The Kingdom of Pigs

By Shinji Suzuki

This is a parody of society in one Asian nation. I got the idea of "the nation of pigs" from the prediction of one writer. I think what he predicted more than 50 years ago is becoming a reality.

Most people in the country have lost their own pride and discretion but they don't realize it. Even though it is affluent materially, they have lost important things and it makes society in it distorted.

Because of this, I predict the collapse of the nation in the near future. As a man who lives there, I want to record what is going on in it as a novel. This version is the earlier part of the novel and if some people buy it, I will write a latter part.

• Language: English
• Publisher: eBookIt.com
• Release date: Mar 11, 2021
• ISBN: 9781456637071

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Contents

Prelude

Chapter 1

Prelude

Those who have lost their own discretion and pride shall be ‘pigs,’ a wise man once said.

If what he said is correct, Shinji wondered, almost all the people in this country are pigs!

More strictly speaking, not almost all but exactly all the people in this country were ‘pigs’ when it comes to those he had met in his life. Surely, from his point of view, they looked like pigs not only in terms of their behavior, but also their appearance. Even though they claimed themselves to be humans, without a doubt, they didn’t look like humans to him. They had oinking noses and pointed ears, their skins were pink, and they even had tails!

Is it possible? he asked himself. All the people living in this country are pigs?

He trembled with fear. He hurried into the bathroom and looked into the mirror. Surely, there was the face of a young man. He sighed and asked himself again,

If I am the only human in this country, why don’t the others sense something is wrong with me? Their appearances are totally different from mine!

Certainly, that was strange. One human and millions of ‘pigs.’ There was no possibility that they overlooked it. But actually, they didn’t speak of it at least in front of him. He thought about it for a while and came up with one working hypothesis.

Originally, they were all humans, and even after having changed into pigs, they didn’t realize it.

It’s not something that had started recently. Looking back on his childhood, from the beginning, he had felt something strange with others. They were probably humans, not exactly pigs, but from his viewpoint, they didn’t look like humans. Besides their appearance, they seemed to have lost their own discretion and pride as the wise man had said, though it wasn’t clear whether they had lost it or hadn’t had it from the beginning. What was clear for him was that since the moment he was born, he had been feeling himself different from others, even his parents. He had been looking for the answer about why and one day had come across a book that contained the sentence above. It was shocking to him but seemed to have something convincing in it.

It was very vague, but he felt he’d gotten a hints about the question he had secretly had for a long time and became somehow radiant. Then he turned his eyes to the clock. It was 8:00 a.m. It was time for him to leave for the office. He quickly changed his clothes, put on his jacket, and left home in the cold winter weather.

Chapter 1

After he got to the office and sat on his chair to prepare for his work, Takashi, one of his colleagues, started talking to him.

Have you heard that Mr. Mori will leave this company?

It was news to him, and he was surprised. Mori was one of the executives of his company, which was a middle-sized IT company with about 100 employees and his direct supervisor. Even though he was not so competent, he was amiable and not demanding and overall a good boss for Shinji.

Why? Shinji asked.

He couldn’t produce the result the president asked him for. You know, most of the executives in this company are NOT regular workers. They are outsourced employees.

Until recently, most workers in Japon, the country where Shinji lived, were regular workers and protected by law considerately. The employment system was called lifetime employment and once you were hired by a company, you had to be loyal to it all your life, but as a reward, you didn’t have to care about anything other than the work assigned to you. As long as you were loyal to the company, you were provided with enough things to live, such as good salary, welfare, and even a pension after your retirement. All of the rules favorable to workers were strictly stated in the laws, and if a company disobeyed, it had to pay a big fine and receive instructions from the Labor Standards Office. Japonese workers were so well protected that it was not common for them to change the companies they worked for, let alone their occupations.

Sometimes this system was criticized as rigid, but at least as far as Shinji remembered, at the time when this system worked well, people looked happier. It was about twenty years ago, when Shinji was a child, that the system began to change. Even though some experts said the Japonese employment system had been changing into a favorable direction during the last twenty years, Shinji didn’t believe so. Anyway, like so many others, Shinji’s company also once had fired most of the executives and renewed their contracts as outsourced employees a few years ago. At that time, Shinji felt it was a de facto dismissal, and, hearing the news that Mori would leave his company, that feeling strengthened.

After leaving this company, where will he go? Shinji asked.

I don’t know, Takashi answered indifferently.

Indifference! Shinji thought. Indifference is the word that symbolizes the people in this country.

Surely, when Shinji was a child and the world was brighter, it wasn’t so. He remembered one incident that