Man with No Name: A Nanashi Novella

by Laird Barron

  The fans loved it.

  Father to numerous children, he’d married several times, most recently to a much younger American woman, an actress named Susan Stucky who hadn’t acted in half a decade. An odd couple to be sure. The tabloids claimed they’d met when he rescued her from drowning at a casting party in Beverly Hills. She was floating face down near the bottom of a swimming pool and he’d dragged her out and revived her.

  Everybody knew Muzaki the way everybody knew Ali or Pele. He was an institution and unlike a lot of other superstar athletes, he'd managed his money wisely and retired a wealthy man. He'd opened a chain of mixed martial arts gymnasiums, sporting goods stores, and invested in numerous nightclubs and warehouse properties. Muzaki's greatest and worst kept secret to financial success was his affiliation with the Dragon syndicate, number one rival of the Heron Clan. Muzaki, despite his waning celebrity, remained a sentimental investment of Miyami Tanaka, the Dragons' inestimable socho.

  “Wait here,” Nanashi said at the door, nodding at the crazy brothers. “Both of you.”

  “Huh?” Mizo thrust his chin forward. “Uncle Nobukazu said--”

  “Wait here and watch the door.”

  “Why?” said Jiki.

  “Because somebody has to do it.”

  “You watch the door, then.”

  “Shut up and watch the door,” Koma said.

  “What for?”

  “Keep a lookout in case Tanaka's boys show up or something,” Koma said. Of course, a bunch of Tanaka's boys could already be inside since the gym was a favorite hangout of Dragon foot soldiers, many of whom worshipped Muzaki like a god.

  Jiki didn’t say anything, just folded his arms in sullen resignation. Mizo rubbed his mouth. His cheeks became red. “Me and Jiki didn't come here to stand around while you guys --”

  “Shut up,” Koma said. He brushed past and went inside.

  Muzaki stood to greet Koma. They shook hands and exchanged pleasantries and Muzaki introduced the other men at the table -- a fight promoter, a lawyer, and a couple of trainers; nobody of importance. Nanashi hung back and watched them. He recognized Muzaki from the pictures and the old fight clips. The old man had gone to seed, but remained an impressive figure nonetheless. Squat as a fireplug, yet inordinately broad, his knuckles brushed his knees. There was a whole lot of muscle under all that flab. Koma, who'd grown rather stout himself, resembled a child by comparison.

  Haru and Amida sidled next to Nanashi.

  Haru said with the corner of his mouth, “You ever see his wife? The American? Oh boy. Oh man.”

  “The actress?” Amida said. “She’s dead.”

  “No, she’s alive. Susan something. Susan Stucky.”

  “Well, she doesn’t act anymore. What was she in?”

  “Lots of things.”

  “Yeah, but there was that one flick. Damn it, what was it called?”

  “The gangster movie? The one where the Mafia blew her up on the yacht? There’s a tragedy. What a waste. That two piece white bikini she ran around in almost gave me a heart attack.”

  “She was an ice bitch.”

  “Oh yeah. Oh boy.”

  “That big ugly bastard is hitting that? I am in the wrong business.”

  Muzaki swiveled his lumpy head their direction as if he’d caught their whispers.

  “Man, he's big,” Amida said. “My father swore he was in Osaka the night Muzaki broke Ostreshinger's back. I wonder if I can get his autograph.”

  “Sure you can,” Haru said. “Didn't he kill the German? I thought he did. It was in the papers.”

  “No, no. Muzaki just hurt him. Ostreshinger was in a wheelchair for a few years. He died in a home. Respiratory failure.”

  “Exactly. Which was courtesy of Muzaki fucking him up, right? So, Muzaki killed him.”

  “If you look at it that way, yeah. Muzaki killed the shit out of that German. Kind of sad. If he hadn't killed the guy, he probably wouldn't have retired so soon after.”

  “You think Muzaki retired because he felt guilty over what happened?” Haru shook his head. “No way. Who cares what happens to one of those bastards? It was business. Muzaki got out because he was becoming a slob. Look at him over there.”

  “I'm looking, believe me. How are we gonna get him in the car?”

  “It's not like we're gonna stuff him in the trunk.”

  “We're not? Oh, good.”

  “Anyway, we got an axe.”

  In the end Muzaki smiled hugely and came along, docile as could be. Nanashi, whose job description included fretting over such details, didn’t like it at all.

  * * *

  Koma drove inland. The day was bright and warm. Nanashi sat on the front passenger side, angled so he could see the rearview mirror. Haru and Muzaki sat in back. Mizo, Jiki, and Amida paced them in the second car.

  “Is it far?” Muzaki said as the city eventually dropped from sight behind them and they crossed mile after mile of rice and bean fields. “If it's far, you should know I've got a kidney problem.” He shifted his bulk uncomfortably.

  “It's far,” Koma said. He drove fast, pedal to the floorboard when traffic allowed. Koma was a formula car nut. He seemed to think he'd watched enough grand prix' s to drive like Hakkinen or Schumacher.

  “Ah. About my kidneys --”

  “You can go in this,” Koma said, swishing the remnants of a liter bottle of cola.

  “Don't worry, Muzaki-san,” Haru said. “We'll stop along the way. Koma has his own kidney problems and there's only one bottle, right?”

  “I should've made you ride with the mongoloid twins,” Koma said. “Let's have some music.” He turned on the radio and began fiddling with the dial.

  A black cloud swooped in directly overhead and blocked out the sun. Rain pinged from the windows and obliterated the highway markings.

  “Haru says you are a fighter,” Muzaki said.

  “Eh? Me?” Nanashi startled, realizing the big man was speaking to him. “Not really. I'm too old.”

  “Too old?”

  “I'm thirty-three.”

  “That isn't so bad. Not if you're tough.”

  “When I was a boy I trained in a dojo, that's all.”

  They regarded each other in the mirror. Muzaki's features were brutish and scarred. His skull was shaped like an anvil. His ears had contracted to small, fleshy knobs. His nose was a deflated bump of impacted cartilage. He reached forward and grasped Nanashi's shoulder and squeezed. The power in his hand was enough to make Nanashi queasy.

  Muzaki said, “But you still train. You're built like a good, sturdy light-heavyweight. You've never been in the ring?”

  “No. I trained for…habit, I guess.” Nanashi lit another cigarette to cover his unease. He'd seen enough clips of Muzaki strangling his hapless foes. Muzaki was famous for hip throws and sleeper holds. "The Savage" had been one of his many ring names. He'd dressed in bear skins, on occasion. Real skins.

  “Habit?” Muzaki settled and the entire rear seat creaked beneath his weight. “May I have a cigarette?”

  “Say, Muzaki-san, have one of my mine.” Haru reached inside his coat.

  “No, thank you. Nanashi?”

  Nanashi turned awkwardly in his seat and handed Muzaki a cigarette. Haru quickly lighted it for Muzaki.

  “Thank you.” Muzaki coughed a bit. “Ack. It's been years since I smoked one of these.

  “Why start up again?” Nanashi said.

  “Isn't it tradition for the condemned to get a last cigarette?”

  “Don't be so melancholy,” Koma said. “We're just going for a ride. Jesus.”

  “Yes. Where is this place, again?”

  “Inland,” Koma gestured vaguely.

  “Inland…” Muzaki nodded to himself.

  “In the mountains. We'll stay at the lodge tonight.”

  “Oh?”

  “You'll enjoy it,” Haru said. “It's nice. I take Koma's girlfriend there all the time.”

  “Hey! Watch your mouth!�
� Koma said over his shoulder and almost swerved into the ditch. Haru chuckled and slipped a set of headphones over his ears.

  A chill crept into the car despite their mingled breath and cigarette smoke. Cold air rushed through the vent and over Nanashi's knees. They glided among hills. Every piece of landscape lay abstracted by water rushing over the windshield. Koma engaged the headlights and it was as if they were driving into an endless tunnel. Nanashi remembered killing ants as a boy with his brother's Swiss Army knife -- first with the magnifying glass, then the blade. He'd poured water into their nests, watched black torrents of workers and soldiers tumbling in the rivulets. He envisioned God's thumb poised over the Cadillac.

  Late in the afternoon, they left the highway and followed a single lane along a fast-moving stream that had carved a gorge of black stones and flint-ribbed cliffs over the aeons. Rushes swirled along the cut-banks where the churn and froth subsided to misty vapor. Bamboo trees swayed, and the shadows of bamboo trees swayed also, and when Koma stopped the car so Haru could snap a few photographs of the waterfalls, Nanashi went to the edge of the road and stared down into the gulf of trees and bushes and rocks. The rain had slackened to a drizzle. His hair hung lank across his eyes; his tie drooped, a sodden cord.

  Birds called angrily from the forest depths. Or ghosts made angry bird cries from the forest depths, urging trespassers to turn away, to make for the well-traveled roads, the safety of highway markings, telephone poles and lights, the comfort of multitudes. Nanashi had come here once before in the tenure of Uncle Kojima, had stood in this very spot on the crumbling precipice while his brethren took photos and smoked cigarettes and passed around hip flasks of brandy, and he'd listened to the strange arboreal chorus. He thought this time there were more voices out there among the trees. He tapped his prosthesis against his silver eyetooth.

  The lodge itself crowded the summit of a butte overlooking the upper falls of the gorge. Matasui Hot Springs was an amalgam of old eastern pagoda and Nineteenth Century French chalet; very rustic and very exclusive. The parking lot notched the hillside; a rusty guardrail demarcated a sheer drop of at least sixty meters. Theirs were the only vehicles in the lot.

  Mossy flagstone steps made a series of switchbacks up to the main building. The seven went single file, Nanashi at the rear. He gripped the slick wooden rail and scanned the road until it dwindled far below into the misty woods. He didn't think they'd been followed, but it paid to be cautious. Powerful forces surrounded Muzaki, after all.

  * * *

  Nanashi disliked the proprietors, an obsequious, elderly couple from Tokyo. The couple presided at the front door with a contingent of young men who fought amongst themselves over a handful of valises and overnight bags the Herons had brought along. Nanashi overheard Haru explain to Muzaki that the Herons owned a significant stake in the lodge. The details were cloudy; Nanashi knew the establishment made a nice honest front for the syndicate, and a terrific place for the bosses to relax and conduct business far from prying eyes in the city. Indeed, the city literally crawled with spies; they scuttled in every nook and cranny, like cockroaches, as Uncle Kojima had said a dozen times a day. He'd been right, too. Old, stately Kojima, collector of walking canes, fingers, and women -- shot ninety-six times by a pair of goons wielding Chinese submachine guns, right there in his own satin sheets on his own enormous bed. What an ignominious end for a modern day warlord.

  The twins were given custody of Muzaki. They flanked him like attack dogs while he inspected the rather expansive foyer as it opened into a common room decorated with plush furniture, bamboo pots, and a stone fireplace already crackling behind ornamental grates. Here and there were marble lamps and apparently authentic statuary (arms and heads were broken off!), and on a carpeted dais, a baby grand piano gleamed like a piece of black ivory. A long, shiny bar formed an L near sliding doors that led onto a patio, which extended beyond the cliff and into open space. Of course, Koma, Amida, and Haru made directly for the bar where a tall, bald man in a silk shirt and suspenders was already lining the counter with shots of whiskey.

  Nanashi stepped out to make a brief tour of the grounds. He followed the crushed stone path around the perimeter of the lodge and several outbuildings. These latter were private bungalows, and all appeared empty, their doors locked and windows shuttered. He peered through the glass, and was greeted by darkness and silence. Behind the central building was a storage shed and a low timber building that snugged into the hill. A sign on the door marked it as the bath house. More paths spiraled from the central axis into the shrubbery. It was rapidly becoming too dim to appraise the situation much further, so he went inside. He selected a table adjacent the terrace and told the unctuous proprietor, who’d slithered over with a bottle and glasses, to away with the booze and fetch him green tea and honey. His companions were enjoying themselves immensely -- they clustered around Muzaki, who seemed to be involved in teaching them a card trick, or passing around a wallet photograph.

  A few minutes later, Jiki and Mizo came over, their captive in tow. “Hey, you watch this guy for a while,” Jiki said, pointing to Muzaki.

  “Yeah,” Mizo said. “We're going to get wasted.”

  Muzaki settled his hulk across from Nanashi. He smiled, cave-like.

  The proprietor returned with tea and poured it for Nanashi and Muzaki and hung around rubbing his hands together entirely too long until Nanashi drew his revolver from its shoulder holster and set it on the table. The proprietor went away.

  “So.” Muzaki sipped his tea. “We wait.”

  Nanashi nodded. He holstered the gun and smoothed his wet hair against his skull.

  Darkness slipped over the land. The rain was back and it had brought the wind. He shivered despite the warmth of the lodge. The guffaws and raucous cries of his comrades at the bar reminded him of the jeering birds, and he felt strangely alone.

  “I like you, Nanashi,” Muzaki said.

  “Thank you. I admire you, as well.” In the awkward silence that followed, Nanashi poured the remainder of the tea. He snapped his fingers at the proprietor, who carefully lurked just beyond eavesdropping vantage. The man scurried to fetch another pot.

  “You’ve seen my fights?”

  “Oh, certainly. My father never missed one. We watched them together.” Nanashi didn’t think about his previous life when he could avoid it. This memory knifed through the fog, the denials, and incised itself upon his mind.

  “Ah. I am glad to hear such things in my declining years,” Muzaki said.

  “In fact, my father was something of a scholar regarding the lives of the great wrestlers. He intended to write a book one day. He studied your biography closely. And the documentary that was done in the 1980s.”

  “Such a bit of nonsense and fluff. I was vainglorious in my youth.”

  “With reason.” Nanashi was impressed with the big man’s recovery from the anxious journey. He appeared altogether more relaxed and collected than his circumstances warranted. The Herons possessed a reputation for casual malice and sadism. Every gang in the land knew of the ghouls Mizo and Jiki, the Terrible Two. Surely Muzaki knew, as well. “How do you come by fearlessness?”

  “Is such a thing possible?”

  “Well, then. How do you come by the illusion of fearlessness? That is arguably a more formidable accomplishment.”

  “Fear arises from the unknown. I now understand my situation perfectly. Besides, I am not truly here in the larger sense. None of us are. I am curious, though. Why is it that most gangsters talk with their mouths closed? All that grunting makes it difficult to understand what they are saying.”

  “Makes them sound tough. Like bad guys in the movies.” Nanashi glanced at his associates--gibbons, snarling and strutting. Saddened, he flicked his gaze toward the darkness beyond the terrace. “It has occurred to me, more and more, that this existence is one of reckless waste. We labor in futility.”

  “Ha! My friend…such a morose comment. And you’re completely sober.”


  “I think we were all better off when I was a happy drunk.”

  “The world adores happy drunks and it deifies fools. Did I not play the buffoon in the ring? No one really loved me until the costumes, the play acting and charades that replaced the real blood and tears of my sacred profession. When I abandoned sport and became a caricature, I ascended unto that most sublime tier of entertainers. I once dressed as a bat, like a luchador. Oh, the agony.”

  Nanashi remembered the bat costume, indeed. And the fake metal chairs used as bludgeons, the fake blows, red dye and caramelized sugar. His father had stopped watching by then, had stuffed his notes and papers into a box and pretended he’d never been particularly interested in the first place.

  “It is strange that you ended up with these thugs,” Muzaki said. “Something wondrous and terrible occurred in your youth.”

  “I was discovered living a vagrant’s life in an alley. Heron family rescued me, redeemed me.”

  “Like baby Moses discovered in his basket. What came before the basket?”

  “I’m the Man with No Name. I drink, brood, kill. The past is immaterial.”

  “Ah. Fuck the past!”

  “Fuck the past!”

  There was a scuffle at the bar. Mizo, red-faced and swearing, clutched Haru’s tie. Haru waved a flip knife. There was laughter as the others pulled them apart and shoved glasses into their hands in an attempt to drown their whiskey-fueled aggression by the counterintuitive method of killing fire with fire. Nanashi said, “The future is unwritten. I could stand and walk through the door and disappear in any direction. Why is that so difficult to remember in the present?”

  “Because death and destruction follow the Man with No Name wherever he goes. This is the natural order of the universe.” Muzaki’s smile was strange. His scars seemed to become more livid and to stretch in discomfiting ways. For a moment, the essential atavism of his countenance was accentuated; its intelligence and humanity, receding into the pits of his eyes.

  Nanashi concentrated on the darkness. “Koma keeps me around because I am steady. I never lose my head when trouble comes.”