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

  Two weeks after the accident, the Young Master came to the police station to retrieve the evidence box in which I had been placed. I didn’t know much about him—a rudeness on my part. His Predecessor, having lost his wife at a young age, had rarely spoken of his family in front of his passengers. My former master had made a great effort to keep his family matters from entering his work. The Young Master brought me into his room, a largely empty space. He flipped through my pages, then tossed me into the waste bin.

  My disposal didn’t sadden me. I merely sighed and resigned myself to this being the end of everything. After all, I had deviated quite far from what a map was supposed to be, and everything I had done had been for the Predecessor; being discarded upon his death was a fate I had brought upon myself.

  The next day, the Young Master put me into a trash bag with various other refuse and left me with the rest of the apartment complex garbage. The Young Master apparently didn’t cook for himself, and my pages remained unsoiled by moist kitchen waste. Then something happened that I could scarcely believe. The Young Master came back and retrieved me alone from the trash. He stuffed me into his bookcase and left me there.

  One night, some two weeks later, he pulled me from the shelf, his face flushed. I thought he might have had a few drinks. The Young Master opened me, and his eyes stopped on one of his Predecessor’s X marks. He flipped from one page to the next and back again, finding all eight marks, then took me with him for a ride in his Land Cruiser. Having already been through one accident, I was beside myself with worry for the inebriated Young Master. His Predecessor had never been much for drinking, and even if he ever had a drink, I don’t believe he would have even considered getting behind the wheel. But now the Young Master arrived at one of those X marks, and began searching around for quite some time, shovel in hand, and then he was digging. At least, I was later able to infer this when he laid the plastic bag beside me on the passenger seat. Inside the bag were several human fingers, their bones poking out like pieces of muddy ginger root.

  Beginning that night, the Young Master visited each mark, bringing back plastic bags with bits and pieces from each. Even after he had made the full tour, he returned to the marks whenever the mood struck him, where he seemed to take advice—or an explanation—from the things that used to be his father’s passengers. I have no way of knowing what inspired the Young Master to decide to continue his Predecessor’s Mission, but this was when he started.

  And so the Young Master carried on the mission, but when I witnessed his burial of his third victim, I began to feel we were in jeopardy. From where he had set me down on the ground nearby, I saw him simply lay her down in the tall grass—not burying her deep in the earth. From there, he went straight home and immediately went out again to his job. As I had done for his Predecessor, I presented the Young Master with advantageous burial sites and hunting grounds. Since ours was a new relationship, I would have expected a few hiccups in our communication, but so far I had been concealing and emphasizing for him with satisfactory results—he was his father’s son, after all. He had shown ample care for his own person, and I had considered him to be a thoughtful man; now this act of negligence came as a great shock. He must have had his reasons, I’m sure, but we maps are not accustomed to such unexpected behavior. Similarly, the bodies of the next two women he carried away before promptly returning to the car. And his inexplicable behavior didn’t stop there.

  The Young Master began spending a great deal of time making a copy of me. He covered my pages with tracing paper and made a facsimile in earnest. The process stretched across two weeks, during which time he ceased to carry out the mission.

  Enduring the unpleasant feeling of the thin tracing paper pressed onto me, I carried a faint hope that the Young Master was simply reviewing his own deeds. Though he varied his hunting grounds, he restricted the burial sites to within an exceedingly limited area. This posed an incredible risk, as I had indicated to him many times over, but never once did he locate a burial site more than two kilometers away from his residence. It was my hope that this tracing would offer him an objective view of the burial sites and would allow him to reflect upon and take notice of this error.

  One night, the Young Master had a nasty-looking thing in his hands. Rolled into the shape of a tube it looked like paper, but even from a hundred meters away I would have recognized that it wasn’t. It was a 30-centimeter square of human leather. I reckoned he had taken it from a woman’s back. It must have required a considerable effort to stretch and dry the square. Beaming with pride, the Young Master affixed it to the wall. And what a shock was in store for me when he did—certainly no less unsettling than when I found his Predecessor’s head resting on the passenger seat.

  The Young Master had copied my map onto the human skin. He had probably used carbon paper or something of the sort as a medium. The city streets made twisted capillaries on the skin, which was dull as rubber and white with yellowed blotches.

  To my horror, the skin made a noise. he said, not a word but an ugly, repellent noise.

  he said, as the Young Master regarded him with satisfaction and gently touched his surface.

  he said, and I realized he was sounding out his first word.

  The Young Master couldn’t hear the skin’s voice, as a matter of course, but I did, and it sent a wave of nausea through me. It had meant that this thing too was a map; we were of the same subspecies.

  The Young Master held a deep affection for the map. From that night on, whenever he carried out his mission, he put a mark on us both. But for mine, he used nothing more than a cheap pen, while on the human leather he used, as had his Predecessor, the target’s blood. With each passing day, I felt a black shadow creeping out from the skin’s place on the wall, beginning to dominate the room.

  I regret that what I’m about to say may come across as me simply speaking ill, but if I may be frank, the Young Master was remarkably careless compared to his Predecessor. My former master always wore gloves, perhaps due to his profession, but even when he didn’t, he treated me with the utmost care. He was kind to me, cautious not to harm my paper when he turned my pages, and he protected me from stains and smudges with a plastic cover. As for the Young Master, he had a habit of licking his fingers before he turned my pages. Yes, it kept his fingers from slipping across my paper, but moisture is my greatest adversary, and moreover, when he did so after a burial, I couldn’t help but worry about all the kinds of bacteria and blood and the like he was putting into his mouth. It was that kind of negligence toward minute details that I knew would prove fatal to his mission.

  Nevertheless, no matter how that map was made, the skin was still a map with his own job to do; and yet he showed no intent to perform the slightest assistance for his master. I would even have gone as far as to say that the Young Master would be better off dropping his fascination with this oddity posthaste. That monster leeched the Young Master’s energy, doing nothing but fatten his hoarded knowledge more and more with each day. I knew he was of no good to the Young Master.

 

  The skin’s grumblings, like the grinding of a stone mill, were at first incoherent, but when the sixth mark had been placed, his words at last took form.

  Such was my irritation that I raised my voice, shouting,

  The skin had the temerity to chuckle at me.

 

  the skin said.

 

 

 

  The skin shifted his attention to the Young Master’s bedroom, where the man was currently at rest. him.>

 

 

  I didn’t answer.

  the skin said.

 

 

  I asked.

 

  I couldn’t refute anything the skin had said. If anything, he had answered my lingering question: why the Young Master had concentrated the burial sites within a local area. If what the skin said was true, the Young Master wouldn’t have wanted the burial sites to be excluded from his crew’s area of operation.

  The human leather said nothing else the rest of the night.

  The conversation motivated me to devote my full strength to driving apart the human leather and the Young Master. If I didn’t do something, I knew trouble would come. I decided that when the Young Master next returned from a successful mission and came to leave his marks on us, I would pray for him to destroy the skin. I had no evidence my wish would come true in any fashion, but the Young Master and I were longtime partners, sharing our kind of communication, and I was going to venture a prayer on a slim hope.

  An opportunity came sooner than I expected. That very same night, the Young Master had again put himself in danger. Everything having gone well, he was in a bright and cheerful mood. Meanwhile, I couldn’t shake the dark cloud that hung over me. Humming to himself, the Young Master carried me over to the human leather, licked his fingers, and began turning my pages.

  went my silent plea. And, And,

  As if he had heard my prayers, the Young Master looked to the human leather and stopped his hands.

  I sensed the leather holding his breath.

  Without realizing it, I began to speak the words aloud.

  As if he had taken my pleas to heart, the Young Master raised his hand, noisily tore away, and threw what he had torn into the waste bin.

  I was stunned. I didn’t know why he had done what he did. He hadn’t ripped apart the human leather, but rather me instead.

  The skin’s maniacal laughter shuddered through the air. Come what may, I will never unhear that sound. Scarcely able to breathe, I became faint, dizzy, and felt as if my insides had been crushed. It took me two whole days to fully comprehend my current state.

  I had lost 52 pages. My one piece of luck amidst the misfortune was that my spine had remained intact, and I had escaped being split in two. However, I was now incomplete. At the very least, I was now missing great swaths of geography, from the forested Mount Takao to the suburban Tama Center; the old Olympic grounds at Komazawa, the transit hub of Shinagawa, and Tokyo Disneyland; Hashimoto Station in Sagamihara City to the west; Oimachi Station and Oi Wharf; and all across Machida City, from Tsurukawa and Fuchinobe to Sagamiono. I wished the Young Master had simply thrown me out, rather than leave me in such a sorry state, but the Young Master kept what remained of me. I don’t think he retained me out of any sentiment toward our relationship. Perhaps he just wanted to keep the original parts that bore his Predecessor’s marks—if that was the case, sooner or later he would strip me down to a mere six maps. I needed to do whatever I could to prevent that tragedy from befalling me. But what could I do, anyhow? I had already lost over half of my body, and I could no longer conceal and emphasize as well as I had before. Either way, the Young Master would soon have no use for me; the other day, he went out to one of those big-box stores and returned with one of those abominable navigation systems.

  After the events of that night, whenever the human leather took notice of me, he prattled on and on, attempting to talk to me, but I could never muster the energy to reply. One thing he said, however, couldn’t escape my notice: the Young Master’s mission was receiving a great deal of attention out in the world, and the dragnet was closing in.

  the human leather whispered.

  I met her only by happenstance. The Young Master, who was now showing little interest in me, used me again after what had been quite some time. When he was done, he inserted a note-sized piece of paper between my pages. Never in my life had I been in direct contact with such a thing of beauty. The paper was ruled in a grid, much like graph paper, except for the neat, tiny dotted lines that had been placed inside the squares, making patterns with a curious rhythm and harmony.

  said a voice that reminded me of elegant silk.

  I asked, but was met only with silence; perhaps I had startled the delicate paper. I didn’t speak again until the next day. I said. Exhaustion, brought on by the many shocks I’d suffered, had caused me to speak with more flippancy than was my custom.

  she replied.

 

  the paper said,

 

 

  I said,

  I was elated to have encountered this unexpected companion. Our conversations flowed with more ease than those I had had with the human skin; despite our differences—me a map of geography and she a map of knitting—we were both maps. After our introduction, we talked about a great many things: how pongee and weaving can be traced back to the Stone Age; how people in Denmark were already wearing what we would call clothing in 3000 b.c.; how there are over one hundred kinds of knitting. Like me, she remembered history, which may have been another reason we got on so well.

  she said.

  I asked.

 

  I had no answer.

  she explained.

  I began to say, but she cut me off.

 

 

 

 

  That night, I made the knitting chart a promise.

  I promised that even if we were to be thrown away, we would be thrown away together.

  she said.

 

  e.>

  I said.

  From now on, I was going to be deeply happy. I wouldn’t have minded being left lying there, forgotten near the Land Cruiser’s mud-splattered running board. Gone were my feelings of self-loathing at the Young Master’s neglect. I even wished I could be left there forever.

  But then the Young Master opened me.

  We were passing the eighteenth-kilometer marker of the Tomei Expressway. The Young Master didn’t seem to look at anything on my pages. He simply reached for me out of habit, picked me up, then tossed me atop the passenger seat. The Land Cruiser’s windows were wide open. A gale-force wind harried the car’s interior and began to lift me up.

  the knitting chart said.

  I said, clutching my pages around her as tight as I could.

  But I couldn’t hold for long. In a single moment, a devilish whirlwind tore open my pages and cast away the tiny scrap of paper.

  I hadn’t even the time to call out to her. The knitting chart had flown from the car in an instant. I cried in silence. The Young Master didn’t touch me again. It was as if he had put me on the car seat for no other reason than to take the knitting chart away from me. On this day, I came to a kind of resolve. If the Young Master persisted like this, he would no longer be able to carry out his Predecessor’s will, as was his duty. If I could do nothing else, I needed to change his course.

  Late one night several days later, the human leather’s suppressed laughter changed into something twisted. The Young Master sprang from his bedroom and looked out the window. Clicking his tongue, he began throwing on some clothes.