Hanzai Japan: Fantastical, Futuristic Stories of Crime From and About Japan (8 page)

I’d never seen Steve so shit-faced. Whatever roofie Luce had slipped into his sake bomb hit hard and fast, reducing him to a slobbering mess, dribbling rice everywhere, falling out of our booth and telling the too-polite waitress twice that he wanted to make babies with her. Luce had wanted to keep him all but stone sober, make it hurt, make it count, but Steve and I had been friends a long time. He’d never done wrong by me, just by everyone else. I owed him one last night on the town, followed by a quick, quiet death.

Luce and I practically carried Steve out of the Tokyo Tavern. We’d scouted an alley a couple blocks down, behind a nightclub where the steady static of EDM would drown out any screams he might get a chance to let out. We’d agreed to strangle him. Less mess, more poetry. My tattoo remained the same as it was the night we met the girls. I wondered if, after tonight, the change would be permanent.

Steve mumbled something about Luce’s tits and told me he loved me. For a moment I wondered if I could go through with this. For all I knew, my tattoo wasn’t a demon or a way to see into anyone’s mind; I could just be a lunatic—a brain tumor, Lyme disease, schizophrenia. Was I really willing to murder my best friend over a newscast and what could have very well been a drug-addled dream?

And there, as we turned the corner towards the club, was the phantom tattoo shop. “I’ve got an idea,” I said. “Even better than killing him.”

She shifted under his weight and looked up at the banner. She read my mind and she grinned. “You’re sick,” she said. “But in a good way.”

We wrangled Steve through the door and the red-eyed proprietor barely looked up from his porno rag. I dumped Steve in the chair and turned to the owner. “Give him what you gave me,” I said, turning over my wrist.

“Dragon?” he said.

“Demon,” I repeated. “Just like you gave me.” I handed him the list we were going to pin on his shirt when we dumped his body. “And below it, I want these girls’ names in the same kind of ink.”

“Let’s get tattoos!” Steve shouted. “Fuckin’ tattoos, bitches!”

“You heard the man,” I said. “Ink him up.”

The cops found Steve wandering the FDR naked and screaming what they eventually translated to be a confession. Twenty-two bodies total. He was seeing ghosts, he’d told the cops, twenty-two ghosts all kicking him around and shrieking in his ear. He might never be fit for trial, but it was enough to keep him locked up for life.

A detective came by and questioned me and Luce, but we stuck to the script—we got drinks, yeah, but dumped his drunk ass in a cab and came home before ten. He clued me in on everything Steve said about me, that I was there the night of Shanna and Nikki’s murders, that I got him the tattoo, that I was possessed by demons the same way he was. I played somewhere between embarrassed and level-headed, kept my sleeve rolled down except to show him that, yeah, we got matching tattoos like the idiot bros we were. I reiterated that I knew nothing about the murders, that I couldn’t believe he would do this, but yes, I saw him leave Bento Friday and Decker’s with the girls in the photos. He asked why I didn’t go with him the last time; after all, there were two girls. “I got a girlfriend,” I said, glancing at Luce. Maybe it wasn’t entirely true, but she didn’t correct me. She reached over and took my hand, just to sell it that much more.

The hardest part was trying not to think about the murdered girls. I’d be sitting at my desk at work and catch myself savoring the feel of a slim, smooth throat going limp between my bare hands. I had to fight to get my head clear and it wasn’t always easy. I would catch myself staring at Luce’s long, lean neck, the tendrils of her own tattoos just barely caressing her collarbone. I didn’t like the feeling.

My tattoo burned and I swore I heard it whisper in the 3 a.m. quiet. I got out of bed and crept quietly into Luce’s room. The city lights through the blinds striped her like an old black and white movie. She was sprawled out on her back, head turned away from me. She might not even feel it. All I could do was hope that it was over quick.

But as soon as I touched her neck, she woke up screaming. I clamped my hands down and she kicked, landing her knee square in my balls. I rolled off her and she freed herself. I stumbled to follow her. “Luce, I’m sorry!” I said. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. …”

She ran into the kitchen, grabbing a paring knife and a cutting board. “We end this,” she hissed. “Tonight.”

“Luce, I can explain. …”

She lunged at me, swinging the cutting board like a shield. I tried to sidestep her, but she knocked me to the floor and held me down with her knee on my neck. “Make another move and I’ll slit your goddamn throat,” she said.

“Luce,” I pleaded. “Please, Luce, I’m so fucking sorry, Luce, please don’t!”

She gripped my wrist and grabbed the knife. I turned my head so that I didn’t have to watch what she was about to do. I knew it had to be done, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t going to hurt like hell.

The agony was almost euphoric. She stroked the blade down my flesh like she was peeling an apple. There was a scream that wasn’t my own, an unbearable heat, and then a warm wetness. I opened my eyes to see her tearing strips from her blue striped oxford, the one she bought while we were out together. “Thank you,” I murmured as blackness closed in around the edge of my vision.

“Shut up,” she said. “Keep your arm elevated. I’ll call an ambulance.”

I was surprised to see Luce waiting by my bed when I woke up in the hospital. The first words out of my mouth were another apology, then five more just in case the morphine muddled up the first one. She didn’t say anything, just turned over my bandaged wrist, her fingers in my palm, almost like we were holding hands. “Told the docs you got a bad batch of pills,” she said. “Said you thought you were possessed, tried to carve the demon out of your skin. Figured it was as close to the truth as they were able to handle without locking you up in the padded cell next to Steve.”

She had wrapped a scarf around her neck, but I could still see the edges of the bruises my hands left on her throat. “Did it work?” I said. “Did you get it out?”

She slid two fingers up under my bandage. It hurt, but nothing changed. “Guess so,” she said. “Sorry it had to be so violent. You’ll have a pretty nasty scar. They had to do synthetic skin grafts, like the kind of skin they put on the sex-bots to make them feel real. You lost a lot of blood.”

So they were real. “Maybe I’ll get a tattoo to cover it,” I joked, suddenly fully aware of just how thick and wonderful the morphine haze was. “Maybe a kanji that says ‘Dragon.’ For real this time.”

She let me have a little smile that felt like déjà vu. I fell asleep again. Doctors came and went and I woke to someone changing my bandages. Where my tattoo had been, Luce had drawn a little rabbit in sharpie marker. I grinned. “That’s my next tattoo,” I said to the nurse. “My friend drew it for me. I’m going to get it inked as soon as I get out of here.”

“It’s very nice,” she said.

I held it up to get a closer look, touching the fake skin that almost felt real. The rabbit was crudely drawn, one eye bigger than the other, one ear slightly crooked. But there was something so fucking sweet about the clumsiness of the doodle, like something scrawled in a yearbook, a passed note, the cover of a mix CD.

Then the little bastard winked at me.

The Japanese know the right way to do everything.

That’s what they say, anyway, “they” being the Japanese. So take whatever “they” say with a pinch of wasabi.

Still, you’d struggle to find another people more dedicated to writing the manual of life. There are rules for preparing tea, slurping noodles, disciplining your kids and ignoring your elderly relatives. You look hard enough, you’ll soon know how to breathe, shit, think, and even—when your tolerance for ironclad “advice” has hit critical mass—how to end it all. Because there’s no whiff of brimstone here, no familial shame—as long as you do it the correct way, the Japanese are all about you killing yourself.

So what is the correct way? Survey says
seppuku
? Nuh-uh. Ritual disembowelment, as pretty as it is to see the steam rising from your newly emancipated guts in the morning air, is too nineteenth century for modern Japan, unless you happen to be a fascist closet case caught at the sticky end of an unsuccessful cout d’état. Hanging’s off the list, too—Japanese architecture doesn’t provide the rafters to swing from. You could always throw yourself onto the Metro tracks, but if you have next of kin they’ll have to pay compensation for the damage your soft, juicy carcass did to that three-hundred-ton train. Plus, you’ll be infringing on that most inalienable of Japanese rights, which is to scurry through life unmolested by someone else’s emotion. No—if you mean it, and this isn’t some half-assed cry for help, then you take yourself to a height of twenty meters or more and you aim your forehead at the concrete below. To paraphrase Sean Connery: that’s the Tokyo way. And that’s how you’ll get ’er done.

These were the facts that stuck in a reeling mind, addled with Kirin and crystal meth, trapped in a rabbit-hutch apartment on the thirteenth floor and searching for a story with a bit of meat to it for once. Because without a story, I was nothing.

My own fault. I’d stupidly led myself to believe that I was a reporter. But after four years—unlucky number four if you believe elevators—I was mashed up against thirty-eight, my
Rum Diary
years were smoke, and I found myself lurching into the bitter and balding period where alcohol and amphetamine anxiety had me hitting the wrong keys and muttering to myself in public.

This was not the plan. The plan was to skip through Europe, slob around Thailand, Laos, and the parts of China that didn’t actively hate Americans, then land in Tokyo and make my bones as the truth-telling turd in this uptight little punch bowl of a city before I returned to the States an honest-to-God folk hero.

That hadn’t happened. Four years, and I was still on the outside looking in. Confused, irritated, scrabbling for information. The Japanese fed me facts like food pellets. I gobbled them up and just managed to stay on the living side of starvation, but it was no kind of life. And then came the celestial cackle-snort that dropped me into the offices of the
Daily Shimbun
.

The
Daily Shimbu
n
—literally, the “Daily Newspaper”—was about as dynamic as its name, an English-language morning rag that catered in low-key
gai-atsu
and whimsical lifestyle sidebars. I provided the expat stories, such as they were. After a year of Akron-born Akita breeders and creepy fiftysomething
Queen’s Blade
nuts, I’d decided to make shit up. Nobody checked because nobody cared, and I liked to think that someone out there got a giggle at Dr. Cliff Huxtable’s flu shot reminder and Mr. Archibald Bunker’s bonsai tips. Still, I was wasted professionally. I needed a real story, something with bite and range, and my editor—a dead-eyed scrotum in a suit named Shima—wouldn’t hear of it, preferring instead to let my career die the death of a thousand vacant smiles. Because I was an outsider, I was only good for outsider fluff. I didn’t know Japan, and I didn’t have the requisite skill to deliver good copy.

In my drunken rages, which were frequent and obscene, I’d testify to the neighbors through
nori
-thin walls that the American male—the
white
American male, by God—used to be a person of
note
on the world stage. That this particular white American male—and who won the war anyway?—should be respected and admired for his
mind
. That he should not be treated like an alcoholic, meth-buzzing, stained-pants hack just because he
was
one.

So I kept looking for a big story, something only I could write. And the more I looked, the more time I spent under the cosh of Shima and his ilk, the more I wanted it to be a piece that ripped the heart out of this country. A career maker shaped like a B-29 Superfortress. Something to carpet-bomb the place while I rode the shockwaves home. Because that was the point to journalism—you put that dirty laundry out there for everyone to see. You tell the story come what may. Destroy jobs, lives, countries, whatever.

You say the unsayable.

The Deep Throat to my Woodward and Bernstein was a salaryman named Izutzu. After six too many American beers at a Roppongi expat dive that did a good line in ironic karaoke and overcooked burgers, Izutzu announced to everyone with a pair of ears and a knowledge of Japanese (because heaven forfend we speak English in an expat bar) that I should look into sumo.

“Really?” I said. “I mean, I know I’ve been putting on weight, but—”

He slammed the bar. “It’s
rotten.
”

“I see.”

“To the
core
.” Izutzu’s lips buckled with wind. “It’s a yakuza racket. Always has been. They fix fights.”

“So?”

Another slam of the hand. “It’s our national sport!”

The man had a point, and one which became the crux of my own pitch to Shima: “People say that baseball’s the new national pastime, but what about sumo? How about I write something for the expats, play up the Shinto connections, the history, get them interested and their rumps on seats? I’ll treat the whole subject with the dignity it deserves, Shima-san, I promise. What do you say?”

Shima regarded me for a long time. The half-smile never left his face.

I waited. Knew if I spoke again, I’d blow the pitch. For us brash foreigners, silence was subordination. We sought to dominate with loud voices and urgent opinions. But I’d come to learn that stillness could be a great source of power. And I was ready to wait as long as it took if it meant a shot at—

“No,” said Shima.

I resisted the urge to put his head through the wall, bowed sarcastically, and stalked out.

The
Daily
Shimbun
was no place for quality journalism anyway. I toasted my perception by dulling it at the dive. When Izutzu sauntered in after a hard day’s work of napping on the Metro, I told him the news and we drank together until he was loose enough to coerce. Then I made him call round all the sumo stables to secure a visit on my behalf, the idea being that the stable masters would be more open to a native. One eventually said yes, a guy by the name of Hideo Yamashiro, who’d just opened a new stable with the old name of Wakamatsu. From what Izutzu said, it sounded like this Yamashiro guy was hoping to follow in former Wakamatsu master
Ō
zeki Asashio’s footsteps and coach some top-division wrestlers. It also sounded like he was desperate for publicity.

I was only too happy to oblige.

The stable opened at five. Didn’t leave me much time to sober up and sleep was out of the question. I left Izutzu in a heap in the corner of the bar, then scored some Chinese ice that punched like a panic attack and boasted a four-hour hit. I doubted it. Time was, you could score semi-decent speed from the Persians who used to hang out down the right side of the 109. Now I had to make do with little and, often, bumps and breaths of toxic shit that could ravage mind and body if you weren’t careful. I’d seen better men than me model tin foil and chew their fingers to the knuckle. I was careful. I tempered that shit with liquor.

Somehow time shuddered away from me. I arrived an hour late. Yamashiro wasn’t happy. He’d dropped most of his fighting weight and now looked like a Shar Pei. The only reason he didn’t toss me out on my ear was that I brought him a bottle of Blanton’s Special Reserve as a thank-you gift. He smiled, we bowed, he gestured to the viewing platform, and I took a seat.

The practice area of the stable looked like a dirt-floor basement, strips in the ceiling, windows opaque with grime and morning light. A clutch of free weights littered one corner, a sumo ring occupied the middle and, on the right, a cushion sat between an ashtray and a newspaper. Yamashiro settled on the cushion and lit a cigarette.

Just like everywhere else, the stable had its rules. If you were there to observe, that was all you did. No photography, no questions or commentary, and definitely no snickering at the loose rows of giant, half-naked baby-men as they performed their warm-up stretches in a flabby Fosse number. I wasn’t laughing. Watching the same movement—slap thigh, lift leg, stamp down, repeat—for so long zoned me out, and I only snapped back when I heard the sound of colliding mountains.

For all its Shinto-infused horseshit, sumo is a simple martial art that boils down to two angry fat men mashing flab at speed. They then try to shove each other out of the ring, or else put their opponent to the ground. Bouts rarely last more than a minute; most only last a few seconds. Performed with skill, sumo is an explosion, and you bear witness to two men crashing into each other—their bodies, sometimes their skulls—with an unholy velocity. The wrestlers dialed it back for the practice bouts—these were mostly of a survival nature, one wrestler in the middle of the ring pounded by his stable mates until one of them won and took his place. By the time Nakahara entered, most of the juniors were caked with dirt and sweat and already puffing hard.

Nakahara was the ogre king of Wakamatsu, the only wrestler I’d seen in Yamashiro’s stable to sport the coveted white
mawashi
. He carried himself like he ground bones to make his bread and went on to demolish the junior wrestlers without breaking a sweat, though I began to suspect that many of them were taking gentleman dives. He was attended by a junior with welts on his back, bruises both old and new peeking out from under the mud, and whose arms were peppered with what could have been a rash, but which looked more like cigarette burns. When practice ended, Nakahara and the other senior wrestlers went outside to hose each other off. The juniors repaired to the kitchen to make lunch.

I sat alone. A tremor in my gut. Another in my cheek. The smell of dirt and sweat, mingled with the miso broth scent that wafted into the practice area nauseated me.

There were no yakuza here. But there was something arguably more interesting.

I looked up to see Nakahara’s attendant. He bowed and told me
chanko
was ready.

“Thank you.” I got to my feet, and rubbed my sleeping leg. “What’s your name?”

“Kouta.”

“How old are you?”

“Seventeen.”

“Where are you from?”

“Osaka,” he said. And then, as if caught in a lie, “
Near
Osaka.”

“You came here to learn sumo?”

Bowed head. “I did not like school.”

Kid like him, built big and not too bright, wouldn’t make it in corporate so his parents had shipped him off to the dirt ring. If you became a junior, you didn’t have to finish high school, and stables these days were desperate for applicants. As long as you looked the part, you were in, even if you didn’t have an ounce of talent for the sport. One glance at Kouta, and I saw someone trapped and frightened. Hated it here, but had nowhere else to go. It was a look I knew only too well.

“And where’d you get those burns, Kouta?”

The junior’s face smoothed. He swallowed. He repeated that food was ready.

“I can help you, you know. I can tell your story.”

He looked at me. Wavering. Wanting to speak.

“It’s okay.” I gave him my best concerned expression. “Someone hurting you here, Kouta?”

A creak. Yamashiro had entered the room. Kouta stiffened, bowed once more and left.

I beamed at Yamashiro. “Yamashiro-san, I must say, your wrestlers are very talented.”

He wasn’t buying it. “You must leave.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I spoke to your editor. He said you are not authorized to be here.”

“There must be a misunderstanding.”

“No misunderstanding.”

“He told me to come here.”

“Then you must deal with him. Goodbye.”

And he turned away. A couple of wrestlers appeared in the doorway, there to make sure I left the building. I took the hint and made for the door. I didn’t want to stay for lunch, anyway. Just the thought of food made my stomach curl in on itself.

Instead, I hit the pipe and the dive bar in short order. Checked my phone and, sure enough, there was a message from Shima, politely informing me that due to my increasingly erratic and unstable behavior my services as expat correspondent were no longer required. Which meant my work visa was about to go down the toilet.

Good. Couldn’t get me out of this country quick enough.