Genocidal Organ was the debut novel of Japanese science-fiction writer Project Itoh (1974–2009). A finalist for the seventh Sakyo Komatsu Award in 2006, it was published in 2007, issued in a Hayakawa Bunko paperback edition in 2010, and adapted into an animated feature in 2017. This essay uses the Chinese translation published by Taiwan Tohan in 2015 and the SumiSora & CASO fansub release of the film.1 For more about Itoh, see the Project Itoh official website for the 2015 animated film project.
When I kept silent and refused to confess my sins, I grew weary in body and mind from groaning all day. You disciplined me day and night; my strength drained away like water drying up in the summer heat. (Selah) I acknowledged my sins to you and no longer concealed my evil. I said, “I will confess my sins to the LORD.” And you forgave me. (Selah) —Old Testament, Psalm 32:3–5, CCB
Prelude
I had no particular desire to arrest or kill John Paul. But I knew I could expect to find Lucia Skroup wherever John Paul was. Lucia Skroup was all I cared about.
I wanted to see Lucia one more time.
I wanted to hear Lucia tell me herself that she forgave me.
God is dead. God is dead. I couldn’t care less.
As long as Lucia forgave me, that was enough.
This interior monologue appears in the novel after the mission in Prague ends in failure. It may help explain the abruptness of the film’s final stretch: the protagonist’s fixation on Lucia—even to the point of attacking his own comrades for her sake—comes from his belief that his guilt is so profound that he must ask her for absolution.
But why does someone whose job has always been killing develop a sense of guilt? And why Lucia? These questions lie at the heart of “guilt” as a theme in Genocidal Organ.
Seeking Guilt
“The fact is, when the doctor asked you, you decided of your own free will to discontinue my treatment. So you have to bear that responsibility. All those people you killed on your missions—that wasn’t the decision of the Department of Defense or Special Operations Command. You have to take responsibility for killing them too.”
My mother held me to account without mercy. I covered my ears, but her cruel words poured on in an unstoppable torrent.
…
“Holding your head won’t help, you know.”
A young voice came straight into my ears. I looked up and saw Alex smiling at me. Already dead, he pointed to his head and said, “Because hell is right here.”
“Stop it!”
“People are just brain cells, just water, just carbon compounds. Human beings are nothing but little lumps of DNA. We’re nothing but matter from the moment we’re born. No different from artificial muscle. To look for a soul in this lump of matter, and to believe that the soul gives rise to ethics, morality, and lofty thought—that’s just self-deception. Sin and hell are both inside your head.”
These dream passages, absent from the film, could be called the key to understanding the work. The protagonist keeps dreaming of his dead mother. The novel opens with the words “I was the one who killed my mother”: he consented to withdrawing life support when there was no longer any possibility that she would wake. We might say that this was the moment he began, gradually, to reflect on the meaning of the “killing” he had been numbly repeating. It is also where the novel’s story begins. (The film adaptation, by contrast, opens with the nuclear explosion in Sarajevo: it sets out to tell a different narrative.)
Signing the consent form the doctor handed him and ending his mother’s life support was the “killing” that felt least real of all those he had experienced. What makes him anxious is precisely this lack of felt reality—or rather, the fact that killing with a gun feels just as unreal. Under psychological conditioning, he can kill any target without the slightest inner disturbance. He does not kill with pity or guilt, feeling he “has no choice”; he simply completes the job flawlessly, like an assembly-line worker.
His own indifference horrifies him. Why can’t he feel guilty? As a well-educated American citizen, he has a whole moral discourse in his head to account for his killing. Killing is of course a sin, but one that can be absolved by the so-called homeland, freedom, human rights, and so on. For him, though, absolution is not even the issue: he cannot feel the guilt that ought to be there in the first place. Where is “guilt”?
To seize on even the faintest feeling of guilt, he insists at the beginning of the novel that “I killed Mom,” trying to fill this unnameable emptiness. Yet he discovers that even when there is no doubt that he has killed, he can barely feel any reality in it—like a defendant with schizophrenia who admits every charge yet remains indifferent.
So the protagonist sets out in search of his own guilt. Along the way, Lucia brings him to a sudden realization:
“Even though people are influenced by the past, by their genes, and so on, they can still choose what to do and what not to do. People are free because they can choose to give up their freedom. Because, for their own sake or for someone else’s, they can choose what they must not do and what they must do.”
I looked at Lucia’s face. For some reason, I felt redeemed. But not because what I had done had been affirmed, or because my sins had disappeared.
It was because Lucia had told me that I myself had chosen to bear my sins, rather than shift them onto someone else.
If all culture, morality, thought, and even the self can be reduced to genes, historical constructions, and the functions of organs, what meaning can freedom have? In the end, human beings are merely machines driven by these mechanisms. Yet Lucia tells him: even so, we are free. Even if every choice we make can be reduced to some chain of cause and effect, there must be a subject who makes that choice. Like Augustine’s “I doubt, therefore I exist” and Descartes’s “I think, therefore I am,” the version here is “I act, therefore I am guilty.”
This is the logic of the fetish: the “I” in those three short statements is merely a sign marking the absence of the real “I.” It is precisely because the real “I” cannot be found that such a mark is used in its place; to keep this emptiness from being exposed, one must believe in the mark and prove it true. In other words, only exchange can prove that money has value; only confession can make one guilty; only martyrdom can prove the reality of the faith. This seemingly deranged reversal of cause and effect is not “knowledge” but “ethics”—Tertullian’s “I believe because it is absurd.”2 Only in this way can the charge stand.
Thus, although Lucia’s words have no explanatory power whatsoever, the protagonist feels redeemed: what Lucia shows him is not the truth about guilt, but an ethics of guilt. To become guilty, he must first confess and atone.
What we see here is an inverted version of Crime and Punishment. According to his moral code for great men, Raskolnikov believes that killing the old, usurious landlady is no crime at all; yet the traumatic experience of actually killing her breaks him.3 Guilt seizes him not through moral discourse but through an experience felt in his own flesh, until its torment finally leads him to turn to faith and repentance. If the “moral lesson” of Crime and Punishment is that those without faith inevitably bring punishment upon themselves through evil deeds, Genocidal Organ presents a paradoxical counterproposition: those who commit evil must recover faith in order to seek punishment. In the former, a person recognizes his own smallness and comes to fear God; in the latter, he feels empty because he is no longer small, and tries to recover himself by appealing to a God who is already dead. The former is a traditional proposition; the latter is already modern, even postmodern—“I’m not trying to escape guilt. What I fear is precisely the opposite: that I may not be entitled to bear it. For me, the worst truth is that my guilt does not exist.”
The Hollow “I”
Why, then, does the protagonist want to be punished? Clearly, his desire to bear guilt goes far beyond the moral commandment “Thou shalt not kill.” His anxiety comes not simply from moral vertigo but from the emptiness of the “I,” from Pascal’s “abyss” of infinity and nothingness—an abyss of uncertainty, an abyss of nothingness that swallows even the self-evidence of “I exist.” Step outside the everyday life protected by consumerist illusions and try to peer into that abyss, and an existential crisis becomes unavoidable.
In the film, the protagonist and Williams are at home watching a football game on television. A player is fouled and falls to the ground in pain. “Overprotected,” the protagonist says. This applies not only to players protected by rules and citizens protected by identity verification, but above all to the protagonist and his fellow special-forces soldiers, protected by cutting-edge technology. He continues: “Although we’re overprotected and can no longer feel certain things, they’re still stored in our brains.” Those “certain things” are in fact the sin and hell Alex speaks of: the “abyss” that threatens the self’s existence.
For Pascal, the sensation of the abyss comes from an immediate experience of time’s passing, or a primordial experience of “uncertainty.” In the world of Genocidal Organ, we could say that this primordial experience has been completely screened out. A wristwatch is all you need to recover a “normal” sense of time: everything is under control. The same is true of other primordial experiences. Cultural censorship screens out primordial violence; online media dispel loneliness; and fear of the unknown poses no problem for people protected by technology and information. Clearly, the protagonist has not undergone some traumatic primordial experience. What, then, gave him his glimpse into the abyss?
“Conscience is a physical entity in the brain, you know. It’s distributed across specific coordinates in the orbitofrontal cortex, the superior temporal sulcus, and the amygdala.”
“By blocking off different modules in the brain, we can not only suppress pain but give operatives different personalities according to the needs of the mission.”
“‘I’ and ‘consciousness’ are merely matters of definition. In other words, human society has yet to decide just how many modules count as an ‘I,’ or how many modules working together count as ‘consciousness.’”
During counseling, the doctor introduces the protagonist to what could be called the latest findings in neuroscience. These findings tell us that the “I” is merely the combined effect of modules produced by a mass of brain tissue. To say “I exist” is merely to describe these modules functioning properly. Here we see science’s most radical negation of transcendental subjectivity: when every directly experienced sensation is reduced, in the language of science, to an effect of neural signals, and every action is explained as the coordinated functioning of different bodily tissues, can there still be any felt reality to existence?
The protagonist therefore feels an overwhelming emptiness. “Only when I live next door to death can I truly feel that I’m still alive… That real feeling of being alive is the main reason I still keep going back to the battlefield.” Yet even this intense sense of life alongside death becomes exceedingly faint under technology’s protection. When he sees Leland, reduced to half a body with his intestines spilled across the ground, still firing as though nothing were wrong, the image of the “human being” collapses. To evade some part of this trauma, he turns to humor: “Can you make do with this leg?” But a severed leg plainly cannot stitch the shattered “I” back together. The trauma here is precisely not primordial violence but its absence: this utterly absurd, utterly ironic scene. His “vertigo” comes not from an intrusion of the Real, but precisely from the exposure of the fact that “the Real cannot break in”—he discovers that he cannot escape “protection”; or rather, that beneath that protection there is no “self” at all. Faced with this scene, he does not even feel sick: that inconvenient function has already been duly removed from the machine called “Clavis Shepherd.”
To recover a sense of reality, then, he believes he must shoulder his sins:
I accepted my sins in order to feel that I was truly alive. But if any of those sins did not come from my own self, then that “feeling of being alive” was an outright lie.
This means he must not only accept his sins but also find a real, credible subject capable of bearing them. And it is the latter problem that must be faced first.
I Act, Therefore I Am Guilty
As noted above, once science dismantles the “self,” any such self can be reduced to modules. The existence of a “subject of action” capable of taking responsibility for its actions becomes still less possible, since any movement can, in theory, be captured by physics and explained by biology. How can action be established as real again, so that its consequences can be borne?
In The Structure of Behavior, Merleau-Ponty writes: “Apprehended from within, my behavior appears directed, possessing a certain intention and a certain meaning. Science seems to require us to discard these characteristics as appearances, beneath which another kind of reality must be discovered.”4 Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology holds that the core of “behavior” is its intentionality, and seeks to affirm behavior endowed with intentionality against science’s reduction of human behavior. In other words, we need to adopt this phenomenological ethical position and affirm what is given “directly,” from within: to oppose science’s decomposition of behavioral “phenomena” by affirming behavior’s “intentionality.” That is, the intention, meaning, and ethics of behavior take priority over—and are independent of—its causes and effects. Hence the psychiatrist’s repeated assurance to the protagonist: “Of course that was your own will. There’s no need to doubt it.” Hence Lucia’s assertion that people are free because they can choose what they may and may not do.
Thus, however unreal his own behavior may feel, however much his body resembles an automatic machine, action—pure action alone—is trustworthy. Only the fact of pulling the trigger, firing the bullet, and killing the enemy is beyond doubt. Each time this fact occurs, another entry is added to the record of his crimes, because action proves my intention; action guarantees the meaning of my existence (its knowability). So the protagonist believes.
“The relation between what exists and the fact of its existence, between consciousness of contents and consciousness of the activity that roots those contents in being, must remain external. Ultimately, consciousness is defined by possessing an object of thought or by being transparent to itself, while activity is defined by a series of events external to one another.”5 In his discussion of the vital and human orders, Merleau-Ponty writes that intention must have an object, and consciousness must acquire an external definition within a structure. There is no point in discussing a “primordial” form of consciousness: from the outset, consciousness appears as a structured consciousness. Such an explanation amounts to placing a sequence of “social–subjective intention” alongside a sequence of “scientific–objective analysis,” so that “meaning” will not be dissolved by “truth.” The key here is that consciousness receives a guarantee from “outside,” and this outside possesses an inexhaustible store of meaning: it is the “Other presumed to know everything.”
The Other guarantees the subject’s meaning and free will. It tells the subject, “This is your will. This is exactly what you want.” It is like Augustine’s certainty about human free will: “There must be a will, since He has foreknown it. And it is a will only if it is within our power; therefore He has also foreknown that power, and His foreknowledge does not take my power away” (On Free Choice of the Will, 3.3.8). God’s foreknowledge does not conflict with human free will; rather, the former guarantees the latter. In other words, there is an observer who has “seen” all the protagonist’s actions and, being all-knowing and wholly good, can always find some way to accept and understand him. Otherwise, even if his actions establish his crimes, there is no subject to administer “punishment”; without such a subject, the crimes too lose their meaning. That is, finding a subject who can bear guilt is not enough: there must be an Other who carries out punishment. Only once guilt and punishment are established can the “I” exist:
I don’t need counseling.
I need punishment.
I need someone to punish me.
I want to be punished for every crime I’ve committed up to now.
I Am Punished, Therefore I Exist
Where can such an Other be found? In the modern world, the punisher is usually “society.” It can select a suitable charge for a person from its legal codes, accepting that person through punishment, condemnation, and the like. But society is insufficient as the protagonist’s punisher; strictly speaking, it cannot serve as the ultimate “Other presumed to know everything” either. The “Other presumed to know everything” occupies a special position: it keeps its distance from “me” and watches me; it is accepting; it “knows me better than I know myself.” Only such a subject can embody the punisher. We should note that “presumed to know everything” does not mean this subject really is omniscient. Rather, for “me,” it can understand everything about me, as though it had always been watching over me. In the end, though, this is only a “presumption.” Once a particular person comes to embody this image of the subject, they risk destroying it the moment they speak. It is not hard to imagine the absurd scene that would result if I suddenly revealed my most hidden side to that person, only to discover that they did not understand it at all. Thus, “keeping a distance from me” actually means that this Other cannot communicate with me at all—or that it knows me only because I believe it does. It may even be entirely a fantasy, like the imagined Black woman who accompanies the protagonist in Joker.
The protagonist is convinced that only Lucia can punish him, that she alone understands him best, and that seeking punishment and forgiveness from her is his only route back to “normal.” Why Lucia? He believes he has sinned against the people he killed with his own hands. Clearly, he cannot ask their forgiveness: once anyone dies, they enter a condition utterly alien to the living. To commemorate the dead in search of forgiveness is merely wishful thinking on the part of the living. And so he says: “When God died, sin became a human affair. It is still human beings who sin, but those who can absolve sinners are not God—they are people whose bodies are already dead.”
Lucia, at least, is still alive: someone who can listen to him and offer guidance. In his eyes, she is innocent and without sin, a person with a simple moral conscience; yet he has been deceiving and using her all along, sinning against her. At the same time, as Paul’s mistress, Lucia has sinned against his wife in a way no one can absolve. Thus:
I was drawn to Lucia. We were both sinners who could not be absolved. We both felt guilty toward the dead.
So I decided to tell her my sins.
Looking back, it was the most oblique way of conveying my love to her, the barest confession of love.
As fellow sinners, Christians form a fellowship, through which they are joined to Jesus Christ and share in the forgiveness of sins bought by his sacrifice. The bond of this fellowship is love: “Whoever has no love does not know God, because God is love. God sent His only Son into the world so that we might have life through Him. This revealed God’s love for us. Love is not that we loved God, but that God loved us and sent His Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins” (1 John 4:8–10, CCB).
When both Jesus and God have abandoned us, the sinners left in this world of the last days cannot obtain absolution, but the fellowship of love remains. This fellowship of sinners is the protagonist’s “Other.” By seeking forgiveness and punishment from Lucia, two sinners can support each other and go on living normally. If deliverance is impossible, we can at least find a little peace by telling one another our sins. If we cannot be joined to God and seek our final rest, sin can at least join us to other sinners—to Adam, the ancestor of sin and of humanity alike:
I was neither wholly willing nor wholly unwilling. I struggled with myself, creating an inner division that I did not will. This division did not prove the existence of another soul, but only the punishment I suffered. What brought about this punishment was not I myself, but “sin dwelling within me” (Romans 7:17). It was punishment for the sin I had knowingly and willingly committed, for I was a descendant of Adam. (Confessions, 8.10.22)
Whether I am guilty, whether I can be absolved—these no longer matter in this world of the last days. The real terror lies in the division of the “I”: I am afraid that my existence will shatter into fragments. Since a pure soul has nothing left to hope for, give me a soul deeply stained by sin; let me be punished. Through the pain of punishment, I can enter the fellowship of sinners; through the pain of punishment, I can feel the soul’s existence to its depths. This is true of the protagonist. And if, as Alex says, hell exists inside the brain, is it not true of everyone?
If modern people have killed God, they have neither discarded “sin” nor destroyed hell. They have merely forgotten them, throwing them into the deepest recesses of the brain. Should we overprotected people happen to remember our sins one day, the hell hidden deep within the brain’s folds will open its gates. Should we stray, amid the fallenness of everyday life, into a “clearing in the forest” that lays bare the question of existence, sin will drag us into hell.
Conclusion
In the end, the protagonist never hears Lucia forgive him. Just like any Indian insurgent or African child soldier, she is defenseless as a bullet pierces her skull.
Lucia was dead. There was no one left to punish me or forgive me.
Here and now, this was hell. I had imprisoned myself in hell. Hell is right here, you know—I remembered what Alex had said. Yes, I had fallen into the most terrible hell. I had come to the African interior to be punished and forgiven. But once I arrived, both my punishment and my forgiveness were destroyed and gone.
Is this my punishment? I must wander helplessly with my sins until I die.
The forgiveness he had so desperately pursued vanishes—not because it is beyond his reach, but because he suddenly discovers that it never existed in the first place. Lucia does not intend to condemn him for killing and deception. Instead, she insists on making the truth public: the fact that the world is built on a heap of corpses. Perhaps she makes this demand only out of humanitarian sympathy for the innocent lives caught up in the massacres. Yet as John Paul and the protagonist carry out this demand, they take it beyond the bounds of “morality,” because a civilized world must exclude corpses—through funerals, public commemorations, mourning, and so on. John Paul says:
“I originally intended to bear everything myself. But if Lucia wants the world to know all this, then I’ll make everyone understand that a world without terrorist attacks is actually built on corpses. People will be forced to decide whether that is right or wrong.”
The protagonist likewise believes:
This world is not moral enough. This world is not yet completely filled with conscience. We are still far from that. There is still so much we refuse to see.
What overturns morality is not the evildoer without a conscience, but the beautiful soul in its extreme form. It steps beyond morality’s bounds and leads humanity into an intolerable predicament. The protagonist knows that simply announcing the truth through the media is not enough. As Patlabor 2 the Movie teaches us, civilized society is too small to contain real war. Even if a war breaks out somewhere in some country—even if it breaks out right beside us—it remains nothing more than a false war on a screen, nothing to do with us. To proclaim the truth, “telling” people is not enough: humanity must be plunged “into the truth.” What the protagonist sees is no longer merely his own sin, but the profound sin of the everyday world—America—this vast city of Babylon.
I tell my story as if chanting. As I speak, I pay special attention to intonation and rhythm, hoping that those who hear it will kill one another, hoping that people across America will slaughter one another. I hope someone notices that this is a prayer, and a song.
The protagonist decides to call upon the Messiah, to bring about the Last Judgment with a prayer spoken in the grammar of genocide, so that punishment descends upon American soil. It is precisely at this moment that the protagonist’s personal journey of atonement, traced throughout this essay, joins with the world’s Messiah. The two narratives of Genocidal Organ converge here. As for the other narrative—the one mentioned at the beginning, which starts with the nuclear explosion in Sarajevo—let’s leave that for another day.
“My people, leave that city, so that you do not share in her sins and suffer her plagues. For her sins have reached the heavens, and God has not forgotten all her wrongdoing.
Treat her as she has treated others; repay her double for what she has done. Mix her a double portion in the cup she used to mix her drinks. Give her suffering and sorrow to match her self-glorification, luxury, and debauchery. For she says in her heart, ‘I reign as queen. I am no widow, and I will never know sorrow.’
So in a single day her plagues will come upon her together: death, sorrow, and famine. She will be burned to ashes, for mighty is the Lord God who judges her.” —New Testament, Revelation 18:4–8, CCB