Hanzai Japan: Fantastical, Futuristic Stories of Crime From and About Japan (2 page)

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 stretched 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.

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.