Hanzai Japan: Fantastical, Futuristic Stories of Crime From and About Japan (32 page)

“So I went up there, knocked on his door, tried to explain to him that the tide was rising against him, you know? And the man made me tea.” He snorted. “I’m standing there, being an idiot, talking loud and slow like that’s gonna make the man understand me, and he’s puttering around in his bathrobe and then all of a sudden he brings me a cup of tea. Was good, too. Light. Orangey.”

Marks sipped his coffee. He hated tea. Always tasted like water to him. Water with a defect.

“I don’t know how we became friends. Friends gotta be able to talk, right? I came up for tea. We listened to music. I brought up some of my own, he’d put it on. Sometimes we drank booze, got a little high. Not one word understood between us.” Spencer smiled slightly, studying the light in the windows of the diner. “Not one word.” He looked at Marks and sobered. “One night, I stop up, there’s a box in the hall, all this foam wrapping and plastic, and I go in, and there it is: The doll. Hideki’s Dutch Wife.”

For a moment, Marks saw the eyes: Perfect and empty.

“What can you do? Man marries a doll. I didn’t say anything. Or do anything. He started dressing her up. Bought nice things, expensive things. Started putting a cup of tea out for her.”

Marks studied the coffee cup up close as if it was fascinating. “He, uh,
sleep
with her?”

Spencer snorted. “I don’t know the man fucked the doll, Phil. You spend ten grand on a sex doll and not fuck it?”

Marks tipped his cup towards him. “You’re pretty sure it killed the old man, though,” he said. “Despite being a doll.”

Spencer didn’t say anything for a moment. He sat looking out the window, chewing his thumb. “Just look into it, okay, Phil? All I’m asking. Call me crazy, you want. Hideki deserved better. I was his only person, you know? Maybe he got family back home, I don’t know. I do know they never once looked for him, reached out. All Hideki had was me. Just look into it. I’ll pay your fee.”

Marks nodded. “And I’ll let you.”

Marks leaned against the warm chassis of the car and fished another nut from the plastic bag. Honey-roasted peanuts, one dollar from a vending machine that looked like it had last been serviced in a previous decade. They tasted like corn syrup and salt and made him sick, but he figured he needed every empty calorie he could get.

Across from him, a dark green metal door opened, and a uniformed police officer exited—fat, edging towards middle-aged, and wearing his uniform like it had been found, mysterious, in his closet that morning. He walked furiously up to Marks and handed him a bundle of files wrapped in several thick rubber bands. “We square?”

Marks glanced at the files as he stuffed the bag of nuts into his jacket pocket. “One more thing: The doll. I’m gonna need it.”

The officer’s eyes bulged. “The
doll
?”

Marks shrugged. “No one’s gonna miss it.”

The officer pulled one large hand down his face and left it covering his mouth for a moment. “Shit, Phil, I know I … I mean, the official ruling’s a suicide and there’s no family, but shit, that’s in the lockup, you know?”

Marks nodded. “I told you it would be a
big
favor.”

The policeman nodded, slumping. “All right. I’ll call you.” He started to turn, then stopped. “The
doll,
Phil?”

Marks sighed, extracting the bag of nuts from his pocket. “Christ, Stan, I’m not going to fuck the doll.”

Marks drove to the Starlight Motel and paid forty-one dollars for a room, using the wrinkled and worn fives and singles Spencer had given him. It felt like a huge expenditure, all for a room that had been theoretically cleaned, hot water, and that exotic feeling of a private space sealed to the elements. He stood in the doorway for a moment, rain crashing down outside, and tried to remember how he’d gotten here. The series of decisions, the flowchart of his existence. It was vague, as it had been as long as he could remember. He assumed he’d been clear at some point, but there was a … live wire in his memory. When he touched it, he jumped back, and when he came to he’d lost another five seconds.

The room was larger than he’d expected. It had a living area with a couch and a table and a TV, a small desk area, and the bed. A thin-looking door hung half-open in shadow, the bathroom. The room smelled strongly of disinfectant. He wasn’t sure if this was encouraging or discouraging.

Turning, he picked up one end of the duffel bag and dragged it into the room, kicking the door shut behind him. He unzipped it, pulled the doll from it, and set it on the small couch, its upholstery orange and angry-looking.

The doll looked awkward, the limbs jutting out stiffly, and he had to resist the urge to arrange it, to make it more comfortable-looking. He didn’t like looking at it, and turned to inspect the rest of the room. He didn’t like looking at
that,
either. Green carpet, heavy, oily-looking bedspreads in floral patterns that almost, but not really, matched the walls and carpet, an ancient television on top of a pressed-wood dresser he never wanted to touch. He had an idea that if he pulled open a drawer, bats would fly out, or roaches, or bedbugs, a torrent of wriggling bodies that would envelop him and consume him.

He turned and dragged the blond wood chair from the desk and sat down, crossing his legs and folding his hands in his lap. He stared at the doll. The easiest way to earn his fee from Spencer was to simply demonstrate that the doll was just the most creepily realistic sex doll he’d ever seen.

It did look realistic. The skin, the hair, the teeth hinting out from the slack, half-open mouth. The eyes, blank and dead but with a believable shine to them. The eyelashes, delicate, soft. He could imagine, in low light and from the right angle, mistaking her for a zoned-out girl just sitting in a room, staring at nothing. And he could imagine, every year, the lighting getting a little higher and the angle getting less severe, until one day in broad daylight you’d walk by this doll and fall in love.

He startled. The light in the room had changed, and he pulled his phone from his pocket. Two hours had passed. His head ached. Sleep came easy for him, these days, but he never felt rested. He woke up with headaches, all the time. He stood up and staggered, his legs asleep and filled with needles. He stretched them out, walking around the room turning on all the lamps, suffusing it in a weak orange light that felt cold and useless. He wanted a drink and a cigarette and stood in the middle of the room, frozen and afraid to move.

The doll hadn’t changed expression or position, but he was aware of it. As if it was putting out a specific signal that he could feel.

He leaned over it and then crouched down, getting close to its cold, elastic skin. He smelled it—perfume. Light and fruity, citrus.

Something suddenly
clicked
inside the doll’s mouth, and Marks leaped back, almost tripping over his own feet. Heart pounding with giddy, ridiculous reaction, he knelt down and shuffled on his knees back to the doll. He pinched its mouth between two fingers—the lips parting in a terrible, realistic way—and forced it open.

Inside, on the pink, gleaming tongue, was a tiny turtle. As Marks stared at it in surprise, it slowly, calmly pulled its head back inside its shell.

Marks stood up with popping joints and shaking hands, adrenaline burning off as the silence and thick air of the room crowded in again. Pushing a hand through his hair, he turned and picked up the files, carrying them to the desk area and sitting down. Turning on the lamp, he began flipping through them.

Crime scene photos. Coroner’s report. Incident form—no mention of a turtle, which didn’t surprise him. Thinking it a clear-cut case of suicide, there would be few volunteers to explore the cavities of an old man’s Japanese sex doll.

There were copies of the document Aoki had tucked into the waistband of his boxer shorts: A short, concise will, leaving his only sizable asset—the doll—to Spencer. Marks looked up at the mirror over the desk for a moment, chewing his lip, staring at but not really seeing himself.

Looking back down, he found the photos of the scrap of paper and stared at it, the characters meaningless to him. He folded the photo once, crisply, and slid it into his breast pocket. He turned and stared at the doll. It gave every impression of waiting patiently for the television to be switched on, its mouth still slightly open.

“
Kotodama,
” the fleshy man in the old sweater said. His hair was in retreat from his face, and the top of his head had been burned pink, peeling eternally. The sweater was shapeless and thin, fraying and stained. Under it he wore a similarly elderly and disreputable button-down white shirt and a pair of soft-looking tan trousers. He wore thin, delicate round glasses that he pushed up the bridge of his nose every few minutes. “Japanese, literally ‘spirit of language.’ If you were an asshole, you could call it a magic spell.”

He slid the photo of the note along the worn wooden bar and picked up a tumbler of whiskey, but didn’t sip it.

“We both know I’m an asshole, Ivan,” Marks said, tapping one finger on the photo while he looked at the collection of amber bottles on the shelf. “What does the note say?”

“Oh, you’re an asshole, all right. No,
How are you, Ivan?
No,
How’s the research coming for the book?
” Ivan leaned back in his chair and sighed. “It’s a request for immortality, essentially. If, as I said, we were
both
assholes and were going to regard this as some sort of spell, that would be the desired effect.”

“What about the turtle?”

Ivan looked up at the ceiling of the bar, which was rusting old tin in an elaborate design. “If we’re going with my bullshit immortality interpretation, it might be a way of anchoring the spirit. The
minogame
in Japanese legend is a turtle that’s so old it has seaweed growing on its shell like moss. If I were, say, doubling down on being an asshole, that’s what I’d say.”

He set his glass on the bar and adjusted his glasses. “Phil, you called me here to not have a drink with me and ask me about bizarre Japanese love notes?”

“You’d call it a love note?”

“If I wasn’t an asshole, yes.”

Marks chewed his lip.