Kabuki-cho once covered a quarter-mile square area in downtown Shinjuku. It had been home to more than eight hundred bars, restaurants, game rooms, massage parlors, love hotels and nightclubs. Tokyo’s red light district and pleasure quarters.
Morning, noon and night, and straight through till dawn, 24/7, Kabuki-cho never slept, and the flow of the young and the restless never ceased. That hadn’t changed, though these sleepless nights were of a far more abominable nature.
Taking the Shinjuku station JR Chuo exit, continuing straight down the hill and crossing Yasukuni Avenue, brought them to the one-block main drag known as “Center Street” — the unofficial entrance-way to Kabuki-cho.
Center Street was still there. The buildings weren’t. The gaudy, garish soaring structures that once lined the boulevards, and Kabuki-cho’s “gateway road” that once impressed so many visitors, were now piles of rubble.
Las Vegas-style neon signs of the Kabuki-cho Stardust Casino—the cooks at the beef bowl emporiums shouting out orders and specials—the kids staring wistfully through the show window of the Shinjuku Gun Shop at the latest weapons on display—it had all disappeared, along with the buildings.
But the Koma Theater—that closed in the end of the Center Street block—was still intact. The walls were cracked. Big holes in the plaster revealed the skeleton of the framework beneath. For some inexplicable reason, the whimsical Devil Quake had not bared its fangs at this temple to the performing arts.
Turning left in front of the Koma Theater and then right revealed a public square. It was once said that “Water Fountain Square” never slept. People gathered there waiting for the theaters to open—The Milano, Odeon, Shinjuku Academy, Shinjuku Joy Cinema.
Joined by drunken frat boys singing at the top of their lungs, annoying the body builder types cruising for a bruising with the pretty boys. Out of the blue, an up and coming pop star would stage an impromptu concert.
A place where anything could happen, and not only in front of the movie theaters. Years later, for anyone who’d ever been there, the Joypack Building—stuffed with every form of entertainment from game rooms to cabarets—lived on in their memories.
In their place, curious prefab units — “Foundation to Finish in Thirty Minutes,” the manufacturer’s slogan was—stood crowded together. The “Disco,” like a stack of soup bowls, every story a dance floor. The “Willow,” so-named as the slightest wind made it sway like a reed. Customers came for the thrill, and on occasion fell to their deaths through the unglazed windows. On the site of the Milano was a dome called the “Battlefield,” where full-body contact fights were staged with blunted weapons.
And everywhere neon signs and billboards advertising their wares and services using the latest projection and holographic technology, so garish as to give anyone a migraine who looked at them for more than ten seconds.
Of course, these buildings weren’t simply not constructed to code. They barely followed the physical laws of the universe. Those who took one step inside Kabuki-cho never noticed. The sheer magic of the place, the enrapturing thrills, washed those fears away.
But they should take a good look around.
Hard to tell if he was a tourist, traveler, or passerby, but a man with a head of hair down to his waist was loitering around Water Fountain Square. The hair wafted up and several strands dropped to the ground. It wasn’t hair, but thousands of insects growing out of his head. They wriggled across the ground to a sleeping vagrant with a liquor bottle in one hand, and slithered into his body through his ears and nose.
A few seconds later, the vagrant’s face paled. With vacant eyes, he came to his feet. These were a species of “mind master” vampire insect particular to Demon City. Having sucked up the blood in a host’s body, they took control of the brain and turned it into a sleep walker, guiding the host to the next victim.
Someone must have reported the outbreak. A yakuza-looking guy dressed all in black ran up and fired a flame thrower, turning the vagrant into a human candle.
Just another day in Demon City. When everything was weird, nothing was.
A teenager with half a cyborg face. A girl straddling an artificial beast, some random mix of bear and wolf and reptile. A gorilla man with the eyes of a dead fish, characteristic of the kind of addict that spent all his time bar-hopping for mutant morphing drugs. A gangbanger dressed in guerilla fatigues, with a caseless sub-machine gun on his hip.
Parading in ones and twos and groups down the sidewalk. All criminals run out of business and out of town in the outside world.
And those who, at a glance, appeared to be respectable citizens in respectable dress. But their severe expressions and the bulges at their sides or on their hips revealed them to be heat ray-packing assassins.
On what passed for the surface roads, frenzied music spilled out of the prefab “flash” clubs. Here a deep water cyborg and a mutant bear man grappled with each other. There a lone yakuza swaggering down the sidewalk was grabbed by another gang hiding in the shadows, dragged down an alley and made a victim of their torture machines, scalpels and needles and various other implements attached to the tips of their hands and feet.
A scream. A giant snake clad in shirt and pants twined around a seventeen or eighteen-year-old girl. The kid who appeared to be her boyfriend fired a pocket rocket on his wrist and blew away the head of the snake man. As they patted their chests in relief, a giant leech the size of a ten-foot-square carpet dropped out of the window of an abandoned building and enveloped them.
The pedestrians in the vicinity didn’t spare them a second glance.
Only idiots walked next to a building if they didn’t know exactly what was lurking inside. Five minutes later, the engorged leech disappeared, leaving only its slippery trail and a pair of desiccated corpses behind.
The cabbie who’d driven them from the Shin-Okubo street market said this was the one place they shouldn’t go, and he wasn’t kidding. The nervous system of a normal person would shut down after walking a dozen feet, and not long after that, the vultures would drag them into the shadows.
Here were all the reasons Shinjuku was called “Demon City.”
Kyoya and Sayaka had come to Center Street. They’d reconnoitered Shinjuku station, but the edifice and the side buildings were all rubble, and all the entrances were impassable. But seeing that the Sorcerer and his associates could come and go as they pleased, there must be a hidden accessway. What they needed was somebody with detailed knowledge of the station.
“This would seem the perfect place to ask,” said Kyoya, glancing around.
Sayaka didn’t answer. Mouth half-open, she stared amazed at the glorious awfulness of the sights and scenes around her.
His next thought was: Yeah, I probably should have sent her packing.
After scouting out the station, he’d made another effort to send her outside the city, but she wouldn’t agree. And when he tried to force the issue, she looked up at him with her big brown eyes and whimpered, “You promised,” and Kyoya buckled.
Naw. She’d be back like a boomerang.
Wishful thinking in any case that they’d happily meet up again the way they had in the DMZ. And if she fell into the hands of those demons, game over. Plus they didn’t have the time. If push came to shove, he’d knock her out and park her someplace safe.
So he let her tag along, though having no idea what was going to happen next.
Drawn along by the currents of the weird and the strange, the two of them ended up at the Koma Theater.
“Where should we go to find a person like that?” Sayaka wondered aloud, coming back to her senses.
“Good question. I suppose we could start with the local hotels. A thousand credits should loosen lips around here. But let’s hang out for a while. What? We won’t do ourselves any good running around like chickens with their heads cut off. We’ve still got all of tomorrow. Don’t rush it.”
Kyoya shut his mouth too late. Sayaka’s eyes brimmed with tears. “Hey, hey,” he said soothingly. “Just joking. Let’s go find us an informed hotelier.”
“Yes!” Sayaka smiled.