“Are—are you Setsura Aki?”
Sasaki’s voice rose half an octave. His blood pressure followed suit. Keep your head in the game, he remonstrated with himself.
This was probably the same young man who, on the corner in front of Mitsubishi Bank, had whispered in his ear that he could come to this room in the Shinjuku police station.
“I’m Sasaki, from Historical World. I apologize for taking you away from your regular business.”
He held out a business card. The young man took it, and motioned him to the remaining chair.
Sasaki had the uncomfortable sense of being under a microscope. Glancing at the young man’s face, he simply couldn’t get riled up about it. He knew he was staring at the smiling countenance beneath the wave of black hair, but had a hard time averting his eyes.
“I heard you ran into a bit of trouble getting here,” Setsura Aki said, the pleasant expression not fading from his face. “Get into the wrong taxi and you can end up in a world of hurt. In this city, you take your life in your hands just visiting the police station.”
“Don’t I know it,” Sasaki said. He restrained himself from adding a few choice words about that cabbie. The man had shown up to hear him out. The least he could do was buck it up.
“What little information I have says you’re a reporter for the Historical World,” Setsura said, glancing at the business card.
The statement was a tad anticlimactic. Historical World was a history periodical apparently as well-known inside Shinjuku as elsewhere. Nationwide, it had an audited circulation of five-hundred fifty thousand, leaving its competitors in the dust. That the subject of history could boast such a dependable audience spoke well of its enviable fan base.
“I’ll send you some back issues. But I am surprised.”
“What about?”
Eyes so deep they seemed portals to his very soul rested upon him. Sasaki shivered despite himself.
“The response to my letter said I was to take Shinjuku Avenue from the station straight towards Yotsuya. I didn’t imagine I’d end up meeting you in an interrogation room in the police station.”
“Did you say anything to the police?”
“Only that I was meeting you to get some material for a story.”
Setsura nodded, his eyes still fixed on Sasaki. “Fine with me. It’s as good an approach as any.”
“I wouldn’t have believed that’d ever pass muster. The biggest surprise of all. Walk into a police station in Demon City without any reason to be there, and walk out again with all your limbs intact. To tell the truth, this is exactly the kind of thing I’m looking to learn more about.”
He wasn’t kidding. The senses he’d honed during his twenty years in the business were kicking in. That sense of excitement, that flutter in the stomach—it was like watching the shell around the egg beginning to crack, the creature within poking out its beak, reaching out with its claws.
“As I explained in my letter, this is for our upcoming special edition issue. Historical World is taking a hard look at Demon City.”
Whatever reaction might have registered on the young man’s face, the answer he gave was totally disarming. “From the day Shinjuku became Demon City up to now, every medium of mass communication on the planet has taken a hard look at Demon City. Every last one of them amounted to nothing more than vulgar sensationalism. Though I suppose as long as that meets the needs of the masses, this city will simply remain as one more source of sordid entertainment.”
As a journalist, Sasaki wished to voice objections to this analysis. That human propensity to relegate objects of horror to a genre of entertainment must reach back into the mists of time.
Turning the horrors of Demon City into “special editions” and increasing circulation many fold wasn’t done to panic the population, but because the readers really were fascinated by headline articles such as:
✦ ✦ ✦
“Demon City’s Tragic Year”
“True Crimes Attributable to Shinjuku’s Devil Quake”
“The Witches and Warlocks of Shinjuku”
“Who’s Behind Those Unsolved Murders”
“Shinjuku’s DMZ: Then and Now”