It's a fake world. Alternatively: All the world's a stage.

One day two years ago (as Shukan Bunshun magazine reported recently) a 76-year-old woman got something in the mail. A business pamphlet of some sort, something about an "investment diamond" — if she would buy it for ¥1.5 million, the company (A. Ltd., let's call it) would buy it back from her for ¥2 million, and she'd be ¥500,000 ahead.

Soon afterward there came a phone call. A young man from A. Ltd.; had she received their pamphlet? Yes, she had, she said, and it seemed rather strange. Not at all, said the man, it's quite routine, this is how the "investment diamond" business works. He was friendly, engaging, "not the sort to lie," she said later. At one point his frankness expressed itself in tears: "If I don't make a sale I'll get fired." The woman sympathized; she'd think it over, she said.