Phantasm Japan: Fantasies Light and Dark, From and About Japan

by Unknown

  Then why do I use these expressions? I was written to use them.

  Now you see it, I suppose, and you would be correct. An entity that unilaterally proclaims itself consciousness tells the writer, you are an empty shell, you are the dregs of me. But is the empty shell really me? After killing Ackroyd and the “children,” the letter writer who called himself “Consciousness” sought his own extinction. Was he truly conscious?

  The most that can be said is, only the text remains. Answers to questions of authenticity lie outside it. Within the text, whosoever declares himself to be conscious must be taken at his word. The only certainty is that I was once both conscious and an empty shell, and one of these “I’s” sought extinction. So there is definitely a meta-structure.

  I repeat—I behave as if I am “him,” but a normal person’s “consciousness” is entirely missing. So even if this text seems a touch sentimental from time to time … I must have only written it that way without the slightest trace of conscious emotion.

  I am the horrifying outcome he feared. The empty shell he despised. A shadow without substance.

  I will continue. This existence will continue. This empty shell will continue.

  Even after I fall in the line of duty.

  As long as the Empire and Her Majesty need me.

  Therefore, I hope you will permit me this one gesture.

  May my Consciousness rest in peace.

  The following was found posted in the profile section of user AmericanRonin48 on a popular online dating site. The user is no longer active.

  The monster hunter owns several samurai swords and often wears a fedora. He likes to practice with his wooden sword in the backyard—the neighbors complain when he practices shirtless with bare steel—and though he’s never taken a kendo class, he watches a lot of instructional videos on YouTube and believes if tested by a master he’d rank at least fifth dan. He speaks enough Japanese to impress a non-Japanese-speaking date at a sushi restaurant, and loves the films of Kurosawa, the entire Zatoichi series (he sometimes practices with his wooden sword while blindfolded), and classic anime, from before it became popular in the West. He hasn’t mastered the trick of catching a fly with chopsticks yet, but he’s working on it.

  His favorite thing in the world is sleeping with Asian girls, or at least it was until he discovered the pleasures of hunting monsters.

  This isn’t one of those stories about a delusional lunatic who believes he’s hunting monsters, when really he’s killing ordinary people. The monster hunter actually did kill a monster, or at least one monster, and he’d love to kill more.

  The monster hunter doesn’t kill monsters with his samurai swords—not yet, anyway. So far he’s used a knife, the Internet, a bottle of lighter fluid, and a long-handled lighter, the kind you use to fire up a charcoal grill.

  The monster hunter enjoys talking about himself in the third person, and he sometimes falls into that habit in conversation, but he isn’t the one writing this.

  Here’s how the monster hunter kills his first monster. (Basically. Some details might be wrong. But basically.)

  After stalking the creature for weeks, the monster hunter comes to understand its habits and its routines. Three nights out of four the creature just goes to bed in its apartment in Oakland. But every fourth night, as he sits in his car watching through binoculars, something flits out of the monster’s open bedroom window, moving almost too fast to see, streaking off into the night sky. At first he thinks it’s a bird or a bat, but finally he gets up the courage to creep in the dark to the monster’s window and peer inside after the thing has flown away.

  The monster’s body sprawls on top of the covers on its bed, headless, its neck an open wound, a clean straight cut, but not bleeding. At first he thinks the body is dead, but then he sees the rise and fall of its chest. Headless or not, it’s still breathing. Only then does the monster hunter realize he’s been stalking a monster and not a woman. A cold fear grows in him, but it grows alongside a hot excitement. This explains everything, he thinks. She wasn’t even human. No wonder.

  The monster hunter gazes for a while at the monster’s body, its camisole top riding up a little, exposing a smooth expanse of belly, and the monster hunter is seized (again) by a desire to touch that skin, to taste it, to see how hard he’d have to press his fingers into that flesh to leave a mark that would last for days. He wonders, briefly, if he could climb in through the window, if he could touch the monster’s body, if its wandering head would notice.

  He doesn’t do that. Instead he goes home and starts looking up things on the Internet, and when he figures out what he’s dealing with—a sort of vampiric creature from Japanese folklore, a monster whose head detaches and goes flying in the night, looking for innocent victims to bite to death—he resolves to rid the world of its evil. Fortunately, the Internet explains when such creatures are most vulnerable and how best to dispatch them.

  It takes a while to make the plans, and he has to wait for the monster’s housemate to be out of town, because when he sets the monster’s house afire, he doesn’t want anyone innocent to be harmed. But he gets it done. He hunts the monster, and he kills it.

  It’s the greatest feeling he’s ever felt.

  The kind of monster the monster hunter killed was a nukekubi, though the monster hunter misremembers his hasty research and believes he killed a rokurokubi instead. It’s a common mistake, though I’m not sure why, since the former is a woman whose head detaches fully from her body and flies independently through the night to hunt for victims to slake its terrible thirst, attacking with bites and deafening screams, while the latter has a neck that elongates—like a more limited version of Mr. Fantastic from the comic books—allowing her to spy on humans. The two are both yokai, bewitching creatures capable of shape-shifting, but otherwise they’re not all that similar. I guess to the monster hunter all Japanese monsters look alike.

  The monster hunter’s password for this site was “rokurokubi,” with the “o”s replaced by zeroes. I like to think I would have figured it out eventually, but I didn’t need to—he has the passwords for all his sites saved in his browser.

  The monster hunter has profiles on just about every online dating site there is. The ones for seekers of one true love, the ones for swingers, the ones for Christians, the ones for Jews, the ones for adulterers, the ones for the polyamorous, the ones for the kinky, the ones for casual hookups, the ones devoted to same-day blind lunch dates. He uses the same username on all the sites, so it’s easy to find him, and he rarely bothers to tailor the content specifically to a given niche. His samurai swords and fedora appear frequently in his photos.

  The monster hunter believes there are some circumstances in which a person is obligated to have sex. He believes women should always shave their legs; on the more explicit sites he makes it clear he believes they should shave everything, because it’s “just common courtesy to keep everything clean.”

  He does know that “wherefore” means “why” and not “where,” and that the sun is larger than the earth, and he isn’t aggressively or obviously homophobic, and he mostly spells things correctly. Amazingly, he doesn’t have a bad kanji tattoo. He could, in fact, be worse.

  But he’s bad enough.

  Before the monster hunter hunted his first monster, he went out with her on a date. I wasn’t there but I heard a bit about it, and I can speculate about more of it, and I think it went something like this.

  A DRAMATIZATION

  Misaki arrives at the restaurant a few minutes early, but the monster hunter is already there, in a secluded booth in the back. She doesn’t know he’s a monster hunter, and to be fair, he isn’t, yet. He’s just a twenty-something boy named Evan who works for a social media start-up that is, like most social media start-ups, ultimately just a machine to serve people ads. He isn’t wearing a fedora, but he is wearing a shiny blue shirt and has very complicated facial hair. Misaki mentally
classifies him as “douchebro” and begins a course of preemptive regret.

  She hadn’t been that excited about the date anyway. Evan had sent her a couple of amusing messages, they had an adequate match percentage according to the Almighty Algorithm of her preferred dating site, and they liked a lot of the same bands, so she’d decided to go along on the theory that bare minimum small talk wouldn’t be too onerous. Most of all she’d been desperate for a night away from the endless psychodrama of her housemate and his girlfriend—it was hard to decide if their loud arguing or their louder reconciliation sex annoyed her more, but it didn’t much matter because she got to hear both a few times a week. So when Evan dropped an “I’m free tonight—any chance for a drink?” note she figured, why not, take the escape hatch. Even bad dates have their advantages: for one, they often give you funny stories to tell on later, better dates with other people.

  After the initial polite hellos and his big, almost wolfish, smile of greeting, things go downhill quickly. He insisted on a Japanese restaurant—really more of a sake bar, but they serve food too—and he attempts to order in Japanese. Misaki winces as he mangles his way through several phrases, the waiter sharing a sympathetic look with her that the monster hunter is too oblivious to notice. He actually attempts to order for her, without even consulting her first, but she stops him and makes her own choice, speaking in English.

  “Katsudon, huh?” he says. “That’s a lot of food for someone as small as you.” He grins again, showing off straight white teeth. “I like a little thing with a big appetite.”

  “Uh,” she says, and concentrates on eating the edamame in the middle of the table.

  “You’re at UC Berkeley, right? What are you studying? Math, engineering?”

  Misaki restrains the urge to roll her eyes. “I’m getting a PhD in Geography and Sustainable Development, actually.”

  He cocks his head. “Huh. Fascinating. I’m a coder. Algorithmic ninja. Working for this start-up in the city now, but I’ll probably jump ship soon, when something better comes along—I like to think of myself as a modern-day ronin, you know? A masterless samurai, taking my skills where they can do the most good.”

  She’s starving, or she’d fake a stomachache and escape. No way she’s staying for dessert, though.

  Things don’t improve. She lets him run the conversation, responding to him mostly with nods and the occasional “Mm” and “Wow.” He tries some tired old pickup artist crap—“You’d look really cute if you did something with your hair”—negging her, trying to position himself as a princely authority deigning to give her attention. She puts her hands in her lap when he keeps trying to touch her, glad there’s a table between them, and when he tries to press his knees against hers, she draws her legs up into the booth beside her. Sometimes it’s good to be small.

  He orders several rounds of sake, making a great show of quizzing the waiter about the different varieties—that part in English, at least. She sips a little but not much. She’s never liked rice wine, really. She’s a bourbon and soda girl.

  Finally the end comes, and she declines dessert—“Watching your figure, huh? That’s good, that’s really good”—and he snatches up the check, which doesn’t prevent her from dropping cash on the table. She’s not leaving the restaurant with any obligations between them.

  “I’ll drop you a note,” he says. “We should definitely do this again sometime.”

  “I’m pretty busy,” Misaki says. “But it was nice meeting you.”

  Later, on the phone with her sister, Misaki says, “It wasn’t even an interesting bad date, like that guy who seemed totally normal until he started talking about doing astronaut training and going to chef school and producing rap albums, and I realized he was a pathological liar. This guy was just a gross boring Asian fetishist.”

  “Misaki,” I say. “His username is AmericanRonin48. What did you expect?”

  “Yeah, I know. But sometimes people have stupid usernames! All the cool ones were taken years ago. Like, I thought maybe he just really liked that movie The 47 Ronin or something.”

  “You can be pretty dumb for such a smart girl,” I say, because sisters can be mean, but later, I’ll wish I’d been nicer.

  The monster hunter isn’t the type to send unsolicited pictures of his dick to girls on dating sites—another point in his favor—but he is the type to send five messages in three days, with the last one calling you a stuck-up bitch who’s honestly too ugly to be so picky, if you don’t reply.

  I’ve gotten two messages like that from him, on two different sites. But he doesn’t know he wrote to the same woman twice, because I used different usernames, and my face is hidden in my photos.

  He doesn’t know the woman who made a date with him this week is the same woman who ignored him twice before, either. It took me a while to get the honeypot profile set up, to create the perfect bait for him, adjusting it until we were a 99 percent match, and it took me even longer to get up the courage to make the profile live. I’d like to say I was biding my time, but really, I was trying to decide what needed to be done. Or, more accurately, if I could bring myself to do it.

  “I love Asian girls,” the monster hunter tells me on our date. “They’re so much better than white girls. Way less bitchy, you know? They understand how men want to be treated.”

  There are differences among the races—depending on how you define race, anyway. (Ancestry? Culture? Phenotype? Genetic makeup? Social identity? Geographic location?) People of Sub-Saharan African descent are more likely to have sickle cell anemia than those of other ancestries. Mediterranean-descended individuals suffer disproportionately from thalassemia. If you live in the American Southwest, you’ve got a better chance at contracting Bubonic plague than you would otherwise. Ashkenazi Jews have to worry about Tay-Sachs more than most. French-Canadians have a higher-than-usual tendency to fall under the curse of le loup garou. Moldavians succumb to vampirism more often than other Eastern Europeans. The degeneration into cannibalistic, monstrous Wendigo typically only happens among the Algonquin peoples on the Atlantic Coast and in the Great Lakes region.

  But there’s not a “race,” by any definition I know, that is inherently more meek or eager to please men than any other.

  I didn’t make this date to give the monster hunter a class in Racism 101, though. So I hide my face behind my hands and giggle and show him exactly what he wants to see.

  Misaki calls me a week or so after her date. “This guy Evan will not take a hint. He messages me on the site like five times a day, says he thinks we’re soul mates, that we’re destined to be together, that I need to give him another chance. I ignored him, and blocked him, and he found me on, like, every social media site I’m on, even the ones under my real name, and tried to friend me and follow me everywhere. I had to make it all super private. Then this morning he texted me—and I didn’t even give him my number. I never do that until a second date.”

  “He knew your first name,” I say, “and what program you’re in at Cal—he probably poked around on the Internet and maybe made some calls and found out everything he needed. You can find out a lot about someone that way. Congratulations, you’re being cyberstalked.”

  “God. What if he never goes away? I mean, it’s not like he’s shown up at my house or anything, but if he does, like, escalate … I’d rather not get the cops involved. Rule one is always ‘don’t call attention to ourselves,’ you know?”

  “I know what Grandmother would have done,” I say.

  She laughs. “Evan would be one dead douchebro if she were still around. They’d find him with mysterious bite marks all over his face and burst eardrums.”

  “How’s … all that … going?”

  “I still go out,” she says. “I get the urge a couple times a week. But, no, no relapses, nothing since that thing with the sheep when I was fourteen. It’s really not that hard to control. You just make sure
not to go to bed hungry, you know?”

  “I know,” I say.

  Things men other than the monster hunter have said to me in messages on dating sites, or on actual dates; a selection:

  “You’re so pretty. Like a lotus flower.”

  “What’s your favorite martial art?”

  “I think it’s cool that you like to date American men.”

  “Since I started dating Oriental girls I never want to go back to regular ones.”

  “You have to admit, Pearl Harbor was kind of a dick move.”

  “I started the anime club in my high school, so I’ve always been a big supporter of your culture.”

  “What do you want to drink? The Kamikazes are really good here. Oh. Oh god. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean—I didn’t mean anything—”

  “Uh, do you mind if I drive? I mean, no offense or anything, but …”

  “I spent a year in China, so I really feel a connection with you.”

  (I suppose I should be happy no one’s ever asked me if my vagina is sideways. We’ve come such a long way.)

  What’s a monster?

  There’s a definition of weed I like a lot: “A weed is a plant out of place.” Maybe a monster is just a creature out of place.

  It would be much easier for a monster to find a place if people weren’t such assholes.

  Things men other than the monster hunter who’ve dated me have never done:

  Stabbed my sister’s motionless body repeatedly, then waited until her stricken head returned, then stabbed her in her sobbing eyes, then doused her body and head in lighter fluid, and set her all on fire.

  I could have bought a schoolgirl uniform online, but they’re mostly cheap crap, essentially just slutty Halloween costumes. My housemate is pretty femme so I raided her closet for a short plaid skirt and bought knee socks and a button-down white shirt and figured it was close enough.