by KJ Charles
Or had I?
A horrible thought flashed into my consciousness. Taka.
If this mess had happened a year ago, I’d have been on the phone to Taka right now. I couldn’t think of anyone better qualified to get me out of trouble. Except that he’d been getting steadily more unreliable, his drug-fuelled eccentricities more and more alarming, his already shady morals more and more flexible. The Karaoke Incident had crossed the fine line between eccentricity and insanity, and accelerated away into the distance, and the sequel to that had made me stop talking to him for good.
After the Incident, the manager of the karaoke box place had been seriously pissed off, audibly debating with himself whether to call the police or just have someone break Taka’s legs. Yoshi had intervened on his behalf, as he’d been doing for years, pleading with me to help him out from the panic fund. Reluctantly, I’d paid up and given Taka my bank details so he could return the money, and he had, and then a month after that I’d needed a bit of extra cash, got declined at the cashpoint, and discovered that, God alone knows how, he’d emptied my account completely.
He’d needed the money urgently for a big deal that would get him back on his feet financially, he’d explained in injured tones as I screamed abuse at him. And of course he hadn’t asked me—what would have been the point? I’d just have said no.
He had, to be fair, paid me back in full two days later, and promised not to do it again, as though that meant anything, and I had promptly changed all my account details. I also hadn’t spoken to him since. And after a couple of months, I’d stopped obsessively checking my balance.
What if he’d found a way to get at it again?
In the time it took me to type my PIN into the keypad, I’d already imagined the scenario in full. Stranded in rural Japan, current account empty, nowhere to go as the yakuza closed in…
I was mentally damning his ancestors when the healthy balance flashed up on the screen. The relief was overwhelming, and it set off a hopeful little voice in my head.
Maybe he has cleaned up, like Yoshi says, it said. Maybe you should call him. Maybe he could get you a passport.
Maybe I was in quite enough trouble already.
Someone was waiting behind me for the machine. I got out a wodge of ten-thousand-yen notes from my current account and then went on a mission to shop.
I decided on the way that the OL look had probably served its purpose for the time. It had been mostly business people on the train, and OL was the diametric opposite of the hostess look, so they might well guess it was what I was sporting.
In Tokyo I’d have gone Shibuya-style—bought myself an orange fright wig and some blue lipstick, a pair of six-inch glittery platform boots and a skirt shorter than my knickers, and you wouldn’t have been able to tell me from a thousand other girls. Somehow I didn’t think that would work in the provinces. I needed to keep my dark glasses if I was turning Japanese—again, in Tokyo, I could have so easily, so anonymously, bought myself a pair of ready-made dark-tinted contact lenses and made my eyes less of a problem. Could I do that here? No chance.
I hate being out of the city. If I hadn’t panicked, been rushed into leaving, I could have gone to ground in Tokyo effortlessly. Had Mama-san sent me here on that train deliberately?
Concentrate, woman. I shopped quickly, keeping the purchases small and unmemorable, including a large bag into which I transferred my goods. I picked up an orange handbag and a decent shoulder bag in dull red leather, and then I went into the toilets at a mall to change, and dump my original bags.
An OL went in to the toilets. A student came out.
The night work and smoke haven’t been kind to my skin, but I don’t sunbathe and I use very expensive moisturiser, so I figured I could knock a few years off my age without it being too obvious. Brown, low-heeled suede boots, big orange cardigan, fussy blouse, floaty scarf, calf-length brown coat, dangly earrings, unflattering pale pink lipstick, big Yoko Ono sunglasses, book poking out of bag. I’d have liked a wig too, but I didn’t want to risk getting one in case they thought to ask at wig shops. My hair was so expensively cut that it was hard to make it look frumpy, but I put a couple of cheap clips in at awkward angles and there I was—an earnest student, probably coming up to her final exams, and dull as ditchwater.
I put the big bag in a storage locker at the mall, packed my shoulder bag and headed out to a public bathhouse.
Almost everyone has their own bathroom now, of course, but the tradition of the public shared bath is still very important in Japan, and any town will offer one. The nicest are built over natural hot springs, and this was one of those. I ducked through the curtains on the women’s side, paid my few hundred yen and went into the changing room.
It was early yet, and there were just a couple of old ladies gossiping, stripped down to their beige support hose and cantilevered bras. I muttered a greeting that went mostly unheard under their gossip, and kept my ears out for local speech as I undressed. I needed to make sure the nasal Tokyo accent didn’t give me away.
I cleaned off the nail polish first, then plonked my newly acquired soap and shampoo into a plastic basin and carried it to one of the many waist-high shower points round the bath that took up most of the tiled room. (You wash yourself thoroughly before you get in the communal bath, which is for soaking and relaxing.) I sat heavily on a plastic stool, realising suddenly how tired my legs were.
God, it was good to wash. I scrubbed and scrubbed, getting the smoke and alcohol, the sweat, the fear and guilt off my skin. I washed my hair twice and rubbed shampoo into my eyebrows to get rid of the mascara, which would inevitably run in the sauna-like heat—I’d redo them after my bath, then get a tint from the pharmacy. What a waste of a bleach job. Once I was clean down to the bone, I lowered myself cautiously into the scorching bath, keeping my eyes down to avoid catching anyone’s gaze, and luxuriated in the heat of the mineral-rich water, letting it soothe my aching muscles. It was too hot for me to fall asleep, but I stood it as long as I could, emptying my mind and letting out the panic and adrenaline before rinsing off the minerals with cold water.
Clean, re-eyebrowed, my hair dried into a thoroughly drab, flat style, I emerged from the bath a new woman, albeit one who still had yakuza after her.
It didn’t feel that bad after a while, probably because I was too tired to panic properly. I found the student hang-out area, where I fitted in so well that someone asked me about lecture times, went to a tiny shack where I stuffed myself on miso ramen with spicy pork and plenty of chilli oil, and wondered if I had really needed to be so paranoid. Would they honestly send some huge team all this way to find someone who probably wasn’t involved? Kelly’s lies could be convincing, I knew, since she had a way of persuading herself something was true, so that there were no telltale giveaways in her body language or tone. I was sure she’d believe by now that she’d never done anything to Mitsuyoshi-san, and maybe that conviction was ringing in her voice and giving the yakuza pause, but hell, she’d been packed to run.
I’d more or less decided that the men on the train had been a precaution and that I wasn’t worth tracking so far when my phone rang.
It was a Tokyo landline number I didn’t recognise. “Moshi-moshi.”
“Kechan?”
“Yoshi.” I felt like kissing the phone. “It’s so good to hear you!”
“Are you okay?”
“Yes, fine, but listen—”
“No, Kechan, please listen to me first—”
“Yoshi, just listen, will you? Noriko mustn’t go back to the flat.” I started walking across a small square to avoid being overheard. “Mama-san gave those people my address—”
“Kechan—”
“—she could stay with you, maybe, but till this is sorted—”
“Shut up!”
Yoshi was never rude. His shout cut my breath off in my throat.
“I’m sorry,” he added more quietly, and I suddenly registered the strain in his voice. “But you
have to listen. I— Oh, this is bad, so bad.” He sounded like he was crying.
“Yoshi?”
“It’s Noriko. They got her already.”
It felt like a punch in the stomach. “Got her?”
“I guess they went to your flat. I didn’t think— I went this morning. I found—” He sniffed hard. “They raped her. More than once. Three, four times, maybe. And they hit her head, kicked it. She’s in the hospital, in a coma. They think she probably has brain damage.”
I found that I was sitting on a bench. I couldn’t breathe, and my mouth was pulled open and distorted with the pain.
“Oh, Jesus Christ. Why? Why? She didn’t do anything! I didn’t do anything, and all she did was live with me and—oh my God.” It hurt so much. I had my free arm clutching my stomach, and I was rocking back and forth on the bench like a crazy woman.
“What is going on, Kechan?” demanded Yoshi rawly. “Why are the yaks after you?”
“Are you sure it was them who attacked her?” I whispered.
“No, maybe it was just a coincidence! She was unconscious when I found her, and they’d wrecked the place, and nobody saw anything they’re going to tell the police about. It was them.”
I wiped the tears from my eyes with the back of my hand. My throat was painfully constricted, and there were deep, wrenching sobs waiting to come, but not yet.
“It was that bitch Kelly at the bar,” I said, trying to keep control, and I told him briefly what had happened, how Kelly had set me up to confuse her trail.
“So why did she attack the old man?”
“Don’t know. Maybe she agreed a price with him, then couldn’t go through with it—or never planned to. Maybe she always meant to hit him, take the money and run.”
“It must have been an awful lot of money, then,” said Yoshi dubiously. “You couldn’t run far enough after doing that to a yakuza boss. And they’re after you just in case you might be involved?” He sounded incredulous. “They did—that—to Noriko just in case?”
I wanted to be sick. “I’m so sorry, Yoshi.”
“It wasn’t you.” His voice was furious. “It wasn’t your fault. Those people. That stupid woman. Kechan, why are you still in Japan? Get out, just go, and—”
“I can’t.”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“No, I mean I can’t. I don’t have my passport or ID.”
Silence.
“I told Noriko—”
“I know you did.”
“Hell,” said Yoshi explosively. “She’s so useless—”
He cut himself off, and I dug my teeth into my lip to keep from weeping. Noriko was indeed useless, absolutely and absurdly useless. In the three minutes it took to make cup noodles, she would forget she’d put them on and order pizza, and before that had time to arrive she’d have heard the gyoza van on the street and run down for fresh dumplings instead, then would look adorably confused when the pizza-delivery boy appeared. We’d never understood how she held down a job.
Raped three or four times. Kicked in the head. Coma.
“Maybe I can go to the flat and find your things—” Yoshi began.
“Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare do anything so stupid, do you think I can bear to have something happen to you too? I’ll just stay low. It’ll be fine.”
“Where are you?”
“Nagano.”
“Why?”
I told him about the train and Mama-san’s betrayal, and dug my nails into my palms as I spoke. Yoshi was silent for several seconds, and when he spoke it was very slowly and carefully.
“You’ve been there for several hours? In the open? And you answered your phone? Kechan, you idiot, get rid of it, turn it off. Buy another, a pay-as-you-go, and text me the number. You aren’t fit to be out. And where are you going now?”
“I thought I’d stay here. Why should—”
“Stay? Don’t be a fool.”
“Where should I go, then? I’ve made myself look different. I don’t know anywhere and I want to stick to big cities and this is countryside hell!”
“Ssh. You’re shouting. Um. Let me call you back, okay? But go buy another phone.”
He hung up. I stared at my lovely slim phone and wondered what he was talking about. They couldn’t trace mobile calls, could they?
I’d been checking around me as we spoke, looking for goons, and though I’d seen none, I was feeling very cold and small and numb all over. I headed over to the temple, Zenkoji, which was crowded with tourists even in this unpromising season. I dare say it’s very nice; I wasn’t really in the mood for sightseeing. I went to the shrine, and threw in five hundred yen and clapped my hands to get the gods’ attention, but I couldn’t think of anything to say to them.
I’d been sitting in the sharp wind with Noriko’s luck gripped in my hand, staring at the fluttering white flags for some time, when my mobile rang. It was Yoshi again.
“Listen, I’ve been thinking,” I said before he could begin. “Mama-san said not to go to the police, but surely they can’t expect to keep this quiet. I’m going to call. Tell them about Kelly and Noriko and the old man.” I’d doubtless get kicked out of the country afterwards under the moral turpitude laws, not to mention a few others, and I’d need to warn the Primrose Path girls, but the idea of those goons and Noriko, and of them getting away with it unpunished, was like a ball of acid in my gut.
“Don’t be stupid.” Yoshi’s voice was urgent. “If they aren’t saying the old man was murdered, it’ll be a nightmare to make anyone listen to you. Think about it. Kelly’s not around, the family will be denying anything wrong, you’d have to spend hours in a police station telling your story over and over, and how long do you think it would take the family to find out where you were?”
“Oh, come on,” I said uneasily. “It’s not the fifties any more—”
“Dead yakuza boss.” Yoshi stressed every syllable hard. “You think the family won’t be calling in every favour from every dodgy cop in town? If your name shows up on any database— You can’t risk it. Just stay out of sight till this gets sorted out, Kechan. It can’t be long.”
“But Noriko—”
“Going to the police won’t help her now. When she’s better, when you’re safe, then we’ll talk about it.”
I knew what that meant. “We’re going to keep quiet? Let them get away with this?”
“Well, what are we going to do about it?” he snapped. “Tell the police we think yakuza attacked Noriko because her illegal friend’s gaijin hostess colleague might have killed someone whose death hasn’t been reported as a murder? Hope they do DNA tests on the whole Mitsuyoshi-kai on our say-so? What have we got?”
“But—”
“Damn it, Kechan. If you grass them up now, you’re not only telling them where you are, you’re giving them more reason to go after you.” Yoshi wasn’t letting me get a word in. “They’ll want you twice as much. You cannot let the police know who or where you are. You can’t trust anyone. Understand?”
“So what the hell do I do then?”
“Just stay calm. Listen, I’ve talked to Taka—”
“Oh, bloody hell!”
I should have known. I’d had to stop myself calling Taka, even knowing that he was a dangerous nutcase. Yoshi had hero-worshipped him since they’d ended up sitting next to each other at school, after Yoshi had been moved up two classes because he was so bright, and Taka had been forced to repeat a year after failing to turn up for any exams. Yoshi was shy, reserved and painfully correct, and he looked with awe on Taka’s disregard for convention or manners or basic safety precautions. He’d have turned to him without thinking.
Yoshi knew exactly how I felt about Taka. “I’m staying at his place,” he said, a bit defensively. “While this is all going on.”
“Why?”
“I’m your personal contact, Kechan. You have me down in the bar records as the person to call in case of problems. I thought they might come to me.”
&
nbsp; I felt sick. “Oh, no. Oh, Yoshi, I’m so sorry—”
“Taka’s sending someone to help you. You need to do what he says and stay out of sight. Okay? The word is chanko.”
“The what?”
“The word. The password, maybe? I don’t know, that’s what he said.”
“I don’t have time for Taka’s shit right now!”
“Ssh. He says you should go to Matsumoto, be there tomorrow morning by ten thirty. Wait by the bridge at the castle entrance.”
“Castle? Bridge?”
“You’ll find it,” Yoshi said. “Kechan, please. I know you’re a bit annoyed with Taka, but he knows how to deal with this sort of situation.”
Yoshi sounded exhausted. I bit my tongue against the words I wanted to say and asked instead, “Are you okay?”
“Fine, sure, yes. No. No, not really. I lost my job.”
“What?”
“That big project, remember? I didn’t turn up today because I was in the hospital with Nori-chan, and I didn’t call till lunchtime, and then I rang to say I couldn’t go in tomorrow—because I’m scared, Kechan, I’m scared they’re looking for me too to get to you, I’m scared they know where I live and where I work. And—and they fired me.”
“They can’t do that.”
“Yes, they can. Short-term contract. And this project—we missed a deadline today because I wasn’t there. I let everyone down.”
“No. You had to be with Noriko—”
“I needed to be with her this morning when they did those things to her. I let her down, and then I let my company down, and— Just go to Matsumoto and let Taka’s friend help you. Please.”
“I’ll go,” I said.
A small part of my brain was wondering just how bad an idea this would be. Matsumoto was the place with the airport; if they were watching at all, it would be there. And God alone knew what Taka would be sending my way. He was involved in the amphetamine trade, which meant he kept some pretty odd company. His friends might not be yakuza, but I still wouldn’t want to owe them any favours.
