Beelzebub is a Post-Modern Feast (47,000 characters)

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Beelzebub is a Post-Modern Feast

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[Note] This article/manuscript is a work of fiction and has no relation to any real persons, organizations, or rights. Even if names identical to real entities appear in the description, they are all projections of the author's inner space, events from a different timeline, or, even if they occur in this timeline, expressions of statements made by the author's exclusive guardian spirit. In other words, it is assumed that (as the author's exclusive guardian spirit says) is omitted from all sentences. Therefore, it absolutely does not infringe upon real persons, organizations, or rights, it is absolutely not intended for slander or defamation, it is absolutely not intended to disturb the reader's peace of mind, and it is absolutely not intended to shake the harmony of the universe. Accordingly, unauthorized reproduction or reprinting of this content is strictly prohibited, and naturally, the author reserves the right to change the content freely.

1. The Afternoon of 420,000 Copies

The phone rang right after I confirmed the number 420,000 on the display. Looking at the caller ID, Toru Kodawari did not move for three seconds. What was displayed there was his own name and his own number. The reason Kodawari picked up the receiver was closer to a feeling of having been waiting for it for a long time than to fear. Kodawari picked up the receiver with trembling fingers.

"Kodawari-kun, isn't it time we discussed the Gurdjieff Work?" the voice said.

In terms of voiceprint, it was his own. But that voice contained none of the fatigue, regret, or compromise that Kodawari had accumulated over 30 years. Although the voice itself was the same, it was a strange impression, as if another existence were borrowing the instrument called Kodawari to perform.

"Who are you?"

"You know best."

Silence fell. Kodawari looked out the window. The spring twilight of Mita covered the city like a film of light.

"State your business."

"Are you going to run an ad?" the voice said. It was not a tone of reproach. It was simply asking. "Are you going to sell Beelzebub with an ad?"

Something moved deep in Kodawari's throat. It was something he had known since he was in his twenties. In the Gurdjieff Work, promotion and advertising are considered some of the most Hasnamussian acts. Exploiting people's sleep, stimulating mechanical desires, and consuming the essence of others for one's own vanity and the organization's profit. He had always known that was the essence of advertising. Knowing this, he had continued to run ads for 30 years.

"I know," Kodawari said.

"Then why do you do it?"

"I don't know," he said. It was an honest answer. "Because I don't know, I am trying to do it."

There was a faint presence on the other side of the phone. A silence that could be taken as acceptance or disappointment.

"Even at 63, you still haven't been able to verbalize it?"

"I haven't."

Silence again. This time it was long. Furukawa felt something come to a standstill within himself. No counterarguments, no excuses emerged. His three centers, for once in agreement, simply remained silent.

"Then, we need to discuss this," the voice said. "About this contradiction. About the question of whether doing what is forbidden can become a mission."

"When?"

"Every time you pick up Beelzebub."

"Let me ask you one last thing," Furukawa said. "Where are you right now?"

On the other end of the line, there was a faint ambient sound. Human voices. Then, something like a shelf, like books, a sound that smelled like paper.

"It's Itami," the voice said. "A small bookstore inside an Aeon. You will come here someday, too."

The call ended. Furukawa hung up the receiver and stared at the wall for three seconds. Then he returned to the display, where the number 420,000 was glowing. It was the same number as before. However, its weight had changed slightly. He turned to his keyboard. He had to work.

Furukawa continued to think about the identity of the caller that night and the next morning. Was it a psychological self-split? Was it a byproduct of the moment his consciousness, reaching the sliding point of the Heptaparaparshinokh, connected to the structure of the universe? Or was it something else entirely? None of these were explanations. Furukawa felt that was fine. In Gurdjieff's universe, being unable to explain is not a defeat. Continuing to move while unable to explain is the practice of the duty of Trogoautoegocrat.

2. The Life of Toru Furukawa

June 2026, 3-4-8 Mita, Minato-ku, Tokyo. At the desk of the advertising manager of Hirakawa Publishing Co., Ltd. in a certain timeline, Toru Furukawa felt his three centers playing discordant notes. In his mid-twenties, he had encountered the works of G.I. Gurdjieff and, as a person who accepted them 100 percent as the truth of the world, it was a shock that burned through the depths of his soul.

That shock did not immediately turn into action. For a long time, he did not have the courage to contact a real-world group. He was plagued by an inferiority complex that the members depicted in Gurdjieff's books were all super-elites, and that if he, who had nothing to offer, knocked on that door, he would surely be turned away. A few years after his wife passed away, as he began to realize the end of his own life, he started learning Arabic, Hebrew, and Sanskrit, preparing to read the scriptures in their original languages. While tracing the transmission routes of these ideological arks, he felt a strong sense of discomfort with the current situation where modern people, regarding world heritage sites and tourist attractions, enjoyed only the external culinary cultures and buildings as objects of appreciation while keeping the lids closed on those ideological arks. It was then that he felt a premonition of the real thing on a Gurdjieff group website that had no signs of advertising at all.

In the winter of 2006, five years after his wife died, Furukawa made his first contact with a group. His long-standing inferiority complex was shattered by the shock of loss. It was not a feeling of water overflowing a weir, but of the weir itself collapsing. Face-to-face meetings with nearby members, remote sessions via email, and an annual retreat camp. In that place, connected to the London branch, Furukawa sat for the first time among "those who have the same question." It was real. At least, that was how it felt to him.

A group in Gurdjieff work is a vehicle for observing oneself in the midst of daily life and illuminating one's own mechanicalness through the eyes of others. There, reading, speaking, remaining silent, and observing reactions in life are linked as a single practice. Furukawa did not doubt its necessity. The group is necessary for evolution. That conviction remained even after disillusionment.

In 2022, when the central figure who had supported the group for many years was weakening and nearing their passing, Furukawa began to feel the group stagnating. He could not suppress his critical feelings. At the same time, he knew that much of that criticism was also a mirror reflecting his own immaturity. Knowing this, he sought change externally. He thought that if he changed his environment, something might move.

He judged for himself and looked for another circuit. After about 20 Zoom sessions with a different branch of the Gurdjieff group that he reached as a result of that choice, Furukawa faded out of his own volition in November 2023. He still carries the burden of his disloyalty to those who had introduced him. He had long avoided telling anyone about that experience. He felt that by speaking of it, he might damage something of someone who still remained there. It was consideration, and at the same time, it was Furukawa's own way of being polite.

The group is necessary. Vehicles have a lifespan. Is it a living vessel with a purpose, a vessel that functions as a bridge while becoming formalized, or something else entirely? Furukawa had held that question since his twenties. Knowing this, it took him 22 years, from 2001 to 2023, to verify it with his own body.

There is no need to tell his personal history at length here. What is necessary is that, after that long detour, Furukawa still held a sense of disloyalty and incompleteness toward the group. What he held was not a rejection of the group, nor a denial of the work. Was there a need for a circuit to deliver this book to those who did not reach the group, those who left the group, and those who stood still before the group? That question had begun to grow within him.

And now, before his eyes, is that book. Furukawa once read this book aloud in the middle of the night. Heptaparaparshinokh. Triamazikamno. Trogoautoegocrat. Laws of the universe, the intersection of three forces, the principle of mutual feeding. Before he could fully understand the meaning of the words, the sounds themselves entered his body. His three centers, for once in agreement, came to a standstill. Before meaning, something moved.

That unresolved wound was now, on the advertising manager's desk, transforming into the contradictory mission of delivering Beelzebub to one million people. Advertising might be a Hasnamussian act. But perhaps delivering it to those who were not reached is also a duty of Trogoautoegocrat that he has been avoiding. Furukawa did not know. Without knowing, he had no choice but to start working.

3. The Giant Tower of Beelzebub

As the advertising manager, Waritetsu Furuta watched coldly as the news broke that director Paul Thomas Anderson's latest film, "One Battle After Another," had won major awards including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay at the 98th Academy Awards in March 2026. While the world was intoxicated by the absurdist drama loosely based on Thomas Pynchon's "Vineland," he was tasked with executing the order to reboot this extraordinary cosmic prose, "Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson," as the ultimate weapon to end this impasse.

The original English title is "Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson: An Objectively Impartial Criticism of the Life of Man." An objectively impartial criticism of human life. Herein lies the key to reinterpreting this book. The original title explicitly identifies not only the hierarchies and laws of the universe but human life itself as the object of criticism. Eating, excreting, clothing, vanity, theater, tourism, science, religion, reading, education, and the use of the body. The entire endeavor of humanity is audited from the window of a spaceship. Therefore, this book cannot be read simply under the shelf label of "esoteric spiritual book." It is a critique of civilization, a comedy, and a life diagnosis disguised as cosmology.

Gurdjieff begins the opening of this book with a warning to the reader. First, he commands them to "read it three times," and then provides a mechanism to the effect that if they don't like it, they can get their money back. Neither James Joyce nor Thomas Pynchon said such things. They test the reader, but they do not offer an escape route. Gurdjieff went out of his way to provide an escape route while saying, "But be prepared to read it."

A portion of this opening contains a reversal similar to the device Socrates used at the beginning of the "Apology." Socrates, while claiming he did not know how to speak in court and could not use flowery language, turned that very gesture of humility into an extremely powerful defense. Gurdjieff, too, while declaring that he did not know the art of writing, meticulously arranged the opening section containing that declaration as a device to shake the reader's stance. Socrates gave that defense while under a death sentence. Gurdjieff wrote this book after war, exile, and a near-fatal car accident. Both are words from a place that has abandoned "ordinary survival strategies." A Beelzebub researcher and a Plato researcher have never been in the same room. The fragmentation of the canon makes the lines that should be connected invisible.

What Borges tried to protect in "Ficciones" was to liberate Attar's venerable "Conference of the Birds" from the shallow praise of critics. The circular structure, in which 30 birds realize they were God after a journey in search of Him, continues to burn even after enduring the consumption of criticism. And this is the same kind of circle as the cosmic grammar possessed by Beelzebub. In "Ficciones," Borges mocked critics who praised the "meaningless coincidence" between Joyce and Homer. And likewise, he satirized critics who praised the venerable Attar's "Conference of the Birds" for its superficial resemblance to Bahadur's novels, noting that they garnered praise with the same recklessness in London, Allahabad, and Calcutta.

Furthermore, Gurdjieff is sharp about the toxicity of language. He uses the metaphor that Russian is suited for jokes and insults, while English is suited for talking about Australian frozen meat by the fireplace. And he throws in the concepts of "mentation by thought" versus "mentation by form." It is a declaration that even the same words are not conveyed because the "form" differs depending on the geography and conditions in which one was raised, which is why he writes in this way. All of this converges the lineage of absurdist novels that have developed under the baptism of adultery by James Joyce's "Ulysses," Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow," Franz Kafka, Kobo Abe, and William Burroughs and J.G. Ballard, into a single cosmic science fiction work.

The narrator is Beelzebub. He is a being whom the three-brained beings of Earth call "the Devil," but in Gurdjieff's universe, that designation is merely a product of fallacy. Beelzebub is rather a cosmic sage who has acquired deep compassion and objective reason after long exile and reflection. He once rebelled in his youth and was exiled to Mars, Ors, within the solar system. Later, having received a pardon from the Creator and returned to his home planet Karatas, Beelzebub tells his grandson Hassein about past events on Earth while aboard the spaceship Karnak, which is heading to a conference on the planet Revozvradendr. That is the basic composition of this grand epic. His attendant is Hassein. The dialogue between the three gradually reveals the core of cosmology.

The universe Beelzebub speaks of has its own unique characters. Ashiata Shiemash, a saint sent to Earth. In order to save the three-brained beings (humanity) who could no longer employ the objective conscience remaining in the depths of their subconscious in their daily consciousness due to the influence of the organ called Kundabuffer, he was tasked with "awakening through Conscience." He almost succeeded. However, a being named Lentrohamsanin appeared. Lentrohamsanin, one of the most dangerous Hasnamusses in human history. A Hasnamus is a being who inflates a false personality rather than developing their own essence, and unilaterally consumes the life energy of others. Lentrohamsanin eradicated the work Ashiata Shiemash attempted to bring the data of objective conscience remaining in the depths of the subconscious into awakened consciousness, using skillful theory. Through the words "individual freedom" and "the right to happiness."

Gornahoor Harharkh, a genius scientist from Saturn. Gornahoor is also a title that the three-brained beings of Saturn place before their names to show respect. Okidanokh, the energy omnipresent in the entire universe. Through his experiment of its tri-partition, he proved the relationship between matter and consciousness. He is Beelzebub's best friend and the embodiment of objective science. Angel Looisos, the very person who implanted the organ of Kundabuffer into humanity. Not out of malice. He designed it so that humanity would perceive reality "upside down" in order to maintain the balance between the Moon and the Earth. The organ was later removed, but the results remained. The Akhldanns, a group of intellectual seekers who actually existed on the continent of Atlantis. It was a society for "self-knowledge" founded by a person named Belcultassi. They anticipated the great catastrophe approaching their planet, and scattered to various places to determine its nature and observe it. Shortly thereafter, the second crustal movement, or the sinking of Atlantis, occurred. The search was not lost. The search was dispersed throughout the entire planet. These are not metaphors. At least not for Gurdjieff. And the fact that all of this can be read as "SF" is Beelzebub's greatest weapon.

4. 18:08, Itami City, Hyogo Prefecture

There are people all over the world who boast about reading "Finnegans Wake." There are piles of "Ulysses" commentaries. Pynchon readers have a sign language with which they secretly confirm their peers. Yet, Beelzebub readers do not gather for parties. That situation is clearly strange. In fact, Beelzebub is better suited for parties. If those who have read all three volumes gather, they could talk about the story of Kundabuffer, the division of roles between Lucifer and Saturn, the types of Hasnamusses, and where the Law of Octaves slips. The topics would be endless.

Why was the organ of Kundabuffer implanted, and why was it removed? Why did only the results remain after it was removed? Why did Ashiata Shiemash's "awakening through conscience" plan lose to Lentrohamsanin's "individual freedom" theory? How does the "relationship between consciousness and matter" shown by Gornahoor Harharkh's Okidanokh experiment connect to modern physics? Why did Belcultassi and the Akhldanns scatter to various places to observe the approaching great catastrophe before the sinking of Atlantis? Why is Heropass (time) a "merciless master"? Is Solionensius operating at this very moment? What works of art remain in the modern era as Legominisms? Does the Kesdjan body really persist after death? Do souls that die without fulfilling the Partkdolg-duty really become food for the Moon? Would such topics come up at a "Ulysses" reading group? Waritetsu Furuta's mission is to create that gathering point.

Saturday, February 21, 2026. Waritetsu Furuta was in Itami City, Hyogo Prefecture. If asked why he was there, it would be difficult to answer. He was not ordered by anyone. There were no business trip plans. But a few weeks had passed since that phone call, and before he knew it, he was sitting in a Shinkansen seat, and before he knew it, he was walking through the automatic doors of the Aeon Mall. 18:08. He stood in front of the religion and spiritual world shelf and took a picture with his smartphone. The moment he pressed the shutter, something was completed in Waritetsu's back. The ambient sound on that phone call was this.

The photo showed "Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson" placed on the religion and spiritual world shelf at Miraiya Shoten Itami (1-1-1-2041 Fujinoki, Itami City, Hyogo Prefecture, inside Aeon Mall Itami). At the very least, it can be confirmed that the book was on this shelf at that time. The image captured by the wide-angle lens clearly recorded the Heikisha edition of Beelzebub, emitting a dull green light on the religion and spiritual world shelf. Even though it was one copy of stock, the placement itself seemed to carry meaning. Waritetsu zoomed in on the photo and, while staring at the recorded metadata, was convinced that this was a singularity to prevent the slippage of the cosmic octave.

In the middle of that chaotic shelf, where "The Magic of Findhorn" and "Samadhi" were next to it, and Rudolf Steiner and Krishnamurti were on the upper shelf, this green monster was enthroned. This place was the secret landing site of the spaceship Karnak on Earth, and the only hope delivery center for readers swimming in the desert of absurdity. Behind the photo, one wants to imagine the judgment of someone who chose the layout of this shelf. However, there was no smell of a secret society at the Miraiya Shoten Itami store. There were no encrypted signals, no liaisons lurking in the back of the shelves, and no black envelopes from the Gurdjieff Society, at least not at that time. Only one book, placed among the sounds of daily life, was there, all too calmly.

Afterward, Waritetsu re-examined the map of Itami. The shelf at Miraiya Shoten Itami, the ruins of Arioka Castle, and Kouson-ji Temple. Kouson-ji is known as a temple associated with Araki Murashige, and the history of its name change from Jozan-an to Kouson-an during the Edo period is also conveyed as being related to the history of the old castle ruins of Araki Murashige. The memory of Arioka Castle was not confined only to the castle ruins. Even as the landscape changed due to the development in front of the station, the temple moved, the bookstore moved from the 3rd floor to the 2nd floor, and movie announcements flowed in as city information, only Murashige's shadow remained thinly on different sides of the town.

Honobu Yonezawa is a writer from Gifu Prefecture. "Kokurojo" was born not as a local novel by someone from Itami, but as a work that chose the Battle of Arioka Castle, a closed space with no escape, as a stage device for a mystery. That work was made into a movie after winning the Naoki Prize, and now it is being reconnected with Itami City. The direction of cause and effect seems to be reversed somewhere. Did the land call the work? Did the work call back the land? Or is Waritetsu, the observer, just drawing lines on his own?

"The places are increasing, aren't they?" Ukeuri said.

"I don't know if they are increasing, or if I've just become able to see them," Waritetsu replied.

Arioka Castle was a closed-off castle. "The Black Prison Castle" turned that closure into a mystery. Kōson-ji Temple kept Murashige's name in its temple name. At the Miraiya Bookstore in Itami, "Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson" was placed on the religion and spirituality shelf. A closed castle, a remaining temple, a placed book. The three points were too close to demand an explanation, yet too far to be called evidence.

There was no definitive evidence at Kōson-ji Temple, the Arioka Castle ruins, or the movie poster. Only the place name Itami silently accepted all the lines.

5. Joyce and Pynchon

James Joyce's "Ulysses" is one of the pinnacles of human intellectual adventure, pushing the material of language to its absolute limit. Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow" mapped the paranoia and bureaucratic violence of the postwar world with unprecedented density. Franz Kafka's absurdity gave, for the first time, a precise outline to the inexplicable fear felt by modern people. Kōbō Abe wrote about the experience of identity loss in Japanese for the first time on a cosmological scale. William Burroughs hacked language itself, and J.G. Ballard dissected the strange beauty lurking in the depths of human desire. These writers are incredibly interesting. They stretch the reader's brain in unprecedented directions.

However, there is one thing missing.

They are geniuses at deconstructing the world. But they do not have the blueprints for what comes after the deconstruction. Joyce borrowed the structure of myth, Pynchon surrendered to entropy, and Kafka closed the curtain while presenting the absurdity. This is also a sign of sincerity. It is an intellectual honesty that says, "Do not speak of answers when you do not know them."

That is why Furtawari, while respecting them, wants to hand over one more book.

Those who can laugh at and love the difficulty of Finnegans Wake cannot possibly be daunted by the flood of neologisms in Beelzebub. Those who have swum through the labyrinth of paranoia in Gravity's Rainbow to the end cannot possibly find the structure of malice in Lentrohamsanin boring. Those who kept turning the pages while standing before Kafka's castle cannot possibly surrender before the cosmology of the Kesdjan body. There is no way that you, who enjoyed postmodernism, cannot enjoy Beelzebub.

I would like to add another circuit here. The neologisms in Beelzebub are connected not only to the difficult literature of Joyce and Pynchon but also to the naming sense of nonsense science fiction. In Yasutaka Tsutsui's "Record of the Horse-Head Wind and Clouds," long proper nouns and deflating neologisms appear one after another, such as the Horse-Head Dark Nebula, the Sacha-Bi tribe, the Kounbi tribe, Bishbalik, Bushbalik, Tonbinai, and Zundro. While having the skeleton of war science fiction, those names turn the work into a nonsensical alien military chronicle. In Kurt Vonnegut's "The Sirens of Titan" and "Slaughterhouse-Five," long names that combine pseudoscience and jokes appear, such as Tralfamadore, Tralfamadorians, and the "chrono-synclastic infundibulum" in "The Sirens of Titan." Douglas Adams' "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" also features names like the Infinite Improbability Drive, Zaphod Beeblebrox, and Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz, which sound meaningful but are thoroughly playful. In Stanisław Lem's "The Cyberiad," Trurl, Klapaucius, long chapter titles, and pseudoscientific machine names support the neologism sense of nonsense science fiction.

Furthermore, in Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow," there is an expression to the effect of "More Ouspenskian nonsense," treating Ouspenskian mystical thought and four-dimensional thought in a mocking way within the work. However, one must not conclude that Pynchon himself treats Gurdjieff's entire philosophy as nonsense. Rather, Pynchon approaches the thought surrounding Gurdjieff while simultaneously maintaining a distance where he does not fully trust it. The neologisms in Beelzebub can be read not only as the labyrinth of Joyce and Pynchon but also from the lineage of laughter, pseudoscience, and cosmic nonsense opened up by Yasutaka Tsutsui, Vonnegut, Adams, and Lem.

The only difference is this. The 787 pages of Beelzebub offer a blueprint after the deconstruction. I want you to hear the details of that blueprint. Heropass, the flow of time itself. Gurdjieff called this the "merciless master." Time waits for nothing. Solionensius, a phenomenon in which the impulse for "mutual destruction" increases in the entire planetary organism during a specific cosmic cycle. Beelzebub says that most of humanity's wars can be explained by this. Theomertmalogos, the radiation of the Highest Sun Absolute (God). It is the name of the primordial energy of the universe. Megalocosmos, the system of the entire universe. Protocosmos, its core.

The psychological neologisms are even deeper. Hanbledzoin, the substance equivalent to "blood" that nourishes the Kesdjan body, the second body of three-brained beings. It is an independent entity separate from the blood of the physical body, obtained by converting elements from the sun and other planets. Through the action of this hanbledzoin, the special influence relationship where people "hypnotize" others is also explained. Martfotai, a term that refers to a stage related to self-individuality, not the highest order of thought itself. It must not be confused here with Ishmetch, which is spoken of as a stage of necessary objective reason. Kesdjan body, the intermediate body of the soul. A subtle structure that can persist even after the physical body dies. Being-Partkdolg-Duty, conscious labor and intentional suffering. A cosmic duty imposed on three-brained beings to develop their own essence. Gurdjieff said that those who neglect this will have their Kesdjan body unable to be maintained after death and will become "food" for the moon.

Legominism, the original function of art. In the past, humanity embedded "objective information" in music, architecture, and dance to pass on important knowledge across generations. Beelzebub says that Stonehenge, the Egyptian pyramids, and Gregorian chants are all legominisms. Modern art has lost that function. Iraniranumange, the principle of cosmic material exchange. Every existence becomes nutrition for another existence by being eaten. Death is not an end, but a participation in the cosmic cycle. Anulios, the brother of the Earth's satellite that humanity calls the "moon." The name of another satellite that is no longer visible. Tikliamish, Maralpleicie, the Land of Pearls, the three civilization spheres where humanity gathered after the sinking of Atlantis. They correspond to the modern Middle East, India, and Central Asia.

Gurdjieff offers the "hope" that postmodern literature sincerely reserved with this level of resolution. Furtawari does not crush the dogma of "must not be useful," which is the unwritten rule of pure literature, but gently sets it aside. At the bottom of the hole dug by Joyce and Pynchon, a ladder called Beelzebub is leaning. What is there is a difference in purpose.

Why is Beelzebub not on the list of great towers? Furtawari has been thinking in three layers. The first layer is genre contamination. As long as Finnegans Wake is called a novel, even if it is difficult, criticism feels an obligation to put it in the ring. Before facing the text, Beelzebub is labeled as "Gurdjieff's teachings" and classified on the shelves of religion, self-help, and cults. Joyce became literature because he ran away from the church, and Gurdjieff became spirituality because he brought in cosmology. This asymmetry is equivalent to intellectual laziness. The second layer is the aversion to the utility of the text. The consciousness that "it must not be useful," which is the unwritten rule of postmodern literature. The fact that Beelzebub gives conviction in the good design of the universe and even provides hints for health methods functions as a wound in the literary world. The third layer is the politics of neologisms. Joyce had a guarantor named Ezra Pound. Who was Gurdjieff's guarantor? Gurdjieff's guarantors are certainly few. However, they were not non-existent.

Seigo Matsuoka attempted a connection within the frame of editorial engineering. However, there is an aspect where that frame rather transported Beelzebub from the literary canon to another shelf. Akira Kasai illuminated Gurdjieff from the circuit of angelology and spoke of the connection between the body and the universe in the language of dance. Kiyoshi Matsumura re-read Gurdjieff's cosmology from an astrological and spiritual horizon in "Humans are Spaceships." And in the unexpected medium of YouTube, voices seriously considering the proposition that "the multiple selves Gurdjieff speaks of do not belong to the same timeline" are multiplying at this very moment. The connection to the literary canon continues to fail, but the approach from other circuits has not stopped. The problem is that they remain scattered and have not gathered into a party of a million people.

And Beelzebub himself does not remain in the observer's seat either. In the final stages of the story, his very rank wavers. The one with the devil's name, after long exile, observation, and suffering, approaches the ranks of the saints. I will leave that dangerous question on the back of the shelf for now. Because it will come back again in the photos of Itami.

6. The Cosmic Auditor of the Conspiracy Theory Festival

Speaking of postmodernism, it is conspiracy theories and civilization criticism. There is a mysterious ancient organization pulling the strings of the world from behind the scenes, obstructing or interfering with the protagonist. The protagonist is tossed about. However, until the end, it is unknown whether that secret society really exists. You don't know if they are there or not. This feeling is the pleasure of Pynchonian absurdity and conspiracy theories.

Where does the rocket in "Gravity's Rainbow" fly from, whose desires does it pass through, into whose bureaucracy is it sucked, and on whose body does it fall? The reader spreads out the map many times. The maps increase. The lines increase. The arrows increase. Eventually, the arrows themselves become suspicious. The conspiracy is visible. Too visible. Because it is too visible, you don't know if it is really there. This is the festival of postmodernism. Humans sometimes need a masquerade of evil masterminds, secret societies, and invisible rulers. To deal with an absurd world, they want a story that someone is pulling the strings behind the scenes.

However, in 'Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson,' that pleasure is flipped on its head. The secret societies spoken of in conspiracy theories actually do exist. However, they are not evil secret societies. They are the awakened ones, the guardians of humanity and the universe. Messengers sent by the Absolute, the God-like entity known as the All-Embracing Sun, or Beelzebub himself, a former messenger, observe, intervene in, and protect human history from behind the scenes.

In other words, Beelzebub is also a 'secret society' story. But that secret society is not evil. It is a group of guardians. A group of awakened ones. A cosmic consulting group. Beelzebub himself can be read as a consultant summoned by the guardian group, or perhaps as a cosmic auditor. The three-brained beings of Earth sleep at will, wage war at will, cherish canned goods at will, think white bread is a luxury item at will, go to the theater at will, and seal the ark of their ideology at tourist spots at will. A cosmic auditor is dispatched to that very scene.

This consulting group does not just offer sweet encouragement to the three-brained beings of Earth. They record. They diagnose. They get angry. They laugh. They are dumbfounded. They point out the holes in civilization. They sniff out the stench. They doubt the canned goods. They laugh at the white bread. They look down from the windows of their spaceship at the vanity of theaters, tourism, sports, and scholars.

From this, a reading emerges that 'evil conspiracy theories cannot hold up as the truth.' At least, not in a Beelzebubian universe. The consciously awakened are not beings who plot evil conspiracies. Consciousness equals goodness, and a truly conscious being does not become the mastermind who destroys the harmony of the universe. Evil is, rather, sleep, mechanicalness, reaction, vanity, self-justification, and the Ghasnassian dullness that drains the life energy of others. There is no high consciousness there.

However, the 'festival' of evil conspiracy theories is allowed to exist. To process an absurd world, humans sometimes need a masquerade of evil masterminds, secret societies, and invisible rulers. Conspiracy theories are not the truth, but they function as a festival, as a mask, and as stage equipment for a story. The problem is not in fixing them as the truth, but in observing why one desires that festival.

Evil conspiracy theories are a festival. Postmodernism dances at that festival. Beelzebub does not destroy that festival, but audits it from above. He diagnoses humanity's eating, excretion, bodies, stench, tourism, theater, science, vanity, reading, faith, canned goods, and even white bread. In short, Beelzebub is the first-aid team for the conspiracy theory festival and a cosmic auditor who has appeared at the masquerade.

Here, Gurdjieff's own first chapter returns. In the original first chapter, there is a phrase uttered by a drunken Russian merchant at a bookstore after being confused by the price including postage. In English, it is 'If you go on a spree, then go the whole hog, including the postage.' In Japanese, it means something like, 'If you're going to have a wild party, go all the way, including the postage.' Gurdjieff elevates this merchant's words to a universal principle for when he writes his own book. If I am going to write, I will write not on the small scale of Earth, but on the scale of the entire universe. If I am going to make a scene, I will make a scene that includes the postage.

The Beelzebub party is an extension of the universal-scale wild party that Gurdjieff himself opens in the first chapter. If you are going to hold a festival, don't just gather the clean believers and end it there. Include the antis, the misreaders, the fakes, the plagiarists, those who turned it into a personality test, the protectors, the angry ones, and the doubters as the postage. But including them as postage is different from allowing harm. The festival takes on the chaos. It takes on the misreadings, the disguises, the marketization, and the Judas-like leakage. The cosmic auditor orders the exit for the domination and exploitation that hurts people.

When Furutawari thought of this phrase, he laughed for a while. The first-aid team for the conspiracy theory festival. A cosmic auditor who appeared at the masquerade. It's too light. But there is accuracy at the bottom of that lightness. Beelzebub flips the secret society configuration itself from an evil mastermind to a guardian group. Gurdjieff turns the pleasure of 'I don't know if they exist or not' presented by Pynchon into a cosmic joke: 'They exist. But they are not the evil you think they are.'

That joke is scary. Scarier than evil. If it were an evil secret society, you could push the responsibility onto someone else. If a guardian group exists, your sleep is being watched. Your way of eating, sitting, excreting, laughing, sightseeing, believing, and even your attitude of pretending to have read books you haven't read—it is all being watched. Postmodern conspiracy theories whisper, 'Someone is controlling the world.' Beelzebub says, 'You don't even control your own stomach.'

Herein lies the comedy of Beelzebub. Beelzebub's cosmology rises as a book of comedic modern civilization criticism that has swallowed all civilization criticism. Moreover, it does not end with judgment. To put it in biblical terms, Beelzebub has 'judgment' and 'salvation,' or 'grace,' as a set. It not only fiercely criticizes humanity but also adds hints for recovery somewhere regarding the body, food, excretion, lifestyle, and the state of civilization. While laughing, he hits. While hitting, he treats. That is also what it means to be the first-aid team for the conspiracy theory festival.

Beelzebub is also a Machiavellian. This does not mean he is a cold-blooded schemer. It means he is an existence that uses lies, fables, exaggeration, caricature, reversal, and provocation in dealing with humanity's sleep. It is not malicious manipulation, but a skillful means to protect humanity. A gospel that says lies are also a skillful means. It can be read not as a religious assertion, but as a function of the story. Many of Beelzebub's Earth visit episodes can be read as lies to protect humanity, or as truths in the form of lies. Even if you tell the truth head-on, it won't reach those who are asleep. That is why stories are necessary. Exaggeration is necessary. Laughter is necessary. Civilization criticism that looks like terrible insults is necessary.

This realm cannot be measured by the Kantian ethics of 'do not lie.' Like the scene of Ashwatthama in the Mahabharata, there is a realm where words are used to move the other's perception, even if they are not lies in form. Beelzebub is in that realm. He does not deceive humanity. He shakes the perception of sleeping humanity with truth borrowed in the form of a lie. Judgment and salvation. Insults and medical treatment. Caricature and prescriptions. They are all served on the same plate.

That is why Furutawari wanted to deliver this book to readers of postmodern literature. To those readers who laugh at conspiracy theories, get drunk on them, doubt them, and yet still need the form of a conspiracy theory. Beelzebub descends to the center of that festival. And he says: You may dance. But observe why you want to dance.

7. Beelzebub as a Cultural Anthropological Prophecy

The reason Furutawari could not bring himself to sell Beelzebub as a 'difficult book on cosmology' was because there was an explosion of cultural anthropological prophecy in it. Beelzebub talks about the laws of the universe. But with the same intensity, he talks about human baths, toilets, food, canned goods, bread, gum, fruit, theater, sports, doctors, pharmacists, perfume, clothing, hairstyles, and shaving. Cosmology and civilization criticism are not separated. Because there is cosmology, civilization criticism is not just complaining, but a cosmic audit.

Beelzebub is a comedic criticism of modern civilization. However, it contains not only criticism but also the correct answers as a book of cultural anthropological prophecy. The wisdom the body has forgotten, the preservation techniques food has lost, the posture excretion has discarded, the moment attention turns into sleep. Beelzebub laughs at them, is dumbfounded by them, and judges them. While judging, he also leaves a path to return.

First, the bath. Beelzebub mocks the fact that Europeans began to emit a peculiar stench because they lost the habit of dissolving and washing away oils and waste deep in their pores with heat, like in a hammam. Perfume was developed to disguise that stench. However, for dogs, the smell of mixed stench and perfume is even more unpleasant. If you laugh and end it here, it's just an insult. But Beelzebub's criticism can be read as civilization criticism surrounding clothing, pores, washing habits, vanity, and the loss of bodily knowledge.

By wearing clothes, waste and oils that should be discharged from the skin's pores are retained. They do not come off just by washing with hot water. By warming slowly, the oils deep in the pores are dissolved. The mechanism for this is the hammam. The modern popularity of saunas, steam saunas, thermotherapy, and body maintenance looks like a return of lost bodily knowledge when viewed from Beelzebub's spaceship. The judgment on the stench and the salvation of the hammam are a set.

Next is excretion. Beelzebub sees that modern comfortable toilet seats and chair-type toilets deprive people of the natural posture necessary for defecation, leading to constipation and the decline of bodily functions. What is being dealt with here is not the superiority or inferiority of toilet styles in specific countries. It is a story about how comfort takes away the defecation posture that humans used to take instinctively. Convenience weakens the body's wisdom. While civilization helps humans, it takes the body away from them.

Furthermore, there is the story of the bedridden comfort toilets and comfort beds of the ancient Tikliamish civilization. The wealthy invented comfort devices that allowed them to excrete while lying down. It is too comfortable. Too comfortable. The body stops working. Illness is born. Social backlash also arises. In the end, it leads to riots by slaves and the masses, and massacres. This is black humor, and at the same time, it can be read as a prophecy of modern nursing beds, excessive comfort, and devices that allow us to live without using our bodies. Beelzebub is laughing. But deep within that laughter lies a prescription: 'Use your body' and 'Do not lose your natural posture.'

Restaurants are not exempt either. One might expect the kitchen of a restaurant boasting hundreds of menu items to be a giant temple of cooking utensils, but in reality, it is just a few frying pans, serving dishes by simply heating up canned goods. Beelzebub strikes at this. The number of menu items is not proof of abundance, but can be vanity and improvised theater. Furthermore, regarding canned food, there is a caricatured criticism that the essential nutrients change within the can and are lost the moment it is opened. Rather than reading it as a claim of modern nutrition, it should be read as a critique of civilization that laughs at the excessive faith in preservation and processing.

And here too, it does not end with judgment alone. The criticism of canned food is connected to Maralpleicie, or the wisdom of ancient Asian preserved foods. Preserved food itself is not bad. There are preservation methods that are in harmony with nature, and techniques to keep what the body needs without losing as much as possible. While laughing at civilized preserved food, Beelzebub shows another wisdom of preservation. Judgment and salvation. Canned food and ancient Asian preserved food. Civilization critique and anthropological prophecy.

White bread is the same. Humans throw away the most important parts of grain—the germ, the malt, and the nutrient-rich parts near the husk—and gratefully eat bread and grains that are like white, leftover scraps. This can be read as a critique of modern refined foods, the value of whole grains, and the vanity of visual whiteness. We feel that white things are high-class, that refined things are clean, and we throw away the parts that sustain life. Beelzebub sniffs out the strange aesthetic of civilization there.

Gum also appears. Regarding habits like modern chewing gum, the story of the ancient Asian 'Kevah' overlaps. It was not just a habit of chewing, but had a rational meaning: to stimulate the secretion of saliva and internal substances, aid digestion, and keep teeth and the mouth clean. However, modern people have forgotten that meaning and are only imitating the superficial habit. Here, too, there is a set of criticism and solution. There was meaning in the act of chewing itself. There was meaning in saliva. There was a gate in the mouth that led to the entire body. Modern people have forgotten the gate and left only the mint-flavored wrapper.

Fruits, jams, and orangeade are also subject to Beelzebub's audit. Fruits selectively bred to emphasize only appearance. Jam colored with chemical dyes. Orangeade that irritates the mucous membranes of the gastrointestinal tract. The issue here is not the food itself, but the vanity that clings to food. The color is beautiful. The shape is good. It is sweet. It is flashy. It sells. But what is the body receiving? What is the gastrointestinal tract saying? Beelzebub laughs at the disconnect between the tongue and the gut.

Doctors and pharmacists also appear. Irony toward money-worship, placebos, and X-ray therapy. This is not a place to completely deny modern medicine. Gurdjieff's narrative criticizes the human attitude of turning science into a religion and subordinating it to money, vanity, and mechanicalness, rather than science itself. Treatment becomes a business, business becomes authority, and authority takes away the power to think. At that moment, science, while remaining science, becomes superstition.

The caricatured criticism of Darwin's theory of evolution is the same. There is no need to read it as a claim denying the theory of evolution as modern science. Beelzebub's narrative can be read as laughing at the vanity of scholars, blind faith in trendy theories, and the mechanicalness of thought. When humans acquire a new theory, they begin to use it not as a tool for thinking, but as a chair from which to look down on others. Beelzebub kicks the legs of that chair.

There is also criticism of women's short hair, atropine, shaving, and clothing. Modern readers might feel a sexist or body-normative assertion there. But if read as Beelzebub's excessive caricature, the focus is on the entanglement of beauty, fashion, bodily function, and vanity. It is not judging the hairstyle itself, but laughing at the mechanicalness of humans turning the body into a symbol, the symbol into a trend, and mistaking the trend for their own will.

Etiquette education, theater, playhouses, tourism, sports, the foxtrot. These are also audited collectively. It is a critique of the self-sedation, vanity, showing off, and mechanical entertainment of modern culture. Going to the theater. Going to tourist spots. Watching sports. Dancing. Behaving politely. There is enjoyment in that. But enjoyment can also be an extension of sleep. Entertainment that has lost self-observation is just a redecoration of sleep. Beelzebub is watching entertainment that has lost its attention from the window of a spaceship.

Looking at it this way, Beelzebub is laughing at modern civilization. While laughing, he also provides the correct answers. In white bread, there is the wisdom of whole grains. In canned food, there is the wisdom of Maralpleicie or ancient Asian preserved food. In toilet seats, there is the wisdom of natural defecation posture. In foul odors and perfumes, there is the wisdom of the hammam. In gum, there is the wisdom of Kevah and saliva. In the criticism of theater, tourism, and sports, there is a path to regaining conscious attention rather than self-sedation.

In biblical terms, judgment and salvation, or judgment and grace, are a set. Therefore, this is not a sermon, but an anthropological prophecy. While caricaturing the strange habits of civilization, it records where humans have departed from the body, nature, attention, conscience, and reason. And it shows that if you have departed, there is a way back. Beelzebub judges. While judging, he hides grace. No, he has not hidden it. It is just that humans, like someone who lets something important escape the moment they open a can, are simply missing the grace.

8. The Man Who Imitated the Gospels

There is an episode that cannot be avoided when Furtawari advertises Beelzebub. It is the story of the man who imitated the Gospels. This episode is packed with a Beelzebub-style Machiavellianism, a critique of crowd psychology, and a cold comedy about a culture that worships without reading.

An ordinary writer reads the Gospels of Matthew, Luke, and others. There, he gets the idea to write a Gospel himself. The motive is not noble. There is the arrogance that because he is more educated than the ancient barbarians, he should be able to write a better Gospel. Furthermore, there is the philistine calculation that the British and Americans like this kind of book, so it will make money. Faith and the market are shaking hands on the same desk. Beelzebub does not miss that handshake.

The writer's book is seen as dangerous by those in power. Excommunication. Anathema. Banning. Denunciation. But that uproar conversely becomes advertising. The masses flock to the writer. Not only his new Gospel, but even his past works sell, and he becomes a great best-selling author. The prohibition of power becomes advertising. Scandal becomes sales promotion. Judgment becomes a sales tactic. Here is a Beelzebub-style Machiavellianism so accurate that Furtawari, the advertising manager of the publishing house, would want to cover his face.

What is even more cruel is what happens afterward. What remained for posterity was not the content. Many people have not read the book. They only know the name. Even without reading it, they worship him as a great writer and a phenomenal understander of human psychology. In other words, readers do not read the book, but read the uproar and the label. They worship the name, not the content.

Rather than reducing it to someone's real name, this episode should be treated as a fable about how a book that is only worshipped by name and not read becomes an authority. If you confine it to a specific writer, Beelzebub's blade dulls. What is being stabbed here is not an individual, but a habit of culture. Thinking you know something even though you haven't read it. Worshipping the uproar and the label instead of the content. This is the very culture of 'classics you only know by name' in the modern day.

For example, 'Gravity's Rainbow.' I know the name. I also know it is a difficult masterpiece. I also know that Pynchon seems important. Whether I have read it or not becomes a separate issue. Or, like 'The Prophecies of Nostradamus,' there is a phenomenon where only commentaries, convenient excerpts, and adaptations that stir up fear circulate, rather than the original text itself. The structure is similar. Humans inhale the fog generated around the original text, not the original text itself.

And this episode also bounces back onto 'Beelzebub' itself. 'Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson' also runs the risk of being returned to the shelf as a 'difficult mystical book' without ever being read. Only the name circulates. It seems thick. It seems difficult. It seems like Gurdjieff. It seems religious. It seems dangerous. While being told that, the main body is not read. The blade with which Beelzebub laughed at the man who imitated the Gospels is also stuck in the spine of Beelzebub itself.

Humans have abandoned the duty to form beliefs through their own logical thinking, living instead by relying on the opinions of others, public reputation, authority, and trends. They pretend to know things they have not read. They worship the noise and the labels, not the substance. As a person working in publishing, Furtawari shuddered at this structure. Advertising exploits this structure. While exploiting it, one must also break it. That is precisely why this advertising novel needs to break that misunderstanding.

Beelzebub is a Machiavellian. But that does not just mean he is a cold-blooded strategist who controls the masses. He knows that humanity only pays attention through noise. So he uses noise. He knows that humanity can only see itself through fables. So he uses fables. He knows that humanity only reacts to exaggeration, caricature, and inversion. So he speaks in excess. A gospel that says lies are also a means to an end. Truth in the form of a lie. A story to protect humanity.

Furtawari said to Ukekuri.

"Advertising creates noise."

"Yes."

"Beelzebub suspects noise."

"Yes."

"Then, what does it mean to advertise Beelzebub?"

Ukekuri was silent for a while.

"It means creating noise and making people observe the noise itself."

Furtawari nodded. The man who imitated the gospel is inside Beelzebub. He is also inside Furtawari. He is also inside the reader. Among the piles of masterpieces whose names we only know, there is a green giant volume that has not yet been read. To make people pick up that book, Machiavellianism was necessary. But that Machiavellianism must not deepen the slumber. Lies are also a means to an end, and the means must lead toward salvation.

9. The Shipping Costs of Anti-Apostles and Fakes

Gurdjieff already knew about the festival. The Russian merchant in the first chapter is puzzled by the price including shipping, and in a drunken mouth, he spits out that principle. If you are going to have a wild party, go all the way, including the shipping costs. This single phrase became the constitution of the Beelzebub Party within Furtawari. If you are going to make noise anyway, do not just invite clean followers. If you are going to read anyway, do not just close yourself off with the orthodox books at the back of the shelf. Observe the antis, the fakes, the misreadings, the appropriations, the plagiarisms, the personality tests, the protectors, the angry ones, and the doubters as shipping costs. Unless it includes shipping, it will not become a book of universal scale.

Within those shipping costs is Kentaro Komori's 'The Afterimage of Gurdjieff.' Kentaro Komori reads Gurdjieff not as a saint of mystical thought, but as a dangerous spiritual controller or a bizarre figure in historical mystery. Even among spiritual supporters, there are people who strongly dislike Gurdjieff. Kentaro Komori appears to be a representative of that. Furtawari did not think that position should be erased. Rather, without it, the festival would not be lively. The Beelzebub Party needs not only followers but also anti-apostles.

Anti-apostles shake the deified image of Gurdjieff. They break the lukewarm intoxication of the believers. They give shadows to the festival. The gaze that reads Gurdjieff as a villain also becomes an object of observation within the Beelzebubian universe. Of course, one must not confuse this with an understanding of the original text itself. It must be treated as the image of Gurdjieff in Kentaro Komori's work, a literary and mystery-oriented image of Gurdjieff. But the festival of anti-apostles has the role of a festival. An altar built only of light quickly becomes cheap. Only when shadows enter does it finally become three-dimensional.

On the other hand, there are also those who protect. William Patrick Patterson's 'Struggle of the Magicians: Why Gurdjieff's Fourth Way is a Fraud' addresses the commercialization, distortion, plagiarism, and fake successors surrounding the Fourth Way. Patterson is on the side of the protectors who record the festival of fakes and try to identify what should be excluded from the venue. An angry monitor. A gatekeeper. A record keeper. He is the man checking tickets at the entrance of the Beelzebub Party.

One must distinguish between what to include as shipping costs and what to eject from the venue.

First, the bookmark people. Robert Earl Burton and the Fellowship of Friends. Furtawari condemns this as a complete fake. The technique of inserting bookmarks and advertisements into Gurdjieff-related books to make it look as if they are connected to the orthodox Fourth Way is malicious mimicry. They parasitize the Beelzebub on the shelf and hook the reader's curiosity. They are truly the bookmark people. Moreover, Robert Earl Burton is said to have fabricated a doctrine not written anywhere in the Work: 'Gurdjieff is the leader of the body, Ouspensky is the leader of the emotions, and I am the leader of the intellect.' This is one of the most vicious fake doctrines. He uses the names of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky as a stepping stone to place himself at the third apex. A fake crown is always made of stolen names.

Furthermore, regarding Burton, there are matters that have become problematic due to serious accusations, reports, and lawsuits concerning sexual abuse, grooming, control, and exploitation of young male members. Here, Furtawari's voice turns cold. It has crossed the realm that can be treated as masquerade, misreading, or frenzy. Control and exploitation that hurt people must not be included in the Beelzebub Party. The festival accepts chaos. But it does not celebrate harm. It does not let exploitation dance. The cosmic auditor orders an exit here. The bookmark people are poison mixed into the shipping box. They are fakes that should be excluded from the venue.

Second, the Enneagram personality types. Furtawari places this not on the shelf of crime, but on the shelf of a huge festival. Symbols derived from Gurdjieff have transformed into psychology, self-help, business training, and personality diagnosis, becoming popularized, marketed, and turned into a modern masquerade. It is not the Work of the original text itself. The phenomenon where Gurdjieff's Enneagram is circulated as a personality type theory is a misreading, a marketization, and at the same time, a huge social event. In the conference room of corporate training, the 9 types dance. On the self-understanding sheet, humans write down their character, not their mechanicalness. If it were Beelzebub, he would probably laugh. Furtawari also laughs. But while laughing, he observes. This is the noise included in the shipping costs. It is a huge personality-diagnosis merry-go-round spinning on the periphery of the Beelzebub Party.

Third, Osho's plagiarism, appropriation, and incorporation. Osho falls out of the line of legitimate successors and is placed on the side of the fake. However, this festival does not end with simple plagiarism. There is a hypothesis that J.G. Bennett's intentional involvement is suspected in the background of the information leak to Osho. It might be the path of Judas. It might be the festival of Judas. The festival of Judas has too much information to be dismissed as something disgusting. Betrayal, leakage, plagiarism, diffusion, adaptation, misreading, and the possibility of salvation are intertwined. It is a world of the most post-modern confusion and absurdity. This has more information than the spiritual anti-apostles. Anti-apostles throw stones from the outside. The festival of Judas unlocks the door from the inside. Information leaks out, the leaked information becomes tainted, multiplies, and flows into other markets. Therein lies the post-modern absurdity.

The Protectors. The Anti-Apostles. The fakes included as part of the festival. The fakes excluded from the festival. Furtawari viewed these four categories not as a table of morality, but as a layout for cosmic auditing. Patterson is a Protector. Kentaro Komori's 'The Shadow of Gurdjieff' is a festival of Anti-Apostles. The Enneagram personality types and Osho's plagiarism and appropriation are shipping costs observed as a modern frenzy while deviating from the orthodox. Robert Earl Burton and the Fellowship of Friends are subjects for removal, accompanied by control, exploitation, and false doctrines. A festival requires the power to sort out those who are forgiven, those who are observed, and those who are to be removed. It is part of the festival to distinguish between what to include as shipping costs and what to exclude from the venue.

'If you're going to have a wild party, do it thoroughly, including the shipping costs.'

Furtawari noted that phrase down once more. Shipping costs also include books by Anti-Apostles. They also include mountains of personality diagnostics. They also include Osho's market. They also include the suspicious shadow of J.G. Bennett. Exploitation and harm are poisons that have entered the box of shipping costs. If you are going to hold a Beelzebub Party, you must make that distinction. Those who dance. Those who observe. Those who laugh. Those who get angry. Those who are removed. Furtawari knew that the classification was not perfect. Even so, if you hold a festival without having an imperfect classification, the festival will quickly become a village of Hasnamuss stalls.

Ukeuri looked at the note and said.

'It's a blueprint for a festival, isn't it?'

'It's also an evacuation route map,' said Furtawari.

'For a cosmic auditor?'

'For a Beelzebub Party.'

Ukeuri nodded. To dance, you need an exit. To read, you need to know which fakes should be removed. To party including shipping costs, you must remove the exploitation mixed into the shipping costs. Furtawari finally felt he understood a little bit. A festival is the name of the most dangerous order for taking on disorder.

10. The Universe as a Design Flaw

Furtawari once formulated that Kurt Vonnegut is a pessimistic vaudevillian, while Gurdjieff is a critical Bodhisattva. 'The Sirens of Titan', 'Slaughterhouse-Five', 'God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater', and 'Timequake' are Vonnegut works that remind one of Trout. The era of laughing and forgiving the 'universe as a design flaw' that Vonnegut depicted is over. What Gurdjieff presented was the conviction that this universe is designed correctly, and the problem is merely a bug embedded in humans, namely the organ of Kundabuffer, and the salvation from it.

This difference is desperately large. While Vonnegut thought the universe was a design flaw or had no design and that we have no choice but to laugh and forgive it, Gurdjieff concluded that the universe is designed correctly and preached waking up while laughing. It is Furtawari's mission to deliver this critical Bodhisattva perspective to the modern age with the impact of one million copies.

And this mission does not end with the promotion of cosmology. It is to deliver an impartial criticism of human life to post-modern readers. As a rescue team for a conspiracy theory festival. As a cosmic auditor appearing at a masquerade ball. It is to draw a single green line between white bread, canned goods, perfume, theaters, and unread masterpieces.

11. I am trying to do it because I don't know

Furtawari did not start writing the strategy book for sales. It was also to have the voice on the phone say, yes, that's it. But more than that, there was a question he absolutely had to confirm. Is advertising Beelzebub in the AI era a taboo? Is it a mission? Is it a Hasnamuss act? Or is it the moment when something that has been kept secret moves to another vessel?

Throughout history, the modes of information transmission have been fundamentally rewritten several times.

The second wave. Rotary presses and printing presses appeared, and books were published in large quantities. Radio was born, television was born, and mass media began to homogenize human consciousness. Information was no longer for the chosen few. When Gurdjieff gathered his disciples at the Prieuré in the suburbs of Paris and taught the Work through dance and dialogue, this wave had already begun.

The third wave. The Internet was born. Works became electronic data, and communication with the other side of the globe became possible instantly. The fairy tale that 60s science fiction dreamed of as 'telepathy' landed in reality in the form of email and social media. Copyright became a mere shell, and information became a commodity. Just as people continued to drink during the Prohibition era even though the law forbade alcohol, 'copyright infringement' quietly shifted to a de facto standard. Furthermore, the information age evolved from an age of tools to an age of utilization, and various applications accelerated the externalization of human thought.

And the fourth wave. The age of AI has arrived. Automatic translation, automatic writing, automatic composition, automatic drawing, and automatic generation of video works. What William Gibson depicted in his 1984 novel 'Neuromancer' was a future where consciousness leaves the body, jacks into cyberspace, and swims directly in the sea of information. But reality exceeded that prophecy in a different way. An era is coming where you don't even need to jack in, and the boundary between reality and non-reality becomes indistinguishable.

In the midst of this flow, a single question surfaced for Furtawari. It was a question without an end.

The Gurdjieff Work was once kept secret. It was passed down from teacher to student, orally, to only a select few. Perhaps there was meaning in that secrecy. The transformation of consciousness does not occur simply by reading a text. Something only begins to move when human beings with bodies gather in the same place and repeat the same practices. That is precisely why there was danger in spreading it as mere information.

However, in this age of the fourth wave, where information is as ubiquitous as the air, what meaning remains in that secrecy? Furtawari stood at the boundary between an era where protecting was the way of transmitting, and an era where opening might become the way of transmitting.

Was keeping it secret a form of protection? Or had the secrecy itself been utilized for a certain kind of organizational benefit? In the fourth wave, when this dialogue record from within the spaceship reaches the hands of a million people, will the 'conscious transmission' Gurdjieff intended be established, or will it collapse? Or perhaps the wave itself will become a new vessel for transmission.

Furtawari had no answer. But perhaps carrying a question without an answer while running an advertisement was the duty of 'Parktdoldg' imposed upon a 63-year-old advertising manager.

And there was one more observation Furtawari had made.

As he looked at articles on the internet, he felt that reviews of Gurdjieff of a different quality than in the past were proliferating on platforms like note, YouTube, and book review sites. In the past, one would notice dilettantes spreading impressions like 'con artist,' 'charlatan,' or 'founder of a dangerous cult.' But now, the volume and quality of writing by those who had seriously read Gurdjieff seemed to have clearly changed.

The presence of the know-it-all doctor known as AI might be in the background of this. AI is not omnipotent, nor is it completely free from bias. But if you ask it about Gurdjieff, it can at least rearrange the structure of his cosmology, the content of his own works, and his position in the spiritual history of the 20th century outside of the simple binary opposition of charlatan or saint. Furtawari felt the acceleration of that objectification on his own skin.

Furthermore, the spread of common concepts has played a role. 'Attention' is a concept that practitioners of the Gurdjieff Work have shared only internally for many years. It is the practice of intentionally directing one's attention and maintaining it. However, what made Furtawari smile bitterly was that the technique of directing attention is already circulating as a general term in 'shamatha-vipashyana' in Theravada Buddhist meditation, the practice of observation in Tibetan Esoteric Buddhism, and in mindfulness, which has spread explosively in recent years.

For a long time, Furtawari had felt an indescribable sense of discomfort toward the attitude of calling general knowledge that everyone can know a 'Pandora's box that must not be opened,' or ostracizing those who talk about it as rule-breaking heretics. It seemed to him that this was pointing in the exact opposite direction of the task of 'awakening of consciousness' that Gurdjieff had seriously continued to question.

In the age of the fourth wave, delivering this green spaceship to a million people might not be the destruction of protection, but a new form of transmission. Or perhaps that, too, was just one of the questions without an answer.

The next morning, Furtawari contacted Ataru Ukeuri of Neurolang Consulting. Ukeuri was 31 years old. He was a man who preferred navy blue coats and, rather than aggressive sales, would make strangely quiet visits, such as leaving materials at a company and then leaving. He was not an employee of Hirakawa Publishing. He was a person called in as a consultant for the client to observe the advertising copy, reader reactions, organizational silence, and the sequence of discomforts that had not yet turned into accidents. Furtawari felt that the plan to deliver Beelzebub to a million people was becoming not just an advertising measure, but a project that would change the organization's perception itself. That was why he needed to call this man from the outside, rather than a subordinate within the company.

Ukeuri was a consultant who observed manufacturing process defects and organizational silence, but he also had endurance for literature. He read the complete works of Kafka and Pynchon during his breaks. He was that kind of person. Kafka refers to the early 20th-century Czech author Franz Kafka. The dead-end nature of 'The Trial' or 'The Castle' precisely matches the feeling modern people feel every day: 'I don't know why, but I am being rejected by the world.' Pynchon refers to the American author Thomas Pynchon. Those who have read the near-indecipherable complexity of his masterpiece 'Gravity's Rainbow' to the end possess a certain kind of intellectual endurance. Ukeuri was a man who used that endurance not as a sales tool, but as a tool for observation.

To Ukeuri, who appeared in the reception room, Furtawari asked without preamble.

'Mr. Ukeuri, do you know the book Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson?'

Ukeuri looked surprised for a moment.

'I know it. I haven't read it, but I know the title. It's a book by Gurdjieff, right?'

'You haven't read it?'

'It's too thick. And, well, it has a sort of religious image.'

Furtawari listened to those words as if writing them down on a blackboard. 'A religious image.' This was the first layer of genre contamination. Even a person who reads Kafka thinks that. Moreover, Ukeuri is not a general reader. He is an external consultant whose job is to pick up on organizational silence, process defects, and unspoken signs. Even that man, when faced with Beelzebub, first gets tripped up by the label on the shelf. To Furtawari, that looked like the first piece of observational data indicating the current position of this book.

G. I. Gurdjieff was a mystic and teacher who began his activities in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century. However, the word "mystic" alone is insufficient. "Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson" is an unprecedented cosmic science fiction work that wraps the structure of the universe, the mechanical nature of human consciousness, and the path to true awakening within the narrative of Beelzebub. While in reality it is placed on the shelves of religion and spirituality, within it, literature, mythology, cosmology, psychology, and bizarre science-fictional imagination are simultaneously at work.

"Ukeuri-san, have you read Finnegans Wake?"

Finnegans Wake. A novel written by James Joyce over 17 years, said to be the most difficult in the history of human literature. It is written in a storm of coined words that mix numerous linguistic elements including English, French, and Latin, and it is said that there are only a few thousand people in the world who have read it through.

"Only partway through. It was interesting, though difficult."

"What about Gravity's Rainbow?"

"I read it. It was the best."

"Then you are ready to read Beelzebub," said Furtawari. "Someone who can laugh at and love the difficulty of Finnegans Wake will not be daunted by the flood of coined words in Beelzebub. From today, I would like you to observe this project."

Ukeuri looked at the cover. A green spine. The Hirakawa Shuppan edition.

"Are we going to advertise this?"

"Yes."

"It's closer to a redesign of perception than an advertisement."

"That is why I called you."

Ukeuri was silent for a moment, then said without taking his eyes off the cover.

"Understood. First, I will observe where readers reject it. It looks religious, it's thick, it's difficult, it's on the wrong shelf, they don't know who the book is for. I will look at that order."

Furtawari turned to his keyboard.

"We will create that from now on. Ukeuri-san, you write too. Not as copy, but as an observation record."

That afternoon, Furtawari and Ukeuri sat facing each other, opening two laptops. Furtawari wrote the structure, and Ukeuri converted the observation results into words. At first, Ukeuri's writing was too elegant. It was too intellectual. Out of respect for the reader, the shock needed to shake the reader from their slumber was missing.

"Can you write more violently?" Furtawari said. "Joyce's readers are smart. To move smart people, you need a violent shock rather than smart words."

"What do you mean by a violent shock?"

"Banksy. Gunningham. Masks and graffiti."

Banksy is an unidentified street artist. He continues to paint political stencil art on walls around the world, and his works fetch hundreds of millions of yen at auction. In March 2026, an investigative report by Reuters suggested that Banksy is likely Robin Gunningham. The world was abuzz at the moment the mask was peeled away. Furtawari was trying to repurpose that frenzy for advertising.

“Ukeuri-san, what did you feel when you read Pynchon?”

“I felt that the world is full of conspiracies.”

“No,” said Furtawari. “The world is so complex and interesting, yet you must have felt that no one realizes it. Please turn that feeling into copy.”

Ukeuri fell silent and began to write again. What he was writing was not only advertising copy, but also a process observation table recording the order in which the reader's perception opens.

12. The Roar of the Final Strategy Document

The moment Furtawari began to strike the keyboard, that voice spoke in the back of his mind.
“Is this also work?”
Furtawari did not stop his hands. He thought that stopping was the answer. Toru Furtawari faced the blank project proposal spread out on his desk and summoned the dynamism of Alfred Bester to his fingertips. March 2026. The world is burning. An explosion of information. Saturation of the senses. The extreme north of absurdity. He turned his keyboard into a weapon and began to carve out a manifesto for exceeding one million copies with a rhythm that grated on the nerves.

【Complete Edition: Final Strategy Document】PROJECT: BEELZEBUB'S HANBA-NIRU FEAST
Stewing absurdity, devouring the universe, and delivering hope

James Joyce is discussed in the “salon.” Thomas Pynchon is dissected in the “laboratory.” Gurdjieff is thrown into a giant pot, body and all, in the “hanba” (labor camp), and transformed by the heat of boiling octaves. This is the foundation of the campaign.

Let me tell you the history of this name. “Gunningham,” who is considered to be Banksy's true identity. That sound summons the Japanese word “Gannibal.” The one who devours. A variation of cannibal. But Gannibal is still rough. Taking it one step further, it becomes “Hannibal.” The name of the Carthaginian general and the most feared strategist in human history. And if you flip the sound of Hannibal, it becomes “Hanbaniru.” Stewing in the labor camp. From Gunningham to Gannibal, from Gannibal to Hannibal, from Hannibal to Hanbaniru. This is a chain of sounds, a transformation of meaning, and proof that the universe's octave has made one full rotation. It is a declaration that the truth of the “Hanbaniru” (stewing in the labor camp) universe will be cooked not in a neat study, but in the hellfire of a gritty, real-world site.

╔══════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
║                                                              ║
║   ジョイスを読んだ君へ。                                     ║
║   ピンチョンを読んだ君へ。                                   ║
║   バロウズを読んだ君へ。                                     ║
║                                                              ║
║         次の扉が、ここにある。                               ║
║                                                              ║
║   ========================================================   ║
║                                                              ║
║   G.I.グルジェフ                                            ║
║   「ベルゼバブの孫への話」                                   ║
║                                                              ║
║   787ページ。宇宙船の中の対話。                             ║
║   解体の後に、設計図がある。                                 ║
║                                                              ║
║   ========================================================   ║
║                                                              ║
║   「HANBA-NIRU FEAST」                                       ║
║                                                              ║
║   飯場（はんば）で煮られろ。                                 ║
║   君の眠りを、宇宙の火で調理しろ。                          ║
║                                                              ║
║                          平河出版社                         ║
╚══════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝

1. Campaign Identity: The True Identity Was “You”

March 2026. Reuters published an investigative report indicating that the masked artist Banksy is likely Robin Gunningham. While there are still disagreements regarding this report, the news that such a figure had emerged from behind the mask was widely circulated. But! The true identity of the “Grandson (Hassine)” in “Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson” has not yet been revealed! The core of our campaign is this! “The true identity of the grandson is you, the one holding this book!” The ultimate revelation of identity, identification! You decipher the blueprint of the universe. You awaken. You are the Hassine!

2. Urban Guerrilla Strategy: Homage to Robin Gunningham

We will use the signature “Robin Gunningham,” which was recorded in police documents when Banksy was detained in New York in 2000, as a modern stigmata.

“GUNNINGHAM meets GANNIBAL meets HANNIBAL” operation!
We will deploy Banksy-style fictional stencil advertising visuals that make it look as if a “Gannibal (the one who devours)” has appeared on walls around the world! Gannibal will eventually become Hannibal. The Carthaginian strategist approached Rome via a route that exceeded the enemy's expectations. We, too, will deliver Beelzebub via a route that exceeds the literary world's expectations. But what we are devouring is not humans! It is a metaphor for **“devouring your own mechanical nature and old literary paranoia to nurture a new soul.”** Devour! Your own sleep!

“BEELZEBUB WAS HERE”!
“KUNDABUFFER,” “HASNAMUSS,” “TRIAMAZIKAMNO”
Deploy these keywords as in-universe advertising visuals that look as if they have been projected onto the walls of authoritative buildings, banks, and parliament buildings in various locations! Now that reports regarding Banksy's true identity are heating up, Gurdjieff will take over that “baton of anonymity”!

3. Main Campaign Manifesto: Fire All Rounds!

【Headline】
If you enjoyed Joyce, Pynchon, and Burroughs, there is no way you cannot enjoy Beelzebub. To you who have loved the labyrinths of Joyce, Pynchon, and Burroughs to the fullest. The next door is here.

【Body Copy】
In 2026, the world reached a conclusion. Reuters published an investigative report strongly suggesting that the masked artist Banksy is Robin Gunningham, and people are hallucinating the Japanese word “Gannibal” in that sound, wandering the sea of the internet. But behind this frenzy of “exposure of true identity,” a much larger “true identity” continues to keep silent. You who have received the “baptism of adultery” through James Joyce's “Ulysses” and “Finnegans Wake,” Thomas Pynchon's “Gravity's Rainbow,” the absurdity of Franz Kafka, the disappearances of Kobo Abe, and William Burroughs' “Naked Lunch” or J.G. Ballard's “Crash,” and have continued to climb the giant towers of absurd literature. This year, the film “One Battle After Another,” loosely based on Thomas Pynchon's “Vineland,” swept the Academy Awards, and the dawn of the post-modern was announced. People were relieved by a faint happy ending in the desert of “latent defects.”

And! Why is **G.I. Gurdjieff's “Beelzebub”** not on the list of literary classics! That no one speaks of this “cathedral work,” as huge as a Leviathan, in the same breath as Joyce or Pynchon is nothing but intellectual laziness! As Gurdjieff declared, this is undoubtedly “SF,” and it is an unparalleled art that has expanded the long proper nouns, deflating coined words, and alien military-record-like naming sense reminiscent of Yasutaka Tsutsui's “Chronicles of the Horse's Neck” to an even more cosmic scale! “Kurt Vonnegut is a pessimistic vaudevillian, but Gurdjieff is a critical Bodhisattva.” Remember this wise saying once carved into mixi! “The Sirens of Titan,” “Slaughterhouse-Five,” “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater,” and “Timequake.” If the 20th century was about laughing off the sorrow of the “universe as a design error” that Vonnegut depicted through works reminiscent of Trout, then we in the 21st century must grasp the conviction presented by Gurdjieff that “everything is perfectly designed”!

In 'Ficciones', Borges mocked critics who praised the 'meaningless coincidence' between Joyce and Homer. Similarly, he satirized those who lauded Attar's venerable 'Conference of the Birds' for its superficial resemblance to Bahadur's novels, noting that such critics in London, Allahabad, and Calcutta all garnered praise with the same recklessness. Attar himself is in a class of his own. Borges sought to protect the circular structure—in which thirty birds travel in search of God only to realize they were God all along—from the consumption of criticism. And that circle is precisely what Beelzebub shares as a cosmic grammar.

Those who love James Joyce know that language can be a blueprint for the universe. Those who have finished reading Pynchon have the stamina to embrace the complexity of the world while laughing. It is those with that stamina and affection who are prepared to read Beelzebub. Ideas for health, warnings about the dangers of civilized society, and the 'conviction' that this universe is designed with good intentions. Beelzebub offers the answer that postmodernism sincerely withheld.

Let us turn the fire that Seigo Matsuoka lit in solitude in 'Senya Sensatsu' into a 'Beelzebub Party' of one million people. Inheriting the reversal of rhetoric that Socrates showed at the beginning of his 'Apology'—'I am ignorant'—this 'objective literature' shocks by dismantling the reader's brain before pouring in the truth! Now that reports on the true identity of Banksy and Gunningham are heating up, it is your turn to expose the true nature of the 'organ Kundabuffer' embedded within you!

And finally, a strict production order: 'Hanba-niru' (Cooking at the Labor Camp) is the core of the promotion; repeat this power word rhythmically to imprint a 'mysterious yet delicious-sounding frenzy' onto the public brain. However, once you open the book, there is no 'labor camp,' no 'cannibal,' and no 'Gunningham' to be found. What exists is only the dialogue inside Beelzebub's spaceship, which is coldly objective, grand, and dense. This gap is the greatest shock of all.

Now, let's start the Beelzebub Party! You who have loved absurdity to the end, celebrate the blueprint of the universe next!

Furtawari wondered if this plan would be sabotaged somewhere. A mysterious secret society. A book club with no name. The shadow of the Gurdjieff Society. Or perhaps people who, to protect Gurdjieff's name, want to keep anyone from reading him. If he imagined it, he could create any number of plots. Printing data disappearing just before the ads go out. Event venue reservations being canceled for unknown reasons. For some reason, only Beelzebub disappearing from the religion and spirituality shelves. Unseen critical terms erupting simultaneously on X trends. Furtawari anticipated all of it.

However, nothing happened.

The fact that nothing happened was even more eerie. Was there no sabotage? Had the sabotage already succeeded, and Furtawari was unable to notice it? Did the secret society not exist from the beginning? Or is making people think it doesn't exist the oldest method of a secret society? Ukeuri said that one cannot include what cannot be observed in the object of observation. Furtawari thought that perhaps it exists precisely because it cannot be observed. The two did not agree. And that disagreement alone remained at the center of the campaign.

13. 100 Guerrilla Tactics

The following is a group of fictional promotional measures conceived by Toru Furtawari, not an actual plan or announcement. Furtawari refused all omissions and hammered the following items into his manifesto as tactics that exaggerated feasibility. These are not instructions for actual execution, but a list of excessive metaphors, in-universe projects, fictional visuals, and hallucinatory campaigns generated when the advertising brain runs wild.

World expansion of the 'HANBA-NIRU' kitchen car! Create fictional advertisements that make it look as if muddy kitchen cars have appeared next to literary festival venues around the world. The menu is only 'Kundabuffer Stew.' Inside, a bookmark mimicking a page of 'Beelzebub' is included. As passersby tremble, asking, 'Is this a cannibal's pot?', we read aloud the first chapter of Beelzebub and announce that this is 'the process of cooking one's own mechanical nature'!

ROBIN GUNNINGHAM SIGNATURE campaign! Include a fictional 'Robin Gunningham'-style signature on the book's obi that evokes the handwriting from when Banksy was arrested, and add the message, 'You are the one to expose the true identity of this book!'

GANNIBALISTIC READING event! Using 'Gannibal (the eater)' as a keyword, develop a book club that 'devours' old modes of thought and mechanical nature as a fictional street event! Set up a photo-style visual where participants are wearing Banksy-style rat masks!

Redistribution of Seigo Matsuoka's editorial engineering theory of Beelzebub! Rebuild the logic that Mr. Matsuoka once presented for 'connecting Gurdjieff to the literary canon' for modern SNS and spread it!

Invitation to Vonnegut readers! Develop a promotion for the readership of 'The Sirens of Titan' stating, 'The sight that Trout wanted to see at the end is inside Beelzebub's spaceship!'

Kundabuffer Graffiti Project! Now that reports on Banksy's identity continue, in order to dare to return to 'anonymity,' create a series of fictional visuals that make it look as if 'KUNDABUFFER' stencils have appeared in 'mechanical places' (government offices, banks, factories) everywhere!

PTA 'Inherent Vice' comparison screening! By contrasting the desert of absurdity (Pynchon's world) with the design of the universe (Gurdjieff's world), highlight the 'practical hope' of Beelzebub!

Attar's 30 Birds digital art! Use AR (augmented reality) to create a device where 30 birds appear in the city sky along with Beelzebub's spaceship, the Karnak!

Socrates 'Apology' podcast! A series where Plato researchers and Beelzebub readers discuss how Gurdjieff's pose of 'not being a writer' is a highly sophisticated rhetorical technique!

Yasutaka Tsutsui 'Horse Head Chronicles' respect project! Invite fans of the master of Japanese absurdity and coined words to a 'universe of even longer coined words' that lies beyond long proper nouns, deflating coined words, and alien military chronicle-style naming senses!

Leviathan's stomach party! A one-night-only secret event-style advertisement with the concept of creating a Beelzebub party venue inside the giant Leviathan (the national system)!

Creating a fictional internet archaeology poster that looks as if 100 threads titled 'I read Beelzebub and the Kundabuffer disappeared, lol' were posted on a bulletin board simultaneously!

A projection mapping-style visual concept that transforms the entire Hirakawa Publishing Co., Ltd. building into the giant spaceship Karnak through lighting effects!

A fictional product advertisement for a tie-in product, 'Hambanil Curry: Super Spicy,' to be released at convenience stores nationwide! The package includes a warning: 'Remember while you eat!'

Producing a fictional news clip from a movie, depicting a mysterious group wearing Beelzebub masks appearing at the stage greeting for the film 'One Battle After Another'!

Developing a fictional bookstore-style visual project for readers of Vonnegut's 'The Sirens of Titan,' making it look as if Beelzebub advertisements had spontaneously appeared from between the pages of the book!

A video work set as a funeral live performance for absurdist literature! An excessive art video that makes it look as if the works of Kafka, Kobo Abe, Burroughs, and Ballard were boiled in a giant Hambanil pot!

A fictional app advertisement for a subscription service for the health method 'The Beelzebub Method'! It delivers special exercises to balance the three centers at a fixed time every day!

A fictional movement advertisement advocating for the '#KundabufferRemoval' diet on X! A campaign to completely block the overconsumption of information and polish one's own essence!

A literary poster set in a world where a limited-edition booklet reconstructing Borges' 'Ficciones' using Beelzebub terminology is rumored to exist like a phantom on university campuses!

A fictional installation advertisement that looks as if 'Gravity Experience Boxes,' where one can physically feel the pressure of the state, have been placed around the city! Beelzebub is always placed at the exit!

A fictional project to hold a 'Beelzebub Hymn Naming' contest online, making the long proper nouns, deflating coined words, and alien military-style naming sense of Yasutaka Tsutsui's 'Uma no Kubi Fuunroku' even more complex!

A fictional product advertisement for the release of a Hasnamuss diagnostic app! When you answer the questions, your ego stage is quantified, and you compete for scores!

A fictional city festival video that looks as if a parade of coined words took place, marching through the main streets of Ginza while chanting 'Triamazikamno'!

A fictional product promotion video that makes it look as if Beelzebub energy drink 'Octave of Awakening' was distributed for free in a major corporate office district!

A fictional debate program conducting a general election for Bible villains! A thorough discussion on who among Satan, Leviathan, and Beelzebub contributes most to the 'balance of the universe'!

A 24-hour response event-style streaming project based on records of dialogues using advanced logic! Continuing fruitless arguments over the literary status of Beelzebub!

A fictional social media campaign on X: '#WhatDidYouTrigamiToday?'! A campaign to praise miraculous actions performed in accordance with the three laws of the universe and Triamazikamno!

A visual of a soup kitchen event using a giant Hambanil pot! A hallucinatory advertisement photo that looks as if special soup and copies of the first chapter of Beelzebub were distributed to 10,000 people in front of Shinjuku Station!

Publishing a full-page newspaper advertisement-style poster for 'K's Awakening,' a fan-fiction work where Beelzebub solves Kafka's 'The Trial'!

Produce an in-story advertisement video that looks as if a Burroughs-esque 'Naked Lunch' cut-up video has hijacked the giant monitors at the Shibuya Scramble Crossing!

A fictional announcement for an immersive video experience event that drags Kobo Abe's 'The Box Man' out of a physical cardboard box and reveals the vastness of the universe!

A fictional annotated advertisement where Beelzebub uses a red pen to correct the daily actions of Leopold Bloom in James Joyce's 'Ulysses' as 'abnormalities of three-brained beings'!

A proposal for a non-existent publishing project: a new edition that transforms the silence and cunning in James Joyce's 'Ulysses' into statements filled with Beelzebub's objective compassion!

A fictional exam advertisement for the 'Hassan-i-Sabah Certification: Beginner Level'! A series of extremely cruel multiple-choice questions designed to make you realize you are a broken machine pretending to have a conscience!

The headline for a full-page ad will be: 'To you who despaired at Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Grandfather is waiting at the Itami Aeon Mall'!

A fictional special edition project announcing the start of pre-orders for the 'Beelzebub 1 Million Copies Commemorative Premium Box,' which includes a precision papercraft of the spaceship Karnak as a bonus!

A fictional online project hosting a '#SaturnsDivisionOfLabor' discussion on X! Discussing how to convert the destructive energy within oneself into the creative maintenance of the universe!

A daydream of publicly releasing a digital archive that consolidates all the books said to exist in Borges' 'Library of Babel' into a single volume of Beelzebub!

An Attar's 'Conference of the Birds' stamp rally! A fictional travel project that involves trudging through mud to visit construction sites and labor camps across the country to physically train one's own three centers!

A video project that looks as if it carried out Socratic street dialogues! A video stream that keeps asking passersby, 'How do you prove that you are not just a machine?'

A fictional product advertisement distributing a 'Beelzebub Consciousness Correction Patch' to forcibly stop the infinite time loop depicted in Vonnegut's 'Timequake'!

A fictional map visual that looks as if it has marked every rocket impact site in Thomas Pynchon's 'Gravity's Rainbow' as a sacred site on a location information system!

Produce the Song of Hassein! A fictional music campaign aiming for the number one spot on video-sharing sites by creating a highly addictive remix version!

An extreme corporate advertisement parody set in a company that mandates all employees spend one hour of their working time solely on recollection!

Post a fictional event announcement in the style of a DIY workshop at an Aeon Mall plaza, where Beelzebub's wisdom is used to physically repair the glitches of post-modernism!

A direct mail advertisement from a dream, looking as if an invitation to a party had been delivered to every mailbox in a super-luxury residential area in Tokyo!

A fictional social media festival hosting a '#WhatCosmicDesignDidYouFeelToday' contest on X! Forcibly praising trivial daily luck as part of the universe's grand design!

A video where grandson Hassein explains a difficult passage from James Joyce's 'Finnegans Wake' in the words of a kindergartner!

A tokusatsu-style promotional video where a giant monster called 'the State' is boiled in a special pot to skim off the scum!

A dangerous metaphorical video about death and awakening that recreates Gurdjieff's car accident using the latest technology! Experience the moment of awakening, which can only be obtained through the intense shock of death, as a safe performance!

A 100-minute fictional special interview video where Seigo Matsuoka asserts, 'Beelzebub is the greatest editorial engineering in history, and an octave of information!'

Launching a fictional campaign that grants the vast inheritance of Vonnegut's 'God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater' only to those who practice self-remembering!

A Beelzebub reading survival marathon! A poster for an impossible reading competition that involves reading the entire book aloud without sleep or rest while screaming, pushing the mechanical brain until it ceases to function!

A fictional newspaper advertisement that looks as if it has thrown down a gauntlet of war to the media, declaring, 'Next, expose your own filthy conscience!'

Reporting brain awakening via '#KundabufferRemoval' on X! A fictional movement to establish this as a new form of cutting off information overconsumption!

Producing a 'Beelzebub Sprinkler Truck' that blasts through the desert of absurd literature! An excessive visual performance that drenches the cafes where city intellectuals gather with 'water of wisdom'!

Releasing a language conversion tool that takes the neologisms from Yasutaka Tsutsui's 'Horse's Neck' and outputs them replaced with even more complex and bizarre Beelzebub language!

The production of an eerie short film where a typewriter that was once William Burroughs's personal property begins typing the words of Beelzebub on its own!

A fictional psychology seminar-style lecture that deconstructs J.G. Ballard's obsession with car accidents using the cosmic 'Law of Collision'!

A fictional documentary where, while reading Kobo Abe's 'The Woman in the Dunes,' one actually digs in the sand dunes for 24 hours to discover Beelzebub buried at the bottom!

Creating a fictional urban legend-style analysis page claiming that the spine of Beelzebub is actually visible in the background of the movie!

A festival to pray for reaching 1 million copies sold! A world-simultaneous 'Self-Remembering' streaming event where 1 million readers simultaneously become aware of their own breathing and existence!

Using arrogant posts by celebrities on X as subject matter to generate fictional 'This is a classic example of a Kundabuffer' critique cards, encouraging awakening not through public attack, but as a metaphor within an advertisement!

A grand animation production where the absurd endings of all the stories in Borges's 'Ficciones' are revealed to be connected to a cabin on the Karnak!

A large-scale fictional performance where the 30 birds from Attar's 'The Conference of the Birds' grab the logo of Hirakawa Shuppan and fly over the White House!

A fictional announcement for an emergency academic symposium at a famous university, discussing how Socrates was a Beelzebub-like or Hassein-like existence.

A countdown program to end the freezing of time depicted in Vonnegut's 'Timequake' and begin a new time!

A fictional white paper that looks as if it were officially submitted to an international organization, providing 'Guidelines for Self-Remembering' to fix serious bugs lurking in the depths of national systems!

An impossible corporate statement advertisement declaring that at the moment 1 million copies are reached, all employees will officially cease to engage in any idle chatter!

A fictional news report as if the coined term 'Polyprotomenion' had been nominated for the Buzzword Awards as a new term referring to all the irrationalities of modern society!

Post-modern leftover disposal! A dreamlike bookstore fair that collects all the absurd literature of the past that was too difficult to finish and exchanges it for Beelzebub for free!

A fictional social media campaign to make '#Triamajita' explode in popularity on X as a tag for every success in daily life!

A fictional script project to release a worldwide screenplay that rewrites Thomas Pynchon's 'Vineland' from the perspective of Beelzebub!

A sound source that completely purifies the absurd anxiety underlying all of director Paul Thomas Anderson's works with sacred piano music composed by Gurdjieff!

The display of a visual advertisement where 1 million copies of Beelzebub erupt from Hanbanil's giant pot like scorching magma!

A late-night lecture-style video where Seigo Matsuoka talks about the relationship between the page structure of Beelzebub and the structure of any universe!

An extreme brand strategy that turns the green spine of Beelzebub into an icon as the only escape route from Borges' labyrinth!

The release of a shocking confession video revealing that Attar's 30 birds were actually editorial staff members!

A history-altering animation where Beelzebub turns the contents of Socrates' hemlock cup into wine filled with objective wisdom!

An audio drama where Vonnegut's Tralfamadorians and Beelzebub converse at the edge of the universe over the blueprints of the cosmos!

An advertisement for a non-existent e-book version that changes the final total affirmation of James Joyce's 'Ulysses' to 'Yes, My Lord Beelzebub!'

A fictional project to hold '#Kundabuffer Ogiri' on X every day! Answering the question of why crowded trains are so desperate with laws!

A new, mysterious landmark advertisement in Tokyo that makes it look as if a giant golden fly, the symbol of Beelzebub, has appeared on the roof of the headquarters building!

Instead of auctioning off fake street art, producing a fictional news video claiming 'fake street art was sold for a high price,' and talking about the dream of donating Beelzebub to libraries nationwide with the proceeds!

A fictional novelty item that distributes a special spiritual detergent to wipe away the latent defects of absurd literature as a purchaser benefit!

The production of a survival program where one reads Kobo Abe's 'The Woman in the Dunes' while actually crossing a desert, surviving solely through the power of recollection!

The release of a recipe book for an objective lunch cooked entirely with awakened consciousness, far surpassing William Burroughs!

A fictional site that explains the car crashes depicted in Ballard's 'Crash' as a physical phenomenon of octave slippage!

A literary delusion of publishing an indecipherable 10,000-character letter of appreciation addressed to Yasutaka Tsutsui, using only the eerie coined words that appear in Beelzebub!

I will release to the entire world the recipe for the ultimate nourishing soup, extracted by simmering social systems for a long time!

This is a video series where Socrates appears in the modern network and uses only objective reason to completely refute those who repeatedly sneer anonymously!

I will conceive a massive fictional timeline advertisement that makes all X users feel as if they have received an invitation!

A fictional database project that publishes an editorial index that forcibly converges all the data from Seigo Matsuoka's 'Senya Sen-satsu' into the single point of Beelzebub!

A fake new interpretation that the mathematical formula for the rocket's trajectory in Thomas Pynchon's 'Gravity's Rainbow' actually depicts the characters of Beelzebub, structured as the pages of a fictional critique magazine!

A fictional urban legend-style specification where, when you play a movie DVD, there is a 10 percent chance that footage of Gurdjieff himself dancing will start to play!

A massive hologram projection where champagne celebrating the sale of 1 million copies overflows like a fountain from Hambar-nil's giant pot!

I will create a fictional literary mystery revolving around fragments of a non-existent diary, claiming that Borges met Beelzebub in a dream just before his death and realized the end of the infinite labyrinth!

A fictional paper in the style of a new historical theory, claiming that Attar's 'Conference of the Birds' was actually aiming for the parking lot of the Aeon Mall in Itami City, Hyogo Prefecture!

A confession video within the story where the advertising manager, Tetsu Furtawari, reveals to the whole world that he is actually 'the reincarnation of Grandpa's grandson, Hasshin'!

Beelzebub reaches 1 million copies sold. The awakening of all humanity through the holding of a simultaneous global Hambar-nil super feast!

The measures were put into action three days after the proposal was written. The first to move was Ukauri. However, he did not receive orders as an employee of Hirakawa Publishing. As a consultant for a client of Neurolang Consulting, he headed to Shibuya on his day off to observe which symbols readers would react to. He used a Banksy-style stencil to prototype a composite fictional advertising visual that looked as if the word 'KUNDABUFFER' had been carved into the pillar of a pedestrian bridge.

Kundabuffer. A concept proposed by Gurdjieff in 'Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson'. Long ago, to maintain the gravitational balance between the moon and the earth, a certain higher being implanted an 'organ that perceives reality upside down' deep within the human brain. The name of that organ is Kundabuffer. Because of this organ, humans do not realize they are asleep. They do not know they are merely reacting mechanically. They do not know they are not truly alive. Gurdjieff called this 'sleep'. And he called waking up from that sleep 'work'.

The next morning, the image was uploaded to X, and 500 replies were attached to a post asking, 'What does this mean?'. Half were sneers. But the other half contained the word 'Gurdjieff'.

'Mr. Furtawari, we are getting reactions,' Ukauri reported the next morning.

'How many?'

'4,000 impressions on X. Of those, 200 mentions related to Gurdjieff.'

Furtawari looked at the numbers in silence. 200. A certain percentage of the 420,000 copies are somewhere in this city. Sleeping. Still implanted with the Kundabuffer organ, yet feeling something. 200 people had something stirred within them upon seeing the words on the wall.

'Continue,' Furtawari said. 'Next time, in front of a bank.'

As one of those measures, Furtawari headed to Itami again. This time as a reporter. He believed that delivering the actual situation of bookstores currently stocking Beelzebub to the world during the campaign would be the greatest advertisement.

On the other hand, Furtawari could not shake off a kind of vigilance that he knew was ridiculous even to himself. Could a mysterious secret society, or perhaps some branch of the Gurdjieff Society, have sensed this project and moved to interfere? The man folding his newspaper in front of the station ticket gate, the old man spinning a paper cup at the edge of the food court, the shopper crossing the bookstore aisle three times. Everything looked like a signal, and everything looked like a coincidence. He looked back over his shoulder many times. But all that was there were the lights of the Aeon Mall, shopping bags, the voices of children, and fragments of a life that connected to nothing. Was there interference? Was there not? Did someone see? Did no one see? The truth remained completely unknown until the end.

Miraiya Shoten Itami is a store directly connected to JR Itami Station. During the renovation on April 20, 2018, it moved from the 3rd floor to the 2nd floor, and at that time, the store area was expanded by about 1.5 times. The wave of people flowing in directly from the station, the everyday atmosphere of the Aeon Mall, families carrying shopping bags, students, people on their way home from work. In that flow, there is a shelf for religion and the spiritual world. 'Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson' was placed there.

Furtawari confirmed that fact once more. The green spine was indeed there on the shelf. It was not just a photo. It was not just a memory. It was present. He approached the staff to request an interview or confirmation. Why was this book placed on this shelf? Whose decision was it? Since when had it been placed there? He wanted to ask those things.

A formal interview did not take place.

The staff responded formally, saying, 'I will pass this on to the store manager.' No contact information was accepted. There was no opportunity to exchange business cards. The door to a deeper conversation did not open. Furtawari had no choice but to withdraw for the time being.

However, there was one piece of information obtained. The decision on book placement could be made by the store manager or by the person in charge of the section. In other words, the reason 'Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson' was on this shelf could not be reduced to one clear signature. It might have been the store manager's decision. It might have been the section manager's decision. Or, it might have been something carried over from the shelf-making process since the relocation.

The relocation and renovation on April 20, 2018. It is possible that this book has been on the shelf since that time. However, that is not certain either. It is unknown whose decision it was to place it there. As for why it is still on the shelf, it is impossible to determine whether it is being replenished after being sold, or if the stock has remained for a long time. Is it there because it is selling? Is it remaining there even though it is not selling? Is someone consciously protecting it? Is it simply there due to the logic of the shelf? All of that is unknown.

Furtawari did not want to whittle away at this unknowability. Rather, he felt that this unknowability was closer to the core of the event. An unexplained placement. An unspoken decision. A situation where only the verifiable presence remained. 'Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson' was not mythologized by someone's testimony, but stood before Furtawari simply by being on the shelf.

Legomonism, Furtawari thought. As seen in Chapter 5, it is a container for transmitting important knowledge across generations. Perhaps this shelf, too, was carrying something not through someone's explicit testimony, but through the placement itself. Whose decision it was is unknown. Whether it is a replenishment or remaining stock is also unknown. An interview cannot be conducted. No explanation can be obtained. Yet the book is there. That silence touched Furtawari's three centers more deeply than any testimony.

14. The Perpetual Party

The story does not end at the moment it sets a massive milestone of exceeding 1 million copies sold. Rather, from that point on, objective reality begins to accelerate at an uncontrollable speed. The photo of that shelf at Miraiya Shoten, recorded at 18:08 on February 21, 2026, became the most important landing point in this project.

It feels as if this placement was not a coincidence, but the result of some kind of higher-order choice. Toru Furtawari still keeps that photo taken on February 21 in the corner of his desk. He continues to imagine the decision of whoever chose the shelf. But as confirmed in Chapter 13, the subject of that decision is unknown. Whether it was the store manager, the section manager, or a placement chosen by the shelf itself in the flow of relocation and renovation, is unknown. Only that uncertainty remained, along with the green color of the photo.

Furtawari accepted that indeterminacy not as a deficiency, but as the substance of the event. No dramatic testimony was obtained. But the book was there. Without being explained, without defending itself, it showed its green spine and was on the religion and spiritual world shelf.

That was enough.

Gurdjieff uses the term 'conscious labor and intentional suffering.' The Partkdolg-duty. For Furtawari, that duty was not to believe the story that was told. Rather, it was to hold onto what was not told, just as it was. The reason is unknown. The decision-maker is unknown. Whether it is a replenishment or remaining stock is unknown. It was to take all that unknowability back with him, while it remained unknown.

It was when the sales exceeded 560,000 copies that Ukeuri returned to Hirakawa Publishing from Neuro-Language Consulting and came to Furtawari's desk.

'Furtawari-san, how are you going to handle the Itami matter after all?'

Furtawari looked at the photo. The shelf at Miraiya Shoten Itami. Religion and spiritual world. The dull green spine.

'I will handle it as it is,' Furtawari said.

'As it is?'

“No testimony was obtained. But the book was there. That was enough.”

Ukeuri was silent for a moment.

“As an advertisement, isn't that weak?”

“It is weak,” Furutawari said. “That is why it is authentic.”

Ukeuri started to say something, then stopped. Furutawari continued.

“Strong stories are consumed immediately. Someone placed it. Someone protected it. Someone was waiting for it. Those kinds of stories are easy to understand. But Beelzebub is not an easy story. It is there without a known reason. Enduring that presence is the beginning of reading.”

Ukeuri placed one more observation memo about Itami on the desk. On it, the words Miraiya Shoten Itami Store, Arioka Castle Ruins, Koumura-ji Temple, 'Koku-ro-jo' film adaptation, Murashige Project, Religion/Spirituality shelf, and 'Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson' were listed without any arrows.

“Are you not going to draw arrows?” Furutawari asked.

“The moment I draw them, it becomes a lie,” Ukeuri replied.

Furutawari looked at the paper. A relationship diagram without arrows. It seems connected, yet not connected. It seems disconnected, yet it is already placed within a single town. If it were Pynchon, he might start talking about the postal system, an underground organization, or a message that reaches no one. But Furutawari did not have the courage to write that far. The interference of a secret society has not yet occurred. No warning from the Gurdjieff Society has arrived. Miraiya Shoten Itami Store is just operating, Koumura-ji Temple is just there, the Arioka Castle Ruins remain in the town, and the film is just heading toward release.

Even so, Furutawari could not shake the feeling that something was approaching. Or perhaps it was he who was approaching it. The truth remained unknown until the end.

For a while, both of them were silent.

“Let's continue,” Ukeuri said.

“Yes,” Furutawari said. “Let's continue.”

At that moment, the green in the photograph seemed to deepen slightly. At first, Furutawari thought it was the brightness setting of the LCD or an illusion created by the fluorescent lights in the middle of the night in Tokyo. But the next moment, something hard extended from behind the spine of Beelzebub. It was a horn. In the symbolic outline that should have already been visible, another branch that had been overlooked appeared. It was not the first or the second. What he thought he had already counted demanded a recount, and outside the diagram he believed was closed with four, a fifth branch appeared. Furutawari rubbed his eyes. Of course, a photo is just a photo. A shelf is a shelf, a book cover is a book cover, and the Religion/Spirituality shelf is just calmly displaying products under the lights of the Aeon Mall. Even so, inside him, the horns had increased. It looked as if Beelzebub had reached another stage of a different reason.

“Did you see something just now?” Ukeuri said.

“I think I saw it,” Furutawari replied. “The fifth horn.”

“Is it a classification issue?”

“Perhaps it is a classification issue. Or perhaps it is an issue where the classification breaks down.”

In Furutawari's mind, the stages of reason, the stages of existence, and the groups of words related to the individuality of the self, known in fragments, began to flip silently without being organized. Ashiata. Marthothai. Holy Podkoolad. Something that might be even higher. But those words do not form a complete table. There is a fundamental doubt regarding the fluctuation of translations, the lack of tradition, the reader's desires, Gurdjieff's intentional disruption, and whether the human mind even has the ability to correctly read a hierarchy of the universe. Even so, Furutawari accepted the fifth horn as the reason of 'Holy Podkoolad.' It is not a conclusion. It is not a record of arrival. It just happened to look that way. Once seen, it cannot be treated as if it never existed.

At that moment, deep within the photograph, a presence appeared whose name was not permitted to be recorded. It was something that could only be called an archangel. To give it a name would be to lower it. To attach a proper noun would be to return it to the shelf. Therefore, Furtawari simply viewed the presence as 'a presence whose name is not permitted to be recorded.' It seemed as though the presence had come to bestow a new horn upon Beelzebub. But before the act of bestowal was complete, a presence of a higher order passed through from even deeper within. It was not light. It was not sound. Yet, one could only perceive its rank. The presence whose name was not permitted to be recorded stopped its movement midway, bowed its head, and prostrated itself. Furtawari tried to see exactly what it was prostrating before. However, there was only the passage of something invisible. There is no proof. There is no denying it either. Yet, the horns had increased.

'The more you try to classify it, the more it collapses,' Ukauri said.

'Collapses?'

'Yes. If you put it into a table, it breaks. Higher, lower, identical, separate existence. The moment you try to organize it like that, the object of observation shifts. It is the same as a process defect. The moment you decide on a single cause, the site produces a different defect.'

While listening to those words, Furtawari thought about the relationship between Beelzebub, Jesus, Buddha, and Ashiata Shiemash. One cannot say they are the same existence. Such a conclusion is far too crude. But there are too many coincidences. Compassion, conscience, awakening, law, self-sacrifice, intervention in humanity, the diagnosis of sleep, and the speed at which humans turn those teachings into institutions, return them to the shelf, classify them, and comfortably forget them. There are too many such coincidences.

The hypotheses proliferated on their own. Perhaps they are separate existences that merely arrived at the same reason. Perhaps, while possessing different bodies, different eras, different languages, and different cosmic missions, they touched the same layer of objective reason. Or perhaps, in objective reason, the 'I' is shared. The human I, the prophet's I, the awakened one's I, and the cosmic exile's I might lose their distinction at a certain height, allowing the same light to pass through different windows. Or perhaps cosmic roles are rotating. This time Jesus, this time Buddha, this time Ashiata Shiemash, this time Beelzebub. Only the name tags change, the roles circulate, the personnel rotate, and the three-brained beings of Earth create new religions and new misunderstandings each time. Or perhaps the hierarchy table itself is a misreading. The stages of reason might just be a straight line drawn by the human side, when in reality it is a circle, a vortex, a shelf, a parking lot, the lighting of an Aeon Mall, or a single green book placed on the religion and spirituality shelf at the Miraiya Shoten Itami store.

None of the theories reached a conclusion. Rather, only the fact that they did not reach a conclusion was strangely powerful. Doubts amplified, hypotheses branched out, the fifth horn seemed about to sprout even smaller branches, and Furtawari did not know how to stop it. There is no proof. There is no denying it either. Every time one tries to read the cosmic hierarchy table, the page numbers change.

In that uncertainty, names flowed in. It was not a system. It was not a roster. It was not a ranking. Ashiata Shiemash. Jesus. Buddha. Moses. Muhammad. Krishna-Tukarna. Belcultassi. King Konuzion. King Apolis. Makari Kronberkzion. Pythagoras. Leonardo da Vinci. Ignatius of Loyola. Mesmer. Hadji-Asvatz-Troof. It was a flood of names recalled in fragments. A strange clarity that exists just before religious history, the history of mystical thought, the history of science, kingship, legend, work, misreading, translation, and conspiracy theory. The abnormality of seeing them all lined up on the same level shone deep behind Furtawari's forehead. It is not about who is above and who is below. It is not about who is orthodox and who is heretical. The phrase 'the hidden history of human awakening' passed through him once. And then it immediately vanished. Despite having vanished, it remained more strongly than before it disappeared.

'Can this be made into a report?' Furtawari said.

'It cannot,' Ukauri replied immediately. 'The moment you make it into a report, it becomes mere classification.'

'Then, into an advertisement?'

'The moment you make it into an advertisement, it is even more dangerous.'

'Then what should I make it into?'

Ukauri looked at the photograph. The green spine. The horns that seemed to have increased. The archangel that should not have been visible. The presence that prostrated. The something even higher that passed through. The flood of names. The collapsing classification. The observation without proof.

'You have no choice but to make it into a story,' Ukauri said. 'If it is a story, you can leave it in its collapsed state.'

Furtawari nodded. No conclusion was reached. Rather, the fact that no conclusion was reached finally sat in place of a conclusion. Are Beelzebub, Jesus, Buddha, and Ashiata Shiemash the same? Are they different? Are they separate existences? Are they the same reason? Is it a rotation? Is it a misreading? All the hypotheses returned to the shelf, the shelf answered nothing, and the photograph remained a photograph, its green color just a little deeper.

Late at night, Furtawari's smartphone rang as he returned to his office in Tokyo. The caller ID displayed Furtawari Toru. His own name and his own number. This time, he answered immediately. 'Furtawari-kun,' the voice said. 'Do you remember the phone call on that spring morning?' 'I remember.' 'At that time, I told you. The time has come to discuss Gurdjieff Work.' 'You did.' 'Have you reached an answer?' Furtawari looked at the night view outside the window. Tokyo was shining. A million windows were shining. Sleepless people were doing their respective jobs in front of their respective desks. Some of them might be reading 'Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson' tonight. 'The Work had already begun,' Furtawari said. 'From the very beginning, all along.' 'That is correct,' the voice said, sounding satisfied. 'That is why I called. So that you would realize it.' 'Where are you?' 'Next to the reader who bought the millionth copy.' The call disconnected. Furtawari looked at the screen. Nothing remained in the call history. Outside the window, Tokyo was shining. He placed his hands on the keyboard. The work was not yet finished.

Reference Source

G.I. Gurdjieff, 'Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson', Hirakawa Shuppan

G.I. Gurdjieff, Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson: An Objectively Impartial Criticism of the Life of Man

G.I. Gurdjieff, 'Meetings with Remarkable Men', Hirakawa Shuppan

P.D. Ouspensky, 'In Search of the Miraculous', Hirakawa Shuppan

Thomas Pynchon, 'Gravity's Rainbow', Kokusho Kankokai

James Joyce, 'Ulysses', Shueisha Bunko

James Joyce, 'Finnegans Wake', Kawade Shobo Shinsha

Jorge Luis Borges, 'Ficciones', Iwanami Bunko

Yasutaka Tsutsui, 'Uma no Kubi Fuunroku', Shincho Bunko

Kurt Vonnegut, 'The Sirens of Titan', Hayakawa Bunko

Kurt Vonnegut, 'Slaughterhouse-Five', Hayakawa Bunko

Douglas Adams, 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy', Kawade Bunko

Stanisław Lem, 'The Cyberiad', Hayakawa Bunko

Kentaro Komori, 'Gurdjieff no Zanei', Bunshun Bunko

William Patrick Patterson, 'Struggle of the Magicians: Exploring Gurdjieff's Fourth Way', Cosmos Library

Honobu Yonezawa, 'Kokurojo', KADOKAWA

Miraiya Shoten Itami Store Information

Itami City Related Public Documents

#BeelzebubsTalesToHisGrandson
#Gurdjieff
#PostmodernLiterature
#ThomasPynchon
#JamesJoyce
#KurtVonnegut
#SeigoMatsuoka
#MiraiyaShoten
#Itami
#Hambaniru
#Hambaniru
#KattetsuFuruta
#Absurdity
#ObjectiveLiterature
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