The One in the Mirror
By Jason Low
Tatsuo Suzuki - From the series Tokyo Street (2009-2018), Black and white photograph
Image description: The photograph captures the bustle of a crowded street. In the background, neon-lit number signs indicate gateways. Most of the figures’ faces are blurred. One middle-aged man with glasses gazes directly at the camera.
It was late summer, the morning after the election. Eddie Cheng was just about to step inside the cafe when someone pushed the door out towards him with such force that it almost knocked him over.
“Watch it!” Eddie said.
The old woman’s head remained still while her eyes moved quickly, as if she was discreetly trying to survey the area. She studied Eddie for a few moments and then clutched his upper arm. “I once saw someone trawling through musty smelling racks of old paperbacks and thought there would be hope in the world,” she said.
“I think you’ve got me confused with someone else,” Eddie said, pulling his arm away.
The old woman muttered something in reply, but her gaze aimed past Eddie into the cafe. Then, a man, lean with muscles and wearing an ombre suit with shades of yellow that blended summer daffodils to pale corn-silk blush, came outside and said, “I apologise for her disturbing you on such a lovely day.” The man’s lips pulled up at the corners and a crusted smile beamed down on Eddie. The man grabbed the old woman under her arm, whistled a cheerful tune, and led her away. Eddie watched them go. The old woman could not keep up with the pace, her short legs spinning in the wake of the man’s stride.
The cafe was respectably full. Corporate workers and dressed-up professionals on their way to work were drinking coffee. A well-heeled older crowd was having a leisurely breakfast. They talked excitedly, faces convulsing with laughter, like they wanted everyone around to hear and see their pleasure. Eddie found an empty spot in the corner, pulled out a chair, sat down, and placed his book on the table. As Eddie stared at the newspaper on the neighbouring table, he realised that the National Contentment Party had been re-elected by a landslide, capturing as much as 80% of the votes. The NCP’s slogans to ensure widespread happiness as psychological capital for boosting productivity, creativity, security, and equality resonated with rank-and-file and swing voters. Eddie fidgeted with the blown-out neckline of his t-shirt and looked out into space.
As the conversations around Eddie rattled on, he opened his book—a vintage paperback edition of The Confidential Agent—to read whilst he waited for someone to take his order. He had always found Graham Greene’s ruminative thriller to be consoling. He even used it to teach Melancholy and Malcontent in Spy Fiction when he worked at the university’s English Department. Sensing that someone was standing in front of his table, he gazed up from his book to see the server looking at him. She wore a lilac polka-dot dress with a matching scarf around her neck. There was a spiral notebook with a cat-themed pencil in her hand. Then she said in an upbeat voice, “I can’t believe you dare to show up outside like this, spoiling everyone’s fun. This establishment isn’t the right place for the likes of you.” A smile unfolded over her face.
Scrambling to make sense of the situation, Eddie wondered if the server could have been a student he had failed in his class. He didn’t recognise her. Then Eddie registered the sudden silence around him and how everyone in the room had turned to look at him with the same vivid grin snapped across their mouths. Eddie quickly got up, grabbed his book, and left the cafe. The lively atmosphere inside the cafe returned as soon as the door swung shut. A waist-high robot-server displaying crinkled eyes and raised cheeks on its screen shuttled about the cafe. It stopped occasionally to allow customers to load their dirty cups and dishes onto its heavy-laden trays before calling out, “Have a good morning.” No one returned the greeting.
Outside, Eddie noticed how every person walking past him dressed in highly saturated hues: electric blues, mulberry pinks, fiery reds, and cautionary oranges. He was the only person wearing a bland beige t-shirt with khaki pants. Eddie searched his memory but drew a blank on the style of clothes the old woman outside the café was wearing.
Walking down the street blooming with climate-controlled shopping arcades, Eddie stopped to look at the window display of the government-owned bookstore. Podiums and plinths called attention to new titles on happiness, positive thinking, and self-help. The covers featured blooming flowers, floating balloons, and grinning faces. A mechanical glass eye, with shiny reflective panels that formed a halo around its outer surface, much like the sun’s corona, hovered above the merchandise.
Suddenly, prompted by the sound of blaring sirens, people rushed out from the bookstore to bow their heads as a motorcade of ministerial BMWs drove by. There were stiff, uncompromising, super-polyester national flags planted on each vehicle’s fenders. Amidst a sea of bowed heads, Eddie stood upright in muted opposition.
After the cars turned into the next street, people scrambled, clawed, and pushed to go back inside the store to purchase signed copies of The Chronicles of Infinite Happiness: Our Leader’s Odyssey. Soul-sucking waste of paper, Eddie thought. Then, he saw the man reflected in the window. The man in the ombre suit was smiling at him.
Eddie turned around to look across the street, but the man had disappeared. He clutched his paperback tightly and walked for a few blocks to the underground station.
A run of digital panels that ran alongside the escalator to the train platform featured government officials warning the public to safeguard their children’s happiness. Holographic smiley face QR codes attached to platform screen doors winked at commuters, offering invitations to redeem points for discounted consultations at Happiness Hubs found across the city. As Eddie sat in an empty train cabin, overhead speakers piped out announcements advising passengers to report individuals who appeared suspiciously unhappy to dedicated WhatsApp hotlines. He stared at the space above the empty seat in front of him, at the animated decals of anthropomorphised animals with big eyes, chubby cheeks, and button noses that urged him to Be a Do-Right Citizen—Smile!
When Eddie reached his apartment building, he squeezed into the elevator and pressed the button to make it go up to the fourth floor. When he stepped out of the elevator, he found the front door to his apartment open, the man in the ombre suit waiting for him.
“Who are you?” Eddie said, forcing himself to concentrate on breathing slowly and deeply.
“Merrick Ang. I’m from the Ministry of Smiles. The General would like to have a word with you. He’s waiting inside.”
“Do I have a choice?”
“Being a naysayer is not an option.” The man held Eddie firmly by the arm, pulled him inside the apartment, and shut the door.
Tatsuo Suzuki - From the series Tokyo Street (2019), Black and white photograph
Image description: The photograph captures a figure standing behind the glass window of a bus. The figure is dressed in a working uniform and stands next to a ticket machine. The reflections on the window obscure the figure’s head. Reflected on the window is a lively urban scene, including skyscrapers and billboards.
Eddie watched with apprehension as the General ran his finger along the bookshelves in the living room, tut-tutting away at the dust everywhere. He was tall and thin, wearing a boxy floral jacket with slouchy flared pants. The ornate service medals on the jacket pocket and gilded brass shoulder scales lent an aggressive beat to the General’s skater-kid chic.
“Mr Cheng,” the General said, “I apologise for the forcefulness of my personal assistant, but we wouldn’t want you to run away before we have had our tête-à-tête. I’m here on behalf of our benevolent leader. May I call you Eddie?”
“No.”
“Well, Eddie, the ministry has flagged your attitude, your predilection shall we say, as needing a top-down intervention.”
“Are you here because I didn’t vote for the NCP? There is no law that says it is illegal to vote for the competing party.”
“I’m here because you have broken a different rule of law—specifically Article 1 Section 1.7.”
“Which shitty NCP Government rule does that refer to?”
“Temper, temper, my dear Eddie. One must always keep a positive attitude in life. Article 1 Section 1.7 states: Citizens will smile and will read happy books. By the way, is there a fog machine in your apartment?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Look at these old books on your shelves. Rows and rows of Eric Ambler, Joseph Conrad, Dashiell Hammett, and John Buchan, and two bookcases devoted to Graham Greene’s novels and short stories. Every book in your apartment is about people adrift in grey worlds! One would think there is a fog machine you turn on every time when reading these books. Dare I ask about the paperback in your hand?”
“I don’t have a fog machine lying about, and this book is The Confidential Agent,” Eddie replied. “It’s about doubt and alienation, marginality and oppression, stuff that still plagues modern life.”
“Nonsense,” the General said. “It is pulp fiction set in a world of cloak and dagger where disaster lurks at every corner and everyone is doomed. The tale romanticises the breakdown of self-confidence, and the melodrama has seduced you to think that it is special to read dark paperbacks and feel damned and disenfranchised.”
“General, you don’t know what you are talking about.”
“I know it’s the law that citizens maintain the nation’s happiness, to put body, heart, mind, and soul into behaviours that are positive, optimistic, productive, and redemptive, all of which push our country’s economy forward. Any offence under Article 1 is now tantamount to committing a crime against the dignity of our leader.”
“How convenient for you,” Eddie said.
“How long has it been since you supported our national bookstores by buying new and happy books? Time and time again, you pride yourself on being attracted to the raffish air of underground shops selling tatty second-hand books dealing with bleak subjects. The ministry will not tolerate your subtle form of resistance any longer. You are also failing elsewhere.”
“In which way?”
“Students ranked your undergraduate course as being the bleakest on campus. Merrick, would you read a few of the complaints about Eddie’s course?”
The man in the ombre suit flipped through the papers on his clipboard and read out his notes. “One complainant said: Dr Cheng’s course goes into dark and depressing places; I found myself tearing up as I typed the notes! Another said: The course is out of step with our country’s needs. If Dr Cheng is going to teach this, he should at least learn to smile.”
“I refuse to entertain the masses like a grinning idiot,” Eddie said. “Declining student engagement in the humanities is partly a product of budgetary problems in a neo-liberalism-dominated world. Things are going to get worse with you lot staying in power!”
“You can’t blame our nation’s youth for sidelining your course, preferring happy ones with high-value career pathways,” the General said, pinching Eddie’s cheeks.
The General walked to the living room window, opened the curtains, and stood with his back to Eddie. “Tell me, do you read anything else aside from old-timey spy fiction?” he asked.
“There is a row of novels by Jean Rhys and Virginia Woolf on the shelf,” Eddie said, “and a row of poetry from Browning, Yeats, and Byron.”
The General turned around to look at Eddie. “I can see why you’re one of our least cheery citizens. Your apartment is a cesspool of existential interiority, fretful hand-wringing, and agonising melancholia. I’m afraid you are too far gone. The ministry refers to you as a persistent glum-glum,” the General said. His voice softened. “Come away from those ghastly old books and look outside the window.”
Ornamental shoulder pieces glowed in the sunlight as the General held his arms out, welcoming Eddie to step into his embrace.
Eddie hesitated for a moment. Then he placed the paperback he had in his hand onto the tray table, where he kept a few framed photographs, collectibles, tchotchkes, and more. Stepping to the window, Eddie made out tiny people, like figures on a spreadsheet, on the great grid below. Grinning executives, roped with lanyards around their necks, rushed in and out of office buildings. Workers poured out from lorries with smiles on their faces to cover buildings designated for demolition with scaffolding and tarpaulin sheets. Smiling joggers weaved around crowds of smiling shoppers outside high-end retail stores and eateries.
“Happiness is world-changing, Eddie. Everyone out there is a mover and a shaker, an aspirant, a craver,” the General said. “And our country’s economy is booming. Look at that snaking stream of chirpy people lining up to dine at The Smiling Remedy. Have you eaten there?”
“That graveyard of happiness serving alchemical mouthfuls of little cakes? No.”
“Pity,” the General said. “Project The Smiling Remedy is the ministry’s most creative application in the food-and-beverage industry yet. Our scientists re-engineered the baking flour so that cutting into the cakes releases sprays of kaleidoscopic smiley-face edible bubbles. It was my idea to roll out bubble cakes. The recipe is a hit with influencers.”
“You’re a real people person,” Eddie said, glancing skyward.
“I believe in giving our citizens new experiences as a reward for their hard work in making our country the happiest place for everyone.”
“Variety also keeps us from adapting and returning to baseline.”
“You, Eddie, are a glum-glum to the bitter end.”
A sharp knock hit the back of Eddie’s head. His body slumped to the floor.
Eddie opened his eyes and blinked twice. He saw Merrick and the General smiling down at him. He felt his hands duct-taped behind his back at the wrists.
“Take my books and burn them. Just leave me alone,” Eddie cried.
“Neither Merrick nor I care to burn your books,” the General said. “The ministry is not in the business of the wholesale elimination of books. We don’t even care if people read anything smutty, so long as they are healthily happy. Our focus is on dispelling doubt, bleakness, and melancholia. Even then, we will tolerate books with those themes if they give readers a happy ending. We will seal and red-sticker them to warn our citizens of triggering content. In fact, we are launching a new AI-powered division to screen for outputs that elicit deviations from the neural signature of happiness.”
“You’ve got everything figured out, haven’t you?”
“Most of the public voted for us. We have a clear mandate to be the architects of happiness for the collective, and we are tidying up loose ends to ensure that the public emotionally unites in contributing to a stable and euphoric economy.”
Merrick stuck a syringe into a vial to draw out the luminescent amber liquid.
“This is my favourite part of the intervention, Eddie,” the General said gleefully.
The General fetched his smartphone and tapped on the screen. As George Michael’s pop song Heal the Pain filled the apartment, the General danced around Eddie with splaying arm movements and virtuosic footwork that cut imaginary shapes in the air. The General lip-synched the lyrics about being a shoulder to cry on—appropriating its message to suggest that whenever Eddie wanted him, wherever Eddie would be, he would help heal the pain—with such perfection and conviction that the artifice was horrifyingly mesmerizing.
“Why are you doing this?” Eddie shouted.
Tatsuo Suzuki - From the series Tokyo Street (2009-2018), Black and white photograph
Image description: The photograph captures a blurry, crowded, urban scene. The faces of figures on a busy crossroad fade in and out and merge with one another. In the foreground is the enlarged face of a young man who wears an earbud. He gazes directly into the camera. Behind him are individuals dressed in formal, work clothes. In the background are dense, brightly-lit skyscrapers.
The General kneeled down and pulled Eddie up by the neckline of his t-shirt. “Your vibe is gloomy and you are persistently doubtful,” the General said. “It just takes one fun sponge like yourself to suck up and infect the Feng Shui of our country. I will not let you derail the five-fold happiness of progress, productivity, competitiveness, capacity, and wealth our citizens have worked so hard to achieve and enjoy.”
“The doubt in my books helps me see things as they are, their limits, and doubt leads me to believe there is something more than the beatific world of the Ministry of Smiles.”
“But where has doubt ever gotten you but action inertia? It was through certainty, not doubt, that our leader turned this country into a happy powerhouse.”
“In the past, doubts have gotten me threats of being fined and sued for bankruptcy. So, are you going to kill me now?”
“You are too young to die. You are still useful. You are going to be realigned, re-fashioned, and reintegrated into society.”
“One day, when there are no more of the doubtful, the despairing, and the haunted, you will become redundant because happiness might well cease to exist without us glum-glums as a measure of comparison. Now that is a happy thought!”
The General’s smile retreated and his forehead wrinkled. He grabbed Eddie’s chin and turned his head to the side. The man in the ombre suit injected the needle into Eddie’s neck, and a warm sensation raced to the other parts of his body. The world blurred and slipped away into the dark.
“Who’s next?” the General asked.
“I have taken care of the old woman with the penchant for tragedies in the novels of Thomas Hardy,” the man in the ombre suit said.
“It is going to be sunnier tomorrow,” the General said.
Waking up on the sofa in his living room, Eddie heard the wobbling creak of the ceiling fan, the tick of the clock on the wall, and the banging from a nearby construction site. His gaze darted about in every direction before settling upon the curated collection of objects on the tray table.
Eddie stared at the paperback, taking in its broken spine, torn cover, and the page edges foxed and yellowed with age. He kneaded his forehead like he was struggling with some way of thinking. Then he sprang up to his feet and strutted across the room. He picked up a cigarette lighter from the tray table, flicked the spark wheel with his right hand, and touched the flame to the outermost edge of the paperback. A smile spread across Eddie’s face as the smoky vanilla smell of burning paper filled his nose.
That night, Eddie dreamt he was staring at his reflection in the bathroom mirror. The man in the mirror was not smiling, even though Eddie could feel his facial muscles lifting his mouth and pinching his eyes. Eddie struggled to suppress the overwhelming certainty that his true face was the gloomy one in the mirror.
Tatsuo Suzuki - From the series Tokyo Street (2009-2018), Black and white photograph
Image description: The photograph depicts an urban scene and features a man, dressed in a suit and tie and holding a briefcase, walking hurriedly down a street. He glances at the camera in mid-motion. In the background, shops and advertisements line the streets.
Jason Low is a Hakka-Peranakan Chinese who was born in Brunei and raised between the oil town of Seria and the city-state of Singapore. He currently lives in Wellington, New Zealand. He has a PhD in Psychology from The University of Western Australia and spent over two decades working as an academic scientist before shifting gears to pursue creative writing. “The One in the Mirror” is his first published work.
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Tatsuro Suzuki, born in Tokyo in 1965, graduated from Waseda University's Faculty of Law. He began his photography career at the age of 43. After dedicating 25 years to a career in sales at Fujitsu Corporation, he transitioned to become a photographer. Suzuki primarily focuses on capturing the streets of Shibuya and Tokyo, but also explores themes such as portraiture. In his recent works, he uses water as a motif to explore the strength and fragility of life. He is the founder of VoidTokyo, a street photography collective.
In 2016, Suzuki won the Grand Prix at the Steidl Book Award Japan. His photography book, "Friction / Tokyo Street," was published by Steidl in June 2020. From 2019 to 2023, he released "ZINE TOKYO STREET" volumes 1 through 6. In 2025, his second photography book, "濤声 - The Sound of Waves," was announced.
The elections are over. The architects of happiness won again. A new story by Jason Low.