by Otaro Maijo
I willed myself to sit perfectly still or risk humiliation.
Shit! SHIT! It wasn’t going to work! I couldn’t stand it. I was going to cry. And it was going to be one honking flood of tears. Why not? I was really sad. I wanted to cry. Embarrassing or not, it didn’t really matter anymore. I could feel the sobs and the sniffles and the snot working their way up my throat, marching up like they were about to attack. My hands were numb from being balled up so tight.
And then, just as I was thinking, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, this is it…just as I was about to lose it, Yoji stood up as if he was about to walk away.
“I don’t believe it,” he murmured. Was that lucky timing, or what? Or what? In one blast, I breathed…out everything I had been holding inside, then took a few gulping gasps and—then I lost it.
“Hiii…ku, fu, eeeee, ggu, fuu…” I couldn’t believe how pathetic I sounded—couldn’t believe this was coming from my own mouth.
And getting louder every second. It was out of control. I wanted to cry, and that’s what I was doing. What was wrong with that? I wanted somebody to tell me that it was okay for anybody as sad as I was to cry her eyes out for as long as she wanted. But then just as all my blubbering and yelping was about to jack up to some new and more disgusting level, I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, that Yoji was standing a little ways off…talking to someone? “What do you think you’re doing?” he was saying.
You idiot! Yoji! You asshole! I’m bawling my eyes out here and you don’t even notice. Asshole! Drop dead! Do you hear me, Yoji? DROP DEAD!
“You can’t do that here,” he was saying, his voice getting really stern. “Don’t you know where you are? I’m calling the police.” This made me look up. I didn’t even care if he saw me like this. And anyway, if I didn’t look up he’d never realize I was crying.
But did I get a shock—enough to stop me mid-sob, like I was sucking back the tears, which had mostly been for show anyway.
Because now I saw why Yoji sounded so mad: he was standing in front of a couple who were on a bench next to the swings, no more than a few yards away. The man’s pants were down around his ankles and the woman’s skirt was tucked up to her waist, and they were going at it, right there. No doubt about it, they were doing it. They were bumping uglies, and they didn’t seem to care who saw, much less that Yoji was pissed off. There they were, in broad daylight, on a park bench, almost fully clothed, fucking their brains out. But one look told you this wasn’t some pervert thing they were doing—because the whole time they were going at it, the whole time he kept putting it in and taking it out and putting it in and grinding it all around, they were both crying their eyes out. And the tears had nothing to do with the ones I had just been shedding. They weren’t working themselves up and making themselves cry to make a point about something, the way I had been. You could tell that these tears had come pouring out all by themselves. I could see the difference right away. Because my tears had been fake, and theirs were totally real. Maybe it was because I had just been crying fake tears that I knew the real thing when I saw them.
But shit! If they were doing it in broad daylight on a park bench, why were they crying, real tears or not? It did look kind of cool, kind of out there, to be doing it right in the open like that; but somehow I could tell there was nothing fake or showy about either the tears or the sex. They weren’t exhibitionists—somehow I knew that right off the bat. They were crying because they couldn’t stop from crying, and they were fucking because they couldn’t keep from fucking. Of course they were. If they weren’t, why did they go on doing it—crying and fucking—even when Yoji went right up and told them to stop?
I gave a little rub to my cheeks—but the fake tears had dried in no time.
“I said cut it out!” Yoji said, whipping out his cell phone. “I’m really going to call the cops.” I hauled myself up off the pink bear and went over to him.
By this time, the guy had started moaning, but the woman looked up and murmured, “Go ahead, call them. Do whatever you want. It doesn’t matter.” We could see everything now, the skin and pubs rubbing together between the rolled-up skirt and the pulled-down pants, and hear the sound—gucha gucha, chappo chappo. There was something so sad about it that I started feeling miserable again, but in a whole different way.
“I’m not kidding,” Yoji said, starting to punch buttons on his phone. “I’m really calling them.” So I reached around from behind and grabbed it out of his hand.
“Hey!” he shouted. “Give it back, Katsura. This is disgusting. What if some kids were to walk by?” But I didn’t give it back. Instead, I just stood there, looking at their crying faces and their plastered-together parts. “Give it back,” he repeated.
I knew who they were: Takaaki and Sayaka Yoshiba. They’d had three sons, triplets named Shin’ichi, Koji, and Yuzo, and all three boys had been killed by someone who called himself the Round-and-Round Devil. The bodies had been completely dismembered—arms, legs, and heads cut off—and the pieces had been left along the banks of the Tama River. The Round-and-Round Devil was still at large.
So even if this didn’t exactly give them the right to sit on a park bench bawling—and balling—it seemed only fair, to me anyway, that we should let them go at it, at least for a while longer. These were real tears, and if they couldn’t stop themselves from fucking while they were crying them, then so be it. At least that’s the way I felt about it.
And they did seem pretty much determined to keep at it for the time being, but just as Yoji was about to interrupt them again, things got even weirder. A guy appeared out of nowhere, ran up to the bench, stared down at the couple, did this dramatic kind of double take—“Whooooa”—and stood there with this bizarre look on his face. But it wasn’t just his look that was weird—it was everything about him. He was wearing a pink polo shirt tucked into chinos. A little Hello Kitty doll hung off his backpack. He was pale as a ghost and wore these big glasses that were almost covered by long bangs. And he had on this really weird hat. The whole effect was gross—like that disgusting guy on TV, Bondo Oki. I was beginning to think it was something about this park.
But almost as soon as he appeared, the woman, who had seemed completely hot for it until that moment, suddenly pulled away from her husband and rolled down her skirt—I assumed she must know the weird guy somehow. And then the man, Mr. Yoshiba, began slowly pulling up his pants, though he still had a hard-on, and when he was decent again, he got up and walked away without saying a word.
But the Bondo guy was all squirmy and giggly. “Sorry,” he said. “Did I interrupt something?” Then he turned to the woman, apologized again, and ran out of the park, his long hair and Hello Kitty doll bouncing all the way.
By this time Yoji and I were pretty freaked out, so we turned around and headed back ourselves.
WTF.
I remembered I had been crying, but I couldn’t remember why anymore.
Why should I when the tears weren’t even real?
6
The Yoshibas live right near me. You go a little north until you hit the Nogawa River, turn left and follow the bank for about five minutes, then down this little alley. It’s right there. The whole place was crawling with media until just recently, clogging up the streets with cars and bikes and nosy neighbors and gawkers. It was a regular madhouse. But that was over now. It’d been more than two months since the Round-and-Round Devil kidnapped little Shin’ichi, Koji, and Yuzo, cut them up, and dumped them in a heap by the river. Since then, a slasher in Nigata Prefecture had run through a shopping center stabbing everyone in sight. He managed to kill seven people and wound five more before heading for the hills. Everybody was really tense for a week or so until they found his body—he had committed suicide. And then there were the three families living tooth-to-jowl in Tottori Prefecture. A three-way feud that had been simmering for more than a decade boiled over one night. Weapons of choice: ki
tchen knives, hatchets, aluminum bats, lead pipes. Casualty count: four dead, twelve seriously injured. Afterwards, there was an even bigger stink in the village when they found out that the whole thing had been stirred up by a woman who wasn’t even related to any of the three families. She took off out of the village, and the media followed her with helicopters and everything, and in the end just about everybody in Japan was watching the chase on live TV—and nobody even seemed to remember the mass murderer in our neighborhood anymore.
But to get back to my story, in the two years leading up to the Round-and-Round Devil killing the boys, he had apparently killed seven cats and four dogs—maybe more—and left notes by the bodies, labeling them “Souvenirs of a Visit from the Round-and-Round Devil.” There were even little pictures with some of them—supposedly drawn by the Monster himself. I’m not sure what they showed, but they said they were these weird whirlpool shapes. Shit, it was all just copycat stuff, riffing off those notes about the “Bamoidoki God” left by that Sakakibara kid who cut off that little boy’s head, or that other killer who called himself the “Jawakutora God.”
You shouldn’t go stealing other people’s gods.
But then isn’t all religion a matter of stealing in the first place?
The “religious spirit”—a big rip-off?
It’s all about losers, big zeros who suddenly panic and figure they’ve got to find something to go nuts over, so they look around everywhere and they see other losers praying their guts out to the sky or a cross or some statue, and they figure “Shit! That looks good” and they end up doing the same thing—that’s all religion is, deep down. Then there’s missionary work—spreading the Good News—which is even worse. You go out and find other frustrated, pathetic fuckers and sell them the same crap, tell them to pray to the same whatever until they’re dead. But you know, I don’t really give a shit what people do—fool each other, copy each other, even help each other; as long as they don’t bug other people, it’s all good with me. But when it comes to these really pathetic bastards who use a bogus religion or their “principles” or “ideology” as an excuse to kill cats or dogs or little kids—well they can just fuck off and die.
So as for the creep who calls himself the Round-and-Round Devil…well, you pretty much know what he can do.
The little notes he left—those were totally like his calling card: like, “Round-and-Round Devil man was here!” But what the hell were those stupid whirlpool drawings? Self-fucking-portraits? So then maybe he isn’t even human. But of course he’s human, so what we’ve really got is a killer who is some sort of immature child, completely fucked up in the head and unable to tell the difference between this bogus Round-and-Round Devil god and the (human) idiot who made him up and worships him—an idiot who can’t tell the difference between subject and object.
Or maybe just a kid.
These days it always turns out to be kids who do really wacked-out shit. Almost like it’s some kind of fad. Come to think of it, killers do seem to be pretty fashion conscious, in their own way. When they’re thinking of murdering somebody, I bet they go through all the possible ways and think, Well, that’s totally last week, or That’s definitely trending, or That’s going to be all the rage this fall. They need a fashion sense to sniff out the season’s coolest way to kill.
My brother told me that in the old days murderers didn’t usually cut up bodies. In those days, when you cut up a body it was because you wanted a lot of pieces to scatter around in places where a lot of people could see them. You didn’t cut up a body with the idea of keeping the murder a secret. But then someone discovered that cutting up a body made it easier to carry it away and bury it, and then a lot of people caught on and everybody started doing it. A fad, in other words.
Now you’ve got all these morons with their made-up gods—of course all gods are made up—and murdering children in their name in totally gross ways, and it doesn’t look like that fad is going away anytime soon. It’s starting to get annoying. All these sick fucks who kill for their god. And just because the killers happen to be kids this time, that doesn’t mean it’s going to make it seem all new and fresh, at least not for long it isn’t. In fact, I’m way over them already. Drop dead, you fuckers. Who gives a fuck about you or your little monster gods? And anybody who thinks they’re cute or funny or interesting can go to hell right along with them, right now.
And I’m not the only one who feels this way. That “Voice of Heaven” group that formed during the Sakakibara bullshit has been trying to find out who the Round-and-Round Devil is and get someone to kill him. As soon as the news came out, they started a campaign on their blog to “Flush the Round-and-Round Turd Down the Toilet.” They even collected signatures of supporters and a whole lot of money for a legal defense fund for any hero who managed to off the asshole. Pretty cool. I hope someone does flush the Round-and-Round Turd straight down the crapper, and soon. I mean it, because just about everybody is sick as hell of his bullshit self.
Yoji and I were walking back from the playground, and I was thinking about all this stuff, thinking how these mass-murderer assholes never gave up. Then Yoji interrupted to tell me the latest.
“Did you hear that those Voice of Heaven guys have been middling in Chofu?”
“Middling?”
“It means ‘grab every middle school kid you see and beat the hell out of him.’ ”
“You’re kidding.”
“They’re convinced the Round-and-Round Devil is a middle school kid, and they say they want to smoke him out, like you smoke an animal out of its hole.”
“I don’t get it.”
“It’s a threat—they’re telling the middle school kids that if they don’t find out which one of them is the Round-and-Round Devil and hand him over soon, they’re all going to get it.”
“But how do they know for sure he’s in middle school?”
“They don’t. But they don’t care. That’s the way Voice of Heaven operates. They jump to conclusions and then run with them.”
“You’re serious?”
“Unfortunately, yes. The ones doing the beating are these big airhead V of H bruisers, egged on by the little scrawny computer geeks who’ve never been in a fight in their lives. But the ones getting the crap beat out of them are just regular middle school kids. I bet they have no idea what hit them. Think how they must feel when suddenly, out of the blue, somebody starts pounding on them. And it’s happening all over Chofu.”
“For real?” I said.
“For real,” said Yoji.
“But I suppose that’s just the way of the world.”
“Not my world. I don’t think we should take it lying down.”
“Maybe not, but what can we do about it?”
“Fight back—beat up anybody we meet who’s been ‘middling.’ ”
I guess I could see his point. But now that I’d seen the Yoshibas crying and doing it like that, I knew that fighting back wasn’t always the answer. There was something to be said for just giving up, just saying fuck it and letting things slide for a while to see how they develop. Just maybe, doing nothing might turn out to be the best thing, might even be the thing that catches the Round-and-Round Devil. I suggested this to Yoji.
“Don’t be an idiot, Katsura,” he said. “We’ve got to do something. Those Voice of Heaven thugs are hurting people. They’re too anxious to get results. They’re pissed off, and even though they don’t really know who they’re pissed off at they just can’t stand it, so they go around picking on whomever they choose, almost at random. But it’s nothing but a diversion. And they’ll never catch the Round-and-Round like that.”
“You’re right, I guess.” There was, of course, something in what Yoji was saying. On the other hand, they were at least doing something, and I didn’t feel like criticizing anybody who was actually trying to bring down the Monster. Let them give it a try, I thought, even
if their method was full of shit. It was better than doing nothing. Though I did feel bad for the middle school kids who were getting beat up.
After that, we walked along for a while without saying much. I was feeling a little bad that the poor Yoshibas’ consolation fuck had been interrupted back there. They didn’t seem to have much of anything left, so why shouldn’t they fuck their brains out? On the other hand, there was something screwy—if you’ll pardon the pun—about doing it right there on the little playground. So maybe Yoji had been right to try to stop them. Or not? Which was really better for them? If it was me and I was really horny, then I guess I’d rather they let me go on and do it. But I had to admit, to an outside observer it sure looked like it hurt more than it helped—what with all that crying and all.
Yoji seemed to be more worried about some hypothetical kid who might show up at the park than about the Yoshibas, which is why he tried to stop them. And of course he was right. Still, he could have shown a little more consideration for the unhappy couple.
Though that’s probably totally wrong. You can’t do it right out in the open like that, cock and twat to the wind. Makes a bad impression on the minds of our youth. Not to mention any adult who happens by. I mean, who wouldn’t be messed up by seeing something that sad? Two grown people, fucking their heads off and crying their eyes out.
Still, you had to feel sorry for them. Totally sad sex brought on by a totally sad situation—so why not at least let them finish?
Sure you should. But then another thought occurred to me: the Yoshibas had lost their kids under the grossest, most totally terrible circumstances, but maybe out of that horribleness some new kind of sex had been born. Almost like holding all that sadness in your arms and fucking the sadness itself. Sex born out of the death of children. I know it sounds bad when you put it like that, but sex that makes use of pain.
