5.3 Bōsōzoku CRAZY NIGHT RIDERS Part 2

>drinks on me for your bday

Junna messaged Kei that evening. His birthday was May 9th, two days later. They decided if Monday was inconvenient for Kei, they would reschedule. It wasn’t like they had anything to do during the day. Kei accepted the invite a few minutes later.

>sounds good to me!

Hifumi couldn’t drink and Nana wouldn’t, so they’d already gotten dinner at a family style restaurant the night before. Junna hadn’t really gotten the hang of drinking culture either, although they imagined downing sake in cemeteries with their ghost buddies was close enough to how salarymen drank after work. This was a good time to try drinking with living people for a change.

I wonder if I could haunt a cemetery and hang out for drinks when I died…

Junna met Kei at a ramen place that was equal distance from their apartments, close to the center of Tokyo. It seemed the most fair. After asking Nana for suggestions, Junna decided to be cool and quirky and brought Kei some fancy mangos from one of the underground floors at a nice department store. They remembered Kei loved most kinds of exotic fruit.

“Whoa, these look great, did you splurge on them?” Kei accepted the gift with enthusiasm.

“Sorta. I remembered you like mangoes so…”

“You were right, I’ll be taking those!”

“Enjoy.” Junna hadn’t lost all sense of interacting with others even after two years of being mentally, emotionally, and physically unmoored. They had a hard time fashioning a proper smile, though. Judging by Kei’s brows pinching together and his own waning smile, he could immediately tell they were not at peak health.

“You look pretty tired, Jun…”

“What can I say, I’m a night owl and somehow I keep waking up in the morning. I gotta get used to city living again.”

“About that…”

“Anyway, Happy Birthday! You really don’t look a day over thirty. Maybe you and Doikawa should switch ages.”

“Geez, I wish! Don’t try to flatter me so hard, kid!” Kei lightly patted Junna’s head. They were a centimeter or two taller than him, so the gesture felt a little silly to Junna, but in a comfortable way.

After heading inside, they ended up in a booth muttering about supernatural conspiracies. Junna had forgotten how many types of ramen usually came with meat and went for the vegetable ramen instead. They’d eat fish or chicken, but they weren’t in the mood. It was a choice that looked way more health conscious than would normally be attributed to them.

“So, happy to be back in Tokyo?” Kei asked as the opening question once they officially had bowls of noodles in front of them with beer from the tap on the side.

“Yeah, I missed living in the city,” Junna replied, telling the truth.

“Where were you, uh… staying, after you left Gifu?”

Junna’s chopsticks paused in midair and noodles started to slip.

“Here and there…” they said quietly. “Honestly it’s great to be back in Tokyo, I missed it. I guess I’m truly Edokko after all.”

“Edokko haha… Jun, what does that even mean?”

“Well, you see,” began Junna, thrilled to have a chance to redirect the conversation. “A few generations ago, my family were tea merchants. They lived around Chuo for quite a few generations. My great grandpa was the one who changed his surname to ‘Sagyo’ because it was his pen name. He decided to become a poet instead of sticking it out as a merchant. However, he didn’t move far away, so you can trace the Sagyo line back to waaay before Edo was renamed to Tokyo. I’m a child of Edo.”

“If you say so. Was your great grandpa’s poetry any good?” Kei laughed, but Junna felt a stinging sensation as he watched them while they took a long sip of beer. He knew they were avoiding the other topic, damnit!

“I’ve seen some of his stuff. It’s not bad, but there was no way he was going to make a living off it. Anyway, what have you been up to? Finally inherited the mortuary?”

“Yeah. Still working at the camera shop for some extra income. That’s one nice thing about being self-employed; I can let myself have a part time job too.”

He’s trying to support Hifumi, too, huh.

“I’ve been making my way through message boards and forums that talk about the supernatural looking for info on Itsumise, but I’m not that good at knowing what’s real and what’s fake.”

“Fake stories sound like novels,” Junna said, taking a long drink of their beer. It was a lighter color, kind of dry and crisp, perfect for summer. “The writing is too good.”

“Kinda like some of the 2ch classics? Kisaragi Station and Hasshaku-sama?”

“Oh, no, those are real. It’s hard to get to Kisaragi Station, though, and it’s a good thing. One of the few agreed on rules between almost all supernatural practitioners is to avoid that place, although some powerful exorcists will use it for training their students. Risky move if you ask me.”

“Sheesh… I knew the folklore stuff was real but I’m too old to keep up with all these urban legends. I won’t even ask what the story is with Hasshaku-sama. If I haven’t seen her yet, it should be fine, right?”

Junna shrugged and slurped up some ramen before continuing.

“Basically, the only people who post real stories on online message boards are looking for free advice or don’t have close contact with anyone that has real supernatural powers. Otherwise, it’s not that hard to find someone who can exorcize regular ghosts or curses. But I’m getting off track. Have you read anything specifically about Itsumise?”

“Oh, they have a pretty strong online presence with a decent amount of viewers. The comment sections on their videos in particular are nightmarish, for a lot of reasons.” Kei shuddered. “Now that they’re on TV, though, things are getting worse.”

Junna imagined so.

“What do you mean by ‘worse?’ Like, more people involved?” Even though they’d heard about it from Doikawa, Junna’s internal organs tensed up, bracing for the inevitable guilt that would come with Kei’s perspective.

“Yeah. More unwitting human contestants, more ghosts and other stuff, more difficult challenges. I was thinking that they might be gaining more power by uh… eating the souls of the losing contestants…” Kei grimaced, his expression both troubled and sorrowful. “Doikawa and some connections have been trying to find the studio they broadcast from, but no luck yet.”

“When did it start airing on TV again?” Junna had a sinking feeling they were going to hate the answer. Starting online on June 30th was bad enough.

“There was a big advertisement on January 3rd, but that was a Monday, so it was January 6th.”

January 3rd was Ibuki’s birthday. This confirmed Junna’s idea that the situation was escalating, probably due to Ibuki’s powers increasing somehow.

“All of you have gotta have seen those host freaks talk about the producer at some point, right? Do you all already know? I don’t need everyone getting all concerned over me, I just need you guys to back me up.”

Surely everyone in their friend circle and adjacent would recognize Ibuki, and most of them had sent consolations to Junna during their two year wandering. Even knowing they were just trying to reach out in their own way, Junna had felt the messages were tepid and meaningless. None of them knew Ibuki that well, and few of them knew what exactly had happened that resulted in her death and subsequent haunting.

And I gave up any chance of getting sympathy when I turned around and actually caused the haunting myself.

Junna had almost reached the point where the shame outweighed the sorrow. Almost, but not quite. The loss of Junna’s Isshiki Ibuki haunted their dreams almost every night. It was almost painful to wake up some days. Even nightmares were preferable to waking up and seeing the world just turn as normal without Ibuki—the living Ibuki—in it.

Just that fact had caused Junna’s mood to drop that much. They hated it. They didn’t deserve any well wishes or comfort.

“Y… yeah… the producer seems to be… Isshiki-san?” Kei paused way too many times during that sentence, like he couldn’t believe what he was asking and also like he was walking through a minefield.

“Yes. If you don’t know…”

“Doikawa told us—well, me and Nana, basically, though I’m pretty sure Shigoro and Takuto found out from there. She said the Isshiki family home was attacked and the entire family was killed so now… Ibuki is haunting you.” Kei’s look of worry and pity made Junna’s jaw go slack, letting a mouthful of noodles pool back into their bowl. He clearly believed this version of the story with such conviction, as if Junna had simply been an unlucky bystander. And he didn’t know. He didn’t know they’d tried to resurrect Ibuki. Only Doikawa or Junna could have told them that, or so Junna hoped. Doikawa had spared Junna a lot of face by not revealing that part to anyone. Junna would become a pariah among not only the entire supernatural practitioner community, but also among their friends.

“I just need to exorcize Ibuki. We keep tabs on the freak shikigami, we find the studio, and I’ll get Ibuki from there. More simple than we thought, right?”

“Yeah, finding the studio really is the hard part,” Kei said. “It’s probably not in the realm of the living, and I don’t know much about the spirit world at all. I can see ghosts and spirits well enough, but I work in the physical world.”

Kei was essentially myopic when it came to spirits of any kind, although he was skilled at capturing them on camera, where he admitted they looked much clearer. And as his main job, he was right; a mortician worked only with the physical aspect of death and his ability to freshen up a corpse into a presentable state was the only supernatural part of that.

“Leave that part to Doikawa, she’s great at divination.”

“Yeah… say, Doikawa-san is actually very powerful, isn’t she?”

“What do you mean.”

“I don’t know, I’ve seen other Shinto priests and Buddhist monks come by when I’ve visited the shrine for research and everyone seems to have this sort of, like, reverence for her. She’s pretty young, isn’t she only a few years older than you?”

“We were in elementary school at the same time.” Junna smirked. When they were younger, it was easy for them to slip up and call Doikawa “sempai” instead of “sensei.” Even now, Doikawa Touko looked like a mature adult, but she didn’t look old by any means. “She’s only like… I think she’s like thirty?”

“Geez. I’m old, haha…”

“Ack, don’t worry about that, you’re only as old as you feel, right? Anyway, yes, Doikawa is pretty powerful, as far as I know. Even when she was a teenager, there were adults coming to ask her to read fortunes and give out blessings. Her dad is really powerful, too. Maybe it’s the Abe-no-Seimei genes?”

“The… is Doikawa-san related to Abe-no-Seimei?”

“Oh, yeah! I guess they don’t really advertise that much, but apparently you can trace back the Doikawa lineage to Abe-no-Seimei, although I guess it’s maternally since the surname changed. And they’re still like, a branch of a branch family. I think Doikawa might even know some onmyodo.”

“Huh… that would make a lot of sense. At least, that’d explain the power level thing. Interesting. I still have a lot to learn. Mamoru used to say I didn’t need to worry about it, but he ended up being wrong about that…”

Junna couldn’t stand Kei’s wistful, melancholic expression when he mentioned his old friend. It wrenched at their heart in the same direction as when they thought about Ibuki and her family’s deaths. Both had been killed by malevolent entities summoned by others for selfish reasons.

It wasn’t fair. It was too tragic. It hurt too much.

“Hey. Hey, hey, it’s your birthday!” Junna waved the server over for another beer. “We’re supposed to be having fun and getting ready to hunt down shikigami! We have to pull it together!”

“You’re right, you’re right. I guess even though you’re still a kid, you can be pretty wise.”

“If you say that again, I’m going to start calling you Ojisan.”

“Please no, haha…”

Junna left the ramen place buzzed and with at least some idea of what to expect out of Itsumise even if they didn’t know where the studio might be or how they could reach it. Doikawa, Nana, and Benihime could all do divination. Doikawa, as they had told Kei, was exceptionally good at it—to the point that Junna was relying on her for that part, even if they didn’t want to rely on her for anything else.

Maybe, Junna could wrap this up before their time ran out.

If Itsumise started airing on TV on Ibuki’s birthday, they definitely had to stop it before it aired on her death day.