occasion – to buy books, for example. On one such occasion, I shook in anger when I saw this sign in a nearby park:
NO DOGS OR SMOKERS
So now we were no better than dogs. That made me all the more defiant, and my will became so much more unyielding. Would I bend to such oppression? Was I not a man?!
A department store sales rep would bring ten cartons of cigarettes to my house once a month. They were the American brand More, of which I would consume around sixty or seventy a day. But then imports of foreign cigarettes were banned. Just before the ban, I stockpiled about two hundred cartons. These soon ran out, and I’ve had to make do with domestic brands ever since.
One day, I was obliged to travel to Tokyo, as I’d been invited to give an address at a literary event. The event was organized by a publishing house that I’d been indebted to for some years. So I asked my wife to reserve me a seat on the train.
“The fares for smoking seats have gone up by 20%,” said my wife as she handed me the ticket. “And there’s only one smoking car. The ticket-seller looked at me as if I were some kind of wild animal!”
I was utterly dismayed on entering the smoking car. The seats were falling apart and the windows covered with grime. Some were cracked for good measure, only held together by little patches of sticky tape. The floor was strewn with litter, the ceiling thick with cobwebs. In this filthy carriage sat seven or eight po-faced smokers. The gloomy strains of Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A Minor filtered through the loudspeaker. The ashtrays by the seats were crammed full of cigarette ends, and had evidently not seen a cleaner for some time. On the doors at the ends of the carriage were signs saying “No passage to other carriages”. The toilet at the rear of the carriage was just a hole in the floor, leading down to a vat. Peering through the hole, I could see a pile of human waste. There were no taps at the wash basin – just a tin cup chained to the wall, with a hand-operated water pump.
I was so incensed that I decided to cut my engagement and get out at the next station. From there, I returned home in a taxi. After all, if things were already this bad, who could know what awaited me at the venue, or the hotel?!
Urban tobacconists soon became ostracized by the communities they served. One after another, my local suppliers went out of business, forcing me to walk ever longer distances to make my purchases. In the end, there was only one tobacconist left in my vicinity.
“Don’t tell me you’re giving up, too!” I begged the elderly shopkeeper, adding, “But if you do, could you bring your remaining stock over to my house?”
And that’s just what he did, that very same night. “I’m giving up,” he said as he handed the lot over to me. It seems he’d been waiting for the opportunity to jack it in. When I said what I said, he’d jumped at the chance, gathered his stock and shut up shop.
Discrimination against smokers grew ever more extreme. In other countries, they’d already managed to ban smoking completely. We in Japan lagged behind as usual. Cigarettes were still being sold and people were still smoking them. Non-smokers saw this as a national humiliation, and started treating smokers as less than human. Some who smoked openly were beaten up in the streets.
There is a theory that the nobility of the human soul will always prevent this kind of lunacy from getting out of hand. I beg to differ. Opinions may vary on what exactly is meant by “getting out of hand”. But looking back over the history of mankind, we find countless examples of such lunacy merely leading to greater forms of extremism, such as lynching or mob killings.
Discrimination against smokers quickly grew to the level of a witch-hunt. But it was hard to control, precisely because the discriminators didn’t regard their actions as lunacy. Acts of human savagery are never so extreme as when they are committed in the name of a lofty cause, be it religion, justice or “correctness”. In the name of the modern religion of “health,” and under the banner of justice and correctness, discrimination against smokers soon escalated to the point of murder. A renowned heavy smoker was butchered in the street, and in broad daylight, by a gang of seventeen or eighteen hysterical housewives who were out shopping and two policemen. He’d refused to stop smoking despite repeated requests. It was said that, as he died, nicotine and tar spurted out of holes left in his body by bullets and kitchen knives.
When an earthquake set off fires in a densely populated part of Tokyo, a rumour was put about that they’d been deliberately started by smokers. So checkpoints were set up on the roads, and those trying to escape were stopped. If they were wheezing for breath, they were assumed to be smokers and executed on the spot. A sense of guilt, on a subconscious level, seemed to have given the discriminators their own paranoia.
When the national tobacco company went up in smoke and was forced to fold, it was the start of truly dark times for smokers. At night, gangs calling themselves the National Anti-smoking Front (NAF), their faces partly hidden behind triangular white masks, would roam the streets brandishing torches and setting fire to the few remaining tobacco shops.
I, on the other hand – milking the privilege accorded to a fashionable author – would instruct my editors to buy cigarettes for me, and continued to smoke as freely as before. “Pay me in cigarettes,” I would say. “No smoke, no manuscript.”
The poor wretches would scour the length and breadth of the land to find cigarettes that were still being sold, secretly, in remote country villages, or black-market contraband being trafficked in underworld “smoke-easy” joints. These they would present to me by way of tribute.
Nor did it seem that I was alone. Incorrigible journalists would occasionally produce features on celebrities who were still smoking. In their articles, they would list about a hundred people who, like me, declared themselves to be smokers and openly indulged in the habit.
“Which of these headstrong fools will be the last smoker?” ran one of their titles.
As a result, I was soon in constant danger, even at home. Stones were thrown at my windows, and suspicious fires would burn here and there around my walls and hedges. The walls became covered with multi-coloured graffiti, which was always renewed no matter how often I painted over it.
“SMOKER LIVES HERE”
“DIE OF NICOTINE POISONING, DIE!”
“HOUSE OF A TRAITOR”
The frequency of abusive calls and letters merely increased, most of them now consisting of unveiled threats. Eventually, my wife could bear it no longer. So she went off to her mother’s, taking our son with her.
Articles headed “WHO WILL BE THE LAST SMOKER?” appeared in the newspapers on a daily basis. Some commentators even made predictions, and the list of names gradually shortened. But the pressure grew in inverse proportion to the declining number of targets.
One day, I telephoned the Human Rights Commission. A man answered in a brusque, dispassionate tone.
“We can’t help you here. Our job is to protect non-smokers.”
“Yes, but smokers are in the minority now.”
“That’s been so for a long time. We’re here to protect the interests of the majority.”
“Yes? Do you always side with the majority, then?”
“But of course. The very idea.”
So I had no option but to protect myself. Smoking wasn’t actually illegal yet. Instead, the lynchings became more violent (presumably out of frustration). I surrounded my house with barbed wire – electrified at night – and armed myself with a modified handgun and a samurai sword.
One day around this time, I received a call from a painter, Kusakabe, who lived not far away. Originally a pipe smoker, he’d switched to ordinary cigarettes when he could no longer obtain his favourite “Half and Half”. Of course, he was one of the remaining twenty or so “smoking artists” who were always being targeted by the newspapers.
“That things should have come to this!” Kusakabe bemoaned. “I’ve heard that we will soon be attacked. The press and TV companies are inciting the NAF to torch our homes, so they can show pictures of our houses burning on the news.”
“The infidels,” I said. “If they come here first, can I escape to your place?”
“We’re in the same boat, aren’t we? If I’m hit first, I’ll drive over to yours. Then we’ll go up to Tokyo together. I know a safe house there. We have comrades there, too. If we’re all to suffer the same fate, better to die glorious deaths together!”
“Agreed. Let us die magnificent deaths. Let them write in future school textbooks, ‘They died with cigarettes in their mouths’.”
We did laugh.
But it was no laughing matter. One evening just two months later, Kusakabe drove to my house covered in burns.
“They got me,” he said as he parked his car in my garage, which was converted from a utility room in the main house. “They’ll be here next. Let’s get away.”
“Wait a minute,” I said, closing the garage door. “I’ll gather up as many cigarettes as I can.”
“Good idea. I’ve brought a few with me, too.”
We were loading packs of cigarettes into the boot of the car when we heard a sudden commotion around the house. My porch window was smashed.
“They’re here!” I said to Kusakabe, trembling with anticipation. “Shall we let them have it before we go?”
“Shall we? All right, let’s. I’ve been itching to do this!”
We went into the dining room, which looked out onto the garden. A man was tangled in the electrified barbed wire on the back wall, his body making popping, cracking noises. I heated up a saucepan of oil I’d prepared earlier. Then I handed Kusakabe the modified handgun, and picked up my samurai sword.
We heard a noise in the toilet. I burst in. A man had broken the window and was trying to climb through. He must have jumped across from the neighbour’s roof. I sliced his arms off at the elbow.
“…”
He disappeared from the window without a sound.
About a dozen others burst into the garden. They’d probably cut through the barbed wire. One by one, they started to prise open my shutters and windows. After a short discussion with Kusakabe, I went upstairs with the saucepan and poured boiling oil onto the garden from the veranda. The wretches started howling in agony. That was the signal for Kusakabe to start firing at random with the handgun. Terrified shrieks and screams.
They obviously hadn’t expected us to be so prepared. The gang withdrew, carrying their wounded with them. But they’d started a fire near my front door, and the house was starting to fill with smoke.
“A parting gift for us smoke-lovers,” Kusakabe quipped as he coughed. “But I draw the line at being burnt alive. Let’s get out of here!”
“The garage door is very weak,” I said as we got into the car. I sensed that there were people waiting for us in the driveway. “Just drive through it.”
Kusakabe’s car was a Mercedes Benz – built like a tank. I didn’t have a car of my own any more. My son had taken it over recently, and he’d driven it off to his grandmother’s.
The Merc started up, smashed through the garage door and roared onto the driveway. Then we turned into the street at the same speed. We seemed to have bulldozed through about a dozen photographers and reporters, clustered around my house like piles of garbage – but did we care?
“Well. That was fun!” laughed Kusakabe as he drove away.
I still don’t know how we avoided all the road blocks on the way to Tokyo. The burning of our houses would certainly have been reported on television, and both the NAF and the police must have been on the lookout for us. But we drove on through the night, and arrived in the capital as day broke.
Kusakabe’s safe house was in the basement of a luxury apartment block in Roppongi. There, we met about twenty comrades who’d also escaped after their country residences had been burnt down. This was originally a private club, partly financed by Kusakabe, and the owner was one of us, too. We vowed an oath of allegiance and resistance, honoured the god of tobacco and prayed for victory. The god of tobacco, of course, has no physical form. We merely raised the red circle of Lucky Strike, and worshipped this while puffing away.
I won’t go into too much detail about our struggle over the next week or so, as it would be too tedious. Suffice to say that we made a fairly good fist of it. Our enemy was not only the NAF, along with the police and armed forces (which had merely become its tools). For now they were joined by the well-meaning conscience of the whole world, backed by the World Health Organization and the Red Cross. In contrast, the best support we could expect was from unscrupulous rogues who were continuing to sell cigarettes illegally. It would have hurt our pride as smokers to depend on them.
Eventually, the god of tobacco could no longer bear to see our plight, and sent assistants to help us in our hour of need. But they were only the dove of “Peace,” the bat of “Golden Bat,” the camel of “Camel,” and the penguin of “Cool” – none of which were of much use to us. The last that came to assist us was a young superhero with gleaming white teeth, sent by “Smoker Toothpaste”. At first, we thought he might serve some purpose. But soon we realized there was nothing behind his façade either.
“We lived through the horrors of war, survived postwar austerity, and for what?” asked Kusakabe. “The richer the world becomes, the more laws and regulations are imposed on us and the more discrimination grows. And now, we are not free at all. Why is that?”
All of our comrades had fallen, and only two of us remained. We’d been pursued to the top of the national parliament building, where we sat puffing cigarettes for all we were worth.
“Is that what people prefer?”
“I suppose it must be,” I replied. “In the end, we’d have to start a war to stop this kind of thing.”
At that moment, a tear gas canister, fired from a helicopter, hit Kusakabe full on the head. He plummeted down without a sound. The masses swarming below, merry with alcohol as if at a festival, sent up a great cheer and started to chant.
“Only one left! Only one left! Only one left!”
But I’m still here, a full two hours later, still resisting doggedly at the top of the parliament building. I’m quite proud of myself, actually. If I’m going to die anyway, I might as well use up all the energy I have left.
Suddenly, everything went quiet down below, and the helicopters disappeared. Someone was talking over a loudspeaker. I strained my ears to catch what he was saying.
“…won’t we. But it’ll be too late then. And what a terrible loss that will be. For he is now a precious artefact from the Tobacco Age. He should be turned into a natural monument, a living treasure. We must protect him. Will you help us? I repeat. We are SPS, the Society for the Protection of Smokers, created today for the urgent…”
A shudder went through me. Please, no! Don’t let them protect me! This was the beginning of a new sort of cruelty. Protected species are doomed to extinction. They’re turned into peepshow freaks, photographed, injected and isolated, their semen is extracted, and other parts of their bodies are messed about with in different ways. And what happens in the end? They just wither and die. But that’s not all. After they die, they’re stuffed and put out on show. Was that what I wanted? No. I’d rather die in my own way. I rushed forwards and jumped off the roof.
But it was too late. They’d already put out a safety net.
High above me, two helicopters approached with a rope mesh stretched out between them. Slowly, slowly, they descended towards me…