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

announced.
    Her fingers felt like fresh spikes on my still-raw flesh. “A fucking kanji , ” she said, shoving my arm away. “How original. Rough night in Little Toke?”
    “ Awesome night,” I insisted. The air in the apartment was too heavy. All the euphoria, the needle-gun high, the shots and the pills were all starting to dissipate into fragile atoms. I leaned against the doorframe for support and swore it buckled under my weight.
    “Steve get one too?” Luce snorted, her voice sounding like it was a million miles away.
    “Who knows what the fuck Steve did?” Last time I saw Steve he was leaving Bento Friday with a chunky blonde armed with an optic headmount and panties with a credit-card slot built right into the upper thigh.
    “You two are such brosephs,” Luce snorted. “I figured you would have gotten matching tats on your dicks.”
    I tried to flop onto the couch dramatically and instead landed flat on the floor. “And what about you, Manic Pixie Dream Girl?” I spat, hauling myself up against the coffee table. “Would you be more impressed if it said lapin ?”
    She laughed, hard and loud and mean. “You are really fucking drunk,” she said. “ Aller se coucher, Pierre.”
    “Va te faire foutre.” I tried to stand and storm out, but my bedroom was miles away, the whole apartment twisted and slanted like a funhouse. My arm throbbed; the skin around my tattoo crawling. I don’t know how the hell she sat still long enough to get inked up like she did. I would have chewed off my arm to escape that bugged-out ache.

    I woke up on the couch, still drunk, at 6:43 a.m., took a piss and fell into my own bed. Around nine I heard Luce leave, and when I woke up again at 9:27 she had brought me a large bodega cup of black coffee, a glass of water and two Alka-Seltzers. My left arm hurt so fucking much I couldn’t even move it to tear open the packet.
    “You should get that checked out,” she said, clicking off the news report about a dead girl found in Prospect Park when I staggered out into the living room. “It shouldn’t be that red.”
    “It’s fine,” I muttered. “Thanks for the coffee.”
    “Yeah, well, I shouldn’t have been such a twat last night,” she said. “You were pretty fucked up. What the hell were you on and why the hell were you speaking French?”
    “I don’t even remember,” I admitted, lowering my battered corpse onto the couch. “Couple pills, a handful of electro-shots, a pre-game round of sake bombs—nothing too unusual, I don’t think. Jesus, did I really speak French?”
    “Told me to go fuck myself,” she said. “Your tense was fantastic. Nearly native.”
    I rubbed my head, trying to squeeze the headache out through my temples. “I failed French,” I said. “Switched to Spanish in my senior year and barely got a C.”
    “At least you remembered what was useful,” she joked. “And the tattoo?”
    “Steve suggested it,” I said. “It seemed like a good idea at the time. Thinking not so much now.”
    She kinda smiled. “And what did you think was so important that you needed to get it permanently inked on your body?”
    I examined it with a kind of scrutiny that would matter if I could read Japanese. “I think it says Dragon, ” I said. “Dragons are cool, I guess. The lettering looks neat, and trust me, it could have been way worse.”
    She picked her phone up off the coffee table and snapped a picture. “It doesn’t say ‘Dragon,’ ” she said, holding up a side-by-side comparison of my inflamed skin and a kanji on a white background. “It says Demon. ”
    “Still cool,” I snorted. “Maybe cooler. It could say ‘General Tso’s Goes Here,’ across my abs.”
    “More like your gut,” she said. “And anyways, General Tso’s is Chinese.”
    I scowled. “I was making a joke,” I said. But she still wasn’t laughing. “It really shouldn’t be that inflamed,” she insisted. “If the guy can’t even do the right kanji, he