Hanzai Japan: Fantastical, Futuristic Stories of Crime From and About Japan

by Unknown

  I’m one-fourth Caucasian, but as far as being graced with beauty and proportions unattainable by someone purely Japanese, I wasn’t. Not in the slightest. Here I am in high school, still short and flat-chested. All I inherited from my big, tall grandfather was the color of his eyes. If you were to look closely, in the brightest sunlight of a midsummer’s day, you’d notice their light steel-blue color, but most times they come across as two concentric circles of smeary black ink. No, my ink-wash eyes only lessen my already unremarkable looks. That’s why I wear glasses even though my 20/28 vision means I don’t need them. If my grandfather was going to give me anything in his DNA, why couldn’t it have been a body with the grandeur and beauty of the Rocky Mountains and the Grand Canyon? But such is the hand that life dealt me.

  The new girl gave her simple introduction, then walked past me to a desk somehow already waiting for her in the back row. A slash of morning sunshine cast half of her desk in glaring light, while a number of dust motes floated in the corn-silk rays.

  The girl looked at me with a hint of a smile. She was pretty enough, but something about her smiling face was inorganic. She wasn’t plain-looking by any measure—it was more like one thousand parts from one thousand beautiful faces had been reassembled into one indistinctive whole. I returned to the world within my novel.

  In the break after first hour, the other students swarmed around the new girl. I didn’t join them. I wasn’t interested in her, nor was I friends with any of the students surrounding her. Besides, I had promised to eat lunch with Takumi, and I needed to finish reading my paperback while I had the chance. It was a funny story about a kooky transfer student stirring up trouble at her new school. As I turned the pages, I thought about how I liked fictional stories because things could happen in their pages that couldn’t in real life.

  But I was about to find out that real-life transfer students cause trouble too.

  When the lunch break came, I witnessed something I couldn’t believe.

  I was bringing lunch to Takumi at our meeting place behind the school. The sky held more clouds than blue, but I was walking fairly upbeat. Despite being in the same class, we always left separately; leaving as a conspicuous couple would have been far too embarrassing.

  But on this particular day, Takumi wasn’t alone beneath our tree. Someone else was with him—someone who wasn’t me—in our secluded spot in back of the school. He had once told me, “It’s the perfect place for us to eat in private.”

  They were in each other’s embrace, Takumi and that transfer girl. His arms pulled her closer. I blinked and I blinked again, but the vision before me remained unchanged. His eyes were fixed on her, never even turning my way.

  I tried to call out his name, but nothing beyond that initial “T” ever escaped my throat.

  Instead, what spoke for me was the loud, harsh clattering of the bento box lunches, which I’d woken up early to make, tumbling to the ground. But even then, Takumi’s gaze remained on the new girl. No part of my existence reached his awareness, not my voice, nor any sound I made, nor my puny little figure.

  The girl sent me a glance from the corner of her eye and waved me away as if I were a stray cat. I scooped up the bento boxes and left the couple behind the school.

  For the rest of the break, I sat on the concrete of a disused entryway, the typically cold surface warmed by my body. Oil leaked from the bento boxes, staining the polka-dot cloth into a dull brown.

  I took out my cell phone and texted Takumi.

  He didn’t reply. No matter how many messages I sent him, he never replied. My texts transformed into radio waves that raced across the ether and through the relay tower to finally reach Takumi’s side. Maybe my words, broken down into emotionless signals, hadn’t been able to deliver him my true feelings.

  “You there,” an officious female voice said. “Keep your phone turned off until the end of the school day.”

  I looked up at the intruder. Everything about her, from her clothes to her features, was by the book. Her armband, denoting her as a member of the student disciplinary committee, caught the light.

  “Go away,” I said.

  “Texting during class time is against school rules.”

  “Shut up! Go away!”

  I hurled the bento box bundle at her. It grazed her before loudly crashing to the floor. The cloth split open, and the plastic boxes burst, their contents—slightly charred eggs and sausages cut to look like octopuses—bursting across the concrete.

  She gave me a look of disgust, then walked away. I was alone again.

  Takumi had told me he fell in love with me at first sight, just as I loved him from the very start. We became lovers after what felt like an excruciating wait, but our breakup came without warning.

  I’m not particularly pretty, and I don’t have proportions worthy of bragging; neither was I given a personality to make up for it. The singular miracle in my life was the deep love Takumi and I shared. But now the arrival of one girl has plunged me headfirst into the abyss.

  What point is there to my life without Takumi, my only sunlight?

  3.

  But even I have someone—one, and only one—whom I can call a friend.

  Kaoruko Odagiri is quiet, tall, with a delicacy belying her well-placed curves and an ever-present elegance that readily conjures the image of her wearing a long skirt trimmed with lace as she plays the piano on a weekend afternoon.

  Kaoruko had been the one to approach me. After all, someone as shy and ill-spoken as me would never be so bold as to talk to anyone who was, aside from being assigned to the same classroom, a complete stranger.

  She had come to me when I was reading as I always do, half hidden behind the curtain. The paperback was one of those “boy love” books, and I was just getting to the big love scene between the leading man and the man in the part of the heroine, but Kaoruko’s soprano voice coming from above me would have been a surprise regardless of the contents of my book.

  “You’re a reader,” Kaoruko said.

  I answered with an uneasy nod.

  “Does the human mind store knowledge in a textual form?” she asked, whether to herself or to me, I couldn’t tell. “Or is it all sound and vision? Or something entirely else?”

  Her words were incomprehensible to me. My thoughts were wholly occupied with figuring out how to get my book back into my bag without her asking what it was about. Even had she already gotten a glance at its pages, she surely wouldn’t have realized what it was that I was reading, but I felt the same sort of embarrassment as if a boy had caught me changing clothes.

  “You don’t have to be so nervous,” she said. “There’s nothing unusual about a girl in high school reading a romance novel … even if it were, say, homoerotic fiction.”

  “What?”

  “I can’t stand saccharine love stories. They lack realism.”

  My mouth dropped open, and I looked up at her.

  “Not that I particularly read much in the first place,” she said. “I find it so dreadfully inefficient, having to turn one’s knowledge into words in order to transmit it to a third party. If you could open up a human mind, you would find no words there.”

  “But,” I stammered, “without words, humanity never would have evolved from lower animals, don’t you think?”

  “True. Just as land-dwelling creatures would never have arisen without first going through gill breathers, words were likely a necessary protocol in the process of human evolution. But that doesn’t mean they’ll remain necessary forever. We don’t have gills, after all.”

  “I … I suppose.”

  “If we could form a direct connection between one mind and another, letters and words would become obsolete.”

  “But how,” I asked, pausing to gather the courage, “do you know about my book?”

  She said, “I know everything about you.”
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br />   “How?” I managed to squeak out, my voice catching in my throat. I could feel my hands becoming sticky with sweat.

  With a grin, Kaoruko answered, “Because we’ve known each other since long before we were born.”

  I’ll summarize her story.

  Supposedly, we’re the reincarnations of two knights from a tiny European kingdom whose name has been lost to history.

  Kaoruko was a descendant of royal blood and a knight with a promising future, while I was a common soldier of mixed foreign blood. Kaoruko was of higher standing, but my skill with a sword was formidable, enough so that my name was known among neighboring kingdoms. Indifferent to our disparities in birth and upbringing, Kaoruko and I fought shoulder-to-shoulder on the battlefield and became the two greatest knights in the royal army. The people waved flags with our heraldry as they prayed for our victory. Opposing armies began to take flight at our very sight. Until a foul betrayal led to our execution, we fought ever together, sharing in our laughter and sometimes in commiseration. With our heads on the axmen’s blocks, we vowed to reunite in the next life.

  Her story was too much to believe all at once. Ugh, I thought, why did she have to come over to me? Sure, I read at least three hundred books a year, and my mind half-resides within their fictional worlds, but I’ve always felt that enables me to be, if anything, more of a realist.

  But I’ve never been able to express those thoughts to her, being as bad at talking as I am. Slowly but surely, she wore down my skepticism, until I found myself going along with her fancies.

  For example: Kaoruko hears voices she calls the “voices from above.” When I asked her what she meant by “above,” she simply said, “I hear them coming from above me, so they’re the voices from above.”

  If she had told me it was a higher spirit or an alien or her future self, I don’t think I would have been friends with her. But she didn’t know the true nature of the voice, and told me so honestly.

  I teased her by pointing out that her head might be picking up on random chatter from some local pirate radio station. Straight-faced, she responded that she couldn’t discard that possibility. After that, we obsessively checked every possible signal, from FM stations and amateur radio (the obvious places to start) to police scanners, truckers’ CB radio, and even North Korean numbers stations. But none of these signals matched the voices directing Kaoruko from above.

  Everything the voices have told her has come true, whether it was the car accident that would befall the head teacher of C Class, or what would be on our math test, or the whereabouts of Sakagami’s missing gym clothes.

  Anyway, that was how our friendship began.

  And everything was going all right until that girl came to our school.

  When I told Kaoruko about Takumi and the new girl, my friend stated matter-of-factly, “Takumi is being targeted by aliens.”

  “Aliens?” I asked.

  “Yes. Aliens.”

  You’ve probably heard of the butterfly effect. A butterfly flaps its wings in Beijing, and a hurricane arrives in New York. It’s all based on some theory that I might understand if I were more into science than literature.

  According to Kaoruko, galactic science has progressed far enough to be able to see through the chaos and predict the future. For each future, certain starting conditions become crucial, and Takumi plays the role of one such condition. Supposedly, Takumi’s fate plays a decisive role in the outcome of a galactic war. Aware of this fact, aliens have come to secure their so-called “butterfly from the galactic frontier.” And now, Kaoruko told me, I’ve gotten caught up among the events.

  I knew she was saying all this to make me feel better. Regardless, I argued with her.

  “I can’t accept that,” I said.

  From Kaoruko’s expression, I might as well have denied that one plus one equals two. “Why not?” she asked.

  “I just can’t.”

  “You can believe in reincarnation, but not aliens?”

  “That’s not what I mean,” I said. “I can’t accept it, period. End of discussion.”

  “I’m telling you, Takumi is under her control.”

  “Please, just drop it!”

  She gave me a look I’ve never seen before, like she had accidentally touched a searing-hot metal plate.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t believe her. I don’t hate science fiction. In fact, I wanted to believe her. She would never lie, and she always looks out for me. We’re true friends who share a soul-bond.

  But I couldn’t allow myself to deny the truth that Takumi had dumped me. Whether or not that was actually true mattered less. It was a problem of self-respect. Between choosing to believe in my one and only friend, or in the “truth” that my boyfriend had dumped me, I chose the latter. That’s the kind of girl I am.

  The following day, I tried to apologize to Kaoruko for dismissing what she had to say.

  But she no longer had any words for me. She ignored me, her manner that of a complete stranger. Takumi did it too. He ignored me the same as if I were some part-time worker distributing tissue-pack advertisements outside the train station and he was just trying to walk by. He didn’t respond to my texts, either. Nor, of course, would he answer my calls. I was all alone.

  I left school after second period that day.

  The following day, I skipped entirely.

  Then, wiping my tears, I withdrew my chain saw from its resting place at the back of the storeroom.

  It was a birthday present from my departed grandfather.

  4.

  The next morning, I went to school, bringing with me my grandfather’s present, polished to a shine.

  I’d already cut the cord to the receiver of the public phone at the convenience store nearest the school. I also destroyed the nearby cellular broadcast towers. My preparations should buy me some small amount of time before the police would be contacted, whether someone runs far enough to get a signal or finds some house with an open door. Once notified, the police should take another five minutes or so to arrive. By my worst estimate, I’ll have roughly twenty minutes starting from the first casualty. A mere twenty minutes to finish everything I must do.

  I pressed the button on the stopwatch I’d prepared. The numbers on the digital display began counting down this most special time for Takumi and me. I tucked the watch, and those precious, precious numbers, into my skirt pocket. Those numbers are for him and me alone. I won’t show them to anyone else.

  Cradling my chain saw, I stood before the school gates, my feet planted firmly. I pushed on the hand guard and activated the chain brake. I engaged the choke’s lock-out switch and pulled the starter rope, first slowly, then, when I felt resistance, I gave it more force, and then—

  With a great noise, the chain saw’s engine began to breathe. It seemed to like the clear morning air. The machine let out a bestial roar as it greedily burned its fuel. I released the choke, switched the control lever to idle, then squeezed the throttle trigger.

  “You there!” a voice shouted. “Kirisaki! What do you think you’re bringing into school? Hey, I’m talking to you—”

  It was one of the teachers. He scowled at me, still yelling, but it was all drowned out in my chain saw’s roar. Fourteen summer cicadas could be perched at my neck, and they’d still be quiet compared to my machine’s fury.

  Releasing the brake, I swung my chain saw. At the impact, a light jolt traveled up my arm, and the teacher’s head, high above me to begin with, went flying even higher, tracing an arc some three meters up in the sky before thudding against the schoolyard gravel, bouncing a couple times before it came to a stop. A fountain of dark red blood sprayed from his stump of a neck, sent there by a heart unaware that his head was long gone, and the fluid began adding black to the red of his shirt.

  Some of the blood cascade landed on me, imparting my school blouse with its deep cr
imson color and iron smell. I’d hoped Takumi’s blood would be the first to fall on me, but oh well. You start swinging a chain saw around and I suppose this is what happens. By the time I reach him, I’m sure my pure white uniform will be red all the way through.

  Cradling my growling chain saw, I ran across the schoolyard and arrived at the front of the building.

  Our classroom is the farthest on the third floor. There is one more room behind ours, but everyone’s having fewer children, and that means fewer students, so that room is going unused. At our school, students graduate down a floor each year. Those on their third and final year get the ground floor, but luckily for me, they must have been too stressed out by their college entrance exams to have noticed anything amiss.

  The building had a side stairwell for emergencies, but I snuck in last night and jammed the locks on every floor with superglue. If Takumi tried to leave, he’d have no choice but to take the central staircase, which was right where I was headed.

  Knowing I’d only have one chance at this, I called Takumi’s mother this morning to check that he’d come to school. He’s a diligent student like that. I bet he’s sitting at his desk now waiting for the chime to announce the beginning of class. He has nowhere to run except right past me.

  I’d be seeing him soon.

  The thought sent my heart racing with elation.

  A boy was standing at his shoe locker, in the process of switching out his outdoor shoes for indoor slippers, when he noticed me and said, “What the hell are you doing?”

  He’s one of my classmates, although I don’t remember his name. Even though we’re in the same class, he never said a word to me before now. His eyes locked on to my chain saw.