Based on Tales of the Unusual, "The Man in the Spotlight."
An ordinary, practically invisible salaryman wakes up one morning and comes down to the dining room to have breakfast with his family. He says, "Good morning," but neither his wife nor his children reply. They just sit there in silence. In fact, their eyes are wide open, and they keep staring at him with completely expressionless faces. They won't answer when he talks to them, and they don't even react when he waves his hands right in front of their eyes. They are focusing all of their energy on simply staring at him with wide-open eyes.
Thinking something weird must be stuck to his face, he checks the mirror, but finds nothing. Completely bewildered, he leaves for work without exchanging a single word with his family. However, on his way to work, high school girls passing by stare at him with unnatural intensity and blank expressions. When he gets to the office and steps into the elevator, everyone inside stares right at him. Even when he reaches his own department, his colleagues just stare.
Eventually, work begins, and everyone goes about their normal business, having work-related conversations and answering phones. Yet, everyone keeps their heads turned completely toward him, staring blankly without expression. Just as the protagonist gets angry, demanding to know what kind of joke this is, he is called to the president's office.
Even inside the office, the president doesn't say a single word. He just stares expressionlessly, stands up from his desk, and takes a step-by-step approach toward him. Filled with terror, the protagonist flees the building.
People all over town are staring intently at his face with blank expressions. Some people even begin approaching him just like the president did, staring without expression. Thinking he has to escape this town, he gets into a taxi, but the driver keeps staring back at his face through the rearview mirror while driving—it is dangerously reckless.
Dragging the driver out, the protagonist steals the taxi and drives away himself. He finally stops to rest in a quiet residential area in the suburbs and holds his head in his hands. Why is this happening to him? Sure, he was a little insecure about being so plain, and sometimes wished people would pay attention to him, but he never asked for this situation.
When he looks up, local residents are swarming around the taxi. They surround the car, pressing their hands and faces against the windows, peering down through the windshield from the roof. Every single one of them is simply staring at him with wide-open, expressionless eyes.
Screaming, the protagonist frantically puts the car in gear and flees, running over several people in the process. Driving recklessly and escaping to nowhere in a state of panic, everything begins to terrify him: the eyeball-shaped bird scarers standing in the suburbs, the Fuji Television logo he remembers from somewhere, even a fried egg crossing his mind.
Then, on a bridge, he loses control of the car and is thrown from it. His neck catches on the bridge's wire cable, and...
...he died, while a TV camera lens stared at him like an eye. A reporter was broadcasting the death of the perpetrator of a "taxi robbery and hit-and-run incident."
Watching that news report on TV at home(?), Tamori mutters, "That's a remarkably eye-catching way to die," and the story ends.
There are other Tales of the Unusual stories—like "The Smoker Man" or "The Man Who Went Too Far"—where the protagonist suddenly acquires a supernatural condition for no reason, without warning or foreshadowing, and their life is turned upside down by the absurdity of it all. But while those stories have somewhat happy or reasonable endings, this one is just tragic. If it were the result of getting punished for doing something bad in the past, it would make some sense. But for a plain man to be driven into such a disturbing situation just because he wanted a little attention, pushed to the point of running people over and meeting a gruesome end, is just unfair and deeply unsatisfying.
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