Hanzai Japan: Fantastical, Futuristic Stories of Crime From and About Japan (35 page)

Takeda had stepped back as soon as he had withdrawn the knife, but the man’s face hit the concrete right at his feet. He heard the crack of the nose breaking, and saw blood, black in the dim light, flow from beneath the face as greater amounts pooled about the opened stomach, and the hands and feet twitched.

At last they slowed, and Takeda knelt carefully so as not to get any blood on him, gripped the man’s right shoulder, and pushed him over onto his back. He looked at the opened bowels, then at the man’s face.

Remarkably, he was still alive. Takeda could see who he was now. It was not the man whom he had killed all those years before.

It was Suyama, whom he had seen the day before, when he was shopping for books. Suyama, who had recognized him. Suyama, who had found him again and followed him.

Suyama’s eyelids fluttered and his mouth was open wide and moving. Blood from the broken nose was running down over the upper lip and into the mouth, and it made the man’s breath bubble as he tried to keep breathing. It seemed as though he was trying to say something, but could not force out the words. Takeda looked at him intently, as though willing him to speak, and he did.

I only … wanted to … thank you.
The words were wet and muddy, but Takeda thought he understood them. Suyama coughed and blood came out, and he managed to say one word more.

Duhkha …

Takeda’s heart felt as though it were made of stone, and his flesh of glass. He hardly dared breathe, nor even think, lest he shatter, and the only sound in the world had become the racing breath of the man lying on the concrete. After an incalculable time, that breath caught, rattled, and stopped. The eyes were open, but saw nothing.

Takeda looked at the dead face for a long time. Then he knelt and wiped the knife on the legs of Suyama’s trousers, folded it, and slipped it back into his pocket. He pushed up his sleeves and reached beneath Suyama’s hip, sodden with blood, and withdrew the wallet from the left hip pocket. It was still dry. He stood and opened it, looking for an answer.

He hoped for compassion, mercy, relief, but the first thing he saw was a photo ID in a clear plastic sleeve. It identified the man on the floor as Detective Hideo Suyama of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police.

The warehouse seemed to spin for a moment, and Takeda staggered dizzily, then regained his footing. It seemed a rift had opened between his world and another of which he had never known, and he realized that his life had irrevocably changed, due to the presence of the man at his feet, a man who had wanted to thank him for his warning, a man who had heeded that warning, and had chosen to put his wheel into balance as best he could, and found his calling.

Takeda wept for having killed without purpose for the first time. Then he did what needed to be done, and went back into the world, with a new and damning memory.

I love Takumi.

I love Takumi.

I love Takumi.

I love Takumi more than anyone. I love Takumi so much I could die. I love him more than anyone in the whole world.

But Takumi chose her over me.

I hate, hate, hate her.

I’ll never forget the look in her eyes that day. Takumi never saw me, but I saw her glance. She looked at me like I was some pitiful sewer rat crawling out from a drainpipe to find itself on a subway platform.

I won’t forgive her. I won’t forgive her. I won’t forgive her. How dare she touch and cling so to my Takumi. I’ll never forgive her.

For two days I cried, and then I made up my mind. It ends today. I will settle things, my way, with the boy who threw me away and chose her. I can’t do it with words; I’m not a good speaker, and can’t express my true feelings. Besides, even now that we’re lovers, I still get nervous every time I see him.

Except that’s not true.

We’re not lovers anymore.

As painfully sad a truth as that is.

Anyway, I came to school today to express objection in the most extreme way I can.

Sever the telephone line, check.

Sever the coaxial cable line, check.

Destroy the cellular broadcast towers, check.

With my preparations complete, I stand before the school gates. I fill my lungs with the damp morning air.

If I were to stop now, my actions would only be petty offenses, maybe even chalked up to teenage pranks. After all, I’ve never acted out before. I can still turn back and make it as if I never intended any more. Were I able to forget about Takumi, go home, and bury myself within my bedsheets, nothing would come of this.

But …

My mind is made up.

I will kill him, and I will die.

But let’s go back three days to when a new girl transferred to my school.

It happened just before morning homeroom. Our teacher came in just like usual. And as usual our jeering rattled the blackboard, but not him, and he stood at his lectern and called roll with his usual glower.

Then he said, “Ah, I know this is sudden, but we have a new transfer student.”

As usual, I was seated at my desk beside the window, absorbed in a paperback I was reading half-hidden behind the curtain. Sorry, but the story was just too interesting for me to pay attention to some new girl. I noticed her enough to think
She’s prettier than me,
but that was just about the beginning and end of my impression of her. Takumi, sitting diagonally across from me, was showing about 30 percent more interest than I had, but when our eyes met he gave me a grin.

As for my introduction, my name is Fumio Kirisaki. I’m an only daughter coming from a line of lumber brokers stretching back to the nineteenth century. My grandfather on my mother’s side was an American. He left Texas for Japan in some weird search for this leather something-or-other. He fell in love with my grandmother at first sight, married into her family, and was buried in this foreign, eastern land.

I’m one-fourth Caucasian, but as far as being graced with beauty and proportions unattainable by someone purely Japanese, I wasn’t. Not in the slightest. Here I am in high school, still short and flat-chested. All I inherited from my big, tall grandfather was the color of his eyes. If you were to look closely, in the brightest sunlight of a midsummer’s day, you’d notice their light steel-blue color, but most times they come across as two concentric circles of smeary black ink. No, my ink-wash eyes only lessen my already unremarkable looks. That’s why I wear glasses even though my 20/28 vision means I don’t need them. If my grandfather was going to give me anything in his DNA, why couldn’t it have been a body with the grandeur and beauty of the Rocky Mountains and the Grand Canyon? But such is the hand that life dealt me.

The new girl gave her simple introduction, then walked past me to a desk somehow already waiting for her in the back row. A slash of morning sunshine cast half of her desk in glaring light, while a number of dust motes floated in the corn-silk rays.

The girl looked at me with a hint of a smile. She was pretty enough, but something about her smiling face was inorganic. She wasn’t plain-looking by any measure—it was more like one thousand parts from one thousand beautiful faces had been reassembled into one indistinctive whole. I returned to the world within my novel.

In the break after first hour, the other students swarmed around the new girl. I didn’t join them. I wasn’t interested in her, nor was I friends with any of the students surrounding her. Besides, I had promised to eat lunch with Takumi, and I needed to finish reading my paperback while I had the chance. It was a funny story about a kooky transfer student stirring up trouble at her new school. As I turned the pages, I thought about how I liked fictional stories because things could happen in their pages that couldn’t in real life.

But I was about to find out that real-life transfer students cause trouble too.

When the lunch break came, I witnessed something I couldn’t believe.

I was bringing lunch to Takumi at our meeting place behind the school. The sky held more clouds than blue, but I was walking fairly upbeat. Despite being in the same class, we always left separately; leaving as a conspicuous couple would have been far too embarrassing.

But on this particular day, Takumi wasn’t alone beneath our tree. Someone else was with him—someone who wasn’t me—in our secluded spot in back of the school. He had once told me, “It’s the perfect place for us to eat in private.”

They were in each other’s embrace, Takumi and that transfer girl. His arms pulled her closer. I blinked and I blinked again, but the vision before me remained unchanged. His eyes were fixed on her, never even turning my way.

I tried to call out his name, but nothing beyond that initial “T” ever escaped my throat.

Instead, what spoke for me was the loud, harsh clattering of the bento box lunches, which I’d woken up early to make, tumbling to the ground. But even then, Takumi’s gaze remained on the new girl. No part of my existence reached his awareness, not my voice, nor any sound I made, nor my puny little figure.

The girl sent me a glance from the corner of her eye and waved me away as if I were a stray cat. I scooped up the bento boxes and left the couple behind the school.

For the rest of the break, I sat on the concrete of a disused entryway, the typically cold surface warmed by my body. Oil leaked from the bento boxes, staining the polka-dot cloth into a dull brown.

I took out my cell phone and texted Takumi.

He didn’t reply. No matter how many messages I sent him, he never replied. My texts transformed into radio waves that raced across the ether and through the relay tower to finally reach Takumi’s side. Maybe my words, broken down into emotionless signals, hadn’t been able to deliver him my true feelings.

“You there,” an officious female voice said. “Keep your phone turned off until the end of the school day.”

I looked up at the intruder. Everything about her, from her clothes to her features, was by the book. Her armband, denoting her as a member of the student disciplinary committee, caught the light.

“Go away,” I said.

“Texting during class time is against school rules.”

“Shut up! Go away!”

I hurled the bento box bundle at her. It grazed her before loudly crashing to the floor. The cloth split open, and the plastic boxes burst, their contents—slightly charred eggs and sausages cut to look like octopuses—bursting across the concrete.

She gave me a look of disgust, then walked away. I was alone again.

Takumi had told me he fell in love with me at first sight, just as I loved him from the very start. We became lovers after what felt like an excruciating wait, but our breakup came without warning.

I’m not particularly pretty, and I don’t have proportions worthy of bragging; neither was I given a personality to make up for it. The singular miracle in my life was the deep love Takumi and I shared. But now the arrival of one girl has plunged me headfirst into the abyss.

What point is there to my life without Takumi, my only sunlight?

But even I have someone—one, and only one—whom I can call a friend.

Kaoruko Odagiri is quiet, tall, with a delicacy belying her well-placed curves and an ever-present elegance that readily conjures the image of her wearing a long skirt trimmed with lace as she plays the piano on a weekend afternoon.

Kaoruko had been the one to approach me. After all, someone as shy and ill-spoken as me would never be so bold as to talk to anyone who was, aside from being assigned to the same classroom, a complete stranger.

She had come to me when I was reading as I always do, half hidden behind the curtain. The paperback was one of those “boy love” books, and I was just getting to the big love scene between the leading man and the man in the part of the heroine, but Kaoruko’s soprano voice coming from above me would have been a surprise regardless of the contents of my book.

“You’re a reader,” Kaoruko said.

I answered with an uneasy nod.

“Does the human mind store knowledge in a textual form?” she asked, whether to herself or to me, I couldn’t tell. “Or is it all sound and vision? Or something entirely else?”

Her words were incomprehensible to me. My thoughts were wholly occupied with figuring out how to get my book back into my bag without her asking what it was about. Even had she already gotten a glance at its pages, she surely wouldn’t have realized what it was that I was reading, but I felt the same sort of embarrassment as if a boy had caught me changing clothes.

“You don’t have to be so nervous,” she said. “There’s nothing unusual about a girl in high school reading a romance novel … even if it were, say, homoerotic fiction.”

“What?”

“I can’t stand saccharine love stories. They lack realism.”

My mouth dropped open, and I looked up at her.

“Not that I particularly read much in the first place,” she said. “I find it so dreadfully inefficient, having to turn one’s knowledge into words in order to transmit it to a third party. If you could open up a human mind, you would find no words there.”

“But,” I stammered, “without words, humanity never would have evolved from lower animals, don’t you think?”

“True. Just as land-dwelling creatures would never have arisen without first going through gill breathers, words were likely a necessary protocol in the process of human evolution. But that doesn’t mean they’ll remain necessary forever. We don’t have gills, after all.”

“I … I suppose.”

“If we could form a direct connection between one mind and another, letters and words would become obsolete.”

“But how,” I asked, pausing to gather the courage, “do you know about my book?”

She said, “I know everything about you.”

“How?” I managed to squeak out, my voice catching in my throat. I could feel my hands becoming sticky with sweat.

With a grin, Kaoruko answered, “Because we’ve known each other since long before we were born.”

I’ll summarize her story.

Supposedly, we’re the reincarnations of two knights from a tiny European kingdom whose name has been lost to history.

Kaoruko was a descendant of royal blood and a knight with a promising future, while I was a common soldier of mixed foreign blood. Kaoruko was of higher standing, but my skill with a sword was formidable, enough so that my name was known among neighboring kingdoms. Indifferent to our disparities in birth and upbringing, Kaoruko and I fought shoulder-to-shoulder on the battlefield and became the two greatest knights in the royal army. The people waved flags with our heraldry as they prayed for our victory. Opposing armies began to take flight at our very sight. Until a foul betrayal led to our execution, we fought ever together, sharing in our laughter and sometimes in commiseration. With our heads on the axmen’s blocks, we vowed to reunite in the next life.

Her story was too much to believe all at once. Ugh, I thought, why did she have to come over to me? Sure, I read at least three hundred books a year, and my mind half-resides within their fictional worlds, but I’ve always felt that enables me to be, if anything, more of a realist.

But I’ve never been able to express those thoughts to her, being as bad at talking as I am. Slowly but surely, she wore down my skepticism, until I found myself going along with her fancies.

For example: Kaoruko hears voices she calls the “voices from above.” When I asked her what she meant by “above,” she simply said, “I hear them coming from above me, so they’re the voices from above.”

If she had told me it was a higher spirit or an alien or her future self, I don’t think I would have been friends with her. But she didn’t know the true nature of the voice, and told me so honestly.

I teased her by pointing out that her head might be picking up on random chatter from some local pirate radio station. Straight-faced, she responded that she couldn’t discard that possibility. After that, we obsessively checked every possible signal, from FM stations and amateur radio (the obvious places to start) to police scanners, truckers’ CB radio, and even North Korean numbers stations. But none of these signals matched the voices directing Kaoruko from above.