Hanzai Japan: Fantastical, Futuristic Stories of Crime From and About Japan (31 page)

“What now?”

“Nothing. They’re done for.”

I turned to see two fellow guardsmen from the neighborhood, standing in the road behind me.

“I don’t have to listen to this noise. Let’s get on with it.” One of them was the owner of the pension that had been torched. He picked up a shovel and started slinging dirt into the pit.

“Not on my property!” The farmer’s wife came out of the house, yelling and distraught. “Get rid of them somewhere.”

“No way I’m going to touch those things,” said the other mercenary.

“You think I want to?”

The farmer’s wife chanted a Buddhist prayer as they busily filled the pit with dirt. The mewling sounds eventually ceased.

“Maybe we should put up signs warning people about the pits,” said the pension owner with a wry chuckle.

“Yeah. If they ignore them it’s not our fault.”

That afternoon I brandished my spear for the first time. A family came up the road from the direction of Kofu and began badgering the farmer’s wife to sell them food. They looked like they hadn’t eaten in several days. The woman refused the man’s repeated demands, and he was about to use his fists on her and her elderly father-in-law when I stepped in with my spear. To my relief, the family turned heel and left immediately. Carrying a weapon didn’t make me feel safer. Just threatening someone with it, much less having to use it, is terribly stressful for a normal person.

I drew night duty the next day. For the first time I used my weapon. A refugee pulled a knife on me, and I gave him a spear thrust. It certainly had an effect. I wondered what would happen to the man as he staggered off, still clutching a whole stalk of corn. I let him go. I was too terrified by what I’d done, and too conscience-stricken, to move.

When dawn came, the farmer paid me with a rice ball, some pickled eggplant, and a small portion of cooked soybeans. I returned home, gave the food to my wife, and went to bed immediately. I was due back on duty in the afternoon, but I stayed in bed.

At first my wife worried that I was ill, but when she realized I was afraid to go back, she stared down at me with contempt.

“You’re completely irresponsible. You can lie there without a care in the world while your family starves. If you don’t care about me, fine, but what about Hiro?”

I shook my head. “Don’t say that!”

She started in on me then, screaming like she did before. I couldn’t handle it; I got up and slapped her. She stared at me for a few seconds, dazed, and turned and ran downstairs. Seconds later she came pounding back. When I spun round to face her, she gave me a crack on the head. She was wielding a rolling pin. She bounced it off my skull a second time.

“Weakling! You can’t kill a stranger, but you can kill me and Hiro?!”

I covered my head with my hands and ran downstairs onto the terrace. The picnic table and chairs where we used to enjoy family barbecues were still there. Thick strands of that hated kudzu plant were twining up their legs.

Kudzu. That was it. Okada had said you could extract starch from the roots. The refugees who risked their lives to steal crops didn’t know it. I looked out from the veranda. Now everything seemed to be blanketed in a sea of vivid green. I raced to grab the shovel and started digging as fast as I could. The thick white roots dove deep into the soil. Ecstatic, I brought a bundle of roots into the kitchen, washed them, pureed them in the blender with water, and filtered the milky liquid. Heated on the stove, the result was a thick, translucent starch with a unique sweetness, like arrowroot.

My son loved it. My wife did, too, and smiled, a smile I’d given up hope of ever seeing again.

“I hope you don’t expect us to survive on this morning, noon and night.”

“Come on, things won’t be like this forever.”

“Then how long do we have to wait? When and how is someone going to help us?”

My wife took over for me that night. I stayed up till morning holding our son, who fell asleep crying for his mother.

She returned next morning laden with an astonishing amount of rice and worm-eaten beans and corn. To me, her youthful face was all the more attractive when she was angry. I wouldn’t have been the only one who thought so. I had an idea I knew what she’d done to earn this much food.

As a last resort, women have something they can always sell. I felt a mixture of anger, sadness, and resignation as she stripped off her black T-shirt, threw it on the floor and went upstairs. But when I tossed it dejectedly into the washing machine and started the water, I froze with disbelief. The water was stained bright red. What I’d thought was sweat was something else entirely.

My wife wasn’t hurt. The blood was someone else’s. She’d earned the food, but not the way I imagined. I wasn’t sure which was worse.

I went quietly upstairs. She was already asleep, cradling Hiro. Her breathing was deep and powerful, like a lioness after the kill.

That was four days ago. Since then, my wife has stood guard over the fields eight hours a day. Things are getting better all the time. Today, for the first time, a truck arrived from Nagano and distributed toilet paper, vacuum-packed rice, and canned food. But the supplies were strictly for the refugees. The locals were told to rely on their own resources. For the transplants in the pension district, there was nothing. Well, at least things haven’t settled down yet. Standing guard is the only way we can earn our food.

Yesterday my wife came home looking overjoyed. She had found the woman who murdered Siesta, and beaten her legs with a club until the woman was unable to stand.

I’m beginning to notice an unmistakable look of pride in the faces of the farmers. It’s the mercenaries, with no farming skills, who are bathing in blood to protect them, and being fed by them.

Okada was right. The farmers have the upper hand after all.

The rumor now is that people from Tokyo are bringing disease with them. The news was reporting it too, until two days ago, but then suddenly stopped talking about it. It’s a taboo subject, like the breakdown of public order.

But things can’t go on like this indefinitely. In a week everything will be better. I’m sure of it.

I’ll be digging kudzu roots again today. I never touch the rice and corn and beans my wife brings home. Surviving on kudzu starch alone is the only thing I can do to preserve my self-respect as a human being. But I’m dizzy all the time. The diarrhea is terrible. I keep getting these bruises, I don’t know why. Maybe it’s one of those diseases people are talking about.

Still, I believe things will get better. Very soon, now. After all, this isn’t a real food shortage.

“Hideki didn’t speak any English,” Spense said laboriously as they made their way up the narrow, poorly lit stairs. “Didn’t care to. So I took him under the wing, so to speak. Helped him make his way.”

Philip K. Marks tried to control his breathing as they tackled the third flight of stairs, but he was feeling his age. And weight. He contemplated the unfairness of things: having forgotten half his life for reasons he had also forgotten, he’d had the usual middle-aged epiphany and gone sober, started walking. And still he huffed and puffed up the stairs, and he wondered why all of his acquaintances lived in walk-ups. And then he wondered how one upgraded his acquaintances to people who lived in buildings with elevators.

“How’d you communicate?” Marks said, careful to mask his shortness of breath.

Spencer rolled his broad shoulders. He was a tall, dark-skinned man in well-used, oily overalls, rail thin except in the belly, where what appeared to be a swallowed basketball ballooned the front of his clothes. “We said a lot just bein’ in a room, you know? Ain’t that hard.”

The fifth floor was a long time coming between Spense’s arthritic knees and Marks’s labored breathing. When it took Spencer a few moments of struggle to unlock the door to apartment 5B in the dark, stifling hallway, Marks was grateful for the opportunity to collect himself.

The apartment was a five-room railroad. The door opened into the kitchen, which was a large room with very few cabinets and little counter space, dominated by a grease-encrusted old behemoth of a stove, a gas-on-gas model that was also the heat source for the apartment. A water heater had been wedged into the space between the refrigerator and the stove, and a large wooden table filled the center of the room. The walls were an unfortunate shade of yellow, the floor was thick vinyl tile in a shade of holiday green, and Marks found he couldn’t look at both simultaneously without getting queasy. The rest of the apartment, three rooms like a wide corridor leading into darkness, somewhere in the gloom past the stove.

At first Marks thought two people were seated at the table. One was an elderly Japanese man with long silver-black hair, dressed in blue boxer shorts, black socks, and a white sleeveless undershirt. A teacup sat in front of him, a spoon neatly on a folded napkin next to it. There was a slip of paper on the other side of the cup, characters written on it—Japanese or Chinese or something, Marks assumed—in a firm, steady hand.

The other at first appeared to be a young woman in lingerie, but she was unmoving, staring blankly, her hands palms down on the table.

“Jesus,” Marks said, frowning and hunching down a little to get a lower angle. “Is that a mannequin?”

“Doll,” Spencer said, his voice suddenly darker and choked. “Sex doll. They call ’em Dutch Wives.”

Marks stared at the doll. It was the most realistic sex doll he’d ever seen or imagined. Even the eyes looked right, at first. Staring at them he was filled with a sense of dread, a panic welling up from his belly, making his bowels squirm. But out of the corner of his eye she looked like a beautiful woman wearing a teddy and thong, her hair mussed, her makeup perfect. The face had a vaguely Asian cast to it, and the figure, beneath the wrinkled and stretched lingerie, was flat and childlike with only the barest hint of maturity.

Marks looked at the man, then turned his head slightly, keeping his eyes on him. “He’s dead.”

“Yup. Murdered. Poison, I think.”

Marks pursed his lips and then turned to face the taller man. “Spense, you call the cops?”

“Not yet.”

Marks waited a beat, raising his eyebrows. A sense of fatigue ballooned inside him. He knew where this was going, because it was a one-act play he’d performed over and over again. When Spencer didn’t nail his line, Marks sighed. “Why not, Spense?”

Spencer grimaced. “They won’t believe me. They’ll rule this a goddamn suicide. That’s why I called you, Philly. We go back, I know you’ve been in some weird shit. I know you take that weird shit serious. I know you’ll hear me when I say, Mr. Aoki? He was murdered.” Without turning to look, he thrust one long arm at the doll. “By
her
.”

Marks followed his arm with his eyes and stared at the doll. The sense of dread returned, but he wasn’t sure if it was the doll, or his growing sense that he was pushing fifty and still walking up the steps of ancient tenements that smelled like boiled cabbage and cumin, still being shown things he didn’t want to see, still wondering if sobriety was worth it, because not drinking hadn’t exactly transformed him into a prosperous, celebrated figure.

Just as he was about to turn away, say something biting to his old acquaintance, he paused. The dread had clarified, and he knew without doubt it
was
the doll.

It wasn’t the dead-eyed stare, though he couldn’t imagine sweating and grunting over that face, looking into that empty abyss where eyes should have been. It wasn’t the near-perfect skin, it’s near-perfection somehow worse than complete failure. It wasn’t the unmoving stiffness of the pose, without the telltale humanity of trembles and shivers and twitches. It wasn’t the way the clothes hung off the frame without movement or animation.

It was the expression on its face. On
her
face.

There was no expression. He knew that. The doll’s face was slack and inscrutable, the mouth slightly open, eyes at half-mast. If anything, it was an approximation of lust—the parted lips, the sleepy eyes. The face stayed with him, though, and even as he struggled down the stairs, Spense calling the police as they escaped, his rough, deep voice guiding Marks through the orange-tinged gloom of the stairwell, he could see it in his mind. The expression was blank. Nothing. And yet it was
hungry
. Marks couldn’t explain it, but he made his way through life being unable to explain things. It was simultaneously his comfort zone and torture.

As they emerged into the fresher air of Jersey City, Spense snapped his ancient phone shut. “Cops on their way,” he said. “You wanna hang at the diner and I’ll swing by when they’re done?”

Marks nodded. He wanted four fingers of Four Roses, with a sweating bottle of beer for company, and that meant he would spend the afternoon drinking coffee refills until he turned yellow and died. “Why’d you call me, Spense? I don’t write about this shit anymore. Or about any shit.”

Spencer shrugged. “You look into things, right? That’s how you pay the rent, right?”

Marks considered the various definitions of
pay
and
rent
. Finally he nodded. “Sure.”

Spencer pulled his shoulders back and opened his eyes wide. “There you go. I want you to look into it. Cops sure won’t.”

It had all circled back to grade-school math. Although, like many other things—most other things, if he was being honest—he’d forgotten grade-school math almost entirely. The experience of it, not the actual knowledge. He could add and subtract and was aware that someone had taught him how—but he couldn’t remember who that had been or what it had been like.

Those skills, however acquired, defined him now. A decade since he’d held a salaried job, he survived on small math problems.

A cup of coffee in the morning, light and sweet for the extra calories and energy: One dollar at a cart on the street. It tasted terrible. Seven dollars a week.

Office space in the communal building where you were supposed to be out by nine and stay away over the weekends, but where he’d been sleeping without incident: Fifteen dollars a week, three bucks a day.

The phone in his pocket, elderly and underpowered: Ten dollars a month, thirty cents a day, and you couldn’t send email or browse the Web on it.

Lunch and dinner (never breakfast): Five dollars a day. He’d lost seventeen pounds in six months.

Incidentals, the stuff you never expected to have to pony up for, surprising you: Three bucks a day, give or take.

His whole life: Twelve dollars a day. Three-sixty a month, forty-three hundred a year. Small math.

Coffee at the VIP diner cost a dollar-fifty, but refills were free so he argued to himself that he could average it down to something reasonable. By the time Spencer walked in, looking sweaty and tired, Marks was on cup number three and feeling good about his chances of getting Spencer to buy him lunch.

The VIP had been remodeled a few years before, miraculously looking worse after all the work. Gone were the workmanlike Formica and vinyl booths, in were faux granite and scratchy fabric that reminded everyone of the seats on a municipal bus. Gone were the ancient but beloved dime-a-play jukeboxes at the tables, in was an unwelcome extra three pages of menu offering all the sorts of dishes no one in their right mind ever ordered at a diner. Gone was the word
diner,
in was the word
restaurant
.

Spencer slid into the booth and wiped his brow with one hand. “Fucking cops, man,” he said, looking around. “Don’t wanna do nothing, but like to act like they know all about you and are letting you slide outta the goodness of their hearts.”

“You tell ’em about the doll?”

Spencer flicked his yellowed eyes at Marks, looking out from under his brow. “What, I’m an idiot? I tell
you
that shit because I know you. You’re open-minded.”

Marks nodded. Open-minded, he’d found, usually meant
fucking crazy
right up until they needed his help on something. “So, tell me.”

Spencer settled himself. “Hideki moved into the place, what, eight, nine years ago? I don’t know shit about the man. Like I said, no English. And I got no Japanese. He kept to himself, didn’t make any noise, but people started complaining.” He looked at Marks and leaned in. “Not really because the man done anything wrong, you see, but because they didn’t like him. Because he didn’t talk. Because he never smiled.” He waved a hand between them and leaned back—looking, Marks thought, like a man who’d been tired since the day he’d been born. “These fucking people. Same folks who call me when their heat don’t work, all piss and vinegar, same folks don’t tip me come Christmas. Shit.” He blew his breath out and shook his head as the waitress arrived and slid a coffee cup in front of him. He watched her pour coffee and then waved her off.