That Girl's Story

“How about a rain check?” was what Midoriko offered Akira. As always, he was very understanding, but she couldn’t help but feel like a jerk.

How much of what she mentioned about Ryouma—no, Nishikawa Ryouta—had he even believed? It probably sounded like she was spinning some weird, elaborate excuse as to not go out with him. But the truth was, Midoriko was so flattered that someone so intelligent and good-looking as Akira was asking her out, she didn’t know how to handle it.

It wasn’t that she didn’t want to go out with him. She really just couldn’t. Not right now anyway. Even if Ryouma weren’t around, her answer would still be the same.

Still, it was because of him that she did make up an excuse to not walk home with Akira. The night before, he’d gotten…weird. Weirder than normal for Enishi Ryouma.

The normally talkative Ryouma was strangely quiet, even during their nightly pain-relief session. When he did talk, it was stuff like…

“I don’t like him…” You don’t know him.

“I don’t trust him…” Again, you don’t even know him.

Midoriko’s assurances that Akira was kind and friendly only seemed to agitate Ryouma further. By the time she went to bed, he was still sulking on the couch. She hadn’t seen him when she left in the morning either, so Midoriko could only hope he’d gotten over it in the interim.

Not wanting to run into Akira outside the front door, Midoriko decided to stop by a bakery on the way home. Naturally, seeing and smelling everything on offer with an empty stomach meant that Midoriko left with more pastries than she’d intended to buy. It was a bad habit of hers to the point where she’d stopped going to bakeries altogether, but at least now she had people to share everything with.

How long had it been since I went to a bakery and picked out pastries for someone else? she mused, carrying home a full-to-the-brim bag.

Midoriko had been on her own since her mother died, moving from tiny apartment to tiny apartment. Until her life was upended, it had just been a cycle of school and work with only breaks to sleep. Even if Ryouma was still in a pissy mood, the thought of coming back to a home full of people filled Midoriko’s heart with warmth.

So, of course, the apartment was empty when she returned.

Midoriko set down her things, then took off her shoes. She eyed the paper bag full of baked goods hungrily and sighed.

“If I don’t find anyone, then I’ll just eat all of them myself,” she muttered to herself. Bringing the bakery bag with her, she walked further into the apartment towards a particular magic door.

***

Ryouma sat on the veranda overlooking the Japanese garden he’d painstakingly landscaped himself over the years. Next to him was a flask of sake and a cup. He lit one of his hand-rolled cigarettes and then poured himself a drink.

Should I have just met her at the train station? He pondered as he took a sip of sake. No. Maybe I should just start meeting her at work instead.

It would be better to just keep her from commuting alongside that little rat altogether. As Ryouma concocted ways that he could “improve” Midoriko’s commute, the door behind him clattered open.

“Ah…”

They were both surprised to see each other as Midoriko stood in the doorway.

“Welcome back,” Ryouma mumbled as he polished off his cup of sake, then poured another.

“I was hoping I wouldn’t find anyone so I could have all of this to myself,” she said, setting the paper bag on the veranda. Midoriko dug through the bag as she sat down to the right of Ryouma and pulled out a pastry. “But I guess I’ll share with you.”

“Oh, did you buy these with your crush?” he asked, with a venomous smile. He blotted out his cigarette before taking the pastry.

“I bought these so I could avoid my crush,” corrected Midoriko. She pulled out a curry bun for herself and unwrapped it. “I didn’t want a repeat of last night. I had to lie through my teeth about you today.”

Ryouma squeezed the pastry involuntarily as his hand clenched. “Why? Did he ask about me?”

“He mentioned your Nishikawa alias before, but said he looked like an older man. He was just asking if you were related to him,” she explained, taking a big bite. “I lied and said you were Mr. Nishikawa’s brother, Ryouta.”

“Ryouta…?” he repeated, cringing. That’s not a clever fake name at all…

Still, it was troubling that the neighbor had mentioned anything about the Nishikawa alias at all. Kuroiwa sounded familiar, but Ryouma racked his brain, trying to remember if he’d ever seen or met that guy in the past. He usually preferred to avoid the neighbors at all of his urban properties, so how could that guy have learned his name?

“Anyway, we should probably get our story straight,” Midoriko continued while finishing off her bun, completely oblivious to Ryouma’s tension. “I told him you ran the real estate agency that was renting the apartment to me. And that you were Itoko’s long-lost father…”

Ryouma spat out sake as he was taking a sip.

“At least make your lies logically consistent!” he scolded.

She gave him a sheepish grin and shrugged. “Sorry, I panicked when he asked why you were staying with me…”

“Couldn’t you have just said I was your boyfriend or your husband?” Ryouma sighed, then downed the rest of the sake in his cup. “Ah, wait…You probably didn’t want to say something like that to your crush, huh?”

“Th-that’s…” Midoriko held her tongue. It was true that the first thing she felt the need to clear up. So what if she liked Akira! Why did he even care? Did he think it would get in the way of their strange arrangement?

Ryouma poured himself another cup of sake from the flask, but Midoriko snatched it away before he could pick it up. The sharp sting of the alcohol hit the back of her throat as she tipped her head back and drank it like a shot.

“You know, I’ve been thinking…” she said, looking at the kintsugi design on the tiny cup. “You told me about how you got your curse, but you never told me Itoko’s whole story.”

“Why do you need to know that?” he asked, taking the cup back from her. “It’s awful. You don’t want to hear it.”

Ryouma reached for the flask of sake once more, but Midoriko grabbed it first.

“Hey!” He watched, wide-eyed, as she chugged the remaining alcohol in the flask and then set it down.

“I do want to hear it,” she said, wiping her mouth. Midoriko looked at him with resolve. “I need to hear it, because it’s important. Maybe there’s a clue to break her curse!”

He looked at the empty sake flask and sighed.

“Fine. I’ll tell you...”

Ryouma picked up his crumpled, half-smoked opium-laced cigarette and re-lit it. This wasn’t a story he could easily tell sober.

***

“Mr. Xī, welcome to Japan!”

Some time after Ryouma (as Xī Hé Lóng) took Xiǎomíng under his wing, he returned to Japan and made contact with a Triad based out of Yokohama.

“Thank you, but it’s not my first time here. I’m just returning after a long absence,” he said, pouring beer into the glass of the man sitting opposite him. “I was planning to make contact with some local Yakuza. Know anyone?”

The man chugged until it was empty, then slammed the glass down. “Stay away from the Inukai Family.”

“Why is that?” asked Xī Hé Lóng as he poured more beer into the man’s glass. Generally, when someone told him to do something, he felt compelled to do the opposite.

“There are weird rumors going around about them…” The man drank this round more slowly. “First, they were punishing people by making them care for a baby. Now they’re using some kind of dog for torture.”

“That’s strange…” Xī Hé Lóng took a sip of his own beer. “The baby thing—not the dog, to clarify. Lots of gangs use dogs.”

“Mm. Well…” The man downed the rest of his beer before continuing. “They switched from one to the other after a couple years, and the end result seems to be the same for both of them. The people that make it out alive are never the same…”

He explained that it was rare for people to survive the punishment. The ones that came out of it with their faculties relatively intact ended up with ailments ranging from organ damage to paralysis.

“None of ‘em will talk about what happened either. They’re afraid that if they say anything, they’ll be forced to do it again.”

As for the ones that didn’t make it out? Severe brain damage, vegetative states, and even death. The Inukai Family didn’t even need to dispose of the bodies—they could dump them wherever they felt like, because every single one looked like a freak, natural death.

It reeked of some kind of vile sorcery, so Ryouma simply had to find out more. Whatever it was that they had, he wanted it. Something like that simply couldn’t remain under a yakuza’s control. Under the identity of Nishikawa Tatsumi, he infiltrated the Inukai Family.

“Yeah, those rumors are true.”

He’d gone straight to a high-ranking underboss to ask directly. Nishikawa hadn’t expected him to confirm it so bluntly—the man was almost gleeful.

“So what is it exactly?” asked Nishikawa.

“Come with me, I’ll show you.”

The Underboss led him to a nondescript storeroom on the Inukai estate. There, they descended through a trap door to the dingy, windowless basement. It seemed the process for the punishment was their ace in the hole, so they kept it closely guarded.

Nishikawa did dirty work for months to gain their trust just for this moment. He didn’t flinch when they entered the torture chamber to find a man tied up to a chair, half-dead, in the middle of the room. This was par for the course when dealing with gangs.

It didn’t even seem strange to him that there was an old tube TV shoved into the corner of the room, playing worn-out VHS tapes. Nor did the large dog crate, half covered with a sheet, next to the TV seem entirely out of place.

What struck him as out of the ordinary, though, was the fact that the dog didn’t bark once. He’d heard of people cutting the vocal cords in dogs to keep them from barking, but wouldn’t it be better if the dog you’re using to torture someone could vocalize?

As he looked around, there was nothing else in the room. Ryouma had suspected that whatever sorcery they were using to kill someone relied on some sort of medium—that would explain the link between the infant and the dog. But what was it?

The Underboss whistled as he walked over to the dog crate. He unlocked the padlock on the crate, then opened the door and stepped aside.

“Come out now,” he said sweetly.

The image of the dirty, disheveled little girl crawling out of the dog crate on all fours seared itself into Ryouma’s memory.