Subtitle: “With a spirit of tolerance.”
Introduction: No Legends for the Living Dead
A “dark world” of clandestine gambling and illegal transactions, run by men in black, is a favourite subject for film and television. This mysterious heterotopia satisfies our fantasies about what goes on “behind the scenes” of reality. On screen, it becomes a place of thrilling experiences: thick wads of banknotes flying through the air, gun battles erupting in the streets, secret deals in back alleys late at night, the tension of betrayal as everyone pursues a hidden agenda. All these “hidden operations,” impossible in everyday life, indulge our daydreams to the full.
The protagonists are either gambling gods with dazzling skills or heroes who can take on a hundred men and weave through a hail of bullets. Tightrope artists dancing on the edge of danger, they give a consummate “performance” of the peril of approaching death, letting viewers feel the “thrills” of continually testing its limits. Yet viewers also know that the protagonist cannot possibly mess it up. A street acrobat might slip, but that will not happen on screen. However likely failure is made to appear, it is certain not to happen: the performance requires this. The perilous wagers and flying bullets are merely simulated threats of death, whose sole function is to support the protagonist’s ambitious exploits. This is what we call “formulaic,” but as long as chips and bullets supply the thrills, even a lousy film will always find an audience.
In short, these works depict the “dark world” only at the cost of castrating the central signifier governing its operations: death. They excise death’s lethality, prevent chips from circulating at random, ensure that no stray bullet hits the protagonist by chance. Through these operations, they replace death itself with a simulated threat of death, exempting the protagonist from its universal law and conferring a kind of sacred halo upon him. The point is not whether the protagonist gets shot in a particular story, but that from the outset he is already a hero who transcends the law of death. In other words, such works depend on abolishing death’s law of exchange. There is no genuine life-and-death struggle here, because the protagonist’s death has already been packaged as a commodity within a dazzling “performance”; it cannot become a general equivalent available for exchange. The fundamental purposiveness of these adventure stories requires them to suppress the death drive. Some meaning/mission always guides the protagonist, keeping him from straying into a death game without purpose, governed only by the iron law of equivalent exchange.
The protagonist of this essay, however, is precisely a lost lamb who plunges headlong into a suicide game propelled by the death drive. Nobuyuki Fukumoto’s Kaiji Itou is an incorrigible gambler, an idler who scrapes together small sums through petty theft and borrowing here and there, only to squander them immediately on dice and pachinko machines. On one occasion, he unwittingly becomes guarantor for another deadbeat’s loan. When that deadbeat skips town, a debt collector comes knocking, tells Kaiji that he cannot possibly repay the loan, and pushes him into a high-stakes gamble among social scum like himself, with freedom and even life on the line. Kaiji’s gambling story begins with this wager and remains trapped within it. Whenever he finally manages to escape a deadly game, he reverts to being a shiftless deadbeat, is easily duped again, and falls into another wager. Most of the series therefore turns on how Kaiji “escapes alive.” He always loses his life at the very beginning of the game; all his efforts go toward snatching back the life he so casually threw away.
Kaiji surrenders his death in exchange for gambling funds with which to redeem his own death. Surrendering death is already an act of suicide. Through this symbolic death he becomes a “gambler,” gaining admission to the suicide game. The identity of the “gambler” signifies precisely the absence of an identity: only those who have lost their footing in the “surface world” sink to becoming gamblers. These are the “living dead.” Among the kinds of stories still available to them, there are no more adventures or legends, only the pursuit of resurrection or death once and for all.
I. “Gambling Economics” as a Model
Only gambling can so easily cross the barriers of nationality, age, wealth and poverty, gender… all those obstacles, and let people talk to one another… You could call it a common language…!
1.1 Chips Are Code
There is no political economy in the casino. It has no need to take labour in general as its fundamental reference; value is expressed solely through rules—the terms for exchanging chips and the calculation of odds. Here value is converted entirely into code: information with no fixed referent, assigned a value by a structure. Chips are the exemplary instance of casino economics. They represent nothing but a string of data and can circulate through the casino without obstruction; they are not produced but are already in exchange from the outset; every exchange is reproduction, since they appreciate or depreciate in the process. There is no production in the casino, but reproduction is everywhere—and it is perfect reproduction. No actual labour need be invested, nor is there the risk of the “perilous leap” involved in selling a commodity, because only capital is being exchanged. Capital cycles through purposeless circulation, continually satisfying the infinite demand for reinvestment. The slogan “free exchange” proclaims nothing more than its literal meaning: only exchange is free. It determines itself, while everything else is determined by it.
The Bog jackpot: each pachinko ball is worth 4,000 yen.
Chips are money’s money, money in its final form. They fulfil its ultimate mission as the general equivalent: freed from the constraints of any purpose or social reference, they become “substance” in the strict sense. Through the law of reproduction, they posit themselves as their own cause and, simultaneously, as the cause of everything else (everything else depends on them). Common sense tells us that “chips are merely simulated money.” What we see instead, then, is simulation replacing reality wholesale—or reality itself becoming “simulated.” This is because the concept of the “real” no longer has any “value”: it cannot enter circulation or be converted into value through exchange. Capitalism in our time needs only what is most readily exchangeable. Hence the proliferation of simulacra.
Monetary signs become detached from all social production: they then enter into speculation and unlimited inflation… Wages become detached from the “rational” value of labour-power, money from real production: in each case, reference is lost.
Money is emptied of production’s purposiveness and affects; it becomes speculative. It moves from the gold standard to liquid capital and generalized floating, from a referential sign to a structural form. This is the logic peculiar to the “floating” signifier… The signifier frees itself from any signified that might constrain its proliferation and endless play. Money can therefore reproduce itself through a simple game of transfers and accounting entries, through the continual division and repetition of its own abstract substance.1
Baudrillard’s discussion of the changes money undergoes in contemporary capitalism corresponds to what we see in the casino. His analysis begins from the present condition in which “dead labour overwhelms living labour,” and the contribution of human labour-power is increasingly marginalized within production as a whole. Under these conditions, labour in general can no longer serve as the standard of value. Baudrillard even argues that it never was the standard, that this was merely a productivist fantasy. Capital has never subordinated itself to productive labour. From capitalism’s inception, it has been engaged in “god-making”: through an infinite reflexive movement, it absorbs workers, factories, technology, consumption, and so on into its own system, turning them into signs, “floating” signifiers that obey only capital’s grammar.
1.2 Producing the Living Dead
The process by which elements are incorporated into capital’s operations and homogenized is precisely the process from which capital draws its vitality. “Surplus” does not arise through a deduction from the price of labour; it arises at the constitutive moment when labour is given a price and labour-power is traded on the market. Once the concrete elements of production have been converted into a string of coded signs, a string of numbers, “surplus” has already been produced. Thereafter, the elements entering circulation are always already enslaved. Baudrillard describes this originary act of selling out as “handing over one’s death.” People in society are already hostages, because they have handed their death over to the mechanism of symbolic exchange. In return, they receive a quantified death as the standard for social life—“general equivalence is death.”2 Value and death seem to have been equated, giving rise to a widespread fantasy: accumulating value can postpone death to the infinitely distant endpoint of a linear progression of value. The infinity of capital coincides with the infinity of time, lending the accumulation of wealth a spurious sense of progress. But this is merely a deception. Exchangeable death is not, after all, real death; the latter is only continually depleted in this process of accumulation, and capital steals life from that depletion to keep itself running.
In ordinary work, this depletion is slow. Life often ends before accumulation is complete, protecting the fantasy just described. The gambler, however, always squanders the funds borrowed against his life before that life ends. His symbolic death thus comes long before his real death, placing him in a paradoxical condition: he has been ordered out of the field of symbolic exchange, but his flesh remains there—something capital cannot comprehend. Such people are everywhere in the Kaiji trilogy: those who lose their stars in the gambling aboard the yacht and are stripped naked and imprisoned in a glass enclosure; those living in the underground labour facility, where daylight never reaches; the casino boss seized immediately after losing everything to Kaiji. The Teiai Group’s constantly recurring men in black act as cleaners, immediately removing these “unnameable things,” now stripped of symbolic identity, from view—like a city’s waste-disposal system. Fukumoto tries to make the symbolic death of losing all one’s gambling funds resemble real death, with the dreadful fate of being dragged away by the men in black. Yet in Kaiji Itou himself we can see what life in this paradoxical condition looks like. Whenever he is not in a game, he either lies around all day in a filthy room or gets the “itch” and loses the little money he has at a small gambling stall or pachinko machine. This image of a stupefied idler fits the literal meaning of “living dead” remarkably well: someone symbolically dead, but not bodily dead.
In fact, “the gambling funds are exhausted and only flesh remains” does not yet amount to genuine symbolic death. Why should flesh not itself be capital for gambling? The “leap” that treats flesh directly as gambling capital shows us that the distinction between symbolic and real death is itself merely provisional. The symbolic has the power to kill (“power” is itself the manipulation and administration of death); it is simply often concealed from public view. In certain settings, this cruel aspect of symbolic exchange is directly exposed, and we therefore call them the “dark world.” This is precisely the cruel dark world Fukumoto depicts, where the body is merely one more chip. This body-devouring “gambling economics” shows us contemporary capitalist economics in exemplary form.
II. Limbs with Prices Plainly Marked
2.1 Cruel Chips
The chips are free; their owner, by contrast, is imprisoned. His entire fate hangs on this string of numbers. We might even say that his whole life was converted into a string of numbers and entered into the calculation the moment he stepped into the casino. Here, perhaps, we can discern a transformed kind of “surplus value.” Proclaiming gambling’s freedom and fairness, the casino attracts customers carrying gambling funds. Little do they know that chips are only the ostensible objects of exchange: what the casino really covets is their lives. Some casinos readily lend gambling money to customers unable to settle their losses precisely in order to overdraw their “life-value” (within the framework of modern insurance and medical technology, life can be converted into value in the literal sense—or, conversely, life is one of modern society’s resources and already has its price plainly marked). This life-value arises in the process by which money becomes “cruel.”
Money today has become “cool”—“cool” refers to the close, affectless interrelation of terms, a game nourished solely by its rules, by substitutions of terms and the exhaustion of those substitutions… We are in the cool phase of signs. The present system of labour is cool, money is cool, structural arrangements in general are cool.
Coolness is the pure play of discursive values and verbal substitutions, the nonchalance and distance of dealing henceforth only in numbers, signs, and words, the unlimited power of operational simulation… When the medium becomes the message, we enter the cool age. This is precisely what has happened to money. Once money reaches a certain stage of separation, it ceases to be a medium, a means for circulating commodities; it becomes circulation itself, the form of the system realized in its revolving abstraction.3
Money’s meaning has been reduced to a minimum. Henceforth it is merely a string of numbers, neither “hard-earned money” nor “money made without scruple.” All that remains is a tautology: money is money. Money obeys only the rules of exchange; every operation involving it is merely a “game.” Baudrillard calls money “cool” because it obeys only the rules of the game, endlessly and purposelessly substituting one term—a sign—for another. But this has not yet identified money’s “cruel” side.
First, everyone who uses money is compelled to participate in this “exchange game”: this is money’s universal coercive force. Second, money’s conversion into code expands its reach far beyond its basic vehicle, “money,” bringing about a kind of “generalized monetization” (or generalized informatization). Money seeks to draw every element into exchange, into an endless circuit of circulation. Everything is “priced,” but “price” no longer means only a monetary price; it extends to the property of being “exchangeable/able to circulate.” Anything can be exchanged simply because everything has become signs: the trading of user data between websites, the compulsive exposure and exchange of personal information on WeChat’s “Moments,” and so on. Circulation becomes the sole principle and the absolute command. Whether what circulates is money, information, signs, or something else no longer matters—or rather, circulation moulds all the elements passing through it into the same thing. This process itself has a cruel character:
The very possibility of quantitative equivalence already presupposes death. The equivalence of wages and labour presupposes the worker’s death; equivalence between commodities presupposes the symbolic destruction of objects. Everywhere, it is death that makes the calculation of equivalences and arbitrary adjustment possible. This death is neither violent nor bodily. It is the arbitrary substitution of life and death, their mutual neutralization in survival—or death in différance.4
Circulation carries an originary symbolic violence, through which every element becomes the same dead thing. When symbolic violence acts upon an organic body, its destructiveness becomes immediately apparent. We will see this in the quotations from A Thousand Plateaus below.
2.2 Bodies for Sale
The plane on which code operates is, in the strict sense, a “plane of consistency”:
The plane of consistency eliminates all metaphor: only the real exists. These are electrons themselves, real black holes, actual cellular units, real sequences of signs. But they have already left their strata; they have been destratified, decoded, deterritorialized. This is precisely what allows them to approach and interpenetrate one another on the plane of consistency. A silent dance. The plane of consistency disregards differences of level, orders of magnitude, intervals. It disregards the difference between the artificial and the natural. It disregards the distinction between content and expression—all these exist only through strata and in relation to strata.5
Put simply, what Deleuze calls “strata” are mechanisms for defining and dividing things: the family defines what constitutes a father, mother, and son; political economy defines capital, the proletariat, and labour; the social division of labour distinguishes occupations. These strata are preserved within the plane of consistency, giving things form and organizing them into systems. Deterritorialization passes through these strata, undoing their divisions and breaking down boundaries, so that different kinds of things once again operate in an undifferentiated form on the plane of consistency. Deleuze vividly describes this operation as an “intensive continuum”: circulating particle-signs differ only numerically, in intensity/magnitude, and therefore form uninterrupted flows. On the basis of the plane of consistency, Deleuze describes a “body without organs”:
The BwO (body without organs) is precisely what remains when you have removed everything. What you remove is phantasy—the totality constituted by meaning and subjectification.6
Ultimately, is not the Ethics the great book on the BwO? Attributes are the types or kinds of BwO, while substance, power, and the origin-point of intensity serve as matrices of production. Modes are everything that happens: waves and vibrations, migrations, thresholds and gradients, intensities originating in a matrix and produced within a particular type of substance.7
The BwO is the field of immanence of desire, the plane of consistency proper to desire.8
A body without organs—in Deleuze’s account, the body of a drug user, a masochist, and so on—is a body that has lost the divisions modern medicine calls “organs”; more precisely, it has lost the functional divisions of the “organism.” The organism entails hierarchy, functional organization, and centralized administration. For Deleuze, these are precisely the “strata” that bind the body. Only by forgetting organs does the drug user acquire an “ice-cold intensity,” the masochist an “intensity of pain,” because the body has become a plane of consistency across which desire can flow freely. Deleuze regards the body without organs as a kind of practical objective: we should try to form such a body, neither bound by the limits of strata nor destroyed by excessively intense destratification. But our concern here is not individual desire. For the purposes of our subject, we can substitute “money” for desire in Deleuze’s account.
For Deleuze, bodies are most often bound by external strata. Although capital’s operations depend on hierarchical systems, money as circulation itself possesses the power of destratification. What produces bodies without organs is nothing other than the flow of money, into which bodies are thrown, priced, bought, and sold. We can even find a more suggestive formulation in Deleuze’s account. He regards Spinoza’s Ethics as the great book on the body without organs because the relation between the body without organs and “intensity” (or the “matrix producing intensity”) resembles that between attributes and substance in Spinoza’s metaphysical system. The former does not exist independently of the latter but is merely one of its “expressions”; the former is multiple, the latter one. The multiplicity of attributes does not produce conflict, since they are united in substance. Strictly speaking, only substance exists; attributes are merely different “instances” expressing it. This means that the body without organs is merely something secondary, a conduit through which intensity circulates, replaceable or dispensable at any moment. We can say that organic bodies are preserved within systems (strata); when intensity needs to pass through, these bodies are transformed through destruction into bodies without organs, to serve as conduits.
This is precisely the process we saw in the preceding analysis of money’s “cruelty.” The flow of money can make any particular body its conduit at any time. But this differs from Spinoza’s conception in that money is not a genuine god. It does not encompass all things; rather, it devours all things to package itself as a god. The univocity (compatibility) Spinoza envisages therefore does not exist here at all. Since everything is alienated into value, the circulation of value brings about intolerable “mixtures” of human bodies and commodities, accompanied by a certain destruction of the human body. Drug smuggling that conceals drugs in the anus or stomach, organ theft, even life insurance: the “bodies without organs” these operations display, in which human bodies and commodities share a plane of consistency, are no different from those Deleuze describes. Ultimately, the plane of consistency required by the circulation of value can achieve consistency only at the symbolic level. What is fleshly and concrete must be repressed and excluded. This process produces deformed, pieced-together bodies for sale.
Bodies for sale: this image recurs throughout the Kaiji gambling series. In the first gamble aboard the yacht, the losers are stripped naked and locked in a glass enclosure. The older man who mocks Kaiji is redeemed by his companions not out of friendship, but because he has hidden valuable jewellery in a medicated plaster on his back. This constitutes a body for sale. Eliminated gamblers are stripped naked and separated from those still playing; the naked body/flesh produced by this operation is the gambler’s “remainder/dregs.” The only way to prevent such residue from being disposed of as rubbish is to apply a remedial “plaster” to the flesh, joining flesh to commodity so that its symbolic value is not wholly exhausted. In this sense, there is little difference between jewellery worn as adornment and jewellery hidden—“smuggled”—inside the body. Both are merely coverings that conceal the flesh’s character as waste.
Body-part values and the removal roulette in the “17 Steps” mahjong arc.
In these examples, we see death quantified and calculated: concretely, in the prices of valuables embedded in human bodies, the price tags on limbs, and the insured sums of life-insurance policies. What matters is that this quantification imposed upon the body directly threatens life. Code’s deterritorialization of the body is precisely a death sentence. Before the sentence is carried out, people are granted an interval; for gamblers, this is the time they spend standing at the table. Seen this way, all Kaiji Itou’s efforts amount to seeking a “reprieve.”
III. Kaiji Itou’s Survival Game
3.1 Minimum Fairness
Once the wager begins, life has already been lent out. But the threat of death does not immediately reveal itself; the apparent form of a game conceals it. Symbolic exchange operates within a system of rules and assigned roles. Although we have already analysed its deadly character, that analysis was conducted at a meta-level. Those exchanging within the game can see only what the system supplies from within. They know only “how” to exchange and the “effects” of exchange: concretely, how to play and whose advantage the rules serve. They have no time to concern themselves with the character of the game itself, having invested all their energy in “playing”—especially when their immediate interests are at stake. In this frame of mind, a shrewd gambler will naturally select the rules most easily tampered with and the most advantageous distribution of roles. All that remains is to wait for a sucker to take the bait.
Power and an advantage in the rules are the assets on which Fukumoto’s lesser villains pride themselves. They are either petty operators who use their authority to force subordinates to gamble, then cheat to squeeze money out of them, or casino bosses who set traps, “baiting suckers” with large prizes that appear to require nothing but luck. The foreman of the underground labour facility in Tobaku Hakairoku Kaiji, the second part of the series, exemplifies the former. The casino boss who installs “the Bog” in that same part, and the casino boss who plays “Minefield Mahjong” in the third part, Tobaku Datenroku Kaiji, exemplify the latter. These insatiable local tyrants control the visible rules, the concealed methods of cheating, and the violence that maintains this order. Their business is practically risk-free: cheating is fine as long as it stays hidden, and even getting caught merely means not profiting from one customer. They imagine that this unequal exchange can continue forever. As long as they hold the advantage, profit is certain and loss impossible.
Because the rules are unequal, Kaiji always faces an extreme disadvantage. Even if he discovers his opponent’s fraud halfway through, exposing it cannot recover what he has already lost. The law of the gambling table is that the fault lies not with the cheat but with whoever fails to see through the cheating. Yet however much the rules can be rigged, they cannot be changed once play begins. The rules are grossly unfair, but even these grossly unfair rules must remain in force until the final settlement. Rules cannot change midway through: this is a necessary condition of play and the basis on which symbolic violence takes effect. If someone in power arbitrarily changes the rules to oppress an opponent, the violence ceases to be symbolic and becomes direct. This violation of the rules becomes a “scandal” that disgraces his authority; unable to maintain his symbolic identity, he must either step down or do everything possible to conceal the scandal. In short, the immutability of the rules supplies a minimum of “fairness,” because it is the minimum requirement for symbolic exchange to operate. It also offers Kaiji his only way to exploit the rules. As he sees it:
Legitimate places are no good! It has to be underground… somewhere with a sure-fire way to win, where the other side has a secret that guarantees victory… In other words, what I want most is somewhere they might cheat! Because if they might cheat, then look at it the other way: behind that sure-fire method, once you break through that barrier, you’re guaranteed to win!
What Kaiji sees is a metatheorem of the logical system called “gambling”: whatever the particular rules, they must possess some reversibility. If a rule can guarantee the house a win, it can, in reverse, guarantee his own. Kaiji, who has nothing, is “equal” to his opponent if and only if they are considered at this level. Those who gamble against him all regard him as an irredeemable, worthless piece of trash, fit only to be toyed with. When this minimum fairness reveals itself, unbearable terror follows. The rules on which they have always relied seem suddenly to change sides and become their restraints. In fact, however, rules take orders from no one. Gamblers who rely on tampering with them are merely small fry—though Chairman Hyōdō is probably the only person in the Kaiji gambling series who is not such small fry.
The wager against the underground foreman offers the clearest example of this “minimum fairness.” Kaiji learns in advance that the foreman cheats at crucial moments with special dice whose faces show only four, five, and six. During play, Kaiji exploits a lapse in the foreman’s attention and snatches the dice (the foreman had initially grown suspicious but, unwilling to lose a round with 500,000 at stake, cheated anyway), then accuses him of cheating. Kaiji’s accusation, however, is not that he has “broken the rules,” but that he has “concealed the rules.” After exposing him, Kaiji declares that the “special dice” are a hidden rule of this wager: they can keep the game going by adding that rule.
Of course… as I said before, we’ll continue using special dice. You don’t have to worry about being exposed. Go ahead and use them! Because we’ll be using something… like this too…!
Kaiji then produces his own specially made dice, fashioned from the bones left over from the foreman’s steak and Kaiji’s own blood, with a “one” on every face—since three ones pay out at the highest odds. He forces the foreman to acknowledge the validity of the rule allowing “special dice among companions.” Moreover, to make his cheating less conspicuous, the foreman had deliberately changed the rule that allowed a winning banker to keep the bank indefinitely. Instead, “the banker must stay on for two consecutive rounds, win or lose.” Together, these two rules turn the original 500,000 stake into a loss of more than ten million perica, the underground currency, emptying the hoard the foreman has accumulated over many years.
Seen this way, however, gambling seems to become a game anyone can pick up once they know the trick, with victory determined simply by who outsmarts whom. But Kaiji does not enter a wager merely to amuse himself or make money. He knows clearly that he is staking his whole life—and more. In the game against the foreman, for instance, his “entry fee” is the money he and five companions have saved over three months of work. Failure means at least another fifteen years of hard labour under the foreman’s oppression, yet conditions underground make it almost impossible for them to survive that long. Kaiji participates in gambling by repeating “acts of suicide.” The only capital left to him is his body, but once he has lost his symbolic life—unable to repay his debts, deprived of personal freedom—bodily death is merely a matter of time. So Kaiji stakes his life, and more; otherwise this living dead man cannot be “resurrected.” Staking life and more is the most fundamental reason he can win at such extreme gambling. Through Kazuya Hyōdō, Fukumoto calls this “the makings of a gambler.” It distinguishes Kaiji from the petty operators who know only how to manipulate rules: he always commits himself “body and soul.” Every wager is more than a game to him; it is a suicide game directly bound up with death.
3.2 The Only Possible Challenge
To redeem his life, Kaiji must let the stakes expand without limit, expanding “gambling with money” into “gambling with lives”—or rather, revealing that gambling with money is really gambling with lives. This is the theme of the Kaiji gambling series. Kaiji Itou has no personal assets, much less “credit.” His body—his personal freedom and organs—is his only security for a loan. The moment he enters a game, he faces the threat of death.
Does the converse hold, then? Can the wealthy escape the exchange of death simply by gambling within their means? No. The demands of chip exchange always far exceed the limits of one’s assets. Perhaps this should be put the other way around: the body is not one part of one’s “assets,” but their entirety. At the gambling table, there is no boundary between flesh and banknotes. Gamblers always stake their lives—only death is sufficient to serve as a chip, and it treats everyone alike. Although only Kaiji appears to be risking his life, gambling as a transaction is characterized precisely by its magical inflation of the stakes, because it embodies capital’s bottomless desire. Gambling’s demands for money therefore always exceed what any individual can supply. It covets the life of everyone who participates.
Staking death qualitatively transforms gambling as a “game,” just as Russian roulette is entirely different in character from a toy shark that snaps at your fingers. Death is always an excessive price, because the symbolic order is founded on its exclusion. Death is where meaning ends; it disrupts exchange and circulation. (To close this rupture, society must conquer death. “Natural death,” the modern manner of dying, is a clean, sanctioned, “good” death, because it announces that life has reached the end of its “biological” capital. Accidental death, by contrast, is regarded as a failure to fulfil one’s obligations to society.9) Death is replaced by ubiquitous symbolic death, or “simulated death”: the death discussed above, which can be quantified, calculated, and circulated. This death, “rendered harmless,” imprisons unexchangeable real death within the body, preventing its exposure. Gambling, however, recalls real death into exchange. As we discussed in “Bodies for Sale,” a body engaged in gambling is especially vulnerable to being traversed by a deterritorializing flow. Or rather, gambling is the “occasion” on which concealed real death can most readily reappear in its irrational, unbearable true form.
A body engaged in gambling is like a listed bond or share: offer a price and you can acquire its “ownership.” For the wager against Tonegawa, Chairman Hyōdō, with his perverse tastes, proposes letting Kaiji stake his hearing:
All you have to do is accept the risk that you might lose something, and you could win a hundred million yen… For you, Kaiji, who just risked your life, it’s only a small risk… an eye or an ear…!
As far as we’re concerned, your ear is a hostage. Half the rights to it already belong to us. We can’t let you do whatever you like with it! We’re only lending it to you for now. Once the result is decided, I’ll confiscate… your hearing!
But this pledged ear becomes Kaiji’s opening. He realizes that the device fitted to his ear to pierce his eardrum is also what Tonegawa uses to cheat. Excusing himself to go to the toilet, he pretends to lash out in impotent fury at the mirror, then uses a shard of broken mirror to cut off that ear. With one hand he holds a towel against the wound, concealing the removal of the device. He then has a companion hide in the toilet and cup the device in both hands, allowing it to transmit a steady heart-rate reading and mislead Tonegawa. Here, too, Kaiji is merely “turning the rules around,” but we can clearly see that he stakes death—and more. He stakes the maximum depth to which the device can penetrate his ear, the highest stake he can offer. Losing would mean far more than the loss of his hearing: the needle would pierce his semicircular canals and very likely kill him. Yet in this game of “E-Card,” with its unmistakable implications, Kaiji chooses to challenge the “emperor” in precisely this way:
Remember what you said? You said a slave is someone with nothing, someone who’s unquestionably… bullied… But someone with nothing… a slave prepared to throw everything away, can beat the emperor…! Take this! This is… the last voice my companions and I raise from the edge of death… our last refusal to give in…!
In the latter half of the trilogy’s first part, Gambling Apocalypse: Kaiji, Kaiji and others in the same predicament are forced through a series of deadly “stages” for the viewing pleasure of the wealthy. By the time he reaches this wager, Kaiji has endured humiliation and deceit and witnessed the fear, despair, and deaths of countless companions. The story’s emotional pressure has accumulated to the breaking point. His reversal of defeat in the E-Card game is undoubtedly the plot’s climax. Kaiji wins enough to repay his debt and can walk away intact. The high-and-mighty Tonegawa is forced to perform dogeza—kneeling and pressing his forehead down—on a red-hot iron plate: he, too, pays the price. The story seems to have reached a stopping point. But Kaiji decides to press the challenge, to continue his righteous “revenge.” He has understood that a slave with nothing can challenge the emperor with his own death, and that this is the only possible challenge. So he proposes a wager to Chairman Hyōdō.
Many readers consider Kaiji’s decision to challenge Hyōdō a contrived plot development Fukumoto forced into the story to secure a sequel. Yet it also has a certain necessity. Within the world of the Kaiji gambling series, Chairman Hyōdō represents a kind of supreme order and authority. The rebellious Kaiji must settle accounts with such authority. As noted above, gambling’s “minimum equality” enables him to win by turning the rules around. But such reversal is possible not because of the rules’ own power, but because an external, higher authority supplies an arbiter. In the game against the foreman, for instance, had the Teiai executive Yoshihiro Kurosaki not intervened to preside, the foreman would certainly have tried every possible means of wriggling out. This “higher authority” guarantees order—the oppressive order that subjects people like Kaiji to such suffering and humiliation. Kaiji’s ultimate objective is therefore precisely the negation of order. Fukumoto gives this order a “spokesman,” a “target” for Kaiji to challenge: Chairman Kazutaka Hyōdō. It is here that the image of Kaiji as an indomitable, justice-loving “heroic” gambler, established from the opening of Gambling Apocalypse: Kaiji, comes into question.
3.3 The Hero’s Endpoint: The “Suicide Game”
Following the standard progression of a manga, Hyōdō would undoubtedly be the “final boss” to defeat. At the moment Kaiji defeats him, his arduous journey would be elevated into an immortal legend for others to revere. But as we said in the introduction, Kaiji’s story is neither adventure nor legend. If it must be called something, it is merely the story of a gambler struggling to stay alive on the edge of death. The wager with Hyōdō reveals precisely this fact.
Kaiji gives all his efforts at the gambling table a purpose: once he has won his life back, he will defeat Hyōdō. More precisely, Kaiji’s “survival” means recovering his position in the symbolic dimension—settling his gambling debts and returning to society. His challenge to Hyōdō likewise aims to humiliate order and authority on a symbolic level. This line of thought actually continues the theme of Tonegawa’s speech aboard the yacht at the beginning:
The most you ever think is, “Wouldn’t it be nice to win?” That’s why you’re the scum standing here. You can’t just think it would be nice to win… You have to think: I must win! It’s because you people keep losing… that nobody likes you now! Poor and indecisive, down at the bottom of life… crawling, crawling, crawling… always crawling… Why? Because you’ve been losing… from then right up to now! There’s only one thing: win… If you don’t win, you’re scum… You have to win, you have to win… you have to win!
Tonegawa is a model hard worker, climbing step by step into Teiai’s upper ranks through examinations, interpersonal skills, and the like. His creed is to win: only victory can improve one’s symbolic standing. Kaiji, down at the bottom, actually follows a similar logic. What he opposes is only the side of Tonegawa’s logic that “disregards human feeling”—the cruelty of casting losers into a hell on earth. He therefore challenges the symbolic order at the price of death. There is no “greater” object of exchange than death within symbolic exchange, because death exceeds what symbolic exchange can bear. For precisely this reason, deadly gambling reveals symbolic exchange as a site that generates “enjoyment.”
Hyōdō is less the personification of order and authority than the image of a pure gambler, someone who genuinely delights in gambling. He is not an imposing “Big Brother,” but the Name-of-the-Father in reverse: the anal father immersed in enjoyment. If the preceding account gave Kaiji’s gambling a certain revolutionary character by interpreting it as “a challenge that stakes death,” Hyōdō’s intervention reintroduces the dimension of desire. He rewrites Kaiji’s entire righteous cause as enjoyment—the enjoyment of “playing a game”:
I think you must have felt it yourself, Kaiji… You crossed that steel bridge and lived, then won at E-Card just now… The delight, relief, happiness in that instant must have been overwhelming! Struggling on the edge of death is painful, but it’s fulfilling… And escaping death is the sweetest thing in the world, the greatest blessing…! I imagine that enjoyment is already branded into your mind! I suspect your life from now on, Kaiji… will be a journey spent pursuing that enjoyment, over and over…!
We can see that the purpose Kaiji sets himself is a hypothetical imperative. It permits the indefinite postponement of his “ultimate objective,” allowing him to repeat the pursuit of “survival” while hypnotizing himself with this mission. Hyōdō’s words puncture Kaiji’s self-deception, forcing him to acknowledge his desire, to acknowledge that he is simply addicted to the extreme stimulation of walking the edge of death. Yet Kaiji himself has not recognized this. He has not realized that his fierce desire to “stay alive” comes solely from the frenzied drive to “seek death.” It is this drive that makes him actively enter deadly wagers again and again; it is in this sense that gambling becomes the “suicide game” that attracts him. Only under the stimulation of death does Kaiji possess his supposed “gambler’s gift.” He can win only through this investment of enjoyment; he cannot win through the ordinary investment of signs—gambling concerned only with money—where he is just like any mediocre gambler. His wager with Hyōdō, as well as the Minefield Mahjong game in Tobaku Datenroku Kaiji, proves the point.
“The one being tricked… was Kaiji…! These three were tricking him!”
After Kaiji beats “the Bog” pachinko machine and escapes alive from the underground labour facility, his former companions Miyoshi and Maeda seek him out. They tell him that the boss of the casino where they work always uses his employees to peek at customers’ tiles. As employees, the two can turn the tables, helping Kaiji peek at the boss’s tiles instead and make a killing. In fact, however, they have been in league with the boss all along. They tell every customer that “our boss cheats,” then “bait suckers” with the tempting offer of helping the customer cheat. Kaiji agrees precisely because the game looks profitable and risk-free—and walks straight into the three men’s trap. The wager with Hyōdō is no different: Kaiji’s petty cleverness leads him astray. He tries to exploit the rules to devise a gamble he cannot lose. Beforehand, he tucks the slip of paper marked as the winning lot into the side of a tissue box in the toilet. He then pretends to insist on choosing a fair method of gambling himself, steering Hyōdō into agreeing to settle the contest by drawing lots from that box. Hyōdō sees through the entire design. The wager ends in Kaiji’s total defeat and the loss of four fingers.
Precisely because Kaiji is one of the despised “living dead,” with no footing left, his counterattack from desperation displays enormous force. Each of his “escapes from certain death” gives spectators immense enjoyment—not because justice has been done or the oppressed have successfully taken “revenge,” but solely because the person who commits suicide is “reborn.” Or rather, the death brought about by suicide—staking one’s life in gambling—ultimately redeems itself. This may seem a repetitive process: no one has really lost a life, and symbolic value remains unchanged before and after the exchange. Yet in this process the “passion” of death has been fully performed. The increase in value occurs not in symbolic exchange but in libidinal exchange. Death brought about by human agency, especially “suicide,” has aesthetic value: it exceeds the cold, tedious game of exchanging signifiers and brings an experience difficult to symbolize—precisely the characteristic of the object of “aesthetic” appreciation.10
Conclusion: The Suicide Game as a Genre of Performance
In a sense, the story of Gambling Apocalypse: Kaiji is merely another “performance of death” of the kind described in the introduction. The difference is that formulaic films belong to the genres of adventure and legend; they tell the stories of heroes. The Kaiji gambling trilogy belongs to another genre. With the “living dead,” stripped of social identity, as its protagonists, it tells of survival after repeatedly plunging into death traps. More precisely, it presents a “suicide game”: no final realization of value remains, only the reproduction of enjoyment within the cycle of death and survival.
We have seen how money becomes cruel. Yet people can find the most intense enjoyment in this very cruelty, in cruel scenes of mutilation and death—or in escaping such scenes, in “survival.” Among kinds of death, the captivating vertigo induced by suicide has still greater appeal for spectators, because it contains an imagined subversion: “wresting from authority the right to dispose of one’s own life.” Ultimately, however, this subversive character has difficulty entering the political dimension. In other words, suicide’s meaning cannot be fully explained at the political level of individual and society; this voluntary death can therefore only dissolve into the aesthetic. In fact, when it comes to “subversive acts of self-sacrifice,” it is less their ethical, justice-loving component—their subversiveness—that arouses sympathy and admiration than the “self-sacrifice” itself that enthrals people. When a subject commits body and mind to an activity that brings forward their own death, every gesture acquires an inexpressible fascination.
Suicide, once realized, has the character of rupture and negation. Kaiji Itou, however, works to prevent its realization—or rather, he merely lets the allure of suicide cling to him. Suicide that is never realized: this guarantees that suicide can continue forever as a game, a performance, and that the reproduction of enjoyment can continue forever. Here, precisely, we see death converted into code. Death becomes a self-multiplying sign and enters into infinite reproduction. If the performance of formulaic films about heroic legends rests on the exclusion of death, the performance of Kaiji’s gambling rests on death’s conversion into code. The relation between the two may be like that between political economy and the economics of symbolic exchange.
In fact, the Kaiji gambling series is not only still running—the latest part is Tobaku Datenroku Kaiji: Kazuya-hen, and it has been serialized for twenty-five years since the first part began11—but has also spawned spin-offs such as Chūkan Kanriroku Tonegawa (Middle Manager Tonegawa). This is of course directly related to Fukumoto’s prolific output. Yet Kaiji’s gambling story itself possesses the reproductive character described above, so there would be nothing surprising about its spinning out a story of any length. Kaiji’s suicide game is really no different from the little everyday comic episodes of Middle Manager Tonegawa: both can proliferate indefinitely as performances, as diversions for spectators.