Maohden Vol. 1 (24 page)

From within the huge clenched fist came the cracking of bones. Everybody else was already looking somewhere else.

“Enough.”

This voice brought a halt to the inevitable conclusion. The ordinary-looking man spoke like a good-natured old man warning a misbehaving grandson. A chagrined smile rose to his lips.

The big man’s eyes turned toward him. “Stop it,” he admonished him again, though in tones more appropriate for telling a small child to
come here this minute
.

The big man responded with unexpected meekness. Gento’s head appeared like he was setting a bowling ball down on a pedestal.

“My assumptions were not mistaken. We’ll meet again after the competition.”

By means of answer, the ordinary man pointed to the door. Gento left. The corridor was dark and deserted. He climbed the stairs to the upper level and the grandstands. The sultry atmosphere veiled the stars above. The strange air of expectation stung Gento’s skin.

This was the Shinjuku Coliseum. Though it sat only three thousand, it was
the
place where any meet that mattered was held. That night, the marquee event featured Demon City’s annual hair-raising Death Match.

The men Gento had just visited were none other than the contestants.

The members of the Preying Mantis gang were running full-throttle that evening too. The night before, the word had gotten out that they’d lost their boss, and then in short order, the underboss as well. The second underboss had stepped in at that point, so leadership of the gang was currently unquestioned.

All that occupied their minds now was tonight’s prey. The girl the night before was a helluva handful. It was time for some regular fare. Raid a tourist group full of ripe young things, snatch a bunch of MILFs out on the town for a little adventure. Rape and pillage backwards and forwards, right side up and upside down, slaking their burning desires in every wet and warm hole.

Then bury the remains in the ruins. Because that was how it was done in Demon City. These were animals devoid of virtues or morals who nevertheless bore the full weight of responsibility for taking on such brutal natures.

Except that the animals had already been frustrated from eating their fill.

A street buggy was parked outside their headquarters in the ruins of the old Shinjuku Technical High School in San’eicho. Catching sight of the young man standing there, his face like a cool winter moon, their eyes filled with murderous glee. He must be a cop, and they had their own ways of breaking in a rookie.

No need for niceties like introductions. They drew their Japanese swords and charged. The weapons danced through the moonlight. Blood showered from their severed shoulders, staining the asphalt a darker shade of black.

“Where’s your boss?” the beautiful genie asked, standing there without a care in the world.

“M-me.” The number three man stepped forward. Now that he was number one, he couldn’t show fear in front of his underlings. The AutoMag trembled in his right hand, but they probably couldn’t tell.

“Last night, somebody grabbed a girl on Okubo Avenue. Where is she?”

His nonchalant manner finally rubbed off on the gang boss. He settled down and rekindled a bit of his courage. “No idea. Who the hell are you?”

He swaggered and thrust out his chest while making sure the gang members on his left and right were readying their automatic pistols. There was no such thing as overkill when it came to cleaning house.

“Playing dumb leaves me in something of a quandary,” said the visitor. “Reliable sources say otherwise. Where is she?”

By this time, the gang boss had noticed the young woman in the driver’s seat of the street buggy. She was one hot babe, and that got the blood flowing to all the right places in a flash. He was already imagining grabbing her ass and giving it to her long and hard.

“Kill him! But don’t touch the woman!”

The cry was answered by a hail of gunfire. But the foe in front of him didn’t scatter to the wind as expected. The gang boss whirled around. His underlings were the ones spouting blood.

He felt himself seized by madness. His own soldiers were firing at each other. The thin thread twined around their necks. Needles of pain they could not resist ordered them to betray their sworn loyalties.

“I’ll ask you one more time,” Setsura Aki said in a low, calm voice, as the gang boss stood there, veiled in the shades of death. “Where is she?”

Three spotlights trained their white beams on one corner of the playing field. According to long tradition, that was where the trophy was displayed.

A murmur shot through the crowd. A young woman lay naked on the grass. She seemed to be floating there in the white, like the sacrificial victim on a funeral pyre wrapped in incandescent flames.

In the stands, a look flashed across the face of the young man in black, a long-forgotten memory springing back to life. He had witnessed the shape of the seal.

Beneath the moonlight, a raven flapped its wings. Like a black cloud carried by the demonic miasmas, it flew over the crumbling mountains of bricks and rubble.

As if exercising some deep magic, this angel of death flew in a straight line from San’eicho to the Shinjuku Coliseum near the Shin-Okubo Station ruins, the hems of his slicker flapping in the wind.

This angel sported the face of Setsura Aki.

To be continued
.

So what do you think of the first volume of
Maohden
?

As should be clear by now, this novel shares the same main characters as the first volume of
Demon City Blues
. The obvious difference in the two titles is that the latter was a serialization, while
Maohden
was written as a novel (though the second part was published in
Non Novel
magazine).

But in terms of
style
, I chose to make sex and violence the centerpieces of
Maohden
, Vol. I, as opposed to the more lyrical prose of
Demon City Blues
.

I enjoy both approaches, though for an “adult” novel,
Demon City Blues
, Vol. I has received an unusually warm reception from my female readers.

This goes back to discussions from my college days. Originally I was all about the poetics of the prose. My favorite science fiction author was Ray Bradbury and my favorite book was
The Martian Chronicles
. Those old-school stories were all I wrote back then.

Which, to be honest, didn’t amount to a whole lot. The longest thing I did was a ninety-page supernatural script that was staged at a creative retreat I attended.

Kodansha eventually published it in an anthology of my past work. Rereading it now, I can’t help blushing a bit. Suffice it to say that the lyrical mood therein expressed was probably a close reflection of the author’s real self at the time.

In any case, both works play out on the stage of Demon City Shinjuku. This time, though, I wish to devote a few words in this afterword to the secret details of its genesis (I suppose it can be called as much).

First there is the influence of film. Here I’m not talking about specific movies, rather the more general problem of the
set
itself. An editor pointed this out to me and I’ve taken note of it since, but my stories predominantly take place in confined spaces.

Of course, that hardly sums up the entirety of my oeuvre (a fan magazine has put my current total of mass-market paperbacks, including translations, at forty-two). Some like
Makaiko
span the Pacific from Los Angeles to Japan. But compared to the rest, these are indeed rare.

For example,
Journey through Hell
, from the young adult
Alien
series, takes place on a ten-mile long Noah’s Ark, and in
Mystery Mountain
from the same series, the circuitous passageways winding through the mountain.

In the adult category, the action in
Makaiko
, Vol. III never takes a step away from the shores of Lake Towada.

Even in stories where the protagonist is given comparably more room to maneuver, an underground labyrinth or palace fortress or similarly enclosed metaphorical space is sure to show up.

Taken together, this is what I mean by the problem of the set. As a theatrical stage, the set exists as a place to build other worlds, the modern art of cinematography then being used to display the most ancient of scenes.

Applied to the novel, it becomes possible to write action scenes impossible even today, and precisely because of that, I believe, all the more real.

Within the pages of a novel, the author breathes life into the characters of his own choosing, and places them on a set of his own design. Perhaps the epitome of this in manga form is Go Nagai’s
Violence Jack
. He combines the western and the samurai film and contemporizes them to great effect.

I populated Demon City with my lovable assassins, ghosts, gremlins and monsters. Not a whole lot should be read into my choice of Shinjuku. Ginza and Roppongi were out. Shibuya didn’t quite make the grade. Shinjuku was the logical choice.

The result, though, is that real places and buildings become stars in their own right. I’m sure some will find such references morbid, but that only reflects the power the author has in dressing the stage to his own satisfaction. It’s all an artifice, after all. I invite you to consider everything with a charitable eye.

And that brings us to
Maohden
, Vol. II. The short-term serialization begins with the September edition of Non Novel (going on sale July 22), and will eventually become a novel.

What locations will become the next set, and what special effects and gizmos will populate it? Well, we’ll have to wait and see.

Hideyuki Kikuchi (while watching
Last Year at Marienbad
)

Early in the morning of June 11, 1986