Tokyo Noir: The Complete First Season

by J. Scott Matthews

  Satoshi took all of this in at a glance and pushed forward, through the massive intersection with its swarms of people and down through Center Street. He passed ramen shops and standing bars, bookstores that dealt exclusively in porno and comic books, restaurants, sex shops, and back alleys that contained more of the same, only seedier. He was surrounded on all sides by throngs of people all similarly attired in respirators and radiation-shielding jackets, save for a few brave souls willing to risk the fog. He felt the crush of people all around him, the added weight from his heavy jacket combining to make him feel even more claustrophobic. Plus, he still wasn’t used to seeing a sea of faces half-hidden behind respirators and eye masks over radiation-shielding overcoats.

  It didn’t help that the Center Street he remembered from his youth looked decidedly different now. He remembered coming here with Masa and their other friends when they were younger. Shibuya had been an amazing neon-drenched playground of bars and clubs where something was going on at all hours of the day. But lately it seemed different to him. Grimier. Whether the place had changed or just his perspective on it had, he couldn’t say.

  At the end of the street, he turned off onto a side street, then into another back alley, putting distance between himself and the glowing neon theme park that was Center Street. He started to breathe a little easier (even if it was still the same rubbery-tasting, filtered air from his mask) now that he was away from the crowds. He had arrived at his destination.

  He walked along a squat concrete building that looked abandoned, save for a row of filthy windows set at street level from which a yellowish glow emanated. In the middle of the building, there was a staircase carved out of concrete that led down to a black wooden door with a sign that read Frenchy’s Bar. He pushed the heavy door open and walked down the stairs.

  “Hola, Satoshi! Que pasa, man?” Frenchy called from behind the bar when he saw him enter.

  Same old Frenchy’s, with its bare concrete walls, crude wooden furniture handmade from cheap wood and repurposed packing crates, and long bar set against one entire wall. Same old Frenchy too, Satoshi thought as he removed his respirator and smiled at the heavyset, dark-complexioned man behind the bar sporting a bushy mustache and cowboy hat. Satoshi thought he looked like the villain from an old American Western movie, or maybe the cartoon logo for a brand of Tex-Mex food.

  “How are you, Frenchy?”

  Satoshi sidled up to the bar next to some Caucasians who had clearly been drinking for some time.

  “Eh, not so bad,” Frenchy said, already pouring out two shots of tequila. It was an unwritten rule that regulars had to do a shot of tequila with Frenchy upon arriving. Yet Satoshi had never seen Frenchy really drunk. They clinked glasses and downed their shots, Satoshi chasing his with a lime.

  “Wait, you’re Frenchy?” slurred one of the drunk guys next to them. “Why do they call you that?”

  “Because I’m Mexican,” Frenchy said without a trace of irony. The guy looked like he had more questions, but instead he turned back to his friends.

  “Hey, is your better half around tonight?” Satoshi asked, switching to Japanese.

  “Fuck you. And yeah, Ryu’s in back. What do you need?”

  “Gotta ask him something.”

  “As usual. Say, man, you alright? You look like shit.”

  “Thanks. Got a lot on my mind, I guess.”

  Just then Ryu appeared, hauling a quarter keg out from the back. Satoshi nodded to him, and after he finished wrestling the keg in place, Ryu came over.

  For a skinny guy, Ryu was surprisingly strong. Unexpectedly strong, even, given his stick arms. Which was probably why he also moonlighted as a bouncer at Last Resort, an after-hours nightclub. The guys who ended up picking themselves up off the pavement from the alley behind the club with a broken nose or a dislocated shoulder never saw it coming from Ryu. Being the bouncer and sometimes bartender/drug dealer at a major club in Shibuya meant Ryu knew everything about everyone’s business. Sometimes before they even knew themselves.

  “What’s up, Satoshi?” Ryu said. “You alright? Heard you had a little trouble on your boat ride the other day.”

  “How the fuck do you know that already?”

  “I hear things.”

  “I’ll bet. You have a minute to talk? I’m buying.”

  Ryu looked to Frenchy, who nodded. Satoshi and Ryu retired to a table with a tall bottle of Sapporo and two glasses. Satoshi outlined his problem for Ryu.

  “Well,” Ryu said after much careful thought and analysis, “seems like you’re pretty much fucked.”

  Satoshi sighed. “Kinda hoping you’d have something more for me there.”

  “What do you want me to say? If Vasili gave you an order, you better fucking do it. You know how this works.”

  “He also gave me the option to pay him back. So I was wondering if you had heard of any get-rich-quick schemes that might be out there.”

  “Well, there are always things floating around, but none that are easy.”

  “Like tracking down Masa and bringing him in alive would be easy?”

  “True. Is that why you’re looking for an out here, because you’re afraid of Masa?”

  Satoshi looked down at the table for a while without answering.

  Ryu held both hands up apologetically. “I mean, no offense if you are! Hell, that guy scares the shit out of me, too. I mean, just the other day I heard—”

  “It’s not that,” Satoshi said. “He and I go back a long way. And while we’ve drifted apart, I still don’t feel comfortable doing him like that.”

  “Yeah, plus the rumors I’ve heard on that guy … I mean, holy shit, you’re almost better off doing anything else.”

  Satoshi just nodded. “Right, so speaking of anything else … what have you got for me?”

  “Well, I’ve heard about a few things. One might fit the bill, if you don’t mind getting your hands dirty.”

  “I don’t mind getting my hands dirty. So long as it’s just dirt and not blood.”

  “Sure, I guess that’s possible. If you plan it right. Won’t be easy, though. I mean, you’re going to need a disciplined crew with the right gear, and that alone is going to—”

  “Would you just tell me what it is already?”

  So he did.

  Now it was Satoshi’s turn to be philosophical. “Fuck me. That’s impossible.”

  “Not impossible, just difficult. And if your only other option is to go after Masa, difficult is the easy way.”

  Vasili felt like a fool, standing out in the drizzling rain under a slate-gray sky, holding a green plastic phone receiver against his ear and listening to the other side ring and ring. He tried to reach his fixer at the Port of Guangzhou several more times throughout the day, each one equally unsuccessful. Strange, his contact Wu Lin was usually good about keeping in contact. But then again, his packages usually didn’t explode en route, so things had probably gotten fucked up somewhere along the way.

  If he didn’t get through to him soon, he’d have to send some people over to sort the matter out. Just another problem to solve, another blown gasket in the machine gumming up the works further down the line.

  Later, in his office in Club Hyperion, he was working on some paperwork when Jun walked into his office with the faintest trace of a smile on his lips. It was the closest his normally stone-faced assistant ever got to smiling.

  “What?” Vasili said.

  “Did you see the news tonight?”

  “No.”

  “They talked about the financial scandal for a while, followed by a lengthy progress report on the Greater Kanto Barrier. The last piece was a hard-hitting exposé on the best facial soaps for each skin type.”

  “Good. Glad to see they’re covering important news now. I need you to get in touch with Arekusuandaa’s widow. Find out when the funeral will be so we can pay our respects.”

  “There’s to be a funeral?” Jun asked. “But wasn’t he already cremated?”
<
br />   Vasili looked up at him. “I can never tell if you make joke, or are serious.”

  “Yeah, I think I got that from you. But why a funeral for him after he went behind your back?”

  “Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t piss on that traitor to put him out. But we still have obligation to his family.”

  “How so?” Jun asked.

  “We don’t owe him anything, not anymore. But his wife, his family, they did nothing wrong. They need to be taken care of.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “Besides, far as anyone knows, he took his life of his own accord for the Kaisha. Is lie, but is lie we must make people believe.”

  Jun nodded. A flash of motion caught his eye from the doorway as Kameko flew into the room.

  “Something you need to hear,” Kameko said, approaching her boss. “Tetsuo was found murdered.”

  “Tetsuo … our Tetsuo?” Vasili said.

  “Yeah. They found his body in some abandoned warehouse out on Tsukishima. He was strangled, then gutted, as if the serial killer had done it. Or it was meant to look that way.”

  Vasili closed his eyes. Not Tetsuo. Not now. He felt the others’ eyes upon him.

  “How do you intend to respond?”

  “With war. With calculated fury and measured rage.” He thought for a moment. “I want you to find out who replaced Suga as lead detective on serial killer case. I know is not one of ours. We may need to pay him a visit sometime soon.”

  Once his assistants were gone, Vasili walked over to the large windows extending the length of his office and peered out. He saw soot-caked skyscrapers, squat tenements, traffic lights, concrete, glass, metal, and wood stretching out for miles in every direction under the darkening sky. He saw a million places for invisible enemies to hide, lurk, and wait for their opportunity, where they could peer out from behind cracks and crevices in this urban jungle to take their shot at him.

  The siege had started.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The next day, Satoshi went to visit his mother. The sense of guilt telling him it had been too long was overpowering by this point, prompting him to go. Since her train line had been largely submerged a few years back, Satoshi elected to ride the Kawasaki Ninja he used to cut through the city’s congested streets.

  “Oh,” she said upon opening the door.

  “Hi, Ma.”

  She waved him in as she retreated back into her apartment.

  “I got you something,” Satoshi said, taking the bottle of pills out and tossing it to her.

  “My fludarabine?” she asked, picking up the bottle. “Oh, no. This is FR. Don’t they have FC? This stuff upsets my stomach.”

  “Sorry, best I can do right now. Looks like there might be a shortage of medication for the time being.”

  “I heard something about that. Some terrorists bombed a ship in Tokyo Bay, killed a whole bunch of people.”

  As she spoke, his mother walked over to a window that looked directly into a brick wall from the building several feet away.

  Satoshi just nodded. “Yeah, I heard something about that.”

  “Did you know them?” she asked, her tone sharper than before. “The men on the ship? Were they friends, or brothers, of yours?” She lit the end of a cigarette and blew smoke out the window.

  “I … no, Ma, I didn’t know those guys. I wish you wouldn’t smoke.”

  “Why not?” his mother asked. “I’ve already got cancer.”

  As she spoke, she slowly exhaled a second puff of smoke from her nostrils that hung in the air between them.

  He was so used to speaking in English for syndicate business that when he spoke in Japanese, the nuances of the language sometimes caught him off guard. None more so than the phrase for contracting cancer. In Japanese, the phrase literally means “to become cancer.” And sitting there now, watching his mother through the blue haze of cigarette smoke hanging in the air between them, he saw the brutal honesty of the phrase. His mother truly had become cancer. It had suffused throughout her so thoroughly that cancer was all that was left of the woman.

  Things that should have died within her had stayed alive, metastasizing until they had taken on a life of their own. Just as cancer hijacked the body’s own processes and turned them against it, his mother’s sadness had hijacked her, throwing everything about her out of balance. It had hollowed her out a long time ago, leaving just a husk of the former host. His mother had died a long time ago, when his father had disappeared. All that was left was just tissue that was living without sentience, an organism just going through the motions.

  It got to a point when Satoshi realized she would never be whole again. This was when he was in high school, when he’d come home to find a third eviction notice on the door. He’d told his mother, but if it registered in the brain behind her glassy eyes, he couldn’t tell. He’d left home that night with his baby sister crying in the next room, and hadn’t come back for two nights.

  When he had creeped back, he’d had a black eye, raw knuckles, and enough crumpled, dirty bills to pay their rent. It was nearly four in the morning, but she had been awake, waiting for him in the same chair she sat in now. He’d handed her the money without saying a word and gone to bed, so tired he’d slept right through her sobbing in the next room.

  He’d quit school soon after. He had to—he had a family to support. And the only way to do it was by walking the Path. He’d never looked back, couldn’t afford to. Since then, his mother never asked where the money came from, and he never told her. But she knew.

  “Even with cancer, some people can live for years with treatment. Why bother with the meds if you’re just going to sabotage yourself?”

  “I’ve already got a life sentence. Let me at least enjoy some small pleasures as I die.” Another exhalation. “But how are you doing?”

  “Not great, actually. Something I wanted to ask you, something work-related—”

  “I don’t want to hear it,” his mother said, cutting him off immediately.

  “It’s personal, too. It’s about Masa.”

  “What about him?”

  “They want me to find him and … turn him in.”

  “To the police?”

  “To the authorities, yes.”

  Satoshi didn’t like lying to his mother. He felt satisfied that this phrasing was close enough to the truth that it didn’t technically count as a lie.

  “You would do that to your old friend?”

  “I don’t know. I might not have a choice in the matter.”

  “But you were so close. We could hardly have a meal as a family without him tagging along.”

  Satoshi didn’t respond.

  “I almost grew fond of the insolent little shit,” his mother said with a rueful smile that faded as her eyes came into focus on Satoshi. “What do they want him for?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know what he did, yet you’re going to turn him in? You’re going to side against your friend?”

  “I … I might not have a choice. He … they have all the power here.”

  “You’re worried about the police? You’ve spent more of your life on the Path than off it. Now you’re just going to turn on one of your brothers like that? Isn’t solidarity one of your core principles, or whatever?”

  Satoshi was taken aback. She had never before acknowledged what he did. What he was. It took him a moment to respond.

  “I didn’t know you cared so much for the Path’s code.”

  “I don’t care about any of that nonsense. That bullshit gangster chivalry is probably what did your father in. I just know that Masa always worshipped you, idolized you, even. You kept him safe, remember?”

  “He’s changed, Ma. He can be violent, dangerous. We don’t see each other much anymore.”

  “And now that he’s not close, you’re going to cut him loose, eh?” She finished her cigarette and stubbed it out in the ashtray in front of her. “Doesn’t sound like you, Satoshi. Maybe he cha
nged, but you’re practically brothers. What kind of man walks away from that bond? What kind of man did I raise?”

  You didn’t raise me, you abandoned me to raise myself. It’s part of the reason I’m where I am now.

  As much as he wanted to spit invective at his mother, he found that he couldn’t. Something stopped him from saying what he was really thinking.

  “One without a whole lot of options,” is all he said instead.

  Satoshi left his mother’s place a little while later. He began walking through the old neighborhood, less out of a feeling of nostalgia, and more from pure aimlessness as he considered his options.

  And while he didn’t find Masa himself, he saw traces of him everywhere. It was like images had been seared into the landmarks that dotted their past, like shadows left from a flashbulb. The convenience store where they used to spend hours reading manga books because they were too poor to actually buy them. The back alleys they would lead customers down to furtively swap cash for product. The abandoned lofts where Masa would hole up for weeks at a time when his dad was on a bender. At each spot, Satoshi could still make out traces of the kids they had been. The memories lingered in the air as if they were almost tangible.

  At one point, Satoshi walked by a playground that looked familiar. It took him a few moments to realize why, and when he did, the scene began playing out in front of him.

  He saw a young boy duck into the park and begin tearing through it, three older boys close on his heels. They caught him right inside the entrance. The boy being chased put up a brief struggle, throwing loopy haymakers and a few weak jabs that either failed to connect or didn’t do much when they did. He was soon overwhelmed. The others surrounded him and began whaling on him, their fists make flat packing noises as they rained down on his body, face, and upturned hands. The only other sounds were the grunted protests from the boy being beaten and the cruel taunts of his tormentors.