This will be an attempt to explain the “demon” in Demon City Shinjuku. But there are facets to the city that even the old-timers can’t wrap their heads around.
Starting with human beings, an inorganic city incorporates the organic. It grows, divides, renews itself, and thus achieves a kind of asexual reproduction. Shinjuku similarly remakes itself in a flash, moment by moment revealing to mortal eyes entirely different aspects of itself.
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For example: Women’s Fashions on the third floor of the New Isetan Department Store. Ever since its construction, the southwest wall of the third floor has mysteriously expanded and contracted day in and day out, mutating into the shape of the human female pudendum. All the while maintaining its polished finish and the hardness of the stressed concrete beneath.
As a consequence, now only women work and shop there.
A huge department store like Isetan wasn’t about to ban male customers for reasons of architectural modesty. But as soon as men caught sight of the cursed wall, they couldn’t resist curiously drawing nearer and touching it. Medical facilities were located on the third floor, with specialists standing by.
Except that most of the doctors, not to mention the delivery boys, were men as well.
Entranced by the wall, falling into stupors, their faces contorted in ecstasy, many of the male customers climaxed on the spot. In severe cases they collapsed from sexual exhaustion. According to rumors spread by the shop girls, this was a consequence of them getting randy with the women doctors.
But nobody could really say for certain.
The transformations of the wall continue, and computer simulations predict that in several years it will develop the capabilities of a fully functioning female reproductive tract. Finding this an intolerable prospect, store management is said to be seriously considering taking a jackhammer to the whole thing.
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For example: A tree that grows in a corner of Kabuki-cho, one of Demon City’s pleasure districts. In this decadent and corrupt city, not a branch is broken and no obscene graffiti mars its trunk. Not only because apples, pears, grapes and persimmons mysteriously appear on its branches day and night, but because everybody knows that anyone who touches it will meet a bad end.
Botanists from outside Shinjuku speculate that the tree is undergoing mutations at the cellular level. But the cause is unclear. Psychics hired by the Shinjuku ward alderman claim that the tree has its own objectives in mind, but they can’t say what those are.
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For example: The street that goes up the hill from Kagurazaka to Yaraicho. The buildings lining this street change every twenty-four hours like clockwork.
The bookstores, appliance dealers, music shops, restaurants, houses—those wishing to see the transformation of these run-of-the-mill structures must climb the hill at dawn. No other time of day will do. The magic never occurs while descending the hill, either.
The buildings become shrouded like phantoms in a mist. Then overlapping and eclipsing them, as if being born from within, a different row of buildings appears.
Even though none of the visitors who hike the hill work there, they keep coming back. Because at that instant they might catch a glimpse of a lost husband or wife, or child or lover in the row of houses, as if frozen in amber from before the city’s violent destruction and resurrection.
But the visitor is just as likely to see the ancient past or vistas from distant lands. White stone buildings in Greece overlooking the vivid blue Mediterranean. Ancient cities of the Gobi Desert shrouded in blowing sand. Eastern European villages surrounded by deep, dark forests.
They appear before the eyes; and disappear with the light of dawn.
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Nevertheless, the “demon” in Demon City Shinjuku will not be found there. The incomprehensible nature of these ongoing transfigurations must be accepted for what it is. Shinjuku’s demonic nature persists, stubborn and undeterred, and such mysteries serve only to hint at the deeper truths hidden beneath.
And yet, every now and then, as if stepping into the wan glow at the borderline between light and dark, the incomprehensible is made visible. The joy felt in those moments comes from that mysterious thrill in the brain when it solves a puzzle or gains some new insight.
But there is also forbidden fruit that must not be eaten. Things that must not be seen. Even in Demon City.
What occurred on a summer night marks the beginning of one such story.