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

  “Not again, that’s near here. This is scary.”

  “You’ve got to be careful,” I whisper.

  “Yeah, I will. I always am,” she says.

  She’s so cute, I end up teasing a little. “The people who do this stuff, I’ll bet they’re desperate too, running from their own unseen demons.”

  “What kind of … unseen demons?” she asks, her voice tense. She’s still facing the TV. The light ridges that run along the top of her ear are on display.

  I don’t say, Psychos like me.

  “Oh, I don’t know … society?” I say instead. “People making unreasonable demands? Work? An inability to believe in the future of our political system?”

  She doesn’t turn around.

  “Why don’t they find a better way of doing it? There are so many different ways a person can run,” she says. The tip of her ear twitches with each movement of her jaw.

  Since the special honey came into my life, I’ve left behind no survivors. I don’t discriminate. It doesn’t matter whether they’re male or female, adults or kids, pensioners or whatever. They all die.

  I became a “professional” basher because of the special honey, which my girlfriend introduced me to, but she isn’t the one to blame. I was more or less this way even before I discovered the sticky stuff. And my system hasn’t really changed. I suppose I’d use all sorts of different things for the weight, but I’d always had the preference for plastic convenience-store bags. I hadn’t always taken the step of killing my victims. Some would die, but the rest survived. The biggest difference was that, before the honey, I lacked the understanding I have now. I hadn’t heard the warning shout of “Run!” and didn’t really know what was going on, leading me to mistake the elation I got from barely escaping with my life for that of sexual lust; for a time I even limited my targets to high school girls. I used to struggle with the idea that I was some kind of sexual deviant, and even prayed that someone would stop me. I used to fantasize about how good it would feel if one of the high-school girls I’d marked—at the time, always the ones with chunky thighs—were to fight back and drive a sweaty palm heel into my Adam’s apple, knocking me to the ground.

  I don’t think that way anymore. I’ve got the voice screaming “Run!” and I just do what it says. Not that running is enough by itself. That would mean having to maintain that incredible speed forever. I couldn’t do that. That would kill me. That’s why I make the blood offering. By offering a stranger’s blood instead of my own, from my place at the front of the line, I can use the scent to satisfy the psycho behind me, while providing enough of a whiff to keep the psycho behind him—and the one behind him, and all of them, right up to the end of the line—temporarily at bay. These days I understand it all.

  This is my way of running. What else does she think there is? I guess she’s a woman, she probably just said whatever popped into her head, without thinking.

  A few days later, I learned that this hadn’t been the case.

  That night, I heard the voice again: “Run!”

  It’s usually on edge, but it sounds more panicked than usual. “Run!” “Run!” “Run!” The timing’s good as I’m on my way to my girlfriend’s; even better, as I have a jar of the special thirteen-thousand-yen honey. All I need now is a target. I search with bloodshot eyes. “Run!” I start to run. I run with incredible speed. I hear the swish swish of the knife behind me—right behind me. It’s huge. I know this even without looking back. Much larger than usual. More cleaver than knife.

  With perfect timing, I find my target. A woman. No, a man. Too well-built to be a woman. No woman has shoulders so broad. I start to whirl the jar of honey in the plastic bag, fast enough to drown out the sound of the knife. The bag whistles, the jar hums. I continue to accelerate. My victim tonight is a cross-dresser. A man dressed as a woman. A cross-dresser with straight flat hair down to around the neckline, whose shoulders are packed into a light-orange jacket and too burly to be anything but a man’s, who’s wearing a tight yellowish skirt with high heels that match the color of the jacket. He’s got nice legs, but cross-dressers usually have better legs than most of the women out there. I don’t discriminate. Cross-dresser or not, they can all die. I’ll put them all out of their misery.

  I swing the jar, already suspended above the man’s head, down. It finds nothing but air. I lose my balance and stumble forward. For a moment I’m unable to process what happened. I look ahead and see the cross-dresser storming away. The cross-dresser is escaping. Huh … ? His speed is incredible. Is he a psycho too?

  I give chase.

  The cleaver slices down behind me. It feels as though it’s sheared off some hair. “Run!” the scream ricochets through me. I’m fleeing. I’m giving chase. Never underestimate a psycho when he’s running for his life. I start to close the distance. The cross-dresser’s running barefoot now, having transferred his heels to his hands. It won’t help. I’m getting closer and closer. I want to laugh out loud. The cross-dresser isn’t a psycho after all, just a regular old cross-dresser. Just desperate, running as fast as he can to avoid being killed by a psycho. Everyone, crazy or not, runs faster when their life’s in danger, right? That’s why he was running so fast in the beginning. Yeah, well, sorry to say it, but psychos like me are in a whole different ballpark when it comes to this stuff. See, I’m closing in, within reach, right on top of him, whirling the honey so it sings in the air.

  Without warning, the cross-dresser spins around. He’s shorter than I am. The eyebrows are too thick, the lips too red, but he reminds me of someone. As my attention drifts to his rolling shoulders, he punches one of his shoes upward. The toes crunch into my nose, sending blood spraying everywhere. I drop the jar of honey. I can’t breathe. My knees buckle and I curl inward, throwing up my hands to protect my nose. A powerful arm booms through the air. The cross-dresser drives the pointed heel of his other shoe into my right temple. It cracks my skull, snapping as it embeds itself in warm tissue.

  Like all the people I’ve battered in the past, I hit the ground. And, like I’ve done so many times, the cross-dresser crouches at my side; he raises the jar of honey. But he doesn’t crack my skull. He doesn’t need to, I’m dead either way.

  He speaks my name.

  “Why?” he asks through tears.

  “What … ?” I just about manage. The cross-dresser isn’t a cross-dresser. He’s my girlfriend. “What’s with those shoulders … ?”

  My voice is splintered, but it reaches her ears.

  “They’re shoulder pads! It’s an eighties throwback! They’re just new,” she sobs, tugging off her wig. “I was late, overtime. Just hurrying to get home before you arrived …”

  I open my mouth. Viscous blood spills out. There’s something I need to ask her. I force my numbing tongue to move.

  “Was it you? Were you the psycho chasing me?”

  “What about you? Were you the guy coming after me, all this time?”

  I close my eyes. The truth finally dawns. Like me, my girlfriend was pursued by her own unseen psycho, only she had her own way of running. The obsessive dressing up wasn’t so she could feel in tune with herself, so she could feel at home in her own body. It was camouflage. Living in this deserted wasteland, putting on one disguise after another: it was all her way of running.

  Her hands are in mine.

  I’m a psycho, but I’m not the one who’s chasing you. You need to keep running. Run!

  My lips tremble …

  Dress up! Run!

  … but no words come out.

  Every time I come to Washington it rains.

  I don’t know why this should be, but my father used to tell my brothers and me that there’s no point in denying reality, even reality that’s ridiculous. Rain fell insistently, tracing diagonal lines across the windows, as the Acela train Bill Smith and I were riding pulled into Union Station.

 
“It’s still beautiful,” Bill said. “Soggy, but at least down here it’s spring.”

  “You don’t have to try to make me feel better. I don’t believe I have some paranormal effect on the weather and it rains because I’m coming. I just think I unconsciously but cleverly time my trips here to make sure to coincide with the rain.”

  “Not a paranormal effect on the weather, just a preternatural relationship with it? Sure, why not?”

  We swung our overnight bags down and beat it to the subway. In Washington they call it the Metro and it runs on rubber wheels, and in the place we came out, Dupont Circle, it had a huge sci-fi escalator to the street. “You think we’ll be on Mars when we get to the top?” I asked as the gray sky in the round opening came closer.

  “I think we’re already on Mars if we’ve really taken this case.”

  “We can’t not take it. I told you, Moriko’s one of my oldest friends. We were super close in high school until her family moved here her senior year. I used to date her big brother. Maybe you can’t take it. But I have to.”

  “I can’t take what, the fact that you used to date her older brother? Oh, you mean the case. What kind of person would leave his partner on her own with a client who thinks she’s a fox? Besides, from what you say she actually is a fox, though not the kind she thinks she is.”

  “Hands off. That’s the whole problem here—a man after her who she doesn’t want.”

  “What makes you think she wouldn’t want me?”

  “Let me count the ways.”

  I lofted my umbrella, Bill sunk his head in his raincoat collar, and we splashed the two blocks to the row house where Moriko Ikeda lived in an apartment on the parlor floor.

  As I told Bill, Moriko and I have been close since high school. We went to Townsend Harris in Flushing, Queens, which is stuffed full of brainy Asian kids but, as my brother Tim never lets me forget, isn’t Stuyvesant. My four brothers and I all went to high schools you had to test into, but different ones. Tim was already at Stuyvesant when my tests came up; I didn’t even fill out the application. Why? The different-schools thing hadn’t applied to elementary school. I was the youngest—and a girl—and I followed my brothers all the way through Sun Yat-Sen in Chinatown. I couldn’t wait to get to a school where, when anyone asked if I was related to such-and-such a kid named “Chin,” I could say I wasn’t, not just wish I wasn’t.

  Moriko and I hit it off from the beginning, even though the Chinese and Japanese kids mostly eyed each other with suspicion (and the Koreans eyed both of us that way, and the black kids eyed the Latino kids that way, and the white kids were too stunned by finding themselves in the minority to do anything but huddle together for warmth). With me and Moriko, maybe it was an opposites-attracting kind of thing. I was a short, straightforward, practical jock; she was tall, elegant, sweet, and spacey.

  Never this spacey, though. She’d called yesterday to ask me to come to Washington as a last-ditch attempt to solve her problem, which was: a man had stolen her kitsunebi, and since she’d die without it, she had to do what he wanted so he’d give it back. Kitsunebi is the soul of a kitsune, a fox spirit, and in this case what the man wanted was for Moriko to marry him.

  Moriko buzzed us in within seconds of my pressing her doorbell. We’d stepped into the building’s small entry hall and I was folding my umbrella for stashing when she opened the glass-paneled inner door. Her eyes lit up when she saw me, and I’m sure mine did when I saw her. Bill’s eyes I didn’t look at because I didn’t want to know.

  You have to understand: Moriko is gorgeous. She’s not actually super tall, maybe five-ten, but she’s so slender that she gives a long-limbed, languid impression. She seems not to walk so much as flow, and the shoulder-length hair framing her narrow, high-cheekboned face is as black and glossy as her skin is pale.

  Paler than usual, today. She led us into her apartment through a pair of large double doors, closed them behind her, and hugged me. “Thank you for coming, both of you. Though I’m feeling guilty about calling you. I don’t know what you can possibly do. Oh, I’m sorry, that’s so rude of me.” She extended her hand to Bill. “Moriko Ikeda.”

  “Bill Smith. Don’t be sorry and don’t feel guilty. I haven’t been to Washington in a while. Happy to come down.”

  “I wish I could have provided better weather.”

  “Don’t worry about it, that’s Lydia’s fault.”

  Moriko raised her delicate eyebrows but I didn’t explain. After a moment she said, “I have tea. I’ll bring it right in.”

  While Moriko went to get the tea, Bill whispered to me, “Do kitsune control the weather?”

  “No. That was human small talk.”

  I’m always surprised when I find myself explaining something to Bill. As he’s pointed out more than once, I’m the Asian person in our relationship. But he, rumpled, antisocial, and blue-collar as he appears—though not today; today he wore a sharp navy suit with a white shirt and blue-and-silver tie—is the one with the deep background in art, music, and all kinds of culture, including Asian culture. So long before Moriko hired us, he’d heard of kitsune; but apparently he wasn’t familiar with their fine points.

  I was, because I’d looked them up.

  For example, they’re usually called “fox spirits,” but that makes them sound like ghosts and they’re not ghosts. They’re regular foxes who’ve reached a great age and attained wisdom and magical powers. Like shapeshifting. Into old men, young girls, and beautiful women.

  For another example, they carry their souls, their kitsunebi, outside their bodies in glowing globes of fire. In fox form, they hold the globes on their tails. When they’re humans, where to keep the globes—the kitsunebi-dama—becomes problematic. And it seemed that Blake Adderly, up-and-coming young hotshot D.C. power broker, had, in the course of dating Moriko, discovered and walked off with hers.

  “You don’t really believe this stuff?” Bill had asked when I told him about Moriko’s problem.

  “Doesn’t matter. She does, and I’m telling you, she’ll marry this creep if we can’t think of what to do about it.”

  I had to admit the what-to-do-about-it part kind of had me at a loss. I’d come down hoping maybe a little calm, nonchalant logic could defuse the situation, but as Moriko poured green tea into tiny porcelain cups she said, “I know you think I’m crazy.”

  “No, I—okay, a little,” I conceded, taking the cup she handed me. “I mean, I’ve known you forever, and you’ve never—you always—”

  “I like the human form. I was a fox for a long time and this is still new and fun. I’m learning a lot, too. I just never should have trusted Blake.”

  Leaving aside the question of why she ever had trusted a man named Blake, I said, “Tell us about the kitsunebi-dama. What does it look like, and how did he get it?”

  “It’s like a clear rock crystal globe. You can hold it in your hands.” She cupped her hands together and gazed into them sadly. “If you look deep inside you can see it glow. That’s my kitsunebi shining in there.”

  “And how did he get it?”

  She looked calmly at me. “I left it unprotected while we made love.”

  Well, I thought, one often does leave one’s soul unprotected while making love. Just, usually not on the bureau.

  I decided Bill deserved extra points for not laughing, not leering, not even smiling except reassuringly.

  “All right,” I said. “Tell us about Blake, and tell us where to find him.”

  She told us, and nothing about Blake was surprising. He was an attorney, raised with a certain level of power and money, not up there in the 1 percent but somewhere around the 5 to 7. Moriko had met him at a function at the Freer-Sackler, the Asian branch of the Smithsonian, where they both, by Moriko’s admission, were trolling for clients. Blake had attended his father’s law school and now worked at his father’s law firm, s
pecializing in their Asian clients.

  “If you can call it working,” Moriko said. “His actual job seems to be lunch. And dinner. And drinks, and partying. He connects people up with other people they want to know.”

  Bill listened politely, sipping his green tea (which was, expectedly, excellent). His ears seemed to perk up when, in response to my question about hobbies and spare-time activities, Moriko told us Blake raced sports cars. “He has an Aston Martin. He and his friends rent tracks and all go out there and drive fast. It bores me to tears, but luckily it’s a guy thing so I didn’t have to go much.”

  “I’m sorry, Moriko, I should have asked this before,” Bill said, “but what is it you do?”

  “I’m a development officer at the East Asian Union. We bring artists and intellectuals from Asia to the US, and we send Americans to Asian countries, too. Cultural exchange in the name of better relations, that sort of thing. Also, if we’re asked we connect Asian capital with American entrepreneurs. Occasionally the other way, but most of the capital is in Asia these days. China especially. I think that’s why Blake wants to marry me.”

  “I thought he wanted to marry you because you’re hot and he’s obsessed,” I said. She blushed and cast her eyes down prettily, but she didn’t deny it. “There’s another explanation?” I asked.

  “Yes. I mean, he is obsessed. Though I think even that is more about power than lust.”

  “A lot of the time they’re indistinguishable,” said Bill.

  “You’re probably right. But beyond that, I have a wide network of contacts throughout Asia that could be useful to him. You know how it works there, especially in Japan, but in China and Korea, too. People I know who might not give him the time of day on their own will feel obligated to help him out if I’m his wife and I ask them to.”