Cockroaches to destroy the world?

A vile smell wafts out of the front door of the home belonging to the man we'll call Taro Nakano. He walks around in a trademark tank top, and the scowl on his face never leaves.

"You've come about the roaches, right?" he asks the hacks from Donto (September). "It's terrorism it is. Terrorism. It's a jihad."

Tragically, events over the past year have brought the specter of terrorism much closer to most of us than we ever dreamed could be possible. Yet, Nakano, a middle-aged man living in a rural part of Ibaraki Prefecture is openly planning to unleash a terror attack on unsuspecting victims - using cockroaches as his weapon of destruction.

"In our world nowadays, every honest person is treated like an idiot. The only people who get ahead are the ones who're prepared to get dirty. Women are the same. They're all stupid. Money, money, money. That's all they think about. They have no problems stabbing anybody in the back. I'm going to destroy this world. I'm going to terrorize everybody in the world by unleashing my cockroaches," Nakano tells Donto.

Nakano obviously has his gripes with the world. But he has reason to, according to the men's monthly. Once a self-employed salesman for elementary schoolkids' stationary, Nakano was put out of business a decade ago by parents who complained to the police that his wares were fraudulently shoddy. He finally picked up a part-time job working as a pastry chef's assistant before complaints from female customers about his disheveled appearance saw him sacked. Nakano thought things had taken a turn for the worse when he fell in love at first sight with a woman working at his favorite massage parlor, but little did he know that she was to bring about his downfall.

After using every yen he possessed so that he could visit the massage parlor worker, who we'll call Sachiko, for three consecutive days, he was suddenly hustled by one of the knocking shop heavies who bashed him up because Sachiko accused him of stalking her. To make matters worse for Nakano, the monster strong-armed him into paying 500,000 yen in cash to cover Sachiko's costs to get rid of him.

Feeling rejected by the world, Nakano took on a job assembling electrical components and spent all his spare time and money cultivating cockroaches, which he sees as the ultimate weapon of terror.

"Cockroaches eat human eyelashes. I couldn't think of anything more satisfying than to have somebody wake up and discover a cockroach has eaten away their eyelashes," he tells Donto. "And women hate cockroaches. I'll ruin their mental state by unleashing hundreds of thousands of cockroaches onto the streets. And I'm breeding big American cockroaches, which put Japanese versions to shame."

Donto learns that Nakano has a number of theories for unleashing a roach raid on Japan. Simply unleashing massive numbers of the bugs on the streets will set off mass panic, bringing with it considerable numbers of shocked coronary victims and disrupting drivers, who subsequently cause fatal road accidents.

Nakano wants to surreptitiously let loose hundreds of thousands of cockroaches into family homes to target copulating couples. Interrupting them during sex by dropping the bugs from ceilings onto the couple will, according to the cockroach breeder, further reduce Japanese' childbirth rate, create greater strain on Japan's already rapidly aging society and finally obliterate Japan's economy by wiping out its workforce.

Nakano apparently spends most calculating how many more cockroaches he needs to launch his plans and dreaming up new ways to employ his radical roaches.

"You watch. I'll show you," he tells Donto. "I'll definitely show you."

Ryann Connell Mainichi Daily News http://mdn.mainichi.co.jp