Japantown Read Free Page A

scene might have found its way into a woodblock print when the genre veered away from the “floating world” and other lighter subjects. I had clients who snapped up the more grotesque ukiyo-e prints with ghosts and goblins and gore. The pictures weren’t as graphic as the spectacle before me, but some came close, for in the old days before photography ukiyo-e, and variations of the art, served a secondary purpose of reporting the events of the day. They functioned more as a premodern data stream than art, which is why they made their way west to Europe as disposable wrapping material for breakables, much as newspaper is used today.
    Renna spoke in a low growl. “The kill went down fast. Automatic at close range. Maybe four-five rounds a second. Ejected casings scattered like peanut shells. Bastard didn’t care too much about leaving them.”
    “Awfully arrogant,” I said. “Add high-level firepower, what’s that say? Psycho or gang?”
    “Could be either. Come take a look at this.”
    Shoving his hands in his pockets, Renna ambled around to the far side of the scene. I trailed after him until we stood at the point closest to the mother, which also gave us a different angle on the children. The boy’s mouth was slack, his lips ice blue and parted. The girl’s long black hair fanned across the brickwork. She wore a glistening red dress under a pink coat. The dress looked new and very much like the kind of thing my daughter might dream of wearing.
    I raised my hand to block the glare. The girl’s fingers were plump with baby fat and curled around a furry lump matted with blood. I thought I recognized the lump. “That a Pooh bear?”
    “Yeah.”
    I was suddenly aware of the frigid night air coursing through my lungs. Aware that tonight only a thin yellow band of tape separated the living from the dead. That the frail girl on the cobblestones, clutching a favorite toy, resembled my Jenny to an uncomfortable degree.
    Renna thrust his chin at the mother. “That look familiar?”
    My eyes swept over the scene from our new position. About six feet from where we stood, a scrap of paper floated in a pool of blood near the mother. On it was a kanji character, which crawled over the note’sfiber-rich white surface with the jagged, free-form sprawl of a giant spider.
    Kanji were the basic building blocks of the Japanese writing system—complex, multistroke ideographs borrowed from the Chinese hundreds of years ago. Blood had seeped into the paper and dried to the brownish purple of old liver, obscuring the lower portion of the character.
    “Does it?” Renna prodded.
    I shifted to the left to cut the glare of the kliegs—and froze.
    Illuminated in the unforgiving white light was what looked to be the same kanji I’d found the morning after my wife died.

CHAPTER 4
    M OSTLY , I remember the bones.
    The inspector and his team had spread black plastic tarp across my in-laws’ front lawn and were laying ash-covered debris out in a grid as they reclaimed items from the rubble. Shapeless blocks of melted metal. Scorched slabs of cement. And, in a discreet corner behind a freestanding screen, a mounting collection of charred bones.
    Over the next two months I spent all my time attempting to track down the kanji spray-painted on the sidewalk. It had given me purpose, a way to attack my grief. If there was a message to be had about Mieko’s death, I wanted to find it.
    Calling in a pile of markers, I received introductions to experts all over the United States and Japan. But no one could read the kanji. No one had ever seen it. The damn thing didn’t exist. Not in the multi-volume kanji dictionaries. Not in linguistic databases. Not in regional records dating back centuries.
    But I’d laid eyes on it myself, so I dug deeper. I applied the same techniques I used to trace an elusive piece of art, and eventually I unearthed a lead. In a musty corner of a mildew-laden university library in Kagoshima, a wizened old man