Hanzai Japan: Fantastical, Futuristic Stories of Crime From and About Japan (10 page)

When, without thinking, he spoke out in protest, the uncharacteristic ferocity I heard in his voice was no trick of my imagination. This I know because of what happened next. He stopped the car in an unpopulated area alongside a dam and insisted the woman prove she could pay her fare. She roared with laughter, and beaming with delight she announced, “I have no money. I just wanted to see how long I could trick some stupid driver.” Without warning, as the Predecessor was stunned in shock, she punched herself in the face and shouted, “If you don’t take me back to the city for free, I’ll run to the police and tell them you beat me!”

The Predecessor looked at her sadly and said, “All right.” He took the road leading back to the city, but when he turned onto a side road, I knew he was up to something. This paved road appeared to be a major highway, but in fact had been hastily laid down to supply access for construction crews, and eventually narrowed, winding up the mountainside. The highway would naturally have provided the shortest course into the city; I had offered him the route to the bypass, a suggestion I was sure he had understood. Unable to grasp his intentions, I could do nothing but watch.

Suddenly, he stopped the car, got out, and circled to the rear passenger-side seat. The woman started into her cursing, but he silenced her with a single blow. From my place beneath the front seat, I sensed him strike her and heard her low moan. He dragged her out from the car and took her, disappearing into the darkness. After roughly an hour, he returned. The Predecessor slumped his head onto the steering wheel, exhausted, and remained that way for a time. When he lifted his head, I was comforted to see an untroubled look of relief had replaced the severe expression so unlike his mild-mannered nature. He marked me with the tip of a screwdriver, leaving an
X
right in the center of my page, in the forest twenty meters to the north-northwest of where we were parked. I felt searing pain as he pressed the tool into my paper. The mark was wet, a liquid I perceived as not all that dissimilar in composition to his sweat—only this stuff was red.

“Don’t tell anyone,” he said.

Can you believe it? The Predecessor spoke to me. My master, a human, spoke to me, a mere map! And not out of jest or drunkenness—he spoke to me square-on. What fortune, what an honor! The act was without question one of the reasons I decided to follow him from that point on. These emotions, along with the mark itself,
changed
what I was.

My
thoughts,
which I’ve been taking the liberty of expressing to you, were not always so active. We maps typically operate at a much slower tempo than humans do. This is generally believed to be due to
differences in the perception of time between species.
Most humans’ lives end in less than one hundred years, and their memories are restricted to their individual lifespans. But we maps can pass down our memories. We believe this ability stems from the age-old process of tracing and copying our pages by hand, continued to the modern mass production of prints. Each map’s knowledge is restricted to the geographical region under his or her charge, but every map carries the accumulated memories passed down and shared across hundreds of years. Whatever comprises the vessels of our thoughts—our
consciousness
—is dragged along this span of centuries. Consequently, ours is a more prolonged existence than that of mankind. To put it another way, a month is as slow to a map as a year is to a human. Perhaps this is true for maps alone; if cell phones and credit cards possess
consciousness,
surely they experience time far more rapidly. But now, I have been granted a perception of time much the same as humans. This is my aforementioned
change.

What was one
X mark
became two, and two became three. Each mark came as if a ray of morning sunlight illuminating a dark room, making my consciousness more pronounced, and wielded with more rapidity. These changes affected my work. Before, as much as I did to
conceal
and
emphasize,
highlighting the ideal route, my master would apprehend it barely three times in ten. After my change, I found myself succeeding more often than not, and by the end, I was able to achieve a rate of 80 percent. Please don’t misunderstand my motives for stating this; I’m not trying to boast. I only wish for you to understand the true connection I came to share with my master. If I may be so bold, I would call it a
bond.

By the end, my master had marked me eight times.

He approached this extracurricular activity with such a passion that I called it nothing short of our
mission.
My master took on his
mission
in earnest, and his ardor showed no sign of abating. Meanwhile, a change came to the form of duties. Previously, the majority of my efforts were aimed at avoiding the loss in profits that seep in through the differences between perceived and actual geography. But now the planning of my master’s
mission
become of even higher import. One major issue was the
burial sites.
My master endeavored not to leave them near any one central location, but his idea of random was not so random. Though he tried his best each time, on a macro scale, those ever-present precepts of deviation and closest proximity were at work, and a kind of pattern could be discerned in his methods. That’s why, after the third woman, I decided to offer my guidance in locating the
burial sites.
Before, even if I were to come up with such a reckoning, my master would never have utilized it; but this was another skill brought out by my change. Now, the Predecessor grasped my plans and chose to follow nearly every suggestion. This was quite the feat, if I do say so myself—of course, it should go without saying that my master still proudly believed he had
discovered
the locations through his own inspiration.

My methods were as follows. My master preferred
hunting grounds
within
zones
of nightlife activity—and in particular, the back streets where females rarely ventured. I widened his potential
hunting grounds
to include other
zones,
such as shopping areas, and even
edges
like the harbor and
ways
like highway onramps. Furthermore, my master had a tendency to form an isosceles triangle between his
residence,
the
burial sites
,
and his
hunting grounds,
but these missteps I corrected. The Predecessor was only able to acquire as many targets as he did because their bodies remained undiscovered; the women were only reported as having gone missing. The Predecessor was exceptionally capable of leaving no traces. Just in case, I randomized his travel distances after each crime to confuse any computing machine that might attempt numerical tracking, and I strove to locate the
burial sites
outside the radius of his
residence
and other areas he frequented. Furthermore, in order to keep the
hunting grounds,
his
residence,
and the
burial sites
from creating a shifting triangle, I modified direction and distance in order to avoid being enslaved by the distance decay effect.

Despite my relationship with the Predecessor having come into full blossom, the end came suddenly one sunny afternoon. He was driving away from a train station where he had dropped off an elderly passenger. As he approached a major intersection, he grunted and clutched his chest. Soon after, the car jolted. Later, I learned that the Predecessor had suffered a heart attack and, unable to apply the brakes, rear-ended a truck that was stopped at the light. I fell from my place on the passenger seat into the footwell. Always conscious of safety, the Predecessor had his seat belt fastened and avoided striking his head on the windshield. He noticed me on the floor and reached for me with his left hand. A metallic shriek engulfed the car. The Predecessor looked up in surprise, and the windshield shattered, raining down, and a gas cloud filled the interior. I heard footsteps running toward us, and someone opened the door, dissipating the gas. When the cloud cleared, the first thing I saw was my master looking down at me, his gaze vacant, from the nearby passenger seat. I found this somewhat odd, since the rest of him—from the neck down—remained seated on the driver’s side. Shrill screams sprang from the crowd noise. The Predecessor’s right hand still gripped the steering wheel. Above his shoulders, a piece of corrugated sheeting had severed the headrest and extended into the rear cabin. Where the sheeting met his body, fresh blood spilled forth as if from poorly fitted plumbing, and his hand at the wheel slowly opened, a wilting flower, and thudded to his lap. His eyes remained open, staring at me.

Two weeks after the accident, the Young Master came to the police station to retrieve the evidence box in which I had been placed. I didn’t know much about him—a rudeness on my part. His Predecessor, having lost his wife at a young age, had rarely spoken of his family in front of his passengers. My former master had made a great effort to keep his family matters from entering his work. The Young Master brought me into his room, a largely empty space. He flipped through my pages, then tossed me into the waste bin.

My disposal didn’t sadden me. I merely sighed and resigned myself to this being the end of everything. After all, I had deviated quite far from what a map was supposed to be, and everything I had done had been for the Predecessor; being discarded upon his death was a fate I had brought upon myself.

The next day, the Young Master put me into a trash bag with various other refuse and left me with the rest of the apartment complex garbage. The Young Master apparently didn’t cook for himself, and my pages remained unsoiled by moist kitchen waste. Then something happened that I could scarcely believe. The Young Master came back and retrieved me alone from the trash. He stuffed me into his bookcase and left me there.

One night, some two weeks later, he pulled me from the shelf, his face flushed. I thought he might have had a few drinks. The Young Master opened me, and his eyes stopped on one of his Predecessor’s
X marks.
He flipped from one page to the next and back again, finding all eight marks, then took me with him for a ride in his Land Cruiser. Having already been through one accident, I was beside myself with worry for the inebriated Young Master. His Predecessor had never been much for drinking, and even if he ever had a drink, I don’t believe he would have even considered getting behind the wheel. But now the Young Master arrived at one of those
X marks,
and began searching around for quite some time, shovel in hand, and then he was digging. At least, I was later able to infer this when he laid the plastic bag beside me on the passenger seat. Inside the bag were several human fingers, their bones poking out like pieces of muddy ginger root.

Beginning that night, the Young Master visited each
mark,
bringing back plastic bags with bits and pieces from each. Even after he had made the full tour, he returned to the
marks
whenever the mood struck him, where he seemed to take advice—or an explanation—from the things that used to be his father’s passengers. I have no way of knowing what inspired the Young Master to decide to continue his Predecessor’s
Mission,
but this was when he started.

And so the Young Master carried on the
mission,
but when I witnessed his
burial
of his third victim, I began to feel we were in jeopardy. From where he had set me down on the ground nearby, I saw him simply lay her down in the tall grass—not burying her deep in the earth. From there, he went straight home and immediately went out again to his job. As I had done for his Predecessor, I presented the Young Master with advantageous
burial sites
and
hunting grounds.
Since ours was a new relationship, I would have expected a few hiccups in our communication, but so far I had been
concealing
and
emphasizing
for him with satisfactory results—he was his father’s son, after all. He had shown ample care for his own person, and I had considered him to be a thoughtful man; now this act of negligence came as a great shock. He must have had his reasons, I’m sure, but we maps are not accustomed to such unexpected behavior. Similarly, the bodies of the next two women he carried away before promptly returning to the car. And his inexplicable behavior didn’t stop there.

The Young Master began spending a great deal of time making a copy of me. He covered my pages with tracing paper and made a facsimile in earnest. The process stretched across two weeks, during which time he ceased to carry out the
mission.

Enduring the unpleasant feeling of the thin tracing paper pressed onto me, I carried a faint hope that the Young Master was simply reviewing his own deeds. Though he varied his
hunting
grounds,
he restricted the
burial sites
to within an exceedingly limited area. This posed an incredible risk, as I had indicated to him many times over, but never once did he locate a
burial site
more than two kilometers away from his
residence
.
It was my hope that this tracing would offer him an objective view of the
burial sites
and would allow him to reflect upon and take notice of this error.