Hanzai Japan: Fantastical, Futuristic Stories of Crime From and About Japan Read online

  HANZAI Japan

  © 2015 VIZ Media

  See Copyright Acknowledgements for individual story copyrights.

  Cover art by Yuko Shimizu

  Design by Fawn Lau

  No portion of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from the copyright holders.

  HAIKASORU

  Published by

  VIZ Media, LLC

  P.O. Box 77010

  San Francisco, CA

  94103

  www.haikasoru.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hanzai Japan : fantastical, futuristic stories of crime from and about Japan / edited by Nick Mamatas and Masumi Washington.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-4215-8025-8 (paperback)

  1. Japan—Fiction. 2. Detective and mystery stories, American. 3. Detective and mystery stories, Japanese. 4. Paranormal fiction, American. 5. Paranormal fiction, Japanese. I. Mamatas, Nick, editor. II. Washington, Masumi, editor.

  PS648.J29H36 2015

  813'.0108952—dc23

  2015028564

  First printing, October 2015

  Haikasoru eBook edition

  ISBN: 978-1-4215-8694-6

  Introduction: My Magical Girlfriend Has Vanished, Mr. Charlie Parker Nick Mamatas

  Foreword Masumi Washington

  (.dis) Genevieve Valentine

  Sky Spider Yusuke Miyauchi

  Rough Night in Little Toke Libby Cudmore

  Outside the Circle Ray Banks

  Monologue of a Universal Transverse Mercator Projection Yumeaki Hirayama

  Best Interest Brian Evenson

  Vampiric Crime Investigative Unit: Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department Jyouji Hayashi

  Jigoku Naomi Hirahara

  The Girl Who Loved Shonen Knife Carrie Vaughn

  Run! Kaori Fujino

  Hanami S. J. Rozan

  The Electric Palace Violet LeVoit

  The Long-Rumored Food Crisis Setsuko Shinoda

  Three Cups of Tea Jeff Somers

  Out of Balance Chet Williamson

  The Saitama Chain Saw Massacre Hiroshi Sakurazaka

  Copyright Acknowledgments

  Contributors

  During the “Golden Age” of detective fiction, writer and critic Ronald Knox laid down ten commandments to make the “game” of writing mystery stories a fair one for the reader. Clues were keys to unlock the mystery, and thus were sacrosanct. The commandments keep writers from cheating with the clues: no secret twins; no undetectable and previously unknown poisons or other scientific explanations; a maximum of one secret passageway per story; no clues known to the detective, but not to the reader; and no reader access to the interior thoughts of the criminal—which would either spoil the plot or lead to the writer “cheating” by having the criminal think about everything other than the crime.

  In Japan, just as in the West, Knox’s commandments did not always apply. The core of the genre plays fair, but many early Japanese crime writers were pleased to deliberately subvert the rules of the game. Early Edogawa Rampo’s “The Twins”—in which a man is found guilty of a capital crime and confesses to another crime: killing his own twin brother and taking his place, and committing further crimes by planting that deceased brother’s fingerprints at crime scenes, except … well, read it. Anyway, had Rampo been explicitly going for the record in number of Knox commandments to break in one story, he could have done no better. More recently, the work of Otsuichi—some of which has won the Honkaku Mystery Award though he is not regarded as a mystery writer—often involve linguistic and narrative play: two narrators telling their stories with a significant, and obscured, gap in time; sleuths who don’t even care about stopping crimes; solutions that depend on massive coincidences.

  But there’s a method to this madness. Ranpo’s guiding star was Edgar Allan Poe, as is obvious from the author’s pseudonym. Poe believed in ratiocination, but the logical processes of his detectives were themselves almost supernatural, dependent on intuition, nonrational leaps of logic, and the poetics of parallel worlds. In The Mystery of Marie Rogêt, Poe’s sleuth nearly solves a real crime that took place in New York by solving a fictionalized version of the crime in Paris. In his afterword to the novel Goth, Otsuichi admits that he saw his dark sleuth characters as yokai, or spirits, even though in the text they are presented as ordinary, if not exactly normal, human beings.

  Two other of Knox’s commandments come into play:

  All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.

  No Chinaman must figure in the story.

  In Knox’s vision, the supernatural can only be a cheat—a way to make a crime unsolvable by the reader. The writer wins the “game” too easily by hiding keys in places nobody else will ever find. Knox’s reference to “Chinaman” characters, itself reeking of Orientalism, was meant to be a warning against the cliché of casual racism and exoticism common among writers of the era, for whom the villainous Fu Manchu loomed large.

  In speculative stories, the supernatural and super-scientific play complicating roles, not mitigating ones. More keys, stranger locks. Perhaps the most famous Japanese writer in the West, Haruki Murakami, frequently uses elements of mystery: hardboiled characters, women who inexplicably vanish (and even a missing sheep!), murders in the opening pages, and men awakening covered in blood not their own. The preternatural agencies present in Murakami’s work aren’t just an easy way to get someone inexplicably murdered, they’re an excellent way to explore the very nature of crime, power, social trespass, and reality.

  Exoticism is also huge in Japanese mystery fiction, from the very beginning of Ranpo’s fetishization of Poe, to Murakami’s protagonists’ interest in jazz. (“No Yankee must figure in the story” would be a terrible commandment.) The privileged West, long used to writing its own stories, could use a look in the funhouse mirror of exoticism.

  Hanzai Japan brings together West and East, SF/F and crime writers, to tell stories of crime with supernatural or science fictional elements. We’re breaking Golden Age commandments faster than our antagonists—which range from vampires to GPS systems—break laws. We live in a science fictional world; Holmes and his magnifying glass won’t do in a society with DNA tests and mathematical profiling of serial killers. And the root of our interest in crime is fear of the dark, fear of the end of life, and fear of what lies beyond. Far from marring mysteries, supernatural agencies can deepen the psychological reality of the mystery, even as the physical world dissolves into high strangeness. A mystery is about finding the key that unlocks a door. A mystery with fantasy or science fictional elements is about finding the key that unlocks the door, and transforms the room as the reader enters it.

  Following The Future Is Japanese and Phantasm Japan, we started talking about a third anthology. We decided on the theme quickly enough: “Crime is next!” Yes, we are a science fiction and fantasy imprint, but why not? We like crime and mystery stories a lot, as we do science fiction and fantasy, just as you do.

  But finalizing the book’s title was not that easy. Hanzai Japan? 犯罪？ はんざい？ Seriously, for a book title? That sounded odd in my Japanese ears, as all Japanese pals here will agree. And our sales folks weren’t happy with the word Hanzai, which is meaningless to most monolingual English speakers. We spent a few weeks trying to come up with alternatives, to no avail. (Want an example? Several VIZ employees liked Japan After Midnight—but
, hey, this is not that kind of anthology.)

  So, after going round and round, we came back to the first idea. By that time, I actually began liking this title. Peering at the word spelled out in the letters of the alphabet, it felt different from what I knew of it in Japanese. Maybe it was because Nick said “han-zai” sounded cool to western ears; or maybe it was fit nicely into Yuko’s cover art; or maybe it was because, no matter what book title we ended up deciding upon, we were actually getting interesting stories from our contributors by that time and the stories were simply bringing this anthology to life already.

  One simple word, operating beyond its language of origin, inspiring new stories: that was our goal. Now I can say this title is a good fit. (We will see if Merriam-Webster picks up “hanzai” in the future—just like how “emoji” made it!)

  We violated at least two of Knox’s mystery fiction commandments, though—these “hanzai” stories cross genres and the borders where we ourselves are living. I am really grateful to all our contributors and translators for their fantastic work. I hope you also enjoy it.

  I went alone to Greenland, because I’d already gone exploring Nara Dreamland with Lars and Cormac and Eddie Leaper, and they’ll make you done with anything.

  I’d started the drive in the dark, and the light was still barely enough to take photos by, and it was so foggy—that mountain fog that hangs so heavy it seems impossible you can’t push it aside with one hand and let it swing shut behind you—that when I saw the man on the carousel it took me ten seconds to realize he was dead. I hoped it was Leaper.

  He was propped with his back against the pillar, head lolling slightly, like he’d died admiring one of the horses still clinging to its post. I didn’t see any blood, not then, but his eyes had clouded over, so he’d been dead at least overnight. (At the time I didn’t know how I knew, and I was already in the car headed back when I realized it was condensation on his corneas, like back in New York on the windows that faced the garden, and I braked so hard I spun out.)

  There was no bag near him. I imagined his friends panicking and making a run for it, which seemed sadder than him actually dying until I realized he might not have been an explorer at all, just dragged here because no one would find it.

  I took a few pictures without thinking, an establishing shot and a few angles and details to sort out later, like I did with any corner of a haikyo that struck me. I had forty-three photos of the room where the maple had gone to seed.

  For all the urban explorers who go into mental hospitals and come out with stories of chalk that writes by itself and faucets that turn on and off and the certainty that someone’s there with you, I’d never heard of someone finding a dead thing larger than a fox. Were you supposed to call the police? You were probably supposed to call the police.

  There were no tire tracks. There were no footprints but mine. The plants were undisturbed for fifty paces in every direction. I started breathing through my mouth, because it made less noise.

  He had a postcard in his vest pocket with Nara deer on the front. On the back, someone had written “Let them eat from your hand.” The receipt in his pants pocket was from a highway stop two years ago, and had directions written on it in English that mapped to the middle of the Pacific. When I set them on his legs to take a photo, they looked like leaves.

  At Nara Dreamland, the first time I ever went anywhere with them, Lars and Cormac had dared each other up the Aska coaster—Lars had seen someone else’s photos and was trying to top them by scaling the whole drop, and Cormac had taken some pills and was mostly just climbing because he couldn’t stand still. Eddie spent three hours trying to convince me to stay there overnight with him.

  “It’s really beautiful at night, I’ve seen pictures,” he’d said, as I was taking photos of peeling paint on the Main Street shops. “Do you remember it from when you came here?”

  I had been five years old back then, on a trip home with my parents, and I mostly remembered the plane rides and my grandparents’ faces. I should never have told Lars I’d been here. Lars couldn’t keep secrets, even from people who should clearly never be told anything.

  “I have work tomorrow, Eddie.”

  He’d twitched and gone quiet for a while, like he always did when I used his real name. (“It’s mostly just Leaper,” Eddie had said when Lars introduced me, like it was an honorific someone else had given him that he was bashful about.)

  “But we could—“ he said, and then something cracked and Cormac was shrieking and we had to run to help.

  All the way across the park, my bag banging against my shoulders and my camera smashed to my chest with both hands, I was thrilled that Cormac was shouting and cursing. That meant he was probably fine, and I didn’t have to worry about how relieved I’d been to hear him falling, just for something else to do.

  Haikyo hunting only works well if you’re with the same type of people. Maybe you need one thrill seeker to be the first one over the gate, but otherwise, you stick to your own kind.

  But I don’t get the thrill of crossing a threshold that some people get, and I don’t have any skill at photography. The Japanese kids who do haikyo respect the condition of the buildings, but it’s still a detective story to them, and white guys who came to Japan just to see haikyo were all pretty terrible, and they were all interested in the next place or the hardest place, so I still hadn’t found anyone of my kind.

  I might just be a bad explorer. We’d moved back to Yokohama before I got started, so I’d never done any of the haunted hospitals in the States, but I’ve never seen the point of going someplace just to terrify yourself. Some people like to go rooftopping or memorize forty miles of tunnels just to see if they can make it out alive without a map. Cormac told me UK explorers scan maps looking for the (dis.) notation—disused, the final mark that a place has been abandoned—and the first to get into the place gets the bragging rights. Plenty of abandoned places still had security, and for some people that was more important than the place: Witanhurst, military bunkers, anything they had to sneak into. Some people got off on the thrill of arrest.

  I just like being in places that human decision has emptied out. They’re quiet in a way nothing else is quiet, like even the animals left them alone for a while—some mourning period that still lingers after the foxes gnaw through the walls. It was a place that was chosen for a while, and then it was unchosen; you can count its ribs, you can wonder about the little stack of plates left behind by people who must have known they were never coming back and what made those four plates the thing they could live without.

  There was a local haikyo team I met up with once, but while we were in the factory they were talking about the last place and the next place and how hard it had been to find this place, and five voices murmuring is still five voices. I didn’t last long with them. Shouldn’t have lasted with Lars and Cormac and Eddie either, but it’s dangerous to go places by yourself, and it’s definitely more comforting to go places with people you kind of hate.

  It’s fine. I don’t mind coming back to the same place over and over. Sometimes the quiet goes—kids find it and start hanging out there, or it gets refurbished, or it gets demolished until it’s just a pile of timber and glass—and then I look for new places, but there are some small houses in the mountains that I’ve been to a dozen times, so quiet I can sit and watch the foxes burrowing. I don’t need things to be showy.

  Yokohama makes me feel carbonated. Maybe New York would have made me feel the same way if we’d stayed there, but who knows. Yokohama has a few places that feel like New York—Akarenga sometimes, maybe—but just seeking them out makes me feel guilty for wanting Yokohama to be something it’s not, something I wasn’t really old enough to know. When kids at school asked me about the States, there was nothing to tell; it just felt like I had moved from one city into another city that sometimes mapped over its ghost, two dimensions into three, and I hadn’t ever str
etched to inhabit it like I was meant to.

  It’s good for me just to be in one of these gone places for a while, to wander through something so deliberately still, with all its hopes gone. I take pictures of the branches that have broken through the roof: saplings in the middle of a hotel lobby, a carpet of maple leaves in a dining room. I never show them to anyone—no point, maybe, but no need. I like having places just for myself; that’s why I ever go out to haikyo at all.

  (Lars runs a forum for exploration photos. When he hit a hundred thousand shots six months ago, he drew the number in the ground on some dirt outside an unknown site and challenged anyone to find it. He set up a subforum for the people who are trying. It’s the most popular thing on the site.)

  Maybe I understand the archivist kinds a little. The ones who go to libraries and historical societies and buy atlases looking for forgotten places, or who spend six weeks tracking down a family out of a photograph, just to see if they can. Not that I’m any good at it (you have to have a network to be good at it), but I understand. It took me weeks to get up the courage to go to Takakanonuma Greenland, but by then I could have told you the layout of that park with my eyes closed.

  The difference between the Greenland and Dreamland amusement parks is that Dreamland exists in a way you can track. There are pictures of soldiers and families visiting when it was still open. There’s video footage of people riding the rollercoasters and the swings and wandering down Main Street, holding children who have that slightly bewildered look that children tend to get at amusement parks, surrounded by so much fun that will soon be over and that’s all out of your control—the birth of some lifelong dissatisfaction.

  But not Greenland. When you go looking for Greenland, the park might as well have been haunted since it opened for all the pictures you can find of it in its heyday. That place had been born empty in the mist and stayed that way, like it had been made for the ivy to devour.