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

hours and late night was half-price. “If we’re not eating pussy, sushi’s the next best thing,” Steve said. I was too drunk to do anything but smile like an idiot. The tablets, whatever they were, made me euphoric and stupid. It was a perfect state for a Friday night; the only way to truly experience Little Toke.
    Passing the comic shop, I noticed a small enamel necklace of a rabbit. My roommate, Luce, was covered in tattoos of rabbits; she kept them covered with pencil skirts and long-sleeved silk blouses when she taught French at an Upper East Side private school, but she mapped them all out for me once, standing in our living room in her Siouxsie and the Banshees tank top and leopard-print boy shorts.
    I was just drunk enough to be in love with her, convinced that this little token would woo her to strip down and go to bed with me. I slapped a fiver down on the counter, got the little beastie wrapped up and shoved it in my pocket.
    “She’s never going to fuck you,” said Steve, firing up an unfiltered cigarette that smelled like a bum’s asshole. “She’s got no reason to. It’s her apartment, she doesn’t owe you shit.”
    Luce hated Steve. He came over to get me one time and I don’t know what he said to her, but the next morning she offered to pay the cable bill herself if I promised never to bring him around again. But one night, he came to the apartment in the middle of the night, piss-drunk and repeating himself, convinced the cops were following him for a crime he wouldn’t tell me about. I let him sleep on our couch, and two days later I found a dead rat in my cereal box. Luce doesn’t fuck around. I like that about her.
    “You should get a fucking tattoo, ” said Steve, pointing upward to a limp banner with a dragon and a tiger wrapped around thick block letters spelling out tatto o s . “Luce loves that shit, she’d probably fuck you then.”
    In a better state, I would have told him to fuck off, but the second round of tablets the shot girl geisha pulled from the oversized sleeve of her microscopic kimono had made me suggestible and delirious. “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, a tattoo. Fuck yeah!”
    The place was empty except for an old gyno table and a wall of flash: block letters spelling “No Regrets” and “Only God Can Judge Me,” the Twin Towers with various combinations of eagles and flags and “never forget,” naked girls with too-skinny legs and pinpricks for eyes.
    “How about this one?” Steve said, pointing to a purple girl with two swollen eyes and “Told Her Twice” on a banner scroll underneath. Fucked up as I was, I still didn’t find it funny.
    The owner didn’t even seem to notice we were there. He was a squat old Japanese man covered in fading soldier ink, with a wispy mustache and short fingers like a grade-school clay project. He was smoking from a twisted metal pipe, porno magazine spread open on the counter, belt undone.
    I pointed to a kanji labeled Dragon. “How much for that one?” I asked. We were in Little Tokyo, after all, might as well get something to commemorate the night.
    “Fifty,” he grunted in an accent that suggested English wasn’t his second, third or even his fifth language.
    I didn’t see a MasterCard logo anywhere and I wasn’t sure I had $50 in my wallet. But Steve did, and he slapped it down on the counter. “You can get the sushi,” he said. “I’m fucking starving; this is a bargain compared to what you’ll spend.”

    “Luce!” I called, slamming the door. “Luce! I got something for you!”
    She came out of her bedroom, in the romper she made from an oversized Gamera T-shirt that she’d giddily drunk-purchased off a street vendor when she and I first went to Little Toke. My dick got hard and sweat broke out on my forehead. “Jesus Christ, Vance,” she said. “It’s four in the fucking morning, what is your damage?”
    I hoisted up my arm, stumbling backwards from the effort of movement. “Got my first tat!” I