End of the World Blues

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  “Another sake?”

  Kit shrugged, caught himself, and smiled. “Sounds neat…”

  The Japanese woman opposite repeated the words to herself and Kit could see her think them through, consider all possible meanings to be found in the phrase, and fail to come up with one that made sense of being offered a drink.

  “Slang?”

  Nodding, Kit watched her file away the word for later use.

  “We should eat,” she said.

  Fragments of sea urchin slid across Kit’s bowl, and even black pepper did little to improve their taste, which was over-rich and slimy to the tongue.

  This was, he knew, the entire point of eating ezobafun. Its texture being as important as its taste, maybe more important. He could tell himself ezobafun tasted like Mrs. Oniji at the mid point of her cycle, but still his throat tightened with every fresh piece. No amount of sake was enough to wash it down, and he was drinking a lot of sake.

  “Slowly,” said Mrs. Oniji. “It is best to eat ezobafun slowly.”

  Kit looked up from his bowl.

  “Savour it,” she suggested.

  He nodded doubtfully.

  “You like this place?”

  Ordinarily yes, he wanted to say. Only today he was late getting home and Mrs. Oniji and he had at least another three courses to go. The mistake had been in not booking a restaurant himself. Still, Kit understood the compliment she was paying in bringing him here.

  “It’s very elegant,” he said. “Very sophisticated.”

  “Elegant,” said Mrs. Oniji, turning the word over in her mouth. “Sophisticated.” She got the stress slightly wrong both times and swallowed the middle of her second word, but her English was still infinitely more impressive than Kit’s Japanese, which consisted of five hundred or so words or phrases and could be reduced to the three that mattered.

  Domo arigato, Dozo, Sumimasen.

  Thank you, Please, I’m sorry.

  “There is a difference?”

  “Between…?”

  He’d been too abrupt. “Let me see,” he said, pushing his bowl aside, while he explained why the arrangement of bamboo in the rock garden outside was elegant while the American woman at the bar was sophisticated. The weather, clothes, food, Impressionist art, and books, these were the things Mrs. Oniji and Kit discussed during their weekly meetings.

  “I thought, perhaps,” said Mrs. Oniji, “we could go late-night shopping…” She waited for Kit to nod, his acceptance that this was a good idea. “I need a dress for New York.”

  He could hear the simple pride in that sentence. She was flying to America for a week’s holiday, with her sister, her sister-in-law, and her mother. Her husband was too busy to make the trip—Kisho Oniji was always too busy—but his would be the money that paid for first-class flights, the hotel near Central Park, and, quite probably, the presents that all three women would buy him at the Takashimaya department store on New York’s Fifth Avenue.

  Standing up, Kit pulled back Mrs. Oniji’s chair. He had been her English tutor for ten years, her friend for three, and her lover only recently. He was not proud of cheating on his wife, but life with Yoshi was infinitely more complicated than most people realised.

  Neither Mrs. Oniji nor Kit noticed the man who watched them collect their coats and it would have made little difference if they had. Hiroshi Sato had been selected for the absolute averageness of his looks, height, hair, and complexion.

  He was nearly invisible.

  Waiting a few seconds, Kisho Oniji’s personal assistant pushed back his stool, dropped a 10,000-yen note onto the counter, and followed the couple outside.

  CHAPTER 4 — Friday, 8 June

  Below a cast-iron streetlight that rusted in the shadow of an overpass built for Tokyo’s 1964 Olympics (and scheduled for demolition should Japan win the next Olympic bid), on a corner by Best Soul Burger, and a bit beyond where the Shuto Expressway 3 forks west to Shibuya or south towards the ersatz Parisian splendour of the Tokyo Tower, a cos-play-zoku in a faded red cloak made knives appear and disappear.

  The knives came into being between the girl’s first finger and thumb and disappeared at a flick of her wrist. She wore white gloves with the fingers cut away and was watched only by a cat.

  At least that was the night’s audience until Mr. Oniji’s personal assistant arrived.

  “Clever,” he said.

  The girl bowed, bent quickly to scoop up half the coins the man dropped into her plastic coffee cup, and tossed one of her knives high into the air before catching it behind her back.

  He noticed, almost too late, that the girl in the cloak and white-lace wedding dress kept her eyes shut. “Isn’t that dangerous?”

  “Not really.”

  Hiroshi Sato kept watching anyway. Although what he really watched was the alley beyond the girl, where the foreigner headed for home. Mr. Oniji’s instructions had been very clear, Sato was to observe without being seen.

  The job had begun five hours earlier when Mr. Nouveau ambled out of Pirate Mary’s, conversed briefly with an old man, and climbed onto a Kawasaki W650, which he rode north. Having paid a Brazilian mechanic in advance, Mr. Nouveau left his W650 at a machine shop on Akasaka-dori, walking the rest of the way, to arrive at a tiny wooden house near Temechi-dori at 4.30 exactly, the time given for Mrs. Oniji’s lesson.

  Two and a half hours later, Mrs. Oniji and her tutor had left the house. A short while later they reached a well-known restaurant, where they sat at a corner table. Mrs. Oniji did the bulk of the talking and Hiroshi Sato regarded this as appropriate, since she was the one practising her conversation. After this, they went shopping.

  The boss had not asked for a full report. He had merely told Hiroshi Sato where the foreigner lived and when the lesson would begin and ordered him to follow the man. He had not told Hiroshi Sato to write a report or make notes. Although Mr. Sato was making them anyway, just in case. So far as he could tell, nothing unseemly was taking place. Whether walking, talking, or eating, the boss’s wife and the foreigner treated each other with polite respect.

  Leaving the cos-play to her knives, Mr. Sato abandoned the corner near Best Soul Burger for air conditioning inside. He nodded absent-mindedly at the sing-song “irashaimase” greeting from a Korean girl behind the counter and ordered a teriyaki burger. When it came, by itself on a white plate, with a thick soy and plum sauce, he carried it to a table away from a window and began to expand his notes.

  Even if windows had let Hiroshi Sato watch the alley outside, it’s unlikely he’d have noticed the tramp who staggered from a Club Kitty doorway. This was the man who’d watched Mr. Sato break off his careful if over-obvious shadowing of the drunken foreigner. It was even less likely Mr. Sato would have noticed the cat, which ambled over to look at the homeless man at a nod from the cos-play.

  “Trouble?” Neku asked.

  “Think so,” said the cat. At least, that’s what she thought he said.

  The cat might not be able to name days of the week, but he knew good days from bad, and, until Neku appeared, the cat had been suffering bad traffic, weird weather, and a row of metal bins where plastic ones used to be.

  This was a problem, because the cat had been able to lift plastic lids. In fact, since he first stopped to watch the juggling girl two months earlier, those bins had been where he ate every night. The cat wasn’t to know his eating habits had led to a call from the Citizens Recycling Society, suggesting Best Soul adopt metal bins as good practise suggested.

  “You’re odd,” the cat said.

  “And you’re not?” said Neku, twisting her hair into a knot and fixing it in place with two long ivory pins. The blades she slipped into her pocket.

  “Where are we going?” asked the cat. Although, what he actually said was, Now…?

  “Work.”

  The cat scowled.

  “I’ve got this,” Neku said, reaching into her pocket for smoked eel. “Unagi set.” She added, “You eat it.” They walked in silen
ce, with Neku taking cold boiled rice for herself and tossing the cat slivers of meat from her bento box, applauding every time the cat caught a fragment before it hit the ground.

  “All gone,” she told him.

  Having checked to make sure she told the truth, the cat twisted between Neku’s ankles, almost tripping her.

  “Sorry,” said Neku, “I need to be alone now.”

  So the cat asked, Why? Which he did with a simple twitch of his whiskers and a quarter turn of one ear.

  “Hunting,” said the girl.

  At this the cat looked interested. “More food?”

  Neku shook her head. “Enemies…”

  “Ahh,” said the cat. Food, hunting, sex, and fighting, such things he understood. Conversation waited for none of those.

  “Good to meet you,” said Neku.

  The cat nodded and watched her walk away. He liked her cloak, which was long and lined with shiny stuff. And he’d liked the eel, very much. After a few seconds’ thought, the cat trotted after her.

  Violent crime is still rare in Japan. That’s the official version. The truth is somewhat more complex, though nothing like as grim as the hipper guide books suggest, with their dark rumours about heavily massaged figures and officially sanctioned underreporting. Violence happens. It’s still relatively common within families, between senior and junior classes in school, and remains the currency of choice inside gangs, but it occurs within rigidly defined hierarchies. Everybody understands that.

  It felt out of place on darkened steps leading to a Roppongi graveyard.

  Maybe this was why Kit was so slow to realise he was being followed. Alternatively, his slowness might have been down to the sake sweating itself out of his body and making him stumble on the steps, already aware he was too late to do anything but hope Yoshi had left No Neck in charge and gone to visit her sister Yuko as originally planned.

  He was inside his own thoughts, oblivious to the cloying humidity around him. His life was not right, it was not even wrong, it just was…and had been that way for so long Kit found it impossible to imagine life being any different. So he didn’t try, he just put one foot in front of the other and wished himself home.

  Neku sighed. If she’d been hunting she would have struck by now, so much time wasted on tracking was merely silly; unless the man with the Colt was having doubts? This seemed possible—the gap between hunter and prey remained the same ten paces as it had been a minute earlier, only now the hunter was glancing back, as if aware he too might be followed.

  And he was, for reasons that probably made sense only if you were Neku, the original…The foreigner gave her coffee. He’d never actually asked if she liked coffee, but every morning, when he returned from his walk, he presented her with a cup, giving Neku a slight bow. Once she changed doorways just to see what would happen and he arrived at her new doorway, carrying her cup, as if that was where she always slept.

  And before this, he’d given her 5,000 yen. At a kiosk on the way to the Meiji Shrine. One day when he was feeling sad and Neku was feeling scared. In the early days when she was still getting used to being herself. It was unacceptable that someone should hunt him.

  The Rolex was a fake but it was a good fake, triple-wrapped white gold, with a pearl face and appliqué numbers, Korean made. Kit stared drunkenly at the man’s Colt automatic, then at his own watch. “Okay,” said Kit, deciding to do what he was told. “It’s yours.”

  This was not the response his mugger had been expecting.

  “Drop it.”

  When Kit bent, the man shook his head. “Drop it,” he said.

  The fake Rolex hit the dirt with a thud, then bounced against the railings of the graveyard to become lost in darkness.

  “Now your wallet.”

  Extracting a small leather billfold, Kit flipped it open, peered inside, and shrugged. Fifty thousand yen. About the price of a good meal in Akasaka, a week’s heroin, or a proper service for his bike. Hardly worth getting killed over.

  “No,” said the man, when Kit got ready to drop it. “Hand the thing to me.”

  Kit did as he was told.

  His mugger was openly sneering now.

  “And the rest.”

  Kit began to search his own pockets. Nothing but keys to the bar and a handful of coins, mostly 500-yen coins or lower. It was only when he dipped his hand into the inside pocket of his wax jacket that Kit hesitated, although he imagined the expression on his face was surprise.

  “Come on…”

  “It’s just a postcard.”

  “I don’t care,” said the man.

  I always thought this is where we’d both end up. How wrong can one girl be? Signed with a heart, which was really just an M for Mary with the first and last downstroke squeezed together. If her card had sentimental value, how come he hadn’t answered the thing?

  Dear Kit, it probably seems a long time ago now…

  She’d got that right.

  “Come on,” said the man.

  “I’m late,” Kit said.

  The man stared at him.

  “You’ve already got my wallet. And my watch. What difference can a postcard make?” Quite why it mattered to Kit was hard to say. Although, from the mugger’s scowl it obviously mattered that Kit was refusing to do as he was told.

  “Afraid?” the man demanded.

  This was when Kit realised he was shivering. “Drugs,” said Kit, so matter of factly the man actually flushed.

  “Fuck that,” said the mugger, raising his gun. “This should cure you.”

  And just as Kit decided that perhaps it wasn’t worth dying for a black and white card of Amsterdam, his world exploded into a hurricane of white lace and scarlet silk, the mugger’s shot going wide as the cos-play spun between Kit and the firing gun, knocking it aside. Silver hair shook free and an ivory hair pin punched home, freezing a facial nerve as it ruptured the mugger’s eardrum and entered his brain.

  As Kit watched, the homeless man sank to his knees and tipped forward, coming to rest with his head against the railings. The last thing he did was stare at the cos-play who’d dropped to a crouch beside him.

  “Too slow,” she told him. “Way too slow.”

  “What have you done?” said Kit.

  “Spiked him,” she said. “Simple, neat, and looks to the untrained eye like a simple aneurysm.”

  “What about that?” said Kit, nodding to the juggling knife now sticking from the man’s ribs.

  “Oh shit,” she said. “Overkill…I’m Lady Neku,” she added, before executing a small bow and offering her hand. When Kit shook, he couldn’t help noticing that her fingers were sticky.

  “You all right?” asked Neku.

  “Drugs.” He said it without thinking. “I’ve got a…” Kit looked at the dead body, and then from the cos-play to the black cat who’d just appeared behind her. “Is this for real?” he said. “I mean, is any of this happening?”

  Neku shrugged. “It’s as real as anything else on this planet.”

  CHAPTER 5 — Friday, 8 June

  When Kit looked again the girl was gone and so was her cat. The body, however, was very definitely still there.

  “Oh fuck,” said Kit, a fairly useless thing to say.

  Picking up his watch, Kit threaded his wrist through its metal strap and managed to click the catch on his third attempt. It was ten minutes after midnight, which meant it was actually fifteen, because the watch could be guaranteed to lose five minutes in a day. Apart from a splatter pattern, his wallet looked fine, so Kit pocketed that too, having first wiped it on the dead man’s jacket.

  If this was shock…

  A hot night wind, a dead body, and the shakes.

  I should call the police, thought Kit, only what would he say? I was about to be shot when a cos-play saved me. No, I don’t know why. Actually, he didn’t know why he had been getting mugged either. His clothes were cheap, his fake Rolex out of sight, and there had to be better targets out there.

 
He’d seen bodies before, of course. Watched the living die through the cross-hairs of a sniper rifle, each hit walled off in an area of his mind Kit no longer visited. Before that there was Josh, looking neater than he’d ever looked when alive, hair combed and shoes shined, wearing a tweed jacket he’d have hated.

  Getting mugged, that was also shocking. And yet, it was the ease with which the cos-play turned the homeless man to meat…A spike through the ear and a blade to his side, before victim or Kit even knew it had happened.

  That was the real shock.

  He should leave before someone saw him standing next to a body and called the police anyway. In the time it took Kit to think this, he put a dozen paces between himself and the dead man, only to turn back. Had the girl been wearing gloves? Most cos-play-zoku did. Long black gloves that went up to their elbows, white-lace mittens, or some atrocity of chain mail and steel. What if her gloves had been fingerless? Some of the kids wore those. She’d have left fingerprints.

  The drunken conversation Kit had with himself halted him on the edge of flight. In the end he went back, if only because if he decided to leave he’d waste more time frozen to the spot, worrying it was the wrong choice.

  Kit knew himself well.

  Trying to look as if he’d only just stumbled over the body, Kit touched a hand to the man’s throat and then reached for the knife, but it refused to move. Eventually he remembered to twist its handle and the blade slid free with a sucking sound.

  “Nouveau-san…”

  Kit turned at his name and found himself staring into the worried eyes of Mr. Ito, who still carried his rickety home-made brush. The man bowed and, after a second, Kit remembered his own manners and bowed back.

  Sweeping the cemetery might actually be Mr. Ito’s job. Although it seemed more likely that the old man did it from respect or out of love for his dead wife. Whichever, he was there most hours of the day, dressed in a traditional jacket and wearing wooden clogs that were down at the heel.