Hanzai Japan: Fantastical, Futuristic Stories of Crime From and About Japan (9 page)

I watched a red-faced man start to sing “American Pie.” About two minutes in, he suddenly realized he had another seven to go, and hadn’t prepared to be up there that long. But rather than drop the mike, he bulled it out like a true American.

Didn’t matter how dark the situation, you had to push through, right? Get the job done.

And I had the story, didn’t I? Something much better than yakuza, which had become white noise news, quaint in its familiarity. Abuse at a sumo stable might not have looked much better, but it spoke to a central hypocrisy and plucked a nerve too seldom molested. The Japanese hated their reputation for coldness, for cruelty. That this cruelty was taking place in service of their national sport could be incendiary. I imagined the international agencies would want a piece of it.

So I had Kouta’s story. All I needed now was evidence.

I tweaked in the bathroom, cleared the liquor haze from my skull, and headed back out to Wakamatsu. On the way, I pushed through preparations for the Obon Festival, Japanese Halloween with religious bells and whistles. The lanterns and bright colors made my head hurt, so I ducked into the shadows and followed the darkness back to the stable.

I couldn’t see through the dirty windows, so I went round and slithered in through the kitchen. Kept my breath shallow and my footsteps light, following the sound of the evening practice until I reached the door to the dirt room.

Then I heard Yamashiro scream and a sharp slap echoed out into the corridor.

I chanced a peek. Under the harsh strips, the assembled wrestlers looked like a medical exhibition. This was
butsukari
practice—one wrestler was supposed to slam into another in a running charge and drive him through the dirt to the other side of the room. Yamashiro stood in the middle of the ring and yelled, “Charge me!”

Kouta stood opposite, reluctant. He shuffled forward, but didn’t commit.

Yamashiro punched Kouta’s chest, then his own. “Charge me.”

Kouta charged. Yamashiro caught him, shoved him upright and slapped his face pink. Kouta apologized.

“Again!”

Kouta charged. Yamashiro charged back, slammed his full weight into the kid and sent him sprawling backward across the ring. Kouta floundered, rolled, tried to get upright. Yamashiro planted a heavy foot into the boy’s gut. “Like a pig in the dirt.Get up.”

Kouta didn’t move. Frozen in a ball, braced for the next blow.

“Get
up
.” Yamashiro gestured to the other wrestlers, who hauled Kouta to his feet. Yamashiro snatched a bamboo cane from the corner of the room, paused to take a drink of my bourbon, then returned to Kouta, who was busy blubbering apologies. Yamashiro cut him short with a swipe to the belly. “Why do we have no foreigners in this
heya
?”

I took video on my phone. It was beautiful.

“Because the sumo champion must be Japanese,” said the wrestlers.

Yamashiro crossed behind Kouta. “And how do you become champion?”

“Through discipline,” said the wrestlers.

“And how do you learn discipline?”

“Through pain.”

“Through
pain
.” Yamashiro brought the cane down across Kouta’s back. Kouta screamed, then sobbed.

Yamashiro flicked his wrist. The wrestlers dropped Kouta to his hands and knees.

Yamashiro crossed back to the bottle of bourbon. He poured the last of it into a glass, took a hefty swallow—looked like it didn’t touch the sides—then brought the bottle back with him as he began to circle Kouta. “They say there will never be another Japanese champion. They say the Mongolians, the Chinese, the Koreans, they all have the advantage. They have training in other martial arts, the breadth of experience. More than that, they have the hunger and the discipline. They have strength. The Japanese are too soft, too entitled. They think they have hunger, but they don’t. What they have is an absence of soul, of tradition, no inner life. Nothing but a useless husk.”

Kouta started to his feet. Yamashiro brought the bottle down on the back of his head. Kouta let out the kind of embarrassing, high-pitched yelp that spoke of loose bowels and blackout terror.

Then he hit the dirt facedown, bloody, staring and still.

“Fuck.” It came out loud and panicked.

And caught Yamashiro’s attention. I dropped my phone. Bent to snatch it up again and felt the air displace. I looked up to see a glimpse of belly, felt something crack in my head, then I hit the floor. Rolled to see a deep, dark red mark on the wall above me before the world snapped off.

A long period of darkness. Deep. Impossible.

Then:

Taiko drums. The Obon Festival battering its way out of my head. My temples pounded. I felt blood in my hair, and broke a scab when I touched my scalp. I pressed one hand to my head, used the other to haul myself upright.

They’d dropped me somewhere by the river. A good couple of hours’ walk from my apartment in Roppongi Hills, but I could make it. I patted my pockets, found my phone—cracked but working—and my pipe. Fatigue threatened to put me down, so I took a hit to stay sharp. A knock to the head, no telling what damage they’d done. I’d vomited on myself at some point, which meant concussion. I needed to stay upright and conscious. And I needed to move. I needed to get home and write this up. I had my B-29.

I staggered toward the main road to get my bearings, and stumbled straight into a
bon odori
. They danced slowly, precisely; I flailed as I tried to keep my balance. I collided with a young man who wore a Pikachu mask on the top of his head, and I thought for a moment that he had a second face. I reeled, dodged a couple of fat tourists in cheap kimonos and made for the curb. A dancer stepped in front of me. I couldn’t stop. I toppled into her, brought her down with me. She squealed—it hurt my head. I clamped a hand over her mouth and tried to push myself to my feet.

A hand skated my arm, then clung on. It was heavy and cold. I pulled away, swinging wildly at its owner. My fist glanced off a stab vest, then my head took a rap from a baton and before I knew it I was at the mercy of Tokyo Metro’s finest, which was worse than it sounded. As they dragged me to the nearest full station—no
koban
for me, not with the blood and vomit and propensity for violence—I remembered that Japanese police are internationally famous for getting their man. How they do this is they wear you down. They can detain for forty-eight hours without bail. You have the right to
hire
a lawyer, but legal aid doesn’t exist. There are no Miranda rights. And if they don’t get you on the first charge, they’ll get you on something else.

Like drugs. This is the kind of country where they can pick you up for carrying Sudafed, never mind what I had in my pockets.

“What is this?”

Fucking ice. Should’ve dumped it the moment I saw a cop, but I couldn’t think straight and they moved too fast. Probably couldn’t have denied those charges anyway. Got to have pupils like periods here, especially in this room, all this harsh light. Unforgiving. Hospital light. Morgue light.

The cop slammed the table to get my attention. “Where?”

“Huh?” I felt woozy. Disconnected. Something shoved out of place.

He jabbed the bag of ice. “Where from?”

“They killed him.”

“What?”

“This is more important. They killed Kouta.”

“Who is Kouta? He your dealer?”

I shook my head. I needed a doctor. “Sumo. He … sumo.”

The cop straightened up. I felt other hands on me, escorting me out of the light. As soon as we hit the corridor, I remembered:

“Check my phone! I took video. They killed him. Yamashiro killed Kouta.”

They bundled me away down a long corridor with unbarred windows on one side. I glanced at myself as I passed. My limbs had withered, my neck looked warped and long, my belly painfully distended. My face had almost disappeared, two dark holes above an expanse of mummified skin. Beyond my reflection, I thought I could see lanterns flickering on the Sumida River, but I knew it was probably just traffic.

On the other side, there were offices. I saw Yamashiro there, talking to the cop who’d just interviewed me. I couldn’t understand why he was in the building already.

And I couldn’t understand why Kouta stood next to him.

I dug my heels, braked the officer holding my arm. “Wait.”

“You move on.”

I stared at Kouta. He was pale. Quiet. Dressed traditionally.

The officer tried to move me on. I stayed put. He made threats.

Something moved under Kouta’s collar. I lurched forward to get a better look. Heard the officer call for help. Heard footsteps coming my way.

Kouta turned to look at me.

As he did, a maggot appeared at his collar and dropped to the floor.

I screamed. Went weak. Two cops on me, one more going for my legs as I started kicking. Yamashiro glared at me as they took me away.

The cops dropped me into a dog cage with a tatami mat floor and a semi-open squat toilet at the back. A thin futon propped against the wall. Two wool blankets, no pillow. I sat in the middle of the floor and stared at my hands. Blood hit my knuckle. I touched my temple. I needed a doctor, but I didn’t want one. I heard them talk about psychosis and it was all I could do not to start screaming again. Instead I put my hands to my ears, screwed my eyes shut and tried to stop my thoughts running to dead men walking.

The smell of
senko
incense wafted in the air.

“I’m sorry.”

I opened my eyes. Kouta stood in my peripheral vision.

“Yamashiro-san tells us we are his. We cannot die unless he allows it. We must learn discipline through pain.”

“He killed you.”

“Shut up, English!” yelled the duty officer.

Kouta sighed. “There must be a Japanese champion.”

I leaned forward, closed my eyes. Felt blood hit the back of my hand.

“You must tell them.”

I kept my voice down. “Tell them what?”

“My story. What happened.”

“They won’t listen to me.”

“Make them.”

Another drop of blood startled me upright.

They wouldn’t listen to me. They wouldn’t read what I wrote. I was an outsider. But Kouta wouldn’t listen either. All we had was each other, he said, and he wouldn’t leave until I’d told his story. I’d promised.

“We will make them listen,” he said.

And so he guided my hand. A finger to the blood spot, the first slow smear from right to left, and another to cross it vertically. Soon I had the kanji for “Truth.” I stared at it and found my way.

“There,” said Kouta. “Like that.”

I wrote in Japanese, told the story as simply and as elegantly as I could, because that was the way Kouta wanted it. I grew weaker as I bled, but Kouta taught me discipline. I managed to cover the wall as Kouta whispered in my ear, guiding me through every nuance of every stroke. And soon the cops noticed and grew worried and watched me and then grew even more worried. Maybe it was the blood. Maybe they caught the meaning of the words.

Whatever it was, it’s shaken them to the point where a small crowd of police has gathered, chattering quietly. I can hear them now plotting to remove me from the cell.

But not yet. They want to see me finish. Their curiosity outweighs their concern.

When I’m done, I’ll let them see. They can understand then. The whole story will come together, and its bold simplicity will give it layers of meaning beyond my reckoning. They’ll talk among themselves, the story creeping through their family and friends and communities and maybe even nationally and beyond. And maybe the video still works, and maybe it doesn’t. It won’t matter. The story will have a power and longevity beyond a soon-to-be-obsolete video file. Realism isn’t necessary for lore.

Future generations will wonder about Kouta, about me. And they’ll have no answers, just the story.

The way it should be.

Not long ago, the Young Master slowly opened his eyes, gazed up at the sky, where pale moonlight hollowed out the darkness, then fell back asleep. Two days earlier, he looked at me and whispered, but he hasn’t graced me with another word since.

I must admit that when he spoke to me then, I swelled with the unbecoming hope that he had, on some level, finally come to realize what I am. Alas, he has made no further inquiry. But what else can I expect? Even if he had questions for me, I am incapable of offering any answers. Please, go ahead and laugh at my folly.

My sincere apologies for not introducing myself sooner. Under approval of the Director of the Geographical Survey Institute of the Ministry of Construction, and printed thereof, I am a humble atlas, comprising 197 street and topographical maps of the Tokyo Metropolitan Area, projected to a Universal Transverse Mercator coordinate system. As for my particulars, I contain five maps of the city’s center at an enlarged 1:5,000 scale, a further 168 maps at 1:10,000 scale, twelve at 1:100,000 scale, and eleven at 1:200,000 scale, in addition to comprehensive maps of rail transit lines and the Metropolitan Expressway. And, in a measure of considerable extravagance for a mere collection of local street maps, I also include a single 1:10,000,000 representation of Tokyo’s outlying islands. All this and I can still fit in a reader’s hands. Your obedient servant.

The island map is at a scale of one hundred kilometers to the centimeter, and uses a projection that favors accuracy of bearing and distance around an arbitrary central point, rather than Universal Transverse Mercator, which preserves bearing and shapes within a localized area. As you are well aware, the Earth is spherical; consequently, the Universal Transverse Mercator projection is only effective within 85 degrees of latitude, beyond which distortion becomes untenable. This other projection was chosen because sea charts and the like require a projection that is effective across the globe.

My pages run from streets and topography at the small scale, and entire islands in the sea at the large scale; yet I am merely a map.

The Young Master’s Predecessor, his late and estimable father, held me most dear. A taxi driver, the Predecessor purchased me when he began working as an independent. In those first days, he used many different maps, but while the others lacked in thoughtfulness and passion for their duties, I devoted every effort to matching his expectations, and in the end, somehow, I alone survived.

“Who is a map like you to talk of devotion,” you may object, and rightly so. But if I may presume to explain the duties of us maps, I think I may dispel any such prejudices you bear. There once was a time when maps were viewed with an importance second only to the lives of our masters. Nowadays, we have been relegated to the same stature as common stationery, but in the past, only the hands of kings and monarchs—or others of considerably high station—could touch upon our pages. Our current state of decline is due in part to the progression of civilization—the changes of culture brought with the marching of time. In the past, conveying oneself from one point to another was fraught with
mortal peril;
excepting certain professions, this is no longer the case. Excluding certain locales, getting lost no longer brings about an immediate fear for one’s life.

But if you ask me, our decline cannot be entirely attributed to such changes. Are we
maps
not
maps
as our elders were? If we had properly carried out our duty, wouldn’t we have prevented this precipitous decline? Perhaps what led us here was negligence and carelessness borne of our arrogance, as evidenced by the emergence of the navigation systems that have come to be used in our place—such bizarre and idiotic things as I have ever seen. If I may be so bold, I say they may look like maps, but they are not indeed maps. Just as a mannequin or robot will never be the same as a human, even when made to look like one, navigation systems are as bona fide as a back-alley can-can dance. Truly, the inconveniences perpetrated by their “guidance” are met with resentful anger and tearful cries as no rare occurrence. To those who have such inconveniences put upon them, I humbly suggest they
re-examine
their choices. Entrusting one’s route to a navigation system is as foolish as telling a horse a destination, then closing one’s eyes for the ride.

It is my belief that maps have two essential duties: to
conceal
and to
emphasize.
Please consider what I’m about to say not as personal opinion, but as an observation spoken by the long, unbroken blood lineage of my ancestry. Maps are used by humans, such as the Young Master and his Predecessor. Humans, along with some other animals including the hummingbird and certain walking creatures, perceive their surroundings as divisions of objects and empty spaces (those wanting to sound smart might use a term like “euclidean perception”). In other words, humans make sense of their surroundings not only through what they see, but by an internal representation of the
place
—an
inner map
,
if you will. Even if more than one person is in the same location, each person’s
map
will have slight differences; when deciding to take the shortest route from point A from point B, individuals’ paths will diverge. We maps have long held the enduring theory that humans will always move, in the absence of any other intent, according to
the rule of closest proximity.
To summarize: when faced with multiple options, humans will always elect the choice that presents the least amount of difficulties. And yet, even given the existence of one physically shortest route between two points, individuals’ selected paths will contain significant variations. This is because of deviations within their
inner maps.

These deviations arise from the constituent parts of the
inner maps
—for example, the relative appeal of the starting point and the destination, the type and number of obstacles in-between, or the familiarity or appeal of the chosen route.

In other words, when deciding on a path from point A to point B—even when selecting for the shortest distance—the choice is influenced by other factors: whether or not a familiar route exists, the pros and cons of freeway driving, whether or not any favored locations are along the way, and so on.

This selection is an exceedingly intricate decision, and our role is to present the routes most taken by our masters. That brings us back to the two aforementioned concepts:
conceal
and
emphasize. To conceal
means just that—when shown
en masse,
the entirety of our data is difficult to comprehend. Certain information should be diminished, or made indistinct from other data. To
emphasize
is the opposite: to offer certain data in a way that our masters can easily perceive. In practice, our methods are awfully modest; say, lowering the shade of a color ever so slightly, or deepening it instead. Mere child’s play, and yet we road maps have remained in continuous use, never falling out of favor since the times of the Roman Empire, when General Agrippa, on the orders of Emperor Augustus, spent twenty years of his life completing history’s first road map: our originator, the Tabula Peutingeriana. Surely you will agree this unbroken legacy continues not by coincidence.

Allow me to illustrate. Say my master is going to a certain destination; if I blithely display my full contents, my master will take a route that roughly follows
the rule of closest proximity.
But when the situation calls for a race against time, and every minute and second counts, or when a need arises to make an efficient getaway from a certain locale, I must break through my master’s faulty assumptions brought about by the deviations of his
inner map
.
When my master’s child is having a medical emergency, not a single kilometer is to spare, no matter how accustomed the familiar route may be. In such cases, I temporarily
conceal
the familiar landmarks: restaurants, train stations, office buildings, and the like. A momentary confusion will beset my master, but his learned awareness will be reset, and he will examine the map as with
fresh eyes.
At the same time, I can
emphasize
something that my master had previously excluded from his recognition—say, a narrow bridge through which his car can only barely fit—and he will select it for his route. Of course, most of my work is modest, but a master will create such contrasts.

But forgive me, for I’ve forgotten to explain the most important part: a map’s work must be done in secret. When we
conceal
or
emphasize,
we must not arouse a hair of suspicion among the humans. We exist to provide them
assistance,
and nothing more. We must not obstinately lead them around by their nose out of some desire for recognition. Such greed is to be reviled and viewed as a level of extreme arrogance, and its perpetrators worthy of a book burning. We remain behind the scenes, and should our masters elect the route we seek them to take, they must do so with the impression they found it on their own. Otherwise, some time in the future, certain trouble will arise between us maps and the humans.

In this way, I firmly believe that my forebears and I have built the best possible partnership with our masters. Of course, I can’t claim that we all work in perfect harmony.

You again have my apologies for only having provided an exceedingly commonplace example, but if you would consider my words, I think you’ll see they’re not something to be casually dismissed as the nonsensical ramblings of a map.

Please forgive me if I end up repeating myself, but among us maps, we refer to the humans’
inner map
as a
cognitive map.
Its primary constituents—the most readily visualized routes, such as railways, freeways, and the like—we call
ways.
Rivers, seas, and other boundaries that aid in providing structure to the cognitive map are called
edges
.
Boundaries formed by cultural rather than geographical considerations—governmental administration centers, nightlife spots, et cetera—are called
zones.
Centers of activity such as major intersections, train stations, and prominent stores are called
junctures,
while notable landmarks, high rises, and trees are all called
bindings.

I must beg your pardon for prattling on at such length, but my feeble hope is to cast but one stone from the darkness against the apparent rise of those navigation systems over us maps. For what is the extent of their abilities? If all they think they have to do is carelessly regurgitate data to some puppet terminal, with no regard to their masters’ needs and intentions, then all I can say is that they are thoroughly witless things, stuff on the same level as bathroom graffiti. But there I go again. Please give no regard to my petty gnashing of teeth.

The Predecessor changed two years before his death. Late at night, he picked up an appallingly drunk woman who seemed displeased with him from the very start, for she hurled curses and abuse at him the likes of which I couldn’t bear to hear. Whoever she was—I didn’t know if she had a profession or if she was the daughter of some distinguished family—I knew that her words must have been hurtful to my ever-gentle master. It pained me to watch him endure her torrent of abuses. She had told him to take her a good 25 kilometers from the city’s center, but when we arrived, she suddenly changed her mind and demanded a new destination. Though suspicious of the request, my master set out for this new location, where she again changed her mind. After that, my master and the woman exchanged several words. I remember they talked mostly of money. After the woman promised the next destination would be the final one, my master set out once more. The woman’s abuses gained in ferocity. None of what she said to him was at all true, and yet on she ranted. She even called him a lousy listener, and said that’s why he was stuck as a common taxi driver. Finally, she noticed his ID display card beside the meter and began berating his very name. At this offense he seemed no longer able to remain silent. His mother was endeared to his name, because it shared one kanji with his, and he had lost his mother at a very young age.