At four o’clock in the afternoon, the Lauren Knights hostess club in Kabuki-cho welcomed its most interesting visitor since its opening.
The customer on his way out was demanding a refund. One of the employees, Noriko Toyoshi, was having a few words with him. “What the hell you are bitching about?” she demanded. “The way you were copping feels right and left, we gave a little perv like you a bargain deal.”
The time was 3:52.
Taking her raised voice as a cue, the bartender and bouncer joined the party. By the time they’d wrestled their displeased guest to the ground, thrashed him soundly and tossed him out on his ear, it was a little past 3:56.
He landed with his face on the ground a couple of yards out the back entrance.
“Take a hike, mister!” Noriko hocked a loogie onto his back. “And don’t come back!” An old-fashioned send-off, to be sure.
It was 3:59.
With the man’s finger—torn off at some point during the melee—clenched between her teeth like a cigar, she was heading back inside when she saw something out of the corner of her eye. She glanced over her shoulder and caught a glimpse of that face.
It was exactly four o’clock.
The sepia light of early summer stained the falling dusk. O-magatoki it was called, the time when ghosts and demons prowled the earth. Probably not a coincidence either.
Noriko froze in her tracks. A long shadow fell on the earth in front of her.
“Ah, is this where I can find Ryo Terumoto-san?”
The drawling voice burrowed inside Noriko’s head and chased the golden sunset away.
“Who-who are you?” she finally managed to say. The echoes of desire thickly layered her words. She was in the business of arousal but she was the one getting wet.
Whether he knew that or not—the blank tone of his words didn’t change in the slightest—“Where might I find Terumoto-san?”
“You mean, the boss?”
“Yes.”
It was strictly against the rules to give out the name and address of the owner to strangers. But all these taboos had flown out the window as soon as she saw his face. If he asked, she would have stripped naked and gotten herself off in broad daylight.
“The boss—he’s chasing some skirt in the green room on the second floor. What’s this about?”
A ferocious bark of anger made her turn around. “Stupid bitch! You don’t tell shit like that to a perfect—”
The bouncer’s admonition cut off mid-sentence. He’d been lingering at the back entrance. A flush rose to his ashen cheeks. Noriko felt a flash of jealousy. He too was entranced by the man’s spell.
“W-What do you want?” But even this cross-examination was colored by an air of fawning.
“Upstairs, was it? If you would excuse me.”
The silhouette moved. The man was dressed in black. Bathed in the listless sunlight, the turned-up collar of his black slicker suggested being caught in a cutting winter wind. It was the two lowlifes who felt the chill.
A head taller than the five-foot-six bouncer, he disappeared down the hallway. The two stepped aside, as if pushed by an invisible force. The visitor silently climbed the stairs. By the time he got to the steel door identified with a nameplate as the “Ladies Green Room,” a flurry of footsteps sounded out behind him.
“Son of a bitch! You wait right there!”
“Take us for fools, do you? Turn around and face the music, bud!”
The same number of shouts as the pairs of footsteps. A moment later, they fell silent.
The visitor turned around. The next sound was of them all swallowing hard.
Caught in the light streaming in from the end of the hall, the young man’s comely countenance took on an almost ultraviolet glow.
Beneath brows like slender willow leaves, their stupefied faces reflected in his narrow eyes. The chiseled bridge of his nose—white teeth flashing between faintly crimson lips—his entire being wrapped in a savage yet mysterious aura—this was an object of rare beauty, as if sculpted by the gods.
It was almost remarkable that it didn’t strike the grubby eyes of these thugs blind. And yet there somehow arose from his expansive, boundless presence a quite mismatched sense of amiable humanity.
“Listen, you—” But the strangled threats uttered by the head underling carried little force in them.
“I’m here from the Aki Detective Agency,” the young man said. “Two days ago, a girl came here from outside the ward. The word is that she’s making appearances here, apparently against her will. I have a few questions, that’s all.”
“A few questions?” bellowed the stocky enforcer bringing up the rear. “Come here and tell me about it, pretty boy. We’ll sit our two asses down and get to know each other. Or maybe I’ll just set your ass down and get to know it a whole lot better.”
He licked his lips, expressing less a jest than raw desire. The lewd aroma punctuated the violent atmosphere. The men lurched forward, their eyes hot and vacant.
A hardly human groan spilled from those lips. Only once. The men froze in their tracks, a good ten of them, all reaching for their throats, tearing at the invisible in a strange kind of pantomime.
These frantically struggling ruffians, who otherwise thought no more of another human’s life than they would an insect’s, had been rendered literally blue in the face.
The young man—Aki was his name—smiled languidly back at them. A warm smile, utterly unaffected by the grotesque scene before him.
“I can’t let anyone interfere with my work. Take it easy, okay? A word of warning—put up too much of a struggle and your heads may drop right off. Consider yourselves lucky to have faced off against me, and not me.”
With a look like a mischievous child giving the slip to a gang of bullies, he placed his hand on the door knob. The door was locked from the inside. He appeared momentarily perplexed, but tried again—as if he’d been mistaken the first time.
The door opened without a sound.
As the door opened, a man’s cajoling voice could be heard, along with a woman’s moans—that might sound like cries of pain at first, but came from an entirely different source.
The young man slipped inside the room.
It was a ten tatami mat room, approximately a dozen feet square. The tiny concrete-lined genkan held a girl’s sandals and the owner’s very expensive black patent leather shoes. The shoes were polished to a shine and reflected the fluorescent lights in the ceiling.
The thick smell of sweat assailed his nostrils. The walls were lined with utilitarian mirrors and lockers. In the front was a household Shinto shrine. The two other people in the room were right below it.
Between the pair of white thighs waving back and forth through the air, an altogether stranger sight humped in and out of view—the bottom half of a wild animal covered with black, coarse hair. And the gray soles of his feet and the black claws of his toes.
The beast’s lower extremities busily drove her forward and back, pressing the lithesome girl’s body hard against the tatami. Huffing ragged breaths while totally devoted to the task at hand was a bear.
Not a man in a bear outfit. The bloodshot eyes, the gleaming snout, the yellow fangs protruding from the gaping mouth—this was the real thing.
The slender face of the girl beneath him was painted with less a look of fear than a half-crazed expression, staring in a daze at the ceiling. Her breasts and chest were smeared with blood. The red lines crisscrossed her skin. Every time her body shuddered and shook, the bright red blood welled up and the stain spread.
The bear’s claws had left their marks.
Beside them, two outfits had been discarded on the floor—a red dress and a polo shirt and pants and underwear, the latter belonging to the bear.
The girl raised a muffled moan. The bear’s snout covered her mouth, trying to kiss her. A feral maw accosting human lips.
She shut her mouth and turned her face away. The animal pursued her, the pink tongue playing with her lips. The dripping jaws covering her face from chin to nose, she finally opened her mouth.
The tongue dove in, swishing from cheek to cheek, the spit and spittle spilling out of the corners of their mouths.
The girl coughed violently.