The NHK collector’s stabbing of a student

The NHK collector’s stabbing of a student is a 1981 knife attack in Tokyo’s Itabashi district, but its decisive significance lies in Aomamé’s failure to remember it. When she discovers the report, she cannot tell whether she had overlooked it in the newspaper or whether the event has disappeared from her memory. The ordinary-seeming crime thus becomes evidence that the reality she inhabits may be changing in ways her careful habits cannot explain.

The Incident in Itabashi

On October 12, an NHK fee collector, aged fifty-six, argued with a student who refused to pay the reception fee. The collector carried a knife in his bag and used it to inflict a serious abdominal wound. Police arrived and arrested him at the scene; he still held the bloodied knife, stood almost prostrate, and offered no resistance. A colleague described him as having worked as a collector for six years, with impeccable conduct and excellent results at work. The discrepancy between that reassuring professional account and the sudden violence is part of the incident’s starkness.

The collector was named Shinnosuke Akutagawa. Aomamé notes the name’s resemblance to that of the famous writer, but there is no photograph of the assailant in the report. Instead, the newspaper shows the injured student, Akira Tagawa, a twenty-one-year-old third-year law student at Nihon University and a second-dan in kendō. Aomamé reflects that he might have been harder to wound if he had been holding a bamboo sword, while also recognizing the absurdity of expecting an ordinary student to carry one during an argument with a fee collector. The contrast sharpens the strangeness of the encounter: neither man fits the ordinary expectation suggested by his role.

A Gap in Aomamé’s Record

The newspaper account unsettles Aomamé because the attack is not an obscure item buried in a few lines. It occupies nearly half a page of crime reporting, and she reads the Yomiuri every day, closely enough to study criminal cases in particular. She cannot rule out the possibility that she skipped the article, but considers that explanation highly improbable. The uncertainty matters: she has no evidence that the incident itself is impossible, only the unnerving fact that she remembers no report of it.

She writes a summary of the case and records its date, turning the news into something she can check against her own memory. She then follows coverage of the injured student for several days and finds no report that he died. That absence leaves open the possibility that he survived; the newspaper trail provides no definitive resolution. Even as Aomamé tries to establish what happened after the stabbing, the case has already become a test of whether her recollection can be trusted.

The Attack amid a Changing News Record

Aomamé’s uncertainty about the report becomes more consequential when she sets it beside the other news she remembers from the same period. The stabbing was not the only event missing from her recollection: she also finds that she had no memory of the Lake Motosu confrontation, although that pursuit had filled newspapers for days. She recalls that the police and Self-Defense Forces hunted the fleeing extremists through the mountains, killing three, seriously wounding two, arresting four, and losing track of one. The scale and duration of the coverage make the gap difficult to explain as ordinary forgetfulness.

The two stories also occupied sharply different positions in the news. The Lake Motosu operation, involving police officers killed and a major manhunt, crowded out coverage of the student injured by the NHK collector. Aomamé considers that the attention given to the confrontation may have helped bury scrutiny of the fee-collection system and NHK itself. Public doubts about the broadcaster’s political independence had already been intensified by controversy over a program on the Lockheed corruption scandal: NHK had shown the proposed content to politicians from the governing Liberal Democratic Party before broadcast, and the program was altered after political objections. Because NHK’s financing depended on Diet approval, its senior staff feared retaliation from the government or ruling party; some members of that party, in turn, regarded the broadcaster as being under their control. The stabbing therefore belongs not only to a private crisis of memory but also to a public setting in which a major story could eclipse questions about institutional power.

What the Missing Report Reveals

The contrast between Aomamé’s usual precision and these two omissions turns a newspaper check into a test of reality. She considers herself conscientious and meticulous, confident in a memory that has helped her carry out killings without error; she reads the paper daily and believes that no significant item escapes her attention. Yet she remembers the period’s other stories clearly, while the NHK stabbing and the Lake Motosu confrontation alone are absent. Her difficulty is not simply that one violent incident went unnoticed: the selectiveness of the gap resists an ordinary explanation.

Aomamé presses her fingertips against her temples and entertains the possibility that a function in her brain has concealed information from her, as though a black cloth had been laid over certain facts so her eyes could not see them and her memory could retain nothing of them. Alongside the stabbing and the firefight, the concealed items include changes to police weapons and uniforms and a proposed American-Soviet lunar base. The news report thus acquires a significance far beyond its immediate crime: it becomes one concrete trace in Aomamé’s growing suspicion that the world itself has changed, and that some of the evidence has been hidden from her.