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

  I made notes and looked at maps and made some archives requests of the train stations near Hobara pretending I was studying civil engineering, and decided where I had to go. And after the Nara Dreamland visit I took all the extra precautions you made when going someplace solo; I didn’t want any of them coming with me, but I knew things could get out of hand if you went exploring alone.

  I don’t remember driving back from Greenland, that first time. I had the police number programmed into my phone, a call never sent that whole five-hour drive. I deleted it when I got home, and then I sat on my bed and scanned through fifty pictures of the corpse.

  His hair looked like a businessman’s, gone a little to seed; too long between cuts. My notes from the car, almost too shaky to read, were that he was chubby, but when I was at home and flipping through the photos I realized he might just be swollen. I set down my camera for a while.

  He had no tattoos on his forearms. Someone had rolled up his sleeves to the elbows to prove it. My first thought was that he had rolled them up himself, before, but it was cold enough that his eyes had frosted overnight, so he wouldn’t have. Most likely someone dressed him after.

  I thought about that for a long time, sitting cross-legged on my bed. I wondered if he really had just died of natural causes, like a cat that runs away from home when it knows the end is coming. He was young; maybe he remembered the park from childhood and had wanted to come back here, and hadn’t bothered to bring much with him because there wasn’t much he’d need. Maybe he’d been humming carousel music until his heart stopped.

  I doubted it. His shoes were worn nearly through—in one of the pictures the sole was peeling near the arch, and it looked like a sheet of vellum, there was so little left of it. But they were untouched: not a spot of mud, not a blade of grass.

  Someone had killed him, and washed the body clean, and dressed it carefully—sleeves rolled up for testimony. Someone had carried him through the castle gates like a new bride and chosen the carousel for him, and set him gently against the post so he could look at the horses until he was found.

  And he must have been meant to be found. There were so many of us looking for places, looking for this place, looking for things to take photos of, that whoever killed him had staged him to be seen. My establishing shot was at an awkward angle; I couldn’t tell if he was really looking at the horse, or if he was meant to be looking at whoever approached.

  Lars sent me a message at two in the morning: Hey, you haven’t been around much. Cormac’s out of his cast. Feel like going out?

  We went up to some abandoned factory housing that took us nearly five hours to get to. Lars kept the coordinates secret as long as he could, shaking his head and giggling when Cormac asked him, hinting at things it wasn’t.

  When Lars got to “No one will get smallpox,” I said, “Lars, just tell us or don’t.”

  He blinked for a second before he admitted what it was. After that I put headphones on and ignored everybody from the front seat, which I always got to sit in, because Lars’s GPS was broken and I had to translate signs.

  (“Good thing you’ve turned local,” Lars had said when he pulled up, like he always did, “or we’d die of old age in Yokohama.”

  We all waited the three seconds it usually took for Eddie to remind everyone it was also nice to have a girl around in case security stopped you, but he must have still been upset I wouldn’t fuck him in Dreamland, and he kept quiet.)

  “Where have you been, anyway?” Cormac asked me eventually. “You haven’t been in the forums. You going anywhere?”

  “I’m never in the forums. I don’t care who finds Lars’s number.”

  “Jealous, you are. There have been eighty guesses so far. Somebody did a counterfeit just to see if Lars would return to the real one to check on it. Idiots.” He leaned forward. “Lars told me where it was.”

  “He’d tell anyone,” I said, and Lars laughed like I was trying to be funny and said, “I could tell you, too,” and I shook my head and turned up the volume.

  “Let’s just find someone else who likes this shit,” Cormac said at some point, between songs. “Anybody Japanese could read the fucking signs, she’s not worth it,” and it was a solid two seconds before Lars answered, “It’s fine, she’s fine.”

  The homes looked about eighty years old, which made sense when I thought about it but still surprised me. The roof had fallen in on the kitchen of the first house, and we couldn’t get into the biggest bedroom because the door had swollen and molded shut to the frame, so Lars and Cormac and Eddie all took turns getting artistic shots of the panes without paper and whatever they could manage of the room beyond.

  I went into the smaller room, which had to have been a child’s, it was so small. It had been wallpapered in Moga postcards that had crumbled or bubbled or warped, so it looked like the wall was swelling with huge grubs that had black bobs and lipstick for camouflage, rolling down the wall in herds.

  There hadn’t been any grubs at Greenland. No flies, no beetles, none of the things you’d think would be interested once someone had died. I didn’t remember him smelling like anything; nothing rotten had coated my mouth, like the smells of dead things do even when you try to keep them out. Had he been there long enough that the smell was gone? I imagined a scar down the center of his chest, right along the placket of his shirt, where someone had taken the innards out, so the rest would last longer.

  But his eyes had been pristine, milky and round and still glistening, not an eyelash disturbed. The insects couldn’t have taken over. Not by then.

  “You thinking of stealing one?”

  I jumped. “What?”

  Eddie gestured at my camera, where it hung forgotten over my sternum. “Take nothing but photographs, remember. Leave the postcards for posterity.”

  “I wasn’t going to steal anything,” I said, but Eddie was already taking a photo of the wall like it was evidence he could use later if the Missing Eighty-Year-Old Postcard Council called him into court.

  The woods around the houses were deep and quiet, the trees nearly interlocking, which gave everything a grim darkness shot through with bands of light, and I took pictures of that every ten minutes, watching the puddles of sun across the ground and wondering how late in the morning it was before the condensation on his eyes warmed and disappeared, until Lars came out shouting for me because they thought I had fallen through the floor to the cellar and fainted.

  The Ferris wheel at Greenland is at the farthest edge from the sad castle entrance, so you have to work to reach it—my civil engineering class would have frowned on having something so distinctive so far away—but it’s worth it. A ring of circular cars, like a model of an atom or a cartoon firework before it bursts. And decay has only made it quainter, pastels and patina and the entrance nearly blocked off with feathery plants like nature can’t wait to crowd inside. It’s already made it into the lower cars—the saplings have gotten big enough to push inside, their branches trailing leaves against the seats. When I went back to Greenland, alone, I made myself take photos of it again before I went to the carousel. I was an explorer; the Ferris wheel was as good as anything.

  I couldn’t look directly to see if he (it, he) was still there, so I watched the ground for prints (there were only mine, softened by the damp but still marked where I had stepped across the green), and then looked through the viewfinder as I rounded the curve, until I saw the slumped silhouette. Then the shutter sounded like doors slamming shut right on my heels, there was so much blood in my ears. My hands were shaking. I pressed my elbows to my sides, to keep the shots steady.

  He had no tattoos on his ankles or his neck. I hadn’t been willing to do more than lift his collar to see if he had anything lower on his back; the glimpse was enough to tell if he had affiliation tattoos, and it would have been rude to drag him onto the ground to check for any on his thighs.

  I set
his head to rights afterward, so he could look at the horses. The mist had shaken loose from his eyes, and it made him look more interested in everything. (I knocked some air loose from his nose when I pushed him up. He smelled like the floor of the forest, sour and wormed. When I pulled back from it I saw the calluses where his glasses should have been.)

  His shirt was from Uniqlo, which meant nothing, and when I undid his buttons there was no easy scar on his stomach where he’d been emptied out. Be brave, I thought, he’s like any other unchosen place, and so I slid my hand lightly around his ribs—I winced when I pressed in; I was ticklish and always sympathized—and felt a scar that was still raised. Either very old, or very new.

  His fingernails were as clean as my father’s, and he had a callus on his right index finger from writing too much. His mouth had been sewn shut with careful, invisible stitches behind the lips, so tight you couldn’t get a look at the teeth. I ran my hands over his lips to count the stitches (fifty-two), and then along his jaw to count his teeth (three missing).

  The postcard was gone.

  I froze with my hand still in the pocket of his vest; my first thought was, Maybe he moved it to another pocket, and when I realized I laughed too loudly and covered my mouth with my free hand. Then I checked his other pockets anyway, in case I had put it away wrong, and then underneath him, even through the cracks in the boards, just in case. But it was missing.

  The receipt was still there, and I took it out with the sides of my fingers—too late to worry about fingerprints, but still—and got half a dozen photos, just in case.

  I was glad I had taken so many shots on my way in; my hands were shaking, and I would never have been able to put his vest and collar the way I had found them without some reference to go by.

  I waited until I reached Utsunomiya to pull over, and found a café where I could sit with my computer. (I couldn’t look up any of this from back home.)

  Looking for someone who’s gone missing is like looking for a building that has. The news only reports it if he’s famous enough, and in that case you have to think his corpse would set a bigger example than being left in some mostly-forgotten amusement park. You can’t call district police and start asking questions about dental records, but you never call looking for maps directly, either. You go to the library and make up some excuses and start hunting; if you don’t have anything to go on, you take the first map you can find and look for anything (dis.).

  I started in Nara. The postcard could mean anything, but if he’d been at one of the deer parks, someone would have caught him. He must have died long enough ago for the first round of flies to have been in him and gone, not quite enough time for the second. Hair already shaggy, wearing glasses. I started pulling photos.

  It took me under a thousand to find him, in the background of someone’s shot of the red Tamukeyama gate. He still had a watch, then, and he carried a small drawstring backpack, and his button-down shirt was checked in threads of navy. (It probably hadn’t made any difference to whoever had left him, but I was glad he’d been dressed in a style he liked even after someone killed him.)

  My computer could go closer than my phone, and the coordinates from the receipt put me on Manuae, which was so small I had to be zoomed in completely before I could see anything but water. It was an atoll shaped like a ring. This close, Manuae had a little (dis.) at the end of its name.

  There was an extra four-digit number tacked on to the end of the coordinates—the hour on a clock. A lock code. Number of people. Kilos of cocaine.

  I felt with every guess like I’d felt in the plane on the way to Yokohama at thirteen, watching movies in Japanese because I couldn’t sleep, refusing to put on subtitles and getting a bigger knot in my stomach with every word I didn’t understand. All of this was just missing vocabulary—I didn’t want my share of anything, I didn’t want justice for whoever he was. He was an abandoned hotel, he was a peeling shrine, he was a stack of plates; I was closing a window that had no panes in it.

  As I was checking into the hotel for the night, my father called. He wanted to make sure I was still alive, he said on the message, his voice fading by the end of it like he was already hanging up.

  Lars messaged me: Leaper thinks you don’t like him.

  A little later: Want to do another amusement park?

  Which one?

  Gulliver maybe? Or Greenland. Or Russian Village but Cormac already went.

  I went with some people to Greenland last year, I wrote, because nothing takes the shine off for most explorers like knowing someone’s already been there. It was boring. We should do Gulliver. Or the sex museum in Hokkaido?

  Sex museum could be fun, said Lars, after a pause where I could almost hear him looking up other pictures to see if it was worth it. But too far away. Cormac’s teaching English twice a week now. We could do the Grand Moulin?

  Heard it was demolished.

  It had been beautiful; a hotel built three stories high and decorated like New Orleans, balconies like lacework and the floors hardwood under the peeling brocade carpet. Moss had grown on it in patches, and the gold-stamped wallpaper was peeling in wide coils like doll’s hair. There were still some desk chairs in rooms on the third floor, and you could sit and look out at the treetops and understand exactly what had happened with a hotel set so far back in the woods it felt like you were the only living soul for a hundred miles. The birds had come back, and after a few hours I saw a rabbit race from the front door into the cover of trees. They said the owner killed himself and that’s why it was empty, but no ghosts moved, there or anywhere.

  I’d driven back over when I heard it was demolished, to see if it was true. Sometimes people see one fallen wing and assume the whole building is unstable, or someone will say a place is gone just to discourage others from going, you never know. But it had been eaten, a crater among the trees with a few piles of brick and lacework still waiting to be carted away. There were no birds nearby; there wouldn’t be.

  :( Too bad. What about a love hotel?

  With Eddie?

  Lolol. He’s fine. We should try Yui.

  Yui was where the murder happened. Supposedly. That room is scorched out down to the beams. Some explorers said her ghost burned it down, and the story stuck. You can’t keep explorers out of there, now, and Lars’s forum has a whole section dedicated to it with photos of the red handprints that half of them swear are paint and the other half swear are blood.

  Maybe. See what Cormac says.

  Cormac said the Fuurin motel was closer, and so that’s where we went. I pulled my mask up and pretended the rubber seal made it hard to talk, and halfheartedly took pictures as Cormac and Lars dared one another to get aerial shots from the roof.

  I stood for a while in the Japan room, which looked like a set from a Bond movie right down to the TV in one corner, like what I remembered Japan looking like even after I had been home to meet my grandparents as a kid, before that half-memory space filled up enough for me to reconcile it.

  From the medieval Europe room, Eddie and Cormac were taking turns getting their pictures with the suit of armor. There was a spider on the wall beside them. They hadn’t seen it; it was as big across as my hand and utterly still except when Eddie laughed, and then it raised one leg, as if deciding whether or not to strike.

  Watch out, I almost said, or Behind you, but even if they listened they’d probably just kill it. Take nothing but photographs, kill nothing but insects.

  Some of the roof had fallen in, but it wasn’t yet decay, just neglect. The garden courtyard outside the Japanese room hadn’t yet been overtaken by the plants. It was one good cleanup away from being usable again, and seemed to be clinging to its chances; the sort of place that hasn’t yet gone quiet the way it needs to for me to be happy in it.

  I looked over my shoulder. On every wall that was still whole, spiders, holding perfectly still.

 
; It was almost a week before I could get the time to rent a car and go back to Greenland. By now the spine of the coaster didn’t even give me the thrill of having found it. I was just relieved it was still there, and I was the only living thing in it.

  The body was breathing. I took two steps back before I did the math and remembered it was about time for the second round of insects inside him. (Or the first round, if he had been preserved before he got here. Nearly anything could disrupt decay. The more research I did the more I thought something had to be wrong with this body.) They must have been inside the stomach cavity, making homes for themselves; his lower chest shifted in and out an inch at a time.

  The postcard was back in his pocket. Nothing else was written on the back. I had expected another line, some dialogue or a strikethrough when the message was received, but the only sign it had been touched was that one corner had snagged on the pocket and folded when they slid it back in. I took pictures, just to compare later. There was a dot of black marker on the front, and I couldn’t remember if it had been there before. It would probably be enough for whoever came back.

  And they would come back. The only one of them who had respected the quiet was the dead man, whose wrists sometimes stretched as if there was still a pulse beneath them, thanks to the worms and the ants. He was an abandoned hotel, an empty place; he understood. It was the others who didn’t. The people who made the place had decided this place un-existed, and they had deliberately left it behind. It was cruel of them to interrupt it.

  I wrote, “This place isn’t safe” on the back of the postcard, my kanji unsteady (just as well, if you’re trying to look terrified). I walked out backwards, used a branch behind me to cover the worst of my footsteps. There weren’t many. I was learning.

  Inside the Ferris wheel car, hidden by brush and with a missing door in case I had to run for it, I wrapped myself in the emergency blanket I kept in my rucksack. It was cold, and it was only going to get colder, but I wanted to wait, and condensation on your eyes looked pretty enough, if you died.