what you found out?”
“I’ve done some investigating of my own—witches and warlocks working in Shinjuku, new religious sects—and the connection between these supernatural phenomena and the Devil Quake is impossible to ignore. God, I need some water.”
“And the result of these investigations?”
“Nothing but dead ends there. I chanced across a more productive thread while looking into the early days of Demon City’s fratricidal conflicts.”
“Hoh.”
“I have connections at the National Library and the resource center at the Police Training Academy. I turned up a name, Onizuka. A police officer, nearing seventy. He was the only cop who survived Demon City’s first year.”
“That many died?” the young man said. He seemed surprised.
“In the three days after the Devil Quake, until the temporary bridges were erected, gangs ran rampant, violence and murder broke out everywhere, and the Shinjuku law enforcement infrastructure was in shambles. The cops who’d survived the Devil Quake were all pretty much killed in the line of duty.”
“Horrifying.”
“And I’m sure you don’t need to be told the murder rate in the year following. The total came to 5,824. If my memory serves correctly, the number of homicides for the entirety of Japan during that period was 1,920. In other words, a single ward had three times as many killings as the rest of the country combined. Add in theft, burglary and assault and it comes to more than three-hundred thousand cases. That year, 2,819 police officers died in the line of duty. Only one lived to tell the tale.”
“And that would be Onizuka.”
“Yeah. He was discovered in a vacant lot near Kabuki-cho, alive but his memory gone. He spent the next fifteen years convalescing. I checked him out.”
Perhaps in order to put the officer’s mind at ease, Onizuka’s hospital room was filled with a wan, dusky light. This was the room he’d silently occupied for fifteen years. He opened his mouth for the first time.
Sasaki only had one question to ask him: “What did you see?”
He had no way of knowing that in doing so he was taking hold of the end of the strange thread that tied them together, himself, Setsura Aki and that letter he’d sent. He still believed Onizuka was mad. If by chance some spark of sanity had returned, the brain cells holding those memories from a decade and a half ago must have turned to dust in the meantime.
Contrary to expectations, the old cop, all white hair and mottled skin, looked at Sasaki, his eyes coming unmistakably alive. Sasaki had to wonder if he’d been feigning insanity all along.
Onizuka told the story in a voice that sounded like rust falling off an old lock. He’d been transferred to Shinjuku—where the criminal class ran amok—two months after the Devil Quake. Though police headquarters had covered up the true number of cop killings going on, news about Demon City filled the airwaves. An officer who found out he’d been transferred there either resigned on the spot or made out his last will and testament.
As fate would have it, Onizuka was assigned to a police station in Kabuki-cho.
The ragged walls and skeleton of the Koma Theater still remained, while the rest of the buildings and houses had been leveled. Not so different from anywhere else in Shinjuku, except that perhaps because of some lingering karma from its prior existence, the remains of this entertainment district that once fed on human wants and desires became a magnet for all the lower forms of life.
That may have also decided Onizuka’s fate after only two days at his new post.
He set off on a patrol late that night. At one end of “Water Fountain Square” in Kabuki-cho, in the midst of the mountain of bricks and rubble where the Shinjuku Milano and Shinjuku Tokyu Theater once stood, he witnessed a fight.
It was a battle of two against one. The one was a man of medium build. The two consisted of a tall, lanky man and a quite shorter one. The
“I’ve done some investigating of my own—witches and warlocks working in Shinjuku, new religious sects—and the connection between these supernatural phenomena and the Devil Quake is impossible to ignore. God, I need some water.”
“And the result of these investigations?”
“Nothing but dead ends there. I chanced across a more productive thread while looking into the early days of Demon City’s fratricidal conflicts.”
“Hoh.”
“I have connections at the National Library and the resource center at the Police Training Academy. I turned up a name, Onizuka. A police officer, nearing seventy. He was the only cop who survived Demon City’s first year.”
“That many died?” the young man said. He seemed surprised.
“In the three days after the Devil Quake, until the temporary bridges were erected, gangs ran rampant, violence and murder broke out everywhere, and the Shinjuku law enforcement infrastructure was in shambles. The cops who’d survived the Devil Quake were all pretty much killed in the line of duty.”
“Horrifying.”
“And I’m sure you don’t need to be told the murder rate in the year following. The total came to 5,824. If my memory serves correctly, the number of homicides for the entirety of Japan during that period was 1,920. In other words, a single ward had three times as many killings as the rest of the country combined. Add in theft, burglary and assault and it comes to more than three-hundred thousand cases. That year, 2,819 police officers died in the line of duty. Only one lived to tell the tale.”
“And that would be Onizuka.”
“Yeah. He was discovered in a vacant lot near Kabuki-cho, alive but his memory gone. He spent the next fifteen years convalescing. I checked him out.”
Perhaps in order to put the officer’s mind at ease, Onizuka’s hospital room was filled with a wan, dusky light. This was the room he’d silently occupied for fifteen years. He opened his mouth for the first time.
Sasaki only had one question to ask him: “What did you see?”
He had no way of knowing that in doing so he was taking hold of the end of the strange thread that tied them together, himself, Setsura Aki and that letter he’d sent. He still believed Onizuka was mad. If by chance some spark of sanity had returned, the brain cells holding those memories from a decade and a half ago must have turned to dust in the meantime.
Contrary to expectations, the old cop, all white hair and mottled skin, looked at Sasaki, his eyes coming unmistakably alive. Sasaki had to wonder if he’d been feigning insanity all along.
Onizuka told the story in a voice that sounded like rust falling off an old lock. He’d been transferred to Shinjuku—where the criminal class ran amok—two months after the Devil Quake. Though police headquarters had covered up the true number of cop killings going on, news about Demon City filled the airwaves. An officer who found out he’d been transferred there either resigned on the spot or made out his last will and testament.
As fate would have it, Onizuka was assigned to a police station in Kabuki-cho.
The ragged walls and skeleton of the Koma Theater still remained, while the rest of the buildings and houses had been leveled. Not so different from anywhere else in Shinjuku, except that perhaps because of some lingering karma from its prior existence, the remains of this entertainment district that once fed on human wants and desires became a magnet for all the lower forms of life.
That may have also decided Onizuka’s fate after only two days at his new post.
He set off on a patrol late that night. At one end of “Water Fountain Square” in Kabuki-cho, in the midst of the mountain of bricks and rubble where the Shinjuku Milano and Shinjuku Tokyu Theater once stood, he witnessed a fight.
It was a battle of two against one. The one was a man of medium build. The two consisted of a tall, lanky man and a quite shorter one. The
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