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

happen to be a fascist closet case caught at the sticky end of an unsuccessful cout d’état. Hanging’s off the list, too—Japanese architecture doesn’t provide the rafters to swing from. You could always throw yourself onto the Metro tracks, but if you have next of kin they’ll have to pay compensation for the damage your soft, juicy carcass did to that three-hundred-ton train. Plus, you’ll be infringing on that most inalienable of Japanese rights, which is to scurry through life unmolested by someone else’s emotion. No—if you mean it, and this isn’t some half-assed cry for help, then you take yourself to a height of twenty meters or more and you aim your forehead at the concrete below. To paraphrase Sean Connery: that’s the Tokyo way. And that’s how you’ll get ’er done.
    These were the facts that stuck in a reeling mind, addled with Kirin and crystal meth, trapped in a rabbit-hutch apartment on the thirteenth floor and searching for a story with a bit of meat to it for once. Because without a story, I was nothing.
    My own fault. I’d stupidly led myself to believe that I was a reporter. But after four years—unlucky number four if you believe elevators—I was mashed up against thirty-eight, my Rum Diary years were smoke, and I found myself lurching into the bitter and balding period where alcohol and amphetamine anxiety had me hitting the wrong keys and muttering to myself in public.
    This was not the plan. The plan was to skip through Europe, slob around Thailand, Laos, and the parts of China that didn’t actively hate Americans, then land in Tokyo and make my bones as the truth-telling turd in this uptight little punch bowl of a city before I returned to the States an honest-to-God folk hero.
    That hadn’t happened. Four years, and I was still on the outside looking in. Confused, irritated, scrabbling for information. The Japanese fed me facts like food pellets. I gobbled them up and just managed to stay on the living side of starvation, but it was no kind of life. And then came the celestial cackle-snort that dropped me into the offices of the Daily Shimbun .
    The Daily Shimbu n —literally, the “Daily Newspaper”—was about as dynamic as its name, an English-language morning rag that catered in low-key gai-atsu and whimsical lifestyle sidebars. I provided the expat stories, such as they were. After a year of Akron-born Akita breeders and creepy fiftysomething Queen’s Blade nuts, I’d decided to make shit up. Nobody checked because nobody cared, and I liked to think that someone out there got a giggle at Dr. Cliff Huxtable’s flu shot reminder and Mr. Archibald Bunker’s bonsai tips. Still, I was wasted professionally. I needed a real story, something with bite and range, and my editor—a dead-eyed scrotum in a suit named Shima—wouldn’t hear of it, preferring instead to let my career die the death of a thousand vacant smiles. Because I was an outsider, I was only good for outsider fluff. I didn’t know Japan, and I didn’t have the requisite skill to deliver good copy.
    In my drunken rages, which were frequent and obscene, I’d testify to the neighbors through nori -thin walls that the American male—the white American male, by God—used to be a person of note on the world stage. That this particular white American male—and who won the war anyway?—should be respected and admired for his mind . That he should not be treated like an alcoholic, meth-buzzing, stained-pants hack just because he was one.
    So I kept looking for a big story, something only I could write. And the more I looked, the more time I spent under the cosh of Shima and his ilk, the more I wanted it to be a piece that ripped the heart out of this country. A career maker shaped like a B-29 Superfortress. Something to carpet-bomb the place while I rode the shockwaves home. Because that was the point to journalism—you put that dirty laundry out there for everyone to see. You tell the story come what may.