Free Demon City Shinjuku: The Complete Edition by Hideyuki Kikuchi Page A

societies was a deserted island, a hole of white noise and static.
    Kyoya had rushed out of his house in the middle of the night in order to start making up this glaring deficit. Even waiting until morning would waste hours that couldn’t be made up later. Better to hang out at an all-night bar or fast-food joint and get the low down from the people on the ground. Perhaps info about the hideout of the sorcerer and his monster bodyguards would emerge.
    Now the stark reality of the place was sinking in. There was a neat row of prefab houses behind Okuma Auditorium where the Waseda University student apartments once stood. Here and there, streets and alleys dotted with stores and bars and “safe” hotels for the occasional adventure tourists.
    But all he could do was stand there like an idiot. Every door was sealed as tight as a drum. However he knocked and raised a ruckus, the curfew was on and no new customers were being allowed in. It wasn’t because everybody had gone to bed. Light seeped around the doorjambs and window shades. If he craned his ears, he could hear music playing inside.
    The clubs and hotels announced on their marquees that they never closed for business. But as in Europe during the Dark Ages, fearing ghosts and goblins and things that went bump in the night, during these midnight hours they all held their collective breaths and pretended not to be home.
    â€œDamn. That last diner was the sixth. I’ve been at this for half an hour. What the hell do they think a kid like me is gonna do to them? I suppose I could fake some injury and say I got mugged because they wouldn’t let me in. Next one that bars the door, I’m busting it down.”
    He growled to himself, getting into a downright foul mood, when a dim glow fifty yards off beneath a street light caught his attention. It appeared to be the marquee of a diner.
    â€œHa! That’s the one for me.”
    Perhaps the proprietor was a woman willing to show him some sympathy. Reinvigorated by this thought, he ran down the street. The diner was another prefab house converted into an all-night bar. The name on the marquee surprised him: “Musashi Miyamoto.”
    The name of a famous Edo Period swordsman. Making that the name of a retail establishment was rather odd.
    â€œSounds like the owner has a few marbles loose upstairs. Just my kind of guy.”
    The door was open. The interior of the bar was draped in shadows. The only illumination came from laser light fiber cables hanging from the ceiling. He could have sworn he’d heard naniwabushi —a traditional kind of Japanese narrative singing—accompanied by a shamisen . But there was no background music at all, not even some slow, depressing goth Muzak. The mood was ostentatiously gloomy.
    At the back, opposite the entranceway, was a half-crescent bar with four barstools, and ten cheaply-made tables placed in an arc around it. The place looked larger inside than from the outside. The walls on the left and right were decorated with samurai swords and lances, as if in tribute to the shop’s namesake.
    Kyoya spotted the source of the melancholic mood. At the table to the rear on the left, four men were engaging a young woman in some sort of conversation. Every time her shoulders shook, a low sob escaped her lips. This was no happy get-together.
    The girl was seventeen or eighteen. Three of the men looked about the same age. The fourth was a large man in his thirties who sported a beard. His apron suggested that he was the bartender and proprietor. All his training through the long winter nights on Mt. Daisetsu had sharpened Kyoya’s eyesight, such that he could make out this much detail in the dimly-lit bar.
    Kyoya was wondering how to break the ice when the young man next to the woman casually turned and noticed him. The gaunt face changed in a flash from fear to anger to loathing.
    â€œHey everybody, he’s here!”
    The men all stood as one. The