Hanzai Japan: Fantastical, Futuristic Stories of Crime From and About Japan Read Free

Greenland. When you go looking for Greenland, the park might as well have been haunted since it opened for all the pictures you can find of it in its heyday. That place had been born empty in the mist and stayed that way, like it had been made for the ivy to devour.
    I made notes and looked at maps and made some archives requests of the train stations near Hobara pretending I was studying civil engineering, and decided where I had to go. And after the Nara Dreamland visit I took all the extra precautions you made when going someplace solo; I didn’t want any of them coming with me, but I knew things could get out of hand if you went exploring alone.

    I don’t remember driving back from Greenland, that first time. I had the police number programmed into my phone, a call never sent that whole five-hour drive. I deleted it when I got home, and then I sat on my bed and scanned through fifty pictures of the corpse.
    His hair looked like a businessman’s, gone a little to seed; too long between cuts. My notes from the car, almost too shaky to read, were that he was chubby, but when I was at home and flipping through the photos I realized he might just be swollen. I set down my camera for a while.
    He had no tattoos on his forearms. Someone had rolled up his sleeves to the elbows to prove it. My first thought was that he had rolled them up himself, before, but it was cold enough that his eyes had frosted overnight, so he wouldn’t have. Most likely someone dressed him after.
    I thought about that for a long time, sitting cross-legged on my bed. I wondered if he really had just died of natural causes, like a cat that runs away from home when it knows the end is coming. He was young; maybe he remembered the park from childhood and had wanted to come back here, and hadn’t bothered to bring much with him because there wasn’t much he’d need. Maybe he’d been humming carousel music until his heart stopped.
    I doubted it. His shoes were worn nearly through—in one of the pictures the sole was peeling near the arch, and it looked like a sheet of vellum, there was so little left of it. But they were untouched: not a spot of mud, not a blade of grass.
    Someone had killed him, and washed the body clean, and dressed it carefully—sleeves rolled up for testimony. Someone had carried him through the castle gates like a new bride and chosen the carousel for him, and set him gently against the post so he could look at the horses until he was found.
    And he must have been meant to be found. There were so many of us looking for places, looking for this place, looking for things to take photos of, that whoever killed him had staged him to be seen. My establishing shot was at an awkward angle; I couldn’t tell if he was really looking at the horse, or if he was meant to be looking at whoever approached.
    Lars sent me a message at two in the morning: Hey, you haven’t been around much. Cormac’s out of his cast. Feel like going out?

    We went up to some abandoned factory housing that took us nearly five hours to get to. Lars kept the coordinates secret as long as he could, shaking his head and giggling when Cormac asked him, hinting at things it wasn’t.
    When Lars got to “No one will get smallpox,” I said, “Lars, just tell us or don’t.”
    He blinked for a second before he admitted what it was. After that I put headphones on and ignored everybody from the front seat, which I always got to sit in, because Lars’s GPS was broken and I had to translate signs.
    (“Good thing you’ve turned local,” Lars had said when he pulled up, like he always did, “or we’d die of old age in Yokohama.”
    We all waited the three seconds it usually took for Eddie to remind everyone it was also nice to have a girl around in case security stopped you, but he must have still been upset I wouldn’t fuck him in Dreamland, and he kept quiet.)
    “Where have you been, anyway?” Cormac asked me eventually. “You haven’t been in the forums.