by Unknown
Usually Yoshi had no interest in his father’s business, choosing instead to stay in his room and read manga when he wasn’t in school. But this, of course, was entirely different.
Hideyoshi emptied a large plastic container of various knickknacks. “You get her legs,” he instructed his son as they carried the body into the container. It was tight, but she did fit.
Yoshi helped his father mix concrete together and pour it over the body in the container. As if they were preparing a special cake with a surprise inside.
They did everything in the corner of the storage unit in order to be efficient. That way, after the concrete hardened, they could just leave the box there. In the course of five years, four concrete blocks came to occupy different corners of the storage unit. All produced by father and son.
Left alone in his box, Hideyoshi wished he could sleep. But there was no sleeping here. No possibility of escaping through dreams or nightmares.
He touched his chinko, but it just lay there flaccid. Nothing new. He had become impotent over the past several years. It could have been his age or just being in solitary confinement for so long. Atsumi never came to visit him, and even if she had it would have been behind glass. During his trial she dutifully came to court, sitting in the second row. Her face had taken on a strange yellowish tint, and to make it worse she sometimes even wore an ill-fitting yellow sweater. She had stopped coloring her hair and she looked old enough to be his mother, not his wife.
She came to court out of duty, nothing more, nothing less. She didn’t try to divorce him, as her lifetime job was to be his wife. He wondered why she had done the things that she had, both in support of him and against him. He figured out now that she, like Yoshi, was good at following directions. Once she realized that she was the wife of a serial killer, she wore that title the best she could.
A father-son relationship was different than a husband and wife’s, though, right? It was the blood, the ki, that was the extra connection. In spite of sexual relations, Hideyoshi and Atsumi couldn’t really be one. But Yoshi, with his Osumi-ness, was a mirror, a duplicate. When Hideyoshi looked at Yoshi, he gazed at himself.
His son’s absence now was acutely felt, even more than when he was incarcerated. He loved his son. Adored him. He began to cry. No tears came out of his eyes, but he cried nonetheless.
“Psssss. Hideyoshi,” came the voice next to him.
Hideyoshi turned his back to the voice.
“What is causing you so much grief?”
“You are not an Osumi,” Hideyoshi said. As soon as he said it out loud, he knew that it was true.
“I may not officially be an Osumi, but I work on behalf of all Osus. Osumi, Osuna—even some O’Sullivans,” the voice said.
Hideyoshi considered the list of names and was confused.
“Punctuation,” the voice explained. “Damn punctuation.”
“What, is there some kind of union in Hell?”
“Not a union. I’m part of quality control. Making sure each newcomer is properly handled. And something obviously went wrong with you.”
“I’m worried about my son. He should be here with me.”
“Yes, yes,” the voice said. “We are looking into that.”
“What is taking so long?”
Hideyoshi’s last victim was single like the others, but unbeknownst to Hideyoshi, she was a social butterfly. She had taken pictures of various tables and chairs in the store and texted those images to various friends. She wanted them to give her input, let her know which ones would work in her new apartment.
Of course, when the girl went missing, these friends immediately contacted the police. “When did you last see her?” the detectives asked.
“We were supposed to meet for dinner that Wednesday evening,” the teary-eyed women reported, “but she never showed up. She did text us some photos from a used furniture shop. That’s the last time we heard from her.”
The detectives thus paid Hideyoshi a visit. He was surprised to see that the lead detective was the same female who had come by when Chie Toyama had disappeared. Instead of the bowl cut, her hair had grown out and was layered, wispy at the ends. He pretended that he didn’t recognize her and she did the same with him. Hideyoshi considered it a very bad sign that she didn’t reference their first meeting.
“Do you recognize this woman?” The detective showed a color image of a woman with caramel-colored hair. In the photo, she had bangs; they had since grown out.
“Hmmm,” Hideyoshi said. “She may have come through the store. I don’t believe she bought anything.”
“A lot of women seem to frequent your store, Mr. Osumi,” the female detective said.
“Well, of course. I sell items for the house. That would mean female customers.”
Yoshi was called into the living room next. As he walked in, it was as if Hideyoshi was seeing him for the first time. Yoshi had become tall and lanky with a protruding Adam’s apple and a shock of thick black hair. Before, he usually mumbled and looked down when he spoke to strangers. But that was not the case now. At age twenty-one, with four murders under his belt, he had become more confident, self-assured.
Hideyoshi went upstairs during the interview, stuck in the same bedroom as Atsumi.
“It’s the same woman detective that came that day. The time when Chie Toyama went missing,” Atsumi observed.
It surprised Hideyoshi that Atsumi had remembered the first victim’s name.
“I didn’t realize your memory was so sharp,” Hideyoshi commented. He pretended to read a book on strategy related to the game of go.
“Surely Yoshi had nothing to do with that missing girl.”
“He was only twelve,” Hideyoshi commented.
“No, I mean this girl, the one the police are here about.”
Hideyoshi glanced at his wife. She had certainly diminished over time. Her shoulders had become rounded and her belly slack. She had become an old woman.
“I’m sure it’s nothing,” Hideyoshi casually said.
“There sure has been a lot of crime here in Okayama,” she stated, twisting the edge of her apron. “For being such a small town.”
Atsumi at first didn’t respond when the police came knocking on their bedroom door. “Mrs. Osumi,” the assisting detective’s voice was heard through the cheap processed wood. “You are next.”
She slowly got up from the bed. Narrow wooden stairs squeaked as she made her way downstairs.
When she returned to the bedroom, she was without her apron. “They’re gone,” she announced and slowly prepared to go downstairs for a bath.
Hideyoshi couldn’t stand it any longer. “What did they ask you?”
“The usual,” she responded, choosing a clean pair of pajamas. “Except one strange question from that policewoman. She remembered that when she first came here seven years ago, she couldn’t use the downstairs bathroom. She was asking why.”
“What a ridiculous question.” Hideyoshi felt his gut grow cold.
“You had just finished a plumbing project. I told her that you always fix things on your own.”
The next day, Hideyoshi was called to the police station, and both he and the detective knew that it was only a matter of time. More police were called in and dismantled their floorboards. Only a few attempts with a shovel and the skeleton of Chie Toyama was discovered. Within the week, the furniture store and storage container had been taken over, the mysterious four concrete blocks cracked open.
Detectives found cement—the same kind of cement that had encased the four bodies—in the treads of both Hideyoshi’s and Yoshi’s shoes. Even more incriminating were items found in Yoshi’s bedroom: a wash towel, woman’s panties and flared knit skirt, all mementos that Hideyoshi had been hiding in his glove compartment. Hideyoshi had no idea when his son decided to remove the incriminating evidence from hi
s van. And now, with the second woman’s clothing discovered, the Osumis were implicated in six murders, not five.
All Yoshi had to do was to say that it had been all Hideyoshi’s doing. But he refused to say anything. Hideyoshi was truly touched. He loved his son and it greatly grieved him that he really wouldn’t get an opportunity to express his affection.
Hideyoshi was arrested first, but the prosecutor also wanted Yoshi’s head, which he eventually got. Atsumi secured a separate attorney for Yoshi, but it didn’t make any difference.
They were sentenced at the same time: death by hanging. Atsumi wanted Yoshi to appeal the sentence, but he refused. Not to be outdone by his son, Hideyoshi allowed his death sentence to stand as well.
On death row, Hideyoshi mostly spent time in solitary confinement. Other than the guards, he neither saw nor heard the voices of others. Occasionally someone would pound on the walls. He had no idea who they may be, but in his mind, he imagined it to be Yoshi. He wished that they had learned Wabun code or even the Latin equivalent, Morse, when Yoshi was a child. With the back of his hand, he pounded the wall in increments of three. Sometimes the prisoner on the other side reciprocated. He convinced himself that the pounding was from his son, desperately trying to make a connection through concrete walls.
“So, Mr. Osumi, I regret that an error was made,” the voice who claimed to be an Osumi said one day in Hell.
“What are you talking about? Is it about my son?”
“He was to be sent here. We were ready to process him. But he was recalled.”
“To where?”
“It happens from time to time.”
“Is he dead? Or is he somewhere else?”
The quality-control man refused to answer Hideyoshi’s question. “Actually, I’m here to talk about you. You weren’t fully demagnetized when you entered here.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s a quick procedure. We’ll have to move you in your box. But it will be quick.”
As the quality-control man had said, the box was pulled out and placed on something hard, almost metallic. Hideyoshi was shaken back and forth a few times—a familiar experience—and then it was over.
Before the guards took him to be hanged, they had him stand before a statue of Kannon, the goddess of mercy. In terms of religion, Hideyoshi said that he didn’t have any, but probably leaned Buddhist because he was Japanese. He refused to meet with a Buddhist priest but agreed to see the statue, which he immediately regretted.
Instead of making him calm, the statue agitated him. Kannon, with her narrow face, curved eyes, and serene expression, seemed to mock Hideyoshi.
Why did he need mercy from this woman?
They fastened a blindfold over his eyes, and instead of visualizing Yoshi, Atsumi, or his victims, he only saw that sanctimonious face of Kannon. They led him forward over something soft and carpeted. Hideyoshi could also hear the hum of instrumental music. Something with a Buddhist religious tone.
Regret, a new feeling, washed over him. He shouldn’t have rejected appeals. He should have fought for his life more. He should have fought for his son.
Hideyoshi felt his legs shaking as something—the noose, of course—was placed around his neck. He could not give the guards the satisfaction of him weakening. Those girls deserved what they got. They should have never let him in, he told himself. But his son, his beloved son! At least they will be together in death. Even if it ended in nothingness, he would not be alone in it. That was his only consolation.
The ground then opened up and he was gone.
After the demagnetization, Hideyoshi’s box was returned to its original position. His vision seemed to have improved. He could now see the gray pulp in the grain of the cardboard.
The top flipped open. It was the creature with the blond hair. “You will be alone in your box,” she informed him.
“But I thought my son might be joining me soon?”
“No, we’ve discovered that he will not.”
The cover closed and Hideyoshi could hear a male voice addressing the blonde. “That quality-control shithead. He’s been on my case ever since he started. And why is this asshole asking for his son? The demagnetization should have eliminated that desire.”
“He was just asking about him, not for him. It’ll be fine.”
“If only you had the calibrations correct in the first place.”
“Oh, don’t blame this on me. You’re the one who said that he was sociopath. That he wouldn’t have any attachments.”
Their argument continued but got fainter.
“Pssss. Hideyoshi.” The familiar voice from next door.
Hideyoshi was annoyed. “I thought that you had left. Don’t you have any new cases to follow up on?”
“Checking in to make sure that everything is okay.”
“I’m fine,” he said, feeling space between his body and the box. “Never better.” He didn’t say anything further, and the quality-control man seemed satisfied.
“Goodbye, Hideyoshi. May you have a good stay here.”
Hideyoshi grunted. He was able to extend his right elbow a little in his box. To have all this space all to himself was indeed glorious. Yes, he could easily be alone like this for a life eternal.
I only want one thing in the whole world: for my band, Flying Jelly Attack, the world’s greatest Shonen Knife cover band, to play at Cherry Blossom High School’s Spring Dance. Two things stand in my way:
1) Lizard Blood, a Lolita death metal band, our bitter rivals
2) The end of the world
Lizard Blood isn’t a real band. They only care about going viral and how many hits they get on UltraPluz. They never really learned to play their instruments. Instead, they use synthesizers plugged into programmable neuromuscular implants, upload whatever song they want to play, and play it—or “play” it, rather. They even have their implants synched so they play together—not that that really matters when it’s death metal.
Lizard Blood’s fake lead singer and fake lead guitarist, Yuki Niamori, is very rich—or at least her family is—and she can have anything she wants.What she wants is to be lead singer of a Lolita death metal band that will play at Cherry Blossom High School’s Spring Dance.
She must be stopped.
As for the end of the world, I’m not really paying attention. It’s got something to do with cyber attacks on big banks draining all the money out of their systems—not transferring it, not stealing it, just deleting it as if it never existed. The banks are shutting down and the government can’t stop it. Experts are saying to change your online passwords and stuff, but that doesn’t help because the hackers fix the system so it doesn’t need passwords at all. Change your passwords and biometric logins all you want, doesn’t matter. The hackers still delete everything you have.
It’s not like I have much money anyway, since I spend everything on guitar strings and upgrading my amps. And we still have to go to school, even though half the teachers haven’t shown up all week and the other half are threatening to strike if they don’t get paid soon. Our parents are making us go because they think it’s safe—Cherry Blossom High School’s security guards are still here when the actual police have fled the city. It’s all very complicated, but I’m working too hard to get the chord progression right on “Brown Mushrooms” to notice. If we don’t get to play at the Spring Dance, nothing else will matter.
The big audition for who gets to play at the Spring Dance is in three days. Only two bands have signed up: Flying Jelly Attack and Lizard Blood. Attrition—we scared everybody off. Yuki possibly made threats—at least, she’s made them to us.
Miki, my bass player, says our best course of action is to avoid Yuki and her girls entirely. Ru, my drummer, goes into a murderous rage whenever we even mention Yuki or Lizard Blood. She’s prone to murderous rages, where all her hair stands on
end and her eyes go wide and she bares her teeth like some kind of demon. Miki and I both have to hold her back to keep her from doing damage. It’s this kind of thing that makes her a great drummer.
Trouble is, we can’t avoid our enemy entirely when our enemy seems bent on searching us out.
There we are, just hanging out between classes—or these days, just hanging out until we find out whether we’ll even be having classes. Miki, hair in a ponytail and her wire-rimmed glasses slipping down her nose, hunches over her deck doing something online—because she’s always doing something online when she isn’t playing—while Ru and I discuss what we should wear to the audition. Modern art mini-dresses or jeans and leather jackets? Cute or vintage rebellious? Whatever would make us the most different from Lizard Blood, is my opinion. Ripped jeans and anger.
“I don’t really care, you pick,” Ru says. When she isn’t angry, her hair lies flat in a pixie cut. Really, I don’t even know why I’m asking her—she doesn’t have any fashion sense at all. Me or Miki pick out all her clothes. If we didn’t have school uniforms she might not wear anything at all.
“I just want you to pick one, skirt or jeans?”
“Kit, look!” Ru points down the hallway, and I swear the lights dim and a mysterious wind begins howling past us. Even Miki looks up from her deck.
Lizard Blood appears, standing together, glaring a challenge at us: Yuki, with Azumi and Hana flanking her like acolytes. Between all of them, their poofed-out skirts fill the corridor. They have dyed their hair three different shades of pink: hot, bubblegum, and rose.
We get to our feet and it’s like an Old West standoff.
“Hello, Yuki,” I say. “What are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be practicing?”
“You can’t win,” Yuki says. Her arms are at her sides, her hands in fists. She’s wearing a black and white striped tea dress trimmed in lace and a little derby hat the size of an apple. She is above school uniforms, as she has often informed us. Just think, if she spent as much time practicing guitar as she did dressing, she could actually learn to play. “Why don’t you give up?”
