Osamu Dazai and the Dark Era

by Kafka Asagiri

“Are you ordering me as the leader of this organization?” I asked.

  “No, I merely ask out of personal interest.”

  “Then I prefer not to answer.”

  For a brief second, the boss’s eyes opened wide in astonishment. Then he crossed his arms and smiled like a teacher fed up with a poor student.

  “I see. Then you may go. I anticipate good news from you.”

  Meanwhile, Dazai was over at the port. After walking along the seaside for some time, he found himself in the warehouse district surrounded by a planted forest. There were lines of small ships with their registration numbers scraped off, various stolen cars of international makes, and large chromatographs for manufacturing explosives. Not only did the nearby residents stay away, but even the city police avoided going there without a good reason. The area was run by underground organizations such as the Port Mafia—a death trap, to put it another way. Three bodies had washed up on the coast that morning.

  “Make sure the police don’t hear about this. Also, call the cleaner. We need to get these bodies out of here.”

  Men in black suits—Port Mafia grunts—silently worked at the site where the bodies were found. These city lowlifes simply gritted their teeth and did as they were ordered. There were two reasons for this: One, these were the bodies of their colleagues—fellow mafiosi. The other reason was that one of the execs was expected to arrive on-site any minute due to the gravity of the situation.

  “Look into whether any of these men had families. If they do…” The mafia member in command stopped midsentence and paused for a moment. “…I’ll explain things.”

  The man in charge was a senior Port Mafia member with white hair and a cigar. He had a gentlemanly air, sporting a well-starched black overcoat and a suit. This was Ryuurou Hirotsu—one of the oldest members of the Mafia.

  Hirotsu took out a gold pocket watch and checked the time.

  “One of our executives will be here any minute now. Finish learning everything you can about the victims before he arrives.”

  “Morning, everyone!”

  Hirotsu’s orders were almost immediately followed by a voice coming from the man-made forest. Everyone turned around, looking tense. From appearances alone, the young man who arrived before them could have easily been mistaken for a child. He tottered over to the group, his hair unkempt and his head, neck, and arms covered in bandages. The young man was one of the Port Mafia’s five executives—Osamu Dazai.

  Hirotsu promptly put out his cigar before tucking it away in his pocket ashtray. All the men in black suits placed a hand on their chests and respectfully bowed.

  “Gimme a second, okay? I’m about to clear this really hard level— Oh, crap! He passed me! Eat this! …Ack, he dodged it!”

  Dazai walked closer, struggling with a handheld video game. He was so focused on the screen that he would have face-planted if he had stepped onto even slightly more uneven ground.

  “Ugh. I can’t beat this level no matter how many times I try! This curve here is the tricky part. Every time I go around it, I—Gah! He passed me again!”

  “Dazai, sir.” Hirotsu timidly spoke up on behalf of the others, since they were unable to say anything. “Thank you for coming all this way. The armory guards were shot, and as of now—”

  “It’s been a while since anyone’s been crazy enough to target a Port Mafia armory! How’d they do it?” Dazai asked, still focused on the video game.

  “Our men were killed instantly after being hit with around ten to twenty 9mm rounds each. Then the intruders stole various firearms from the armory: forty submachine guns, eight shotguns, fifty-five pistols, two sniper rifles, and eighty grenades. They also took a total of eighteen kilograms of detonator-type high explosives. The electronic lock was opened with the passcode. How that code was leaked is still—”

  “Let me have a look, then. Here, take care of this for me.”

  “Huh?”

  Hirotsu’s expression turned stern as Dazai handed him the game system. “The trick is in the timing. You use a booster item once you reach the straight path in the middle of the course. So where are the bodies?”

  “Oh, uh, they’re lined up by the tetrapods— Wh-what buttons am I supposed to press?”

  Dazai skipped off to the concrete blocks and ignored Hirotsu, who was holding the console upside down in a fluster. There lay three bodies, each wearing sunglasses and black suits. They were very tough men—up until yesterday. Soaking in the ocean for a few hours had caused their skin to swell, but they would have been in far worse condition if they had drowned; all three of them had bled out almost completely before being tossed into the ocean to sink to the bottom.

  “Hmm.”

  Dazai gazed disinterestedly at the corpses.

  “Their weapons are still in their holsters. Well, that’s just sloppy. Also…most of the gunshots have exit wounds…which means they were fired at close range, from a submachine gun. You’d have to be pretty skilled to get this close without being noticed. I’m getting my hopes up. What about the warehouse’s surveillance footage?”

  Dazai turned to Hirotsu, who simply gazed forlornly down at the game system in his hands and revealed a totaled car on the screen.

  “I am deeply ashamed of myself…,” Hirotsu mumbled.

  Dazai stared at him curiously, as if he had already completely forgotten that he’d passed the game to Hirotsu.

  “Mr. Hirotsu.” Dazai’s eyes narrowed.

  “I… I’m sure if you just give me one more chance, I could—,” Hirotsu pleaded as he gripped the game system once more.

  “Anyone in the lower ranks who causes problems over narcotics should immediately be cut loose,” Dazai suddenly said.

  “Narcotics?” Hirotsu turned pale. “No, nobody is involved in anything like that…including my subordinates. My men are top caliber—”

  “The gun at your waist.”

  Dazai pointed at him. Hirotsu swiftly covered the gun tucked away in his suit belt with his hand, although not on purpose; it was merely a natural reflex.

  “Mr. Hirotsu, you don’t usually carry a gun with you, right? Plus, you’re the kind of person who takes very good care of their weapons. And yet, the sloppy way you’ve tucked it into your belt leads me to believe that it is neither yours nor merchandise. Judging by the condition it’s in, it belongs to one of your men. Am I right?”

  Hirotsu stood in silence as Dazai continued.

  “You have around twenty subordinates under your wing. Did you borrow that gun from one of them? No, you didn’t. There was no reason for you to use a gun at this time of the morning. You took it. Why? Because the grip was lightly stained with blood and some white powder. But there is neither powder nor blood on you, Mr. Hirotsu. One of your subordinates must have caused some trouble over drugs. Judging by the bags under your eyes, I’m going to say it happened last night. So you tied your subordinate up and took his gun because who knows what he’d do if you didn’t.”

  “That’s—,” Hirotsu uttered in a muffled voice, but Dazai kept on speaking and cut him off.

  “That subordinate is ignoring the syndicate’s policy, Mr. Hirotsu. Selling drugs makes a lot of money, but it also brings a lot of problems along with it. The Special Division for Unusual Powers, narcotics agents, the MP’s criminal-organization watchdogs… Government organizations are champing at the bit just waiting for us to make any sort of mistake that would give them a chance to strike. Simply taking your subordinate’s gun isn’t going to do anything.”

  “But…”

  “Mr. Hirotsu, I don’t know why, but I was given the lofty position of executive, and when you’re an executive, you get subordinates whether you want any or not. But I can’t produce results with a bunch of sloppy flunkies. That’s why I cut the bad ones loose early. You should do the same.”

  “…I am deeply sorry,” Hirotsu mumbled, his voice strained.

  In the Mafia, “cutting the bad ones loose” means killing them. Refusing executive orders is treat
ed as betrayal and dealt with in the same fashion.

  Hirotsu apologized but said no more after that. Dazai fixed him with a piercing gaze; the silence was so deafening that time nearly froze in place.

  “…Ha-ha! Just kidding!” Dazai abruptly added in a cheery tone. Hirotsu stared back at him, confused. “The reason you have so many people following you is that you don’t turn your back on them. I’ll leave things in your hands. I won’t tell the boss.”

  He patted Hirotsu on the shoulder and smiled. Hirotsu unconsciously rubbed his throat while he nodded. He must have been tense.

  Dazai, the youngest executive in the Mafia’s history, was a living legend within the syndicate. Nothing got past him, be it from an enemy on the outside or a scandal from within the group. More importantly, nobody had even an inkling of Dazai’s desires or dislikes, or what he supported or was opposed to. Not even Hirotsu, who’d been in the Mafia for longer than most, could figure him out. No one would have been surprised if Dazai had “disposed” of Hirotsu just then.

  “All right, let’s get back on topic. Is there any footage of the attackers?” Dazai asked with a snap of his fingers.

  At Hirotsu’s signal, a man in a black suit brought over a total of five pictures from the security camera. Dazai took them from him and began to study them. The stills showed several men sneaking into the warehouse and stealing the Port Mafia’s firearms. The thieves were wearing worn-out sacks over their heads and dingy cloaks instead of overcoats. On the surface, they didn’t look any different than your average back-alley thug. However…

  “Those are soldiers.” Dazai’s lips slightly curled the moment he laid eyes on the photos. “Seasoned ones, at that.”

  He looked over the dim figures of the raggedy men several times, tilting the photos this way and that.

  “They look like your run-of-the-mill ruffians at first glance, but they’re moving in a diamond formation to cover their blind spots. Mr. Hirotsu, you know what kind of gun this is?” Dazai pointed at the pistol on the waist of one of the attackers.

  “It is an old model, very old. It appears to be even older than me. From the gray body and narrow muzzle, I would say it’s an old-fashioned European pistol known as a grau geist.”

  “I saw this gun yesterday.” Dazai’s eyes narrowed. “That means the men who robbed the armory attacked us immediately beforehand…which means that was just a diversion. Heh. Now things are getting interesting. These guys are even more fun than I imagined.”

  With the pictures still in hand, Dazai spun around, turning his back to the others before starting to walk off. He placed a thumb on his lip, muttering to himself as he paced back and forth.

  “So they purposely leaked intel that they were going to attack us in the middle of our next business transaction. That way, we’d focus our manpower in one location, leaving only a few guards at the armory. Then they stole the weapons—a lot of them. But why? To resell? No, it wouldn’t need to be weapons if that were the case. I see. This is…” Dazai rambled, lost deep in thought. All the others could do was wait for him in silence.

  “……”

  Hirotsu’s subordinates stood stock-still as they waited for the much-younger executive to gather his thoughts.

  “Y’know,” Dazai commented after a good few moments of silence, “I’m thirsty.”

  “I will have someone buy you a drink.” Hirotsu gave a flick of his finger, signaling the subordinate by his side to go. The black-suited mafioso then rushed off in a fluster.

  “Get me a coffee with lots of milk. Make sure to cool it off!” Dazai cheerfully yelled out as the man dashed away. “Oh, but no ice, okay? If you can get me a decaf, that’d be even better. And double the sugar, please!”

  Watching the Mafia grunt depart in a cold sweat, Dazai dropped his voice to a murmur. “Mr. Hirotsu, the enemy didn’t attack just any armory. They went after one of the three major armories containing the Port Mafia’s emergency weapons supply. It’s heavily guarded, and an alarm sounds if anyone enters the area without permission. But these guys easily got past all that, and they sneaked in using the actual passcode—something only subexecutives and higher would know. So how did the enemy get their hands on such top-secret information?”

  Hirotsu’s face tensed. There were only three possibilities: A Port Mafia member was tortured into talking, someone had a skill that enabled them to extract information, or there was a traitor within the organization. All three options spelled a worst-case scenario.

  “This entire area is going to turn into a war zone.” Dazai gazed at the city skyscrapers and gave a small smile. “That over there is gonna end up a pillar of flames. I can already see the sky burning crimson.”

  “Do you know anything about the enemy organization?” Hirotsu asked, suppressing his emotions.

  “One of my men tortured the prisoner we captured yesterday, but he couldn’t get him to talk. The guy just waited for the right moment and killed himself with the poison he was hiding in between his molars. The only thing we got out of him was the enemy organization’s name.”

  As if to portend the next word that would leave his mouth, Dazai shot Hirotsu a grim, piercing stare. His eyes portended an incoming storm of bloodshed and violence that would haunt the average person’s dreams for days on end.

  “…Mimic.”

  After receiving orders from the boss, I started tracing Ango’s steps. But there wasn’t even a single clue before me. Searching for a Mafia informant is on a completely different level from locating a missing pet cat (which I’ve actually done before, so I say this with confidence). If a cat runs away, then you can stake out a local feeding ground, but there was no way for me to even guess where Ango’s “feeding ground” might be.

  With nowhere to turn, I came up with a few hypotheses. There were two possibilities for Ango’s disappearance: Either he went into hiding of his own volition, or he was abducted. If it was the former, then I was out of luck. Ango wasn’t some rebellious teenager running away from his parents. If he really wanted to, he could get himself a few million in untraceable banknotes and travel the world, bouncing from one campsite to another like a nomadic tribesman. Hence why I’d tossed out this hypothesis. The other possibility was that Ango could’ve been taken somewhere against his will. As the boss predicted, the most likely scenario was that an enemy syndicate was trying to get information out of Ango. If that was the case, then I’d want to believe he secretly left behind some sort of trail, like the bread crumbs in that one Brothers Grimm fairy tale.

  I decided to start off by visiting Ango’s residence. Now that I thought about it, I knew next to nothing about his personal life. Our relationship was always like that, though. Ango and Dazai never talked about themselves. The three of us were like a band of thieves who just happened to be hiding under the eaves of the same abandoned temple to avoid the rain. We’d always just get lost in conversation, never knowing exactly who the other was.

  But Ango often had to go out of town for business, and I remembered hearing him casually mention drifting from hotel to hotel during one of our chats. He must’ve stayed somewhere that had ties to the Mafia, given how many people were after his life. There were a few hotels like that within the prefecture, where privacy was of utmost importance. They each had around two dozen armed guards permanently stationed; only a select few could stay at these locations.

  I began to call up some of these hotels. Once the manager realized who I worked for, his strained voice instantly softened, and he began to answer my questions courteously. If we were ever to meet face-to-face, I wouldn’t be surprised if he snuggled right into my lap.

  I finally found out where Ango lived once I called the third hotel. It was an eighteen-story building with sand-colored walls, located just a little off the main drag. The surrounding neighborhood was lined with similar buildings and a park, and the entire area was steeped in a heavy stillness—or a silence, you could call it—despite the daytime hour. The silence was all too familiar for Mafia terri
tory. It looked like just the kind of place Ango would’ve enjoyed.

  After receiving the room key from the manager, I headed to Ango’s suite. According to the manager, he’d started living there around half a year ago and paid in advance. However, due to the nature of his work, he rarely returned to his room. Apparently, he would show up once every few days, then disappear once again by morning. The manager claimed that Ango never invited anyone else inside.

  His room was a tidy one-bedroom suite. It’d been thoroughly cleaned—not even a speck of dust. There was hardly any furniture in the parlor, save for a small bookshelf that held a few old novels and various regional documents. In the ceiling was an air vent so cleverly hidden that it was virtually undetectable, its ventilation fan spinning almost noiselessly. A single black wooden stool sat quietly in the corner.

  In the bedroom stood a short desk and a bed covered in crisp sheets. A reading light hung over the pillow upon which lay an open biography of a genius mathematician from around a century ago who had left an elegant mathematical expression.

  The place practically screamed Ango—an immaculate, smart, sterile space that didn’t give a single glimpse into his life. I stood in the middle of the room and silently looked around. There was something bothering me, albeit minuscule—something I wouldn’t usually give so much as a second thought.

  “Ango Sakaguchi, Mafia intelligence officer,” I said aloud. “You’re a mysterious, intellectual man. Nobody knows who you really are.”

  Of course, no one was there to respond. I headed to the double-door window with its four sheets of expertly inlaid glass. Outside was a view of Yokohama. Directly below was a park that led to a line of high-rise buildings. The stars must cast a pretty reflection off the lake at night.

  I turned my back to the window and made one more sweep of the room. Immediately, I realized what had been bothering me: I was a Mafia member unable to kill. That was why I mostly got stuck with the petty, troublesome jobs. But as I held my tongue while pressing on through these tasks, I started to develop a certain sense of intuition. It was like a hair-thin thread of discomfort that could snap at any moment. However, following the thread sometimes led me to unexpected truths.