Hanzai Japan: Fantastical, Futuristic Stories of Crime From and About Japan (11 page)

One night, the Young Master had a nasty-looking thing in his hands. Rolled into the shape of a tube it looked like paper, but even from a hundred meters away I would have recognized that it wasn’t. It was a 30-centimeter square of human leather. I reckoned he had taken it from a woman’s back. It must have required a considerable effort to stretch and dry the square. Beaming with pride, the Young Master affixed it to the wall. And what a shock was in store for me when he did—certainly no less unsettling than when I found his Predecessor’s head resting on the passenger seat.

The Young Master had copied my map onto the human skin. He had probably used carbon paper or something of the sort as a medium. The city streets made twisted capillaries on the skin, which was dull as rubber and white with yellowed blotches.

To my horror, the skin made a noise.

he said, not a word but an ugly, repellent noise.

he said, as the Young Master regarded him with satisfaction and gently touched his surface.

he said, and I realized he was sounding out his first word.

The Young Master couldn’t hear the skin’s
voice,
as a matter of course, but I did, and it sent a wave of nausea through me. It had meant that this thing too was a
map;
we were of the same subspecies.

The Young Master held a deep affection for the map. From that night on, whenever he carried out his
mission
,
he put a
mark
on us both. But for mine, he used nothing more than a cheap pen, while on the human leather he used, as had his Predecessor, the target’s blood. With each passing day, I felt a black shadow creeping out from the skin’s place on the wall, beginning to dominate the room.

I regret that what I’m about to say may come across as me simply speaking ill, but if I may be frank, the Young Master was remarkably careless compared to his Predecessor. My former master always wore gloves, perhaps due to his profession, but even when he didn’t, he treated me with the utmost care. He was kind to me, cautious not to harm my paper when he turned my pages, and he protected me from stains and smudges with a plastic cover. As for the Young Master, he had a habit of licking his fingers before he turned my pages. Yes, it kept his fingers from slipping across my paper, but moisture is my greatest adversary, and moreover, when he did so after a
burial,
I couldn’t help but worry about all the kinds of bacteria and blood and the like he was putting into his mouth. It was that kind of negligence toward minute details that I knew would prove fatal to his
mission.

Nevertheless, no matter how that map was made, the skin was still a map with his own job to do; and yet he showed no intent to perform the slightest assistance for his master. I would even have gone as far as to say that the Young Master would be better off dropping his fascination with this oddity posthaste. That monster leeched the Young Master’s energy, doing nothing but fatten his hoarded knowledge more and more with each day. I knew he was of no good to the Young Master.

The skin’s grumblings, like the grinding of a stone mill, were at first incoherent, but when the sixth
mark
had been placed, his words at last took form.

Such was my irritation that I raised my voice, shouting,

The skin had the temerity to chuckle at me.

<
You’re the reprobate,>
the skin said.

The skin shifted his attention to the Young Master’s bedroom, where the man was currently at rest.

I didn’t answer.

the skin said.

I asked.

I couldn’t refute anything the skin had said. If anything, he had answered my lingering question: why the Young Master had concentrated the
burial sites
within a local area. If what the skin said was true, the Young Master wouldn’t have wanted the
burial sites
to be excluded from his crew’s area of operation.

The human leather said nothing else the rest of the night.

The conversation motivated me to devote my full strength to driving apart the human leather and the Young Master. If I didn’t do something, I knew trouble would come. I decided that when the Young Master next returned from a successful
mission
and came to leave his
marks
on us, I would pray for him to destroy the skin. I had no evidence my wish would come true in any fashion, but the Young Master and I were longtime partners, sharing our kind of communication, and I was going to venture a prayer on a slim hope.

An opportunity came sooner than I expected. That very same night, the Young Master had again put himself in danger. Everything having gone well, he was in a bright and cheerful mood. Meanwhile, I couldn’t shake the dark cloud that hung over me. Humming to himself, the Young Master carried me over to the human leather, licked his fingers, and began turning my pages.

went my silent plea.

And,

And,

As if he had heard my prayers, the Young Master looked to the human leather and stopped his hands.

I sensed the leather holding his breath.

Without realizing it, I began to speak the words aloud.

As if he had taken my pleas to heart, the Young Master raised his hand, noisily tore away, and threw what he had torn into the waste bin.

I was stunned. I didn’t know why he had done what he did. He hadn’t ripped apart the human leather, but rather me instead.

The skin’s maniacal laughter shuddered through the air. Come what may, I will never unhear that sound. Scarcely able to breathe, I became faint, dizzy, and felt as if my insides had been crushed. It took me two whole days to fully comprehend my current state.

I had lost 52 pages. My one piece of luck amidst the misfortune was that my spine had remained intact, and I had escaped being split in two. However, I was now incomplete. At the very least, I was now missing great swaths of geography, from the forested Mount Takao to the suburban Tama Center; the old Olympic grounds at Komazawa, the transit hub of Shinagawa, and Tokyo Disneyland; Hashimoto Station in Sagamihara City to the west; Oimachi Station and Oi Wharf; and all across Machida City, from Tsurukawa and Fuchinobe to Sagamiono. I wished the Young Master had simply thrown me out, rather than leave me in such a sorry state, but the Young Master kept what remained of me. I don’t think he retained me out of any sentiment toward our relationship. Perhaps he just wanted to keep the original parts that bore his Predecessor’s
marks
—if that was the case, sooner or later he would strip me down to a mere six maps. I needed to do whatever I could to prevent that tragedy from befalling me. But what could I do, anyhow? I had already lost over half of my body, and I could no longer
conceal
and
emphasize
as well as I had before. Either way, the Young Master would soon have no use for me; the other day, he went out to one of those big-box stores and returned with one of those abominable
navigation systems.

After the events of that night, whenever the human leather took notice of me, he prattled on and on, attempting to talk to me, but I could never muster the energy to reply. One thing he said, however, couldn’t escape my notice: the Young Master’s
mission
was receiving a great deal of attention out in the world, and the dragnet was closing in.

<
I can
’
t wait to see what happen
s
,
>
the human leather whispered.