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

You going anywhere?”
    “I’m never in the forums. I don’t care who finds Lars’s number.”
    “Jealous, you are. There have been eighty guesses so far. Somebody did a counterfeit just to see if Lars would return to the real one to check on it. Idiots.” He leaned forward. “Lars told me where it was.”
    “He’d tell anyone,” I said, and Lars laughed like I was trying to be funny and said, “I could tell you, too,” and I shook my head and turned up the volume.
    “Let’s just find someone else who likes this shit,” Cormac said at some point, between songs. “Anybody Japanese could read the fucking signs, she’s not worth it,” and it was a solid two seconds before Lars answered, “It’s fine, she’s fine.”
    The homes looked about eighty years old, which made sense when I thought about it but still surprised me. The roof had fallen in on the kitchen of the first house, and we couldn’t get into the biggest bedroom because the door had swollen and molded shut to the frame, so Lars and Cormac and Eddie all took turns getting artistic shots of the panes without paper and whatever they could manage of the room beyond.
    I went into the smaller room, which had to have been a child’s, it was so small. It had been wallpapered in Moga postcards that had crumbled or bubbled or warped, so it looked like the wall was swelling with huge grubs that had black bobs and lipstick for camouflage, rolling down the wall in herds.
    There hadn’t been any grubs at Greenland. No flies, no beetles, none of the things you’d think would be interested once someone had died. I didn’t remember him smelling like anything; nothing rotten had coated my mouth, like the smells of dead things do even when you try to keep them out. Had he been there long enough that the smell was gone? I imagined a scar down the center of his chest, right along the placket of his shirt, where someone had taken the innards out, so the rest would last longer.
    But his eyes had been pristine, milky and round and still glistening, not an eyelash disturbed. The insects couldn’t have taken over. Not by then.
    “You thinking of stealing one?”
    I jumped. “What?”
    Eddie gestured at my camera, where it hung forgotten over my sternum. “Take nothing but photographs, remember. Leave the postcards for posterity.”
    “I wasn’t going to steal anything,” I said, but Eddie was already taking a photo of the wall like it was evidence he could use later if the Missing Eighty-Year-Old Postcard Council called him into court.
    The woods around the houses were deep and quiet, the trees nearly interlocking, which gave everything a grim darkness shot through with bands of light, and I took pictures of that every ten minutes, watching the puddles of sun across the ground and wondering how late in the morning it was before the condensation on his eyes warmed and disappeared, until Lars came out shouting for me because they thought I had fallen through the floor to the cellar and fainted.

    The Ferris wheel at Greenland is at the farthest edge from the sad castle entrance, so you have to work to reach it—my civil engineering class would have frowned on having something so distinctive so far away—but it’s worth it. A ring of circular cars, like a model of an atom or a cartoon firework before it bursts. And decay has only made it quainter, pastels and patina and the entrance nearly blocked off with feathery plants like nature can’t wait to crowd inside. It’s already made it into the lower cars—the saplings have gotten big enough to push inside, their branches trailing leaves against the seats. When I went back to Greenland, alone, I made myself take photos of it again before I went to the carousel. I was an explorer; the Ferris wheel was as good as anything.
    I couldn’t look directly to see if he (it, he) was still there, so I watched the ground for prints (there were only mine, softened by the damp but still marked where I had stepped across the