Bullet Train

by Kotaro Isaka

  ‘Something wrong?’ Maria doesn’t miss the sudden change in Nanao’s voice.

  ‘I mean, you know, it’s like …’ He stalls for time until the man enters car six and the door closes behind him. Then Nanao’s voice returns to normal. ‘Saw someone I know.’

  ‘Who? Someone famous?’

  ‘One of those twins. You know who I’m talking about. Twins in the same line of work as us. Not Lemon and Lime.’

  Maria’s voice gets tight. ‘Lemon and Tangerine. They’re not twins. They kind of seem similar so everyone assumes they’re twins, but actually they’re totally different.’

  ‘One of them just passed by.’

  ‘Lemon is the one that likes Thomas the Tank Engine, and Tangerine is the serious one that likes reading novels. Lemon’s a classic B blood type and Tangerine’s a classic A. If they ever got married it’d definitely end in divorce.’

  ‘Hmm. I couldn’t tell his blood type just by looking at him.’ Nanao says it lightly, to cover his nerves. It would have been easy to tell which one it was if the guy had been wearing a T-shirt with a train on it. Then he gives voice to his growing sense of foreboding: ‘You think the suitcase is theirs?’

  ‘Could be. Could also be that they aren’t here together. Used to be that they worked individually.’

  ‘Someone once told me that those two are the most dangerous operators in the business.’

  It was a while back, when he was meeting in an all-night cafe with a well-known go-between, a decidedly chunky man. This man used to do all kinds of work, contract kills and other dangerous jobs, but when he began to put on weight he slowed down the pace, got tired of working, and got into the go-between business. When he started it was still a newish thing, and since he was persistent and kept up good relations with people he was able to carve out a solid niche for himself. He kept growing plumper into his middle age, so getting out of the field was probably the right move. ‘I was always best at making connections,’ he told Nanao with self-satisfaction. ‘I think I was meant to be a go-between.’ It didn’t make much sense to Nanao.

  Then the man made him a proposition. ‘Would you take on work that didn’t come from Maria? Because I’ve got a job for you. There’s good news and bad news.’ This guy was always talking about good news and bad news.

  ‘What’s the good news?’

  ‘It pays extremely well.’

  ‘And the bad news?’

  ‘You’d be up against some tough customers. Tangerine and Lemon. I’d say that right now, they’re the people in the business most guaranteed to get a job done. Most violent, for sure the most dangerous.’

  Nanao turned it down without thinking twice. It wasn’t that he had a problem working with someone besides Maria. It was this man’s repeated use of the word ‘most’. He had no intention of going up against that.

  ‘I really don’t want to get involved with those two,’ Nanao wails into the phone.

  ‘You may not want to, but that won’t stop them. If it is their suitcase, that is.’ Maria sounds calm. ‘Anyway, declaring someone the most dangerous in the business is pretty much the same as picking the favourites for this year’s Academy Awards – people just say whatever they want to. There are a lot of candidates to choose from, after all. Like the Pusher. You’ve heard about him, right? The one who pushes his victims in front of cars or trains and makes their deaths look like an accident. Some people say he’s the best in the biz. And for a while everyone was talking about the Hornet.’

  Nanao knows the name. Six years ago, the Hornet made a name for himself overnight by sneaking into the offices of Terahara, the big wheel in the underworld, and killing the boss. He used a poison needle to prick people in the neck or the fingertip. Some rumours said the Hornet was actually two people working together.

  ‘But no one ever mentions the Hornet any more, do they? Flash in the pan. A one-hit wonder. Just like a bee, I suppose, only one good sting.’

  ‘I wonder.’

  ‘Most of what you hear about the old professionals is just a bunch of tall tales.’

  This reminds Nanao of something else the rotund go-between had said. ‘I always get excited when I watch old movies. I think, how did they make it look so good when they didn’t have any CGI or special effects? Like the German movies from the silent era, they’re so old but they’ve got such a glow!’

  ‘Don’t you think the glow is because they’re so old? Like with an antique?’

  The go-between shook his head with theatrical flair. ‘No, no. It’s despite the fact that they’re so old. Look at Metropolis. In the same way, professionals in the old days were seriously tough. I want to say they were more solid, harder. They were on a different level.’ He spoke with passion. ‘And you know the reason why those old-timers never lose?’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Because they’re already dead or retired. Either way, they’ll never lose again.’

  ‘Guess you could say that.’

  The go-between nodded grandly, then launched into tales about his friends among the legends.

  ‘Maybe if I retire now,’ Nanao says into his phone, ‘I’ll become a legend too.’

  ‘Oh sure,’ Maria shoots back, ‘you’ll go down in history as the man who couldn’t get off the train at Ueno Station.’

  ‘I’ll be getting off at Omiya.’

  ‘Good idea. That way they won’t call you the man who couldn’t get off the train at Omiya.’ Nanao hangs up and goes back to his original seat in car four.

  The Prince

  ‘HEY, MR KIMURA,’ THE PRINCE says conspiratorially, ‘things might be getting a little interesting.’

  ‘Interesting. No such thing.’ Kimura has long since been feeling reckless. He lifts his bound hands to his face and scratches his nose with his thumb. ‘What, you had a divine revelation? You realised that you’re a sinful boy? That’s an eventful trip to the toilet.’

  ‘There’s actually a bathroom right next to our car, but I went in the wrong direction, so I had to go through car six to the bathroom in the gangway between six and five.’

  ‘So even his highness the Prince makes mistakes.’

  ‘But things always go my way.’ As the words leave his mouth, the Prince wonders why it is that everything always goes his way. ‘Even if I mess up, it ends up working out for me. It turns out to have been a good thing that I went to the further bathroom. Before I got there, I saw two men in the gangway. I didn’t pay them much attention, just went to the bathroom. But when I came out they were still there. One of them had his arms around the other one.’

  Kimura guffaws. ‘Somebody being held up by their friend is usually a very drunk somebody.’

  ‘Exactly. And the one holding the other up said the same thing. This guy had too much, he said. But it didn’t look that way to me.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He wasn’t moving, but he didn’t smell of alcohol. But mostly, the angle of the head didn’t look right.’

  ‘The angle of the head?’

  ‘The one guy, with the black glasses, he was trying his best to cover it up, but I’m pretty sure the other guy had a broken neck.’

  ‘Okay,’ Kimura says with a long sigh. ‘There’s no way that’s what was going on.’

  ‘Why not?’ The Prince looks past Kimura, out the window, working out his next move. ‘Because if someone was dead there’d be a big fuss right about now.’

  ‘The guy didn’t want there to be a fuss, so he was making up all kinds of excuses. He lied right to my face.’ He pictures the man with the black glasses. Kind-looking, but the offer to help carry the supposedly drunk man had flustered him. It was obvious he was trying to keep a cool facade but inside was frantic. The Prince almost felt sorry for him. ‘And this guy had a suitcase.’

  ‘So, what, you think he was trying to put the body inside the suitcase?’ Kimura sounds flippant.

  ‘Oh, that would have been a good idea, actually. But it probably wouldn’t have fitted. The guy
in his arms was pretty small, but I don’t think it would have worked.’

  ‘Go and tell one of the conductors. There’s a passenger with a broken neck, tell ’em, is that typical? Is there a discount ticket if you have a broken neck? Go and find out.’

  ‘No thanks,’ the Prince answers flatly. ‘If I did that, they’d stop the train. And …’ He pauses for a moment. ‘It’d be boring.’

  ‘Well, we certainly wouldn’t want his majesty to be bored.’

  ‘There’s more.’ The Prince grins. ‘I was on my way back here, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it so I turned back again. When I was in car six I saw a different man. He was looking for that suitcase.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘He was checking the aisle, the seats, searching for something.’

  ‘And this was a different guy from the one with the black glasses and the drunk friend.’

  ‘Yes. Tall and slim, with kind of crazy eyes. He seemed pretty rough around the edges, didn’t exactly look like a productive member of society. And then he asked one of the passengers, hey, what’s in your bag! Weird, right? He seemed desperate, and it was pretty easy to see he was looking for a bag.’

  Kimura makes a show of yawning. This old man’s desperate too, the Prince thinks coldly. Unable to grasp what the Prince is getting at, unsure why he would be sharing all this, the man’s getting anxious. He doesn’t want his much younger antagonist to notice his anxiety, so he fakes a yawn to cover taking a deep breath. Just a little more. Kimura is on the brink of accepting his powerlessness, the futility of his situation. Just a tiny bit more.

  People need to find a way to justify themselves.

  A person can’t live without being able to tell themselves that they’re right, that they’re strong, that they have value. So when their words and actions diverge from their view of themselves, they start looking for excuses, to help reconcile the contradiction. Parents who abuse their children, clergy who engage in illicit affairs, politicians who suffer disgrace – they all come up with excuses.

  Being forced to submit to someone else’s will is the same. It makes people try to justify themselves. In order to avoid acknowledging one’s impotence, one’s abject weakness, people try to find some reason. They think, this person must be something really special to beat me so thoroughly. Or, anyone would be powerless in this situation. This gives some small satisfaction. The more confidence and self-regard someone has, the more they need to tell themselves something like this. And once they do, the power relations are set in stone.

  Then all you have to do is say two or three things that stroke the person’s ego and they’ll do whatever you tell them. The Prince has done it many times with his schoolmates.

  I see it works just as well on adults as it does on kids.

  ‘Basically, one man is looking for a suitcase, and the other one has it.’

  ‘So you should tell him. That guy with the black glasses has the bag you’re looking for.’

  The Prince glances at the carriage door. ‘Actually I lied to him. The man with the black glasses and the bag is behind us, but I told the man looking for the bag that he was further up the train.’

  ‘What are you trying to do?’

  ‘It’s just a hunch, but I bet the bag is pretty valuable. I mean there’s someone doing everything they can to find it, so it has to be worth something.’ As he’s talking, something occurs to the Prince: if the man looking for the bag was coming in this direction, wouldn’t he have encountered the black glasses man? It wasn’t a suitcase that could be folded up and hidden somewhere, so if they crossed paths then the man looking for it should have discovered it immediately. Could he have overlooked it? Or maybe the man with the black glasses hid inside the toilet with the suitcase.

  ‘I’ll share something with you. It was back when I was seven,’ the Prince says to Kimura with a smile. He smiles so broadly it scrunches up his cheeks. Whenever he does this, adults make the mistake of assuming he’s an innocent kid, totally harmless, and they let down their guard. He relies on it. And sure enough, Kimura’s face seems to soften a bit at the Prince’s smile. ‘Robot cards were really popular. All my classmates were collecting them. You could buy packs at the supermarket for a hundred yen, but I didn’t see what everyone was getting so excited about.’

  ‘My Wataru can’t buy cards so he makes his own. He’s adorable.’

  ‘I don’t see what’s adorable about that.’ No need to lie. ‘But I can understand it. Rather than buying some generic card that somebody else made for commercial reasons, it seems a whole lot more worthwhile to make your one for free. Is your kid good at drawing?’

  ‘Not at all. It’s really cute.’

  ‘He’s not? Lame.’

  Kimura stares blankly for a second, and then has a delayed flash of anger at the insult to his son.

  The Prince always chooses his words carefully. Whether the words are violent or easy-going, he never says them without considering their effect. He always wants to be in control of exactly what he says and how he says it. He knows that the casual-seeming use of impolite words with his friends, words like lame, worthless, trashy, establishes a kind of power relation. Even if there’s zero basis for calling something lame or trashy, it has an effect. Saying things like Your dad’s so lame, or You’ve got such crappy taste, these function as a vague denial of someone’s foundation, and it’s effective.

  There are not that many people who have a solid set of personal values, who have real confidence. And the younger someone is, the more their values shift around.

  They can’t help but be influenced by their surroundings. That’s why the Prince frequently displays his own certainty, using words of derision and contempt. More often than not his subjective opinion takes on objective force, reinforcing his superior status.

  People think, that guy’s got a way of looking at the world, he knows what he’s talking about. He gets that sort of deference without even having to ask for it. If you take the position in a group of the one who sets the values, the rest is easy. In the Prince’s circle of friends, there are no clearly laid out rules like in football or baseball, but they all follow his orders as if he were the referee.

  ‘One day I found a pack of cards in the car park of a store. It was unopened, so I’m guessing it fell when a shipment was being delivered. It turned out to have a really rare card inside.’

  ‘Lucky you.’

  ‘Exactly. That was lucky for me. When I brought the card in to school, all those young aficionados lit up. Can I have it? they all said. I didn’t need it, and I was just going to give it to someone. But too many people wanted it. I didn’t know who to give it to, and then suddenly, and this is true, I really wasn’t planning anything, but without thinking about it too much I said, well, I can’t just give it away for free. So what do you think happened then?’

  ‘What, you sold it to the highest bidder?’

  ‘You’re so simple, Mr Kimura. It’s cute.’ The Prince chooses these words intentionally. It didn’t matter whether or not what Kimura said was cute. What mattered was that the Prince had made a judgement. He guessed that Kimura would now feel like he was being treated like a child. Now he’ll be wondering what about him exactly is childish, he won’t be able to escape the fact that his thoughts might be juvenile. Of course, there’s no way for him to answer this, because nothing he said was actually cute. So then he’ll start to think that the Prince knows the answer, and he’ll start to pay attention to the Prince’s values and standards.

  ‘Anyway, it looked like there would be an auction, people started naming prices. But somebody said, hey, Prince, what about something besides money? I’ll do whatever you want. That’s when the whole situation changed. That kid must have thought that it would be easier to do something for me than to pay. Probably didn’t have any money. So then everyone else starts saying the same thing, I’ll do whatever you want. That’s when I realised. I could use the situation to control the class.’

  ‘Sure, why
not.’

  ‘To make people compete with each other, to make them suspicious of each other.’

  ‘So that’s when his majesty the Prince started thinking he was hot shit.’

  ‘That was when I realised that people want things and that I could benefit if I had the things they wanted.’

  ‘You must have been so proud of yourself.’

  ‘Not at all. Just that I started wanting to see how much I could affect other people’s lives. Like I said before, it’s the lever principle, I can push just a little and make someone depressed, I can ruin their lives with minimum effort. It’s kind of amazing.’

  ‘I can’t say I’ve ever felt the same way. And so, what, that led you to start killing people?’

  ‘Even if I don’t kill anyone, hmm, okay, say I’m at the tail end of a cold, still coughing, right? And I happen to pass a mother in the street pushing her baby in a buggy, and when the mum isn’t looking I lean in and cough in the baby’s face?’

  ‘Doesn’t sound like such a big deal.’

  ‘Maybe the baby hasn’t been vaccinated yet and gets a virus. With my little cough it could mess up the baby’s life, and the parents’ too.’

  ‘Did you actually do that?’

  ‘Maybe. Or say I go to a funeral home and bump into the bereaved when they’re transporting their family member’s ashes. Pretend I tripped and fell. The ashes spill everywhere, it’s a huge mess. Such a simple little thing, but it puts a blot on someone’s memory. No one thinks kids have any malice in them, so no one would be that harsh with me. And I’m too young to be punished by the law. Which means that the family who dropped the ashes is even more sad and frustrated.’

  ‘Did you do that?’

  ‘I’ll be right back.’ The Prince stands up.

  ‘Where’re you going?’

  ‘I want to see if I can find the suitcase.’