Hanzai Japan: Fantastical, Futuristic Stories of Crime From and About Japan (3 page)

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?