Six Months in the Land of the Rising Sun

Reo’s eyes narrowed, his body still and tight, arms and legs ready to spring into action. His katana glinted in the streetlights, as did his glasses, giving him an inhuman, cold look.

Harry stood beside him, his hammer on his shoulder, looking nowhere near as prepared for battle. Instead, he looked at the twenty or so demons surrounding them.

Boroborobons. Living futons, the arms and legs made of fabric twitching as they crawled forward, the mattresses and blankets twisting into mockeries of the human form. Harry leaned forward, squinting through the dark, trying to figure out how teeth and claws made out of blankets had killed so many people.

“Killer futons,” Harry said, standing back up straight, cracking his neck. “Because of course. Japan would have monsters which disguise themselves as futons. I LOVE this place. I HATE this place.”

Reo grinned and charged forward, slicing and slashing through the creatures. Harry sighed, slamming his hammer down onto one of the things. He had been with Reo for several weeks when the nighttime murders occurred, eventually realizing the culprits were a gang of criminals who had let themselves be possessed by evil beds, and he had about reached his limit of weird. Still, he could bring himself to find some satisfaction when his hammer crunched onto a bed monster. He couldn’t wait to pull the demons out of these guys and make fun of them for turning into mattresses.

Days bled into weeks which bled into months. Harry Vickers slowly learned how to be human again by immersing himself in the monstrous. Reo’s endless torture of natto and otaku culture felt like he was adopting a weird little brother, even though he was sure the man was slightly older than him. The nights spent caring for Hinata gave him something other than himself to truly worry about again. One night she passed out on his shoulder and Harry waved Reo away when he tried to bring her to bed, sitting there all night with her drooling on him, watching Japanese late night TV.

His time there also showed him how to truly work as an exorcist. The previous two years had been spent brutalizing anything which came in his path, his hammer a righteous tool of vengeance instead of justice, each swing causing Harry to picture Lisa, wondering if he could have saved her if he had it on D Day. He often forgot there were humans buried under the monsters.

Over those first two years, the U.N. had organized the exorcists discovered after the day the world should have ended. A central command of sorts gave them money for jobs accomplished, help when requested and resources when available. Everybody wanted the exorcists free and able to do their jobs. Each major city in the world seemed to draw three to five exorcists on average, an incredibly small number in the early days but increasingly more than enough as humanity clawed its way back and order prevailed.

Harry teamed up with Reo and Tokyo’s other exorcists over the months, fighting off smaller threats like a street gang possessed by kasa-obake, hopping around and trashing neighborhoods with random street crimes and senseless violence, and a sinister woman taken by a rokurukubi, a case which had taken weeks for them to track her down in her human disguise as she strangled and murdered men with her long neck. He also took part in massive coordinated strikes against giant demons, such as a skeletal gashadokuro terrorizing a small town outside Tokyo which they later learned was tied to organized crime and a shipping magnate transforming himself into a umibozu to sink competitor ships along the coast of Japan. Harry scoffed at him as he laid on a dock, soaking wet and in handcuffs, calling the whole thing Scooby-Doo bullshit, much to Reo’s amusement.

That was all excluding his interactions with the Tokyo police. He took part in many cases which crossed over with demon involvement. Those were the ones which haunted him at night. People being tempted by otherworldly demons was one thing. Human monsters who took advantage of those people were a special kind of screwed up. Even after humanity survived doomsday, the worst of it still outdid the demons in terms of pure unrelenting hatred.

Six months after Harry first set foot in the land of the rising sun, he found himself drinking at night with Reo and the other Tokyo exorcists, a weekly ritual he no longer felt like an outsider in. Takeshi, a former sumo who was the oldest of the group, sat at the head of the table, pounding his hand into the table while laughing hysterically. Mayumi, a young woman with braids and glasses who looked like she would be happier in a library studying ancient mythology was to his right, politely chewing her food, while Mizuki, the bleach blonde party girl, egged on the main event. Gaku, human relationship disaster, was in the middle of one of his uproarious stories, Hawaiian shirt crisp and hair slicked back as he gestured wildly, nobody knowing how much of his personality was him and how much was the alcohol.

“…and then her neck started growing longer, wrapping around my naked ass!” Gaku proudly exclaimed.

“And what did you do?” Reo asked with a sly smile.

“What else would I do? I got looooonger too! Fighting her was AWKWARD!” Gaku shouted, bringing out roars of laughter from the men and women at the table. Harry took a shot. For six months, he felt like he had been moving on. All while he had been staying still.

But the world wasn’t still.

“American, huh?” a bitter voice rang out as Harry’s laugh boomed through the bar. Harry saw a guy a table away, a salary man from the looks of it, his hair a mess and his eyes tired and bloodshot. “Bet you think you’re a pretty big guy, huh?!”

“Hey, leave my handsome foreigner alone, shit head!” Gaku scowled.

“It’s fine, Gaku. Relax,” Harry said.

Harry caught Reo’s look. This wasn’t the first time Harry had caught the stink eye from an angry native. Looking at the TV in the corner of the bar, he could understand why.

The suits at the U.N. were shouting again. It was a common occurrence in a world which had gone through an invasion from otherworldly forces. People tried to divide the resources of the world in order to build their countries back up. The aid was given to the more “important” countries first to provide a backbone for the global recovery. But what if you weren’t deemed “important” by these far away men?

“AID PACKAGE INSULTINGLY LOW…” scrolled the words at the bottom of the TV as red faced Japanese men argued with the U.N. reps. Harry knew the politics. We need to give the aid to larger countries, ones which provide more resources, ones which aren’t a tiny island floating in the ocean, despite the devastation the demons had brought to Japan. He knew the logic. And whether he agreed with it or not, he wasn’t in a position to change it.

Harry knew. He understood. The world rebuilt itself. The U.N. distributed the funds. Two years later, Japan waited for its share while building itself back through sheer national pride. And as he looked around the room, seeing the eyes of men and women who respected him and the work he did, the blood and sweat and tears he shed with them as a fellow exorcist, he also saw himself as yet another outsider, realizing national pride most likely excluded him. He closed his eyes, knowing it might be time to move on.